Setting Sail on a New Campaign

I’ve still got one last game to go before I wrap up my rebuilt version of Dragons of Icespire Peak, but it’s a good opportunity to talk about a problem I keep running into:

Wizards of the Coast really doesn’t do much to support DMs.

It’s easier than ever for new players to get into the game, especially with online tools like D&D Beyond, or even just the ability to Google rules or save character PDFs on your phone. But for DMs? Not so much. WotC will sell you pages and pages of villain motivation tables or whatever… but the tables seem to focus more on literary elements, and are far removed from the crunch needed to actually make an adventure work. Rivalry and betrayal don’t really work if there still isn’t a thing for the players to actually be doing. The DMG is also lacking when it comes to advice on building your own homebrew setting, which would also be invaluable for fixing any of their published material. I get that WotC cares more about players since they generally outnumber DMs at least four to one and it’s easy to playtest more options to sell to players… but the logic of it is kind of backwards when you consider that more DMs would mean more games overall.

I’ve really had more luck looking at stuff like this big list of RPG plots on 1d4Chan and combing through books for Pathfinder and the OSR D&D clone Labyrinth Lord. So presently, what I aim for is to start with sort of a sandbox. First, you draw a regional map using 6-mile hexes and then in each hex, you draw a symbol representing what biome is there. Stuff like grasslands, mountains, hills, swamps, etc. The biomes are important because they can influence how long it takes players to travel through that hex or what kinds of monsters the payers might encounter there. Then you throw in different landmarks or label whole areas like “The Hagwood” or “The Haunted Straits.” Already, you can start brainstorming some of the lore that will go with these places. Following that, you can start working on the pantheon and the different factions that shape the history of the place. The plot of the campaign here should ideally spring forth from those groups and the history of the region.

Then what I plan to do along with that, is to use milestone leveling, with one adventure for each level. That way, I’ll have adventures (or at least chuncks of adventures) that flow smoothely from the start to the campaign’s level cap, with adventures balanced for the players’ level way in advance. Hopefully, this shoud let me outline things pretty far ahead.

For my next campaign, I’m incorporating some of those ideas with a Ghosts of Saltmarsh campaign. With most of the published D&D books, I’ve run into frustrating problems with them being pretty much unusable straight from the book. But with Ghosts of Saltmarsh, there’s enough attention turned toward making it more of a sandbox that you can replace wonky adventures or build your own off the existing lore. So for example, I plan to heavily rewrite the second adventure from the book (“Danger at Dunwater”), as well as it’s follow up a few sessions later (“The Final Enemy”). The “Isle of the Abbey” is getting cut entirely because while the encounters might work, the story of it hasn’t been tied into Saltmarsh and there’s maybe a bit too much of a reliance on “evil cults” throughout the book. Evil cults work, but you can only do it so many times before players get wise to it and start to question why anyone would even live near Saltmarsh. It that adventure’s place, I intend to use a modified and expanded version of the optional “Wreck of the Marshal” found in the back of the book.

To fill in some of the gaps, and to give the players more of a chance to put the ship combat rules to use, I want to throw in a few more adventures. So far, ideas include reworking the lore about the ship “The Pale Prow,” so that it’s captained by a vampire who’s hunting down the pirate captain that killed her family… only her bloody campaign has her kidnapping more crew as replacements. Another idea involves a friendly island tribe of Tortles, who had an artifact stolen from them that may or may not control the weather. Maybe rumors of strange magic storms (in the book’s appendix) leads the party to investigate, before they get caught up in such a storm… only to come out of it at the Tortle’s island. To bring in more pirates and more ship combat, the artifact might’ve been stolen by the crew of “The Gnasher,” mentioned earlier in the book.

D&D and Races, Part 2

Since my last post on how races are handled in D&D, I’ve come to the conclusion that even if Wizards of the Coast really doesn’t know what they’re doing at times, it’s all the DMs and players at home that really keep things running. It’s been a long time since I last commented on this, and since then I’ve left Twitter, where most of the “orcs are racist” discourse was happening, because it’s such a toxic environment*. Maybe there’s a right way and a wrong way to use Twitter, where you just pop in occasionally and avoid getting sucked into the drama — but it just doesn’t really feel worth it having to wade through all the crud.

Many of those trying to shame WotC have probably never cracked open the DMG, or have scarcely played in any games, so they failed to realize that the mechanics themselves are very, very flexible. If you don’t like the attributes for orc player characters, just use the versions from Eberron or Exandria. If you don’t like that the orcs are always depicted as evil, just throw in some good orcs. This is really only a problem in The Forgotten Realms, simply because WotC hasn’t bothered to write any good depictions of orcs there yet. Greyhawk technically doesn’t have any good depictions that I can recall either, but the setting is varied enough that you could just drop in a community of good orcs anywhere and it would work. It’s not so easy in Forgotten Realms because the map is already a bit over-crowded and with it being so easy to travel long distances without issue, you’d think someone would have already discovered them by now. In any case, you don’t have to buy WotC’s latest book for a mechanical fix that wasn’t really the problem in the first place.

