Human Slaves Of An Insect Nation Part 2-campaign Setup

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The story is everything and everything is a story by MirrorCradle

Human Slaves of An Insect Nation, part 2: Setting up the Campaign Or Yes, Dave. It IS all about the story!

There’s a TON of role playing gaming articles that directly contradict everything I am about to write here. To be perfectly honest, I don’t blame them, since most of them have been written by gamers and are aiming for gamers who want to tread the middle ground and try to achieve an equilibrium between rules and micromanaging a campaign and narrating it.

Let me make one thing clear: rules are important.

Like ‘get gunned down by an attack chopper for breaking them’ important

They’re the objective ingredient holding an entire campaign together and the only thing that stops your game from turning into ‘I shot you, Timmy!’ ‘Nu-uh, cause I like, got a…magic impenetrable shield that covers my entire body!’

I remember having this conversation with my mother like, a hundred times…

So yeah: rules. Familiarize yourself with them as much as you can. No, you are never going to be good enough (unless you’re the fucking Rain Man, in which case good luck narrating, asshole), but you need to at least be able to handle crises that will certainly emerge regarding rules management.

One handy way to do this is by recruiting a rules-lawyer friend (at least until you feel confident enough to run everything on your own), as an auxiliary, rules-managing StoryTeller.

But don’t be a lazy bastard, unless you want to find your campaign out of your hands and into his for the obvious reason that if you’re too lazy to learn the rules, then you’re going to fuck up and you’ll deserve losing your campaign then.

Joo were my brother, mang. No matter what, joo’ll always be my brother.

Of course, knowing the rules and managing them is a hard job in and of itself, but it’s something mostly based on the ‘buddy-non buddy’ system that I’ll go into detail in another article.

But now, let’s get into the story, shall we? This is…

SHAPESCAPES’ ROUGH AND RUGGED GUIDE TO SETTING UP A CAMPAIGN BASIS 

STEP ONE: KNOW THINE GAMING GROUP

So let’s say this is you:

An average nerd with aspirations to becoming a good StoryTeller.

You’ve got stories in your head, the kind that you don’t think are good enough to be on paper (and you might be wrong about that) but that you’d love sharing with your friends. 

These are your friends:

From left to right: James (he’s into heroic fantasy), Simon (resident scifi expert), Neil (comic book sage) and Elton (keeps trying to play a Jedi in every game, regardless of setting)

Each member in your group wants to play, wanting to hand over the StoryTeller mantle to someone else and they think that your try at a campaign is going to be wonderful.

Before you do anything, think about this: how well do you know these guys? Ask them: what kind of stuff do they like or do they want to see/do in your game? How much emphasis to character development do they require? Are they more the hacky-slashy types or the talky-solvey ones? Do they like getting to know a multitude of characters or keeping up with subtle political intrigues, machinations and a long-spanning plot or would they rather just kick doors down and shoot stuff in the face?

Then consider this: does your idea fit what they want? Is your original concept of them playing Infantrymen in the service of the Panhuman Empire in the year 4500 Post Contact, during the Great War appealing to them? Would they rather have a tongue-in-cheek retired Stormtroopers campaign or should you set your sights for vanilla fantasy?

Knowing your group is the most important step toward knowing whether this campaign is going to go anywhere in the first place. Go out for a beer with the guys before you roll characters and ask them what it is they want and talk about it. 

Who knows? The end result might be way more interesting than you originally thought.

EXAMPLE: You have decided to run a science fiction campaign, where players start off as infantrymen in a great galactic war. Now, that means they’re just plain old GIs, fragile and helpless against the lonely void of space.

James, who’s into heroic fantasy, wants to be a badass commando instead. He wants to be able to meet new lifeforms and beat the living fuck out of them and take their stuff. You decide to allow the players playing as an elite unit that performs sabotage and assassination runs on hostile alien worlds on behalf of the Empire.

Simon, who is really stoked from the prospect of finally playing a scifi campaign, tells you that he considers the Empire’s mode of transportation to be ‘unrealistic’. Simon helps you come up with a slower transportation method and jumps with glee for getting the chance to contribute.

Neil tell you he’s also stoked, but this whole hard scifi is a bit too much for him. You talk it out with Neil and the scientific seriousness gets toned down a bit, for the sake of everyone involved.

Because nobody likes long debates on Klein Bottle mechanics and morphology.

Elton asks you if he can play a Jedi. You ask Elton to very kindly shut the hell up, because this shit has gotten, like, way old.

STEP TWO: KNOW THINE SETTING

I love it how campaign maps get much less detailed the bigger the setting.

So you’ve got a story outline and you’ve made sure no-one’s bitching. Now you need a setting map. There’s tons of premade settings out there (a few of them impossibly awesome ones, like Pathfinder’s Golarion)

Featuring a John-Carter style solar system, complete with huge tits and alien civilizations! IN D&D!

