www. Newbie DM .com

With this website, I’ve tried to give new DM’s out there tools, resources, and tips to run a better D&D game with.  One of the things that I’ve never been able to offer before today, simply because I have no skills at it, is a robust mapping tutorial or series.  So I reached out to the community at Cartographer’s Guild, probably the best mapping resource on the internet, and immediately I had a volunteer willing to help out newbiedm.com readers with their rpg mapping.

Jonathan Roberts, a published cartographer who has done work for Mongoose Publishing, Kobold Quarterly, Open Design, and other publishers, has graciously accepted to provide us with a series on mapping.  Jonathan has a website called Fantastic Maps, where you can see his work.  He is also the project lead on the first Pathfinder adventure to be purposefully created for use with virtual tabletops: “The Breaking of Forstor Nagar”. You can find information on that patronage project here, and find screenshots of the project here.

Over the course of the next few weeks, he’s going to give us tutorials on creating battlemaps, regional maps, and world maps.   And these are not just tutorials on how to draw the maps, but also the thinking behind why things go where they do.  I’m excited to present this series, and I hope these tutorials help you out in what’s probably one of the funnest part of DM’ing, great map-making!  And now, Jonathan Roberts…

Designing and drawing a battlemap – part 1

“Through the archway you see a circular room, roughly 20 feet across, with doors leading off to the east, west and south. The ceiling looks to be vaulted, but it’s hard to tell due to the thick mass of cobwebs that hang like ghostly shrouds. A pile of bones lies heaped in the corner.”

It used to be the case that a DM could describe a dungeon to their
players and everyone would know what was going on. If necessary
players would draw out a map on squared paper as they went along and if a fight broke out the terrain would be built out of pencils and erasers with dice standing in for the combatants. Now this is fine as long as all rooms are built in clean 10 foot squares, but time has moved on and the game has evolved. Adventures take place in the intestines of petrified wyrms, or on the deck of a storm tossed ship. Combat rules have become more involved, requiring careful tracking of distance and terrain. Thankfully the tools we use to play the game have evolved too, whether it’s in the form of dungeon tiles, virtual tabletop software or just a dry erase mat with a grid drawn on it. The adventures that are published have also moved on. Where in the past it was fine to have black and white maps (or blue and white if we’re going really far back) with distance measured in 10 foot squares, now published adventures have glorious full colour maps.

So what do you do when you need a map for your home brew
adventures? There are two things to consider when answering this.
Firstly how do you go about designing the map, and secondly how will you present it? All too often the second question influences the first. If you have a selection of dungeon tiles that you use to display your maps then you can easily fall into the habit of creating maps by taking out your tiles and figuring out the layout of the dungeon. If you use virtual tabletop software you might feel even more limited – only running adventures using maps that you can find or buy through the internet.

Now these are both great ways to create dungeons, particularly when pressed for time, but I’m going to show you how to go about making maps from scratch that look great.  Not only that but I’ll also cover a couple of different methods that will allow you to use these in front of your players, so that you’re not the only one that gets to see the fruits of your labour.

Here’s the map that I’ll be creating in this tutorial:

The full sized version, along with two maptool campaign files, a sliced up pdf for printing at home and a number of pieces of set dressing can be picked on RPGNow.  Now as a special treat for all you NewbieDM readers, there’s a discount code so it’ll only cost you a dollar.

First of all, let’s discuss tools. For this tutorial I’ll be using Gimp – a free, cross platform and open source graphics program. Now if you have a graphics tablet that’s a huge bonus, but the majority of what I cover in this tutorial will be possible with a mouse. All of the steps that I cover here can be directly translated into photoshop.

So shall we start drawing?

Well, not quite. As I said before, there are two questions about maps-first how we should design them, and secondly how they should be presented. So let’s start off with design questions before we put pen to paper.  In this tutorial we’ll be doing battlemaps.

These are fundamentally tied to combat and should be designed with this in mind.  You need to think what kind of encounters you want to throw at your players.  Do you want to give the ranged PCs an encounter where they can fire across large open spaces?  Would you prefer a tight corridor where the fighter can hold off the hordes?  Will the combat change halfway through when enemy reinforcements surprise the PCs from behind?  If so then you’re going to want to make sure that there’s a passageway they can appear from.  The art of designing a good encounter has become more sophisticated as the game has evolved, and the current manuals have excellent advice on how to build a good combat.  Now remember, it’s easier to change the encounter than the map, so best nail down the encounters first.  Then you can build the map you need to run them.

