The GM (game master) has ultimate power. General advice is: don’t abuse this power. While you have the awesome ability to change the moon into the sun and switch the seasons on a whim, such things should be reserved for when you feel like a lark or other equally dire circumstances. Abusing your power as GM can, hypothetically, make your players so furious they’ll leave your game never to return, or throw your favorite desk out your window. I say hypothetically because more often your players will simply forget to show up to your games anymore, leaving you to wonder what you did wrong.
In my experience, the crazier the GM gets, the less the players care. It seems like the game degenerates into total goofiness. Perhaps that’s just a by-product of my particular style.
On a basic level, most beginning players just want to whack bad guys and claim fabulous amounts of treasure. Their end goal is to be as awesome and successful as they can possibly be. The more they can thwart the GM’s plans, the happier they are. Much of successful GMing can be said to involve always staying one step ahead of your players. No matter how increasingly awesome they become, you always have to come up with new threats to challenge them. If they ever reach the point where the game isn’t a challenge anymore, boy are you in trouble. While at first this may seem like a monumental task, it’s really quite easy when you think about it. You’re the GM, you control everything. Coming up with new challenges for the players should be as simple as coming up with the next crazy idea. Unlike a mad inventor, your ideas don’t even need to be plausible to work, you’re the GM; you make the rules.
While rules are good for keeping the player’s egos in check, they’re not quite as useful for you. You might as well make up your own rules and roll arbitrary amounts of dice for results. After all, the classic GMs of yore were encouraged to come up with chances they think are reasonable and assign a dice roll to them. It used to be that improvisation was an encouraged aspect of being the GM. It’s possible you could run a fine game with only d6’s and d4’s if you wanted to.
While it’s all well and good to have dungeons filled with monsters and treasure, did you ever stop to think what the impact of the seasons are on your campaign world? Chances are if you’re running a campaign, you’ve already worried yourself sick about this. My advice would generally be to not sweat the small stuff, but if you really want to, there’s always this article.
Summer
Generally, the game world is always set in summer and on Saturdays upon which the monsters seek to steal the princess from the king and sell her to a dragon in a dungeon. Of course, the dungeon contains many traps and fabulous wealth far in excess of the treasuries of all the nearby kingdoms.
While it may always be summer in the campaign world, try throwing in trifling details such as: roses in bloom, wild life in abundance, overabundance of flowers and plants, green things, summer breezes, cool streams, the shade of trees (with monsters hiding in the branches), and the fact that for the past 52 weeks the leaves have been turning color hinting at approaching winter.
Fall
This part of the campaign should last for the least amount of time. There will probably be a fall solstice upon which much revelry will take place and probably a goodly amount of evil schemes and witchcraft the players can put an end to. Basically, you just have to mention chill breezes and the leaves turning all kinds of bright colors. Big harvest feasts are a good idea, as are bar fights because the farmers don’t know if they’ll survive the winter with such meager crops because they were goofing off all summer.
Winter
While this might technically be a very long part of the year, it’s probably better to keep it short. Everyone is starving, the sun is gone, the players are freezing, food is running short, and it’s basically a horrible time. Fun stuff can include: snowballs, snowmen, avalanches, white dragons, frost giants, winter wolves, and any other monster with winter or white put in the front of their name.
If the people of the campaign aren’t that advanced, many of them may die because of the past hard years combined with the lack of food and resources in the winter. Many animals die because the snow is too deep, humans with lack of tools and resources could fall victim to the same harsh conditions.
Winter is also a great time to gloss over such aspects of the game such as spell research, crafting magic items, and training for new levels. That way, you can get back to the extremely long summer faster.
Spring
There are probably more celebrations you should be making up weird names for here. In fact, if there’s any week in your campaign world without a major holiday, you should probably invent one. In fact, if you rename all the days of the week you can ‘really’ confuse your players.
Spring is basically Summer, except it came after winter so everyone is bound to be relieved they didn’t freeze to death or run out of food. The massive spring melt could probably bring on floods of epic proportions which are bound to cause calamities in major cities. If the players can re-route the flood to wash out the stables of a famous king, so much the better.
Also, it’s quite likely the villagers of the campaign world are feeling frisky like the animals. After a long winter they throw off their thick furs and go back to the bars to seek adventure, women, and bar fights. New blood enters the scene, and there could be huge rows about who gets which of the eligible village lasses.
The Passage of Time
Generally, this shouldn’t matter. If it’s really important, you can roll d1000 (3d10) for the starting year of the campaign world and then try to roll through so many years that all the human characters die and the elves reach 10% of their life-span. Naming each year after a small animal could also be interesting, but will probably just confuse everyone further. You could add adjectives before the name of the animal so you end up with stuff like, “123 Year of the Flaming Rat, then in 124 Year of the Dyslexic Toad…etc.”