Or Savage Worlds’ Slipstream 

Featuring old-school two-fisted action across space and time!

And for you horror enthusiasts out there, there’s good Ol’ Delta Green

The setting equivalent of a 2-dollar whore, there to be used in every way you can’t imagine!

Each of these settings is well-thought out and presented, with a TON of hooks for you to fit it to your narrative needs.

But let’s say you’re feeling masochistic and wanna create a setting for yourself, shall we?

First, don’t draw a map, unless you’re a cartographer. That’s because nobody except cartographers know how a map is supposed to work and besides you’ll probably get bored halfway and turn 50% of the world into desert or mountains about halfway through, going: ‘meh, they ain’t getting there anytime soon’

And then one of them gains access on teleportation capabilities and you suddenly find yourself very, very screwed…

Instead, visit a map-making generator site, like let’s say donjon (#)  or Where the Map Ends (#) for some pretty cool free stuff and tweak the generator until you get the kind of world you want. 

Then look at the map, open it on Paint (or Photoshop if you’re a fancy little image wizard unlike me) and start working on it. Think about your original idea: what’s the world’s technology level? Is it based on magic or science? How much does your setting correspond to actual historical eras? 

Once you’ve got that figured out, then think: How big is your world? Is it the size of dear old Earth (diameter 12,756 km, sphere surface area 511,185,501 sq km) or is it bigger? Perhaps it’s smaller because parts of it haven’t been discovered yet and you need to go map them and stuff!

Also, kill the natives and take their gold and land!

Just keep this in mind: a huge world needs way more detail and is much harder to handle, especially in a setting that supports fast and effective means of transport. If for example you fantasy kingdom has access to Dragonbuses, then that means that the world is suddenly much more easily accessible, news travels faster, etc.

On the other hand, if the epitome of transportation and communications technology is the wagon, then the world can much more easily be divided and managed. News doesn’t get around as fast and people from different cultures do not interact with one another as easily.

Example: Running your SciFi system generator, you create a Galaxy that’s pretty much the size of the Milky Way (100,000 light-years (30 kiloparsecs) in diameter, and is, on average, about 1,000 ly (0.3 kpc) thick, because hey, you’re feeling suicidal!

Good luck filling that enormously enormous space with shit.

You decide that the technological level of the Panhuman Empire is the equivalent of a Type-2 civilization (that is, they have mastered the technology required to harness the power of suns from colonized systems).

For reasons of narrative convenience (and because you can’t be arsed to micromanage every single fucking thing among the billions of things inside this gigantic setting) you decided that transportation technology is based on ships jumping through certain fixed wormholes in space, allowing ships to cross tens of light-years in every jump, but only through fixed routes. You also decide that communications technology, while considerably fast, does not allow for instantaneous communication through sectors and long-distance communication is either handled by mail (yes, mail. As in letters) or can be done instantaneously but is iffy at best.

This means that even though players can cross through systems and reach everywhere with relative ease, they still can’t go wherever the hell they want and to whatever they fuck they like, at least until you’ve gotten the handle of your setting.

STEP THREE: KNOW THINE ANTAGONISTS:

What’s lord of the Rings without Sauron? Star Wars without the Empire? The Batman without Joker? Dr Who without the Daleks?

Answers: A boring tour guide through a boring, mostly empty world. A trilogy of shitty prequels. Better off. Still fucking awesome.

All this positive bias and much more, coming soon!

The antagonist is the single most delicate matter in a campaign. As I said in a previous article, this is not like writing a novel. Your characters won’t stay still and twiddle their fingers as the villain explains his evil plot and they sure as hell won’t spare them or resort to theatric, over-the-top resolutions.

If anything, your players are far more likely to shoot the motherfucker in the face with a machine-gun than even try to discern his plan. So what’s the solution?

Well on one hand know your players. Some people can’t even handle Sephiroth

Considering him to be the epitome of evil genius and sinister characteristics

While others want terrible, over-the-top bastards that are always one step ahead, in the likes of Doctor Moriarty

“Ah but you see, Bob the Paladin,  had already foreseen that you had known that I had known that you were going to stab me in the face with your sword, which is why I invented this sword-disintegrating face spell!”

One antagonist is not enough, especially considering that you’re pitting your one mind (no matter how well-honed and witty) against four other minds (that have nothing better to ponder all week than how to fuck up the antagonist’s plans). It’s entirely possible that you Doctor Evil Mc Mastermind will be shot dead as the players start unloading machine-gun cartridge upon machine gun cartridge the minute he introduces himself and leave you hanging, feeling dirty, cheated and very, very tired.