In this tutorial I want to create a lair for a young adult red dragon.  Dragons love caves, and they also love treasure.  However I don’t want this to be a straight forward single monster encounter – it would be fun to have some smaller enemies to fight as well as the dragon itself.  So let’s say that the dragon has acquired a tribe of humanoids that provide it with sacrifices and treasure.  Not only do they add an excellent lesser
threat for the players, it plays to the themes of vanity and greed that define dragons as well as giving me a couple of hooks to get the players involved.

This mix of foes means we should get a good mix of mass combat encounters and fights with a single monster.  I want the dragon to have opportunities to outmaneuver the PCs. The easiest way to do this is to have the dragon flying.  Now that’s not much of a benefit if the whole dungeon is flat, so let’s have some rooms with high ceilings and different levels inside.  Whilst the players are slogging across the difficult terrain the dragon can be swooping back and forth.  Perhaps we’ll throw in some lava as well to give the encounters some added danger.  Nothing says epic battle like the chance of falling into lava.

I want the fight with the dragon to have a number of beats.  First the players will encounter the dragon when he is about to devour a sacrifice.  They will battle through the dragon’s acolytes to get to the sacrifice and fend off the dragon whilst they whisk the prisoner out of harm’s way.   Then they will go after the dragon – first fighting the dragon in the outer  caves.  They wound the dragon badly enough for it to retreat.  They can leave it at that and go home, or they can follow the dragon to it’s hoard.

There it will fight to the death in a climactic battle – probably with more lava. So I want to have three primary locations. Firstly the outer area where the sacrifice is made. Second the tunnels to the dragons lair where they fight a running skirmish and encounter the dragon’s traps.  Finally the dragon’s hoard where they fight to the death.  Now we have the required locations, and we know the type of fight we’ll be running in each place it’s time to pick up a pen and draw a sketch!

Drawing a sketch

First off let’s lay down a sketch of what we want the location to look like.  Open up a new document in Gimp and set the dimensions to 2000px to a side.  Here’s my layout whilst I’m working – it’s easy enough to set up:

If you don’t have the layers dialogue open, you can find it under Windows->Dockable dialogues, along with the other dialogues.  First of all let’s lay down a grid for us to work with. First create a new
layer (ctrl-shift-n) and make sure it’s transparent. Then go to Filters->Render->Pattern->Grid.  Set the offset to 0 and the size to 50px.

This will create a map that’s got a resolution of 50px per square.  This is good enough for use in a virtual tabletop but if you’re going to be printing then you probably want to go for 100px here.  Now you can go larger.  Print images are normally printed at 300px per inch, but you’ll find that Gimp will start eating up your system’s memory. Anyway, how finely detailed do you need a battlemap to be? I find that 100px per grid square (remember that when printed 1 grid square = 1 inch) is a good compromise.

Rename that layer to Grid – we’ll be using quite a few layers and its always worth naming them to keep track of what’s what.  We’ll be leaving our Grid layer alone for now.  Now let’s sketch out our map.  First create a new transparent layer (ctrlshift-n) and rename it Sketch lines.

At this point I have a layers dialogue that looks like this:

Make sure that when you are working on your map that you have the correct layer selected.  There’s nothing more irritating than finding you’ve been working on the wrong layer and having to do it all over again.

You can fit the whole map to your screen using ctrl-shift-e so that you can see what you’re doing.  Now take any of the tools and start sketching in lines.  I like using a colour and the ink tool. This delivers nice clean lines.  Now start at the beginning, by drawing the entrance to your dungeon.  Lay out corridors and rooms, remembering your notes about what each encounter area needs to achieve.

An aside about adventure flow

Remember that your map defines the flow of an adventure.  A map that has a series of rooms with one entrance and one exit will lead to a linear adventure as players fight through room after room.  This lends itself to dull adventures where players can feel railroaded.  On the other hand, a maze where every turn offers three or four possible directions can leave players feeling lost and unsure that they’re going the right way.  Think of each room as a decision in the adventure. Players need to choose which exit to go through to get to their goal.  Just as you should offer players more than one way to solve a puzzle, it can be useful to offer players more than one path that they can take through a dungeon.

