Category: Column

Reflecting on my first D&D-campaign

On 12. April 2024

A fellow player surprised my Pen & Paper-group and me with a remarkable gift: in a burst of seemingly manic energy, he transformed the 150-page player summary of our first campaign into a Kanka-Wiki. Check it out, it’s fantastic!

Our first Dungeons & Dragons campaign, “Princes of the Apocalypse,” marked my debut as a long-term Game Master. As I delved into the Kanka’s character, location, and journal sections, I found myself reflecting on the lessons learned. What worked? What didn’t? How did the campaign book assist me, and where did it fall short? And most interestingly, what would I do differently today?

This, coupled with wanting to show off the awesome Wiki, inspired this post. Attention, spoilers ahead!

The initial dozen sessions progressed smoothly. Players delved into their first dungeons, fostered NPC connections in the town of Red Larch, and experienced dramatic character deaths and introductions of new characters. The campaign book provided enough inspiration for roleplaying intriguing NPCs and offered engaging adventure locations to explore. However, much of it was buried in WAY TOO MUCH text, requiring significant rewriting for practical use at the table. But isn’t this what GMing is about? (No.. No, it isn’t.)

As we ventured into our first major dungeon, I fell into a trap, set up by traditional D&D dungeon presentation – revealing inhabitants and features room by room.
In a fighting scene, happening in a secluded area of a large cavern, a player used the VERY loud spell «Thunderwave». The suddenly pretty worried players brought up the question, whether this would alarm the rest of the dungeon’s denizens. My pretty concerned thoughts: «Oh boy, I’m frakked, right? The dungeon is actualy above the PC’s level, and if they get swarmed by all the inhabitants, that’ll be one of theses dreaded TPKs (Total Party Kills) ending the whole campaign! Also am I really supposed to scim through several pages of room descriptions, to check for all the enemies? This can’t be how it’s meant to be run, right?»
So i concluded: «Don’t worry! This is D&D. Dungeons are meant to be explored room by room and the monsters next door won’t recognize, what’s happening. Feels stupid, I know, but I think that’s how the game is meant to be played.» (It isn’t).

Only much later a blog post introduced me to and a Master’s Talk reminded me of the concept of «Adversary Rosters» So, first lesson: Use Adversary Rosters. If you want to know what they are about, check out the mentioned blog post or this presentation.

Another lesson emerged when my players surprised me with their unexpected actions at the Cult of the Eternal Flame’s hideout. Confronted with the Cult’s forces conducting an evil ritual, the players chose to retreat and never return. This left me figuring out the consequences of the ritual’s completion, since the book lacked a description of the ritual’s goal.

And goals in general. I realized I had no clue what the four Cults and their iconic leaders actually wanted and what they did to reach their goals. They just sat in their dungeons waiting for the players to show up and kill them until the last one would be confronted while summoning his elemental Overlord. Very villainous. And boring.

The leaders Aerisi Kalinoth, Marlos Urnrayle, Vannifer & Gar Shatterkeel

So I took the Fire Cult’s leader, Vannifer, out of her dungeon and let her ritual-empowered army rampage through the valley. This led to the cinematic Battle of Beliard, with clashing armies, the feeling of «Ooops.. We caused this..» in my players, and the glorious defeat of a Cult Leader, dying for her cause on the field of battle.
The lesson: Villains need goals and agendas including consequences upon their completion.

Reflecting on these experiences, I would change the following, if running this campaign again:

Define distinct goals and subgoals for each cult, promoting opposition between them.
Utilize the faction system from “Worlds Without Number” to simulate faction activities.
Incorporate Adversary Rosters for dungeon management.

Despite its design flaws, “Princes of the Apocalypse” offers a variety of villains and factions and the sandbox design provides the players with ample agency.

For us it lead to a cinematic epilogue and an awesome Kanka-Wiki that ties it all together and induces countless memories!

Arcanor and the West Marches

By Tim

On 6. September 2023

In Column

TAGS: Arcanor EN GameDesign

We have created a new Arcanor page. Arcanor is based on the West Marches. But what are the West Marches?

The concept of the West Marches campaign was first described by Ben Robbins. A tabletop role-playing (P&P) campaign in the style of the West Marches is composed of a loose group of players who participate in irregular gaming sessions in various constellations within the same game world. This world evolves between individual gaming sessions, so players are continuously confronted with the consequences of their decisions (and the decisions of others). If you want to know more but don’t want to read anymore: Matt Colville introduces you to the West Marches in a video.

A dynamic game

Experiencing an ever-evolving game world is one of my main reasons for keeping the role of GM. And Arcanor as a West Marches campaign is perfectly suited to create such a world together with the players.