So how do you solve this?

  

a)  Numbers. There are a lot of antagonists that want the players’ quest to fail or want to inflict harm upon them.

      b)      The antagonist is subtly introduced to the story. He might never appear until near the end of the campaign, or if you do a good enough job, he might never be picked up by the players until it’s way too late 
c)    The 14-year old StoryTeller method: The antagonist is 14 levels above the player’s current level and always leaves everybody with just one hit point after a single round of combat, because the players ‘amuse him’

Oh you know who you are…

Option c is shit and you know it. Option a works best for starting StoryTellers and option b is a risky matter that requires finesse but feels…so…damn…GOOD!

“You mean that the guy who paid for our equipment and travels only did it so he could kill us when we were strong enough in order to win a bet?”

Of course, option b requires always dropping hints to the players and giving them a chance to figure it out on their own, which is also its own reward.

So what’s your antagonist’s beef with the players? What the hell is wrong with him? What does he want with them?

Oh anything, really. Taking over the world, the kingdom, annihilating the Universe, becoming the next Great God or the servant of the next Great God. His motives will only be made clear after the players have decided on a purpose.

EXAMPLE: The team of uber-commando saboteurs from before find themselves facing increasingly difficult odds as they progress into enemy territory. They find their plans revealed and their ambushes expected. Someone has been feeding information to the enemy and the team has made it only by the skin of their teeth the last time. 

Who is the mole? What the hell does he want with them?

There’s no one mole. They’re not the only ones fighting the good fight behind enemy lines or getting fucked every now and then. The intelligence network of the Panhuman Empire is way too large to be properly regulated and can obviously not be monitored by a single individual.

Or maybe it is. Maybe there’s a consciousness, existing as a hive-mind, imprinted in operatives scattered across the Empire, intending to destroy the intelligence network and sabotage the war effort by striking at the informational exchange system. Maybe the players find out one of the hive-mind’s hosts and fight it, finding out more.

But what if the host isn’t just an enemy of the Empire? What if it is some great alien evil, set out to annihilate the lesser races by perpertuating a war that will allow its hidden army, slumbering for millennia at the edges of time and space to swoop in and take over effortlessly?

Suddenly, your campaign is about four people leading a war against a malevolence that has outlived suns. 

Cue Immediate Music.

STEP FOUR: KNOW THINE OUTLINE

So you’ve got your players, your setting and your antagonist. Now it’s time to look back at your idea and re-arrange it so it better fits this greater whole. Maybe some tweaking is required, or maybe the entire premise needs to change altogether.

It is important that you make a very short description of the story. I do it by presenting the story to myself as a movie trailer and see if I like it. Pick the things, the events and the bits that you’ve been working in your mind and arrange them into a short video, lasting 3 brain minutes. Then show that video to yourself and see if you’d go watch it if it were a movie.

If you would, then you’re sold.

By compressing the story into a 3-minute (or 8-sentence) presentation, you have given yourself a very clear outline and are in the position to start working with the greater details. But here’s the catch:

You mustn’t dwell on it too long and you musn’t get too attached to you campaign. Why? Because there’s a  thousand things that could go wrong. The guys might lose interest. Someone might move abroad. Everybody throws himself to his work and can’t find the strength to go through four-hour sessions once a week instead of going out for beers or watching TV with his spouse.

Anything can serve to mess up your game, assholes in the group notwithstanding. You need to be prepared and know that you might get your heart broken. But you know what? Ideas (especially good ones) are never lost.

Who knows? Maybe your scifi idea might turn into a book that you wrote in Greek and are currently in the process of translating to English. Maybe you can fit these ideas in another campaign altogether. Maybe you can break them in shorter ones. Maybe you can make a bitchin’ comic book about it!

Or a series of impossibly campy yet unbelievably entertaining Power Metal CDs!

Either way, don’t fret over it. It’s not the end of the world. It’s a beautiful, beautiful hobby and you won’t regret weaving your own stories for your entertainment and your audience.

Imperium Reginae, Part One

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Orbs spinning in the void, kept in line by ruthless gravity

Human Slaves of An Insect Nation-Imperium Reginae (a bare-bones attempt at creating a steampunk setting)

I was never really partial to steampunk. Not because I found the genre to be beneath me, but because when you’ve been raised on a steady diet of British trip-your-balls-off science fiction and Japanese psychic supermen, well…

You can’t exactly go back to pretending like you give a damn about Star Trek

But steampunk (for all the unnecessary goggles, dials and cogs that it has added to perfectly functional designs), has also added a great deal of awesome to pop culture, the kind that you can’t exactly shrug off and pretend like it doesn’t exist. It bridges fantasy and science fiction in that very special, bullshit science kind of way that I have come to respect and admire.