It has been said that a good GM should keep very careful track of time for such things as training for new levels, researching spells, crafting magic items, getting old and dying, and so forth. This may be true, but I generally find it takes a lot of time so don’t bother much. It could conceivably be used to strong arm your players into doing things. For example: “Bob, I want to build my wand of ultimate authority.” GM: “Gee, that’s great, it seems it’ll take 3 months and the rest of the party plans to do the next fifteen adventures in that time frame, which, if they succeed, will essentially set you back 15 levels of experience and force me to cut you out of the next 32 game sessions.” Bob: “On second thought…”
Mixing it Together
So, we have some cool powers to play around with: weather, time, climate, environment, etc. Why just leave them alone? Perhaps it would be a good idea to encourage the party to buy expensive winter gear. All the animals start to turn white. When the party is on the road to the next village to sell that stupid gear, they fall in a time warp pit where the seasons change by the day. When you wake up in the morning it’s winter, by afternoon it’s like a scorching desert in jungle bloom, and by the evening you’re approaching arctic temperatures again. In such harsh conditions, even crossing a lake could be a perilous endeavor. Especially so if you’re trying to swim across it come nightfall. Picture a group in boat 2 days from land. At nightfall a sudden wave of frigid temperatures freezes their boat in place. They now must abandon ship and cross the tundra. The next morning, a massive heat wave starts ripping up the ice in huge blasts of steam. Now they must swim to shore before it’s night again…
No matter how well prepared your party is, you always have the upper hand. With the ability to throw a frigid wasteland right next to a desert because you felt like it, mess around with time, and arbitrarily mess around with nature; you have a devastating arsenal at your fingertips. Hurricanes aren’t a breeze, and earthquakes aren’t to be taken lightly.
Played right, you can keep your players on their toes constantly buying the right gear or forced to get it from the natives. The monsters of the region are probably acclimatized to the harsh conditions, but the party will need water in the desert, snow goggles and seal fat in the arctic, special anti-venom in the poisonous jungle, and a special hat to fend off those killer fireball leaves in the land of Fall.
Major Festivals
Okay, so you have a special season like Fall and you want to invent a cool event for that season. Obviously, whatever it’s called, it’s just an excuse for the good villagers to feast and get seriously drunk. Obviously there will be a huge party. It’s more than likely a diabolical force will choose this moment to perpetrate one or more dastardly deeds using all this psychic energy (or just so he can say “Ha, I got you all on April Fool’s Day!”).
Whenever there’s a gathering of people, the players will immediately search for the places where they can buy cool things (design some vendors) and for the competitions. In fact, at just about any gathering of more than 3 people, the party will expect there to be competitions they can enter. Such competitions will almost always include: sword fighting, wrestling, archery, magic (no one cares what magic as long as the wizard has something to do), jousting (everyone wants to be a knight at some point), and huge amounts of prize money. Yes, I know ‘huge amounts of prize money’ isn’t a category of competition, but the players will expect it to be there anyway.
The players will expect that if they roll at least 2 high numbers that they should win the competition; if they only roll 1 high number then they will accept a close call at second place. If they fail both rolls, they will expect good role-playing to allow them to win anyway or get a shot at a different competition.
Competitions can also be a great excuse for the player’s characters to try to impress babes. If the characters are too serious for that sort of thing, the villagers can ridicule them about their other pursuits such as serving the king or being on a mission of good. They might have to enter the competitions just to prove their dedication to their cause, and then have to fend off all the women impressed by their strength of character after they win.
While it’s cool to make a big deal about what day your special event falls on—and the cool name it has—generally people only want to know that kind of information in 2 seconds and then look for what this cool event allows them to do. It’s all well and good to have the day of Flaming Battles, but if the players don’t get access to any serious fire or battling, they probably won’t fully enjoy it. Come to think of it, if there’s no fire or battling going on, they usually have a tough time enjoying anything. Burn, burn!
Okay, obviously, players enjoy many other things about role-playing games. GMs are probably just as addicted to pyrotechnics and vast amounts of treasure (which they have almost no use for, already having ultimate power, but find useful as bait for unwitting players).
Foreshadowing
This article is not meant to suggest that you should always be arbitrarily changing the weather or using the elements against your players. In fact, using foreshadowing and explanations can be a great tool. Use the elements only occasionally.
While most of your games might be ‘regular’, having an occasional battle against the forces of nature can be very interesting. You can foreshadow the coming of an abrupt cold by having a crazy man run naked into the village screaming about impending winter, or by hinting the players better stock up on winter gear. If they don’t, at least you gave them a chance.
During the adventure, the players will doubtless wonder about the strange environmental conditions. You can use many explanations for this. An evil force such as a wizard might use the weather against them, this region could be under a deadly magical spell, or an odd tower might appear on a lake-shore and then disappear before the players can do anything about it. As long as there’s an explanation, your job is done.
