Forget the Tavern

Forget the Tavern: Boons, Part 2

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This is part of a series of posts on advice for starting a campaign.
Go to Forget the Tavern: Introduction or to Forget the Tavern: Boons, Part 1

Having described the edge case of boons, let’s look at some that better fit the concept. The first is The Weasel’s Favor. The scenario that introduces the boom reads:

The Weasel’s Favor

While guarding the sinkhole entrance to the Cartways, you and the party were confronted by members of the Redcloaks (one of Zobeck’s gangs) demanding you move out of the way so they could enter. As tensions heightened, Goldscale, Zobeck’s famous kobold paladin of Lada, beloved by most Zobeckans, kobold and non-kobold alike, arrived riding his giant weasel steed Shinespark.

With Goldscale’s appearance, the Redcloaks ran off, shouting vague threats of future violence to both the party and to Goldscale. As Goldscale made small talk with the party — if Zobeck has a folk hero, it is Goldscale — Shinespark started nuzzling you. “He likes you,” Goldscale said, right as Shinespark nipped your hand, not breaking the skin. Oddly, the spot briefly glowed with a golden light.

A few minutes later, some unholy, monstrous screech came up from the sinkhole, and Goldscale stopped talking mid-sentence and drew his sword. After a second screech, louder than the first, Goldscale moved to the sinkhole, quickly turned to you and said, “In the greatest darkness, speak his name,” and then he and Shinespark jumped into the hole. You heard sounds of combat, and while you waited, Goldscale didn’t return that night. A few nights later you caught a glimpse of him astride Shinespark leaping across rooftops, so you know they survived.

When you think of Shinespark, the spot where he nipped you briefly glows.

Goldscale is an established kobold paladin of the Midgard setting’s city of Zobeck, which is where the Empire of the Ghouls campaign begins, and Shinebright is Goldscale’s mount. The boon here is fairly clear, though the player may not be exactly sure what might happen when they invoke Shinespark. And, honestly, because the boons scale with level of the characters/tier of play, and because they are intended to be useful when they’re invoked, I couldn’t tell you exactly what would happen. The most obvious response would be to have Shinespark magically appear, but a paladin’s mount ready to fight might not be what that particular greatest darkness might call for. Maybe the player takes it literally and they are in desperate straights and need light. In that case, the little scar from Shinebright’s nip might shine bright enough to fill a vast cavern or shine a holy light that causes radiant damage to undead. Or maybe it’s a ghostly weasel that both illuminates the area and leads the PC to safety. Maybe things are really bad and it’s not just Shinebright but Goldscale too who answers the call.

It’s a one-time thing, so when the player chooses to invoke it, make it memorable.

One more example of a boon:

The Arrow

On your trip to Old Mikhail’s Inn in the Margreve Forest, after setting up camp for the night, you stepped away from your camp where the rest of your companions were and stumbled upon a shadow fey hunting party. Certain you were going to be running for your life, you were surprised when they invited you to join them. Not wanting to risk insulting them, you joined their hunt, helped take down a large boar, and partook in the feast, spending hours eating, drinking, and sharing stories with them. Eventually, worried that your companions would be looking for you, you told your hosts you needed to get back. They laughed, jovially mocked you for your concern, and warmly sent you off. One gave you an old arrow, telling you that you should never fire it from a bow but keep it always.

When you returned to camp and began apologizing for being gone so long, everyone else seemed confused, and you quickly realized they were all still engaged in the same activities they’d been doing when you walked away. And sure enough, it was as if you hadn’t been gone for no more than a minute. Everyone else considers your time with the shadow fey a fanciful story, and you sometimes doubt it yourself. You do, however, have the arrow they gave you.

So, clearly the arrow isn’t meant to be fired, but other than that, I had no idea what it might be or do. When trying to figure out how to navigate the Underdark, the player with the arrow decided it might work like a compass arrow and lead the party on the right path. That sounded reasonable, and since getting to the capital city of the Ghoul Imperium was a goal in the campaign, I decided the arrow would keep working, because it was what the player wanted to happen, so while the arrow didn’t always take then on the safest route, it took them where they needed to go, and the player who choose that boon got their spotlight time.