Steampunk however, as a genre, did not enjoy all that many representatives in the tabletop rpg gaming department. Sure, there were a couple of examples

Space 1889 being the most epic (if too historically heavy for my tastes) among them

But none of them caught my eye like Radiance. I could go on and on about how awesome this system is and the specifics of its make-up, but that would simply derail the article. Instead, I will focus on exhibiting my hype for it by generating a world, heavily based off the existing canon and show it off to the Internet, for your enjoyment and perusal!

But before we continue, some ground-rules:

Imperium Reginae, despite being intended for use with the Radiance RPG system, will attempt to remain as open-ended as possible.

The idea is for this series of articles to focus on creating a setting that’s based on steampunk and 50’s space opera but I will refrain as much as I can from tying it down to the Radiance system.

Imperium Reginae will be an Earth-counterpart, of sorts.

Without of course, going into too much unnecessary detail, or boring the reader with historical trivia. As I have come to terms with the fact that I suck at maps and in generating believable worlds and societies (never mind histories), I will base the Throneworld on 18^thand 19^th century Earth, with considerable fantasy elements thrown in the mix.

Imperium Reginae is sort of a kitchen sink.

The idea is that this setting is solar-system sized, with considerable regions left uncharted, in order to allow for pretty much everything to co-exist within this impossibly large area. For the interest of this ‘vanilla’ version of the setting, consider it to be electro-tech (as defined within the Radiance book, i.e. as a world with very access to nuclear power and almost magical access to electricity). However, not all societies live off electricity and feature wildly fluctuating levels of cultural progress and development. These, of course, can be modified as each Storyteller sees fit.

With all this in mind, let’s move on to…

IMPERIUM REGINAE-THE VOID EMPIRE

Austro-Russian void-ship ‘Bog’ en route from Cibinensis

The Year is 1453 Anno Reginae, the year of the Empress. There were 13 calendars before it and before that, there was fire and steel and anarchy. In the times before the advent of the dominion of the Austro-Russin Empire, the world was a mish-mash of warring nation-states, vying for power and survival in the face of near cosmic collapse.

Empires (insignificant little pretenders to the might of the Empress’ cominion) had risen and fallen by the dozens in the times following what the Romantics have come to call the ‘Age of Myth’. It was said, that in that strange, distant past before history, man would shape the world according to his whim, by using arcane power. It was said that he paid tribute to ancient gods, long since dead and defunct and wage war with impossible creatures, the end result of their terrible misuse of their power.

Little records of the ‘Age of Myth’ remain. Most are papyri that miraculously survived the hardships of age and the cataclysm that put paid to the society whose deeds and epics they contain. Others are stone tablets, their contents unaltered by time or the elements, yet impervious to translation. The specifics of the life and the imagination of the ‘Age of Myth’ are mostly wild speculation.

While a number of reasons are proposed by historians as to what exactly ended that bygone age, all indications lead to one, solid conclusion: a disaster of incalculable proportions that some call the Deluge, while others yet call it the Rift War.

The specifics of the Rift War are not known. From surviving manuscripts and certain epics, this much can be ascertained: forces alien to the world of the bygone age (and perhaps even alien to this continuum) spilled out into the world during a war of such magnitude, tenacity and destructive extent that served to annihilate all civilizations of the ‘Age of Myth’.

The identity or nature of the combatants remains unknown. Historians, choosing to simply call them ‘the Outsiders’, basing their narratives on sporadic findings and anecdotal epics of oral tradition, describe their clash as

“The war which scorched the heavens”

And theorize that the war lasted from any amount of time: from mere weeks to as long as a decade. Despite its actual duration, however, one thing is made certain: the ancient civilizations did not survive the process.

The Outsiders retreated from the world after they had wrought their destruction, for their own alien reasons, leaving behind them shattered continents and myriads dead. But they also left behind them artifacts, remnants of their technology that were either expended, damaged or left behind in the midst of the chaos. 

Historians theorize that those devices (considered to have significantly lost their potency after millennia of function) could have been the cause of most of this unknown era’s unrest. Nation-states, vying for the power of the artifacts, waged war on each other in order to secure the weapons of the Outsiders, while struggling to unlock their secrets.

Mankind seemed doomed in the face of this constant warfare and the fall of its civilizations, until an unexpected binding force came from the East, to unite the masses into a coherent whole, by force of arms:

The Orc Hordes.

Driven by hunger and desperation, the united Orc tribes swept across the world, crushing the pitiful nation-states and uniting the known world. First in the face of a common enemy and then under their reign.

It was during that time, when the age of constant war came to a screeching halt and mankind had finally the time to devote itself to the study of Outsider artifacts, as well as the restructuring of their civilization. The Orcs, once mighty nomads of the steppes, were slowly integrated to human societies and their Empire ended with a whimper, instead of a bang.