But for a second, lets look at why in-universe, orcs tend to be evil:

The storyline in Greyhawk and The Forgotten Realms — and technically Exandria as well — starts with an event called the Dawn War. Basically, all the gods came to the world from somewhere else (beyond the Astral Sea) and created all the mortal races. Then they all came under attack from elemental creatures called Primordials. During the fighting, some of the gods turned traitor. Some of them wanted to get the other gods to give up on the world and move somewhere else, and others simply went mad. But after the Primordials were dealt with, the “good” aligned deities turned their undivided attention to dealing with the “evil” ones, forcing sort of a fragile peace.

In Greyhawk and The Forgotten Realms, that uneasy ceasefire between the gods is where things stand currently, with some gods being very active in leading or controlling the races they created. That includes the orc god Gruumsh, who demands that his followers be “evil.” This is why orcs are generally evil in D&D.

Exandria changes this. Following the Dawn War, there was a time called The Age of Arcanum where mortals got really power-hungry with arcane magic. Then another war — called the Calamity — broke out, where good deities, evil deities, and powerful empires of mortals with magic that could rival the gods all fought against one another. Some gods outright died. Mortals across much of the world were wiped out. But after the Calamity, the good deities sealed themselves and the evil betrayer gods away from the material plane, to prevent something like the Calamity from ever happening again. Between the Dawn War and the Calamity, many mortals were wiped out and had to re-populate, meaning each settlement is probably a bit more diverse and multi-cultural than what you might find in other settings. In Wildmount and Tal’Dorei, orcs may carry the stigma of being created by Gruumsch but they are not controlled by him, nor do they have to worship him at all.

Some of the push to label orc depictions as racist is a matter of optics: given the choice between what you’re told is racist and what you’re told is not racist, you’d of course rather be seen supporting the supposedly not-racist option, right? But some of it may also be because orcs fit a certain, under-supported niche in terms of character options. Maybe like the orcs of Skyrim or the Qunari in Dragon Age, players want an option that leans toward being pragmatic, physically imposing, and martially gifted — without having to be evil. Orcs and half-orcs should be well-suited to barbarian or druid characters… but the lore of The Forgotten Realms makes it tricky to do that since the map almost literally doesn’t have space to fit in any good-aligned orc communities. This is why I really like the approach taken in Exandria, and why if I did my own homebrew setting, I’d like to have the mortal races a bit more split between the different sides following the Dawn War.

(*Note: A big part of why I feel that Twitter is a toxic environment is that aside from removing depictions of nudity and graphic violence, Twitter is largely unmoderated. Flame wars and trolling are the norm. Twitter’s moderators rely very heavily on automation and consequently cannot enforce rules meant to promote respectful civil discussion.)

D&D and Races

So there’s something that’s been bothering me for a while now. About a month or two ago, it started trending online where people were saying that orcs in D&D were racist because they were biologically required to be evil. Now Wizards of the Coast have published an article pretty much conceding that the orcs and drow do rely on essentialist ideas about race.

The problem with all this is the fact that they’re actually not required to be evil as a rule. It’s more of a trope or cliché. In fact, as of my writing this, TV Tropes had this to say about the matter:

“In-universe, the ‘usually evil’ nature of some races is justified by their racial deities, such as Lloth for the Drow and Gruumsh for the Orcs, being evil. These gods also work very hard to make sure that their worshippers are just as bad as they are, and any that aren’t tend to end up on the gods’ hit list. Good deities tend to respect free will more than the evil ones, so their races have evil, good, and neutral people. Human alignment is all over the place since they don’t have a racial deity to call their own. In some cases, an evil race will also have been created by an evil god.”

TV Tropes does mention that in old versions of the game, rule books listed alignments for creatures without acknowledging that they could differ from that default listing. But should they really have to? Everything can be altered by the DM on the fly as the story calls for it. Even hit points. If you want to split hairs, you could even create your own separate stat blocks for the Chaotic versions of things that are normally Lawful or vice versa. It’s a matter of writing and world-building, not mechanics.

Drow are actually a really great example of why being evil is more of a convention than a rule. In Forgotten Realms lore, the drow originally were good, or at least neutral, before they turned to Lolth for help during the Crown Wars. The Crown Wars were sort of an elven civil war that ended with them dropping magic nukes on each other before many of them retreated back into another dimension called the Feywild. As punishment for siding with Lolth, Corellon — the main elven deity — banished the drow to live under Lolth’s control underground. However, since 2nd edition, there has also been a good-aligned deity named Eilistraee that some drow worship in secret. You probably don’t see her mentioned much anymore because in old rulebooks they outright say her priestesses would do rituals where they danced naked with swords — total fanservice that likely wouldn’t go well with the family-friendly look Wizards is looking to project now.