Other boons included an option for a player character to take a unique Warlock Patron with a custom subclass I cobbled together from the Great Old One warlock patron from the Player’s Handbook and the Elder Influence warlock from Sandy Peterson’s Cthulhu Mythos for 5e. It included the Yog-Sothothery skill and the Mythos Formula Caster feat and formula casting, both from Sandy Peterson’s Cthulhu Mythos for 5e, and while the player had to choose either the Great Old One or the Elder Influence pact as their base subclass, they could choose features from the other as they gained levels. In this case, I also let the players see the pact description before choosing boons so the player who chose it really wanted it.

While boons function more as cool spotlight time for each player/player character, they come with stories, some of which other members of the party were present (the situation that lead to the warlock pack), or resulted in things the PC carried and would get commented upon (the arrow, the light from Shinebright), or was a story to tell the party (the stranger — if the party hadn’t heard the story before Rufous’s return, they certainly would want to know who Rufous was after he showed up).

Forget the Tavern: Boons, Part 1

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This is part of a series of posts on advice for starting a campaign.
Go to Forget the Tavern: Introduction or to Forget the Tavern: That Was Me! Part 1

Boons are related to the That Was Me! activity in that they consist of a past event that a player claims for their character. Unlike That Was Me! entries, only the GM writes them, and they tend to be longer than the That Was Me! options.

Here’s an example of one wrote for an Empire of the Ghouls campaign from Kobold Press. The game was set in Kobold Press’s Midgard.

The Stranger

One evening during your trip accompanying Zobeck city Councilor Halsen Hrovitz to Stefansfor Keep on the border of Morgau, you were gathering wood for the fire when a stranger shrouded in tattered clothing that enveloping him as effectively as deep-cowled robe, approached you, holding hands up in a sign of friendship. When you asked who he was, he replied in a raspy, hesitant voice, “I…I…I am…Rufous. Rufous, I think.” Concerned by the uncertainty and confusion in his voice, you asked if he needed help, and told him you had a camp nearby with food and shelter.

“I saw,” he replied. “I need no help. Just questions. Can you answer my questions?” You indicated that you would try. He first asked you where you were, and when you told him he replied, “Not far, then.” He then asked you what year it was, followed by the day when you told him the year. Finally, he asked if you would be traveling into Morgau. “25 miles beyond Stefanfor Keep,” he said, “is the village of Dunmore. Tell Nada that I am sorry.” When you told him you  weren’t traveling beyond Stefanfor Keep, he nodded, and suggested that if you told them in the keep someone might take the message to her. With that, he thanked you, turned, and walked away. You called after him but he didn’t respond, so you finished gathering the wood and returned to camp.

Before I ask players to choose a Boon, I tell them that each boons comes with a benefit. It might be a favor owed, or a reward of future aid. It might be a one-time game mechanic benefit, spell, ability, or magical effect. The effect is, in part, based on the narrative, but it will also be situational — if they call on their boon at 2nd level, it’s going to be of a different magnitude than if they call on it at 11th level. They’re encouraged to call on them when they think it’s appropriate, and I also have the option to invoke their boon at a particularly opportune time. When I write these, I have an idea of what the boom is, but I don’t have predetermined moment for the boon to be used.

After a player chooses their boon, I asked them if they keep the item, fulfilled the request, or whatever the boon involved. In the case of The Stranger, I asked if the PC did leave Rufous’ message at Stefanfor Keep. The player said yes.

So, what’s going on here in the example of The Stranger? Rufous is a newly revived darakhul and already strongly suspects he is a ghoul. Darakhul are free-willed, intelligent ghouls, and The Ghoul Imperium (the Empire of the Ghouls for which the published campaign is named), is governed by darakhul. Because they have free will, not all darakhul are innately evil, although they do suffer the hunger that drives them to eat flesh. Rufous, I decided, would maintain his neutrality, but realizing there was no place for him above ground, he will find his way into the Underdark and, eventually, to the Ghoul Imperium.

At some point during the game, likely when the PCs were in the Underdark or in an outpost or the capital city of the Ghoul Imperium, Rufous would be there at a time of need. Maybe when the party is lost and out of supplies. Maybe when they’re about to be discovered to be living beings rather than undead. Maybe they need a guide. Maybe they need to be broken out of prison. In that moment, Rufous can be there to repay what he feels is a debt.