Using what little information the alchemist-scientists could glean from the alien technology, new instruments of both war and progress were introduced and implemented: first, firearms. Then, industrialized production. A century later came the gradual rise of the Psionic Sciences and then, finally, the age of Amber dawned.

A world, powered by amber.

It was not, of course, a time of peace but of great upheaval and crimes perpetrated by rising superpowers, who vied from greater dominion upon Terra. Wars were once again waged, this time with weapons designed in factory-cathedrals. Flying engines were utilized and soon enough, Austro-Russian scientists stumbled upon the nucleonic source of power that was hidden within the precious Outsider artifacts in their disposal, unlocking their destructive capabilities.

After the first N-Bomb was utilized in the battle of Londinium, reducing the city to a heap of molten slag a thousand miles across, it had suddenly become painfully clear which the new superpower was.

House Habsburg-Romanov banner.

The Austro-Russian Empire (under the direction of Anastasia Habsburg-Romanov, Empress of All Terras) soon came to dominate the world, its influence and technological prowess allowing it to expand its territories both toward the center of the planet and later on (in 1012 AR), to Luna herself.

 But where the daring void-nauts thought they would find empty landscapes, uninhabited and free for the taking, they found life in such astonishing variety, that they were first astonished, then pushed by greed, then pushed back by the planetary natives and finally, after a bloody reprisal, settled for centuries.

The species that comprise the colonial subjects of the Empire will be covered in a later article. This one will focus, instead on outlining the domains of the Empire and its colonies, which will be later outlined in detail.

The Austro-Russian Dominion Map:

4 out of the 9 planets currently under complete or colonial control.

Moving according to the distance of each planet to Sol, the planets of the system of Imperium Reginae are set as follows (planets under complete or colonial control outlined in bold):

Ostanes: Nearest to Sol and considered uninhabitable, Ostanes began as a small mining outpost for Absolum, a mineral capable of producing three times the output of nucleonic energy in comparison to standard fuels used for the procedure. 

After the depletion of said deposits by 1234 Anno Reginae, Ostanes was re-designed for use as a penal colony, where the Empire’s undesirables are imprisoned and then abandoned, deprived of any hope to escape (or so it would seem).

While reports tend to come in of prisoners coming in contact (or being killed by) some heretofore unknown life forms, the validity of such statements remains to be seen. The fact that the Empire denies expending manpower or risking some of its finest xenologists based on the claims of political prisoners plays also an important part in this.

Artephius: Despite its proximity to the Throneworld, Artephius remains a planet that has resisted any attempts to be colonized or controlled. The overly hrsh climate, its carnivorous jungles and its tenacious and well-organized denizens (catalogued as the Dromites in imperial Xenology) have resisted any attempt of a martial take-over.

Artephius’s climate and humidity make it a perfect environment for disease to thrive. Its native predators (creatures that have evolved to be perfectly adapted to the harsh climate) also pose a considerable threat.

Terra: The Imperial Throneworld and the crowning jewel in the Solar system, it is the only planet that houses such a variety of species (both intelligent and animal). It is the heart of the Imperial political machine and, along with Fulcanelli, the backbone of its armies.

Controlled by the Empress Anastasia Habsburg-Romanov, now in the 4^th century of her reign, it is home to the races of man, Atlan and Gnome on the surface. Its minorities include the orc and hobgoblin tribes (whose numbers have severely dwindled in the previous centuries), while Dwarven and Pygmy colonies exist in the Hollow World below.

Terra’s satellite, Selene, is the only other inhabited satellite in the system (with the exception of Titan). Its denizens, creatures that were dubbed ‘Elves’ by the first xenologists, appear to have existed there and maintained a culture since the ‘Age of Myth’. Exceedingly long-lived and (according to archaeological finds) once technologically far superior to mankind, the Elves appeared to have been locked in perpetual war with a race of similar humanoids dwelling on the Dark Side of Selene, calling themselves the ‘Drow’.

Fulcanelli: Home to the serpent-races, Fulcanelli is a planet that has known strife unlike any that Terra or Selene has ever known. The native reptilian races (Drack, Grippli and Lizardfolk), broken into tribes, consumed in constant wars aimed at the extinction of each species came to a screeching halt when Imperial Forces arrived and provided weapons and aid to the Grippli population.

Severely outgunned, the other forces soon desisted and Fulcanelli has since become the Empire’s Foundry, mined for minerals and manned by engineers with the sole intent of equipping its war machine.

Magnus: A planet of crushing gravity and considerable size, it is home to a species that has been named ‘Goliath by Imperial Xenologists. Extremely resistant to colonization or control by virtue of its environment and inhabitants (like Artephius), Magnus is the chief stage of operations of the Empire, with its moons and comet belt manned by Imperial soldiers and officers, intent on achieving absolute control.

