Dungeons and Resources: Halloween Suspense

Right now I am getting fairly excited for tonight because it is the night of the week that my role-playing games group gets together. We use to gather on Tuesday nights but un fortunately that was going to interfere with a couple of members of our crew. Placing a weekly event on a Friday is a little harder than during the week, for most people, myself included, the weekends are busy and Friday is the start of that.

With my eagerness for tonight I thought it was about time for another installment of “Dungeons and Resources”. In the last while I have not done a post on the topic of role playing in a while and thought now would be a good time to start doing it again. The wonderful world of role-playing games is as always ever expansive and open ended so I am trying to break it down for both players and game masters to enjoy.

Today I will be discussing a topic that is more pertinent to those aspiring to be outstanding GMs and DMs. The topic is of course the basic building blocks for creating a suspenseful and heart stopping adventure campaign. The following is 10 pointers for improving an adventure to the point that all the players are on the edge of their seats.

Photo from erebus88

1. Create Fear and Danger

The very first tip I have to creating a suspenseful adventure is an overlying air of danger. This will breed the required terror and anxiety that you are looking to achieve. Make almost every decision seem like it is a life or death choice, if you are feeling super deceptive you can make these life or death choices relevant later down the line.

Make the element of danger that you choose to use semi hidden and worthy of fear, that means bunnies are not scary. Keep the adventure's antagonists hidden but make sure that the Player Characters are aware that they are there or at least only spotted in the shadows. Allow for the player's own minds to dream up all sorts of creepy wonders their imagination is yours to play with.

To make it more immersive have the adventurers find many weird and bizarre things along the way. Ham it up and exaggerate everything from the glow of the lights to the shadows of the strange items scattered everywhere. The exaggerations may just turn out that it was a small weasel, but as long as the element of fear is intact, you're doing your job.

Most players will scare themselves silly and do most of the work for you if you give them the chance and scatter the seeds of doubt in their minds.

2. Foreshadow

This is one of the elements that you should use most often the scarcest thing around is the fear of the unknown. Build upon this basic human phobia by planting little clues that may indicate what the PCs are up against, you could even have some of these clues can be way of base if you choose.

The players imaginations will get the better of them and lead them to make outrageous assumptions like they're facing hundreds of invincible vampires, or that their mortal enemy of has procured access to horrible one shot kill spell.

Usually none of these unavoidable conclusions are anywhere near accurate to what you have in store for them. The number one key to a suspense game is not knowing what will happen around the next corner and that's something an RPG excels at.

For example when watching a movie, the audience wonders if the heroine will notice the axe-wielding maniac silently moving towards her. Meanwhile while playing an RPG, the players should be wondering, "What the heck's is that noise?!" even though it might be nothing or maybe the killer is about to jump through a window.

3. Create Mood And Play With Phobias

The best thing to do is to ask your players what scares them the most in a casual conversation, then wait about a year and work it into your suspense stories. The hard part is to pull this off without seeming cheesy or being overly cliché. Remember what scared you most when you were a kid and try to get the feeling of that into your adventure. Chances are if you are truly afraid or something actually scares you, it will generate suspense all by itself.

It is always best to establish the mood early on in the story or at the start of the session. If players don’t know what you are planning on doing, they might come into the session with the wrong attitude. Heroes have a tendency to take most things without being fazed.

Instead, before you start Inform the players that this will be a deadly mystery and suspense adventure that they may or may not survive. They might not be scared out of their minds as of yet, but they'll at least start to know that you are serious and won't complain so much when a psychopath starts playing in their favorite character's intestines.

4. Embrace The Unknown

The number one best tool in your arsenal of terror is the fear of the unknown.

The way to start portray this fear is to never be straightforward in your answers to player's questions. Open ended descriptions lead the adventurers down a path to the worst parts of their imaginations.

For example don’t say “you enter the room and there is a large spider in the corner” try something like “As you step through the door way into the dark room you feel a sense of dread wash over your being. You hear a noise come out of the shadows at the far side of the room. You try to look as your eyes adjust to the dim light and all you can make out is something dancing in the shadow that over takes half the small room.”