But if drow can be good outside of Lolth’s control, then it stands to reason the same could be said for orcs. It even says as much in Volo’s Guide to Monsters, though it does also say that orcs have an innate tendency toward violence. Specifically, it says:

“Most orcs have been indoctrinated into a life of destruction and slaughter. But unlike creatures who by their very nature are evil, such as gnolls, it’s possible that an orc, if raised outside its culture, could develop a limited capacity for empathy, love, and compassion.
No matter how domesticated an orc might seem, its blood lust flows just beneath the surface. With its instinctive love of battle and its desire to prove its strength, an orc trying to live within the confines of civilization is faced with a difficult task.“

When you break it down, this passage from Volo’s Guide really can’t be taken at face value. If an orc grew up spending its whole life in the confines of civilization, how can you call it “domesticated?” That’s just not a word you use for people. If violence is in their very nature, why then would they have to be indoctrinated into it? Then you have to consider the impact of the Pygmalion Effect, where its whole life everyone has expected the orc to be violent. It’s almost as if this passage is written in-universe from the point of view of a character who is racist against orcs. (Some D&D books are explicitly written in-character, such as the Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide, which changes perspectives many times throughout the book. Older books even had back-and-forths between the characters Volo and Elminster in the book’s footnotes.)

I guess what I’m trying to get at is that if you want more positive — or at least more nuanced — takes on orcs and drow, you can do that. You don’t need to buy another book rewording the rules. You just need to get creative and write. The published settings of Eberron and Wildemount already have more positive depictions of certain “monstrous” races — and Wizards tried to claim credit for that. However, the authors of those settings — Keith Baker and Matt Mercer — don’t actually work for Wizards. Keith Baker won a contest and Matt Mercer was already a well known voice actor before he got famous with the show Critical Role. Those settings came from the outside and were absorbed into the D&D brand.

I’m not really sure how to feel about Wizards of the Coast right now, because it seems like they may be doing that “absorbing” thing without credit this time. About two weeks ago, following a successful Kickstarter campaign, Arcanist Press released their own supplement on DMs Guild that swaps out race for ancestry and culture. It’s been pretty popular on Twitter and it’s already a “Gold Best Seller.” The idea that they might take a product for sale in their own walled garden and then quash it with their own product just seems… really not great.

Course Correction

Right now I have two plot lines to wrap up and then I have to figure out what to do for the next campaign. One of them is the free Critical Role adventure put out on Roll20, called “The Frozen Sick,” and the other is a heavily-modified version of the Dragon of Icespire Peak.

“The Frozen Sick” is a short adventure, up to about level 3, that my group started playing using Roll20’s virtual tabletop. It’s well written, and unlike the other official adventures published, I haven’t had to rewrite anything… which, you know, is kind of the point of using a published adventure.

The Dragon of Icespire Peak is a very different story, however. It takes place in Phandalin, just like the Lost Mine of Phandelver in the starter set. But it’s not a sequel. Instead, this adventure in the D&D Essentials box set is more of a collection of side quests for players to level-grind until they’re strong enough to finally face the dragon, who for some reason has a connection to Storm King’s Thunder that’s never explained or acknowledged.

I started this campaign with three level 4 characters, to buy myself time while I tried to write my own storyline that would pick up afterward and tie into different elements of the characters’ backstories. Some of the changes made to Phandalin are a little strange, so I modified that before picking just a few of the adventures to run, with the encounters buffed up for more powerful player characters. I don’t think I actually want to go on with that storyline now, so I’m hoping to have the players face off against the dragon and then just end the campaign there, with the possibility of bringing these characters back later.

I’ve had to rewrite the final adventure with the dragon because for some reason it took place in an old fortress inexplicably built out in the middle of nowhere, with a history the players couldn’t uncover because there just weren’t any clues to give them. So that’s been completely redone, and honestly, starting over almost from scratch was far easier than trying to adapt everything for probably the third or fourth time. This has been a major problem with a lot of the published adventures I’ve tried so far, where they have plotholes or a linear storyline paired with a nonlinear map.

At least twice in the starter set there were dungeons with a sort of figure eight shape where players had a fifty-fifty chance of encountering scenes in the wrong order… and in Thundertree, as it was written, they could accomplish their main objective in less than 15 minutes. Then they’re warned to leave Thundertree because it’s too dangerous, even though this guy really wants them to fight a dragon way above their level.

The whole reason I wanted to continue this story in the Forgotten Realms was because after the Lost Mine of Phandelver, the players had new, cool items and abilities, as well as unresolved plot hooks involving their backstories. But I’m really not a fan of the setting. Everything in the Forgotten Realms has already been pretty well settled, on a very crowded section of coastline. In a way, it kind if reminds me of Saturday morning cartoons: the party starts out in a big city tavern before they head out somewhere for a wacky adventure, and then they head back to the tavern so everything can return to status quo. It doesn’t leave much room for exploration.