Back to the sketch

So, following my plan to have a big encounter in a cavern with a tribe and a sacrifice, I’ve laid out a room with a series of terraces at the front that overlooks a cave with the sacrifice platform on top of a pillar. A rope bridge will connect the two areas over the floor below. This area is around 100′ by 80′ in size, offering plenty of space for combat. The terraced seating lends a ghoulish feel to the sacrificial process. The rope bridge, pillars and long drop to the floor ensure that the dragon will have a solid advantage… and if he decides to destroy the rope bridge while the adventurers are on the pillar rescuing the sacrifice then that’s
just icing on the cake.

A couple of passages lead deeper into the mountain. The players can choose either one – they’ll both lead to the same place eventually. The twisting caves offer lots of opportunities for the dragon to circle around
and attack from unexpected directions, and the tight quarters are perfect for placing rock fall traps and pits.

Finally I place the dragon’s lair – a good sized cave enough room to maneuver, but without the large amount of space of the first fight. I want the final fight to be a toe to toe melee combat with the dragon where it can use all of its attacks in contrast to the skirmishes and strafing runs of the earlier encounters. Even though they fight the dragon three times, they should have three very different encounters.

The dragon has his own entrance that I’ll place much higher up the mountain side. Observant adventurers might spot it, and athletic ones might be able to climb the icy cliffs to get in this way. However if they
infiltrate the dungeon through this entrance, they’ll not be able to save the sacrifice in time.

So that’s the logic behind my decisions. Make sure you follow your own logic as you place your own sketch. If you get the layout right now it will make life much easier further down the road. I’m sure you can all see an obvious error my layout so far. I didn’t spot it until the next step…

Laying in the lines

Once you have your dungeon drawn in rough it’s time to start a final version. At this point I create a new (transparent) layer (ctrl-shift-n). This will hold the walls that define areas the PCs can’t enter and other key
structural features like stairs, edges of elevated areas, that sort of thing.  When working on this layer I zoom in to 100% and set the sketch layer to 50% opacity (using the opacity slider in the layers dialogue). Now you can see where I made a few edits to my original layout. I’ve also resized the image up so that my squares are 100px each as I want to allow people to print this out, as well as use it online.

Now it’s important that your walls don’t have holes in them. You’ll see why in the next step.  Be careful as you lay them down, and if your dungeon is rough stone, let your hand jitter around as you draw, this will
create nice rough edges. If your walls are straight then click once at the beginning of the line, then hold shift and click at the end of the line.  Voila! A straight wall.

Equally, it’s easy to create curved lines. Just take the elliptical selection tool (e) and drag out a selection corresponding to your pillar or post (holding down ctrl, shift or alt all help to constrain your ellipse in different ways – have a play and see what works). Once you have the selection you want, go to Edit->Stroke Selection and pick a nice thin line like 2px. Hit okay and you now have a lovely round pillar.

If you’re not sure something will work, try it on a new layer. Then once you have the lines you want, right click the layer in the layers dialogue and select Merge Down to combine it with the rest of your lines.

The Best Bit

Now we’re going to employ one of the most powerful features of Gimp.  Take the fuzzy select tool (u) and make sure that you have your Lines layer selected. Click in the area that you want to be solid wall. Then hold down shift and click in the next region that’s solid wall.  Repeat until all such areas are selected.  You should now see something like the image below.  Make sure that it has selected only the regions you want it to.  This is where all the care you took over your walls pays off.

Now currently your selection (the line of marching ants) will run alongside the lines you drew rather than down the middle of them.  To fix this go to Select->Grow… and pick 2 pixels as the value.  Now your
marching ants should run pretty much down the middle of your line.  We’ll be using this selection a lot so we’d better save it by going to Select->Save to Channel…

If you have the Channels dialogue open you’ll see a new channel appear under Red, Green, Blue and Alpha Channels.  Rename this to Walls and head back to your layers dialogue.  Now that you have this selection the majority of the work is done! From here on it’s surprisingly easy to get a good looking map. Indeed we can get a great simple map with just one more step. Go to your grid layer in the layers dialogue and right click. In that menu find the option Add Layer Mask and when prompted pick the option Initialise Layer Mask to:  Channel.  In the channel you’ll see the shape of your walls already mapped out. Now what this is going to do is hide any of the grid that’s in an area that wasn’t inside the selection that you saved.