They choose the specific goals of the gaming sessions, such as exploring the abandoned city of Oberholm or descending into the depths of the Cockatrice Caves.

The Game Master then prepares the dungeon and all the events and locations along the way. During the session, the players attempt to reach their goal. Throughout the session, they come into contact with new places, characters, and ideas for future gaming sessions.

This dynamic keeps me, as the GM, on my toes and forces me to adapt to the pace and preferences of the players. The story of the player characters takes the forefront as players do not follow a storyline woven by me.

A loose group of parents and other adults

The structure of a West Marches campaign offers, among other things, temporal flexibility. A campaign spanning several years with a fixed group often loses a portion of its comprehensive years due to gaming sessions being canceled, postponed, fizzling out, resumed, and canceled again, at least in my experience.

By transforming the fixed group into a flexible one, players in the pool can now simply sign up for a game (though the desired number of players per session is limited to 4-5 players!).

Extra points if the participants organize the date and location themselves, and there are multiple GMs who can divide the games among themselves. At this point: Thanks to the other KuL GMs for co-GMing! We would welcome more potential Game Masters for our Arcanor campaign with open arms.

Emergent Storytelling

When Lleylwin encountered not only near-death but also the curse of mummy rot in the depths of the Tomb of the Serpent Queen , and had to turn to the dubiously fanatical Sun Legion in search of a cure, I, as the GM, was also surprised by the twists that the stories in Arcanor can take. I hadn’t planned anything in that direction beforehand, and suddenly, another plot thread emerged, sending the PCs on a diplomatic mission with a High Priest.

Such in-game situations give rise to a more organic player experience, compared to when I repeatedly try to gently push the players back into my story framework.

And it enhances my improvisation skills.

So, I can recommend every GM to give a West Marches game like Arcanor a try. See you there!

What is Pen & Paper?

By Tim

On 23. January 2023

In Column

“So what are you doing there?” This is a question I often hear in connection with my excitement that KuL is now renting a game room. And because the short answer “role-playing games”, often causes a somewhat disconcerted frown, here is the more detailed answer.

Telling a Story

Pen & Paper role-playing games, or tabletop-role-playing-games (TTRPG) as they are called in english, are a form of collective storytelling. The duration of these stories can often extend over years, some storylines are never completed and continue to grow.

Players are immersed in character roles, which they have usually created themselves in advance of the game. This can range from a character with a highly detailed backstory and complex personality traits to a blank slate that just has a name. Depending on the players preference, that is.

Typically, the game is moderated by one person. There are countless names for this function in the pen & paper universe: Master, Game Master (GM), Game or Dungeon Master, Judge, Referee, etc.

The Dungeon Master describes a scene to the players

The role of the GM is to present the players with a fictional world, its settings and inhabitants, and perhaps even a prepared storyline à la Lord of the Rings. In this setting the GM confronts the players with situations in which they can act as their characters and make decisions. In the process, the players repeatedly ask themselves the question, “What would my character do?” They answer this question by verbalizing the actions that their characters perform. Confronted with the decisions & actions of the players, the GM considers what consequences they have within the game world and describes the resulting outcome. As a result, new situations arise, which again demand decisions from the players. This interplay between the master and the rest of the group form the building blocks from which our fantastic stories gradually evolve.

Playing a Game

TTRPGs are not only gathering places for hobby improvisers, but also games. The basis for shared fantasy is often provided by one of the hundreds of rulebooks that now exist. One of the most present of them is for example Dungeons & Dragons (you can find more systems, which are available in our game room here). These rulebooks provide decision support when the outcome of a verbalized action is unclear, for example whether the high wall can be scaled, the vigilant policeman outwitted, or the distant treasure island spotted.

A set of dice used in Dungeons & Dragons

Many rulebooks make use of a game mechanic that was already known in ancient times: the dice roll. The attributes and abilities of the character are usually integrated into the dice roll, which, along with their background story and name, are noted down by pen on paper at the start of the game.

This random element results in game situations that neither the players nor the GM could have foreseen, and the stories take surprising turns.

So that’s what we’re doing there. We tell stories together and play a game at the same time. Or the other way around. Me often in the role of the Game Master, the players as characters named Gilbert, Thomas, Akira or Nadjeszka, all with different personalities and abilities and armed with dice, pen and paper.

I describe the worlds, landscapes and inhabitants of Arcanor and Barovia, the principality of the vampire Strahd of Zarovich or the dark forests of Witschwod. The player characters explore these, overcome obstacles and dangers, and conduct negotiations or form alliances.

All fictional, all real

PS: An example of a story which grew over 2.5 years give the unedited playersummaries of Thomas und seinen Gefährten (german).

Thomas und seine Gefährten (german)Download