I have the book for Ghosts of Saltmarsh, which I would absolutely love to run next. But then again, I might like to instead start a campaign in Wildemount, with the opportunity for all new characters after The Frozen Sick. Eventually my goal us to have a Wildemount campaign anyway, but the question is “Do I want to take a detour and do Ghosts of Saltmarsh first or go straight into Wildemount?”

Untested

As D&D Next, 5th Edition went through extensive public and private playtesting before its official release as the new edition. But there are parts of the rules where it seems like enough groups opted out of using them that those parts didn’t really get tested. Namely, most of the rules involving survival skills and hidden doors.

According to the official rules, hidden doors are supposed to have their own static DC. When a character enters a room with a hidden door, they’re supposed to automatically detect it if their Passive Perception score is high enough. A Dungeon Master could ask everyone to actually roll their Perception skill instead… but then all the players will be suspicious and may try to find the door anyway.

Relying only on static numbers with neither side rolling dice creates a situation where some characters will never notice a door while others will always notice a door, defeating the whole point of hiding it in the first place. So for that reason, I think it makes more sense as the DM to roll for the door. If an adventure has a DC written for a hidden door, subtract 10 and then whatever’s left is added as a modifier to your roll for the door. You can think of it as rolling to see how well the dungeon’s builders disguised it. I’d say it’s probably best to only roll once for the door, unless something significantly changes the characters’ odds of noticing it, such as something crashing into the door or coming back to the room after a long rest.

5th Edition’s rules for wilderness survival are a lot harder to fix, which is a shame because otherwise it could be a lot of fun to create a sandbox and have fun exploring it. It’d also give the troubled Ranger class a chance to shine, where as right now subclasses like the Arcane Archer or Scout probably do the Ranger’s job better.

Right away, the biggest problem is how much food and water characters need out in the wild. The official rules say a character can go a number of days equal to their Constitution modifier plus 3 before they have to worry about taking on levels of exhaustion. If they eat a full day’s worth of food (defined as one pound of food) the timer resets. So in other words, a character with a modifier of +0 only needs to eat every third day, yet that’s still somehow “one day’s worth” of food.

Rules for water are stricter, saying they need an entire gallon per day. Not only is that a lot of water, but your typical waterskin in all the basic kits only holds about half that. If they’re already suffering the effects of exhation or dehydration, then each level of exhaustion they fail to save against counts for double. That creates the potential for them to meet a very quick end if they somehow — somehow — don’t meet those very-easy to-meet basic needs.

One solution would be to say that if characters don’t get “enough” food / water / sleep / heat / etc. in a day, they have to make Constitution saves for each unmet need at the start of the next day. Exhaustion from separate sources does stack, but they don’t double up like before. It’s already in the official rules that a long rest can remove one level of exhaustion.

Now to the next problem: foraging for food and water is ridiculously easy. Characters roll against a DC set based on the environment they’re in, and then they get a D6 worth of food, in pounds. The official rules aren’t clear on how often they get to do this, but if they get to forage each time they travel (regardless of the distance travelled) that adds up to a lot of food. If a ranger’s foraging, they find twice as much, and if they have the Outlander background, they find food automatically. These effects stack. So your characters could basically retire from adventuring and sell food full time as rations.

A potential fix is if you say a character has to forage for at least eight hours a day before they find anything. They can forage while traveling or search around camp. They can also break it up into sections rather than spend eight hours straight. But as in the official rules, only one character can make the roll, though another can help to give them advange. Hopefully, those limits will keep them from stockpiling too much food and keep some challenge in wilderness exploration, especially if they’re going to be camped out at a dungeon for a day or two.

Starting Out

I started this blog to archive some of my thoughts on running D&D games, including running adventures, building them, and creating new campaign settings.

I’ve only been running games as a DM for a short while now, and I’ve found that there’s a lot of crucial information for new DMs that’s not in the official books. Some of it can be picked up from older editions or other TTRPG rulebooks, some of it you learn through trial and error, and — if you’re lucky — some of it can be picked up by almost being appreciated into the hobby.

For example, Labyrinth Lord — part of the Old School Revival movement — has good guidelines on creating your own setting by starting with a hex map and then drawing different biomes, followed by putting towns and cities where it makes sense. If you already have themes and factions picked out for your setting, that should help.

Going through the first Pathfinder Core Rulebook, I also found some good information there about campaign writing where you start off by picking out what character level you want to end at, and then write your adventures to lead up to that point.

Stuff like that just isn’t in the official D&D rulebooks, which truthfully feel more as if they’re geared toward people new to the current edition than people new to running games or new to the hobby altogether.