Don't tell the player what they should interpret from the clues or occurrences that they incounter. But you may choose to give them a little help and if you do, make up the worst thing it could be (even if it's not).

5. Red Shirts Die First

Take a page from Star Trek be sure to include a lot of red shirts who can mysteriously disappear or die in strange ways. When someone goes missing without a trace is more frightening than someone actually dying.

Not every one of the characters that are helping the group may be on the up and up or telling everything that they know. If the players are to be scared out of their minds by everything, everyone and any small noises in the night the help being shady may make it worse. If you're doing your job properly, that is probably the best way to add a little twist into the mix.

6. Don't Try To Scare

This may sound counterproductive to what advice I was giving earlier, but really it's not. Never set out your goal to be to scare the players it will more than likely backfire and they will only laugh. Don’t start out by saying something like, "Oh, this is such a scary adventure you'll all be peeing your pants." It doesn't work that way. Every GM worth his weight would love to scare the piss right out of their players on occasion, but it doesn't work if you tell them what you want to do.

If you are a good GM and run a good suspense adventure, and keep up the hard work, they'll appreciate it and they'll still enjoy the game. You might not scare the daylights out of people, but if you do your job there will be just enough doubt in their minds to allow the creeping tendrils of terror and panic to invade.

7. Don't Answer All

Even at the end of the adventure, or outside of the game, don't reveal everything leave them with questions and the doubt will last. For fun at the end have another dead body turn up after the main villain was already captured.

8. Employ Killer Descriptions

One of the finest ways to establish a mood of suspense is to actively work to create it. During the course of a game the players take all their cues about the game world from the GMs descriptions. If you describe something as the most horrible and most terrible area ever, and the fact that if they enter they'll probably die, the players will just turn around and walk away.

I once described a room to be so frightful that my players just turned tail and never went through there. To avoid this little problem be sure to include good motivation for PCs to go somewhere obviously dangerous.

If you want your fearsome description to have any weight, the area must be actually really dangerous. Avoid overusing your fearsome descriptions, as well, or the players will be bored and this will cause problems. If you go for suspense all the time, the players will get used to it and it'll lose that edge you're looking for.

9. The Build up

In literature there is an arc to all stories. The Protagonist is fought at the end, the mask of the killer is removed and the little girl survives the zombie attack with the puppy. In a game, you can't say for certain the players won't kill the bad guy the first time he shows up or at least try to and grow frustrated if you don’t let them win. So it is best to have him not show up for a while, to build up the suspense, start out with small occurrences and strange clues. As the PCs investigate the clues they should find out more about the horror of everything and find that they have more questions than answers, think about the first season of Lost.

Toward the end of the setting, the protaganist should show up and start killing people off  (Red Shirts and silly hero type PCs). Have the toughest, NPCs be the first die. If the players have any common sense, this should freak them out. Let the villain do unreasonable things like kill 30 people in less than 30 seconds. Pull a Scooby Doo and have one of the NPCs have the great idea to split up and search around.

Avoid overdoing the fear, especially if they are just thrust upon the PCs, or your players will just think you're out to get them but don’t go to easy on them. There's a balance to it. Give players plenty of opportunities to foul up their situation on their own. If you do that, they're bound to give you just the opportunities you need to make them sweat.

10. The GM Chuckle

Sometimes just chuckling malevolently and rolling a lot of dice will do the trick behind a screen. The Evil GM Chuckle could be one of your finest strategies for generating suspense.

I hope that these tips help to make help to make your October gaming a very spooky one. 

Sincerely Urban Yeti

RPG IRL: The Beginning

Today is the start of a brand new month and I have decided that it was time for me to start an epic Quest. With each new month I like to reflect on the month that has just past and try to think of what it is that I need to do to get what I want our of life. As of the recent I have been using this reflection period for looking at this, my blog, and how I could go about to improve upon it. I have been using this blog as a means for me to set up many different goals that I want to achieve and as a means of sharing and expressing myself up until now the posts have seen kind of random.