Rufous is the oddball of the boons for that campaign in that I was much more likely to invoke Rufous than the player, and so I kept open the idea that Rufous might show up more than once. And a couple of times before Rufous was brought into play, I told the player that their character saw, or thought they saw, him but was too far away or the PC was too occupied to pursue.

Having introduced the idea of Boons and how they work, I’ll provide two more examples in the next Forget the Tavern post.

Go to Forget the Tavern: Boons: Part 2

Forget the Tavern: That Was Me! Part 4

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This is part of a series of posts on advice for starting a campaign.
Go to Forget the Tavern: Introduction or to Forget the Tavern: That Was Me! Part 1

How These That Was Me! Shaped Our NBA Campaign

As I said, each of these offered both clues and bread crumbs that would become meaningful as the player agents hunted Örümcek and responded to the vampire war however they decided to respond. I wrote twice as many That Was Me! summaries as player characters, and many of them included other themes. By choosing the That Was Me! summaries they did, the players were telling me what they found interesting. In doing so, they helped shape the overall arc of the campaign and the nature of the supernatural. I was playing with the idea of Angel Hair, which is associated with UFO sighting and manifestations of the Virgin Mary. By choosing the That Was Me! summaries involving the Santa Coloma Church and the Virgin manifestations and the cell mate screaming about angels, the players unknowingly directed me toward a supernatural vampires rather than alien vampires.

Likewise, by choosing the Mr. Bungle cover band, the Kiss of the Spider Woman, and the Triesen bartender That Was Me! summaries, the players gave me three ways to feed them information and three ways to draw them into the mystery. Clues and breadcrumbs that would catch the player’s attention because they’d chosen them. But again, who was the Mr. Bungle informant, what was their agenda, and who were they working for — Örümcek? Örümcek’s vampire enemies? a third party? I didn’t know at first. Likewise I didn’t know who left the Kiss of the Spider Woman in the PC’s luggage; just that I could drop Kiss of the Spider Woman references and use the novel as a cypher key. And the bartender of indeterminate gender. A phone call or text, or showing up in person, had potential. (As the game progressed, I decided the bartender was an innocent who just really hated the satanic Norwegian biker gang.) Also, while the player didn’t know it, they chose to add a satanic Norwegian biker gang to one of the two cospyramids.

None of these initial That Was Me! summaries, no matter how obscure or weird, were random events. As the PC agents were hunting Örümcek, they were caught up in its web. However, this wasn’t a Brindlewood Bay style game where the players’ interpretations of facts made them true. I had some specific facts set down after the players decided their One True Thing about Örümcek. Before they stated their one true things, the only element about Örümcek I’d chosen was its name. I don’t recall what rabbit holes I fell into, but after they’d defined their One True Things, I followed the Turkish spider connection to Bulgaria, and through Bulgaria to ancient Thrace as one path, and to Angel Hair as a second path.

I decided Örümcek was a splinter faction broken off and at war with an ancient group of 8 vampires who mostly hibernated in some strange quantum state and appeared as something like a menhir and where hidden away in secret caves. While hibernating, they could communicate with their servants, vampire cultists for lack of a better word, and supernatural creatures. The vampire affiliated with Örümcek was out of hibernation, and Örümcek had killed three of the other vampires. (At the start of the campaign, I didn’t know if Örümcek was a vampire, an organization serving that vampire, or a name for that vampire’s faction). With that knowledge, I wrote the This Was Me! summaries, focusing on the weird with the understanding that what they meant as we played.

As I said, this wasn’t a Brindlewood Bay type mystery. I’d decide how the This Was Me! summaries played out, but I let the narrative help me decide that. I decided the bartender would be an innocent because that not being affiliated with the vampire conspiracies seemed the most interesting option to play off the decision that the Norwegian satanic biker gang served one of the vampire conspiracies. (When I wrote them, I was focused on the bartender as a meaningful NPC and thought the bikers would be a weird red herring.)

