Books
The Blade Itself (Joe Abercrombie)
The Crystal Shard (R.A. Salvatore)
The Fifth Season (N. K. Jemisin)
The Gunslinger (Stephen King)
Hyperion (Dan Simmons)
The Lies of Locke Lamora (Scott Lynch)
Norse Mythology (Neil Gaiman)
Throne of the Crescent Moon (Saladin Ahmed)
Movies
Black Panther (Directed by Ryan Coogler)
Chronicles of Riddick (Directed by David Twohy)
Elizabeth (Directed by Shekhar Kapur)
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Directed by Sergio Leone)
Guardians of the Galaxy (Directed by James Gunn)
Harry Potter Series (Directed by Chris Columbus, Alfonso Cuarón, Mike Newell, and David Yates)
Kill Bill: Volumes 1 & 2 (Directed by Quentin Tarantino)
Mad Max: Fury Road (Directed by George Miller)
No Country for Old Men (Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen)
Raiders of the Lost Ark (Directed by Steven Spielberg)
Thor: Ragnarok (Directed by Taika Waititi)
TV Shows
Angel (Created by Joss Whedon)
Battlestar Galactica (2004) (Developed by Ronald D. Moore)
Breaking Bad (Created by Vince Gilligan)
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Created by Joss Whedon)
Deadwood (Created by David Milch)
Doctor Who (2005) (Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffat, head writers)
Game of Thrones (Developed by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss)
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (Adapted by Peter Harness)
Rome (Created by John Milius, William J. MacDonald, and Bruno Heller)
Sons of Anarchy (Created by Kurt Sutter)
True Blood (Created by Alan Ball)
True Detective (Season 1) (Created by Nic Pizzolatto)
The Wire (Created by David Simon)
Video Games
Baldur’s Gate/Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn
Bloodborne
Dark Souls III
Darkest Dungeon
Diablo III
Divinity: Original Sin
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Horizon Zero Dawn
Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor
Pillars of Eternity
Torchlight II
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
Comics
Black Panther (Written by Ta-Nehisi Coates)
Monstress (Written by Marjorie Liu)
Saga (Written by Brian K. Vaughan)
Rat Queens (Written by Kurtis J. Wiebe)
This is, of course, just a small sample list. As you keep digging, you’ll find even more great fiction to absorb—and the fiction you absorb will unconsciously become a part of your game.
Reading RPG Sourcebooks and Adventures
This might seem obvious, but it’s worth your time to read and reread the published RPG books for the games you’re playing. You can even study and borrow ideas from RPGs you aren’t playing. Just as you devour great fiction, you can likewise devour great published RPGs just for the sake of reading them. RPG writers, designers, developers, and artists have packed their books full of interesting monsters, thorough ecologies, great visuals, new ideas, vast worlds, detailed societies, endless dungeons, intricate plots, and even mechanics that you can borrow and drop right into your game.
In particular, the monster sourcebooks for your favorite roleplaying games can provide tons of hooks and ideas. They can also help you understand the overall feel of the world in which the game is set. Especially if you’re an experienced Game Master, you might think you know all you need to know about fantasy monsters, but give your monsters books the time they deserve and read them all the way through.
Take a Walk
We live in an always-connected world these days. In many ways, these connections have greatly enriched people’s lives. Though articles and posts often speak to the contrary, people are objectively smarter when joined to their smartphones than when those devices aren’t in hand. By the same token, connectivity to the RPG hive mind across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Twitch, and numerous other social networks has made many people better GMs. The more you keep your mind open to the ideas of other GMs, the greater your own skills become.
This constant connectivity comes at a cost, though. Your ability to conduct deep thought can easily disappear when you’re constantly chasing the next mobile distraction. So if you can find the time, take a thirty-minute walk every day without checking your phone and without interruption. If you’re having trouble figuring out where to take this time, you might try to do it first thing in the morning or to sneak away at lunch.
Wherever you find them, you can use these thirty minutes to really think about your game—and you might even get a little healthier in the process. A good walk every day gives you a great chance to conduct some of the GM brain exercises talked about in the next section. Giving yourself thirty minutes of overall mental quiet can do wonders for your creativity.
Tips for Priming the GM’s Brain
Absorb great fiction from books, movies, TV shows, video games, and comics.
Read RPG sourcebooks for both the games you play and the games you don’t.
Take a thirty-minute walk every day to disconnect and think about your game.
Chapter 26: Conducting GM Brain Exercises
“When I’m out walking my dog, or when I’m in the shower, or getting ready for bed, I’m thinking about the game.”
