Shane – Page 2 – Project Work by Shane P.

Imagination & Cryptids

December 7, 2023 Shane1 Comment

“I don’t know you how do it” is a pretty common refrain when hearing about someone running a marathon, writing computer code, or making art.

“Yes, you do!” I often want to scream. The runner spends hours training, the coder hours learning, and the artist hours practicing. There are very few skills humans are born with. We have to learn them. Suggesting otherwise is to disregard the effort someone has put into something.

Imagination is exactly the same. “I’m not creative enough to write a story.” Neither was Gaiman, until he put a bit of effort in. No one is born with thoroughly unique ideas and no one sits around waiting for a muse.

Imagination is an active process that works of the fuel you’ve been collecting for years: books, music, TV. Almost every piece of popular culture is built on top of a predecessor’s work. Munched own by one author to be mulled over and reshaped by the next.

The writing advice of “always be reading” isn’t to improve your vocabulary (that does help, but you may want to turn to crosswords for that!), it’s to fill you up with ideas you can take and work with.

Not wholesale stealing – I believe the industry frowns upon that. But you largely have free reign with the ingredients of stories; if stealing from one place is bad, stealing a tiny bit from lots of places is industry standard!

“It’s Sherlock Holmes, but if Sherlock was a house elf, and he’s trying to track down some keys, like from Locke and Key, but instead of keys they’re dog collars from Infernal Soldiers.”

All ideas stolen from books I’ve read recently, but altogether make a unique premise. Is that imaginative? There’s nothing inspired about it in there – it’s a collection of stolen ideas. But their combination will connect ideas no one has every had before. The twine that connects those threads will make a whole world out of nothing, and the story you tell will come sort of naturally out of that. You’ll have to explain the Infernal Soldiers for one thing, and the relationship between your-version-of-the-house-elves and the rest of society. You’ll have to figure out why the main character is interested in their left over collars – if nothing jumps out at you pick the obvious and see where it takes you. “Well, because he lost them.”

A fantastic and seemingly endless (and public domain!) well spring of ideas to fill up on are folklore stories.

I’m reading an indie published book, Myth & Lore: Cryptids of the UK, which is full of ancient and Weird creatures. These creatures are so mysterious that there’s often large white pieces of canvas around them which need to be filled in with stories. Rarely, for instance, are the motivations of the Loch Ness considered. Lets accept that there is a huge dino swimming around the Scottish lakes, but then the question is why was this singular creature placed there?

Take the macguffin from the last book you read or film you recently saw. Chuck that at the bottom of the loch and suddenly Nessy is there to protect that! That’s a story (or at the very least a side quest)!

That’s what imagination often is. The fun of combining ideas, jumbling them about to see how they play together, and then hopefully their summation ends up inspired.

A Trap Has Grown Here to Farm the Droppings of Hornet-Women

November 28, 2023 ShaneLeave a comment

McGrogan asked over on their blog asked about a trap for hornet-women. Here’s by naturally occuring option.

Pseudo Nests are actually a fungus that survives mostly on the … processed leavings of hornet-women as they’re going to and from their actual nest. Mostly harmless to non-hornet creatures, these imitation nests become more proficient at luring their meals towards them as they grow from small patches of fungus to swallowing up whole forests if allowed.

Spores of this fungus can be found, quite harmlessly, inside many hornet-women’s digestive tracts, largely dormant. These spores are swept up in the normal processes of the hornet and are expelled, often quite near to an actual nest. They begin to reproduce only when in contact with trees or soil which it makes its habitat and yet still survives off of hornet droppings throughout its life cycle.

Once passed their immature stage of “hoping” for food delivery, the nest takes a more active roll in finding food: the developed fungus looks and smells nearly identical to a hornet nest made of traditional material. Akin to catnap or nicotine, the hornets stop by regularly simply to breath it in (and there by picking up more fungus inside of themselves).

For the largest colonies – a key identification for gardeners is the speed of growth and if it reaches unnatural size – the colony has been known to take the addicted, starved bodies of the hornets and reassemble them in the ape of a queen hornet.

With a “queen” present, whole swarms settle and ultimately perish to the fungus. This seems to be the natural limiting factor to the size of Pseudo Nests: they ultimately become too efficient at capturing their prey and can wipe out entire swarms that pass.

Loadouts

November 3, 2023 ShaneLeave a comment

“Did anyone remember to buy a healers kit?”

There are some situations where characters would behave smarter than their players. That’s why we have passive checks and other checks to see if the character thinks (or even remembers) something the player doesn’t.

One of those situations is remember to leave the house with their winter coat when in the middle of the darkest months. It’d be cruel for a DM to suggest that since the player didn’t specifically say, “I’m going to dress up warm,” that the character would be wandering around in a t-shirt and shorts.

Similarly, when you are on floor four of a mine, where the job was to collect a few diamonds, only to realise that no one noted down a pickaxe, the group should be given the benefit of the doubt. Obviously the character would have considered this and picked one up.

Full disclosure: I’ve not actually read Blades in the Dark, and only know it from the Adventure Zone, but it has a nice system for this kind of thing. Before setting off on an adventure, the players decide what loadout they’d like to take. I believe these are along the lines of light and heavy.

The items in those loadouts aren’t decided immediately, but are decided in the adventure as they’re needed. If you’re going in light you can get away with a small handgun or an iron file or some such. Small things. Too many small things will eventually add up to a heavy load, so at some point you can no longer add more things.

A heavy load means you can start pulling out great axes and whatnot. The downside here is that (even before you’ve decided on what items there are) people around you will know you’re packing. Suspicions are going to be raised pretty quickly.