The war has gone on for more than four centuries, without any indication of ceasing. Had it not been for the mandates of the Empress herself, the Imperial Army would long since have given up on its attempts.

Agathodaimon: Until recently considered devoid of intelligent life, Agathodaimon showed signs of an advanced civilization having existed in it until recently. It wasn’t until a century later, during a mining expedition, that the indigenous intelligent species of the planet came in contact (initially peacefully, then violently) with Imperial colonists and army officials.

The natives (calling themselves Rakasha and Slith, respectively) have since conceded to tolerating the existence of imperial colonies. Extremely isolationist, both species maintain their hold on any of their ancient technologies remaining and refuse to give them up to Imperial Xenologists for study.

Attempts on behalf of the Empire to enlist the aid of the Tengu natives of Titan against the Rakasa and Slith have since failed. The Tengu, despite their fierceness in the field of battle, were fickle allies to the cause.

Boyang, Vemana and Cibinensis: Attempts to explore or colonize the furthestmost reaches of the system have been numerous, but have all culminated in failure. Any public information on said planets had been deemed classified by Imperial decree and designated as no-man’s land.

But as the Empire’s population swells and the its needs in energy, minerals and luxuries increase exponentially, the Empire finds its hand forced toward having to brave those planets and wrest control on them once again.

Next time on Imperium Reginae, the intelligent species of the Empire!

Human Slaves Of An Insect Nation, Part 13-sexy In Spandex (short)

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Human Slaves Of An Insect Nation, Part 9-wing It

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Eh, it’ll hold.

Human Slaves of An Insect Nation-Just Wing it.

So you fucked up.

Your players missed the roll, the clues, failed to connect the dots and ignored the pleas of NPCs for help. They stabbed the prophet in the throat and one of them ate the sandwhich depicting the GodHead, wherein their true destiny was foretold. They also burned the tavern where they were supposed to meet their contact 

And you prepared all of two things during the entire week: Jack and shit. Also, Jack left town with your wife.

In short, you got nothing. And your players will be here in three hours, tops (that’s provided that you aren’t watching porn right now, you useless fucking slob, you).

 

I can tell because I'm psychic

So what the shit are you going to do? You can’t have a bunch of people come over so they can enact their elaborate revenge/power fantasies just so you can leave them hanging and you can’t just act like everything’s cool and under control when you sure as hell know it fucking isn’t. So think fast, asshole, whatchoo gonna do?

I’ll tell you what you’re going to do: you’re going to do the single most glorious and tough thing you’ve done in your entire nerdy career. You’re gonna eat thunder and crap lightining. You’re gonna pull of a guitar solo and then you’re gonna get laid with every girl that’s ever rejected you, cause you’re about to FUCKING WING IT.

So close those dozen or so porno tabs and smash your cock against the desk, ‘cause it’s time for…

THE SHAPESCAPES GUIDE ON WINGING IT LIKE A BAWSS

Wing it, just wing it, just wing it…

Step One: Get your shit together.

Check your drawer of notes or beneath those discarded pizza boxes from last week’s game. Take a look at that crappy notepad file you’ve abandoned on your desktop (the one title MAH AWESOME CAMPAIGHN IDEUH). Flip that mangy, dog-eared notebook of yours open. Ignore that shit you wrote when you were 14, those suck. Wait, what’s that? Ahahaha, did you honestly think you could pull off an epic-level campaign, you asshole? Oh my God, you’re such a dweeb!

Found them? Good. Now what I need you to do is-

 

 First, close that new tab of porn that you just opened real quick. Then…

Check for any unresolved threads or half-finished ideas. Oh, I’m sure you have a ton of them. What about that one group of bandits the players beat up and got away, thinking they couldn’t trouble them again? Remember that city from the future that no one ever caught on? How about that hatchling dragon that had its skull bashed in by your players? Don’t you think momma’s gonna be pissed? And hey, did they ever reimburse the high priest of the Lords of Light over that fresco they tore up as they were looking for a way into the catacombs of the faithful?

You may not have pursued those matters because they didn’t seem like much at the time but right now, they’re about to save your bacon! Sure, they appear like weak sauce now, but wait until you add that extra dash of player paranoia into the mix.

But what if something goes wrong? What if you don’t think you can pull of a gaming session with just that? That’s why you need to move on to-

 Dude, seriously?

Step Two: Make shit up real quick.

Just in case your players resolve those problems by virtue of their wit or muscle, you need to have something else at the ready. And what’s better than making some plot hooks on the fly! Do they need to be epic, well thought out or carefully crafted? 