Go to Forget the Tavern: Boons, Part 1

Forget the Tavern: That Was Me! Part 3

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This is part of a series of posts on advice for starting a campaign.
Go to Forget the Tavern: Introduction or to Forget the Tavern: That Was Me! Part 1

In the first two Forget the Tavern: That Was Me! posts, I discussed how I use the That Was Me! activity to start a campaign in media res — with memorable action — and with a party that has a shared history. In those two earlier posts, I focused examples from a D&D campaign. Here, I want to talk about how I used it with a Night’s Black Agents campaign and the changes I made to better fit the context of our NBA game.

Night’s Black Agents That Was Me!

In the Night’s Black Agents game, our campaign frame was based on the organizing trope of Plegane Press’ The Gaean Reach RPG based on Jack Vance’s science fiction series (technically, it was inspired by Kenneth Hite’s article “Call of Chicago: Why Do You Hate Chandler Vaughn?” that applies the trope to other Pelgrane games. In the Gaean Reach, each character has been seriously wronged by an intergalactic criminal known as Quandos Vorn. The point of the game? Quandros Vorn must die! The PCs have banded together because each of them wants to kill Quandros Vorn. At the start of the game, each player gets to name why their character wants Quandros Vorn dead and they get to name one true thing about Quandros Vorn.

In case you don’t know, Night’s Black Agents is ex-intelligence and special forces operatives and criminals gone freelance who discover there is a shadow world behind the shadow world they operate in, and that shadow world is run by vampires.

So, as we began making characters, I told the players there was this figure Örümcek who might be an individual or a name for an organization, and that Örümcek was why they left their old job. Maybe Örümcek framed them and they were fired, or Örümcek killed a loved one and they’ve sworn vengeance, or maybe Örümcek was always two or three steps ahead of the PC, and the rules of their agency kept them hamstrung, unable to do anything but follow Örümcek’s trail of destruction and never able to catch and stop Örümcek. For whatever reason each PC was after Örümcek , the group had come together as they realized each of them believed Örümcek must die. Each chose what Örümcek had done to them personally, and they had a number of That Was Me! summaries to choose from to create a collective back story for their team.

As you can see, these That Was Me! summaries are longer than those I used with the D&D group, and you can also see that I included a question for the player to answer for their That Was Me! The third big difference between what I did for the D&D campaign and for the NBA campaign is that I divided theThat Was Me! summaries into two categories. The first round only included That Was Me! summaries that I wrote, and each of them had to choose one of those. The second round included those written by the players. Unlike the D&D That Was Me! summaries, the ones I used for the first round had specific connections to ideas I had for our campaign — the GM section of the core NBA book includes a chapter on creating a unique vampire (or vampires) for your game. I decided that Örümcek was at war with another vampire group. Whether Örümcek was an individual or a group, I hadn’t yet decided at the start of the game. So, I knowing the basic natures of these vampires, and a rough outline of how the war was being fought — a war in which the PCs were going to learn that they were pawns — I wrote each of the That Was Me! summaries as eventual clues and bread crumbs the agents could follow deeper into the conspiracy.

Here’s a few examples of what I offered them to choose from.