Now obviously this is the opposite of what you want. You selected all the walls, and you want the grid to be hidden there and visible everywhere else, so click the Invert checkbox.  Hit okay and you’ll see the grid disappear in the walled off areas. Delete your sketch layer and you now have a lovely clean battlemap!

Now this is a great map to use for a battlemap. It doesn’t take too longto create, it’s all at the right scale and all the features are clearly shown.  You can print this out without killing your printer’s ink cartridge and it can be easily imported into your virtual tabletop of choice. Save it! First save it as a .xcf file (Gimp’s native file format that preserves all of the information) and then save it out as a jpg.

And just to show how cool your work looks – here it is in maptool:

However, some people prefer their maps with a bit more pizaz so in the next installment I’ll show you how to go about adding some colour…

And there’s the first part of the Battlemap tutorial.  I want to thank Jonathan for helping me with this series, and I hope readers get some nice use out of it.  Stay tuned, as in the next several days we’ll have part 2 up and ready for you guys to keep building your map with.  Also, please make sure you visit Jonathan’s online store and see what kind of maps he’s got for sale.

Here’s a quick thing I’m sure all DM’s do in one form or another, whether it’s via email, wiki, pen and paper, or some other form:  the game recap.  In my particular case, we don’t get to game as often as most of us would like, so as game recap is a great way to get the players up to speed on the events that have occurred in-game up to the current moment.

This is something that I’ve only implemented recently, but I’ve found that it helps cut down the 10 minutes or so of last-session questions and answers before we start gaming for the night.  Here’s what I’ve been doing… I’m building a document as a narrative of the previous game’s session, and I add to it at the end of the night.

A sample page from my recap document

Within the documents I’m adding maps, images, NPC quotes and other stuff directly lifted from the adventure I’m running, in order to make it more attractive and engaging to the guys.  The document is simply a word one, converted to PDF.  Very simple, yet effective.  I even noticed that there were some printouts at the table last time we played.   Everyone knew what had happened previously and we got right to playing for the night.  That’s the point.

Now, what kind of recap you give your players works best depending on your group.  Some groups and DM’s may prefer to write their own version of events on a wiki, using Obsidian Portal for example.  Others may use a Google Group to keep track of what’s going on.  Those are all great tools to use to keep track of your party’s progress, but in my case I’m using what I know is the best for us.  Knowing my players, I don’t think they’d have the time to sit there and dig through a wiki looking for campaign info.

So how do you guys recap your game?  Do you have any links to your campaign websites or wikis out there?  I’d love to see them, as I’m sure other Dm’s would as well.

Yes, I know this isn’t technically tabletop RPG content, sorry RPGBN, but I think this game looks too cool for me not to blog about it.  Plus, it is getting a tabletop treatment courtesy of Green Ronin, so there.

Dragon Age was developed by Bioware, and they see it as the spiritual successor to the Baldur’s Gate series, although it is not based on D&D.  I love Bioware games, Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect are two games that took up most of my time when they came out, and Dragon Age looks like it’ll be no different, plus, it’s heroic fantasy, one of my favorite gaming genres.

The game releases today, November 3rd and here now are a boatload of screens full of coolness:

But what about videos?  Check these out…

Character Creation:

Dwarves!!!!

The Korcari Wilds:

The game is available for PC, PS3, and Xbox 360 starting today, November 3rd!

I have in my possession a brand-spanking-new, hot off the presses signed copy of R.A. Salvatore’s latest Forgotten Realms novel, “The Ghost King”, part 3 of the “Transitions” series.

You, dear NewbieDM.com reader, can win the book!  The contest is simple, send me an email with the best hand drawn sketch you can come up with of Drizzt and his black panther Guenhwyvar.  You can draw it by hand, or on Microsoft Paint.  If your drawing looks like a 3D render or something similar, I won’t even consider it.

Send me those emails, I’ll select my favorite sketch, and you’ve got the book!  Not an artist?  No problem, I’m not a writer and I have a blog.  Enter anyway!

Contest ends Friday November 6th at 11:59pm eastern time.