—Chris Perkins
We don’t often think about what we think about. We do, however, have some control over where we put our minds, and shifting our thoughts can change how we approach our games. As with the rest of the ideas in this book, we want to get the most bang for our buck, even when we’re just letting our brains go to work.
It’s not enough to just think about the game, though. What parts of the game should we be thinking about? What angle should we be taking? Considering that any game can go off in just about any direction when it’s run at the table, trying to think about where a game will go isn’t helpful. So instead, we want to think about the aspects of the game we can control. In other words, think about the questions that are of high value to the game, and avoid questions whose answers don’t have as much to offer.
The last chapter talked about the benefit of spending thirty minutes taking a walk and thinking about our games. (I’m literally going to do this after writing this chapter.) This section builds on that by talking about what questions we can ask ourselves while going on this walk.
What are the Names and Backgrounds of the Characters?
Step 1 of the Lazy Dungeon Master’s checklist doesn’t have to take place with a pencil, paper, phone, or computer. You can do it just in your head. Here’s a quiz you can take right now: What are the names of the player characters in the next game you’re planning to run? If you can’t answer that, it’s worth your time to review them again. Having the characters’ names on your phone can help—but don’t depend on the phone all the time. Commit those names to memory.
This exercise focuses your mind on the most important component of your game, and the one with the most variance in its outcome: the characters. Who are the characters? What are their backgrounds? What are their motivations? What do the players of those characters want?
You can’t, however, determine what those characters will do—and it’s best to not try. But thinking about the characters primes your brain to keep them in mind when you’re thinking about the rest of the adventure.
What are the Villains and NPCs Doing Right Now?
Assuming your campaign has one or more villains, that gives you a variable you can predict. Given the last actions of the characters, what are the villains doing in response? Maybe one or more of the villains don’t actually know what the characters did, and that’s okay. A villain can experience the “fog of war” just as the characters do, which means
the villain has to act with incomplete information.
You can also consider a villain’s motivations. Why do they want to do what they’re doing? In each villain’s mind, what makes them think they’re right? Few villains actually think that they’re the antagonist in their own story. Well-realized villains always think they’re justified in their actions. And the best-realized villains actually are justified.
You can also put yourself in the metaphorical shoes of other important NPCs in the campaign. Main quest givers, faction leaders, and other important secondary characters have their own lives going on while the characters are out doing stuff. The off-screen actions of those NPCs might have repercussions for the story, and spending some of your brainpower to consider those actions pays off when you’re prepping and running your game.
Thinking through the eyes of your villains and NPCs is a fun exercise—and one that helps you keep the game world focused and alive.
What Fronts Are On the Move?
As a tool for campaign building, you developed three fronts—the NPCs and events that are the campaign’s major motivators. For each front, you identified goals and three indicators of progress (the front’s “grim portents”). These fronts continually move and shift. So as part of your GM brain exercises, ask yourself, “Which fronts are on the move?” and think about how they might change the game world.
Running Through the Lazy Dungeon Master’s Checklist
As your final potential brain exercise, you can simply look back at the Lazy Dungeon Master’s checklist. Though the list is designed so that you can sit down and write all that stuff out, you can also run through much of it in your head. Strong starts, potential scenes, secrets and clues, fantastic locations, NPCs, monsters, and magic items—all of those are fine topics around which to focus your thoughts and ponder your game.
Tips for Conducting GM Brain Exercises
A great deal of GM preparation happens in your head—anywhere and any time.
You can shape your GM brain exercises to focus on questions of high value to your game, avoiding those of lower value.
Remind yourself about the names and backgrounds of the player characters in your game.
Ask yourself what the villains and NPCs are doing at that moment in the campaign.
Think about which of your campaign fronts are on the move, and how.
Run through the Lazy Dungeon Master’s checklist in your head.
Chapter 27: Embracing the GM’s Truths
It’s easy to get caught up in the minutiae of preparing and running an RPG without considering the larger truths of these games we love. It’s easy to say, “We’re all here to have fun,” and to talk about “relaxing” and “letting the story unfold at the table”—and then to promptly forget all that when we’re stressed out during the planning or running of a game.
For this reason, it’s worth reviewing the truths of being a Gamemaster regularly. Keeping these truths in mind can help all of us stay on track as we dive into the complex process of prepping and running our games.
Everyone’s Here to Have Fun
“Despite my less-than-stellar performance, the players had a great time. When the session ended, my players thanked me for the terrific game, to which I responded with silent surprise.”
—Chris Perkins
Everyone comes to a game to have fun. The definition of what “fun” means might vary from player to player, but remembering that core truth can help you remember that the players aren’t showing up to make fun of you, or to get pissed off, or to critique your work. Like you, the players come to the game to have a few laughs and engage in some high adventure.