Finally I figured out a way for all of my different interests that I post about to converge on one ultimate unifying purpose. For my future blog harmony I plan on using an element that I have derived from one of my many different geeky hobbies. The system I am foreshadowing about is that I have decided upon making a role-playing stat sheet based on me that will reflect who I am in a real life representation.

The project in question I have named the “Role-Playing Game In Real Life” and for it I was going to have to make my very own character sheet. For this project it required a little bit of research on my part of a few different types of role-playing games. To make the “Role-Playing Game In Real Life” (or RPG IRL for short) I came to the decision to use the D20 Modern character sheet as a starting point for my own.

Using one of the main ideas of character creation from Dungeons & Dragons the baseline stats for attributes are a ten. By using this baseline stat as a bases and taking into account what I have done in my life I came up with stats of my own.

The Attributes are as follows

Strength: Body Might and Brawn, A measure of how physically strong I am.

Dexterity: Agility, Reflexes and Quickness, A measure of how coordinated I am.

Constitution: Stamina, Endurance and Vitality, A measure of how resilient I am

Intelligence: Mind, Brains and Intellect, A measure of how knowledgeable I am

Willpower: Spirit, Wits and Psyche, A measure of how mentally resilient I am

Charisma: Presence, Charm and Social, A measure of how sociable I am

One thing that is a general constant among all of the Role-Playing Games is that on top of the character attributes the characters also have defined skill sets. While I was in the process of building a character sheet it dawned on me that I needed to pick a group of skills that were actually relevant to real-life. The challenge to picking these skills is that they had to be realistic and achievable, that means things like “spell casting” are a big fat no go.

The set of skills that I finally chose are mostly from the D20 Modern character sheet because it seemed to meet my purposes the best. I will not go through all of the different skills from that set and why I chose them nor will I list all those that I cut from the list.

The way that most Role-Playing games work is that as you play you gain experience and your stats then level up accordingly. As for how to go about leveling all of these stats up in real life I had to put a little bit of thought into how that would happen. After quite a bit of pondering I finally decided that the best way to accomplish this is with a completion bar method.

With the completion bars idea this means that each ability stat gets a percent bar as well as the total level. As I accomplish different types of challenges the progress bars will go up accordingly in 5% increments until the bar is full and the level or stat goes up by one point. Each challenge that is completed will improve a related ability score as well as go into the overall level status bar.

For example let us say I do an obstacle course that would increase my strength by 5% and my dexterity by 5%, therefore my total level bar would go up by 10%.

I figured that because I have already achieved some things in my life that I would start myself at level two. On top of not starting off at level one I know that of the skills listed I have actually started learning some of them and due to past training I gave myself the Computer use and the repair skill. Also I know can speak English fairly well so I put that in the skills as well and I am actually hoping to one day fill the other two speak language slots.

On the sheet on this page I have included the completion bar increases from my recent 5k run for the cure that I will be posting about later today.

Now I think that I have explained this to the best of my ability and I cannot wait to begin increasing my personal scores. I am also looking for any suggestions that may help me to improve this system so leave them in the comments below. Also I welcome any and all questions about this that you may have and I will answer them to the best of my ability. 

Sincerely Urban Yeti

Dungeons and Resources: Character Builder App

With so many advances in technology these days it is no surprise to me that there are now RPG apps. I myself am a iPhone user and I find myself using a lot of different apps for different things and GMing is no different.

I have spent a fair amount of time scouring the app store for any kind of app that would help me to build upon my game. As a GM keeping track of NPCs can be challenging especially in a world as in depth as shadowrun. Finally I made a discovery, an app that not only allows me to generate random characters but also lets me edit them how I need too. The app is called " RPG Character Generator " and let me start by say this needs to be included on every DM's iPhone or iPod Touch.

Granted that the random characters tend to be more fantasy based then sci-fi but it is a small detail that I can work around. One of the great features of this app is that it also stores the characters generated so as to be called upon at a later time. This becomes handy while behind a DM screen because sometimes my phone is easier to operate then a computer.