*By entering you agree that your drawing may be posted on my site, whether you win or lose.*

I brought up a topic on Twitter recently that spawned a number of replies and let to an interesting discussion.  I asked if DM’s mostly rolled out in the open, or behind the screen.  A good number of DM’s seem to roll their dice in front of their players, which is what I personally do.  In combat, all my attack and damage rolls are out there for all to see, as I believe it adds a sense of excitement to  combat.  I love the groans that accompany a natural 20, and the high fives that accompany a crucial monster attack that ends in a fumble.

Having said all this, the topic of the DM fudging  the dice came up.  How can you fudge if the dice are being rolled out in plain view?   Well, the truth is that I don’t fudge dice.  Dice fudging goes back to the very beginning of D&D.  It is a tried and true tradition of the game.  After all, what DM wants his party to die at the hands of a lucky Kobold rather than the big boss at the end of the dungeon?  Not me.  But I also think that the element of randomness that the dice bring to the game is crucial, and should be respected.  I was asked if I would allow a total party kill due to lucky rolling at the hands of some mediocre enemies.  So I tweeted the following:

I’d rather “guide” the story through narration than by fudging. If I smell a TPK, I’ll narrate them out of it, rather than lie about a roll.

It’s very simple.  If I see it coming, I’ll get them out of it before I let it happen.  I ask you this… what’s the point of rolling if you know that a certain outcome will cause you to fudge the roll?  If you know that your party might die due to the breath weapon on the big red dragon, and you plan to fudge this “to hit” roll, why do it at all?  Narrate them out of a possible TPK.  Reinforcements come in to help them bring down the dragon… a dragon’s old enemy swoops in to attack him while he’s busy with the party, allowing the pc’s some rounds to deal with a distracted dragon… the party has a round to heal a few key members… You can come up with something.

Although it looks tasty, it's not the fudge we're talking about.

All I’m saying is that I’m not in favor of the randomness of the game being played with.  You wouldn’t use loaded dice, and fudging is the verbal equivalent of pulling out your loaded d20.  Instead, use you narrative control of the game to steer things where you want them to go, while making it feel organic and not too obvious to the players.

I know I’m going to be in the minority with this thinking.  I know that fudging is seen by many as a handy DM tool.  I get that.  But I want to get my point across and get your thoughts on the matter.  If a result is so crucial that you are willing to lie to get it, then just skip the step  altogether and use your storytelling to get where you want or need to go.

Alright, my flame retardant suit of armor is on.  Bring it on!

Oh, and check out Mike’s D&D Blog, where he writes his views on the subject, as he was involved in the twitter debate.

Before I get to the review of the magazine, let me point out why I’m choosing to review Dungeon Magazine now. It occurred to me that I wasn’t seeing any reviews of this magazine (or Dragon) on any of the blogs that I typically read. If I’m wrong, please correct me, so I may add another blog to my list of reads. I figured this may be of interest to D&D players who may not be subscribers of the Insider service, and are looking for a little reading material to help them make up their minds as to whether or not to subscribe. Having said all this, here’s my review.

The Raven Queen graces the cover of Dungeon 171 this month.

Dungeon Magazine has recently changed formats, and has become exclusively a  DM’s magazine. It not only includes adventures, but also articles that are useful for DM’s looking for extra materials for their campaigns. This change was recent on the part of Wizard’s, and as far as I’m concerend, it’s a welcome one. I’d much rather have one magazine to pick and choose from, than have to dig out stuff from two. So, what does this issue of Dungeon offer us DM’s for use in our game? Here’s a sample, let’s see.

Adventures

For DM’s looking for adventures, side trecks, or battles we get a varied lot to choose from, with the bulk of them geared towards the heroic tier of play.  The big picture item here this month is the introduction of the “Chaos Scar” campaign, or as the editorial in the magazine calls it, the “Caves of Chaos” campaign (?).   The Chaos Scar is a long narrow valley carved out by a meteor, dotted with caves and areas of adventures.  The campaign is a loose collection of adventures centered around this area, with enough plot holes deliberately left to allow the DM to fill with his own creations.

W e get two Chaos Scar adventures this month, “Stick in the Mud”, dealing with a tribe of Bullywugs who have taken residence in a long dead Wizard’s laboratory; and “Den of the Slave-Takers”, an adventure revolving around Gnoll slavers and an evil Halfling.  Both adventures are 1st level adventures, perfect to begin campaigning in the Chaos Scar.  I like the idea behind this series, and if I weren’t already involved in a campaign, I would have looked into running this one.