It’s worth your time to find out what kinds of fun each player enjoys. You can learn this most easily by simply asking them what they enjoy most in your games. You might just get a shrug in response, and that’s fine. The players don’t have an obligation to think too deeply about why they like RPGs—they just know that they do like them. And if that’s the case, you don’t have to think too deeply about it either.
Players Don’t Care as Much as You Think
“It took one session as a DM for me to understand how little my players cared about all those details we missed.”
—Nate Owens, blogger and Dungeon Master
As a GM, you can spend an enormous amount of time and energy thinking about, preparing, and running your games—so much so that it’s easy to forget that the players might not have the same level of investment. This can have both positive and negative connotations.
On the one hand, it can be disheartening to realize that this world you’ve spent so much time on just might not be that big a deal to the players. On the other hand, it means you don’t have to worry so much about getting everything right—and that’s a powerful tool for you. It means you can let some details slip or misinterpret a rule and the game won’t come crashing down.
A lot of players have a relatively loose grip on the game as you run it—and you can maintain that same loose grip a lot of the time without hurting your game.
Players Want to See Their Characters Do Awesome Things
More than anything else, players want to see their characters do awesome things. The story of the game will hopefully interest them. But the real fun of an RPG is being able to act within a fantastic world with an empowered character. The players want to feel like heroes. So everything you do, everything you prepare, everything you put in their way should be built to empower their characters to do awesome and heroic things.
You are Not the Enemy
“Be a fan of the characters.”
—Dungeon World
As a GM, you often see the world of the game through the eyes of your villains. But you are not those villains. Rather, you watch the characters act, and then you watch the villains and the rest of the world react around them. Every session, you build a story out of the ethereal sands of nothingness. While the villains might want to destroy the world and kill the characters, you have different goals.
You’re not the competition. But in a game with a grid, miniatures, and heavy combat rules, it’s easy to leave behind cooperative storytelling and become a competitor. You can become the players’ enemy. You can secretly start to desire their demise.
This is the reason that the first act of preparation on the Lazy Dungeon Master’s checklist, as well as the first of the GM brain exercises, focuses on reviewing the characters. Doing so helps to break you of any potential sense of competition with the characters or the players. It reminds you to be a fan of the characters, always.
Players Love Breaking the Game
When players recount their favorite moments in RPGs, they often describe events in which their characters defied the odds—or even broke through the expectations of the game’s rules—to do something truly epic. Players love to see their characters break the boundaries of the game and its world.
Players love it when a character kills a dragon with a single attack. They love to face an insurmountable horde of giants and hold the line. They love to trick a squad of ogres into drinking alchemist’s fire by making them think those bottles hold potions of healing.
As a GM, it’s easy to bristle when you see the rules of the game bent or broken. You know what was intended, and yet something happens that pushes the game past those intentions. You feel the urge to use your GM powers to negate the situation. You want to say no.
Instead, you can say: “Hell, yes! That was awesome!” You can be a fan of the characters, letting the story take that unexpected turn. You can build upon it.
When Indiana Jones shoots the huge sword fighter in Raiders of the Lost Ark, it became one of the most iconic duels ever primarily because the outcome was totally unexpected. It broke the rules. It wasn’t fair. And we loved it because of that.
Characters should have the opportunity to bend and even break past the expectations of the game. But only when it’s awesome, and not if there’s any danger of breaking the game becoming routine.
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p; This is the fine line where a lot of GMs have trouble. How do you stop an awesome event from becoming the new strategy? If the party’s wizard saved the day in one fight by using polymorph to transform the nearly dead fighter into a giant ape, how does this not become the new “ape strategy” employed during every encounter thereafter? You can’t take the players’ new toy away from them after you ruled that it worked the first time. So instead, solve the problem by letting the world evolve.
The villains learn new tactics, spreading that information out to their minions. The giants learn that it isn’t the ape they should be attacking, but the wizard whose concentration maintains the polymorph spell. Other villains hire a band of mercenary wizards with the intent of counteracting new magical threats. The story of characters who can secretly transform potions of healing into alchemist’s fire becomes a dark tale told among the ogres, who become especially careful about such things.
The temptation is often to house-rule a problematic scenario and remove its troubling effect, because it’s easy to do so. But don’t take this easy way out. (And that’s about the only time you’ll hear that advice in this book.) Instead, look for new ways to challenge the characters when they’re due for a challenge. The rest of the time, let yourself enjoy watching them rip through the villains as much as the players enjoy it.
You don’t want to steal the awesome moments from characters. You also want to ensure that awesome moments don’t become stale and boring. Revel in them when they happen—and then let the game and the world evolve to keep the challenges fresh.
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