After running one game of environmental challenge you can go back to regular games for as much as a year before running another. If the same players are around, the abrupt change will have more credibility as the players say, “Hey, I remember when this same thing happened a year ago.”
In my experience, the crazier the GM gets, the less the players care. It seems like the game degenerates into total goofiness. Perhaps that’s just a by-product of my particular style.
On a basic level, most beginning players just want to whack bad guys and claim fabulous amounts of treasure. Their end goal is to be as awesome and successful as they can possibly be. The more they can thwart the GM’s plans, the happier they are. Much of successful GMing can be said to involve always staying one step ahead of your players. No matter how increasingly awesome they become, you always have to come up with new threats to challenge them. If they ever reach the point where the game isn’t a challenge anymore, boy are you in trouble. While at first this may seem like a monumental task, it’s really quite easy when you think about it. You’re the GM, you control everything. Coming up with new challenges for the players should be as simple as coming up with the next crazy idea. Unlike a mad inventor, your ideas don’t even need to be plausible to work, you’re the GM; you make the rules.
While rules are good for keeping the player’s egos in check, they’re not quite as useful for you. You might as well make up your own rules and roll arbitrary amounts of dice for results. After all, the classic GMs of yore were encouraged to come up with chances they think are reasonable and assign a dice roll to them. It used to be that improvisation was an encouraged aspect of being the GM. It’s possible you could run a fine game with only d6’s and d4’s if you wanted to.
While it’s all well and good to have dungeons filled with monsters and treasure, did you ever stop to think what the impact of the seasons are on your campaign world? Chances are if you’re running a campaign, you’ve already worried yourself sick about this. My advice would generally be to not sweat the small stuff, but if you really want to, there’s always this article.
Summer
Generally, the game world is always set in summer and on Saturdays upon which the monsters seek to steal the princess from the king and sell her to a dragon in a dungeon. Of course, the dungeon contains many traps and fabulous wealth far in excess of the treasuries of all the nearby kingdoms.
While it may always be summer in the campaign world, try throwing in trifling details such as: roses in bloom, wild life in abundance, overabundance of flowers and plants, green things, summer breezes, cool streams, the shade of trees (with monsters hiding in the branches), and the fact that for the past 52 weeks the leaves have been turning color hinting at approaching winter.
Fall
This part of the campaign should last for the least amount of time. There will probably be a fall solstice upon which much revelry will take place and probably a goodly amount of evil schemes and witchcraft the players can put an end to. Basically, you just have to mention chill breezes and the leaves turning all kinds of bright colors. Big harvest feasts are a good idea, as are bar fights because the farmers don’t know if they’ll survive the winter with such meager crops because they were goofing off all summer.
Winter
While this might technically be a very long part of the year, it’s probably better to keep it short. Everyone is starving, the sun is gone, the players are freezing, food is running short, and it’s basically a horrible time. Fun stuff can include: snowballs, snowmen, avalanches, white dragons, frost giants, winter wolves, and any other monster with winter or white put in the front of their name.
If the people of the campaign aren’t that advanced, many of them may die because of the past hard years combined with the lack of food and resources in the winter. Many animals die because the snow is too deep, humans with lack of tools and resources could fall victim to the same harsh conditions.
Winter is also a great time to gloss over such aspects of the game such as spell research, crafting magic items, and training for new levels. That way, you can get back to the extremely long summer faster.
Spring
There are probably more celebrations you should be making up weird names for here. In fact, if there’s any week in your campaign world without a major holiday, you should probably invent one. In fact, if you rename all the days of the week you can ‘really’ confuse your players.
Spring is basically Summer, except it came after winter so everyone is bound to be relieved they didn’t freeze to death or run out of food. The massive spring melt could probably bring on floods of epic proportions which are bound to cause calamities in major cities. If the players can re-route the flood to wash out the stables of a famous king, so much the better.
Also, it’s quite likely the villagers of the campaign world are feeling frisky like the animals. After a long winter they throw off their thick furs and go back to the bars to seek adventure, women, and bar fights. New blood enters the scene, and there could be huge rows about who gets which of the eligible village lasses.
The Passage of Time
Generally, this shouldn’t matter. If it’s really important, you can roll d1000 (3d10) for the starting year of the campaign world and then try to roll through so many years that all the human characters die and the elves reach 10% of their life-span. Naming each year after a small animal could also be interesting, but will probably just confuse everyone further. You could add adjectives before the name of the animal so you end up with stuff like, “123 Year of the Flaming Rat, then in 124 Year of the Dyslexic Toad…etc.”