Continuing in the heroic tier of play, there’s a side trek called “Treed!” which deals with an Owlbear the party has to deal with.  Meh.  I wasn’t too impressed.  The adventure consists of a role playing encounter (and labeled as such, even given a level but no XP ?), and a combat encounter.  If you have nothing prepared for your 7th level party, throw this at them, otherwise,  I’d skip it.  What’s a role playing encounter anyway?  I don’t recall that being anything.  It’s not a skill challenge, it has no XP value, it’s just an encounter consisting of a series of Perception & Insight checks.  Weird.

Moving on to the paragon tier of play, we have an encounter that if I threw at my players they’d scream “Cheesy!”.  Not because it’s a bad encounter, but because of who’s in it.  My players are a bunch of cynical jerks anyway, so never mind them.  In this encounter, the players get to fight Drizzt, the world’s most famous Dark Elf, and a nasty 21’st level Solo Skirmisher, along with his panther Gwenhwyvar, also 21st level. The encounter provides the stat blocks, the battle map, and a Skill Challenge to attempt to get Drizzt to stand down.  It’s a neat encounter that I’ll never run, unless I re-skin Drizzt.  “Eh… you guys see a dark elf… his name’s, eh… Brizzt.”  “Brizzt?”  “Yeah, yeah, Brizzt.  Roll initiative.”

For the epic tier of play we get yet another adventure in the “Scales of War” campaign, “Grasp of the Mantled Citadel”.  I’d be lying if I said I knew anything about what’s happening in this adventure path.  I have no idea.  I tried collecting all the adventures as a single PDF and hit over 500 pages a few months ago.  I’ll never run it, so I’m not even reading it.  Either way, they are up to level 22, so it’ll soon be over.

Deities and Demigods:  The Raven Queen’s Misbegotten

This article, by Robert J. Schwalb (who is quickly becoming one of my favorite 4th Ed. authors), sheds some light on the Raven Queen and her followers.  There’s plenty of fluff here related to the goddess, and then it includes stats on several samples of her devoted followers, who belong to groups dedicated to serving her, as well as including details on sects that follow her as well.

It’s a cool article, and seeing as how the Raven Queen has become such a popular deity in D&D, I can see this article getting some use.   I know I may pick and choose certain things from it.

The Eye of Justice

This is a Forgotten Realms article detailing a group of corrupt vigilantes in the city of Westgate.  It includes an encounter, which to me seems a little incomplete due to lack of a battle map.  It also mentions some feats that players can learn for joining the group, but doesn’t include them.  It instead mentions they’ll be in an “upcoming” Dragon article. When?  It’s upcoming.  I don’t play in the Realms, although that shouldn’t necessarily matter, and I have no desire  in using this group as presented.  Plus, the lack of the battle map in the article threw me off.  One of many editing issues with the magazine this month.

The magazine also includes a Mike Mearls article where he answers mail related to Skill Challenges, and a “Save My Game” article on organizing tiles an minis.  This article isn’t even highlighted in the contents, it  gets a very generic sounding “… back with more advice and letters from the mailbag…”.  Meh.

Something happened when this magazine was put together.  The table of contents is all wrong.   The pages don’t match the articles, and page 90 shows up 3 times for three different articles.  There’s a missing battle map, and the editorial on the front page calls the new campaign one thing, while the adventures call it something else.  There are also 9 blank pages with a “Dungeoncraft” header, following such article, in the back of the magazine.  I don’t know, maybe the editor is on sick leave and an intern filled in, because this is sloppy work.  I hate to say it guys, but it is.

If you are a non DDI subscriber, and I had lent you this magazine to judge the quality on, you’d pass on it.  And understandably so, as it feels a little amateurish.  Although in their defense, it’s not a normal occurrence.  Something must have happened.  If these issues are fixed at some point please let me know so I can amend this review.

Many times, we as DM’s do not have the luxury of playing with a group of people we’ve know for a long time and are comfortable with.  I happen to have that luxury, playing with a group I’ve known and have been friends with for over 20 years in some cases, and haven’t had to resort to alternate ways to find players.

So as a DM who’s running a game for a bunch of strangers, you’ve got very little to go on besides the small talk that goes on during character creation night and the pre-game pleasantries that are exchanged on game night.  It’s a tough job to manage 6 or 7 different personalities when you aren’t too familiar with them.  Also, player expectations for your game are something you should know and respect, as well as the reverse; players should know what kind of game you plan to run before they jump unto your table.  With this in mind, I’ve created a small player questionnaire for you to hand out to your (potential) players.