Well, yeah, they need to but right now they can’t be and it’s all your fault because you wasted your entire goddamn week doing sweet fuck all!

So here’s what you’re going to do: you’re going to make some unrelated stuff up. And I mean random. I’m talking rumors, gossip, random magical items stashed in some ruffian’s backpack, perhaps even a footnote in some obscure text that the players are currently researching. Hell, even use a bad guys’ dying cry, that shit’s gold!

 â€œDragon Mountain! Drraagonnn Mountaiaia-blergh!”

Srpinkle those in the beginning of the gaming session or add them at random moments. That’ll catch their eye and give them something to occupy themselves with. But make sure that this information is self-contained and does not require further exposition. Remember: you’re racing against time here and you need to rely heavily on the players keeping themselves occupied, instead of presenting them a ready-made, well-organized adventure.

This way, when they start busting out the dice and start rolling Knowledge (Bullshit) rolls, they’ll be pretty much privy to any information that they already know or that you can easily present to them, without muss, fuss or any effort on your part.

WARNING: If you do start shooting the shit in the unlikely event that they do awesome on that knowledge roll, then make sure you write it down. You don’t want them calling you on your bullshit.

With those two steps taken, move on to-

Step Three: Abuse established material.

Yes, you can use the shit ones too. Desperate times and all that.

Take out all six of your Monster Manuals (including the one with the flying squid that emits apathy), flip them open, check Challenge ratings. Use something that you know will give your players some amount of hell. Bookmark the pages that contain ready-made NPCs.

Need names on the fly? Go to a name meaning website and pull a George Lucas (but try not to suck): type a name’s meaning into the search parameters and look for that name in any language. Make sure you also note that down, because this is the point where you might fuck up the most.

Need traps? Check ready-made ones from adventures or Tabletop RPG website generators (most suck, but a 15-minute search will provide you with some awesome stuff). Need fluff? No time. Just make something up as it goes. Fluff is the one thing that will fuck up your presentation, as it requires some effort and will betray you for the phony you are, so make sure it’s simple and short.

Compiled all that ready-made information? Good work, son!

You’ve earned this one.

But you’re not out of the woods yet! If anything, you’re getting into the hard part. So I need you to read this next bit, ‘cause I won’t be able to help you from now on. 

Step Four: Real-Time Bullshitting

Your players are here and you’re starting up the game. What’s important to successfully pulling off an attempt at winging anything is to make it seem natural, effortless even. Even though you’ve prepared sweet fuck-all, this needs to look like one of those impossibly well-crafted plans you see comic book supervillains pull off.

“You should also know that I am currently under the influence of a considerable amount of PCP. No, I took it after I shot my assistants. BECAUSE IT HELPS ME THINK, LOIS!”

So here’s what you’ll do: you’ll pull off a poker face and act all natural. Players snoop around where they shouldn’t, fucking up your notes? Roll with it. Somebody formulates a tabletop conspiracy theory? Squeeze it in. Someone goes on a rampage? Play that out.

Winging it is, in many ways, the art of manipulating your players’ current responses, building the world around their actions, rather than managing their own actions between scenarios you have set up yourself. This means that the situation that you are currently in is highly unstable. It’s equally possible that you might just pull off your best gaming session ever, just as it is possible that you will royally fuck up and have to call it quits early on, before it spins out of control.

Step Four takes into consideration that you will immediately adjust yourself to your players’ reactions and have a response for their every action at every opportunity. This might sound impossible and downright mad, but it is something that every Storyteller in every game has done at least once and they’re not better than you now, are they?

If this little bastard can do it, then so can you.

Winging it also takes into consideration the fact that you know your gaming group and know exactly which buttons to push. If they’re the hacky-slashy type, then just throw monsters at them. If they like to put some thought into their game, then whip up a murder mystery that is essentially based on their paranoia. 

Speaking of paranoia…

Step Five: Player Paranoia is a guy’s best friend.

“Last night a dark man with no face crawled through nine miles
of sewer to surface in my toilet, listening
for phone calls through the cheap wood with
chrome ears.
I tell you, man, I hear.” Stephen King’s Paranoid: A chant.

Players are often wont to go into tangents. Don’t forget that their in-game responsibility is not quite as awesome as yours and will (at times) look for things to occupy themselves with. Sometimes it’s a fixation with enacting revenge on the poor bastard who overcharged them on inn housing. Other times though, it’s something that you can use.

Take for example, a series of adventures I had run for my players a dog’s age ago, wherein they were playing a group of cops in Dungeons and Dragons. During the course of a murder mystery, one of the players (finding himself in an investigative cul-de-sac) had gone off on a tangent on how this murder could not have been committed by a mortal being, nevertheless a humanoid. He had in fact, theorized that this murder had been committed by an automaton, one that could have performed such a gruesome act with such ferocity and efficiency in the first place.