These loadouts might cost an upfront payment, but making the group pay for the items at the end might be more fun, adding a push-your-luck mechanic. Shall we splash out on a Scroll of Detect Lies now? What if it reveals nothing? What if the dungeon is a bust and the PCs end up going into debt? Drama! Tension! Oooh!

The DM can of course have final ruling on what a loadout contains. Maybe it doesn’t make sense for the PC to be carrying a glass making kit. It’s important to remember rule one of being a good DM though: at the end of the day, your job is to make the players feel like their characters are heroes. If that means they pull the perfect macguffin out their ass and it makes for a cool scene, then why on earth not.

Outer Wilderness, by Claire Scully

October 27, 2023 ShaneLeave a comment

This is a small piece of art, with just under thirty full colour illustrations of distant, exotic planet scenes.

I think I found in in a comic book shop (Page 45, in Nottingham). You can get it over on bookshop.org though. It’s definitely worth having a physical copy. The paper and print are wonderful. The texture is lovely. The colour bold as heck.

There’s story told with each image, though I’d hesitate to say narrative. Which means we can use these fairly abstract things as inspiration. Maybe even use the questions each page evokes as a world building tool for our own exotic planes.

What part of life are the players seeing this place in? It’s dying days? It’s very early stages of forming?
How would life survive here? Your players may need to use waterbreathing spells or oxygen tanks, but what about the things that are already here?
Which biomes are present here? Not just things next to each other, but beneath and above. All life on Earth is around the crust, barely stretching down a fraction of the planet, but that doesn’t need to be the case everywhere.
Without predators, in what way does early life flourish? On Earth we’re around four billion years into evolution. Go back a few billion years, and you won’t find perfectly honed creatures, suited exactly for survial niche. There’d be thousands of species who don’t realise they’re doomed because they’re bad at living.
Could life be planet sized? I watched this documentary about Pluto’s oceans once, and since then I’ve had idle daydreams about six or seven the football pitch sized whales that just float around, basking in the tiny rays of sun that reach them.
How long does this place have left? That moon definitely looks like its on a collision course, given enough time.
What’s the vibe? Peaceful? Dead? Filled with sneaky life?

Then remember, when you’ve decided a few things about your world, throw in some conflict. Drama makes the game.

What brings you here? Helping players buy in to your game.

June 14, 2023 ShaneLeave a comment

If you’re running a one shot, it’s more than okay to drop your PC’s at the entrance to a dungeon and forcibly push them in. On more long lived games though, you’ll want to make sure there’s a reason for the player characters to stick around (rather than returning to their family, their job, or just deciding to call the town guard to handle it). It’s important to the PC’s to know their motivation.

On the flip side, it’s important for players to remember that they’re there to play a game. In most RPGs, you should be building a Hero or at least an Adventurer At Heart who’s eager to throw themselves into a quest with very loose reasoning. “Of course I’ll help! I’m just that kind of half-elf.”

DM and player should meet in the middle here and come up with something fitting and fun. Often, “you were looking for a job – here’s one” is all it takes. But what if you want a little more ramp up to this?

Fortunately, there are some very easy ways for getting buy-in from even the most reluctant of characters and to find out something about them along the way.

Time to pay back that favour. This may be my favourite for a couple of reasons: a) the quest giver can be morally ambiguous, and yet still be owed a debt from the PCs, and b) it sets up a back story for the PC’s and helps them decide their flaw.

In my run of Maze of the Blue Medusa, the initial quest giver was Twisted Wrought Iron, a kenku and master forger. Session zero was a meeting where the party had been summoned and we went around the group with the question “what favour did Twisted do for you that means you own him one?” We kept going around the group and iterating on each others backstories until everyone had a good reason to need to do this job. And, many of the characters “realised” they knew each other too.

Duty calls. What ever the character’s backstory, they lived in a full world before. There’s certainly going to be some person in their lives which you as the DM can exploit. Nobles are often sent off on jobs by their higher ups, and there’s little they can do about it. Holy people are sent on missions.

Remember to ask them how that conversation went, and to describe the authority figure that sent them. That’s some meaty plot there!

Factions are a big deal across the Forgotten Realms, and outside of Faerun you’ll find plenty of allegiances and secret groups. Getting your PCs to join or align with one of these makes plot hooks very easy.

“You’re not the first party we’ve sent on this quest”. You can put this into any adventure with little modification. The buy in here is easy: your sister was in that first party! When the party eventually find the butchered remains of their loved ones, they have a sudden and equally powerful revenge or justice motive.

How did your last adventure go? This may be a brand new character, but this might not be there first adventure. This is a good way to have characters in the group already know each other too. Whatever they say, try to work in a hint towards this adventure. Maybe it was all leading to this, right now.

DMs, note: You don’t have to improvise everything. Get the players to help out.
Finding the character buy-in should be a process the entire group is taking part in. You don’t have to look like a master improvisor. Listen to what your players are hoping to play and lean into that. Let them create whole narratives that are happening outside of the story you’re hoping to tell. Feed off of that, and try to bring it into the adventure.
They’ll be surprised and excited when you ask them “can you tell me more about this god you worship? are they popular? are they the main god of the realm?”

Published adventure hooks. Most 5e adventures, certainly all the published ones, have an ‘adventure hooks’ and/or a ‘backgrounds’ section. These shouldn’t be shrugged at and there’s a lot to be learned in them. One in Elemental Evil picks a villain from the adventure and puts the PC specifically on a quest to hunt the villain down. (Since you’re here, you may as well finish what you started and carry on with the adventure!) Storm King’s Thunder describes how to get PC’s from their previous adventures to the story of the giants.