  • Laying low in Triesen, Liechtenstein while the team was trying to access 1873 bank records, you got restless and wound up in the Take 5 Club Lounge. The booze was reasonably priced, the food good, and the billiards tables busy. You were surprised when the bartender slipped you their phone number as you ran out the back after killing a Norwegian satanic biker gang member with a billiard cue. The team cut and ran, and you haven’t been to Liechtenstein since. 
    • Question: What did you do with the number, and what do you know about the bartender who gave it to you?
  • Tracking down a lead, you were given a backstage pass to a Mr. Bungle cover band gig in Venice. After the gig, you waited in the empty green room as instructed, and eventually the singer, still dressed in full clown costume, arrived. They handed you a flash drive and left. On the flash drive was a cipher key, instructing you how to decipher the set list of the band’s gigs. Since then, you’ve received tickets to six other gigs in locations across Europe. Each has given you good intel. For the most recent concert, you received another backstage pass, and like last time, it was just you and the singer, only you realized the person you were meeting wasn’t the singer you saw on stage or the person you met the previous time. When you raised the issue, the clown raised a finger to their lips to indicate silence, and handed you something.
    • Question: What did they give you? And what kind of clue is it?
  • After arriving in Manchester, England you found in your luggage a near-pristine first edition copy of El beso de la mujer araña (Kiss of the Spider Woman). Throughout the novel, individual letters have been cut out. Someone used gray ink to draw brackets around the section in which Molina recounts the third movie to himself. (You’ve identified the ink as Rohrer & Klingner scabiosa (iron gall dark grey) fountain pen ink. In the middle of the section was a note made of the letters cut out of the novel and glued to a Crane Stationery Wharton card. The message read: “Una historia encantadora, ¿no? Aunque prefiero la cuarta película.” The card was trimmed so that any personalized inscription was removed, and there were no fingerprints or other traces on the book or the card.
    • Question: What do you think the message is trying to tell you?
  • You ran into an old colleague drowning their sorrows at a street cafe in Barri Antic, the old quarter of Andorra la Vella, the capital of the small Pyrenees principality of Andorra. You’re not sure who was more surprised at the chance meeting, especially as you two didn’t like each other. Out of sympathy? Curiosity? Suspicion? You stopped and listened to their tale. They’d been framed for killing their lover. Woke up covered in blood and a knife in their hand. That’s when the visions started. They’re on the run, but they are too tired to keep it up. “The Virgin promised she’d show herself to me, just over there” they said, pointing down the street toward the early medieval Santa Coloma Church. “She didn’t come. Why would the Virgin lie to me?” They then looked you in the eye and said,  “You should go. They will be here soon. The police.” You got up and watched from a distance. It wasn’t three minutes before the police took your former colleague away.
    • Question: Why are you certain your colleague wasn’t lying about the visions?
  • After a botched mission in Bratislava, Slovakia, the team split up and you were caught. You know your cover was blown, only you weren’t sure if they knew who you really were. You were held in a cell with two others, one of whom was asleep when you arrived, while the other barely acknowledged you with a nod and kept silent. Eventually, the sleeping one started shouting about angels. It was clearly a nightmare. When they woke up, they took one look at you and lunged, screaming about you being an angel who had come to kill them. The guards eventually dragged your attacker away as they kept screaming about angels. About 30 minutes later, you were let go. You know the police had you dead to rights, and you have no idea why they let you go.
    • Question: In the bag containing your personal effects was $1,000 in unmarked $100 bills wrapped in paper with a small symbol drawn on it. It was the same symbol you saw tattooed on the back of the neck of the prisoner who had attacked you. What is that symbol?

In Forget the Tavern: That Was Me! Part 4, I’ll talk about how these That Was Me! summaries helped shape our Night’s Black Agents campaign.

Forget the Tavern: That Was Me! Part 1

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This is part of a series of posts on advice for starting a campaign.
Go to Forget the Tavern: Introduction

The first exercise I use is called That Was Me! I learned this technique from a friend as we started a Curse of Strahd campaign. For That Was Me!, each player (including the GM), writes down 2 or 3 summaries of something that a player character in the group did during the group’s shared past. I find it helps that you, as the GM, create one to two examples per player character and share those with the group before you ask the other players to each write one to two more That Was Me! summaries. (In future posts, I’ll provide examples from a D&D, a Night’s Black Agents, and a The One Ring campaigns I’ve run as well as discuss how they shaped our campaign).

Once you have all the That Was Me! contributions, you read them out loud and have players claim them by saying “That was me!” Once a player has claimed a That Was Me!, they sit out the rest of that round, and you continue reading them until everyone has claimed one. If you need to, start reading unclaimed That Was Me! summaries from the beginning and work through the batch again. Once everyone has claimed one, you continue reading so that everyone can claim a second That Was Me!.

I explain to players that while it’s most common to choose a That Was Me! that speaks to them and their early conception of their character, it’s also useful and interesting to choose a That Was Me! that seems completely out of character. It could be a latent aspect of that character which will emerge over time. Or it could be uncharacteristic one-off, which in itself makes for a great story as well as defining who that character isn’t.

Before you write any That Was Me! summaries and ask your other players to do the same, you should decide on a context: How do the player characters know each other? Have they been working for an individual or organization, or all belong to an organization? Did they all grow up together? Have they been pursuing the same goal and have teamed up? Have they never met each other but have all been participants in the same shared dreams?1 (If you go with the dreams, give them context for those dreams such as they were all traveling to a pilgrimage site, or soldiers in an army on the march, or guardians of an artifact. Something concrete and tangible even if the shared dreams involve absurd dream logic.)