Asking questions before the campaign starts is a must.

These questions aren’t meant to include everything you must know about a player, but they do have a very basic and general scope to them, things like how they view alignment in the game, to what food allergies they may have that you may need to be conscious of.

Although I don’t currently have a need to use it, I put it out there in case someone does have a need for it and hasn’t found one online.  I hope it helps somebody out.

EDIT:   I have updated the file to address a typo, and a misunderstood checkbox item that was addressed in comments below.

You can find it here.

I had a chance to read Kobold Quarterly, a D&D magazine believed by many to be the spiritual successor to Dragon Magazine (in its print version pre-4th Ed.) and I can see why that is.  It is a nicely put together mag with tons of D&D content, whether you’re playing 3.x, Pathfinder or my system of choice, 4th Ed.

The current issue out now is issue 11, the Fall 2009 issue, with this nice color cover:

There's some nice artwork right there...

Just from the cover, the two things that stood out the most for me were the articles on 4th Ed. wishes, and the designer round table.  Wishes because I’d like to see how they created that without breaking the game, and the designer round table because of some of the names attached to it.  I had an issue with this article, and I’ll get into that later on in the review.

I won’t spoil all the articles so you have an element of surprise when you pick up the magazine.  You should pick it up if you are running a game and would like to sample other stuff outside of the WOTC published material.  Here now are a few words on some of the articles:

A Broken Mind:  Sanity and Mental Disorders by Scott Gable

Right off the bat we get an article filled with alternate rules for a sanity system in 4e.  The article assigns a new ability score to your character, “Mind”, and based on this score you have a “Sanity” pool of points.  Different factors affect how and when you lose points from you sanity pool, reading forbidden tomes or running into aberrant creatures are two examples that would force you to roll a sanity check to see if you are affected.  There are then effects that take place depending on how many points you’ve lost, etc…  The article is well presented and it’s obvious that some thought went behind the design of the system.  If you are a DM that would find this sort of thing interesting, then by all means go for it.  It doesn’t seem to be too complicated, and the author does a good job of laying it out there in a simple enough manner.

Running Across the Screen, a GM Roundtable

The cover of the magazine calls it a designer roundtable, yet the article refers to it as a GM roundtable.  A minor point, sure, but it stood out for me.  Either way, this is a very nice article that includes 16 DM’s, with such names as Monte Cook, Chris Pramas, Robin Laws, Mike Mearls, Chris Perkins, and James Wyatt.  The article includes the DM’s input on what it means to them to be a DM and other stuff like encounter design and player free will.  It’s good to read what other DM’s think, specially those so close to the game that their names are on the books, so it is an interesting article.  My only gripe, and it’s a minor one, is that for me a roundtable would have everyone in the same room playing off each others’ answers, while this clearly reads as an article combining emailed answers. Doesn’t mean it’s bad, I love the article, but it’s not a real roundtable in how I see the meaning of one.  Either way, as a DM you can get some good insight out of this.

Wishing Well by Garrett Baumgartner

Wishes have been a controversial part of D&D, and I believe their exclusion in 4th Ed. was a deliberate attempt to get away from the more game breaking aspects of the game.  In this article, the author attempts to bring back the Wish as a system revolving around the three tiers of play, and based on the tier the impact and effect of the wish becomes greater.  The wishes are given out as if they were treasure based on the 4th. Ed. treasure parcel system, and they immediately reminded me of the alternate rewards mechanic in the DMG2.  In fact, the Heroic Tier wish is called a boon, which if you’ve read the DMG2, you’ll immediately recognize it as a reward handed out as if it were treasure as well.  Wishes can be used for things as renewing an encounter power, granting instant success on ability checks, and even changing your race at Epic tier.  To be honest, I’m not sure that I’d use the Wish mechanic as written in this article.  Wishes are out of the game for a reason, and this article does nothing for me to justify their existence.