Thus, the Cast Iron Killer was born.

From a player rant, I was able to generate a very unique and interesting monster: an Iron Golem, sculpted in a manner that resembles an angel, able to perform its assassinations and then disguise itself as part of the scenery in the crime scene itself.

Needless to say, the guy that formulated the idea shat his pants with joy. Hope he’s reading it now, because that’s the closest I’ll ever get to admitting that to him.

Player paranoia could also generate instances: someone fears that they are about to be ambushed: have them ambushed. Someone else won’t get over the fact that space vampires want to steal his brain. Then space vampires eat his brain.

With that in mind, you should also consider…

Step Six: This is not a long-term solution

“Duct-tape fixes everything?” “No Dave, duct-tape does not-” “SHUT UP, DAD!”

Winging shit is not a viable alternatively to planning out a campaign. It’s only a short-term solution that is based on the premise that your players actively contribute to the game, with a very high risk.

Winging it also takes a lot out of you: the fact that you need to run a game based on shit that you make up on the fly is vexing and it will make you give up pretty early on. So what can you do to fix that?

Well, first of all, set up a goddamn schedule. Like I mentioned in part 1 of this article series, nobody has the time or the inclination to invest 4 hours a week into planning out a gaming session. If you’re a working man, then 2 hours is the most you can put into it, tops. There is no way in hell you’re going to have the time, the inclination or the capacity to keep this up, unless you earnestly have nothing better to do.

So here’s what you need to do: after you’re done winging this one, get some rest (God knows you’re gonna need it) and then check your notes or write down the important stuff that happened or were said in-game. Use that stuff to plan out the next session, which will shave off like, 30 minutes off your planning time. Rinse, repeat.

This is, of course, not a viable solution either. But it’s going to cultivate in you the habit of planning out and organizing adventures beforehand so this does not happen again. Repeat enough times and soon enough you will be able to organize adventures and an entire campaign based solely on the premise of certain plot elements or ideas and also adept to any and all circumstances that might come up mid-game.

In short, try to see winging more as a power exercise rather than as an approach. Remember kids:

Don’t be a dick! Give a shit!

And you’re going to love what you do for it.

There is however a matter that has not yet been addressed. And that’s one of the boons of winging. Specifically…

Step Seven: Use it to resolve emergencies

“What was that? They all failed their Spot Checks, Knowledge (Nature) rolls AND their Fortitude saves? GET ME KRUSCHEV!”

Remember how, in the beginning of the article I mentioned that something went horribly wrong? (aside from you not preparing dick all week?) Well, we’re about to address that.

You and I, we both know that you’re not an asshole. Sure, you may act the bit to fit your DM cloak and act all alpha in front of the ladies, but you don’t just wanna go around killing dudes unless they’re asking for it. I also know that you try to give people as many chances to pull through any game hazards with the least possible hassle. In fact, you give people maybe two or three rolls just to identify and prepare against the coming threat.

But what happens if you fuck up? What happens when they fail EVERY. SINGLE. ROLL and you have a TPK in your hands, or worse yet, when they don’t pick up any story threads and just end up spending the gaming session twiddling their thumbs?

You wing it. But not in the improvisational manner I said above. You wing it proper. You pull something out of your ass. How?

Well, deus ex machinae are pretty ham-handed attempts at saving a party from annihilation but there are always other approaches. Say, for example, that the alien aquatic monster (which powers your grossly miscalculated during creation) has taken out the team. But who could possibly save them? How about a friendly school of mermen, who rush to the rescue of their unwitting champions!

Let’s say the players have accidentally mucked up the rolls that allow them to follow a path of investigation. Make a non-crucial NPC slip a rumor! Ranger fucked up the tracking roll? Give his animal companion a try! Animal companion fucked up the tracking roll?

 

 Trade that fucking thing for a bear. Bitches love bears.

Players sitting around, twiddling their thumbs like assholes?

Sic the fucking Wild Hunt on them.

Keep them on their toes and train your mental muscles, flex them around, show off to the ladies. Winging it isn’t a panacea, but it sure as hell is goddamn penicillin!

 Addendum:

This article came out shorter than I expected, with or without gratuitous amounts of cleavage. The main reason is that, no matter how hard I may try, I cannot teach you the art of improvisation.

Oh sure, I can give you steps and instructions, but most of this stuff (and the most important bit, the actual performance) can only be pulled off by you and you alone.

As I have said before, Storytelling is a tough hobby that requires you doing five things at once. Winging it is that little sixth thing you need to cultivate with love and care, the way you would an orchid or a pack of pit bull terriers.

And that’s by trial and error alone.

Lots and lots and lots of it.