The code monkeys of lvl99games knew what they wanted when they put this wonderfully useful app together. After using this for a short while I could tell that this was designed with the kind of user in mind, because lets face it most DMs are the kind of people who are always changing things.

One of the advantages of having an app to do tasks like these is that now you can build your campaign while on the go. This allows that if you are out and have a random thought about some kind of enemy that would be awesome to throw at your players you can record it before you forget it.

A great big thank you goes out to one Mr. Steve Jobs for making geeks lives everywhere much easier. For the GM on the go this app is one I personally use and recommend for building a well integrated and complete fantasy world.

Dungeons and Resources: Donjon

As I talked about yesterday the Internet is a fabulous tool for learning and doing many things. For the most part people today use the Internet as a means of social networking, and to keep themselves up to date with the media.
As a gamer I utilize the Internet for it's many gaming resources, wether it is a walk through for the game I am currently playing or a forum to swap ideas and tips on my favorite table top game. I am always looking for good sites to help me to flush out my table top games, to add an element of realism and make the players feel more immersed in the world I have created. Sometimes I find myself struggling to come up with something new, so I find myself turning to the Internet for new and exciting things.
This is when I discovered my first random generator and my love affaire began. First I discovered a simple random name generator, nothing super special just a simple code that spewed out a random name from a list of maybe a hundred. Over time I tried dozens and kept moving on to bigger and more advanced generators to fit my needs.
So now to share with you one of my most frequented, this one I use for magical treasure and to create monstrous dungeons.
Are you ready for this?

Here: http://donjon.bin.sh/

This I find to be a spectacular site.

Dungeons and Resources: Elements of power

Every good DM knows that it can be hard to come up with half decent loot all the time. Especially when your crew decides to raid every single dead body after decimating an army. Some DM's myself include love to keep their players and themselves on their toes with complete and utter randomness.
Some people turn to random Internet based random generators, or random loot tables to put a bit of chaos into a run. Myself being a more visual person I like to see a picture of an item, as a player an a DM when I pick up an item I like to describe the hell out of it. The more intricate the weapon the more I feel it flushes out a character.
So when I was browsing through my local gaming shop, Sentry Box, I cam across this very helpful little item. Upon finding it I thought I had natural 20ed my search check and discovered a hidden treasure trove. What I had discovered was deck of cards, but not just any deck of cards this was a magical deck filled with images of powerful weapons and items. The deck so rightfully boasted it's name to be, The Elements of Power

It turns out that a company called Paizo most famous in the table top community for its RPG called Pathfinder. This company may not be affiliated with the actual Dungeons and Dragons RPG but they are a very similar fantasy game so a lot of the resources can be used with any fantasy style campaign.
Now the cards themselves are pretty basic with just an image and a simple weapon name, with a space for notes on the back. This is very helpful because it allows for the DM to be in charge of the stats and effects of the item on the card. The images that are on the cards are very detailed which help if players are imagination impaired and also can help a DM to spice up his campaign, we all know that everyone's imaginations sometimes can get stuck in a rut.


I highly recommend that every group has a set of cards like this just to keep the game spicy and fresh. And who knows maybe the items on the cards have shady backgrounds. So order them here: http://paizo.com/products/btpy7yi6?GameMastery-Item-Cards-Elements-of-Power-Deck

Dungeons and Resources: the twilight horizon

For those of you who game might I recommend you try your hand at shadowrun. This is one of the bigger role playing games and is my personal favorite, I have been GMing this one for quite some time on and off. I had originally started it with one group and transferred it to my new group. This game holds so close to my heart cause it was the first RPG I ever ran. I had to spend many an hour to amerce myself into this world.
So I recently, as in on Sunday, I bought and downloaded off of my favorite source site drive thru RPG one of the new shadowrun source books, The Twilight Horizon. Now this is a fourth edition book and I run a 3.5 campaign but a new source book is always a welcome sight, because any book can be helpful to a run. I always find I have to alter the stories to fit my campaign but they sometimes give me interesting ideas to make a challenge for my players.

If you are looking for a good set of different runs for any modern or futuristic style campaigns