Deciding on the context of that shared past helps everyone imagine that past.

In the first D&D campaign I used That Was Me! with, we’d established that the PCs had all signed up to work for an Adventurer’s Guild — the ruler of their kingdom had been an adventurer herself, and she decided that such a guild could harness the adventurous to the kingdom’s benefit. The player characters had all been with the guild doing jobs for six months to a year. They’d worked together in smaller groups, and over time they became an effective team, so they got assigned bigger jobs as a group.

For the past 3 months from the in-game day our campaign started, they’d been assigned to assessors taking population censuses and identifying needs of communities. I told them their last assignment was traveling through a mountain range that marked the northern border of their realm, and that the first adventure would begin on their return trip. (At that point, they would be free to keep taking jobs through the Adventurer’s Guild or strike off on their own.) Creating this shared past with a context, also gave us the opportunity to kick off our first play session with a threat the PCs needed to respond to.

In the next Forget the Tavern post, I’ll share the some of the That Was Me! scenarios I provided the other players in that D&D campaign and discuss how some of them became ongoing touchstones throughout the campaign.

Go to Forget the Tavern: That Was Me! Part 2

  1. I’m thinking of using this shared dream version if I ever run The Fortune’s Wheel Planescape 5e D&D campaign. In it, the PCs wake up with amnesia in Sigil’s mortuary. The logic of the narrative as written is that the PCs will band together because they 1) woke up together, and 2) will want to find out who they are together, although there are plenty of options for them to split up before someone promises to help them figure out who they are. Sure, the social contract of playing in a published campaign means the PCs will likely stick together.

    However, waking up in a room with a bunch of other people not knowing who you or anyone else in the room is but you know you’ve had multiple dreams — clearly dreams rather than memories — involving these people provides a far better reason for the PCs to remain banded together once they escape the mortuary. ↩︎

Forget the Tavern: Introduction

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If you spend enough time in D&D forums and similar spaces, you’ll come across people asking for ideas on how to start a campaign other than “you all meet in a tavern.” My short response is this:

Begin the campaign in medias res — with action — and with the PCs already an established group with a shared history. There are two major advantages to this strategy:

  1. You can start your campaign off with a memorable moment of exciting action located anywhere in your world. Maybe the PCs are being chased by a horde of orcs, maybe they’re in a deal just about to go bad, maybe they’ve just tracked down someone they’ve been hunting for weeks, maybe their camp or surveillance post is under attack in the middle of the night, or maybe they’re all dangling from a cliff when a dragon or helicopter flies by and they need to find cover before it comes back in for the kill.
  2. The PCs have a history together. There’s no forced camaraderie or “it takes time before I trust others” going on. No wondering why they’re together. They’ve been through all that offstage before the game begins.

Of course, you can’t just hand wave that and tell the players this is the case. Well, you can with the memorable moment of action, but that too can be established through the creation of the group’s past history.

As I would answer these “how do I start a campaign” questions, I further developed my own ideas, which I then put into practice, and then revised my responses until I started a Google Doc that I shared, and, eventually, a workshop for the One-shot Fridays Discord Server.

A good part of these ideas don’t originate with me. Some of them I’ve borrowed from GMs whose games I’ve played in, and some from other sources likeMichael Shea’s Sly Flourish blog and Lazy DM series, Seth Skorkowsky YouTube videos, particularly the Playing RPGs, GM Toolbox, and RPG Philosophy playlists),1 and Justin Alexander’s The Alexandrian blog and now So You Want to Be a Game Master. I know, for instance, that Sly Flourish discusses starting with action in Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master, but I think I started starting campaigns off with action before I read his book.

So, how do you do you establish a pre-existing team of player characters dropped into the game world in medias res? Create the back history first, and then decide the action. As a group, we do this through a variety of exercises in what I call a Session 0.5, after the we’ve made the player characters.

In future posts for this series, I’ll cover activities for establishing shared histories for a party and tie the PCs to the game world before we play, and why I use them. They include

  1. I’m not a big fan of watching YouTube TTRGP advice and actual plays, even by most of the big names out there, so the fact that I look forward to watching Skorkowsky’s videos is worth noting. ↩︎