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Message: <blockquote data-quote="erucsbo" data-source="post: 2839564" data-attributes="member: 40110">off camera action.How do you approach your role as DM and does WLD make a difference? D&D is an exercise in collarborative story-telling, so a DM could be Author and/or Editor (where prose is the example medium), Composer and/or Conductor (music), Scriptwriter and/or Director (theatre), or Coach and/or Referree (sport) or any other analogy you might come up with. I try and adopt more of the latter role than the former as I don't want to be prescriptive in what happens (and if I was the players would find ways to deviate from the desired plot-line), but that doesn't mean I can't borrow from techniques used by the different roles.One of the greatest directors was Alfred Hitchcock who established great tension by putting things off-screen. Audiences would imagine far more then ever would have been the case if everything had been 'in camera', and all the extra information/plots/intricacies contained in WLD should be allowed to peek through from time to time to play upon the imaginations of the players. It is a pity that so many pages got lost in the crash, but hearing about things that other DMs have done in other sections (and considering how the ripples might spill over in to other sections) helps give the illusion of the Dungeon as a whole rather than a patchwork of barely connected sections. Keep it simple enough (and don't correct the players wrong assumptions) and you should be able to adapt to whatever you want when the players finally do arrive in a different section and they start to see where the snippets of information/news that they got from other sections fit in to the jigsaw (and where they were right and wrong).My players are about 75% the way through E now and they may end up skipping N altogether, but next session I think I will have my first wave of negative energy pulse through the entire complex, signalling the World Eater's awakening. It may even occur partway through an expected fight against Seraxes and the shadows <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devious.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":]" title="Devious    :]" data-shortname=":]" /> I'd be interested in what other "signs and portents" I can throw in from other later sections, especially from those that have had parties go through later sections and in hind-sight wished that there had been some foreshadowing.Taking my suggestion about the aftermath of the celestial/drow battle a bit further, one could have the celestials say how atypical it was of the drow to attack like that, and that they kept calling out "Madness is coming" (which is easy to misinterpret!) [truth might be that they were trying to flee from Madness after he had decimated a drider leader and that they were the slaves running away].Other things from movies/books that might work: - repeated wall markings from previous adventurers like AS (Arne Saknussemm) from Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth. - increase of rat swarms fleeing from something (can be small enough to not do any damage and rush straight past the party) from just about any number of disaster movies. - foreshadowing of stuff from other sections/plot lines (Babylon5) - change the colour saturation/hues of the landscape as evil ebbs and flows, or temperature changes up/down from the lava flow felt in the non-lava flow areas of the dungeon (most VR type movies have something like this happening, including parts of the Matrix trilogy).You don't have to act on any of these - all they do is indicate that change is occurring, and the party's actions might well be the small events that precipitate other things (Jurassic Park - read the book, not the poor interpretation that was the movie).enough rambling - I'll get back in my box now  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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