Farragum, the Howling City by Dan Voyce

This is a neat article detailing an underground city populated by the Derro, and even includes a new disease to throw at your player, “Madness of the Wailing Wind”.  The Derro, which I didn’t know and had to look up, are an evil race that’s a combination of man and dwarf, something the article omits but I would have found useful to know.  Sometimes authors should not assume every reader is a knowledgeable about every D&D thing out there, just a thought.  The article highlights important locales and includes a nicely rendered color map of the city.  It seems easy enough to place this in any generic campaign world, although I’m not sure of there are Derro’s in 4e., making their inclusion in this article a little puzzling.  Perhaps a city of Duergars?  In all fairness it was both a 3.5 and 4e article, which leads me to my one negative thing on the magazine…

Maybe I’m getting blinder as I age, but I had a real hard time finding the reference on the article headers that described if it was a 3.x, Pathfinder or 4th Ed. article.  Once I found it I had an embarrassing moment of “how stupid of me“, but I still feel it could be a little bit more prevalent, or perhaps written into the introduction of the article itself.  Also, the table of contents doesn’t detail what edition the article is for, and I think that would be a good thing to include on there for faster flipping to the sections that may interest me.

My other very minor gripe was the inconsistency with the GM/Designer roundtable article, which seems like an editing mistake more than anything else.  I think it could lead someone who’s looking for designer advice to find something else when they read the article.

The magazine is very nice, very well put together, and for its price it is a good value.  At $5.99 for the PDF, or $7.99 for the print version, you really can’t go wrong.  I think the points I touched on regarding the edition references would go a long way towards making it a little more user friendly, at least for me.  Would I recommend it to someone who has never read it?  Sure.  Extra content for your game is never a bad thing, and sometimes it’s good to go beyond the books and writings of the same designers you keep buying and reading from over and over again.   So yes, I recommend it, even with those minor flaws (to me) that I singled out.

This is the third installment of a series titled Warstories, which consists of short post meant to inspire discussion and dialogue amongst DM’s.  Warstories deal with the many different issues that come up in a D&D game from time to time, and tend to affect Dungeon Masters in particular.

I had an unfortunate situation to deal with in my game recently:  inter-party conflict.  It wasn’t the type of verbal cheap shots that are sometimes traded at the table, nor was it a simple argument about whether to kill or not an NPC.  It was an all out “I’m dropping a daily, action point, and dropping another daily, and if he goes down I coup de grace him” type argument.

Now, you could say that as a DM, I shouldn’t have let the problem they were having escalate to the point of PC murder.  I agree to an extent, but I feel that a DM needs to have a certain “hands off”approach in regards to how the party interacts with each other in order to maintain the feeling of free will.  Could I have brought in some town guards in the middle of the fight in a darkened alley?  Maybe.  But that would be too much of a “hand of God” approach to the situation.  I felt I had no choice but to let it play out at the table and let the chips fall where they may.

After the game ended, and both ended up dead, (the PC who killed first was then killed by another party member in retaliation during one of the encounters of the night) I stayed up thinking about it for a bit and realized a few things.  One, it’ll take a strong group to come back from this.  Even though it is a game, tempers were flaring, and insults were traded amongst the real people behind the PC’s.  That can’t be a good thing, as some of the chemistry in my group is already a little flimsy at best.  Second, no matter what, meta-gaming and the issue of trust will play a role with whatever new PC is introduced by the affected players in this mess.  Of that I have no doubt, and I’m not looking forward to that.  Third, I need to be a dicky DM and stop things before they escalate.  The laissez-faire attitude cost some people a good time last night, screwed my plans for the evening, and left people feeling like they wasted 3 hours of their evening when they could have been home with their kids.

A party divided can't be a good thing.

D&D is a game of heroic fantasy, and killing your party members and sneaking around the party doing your own things are not  heroic acts.  That’s not really the type of game I’m interested in running, not when my D&D time is so limited due to real life.  So how did I handle it, after the fact?  Well, my PC’s got an email from me basically calling them out and saying that if that’s the game they’d like to play, they can find another DM, because I’m not running that.  I have zero interest in balancing a party’s dislike for each other, whether fictional or real.  It’s not my thing, and I won’t do it or tolerate it anymore.  When a player heads towards that, he or she is being disrespectful towards the DM and everyone else at the table.

There are, of course, groups that enjoy this stuff.  Good for them, this doesn’t apply to you if you enjoy running games like what I’m describing.  So I ask more experienced DM’s, how have you handled such situations?  How did your group deal with the aftermaths?  Was the table the same afterward?  I look forward to your comments.