It has been said that a good GM should keep very careful track of time for such things as training for new levels, researching spells, crafting magic items, getting old and dying, and so forth. This may be true, but I generally find it takes a lot of time so don’t bother much. It could conceivably be used to strong arm your players into doing things. For example: “Bob, I want to build my wand of ultimate authority.” GM: “Gee, that’s great, it seems it’ll take 3 months and the rest of the party plans to do the next fifteen adventures in that time frame, which, if they succeed, will essentially set you back 15 levels of experience and force me to cut you out of the next 32 game sessions.” Bob: “On second thought…”
Mixing it Together
So, we have some cool powers to play around with: weather, time, climate, environment, etc. Why just leave them alone? Perhaps it would be a good idea to encourage the party to buy expensive winter gear. All the animals start to turn white. When the party is on the road to the next village to sell that stupid gear, they fall in a time warp pit where the seasons change by the day. When you wake up in the morning it’s winter, by afternoon it’s like a scorching desert in jungle bloom, and by the evening you’re approaching arctic temperatures again. In such harsh conditions, even crossing a lake could be a perilous endeavor. Especially so if you’re trying to swim across it come nightfall. Picture a group in boat 2 days from land. At nightfall a sudden wave of frigid temperatures freezes their boat in place. They now must abandon ship and cross the tundra. The next morning, a massive heat wave starts ripping up the ice in huge blasts of steam. Now they must swim to shore before it’s night again…
No matter how well prepared your party is, you always have the upper hand. With the ability to throw a frigid wasteland right next to a desert because you felt like it, mess around with time, and arbitrarily mess around with nature; you have a devastating arsenal at your fingertips. Hurricanes aren’t a breeze, and earthquakes aren’t to be taken lightly.
Played right, you can keep your players on their toes constantly buying the right gear or forced to get it from the natives. The monsters of the region are probably acclimatized to the harsh conditions, but the party will need water in the desert, snow goggles and seal fat in the arctic, special anti-venom in the poisonous jungle, and a special hat to fend off those killer fireball leaves in the land of Fall.
Major Festivals
Okay, so you have a special season like Fall and you want to invent a cool event for that season. Obviously, whatever it’s called, it’s just an excuse for the good villagers to feast and get seriously drunk. Obviously there will be a huge party. It’s more than likely a diabolical force will choose this moment to perpetrate one or more dastardly deeds using all this psychic energy (or just so he can say “Ha, I got you all on April Fool’s Day!”).
Whenever there’s a gathering of people, the players will immediately search for the places where they can buy cool things (design some vendors) and for the competitions. In fact, at just about any gathering of more than 3 people, the party will expect there to be competitions they can enter. Such competitions will almost always include: sword fighting, wrestling, archery, magic (no one cares what magic as long as the wizard has something to do), jousting (everyone wants to be a knight at some point), and huge amounts of prize money. Yes, I know ‘huge amounts of prize money’ isn’t a category of competition, but the players will expect it to be there anyway.
The players will expect that if they roll at least 2 high numbers that they should win the competition; if they only roll 1 high number then they will accept a close call at second place. If they fail both rolls, they will expect good role-playing to allow them to win anyway or get a shot at a different competition.
Competitions can also be a great excuse for the player’s characters to try to impress babes. If the characters are too serious for that sort of thing, the villagers can ridicule them about their other pursuits such as serving the king or being on a mission of good. They might have to enter the competitions just to prove their dedication to their cause, and then have to fend off all the women impressed by their strength of character after they win.
While it’s cool to make a big deal about what day your special event falls on—and the cool name it has—generally people only want to know that kind of information in 2 seconds and then look for what this cool event allows them to do. It’s all well and good to have the day of Flaming Battles, but if the players don’t get access to any serious fire or battling, they probably won’t fully enjoy it. Come to think of it, if there’s no fire or battling going on, they usually have a tough time enjoying anything. Burn, burn!
Okay, obviously, players enjoy many other things about role-playing games. GMs are probably just as addicted to pyrotechnics and vast amounts of treasure (which they have almost no use for, already having ultimate power, but find useful as bait for unwitting players).
Foreshadowing
This article is not meant to suggest that you should always be arbitrarily changing the weather or using the elements against your players. In fact, using foreshadowing and explanations can be a great tool. Use the elements only occasionally.
While most of your games might be ‘regular’, having an occasional battle against the forces of nature can be very interesting. You can foreshadow the coming of an abrupt cold by having a crazy man run naked into the village screaming about impending winter, or by hinting the players better stock up on winter gear. If they don’t, at least you gave them a chance.
During the adventure, the players will doubtless wonder about the strange environmental conditions. You can use many explanations for this. An evil force such as a wizard might use the weather against them, this region could be under a deadly magical spell, or an odd tower might appear on a lake-shore and then disappear before the players can do anything about it. As long as there’s an explanation, your job is done.
After running one game of environmental challenge you can go back to regular games for as much as a year before running another. If the same players are around, the abrupt change will have more credibility as the players say, “Hey, I remember when this same thing happened a year ago.”
