Tag: game mastering

Seven-Part Pact is played using a framework….

At the start of each in-game month, every player decides how they plan to Spend Time that month. You have 4 tokens, one for each week (roughly). You can place these tokens on various people, places, and tasks. Place one on your Sanctum to spend time there, maybe change something about it. Place one on a Companion to spend time hanging out with them. Place one on the Grimoire to spend a week casting a spell slowly, patiently, carefully. Place one on your Domain to attend to your Wizardly duties (e.g. managing the wilds or advising the king or looking into the Dreaming or whatever it is you do). Etc. etc., many ways a Wizard can spend their time.

These represent the major stuff. The primary task you plan to focus on that week, the activity that’ll receive most of your attention and effort. It’s simply assumed that your character is still otherwise, y’know, living their normal day-to-day life and attending to mundane affairs….

Once everyone’s placed their tokens, we begin resolving the next month of activities. Going around the table, one at a time, each player retrieves one of their tokens and resolves that action….

You can resolve your…tokens in any order. Additionally, once per month, you may move one of your tokens before resolving it, at any time and for no cost. So you have a little bit of leeway to reschedule things on the fly. In this way, players plan ahead but can still be fairly flexible.

So far, this might sound less like an RPG and more like a board game. “Alright, this week my Wizard visits the island of Ishana to recruit a Bard to join the king’s Royal Court.” Done. Next player. Turns go by pretty fast, which I consider to be an advantage. But when does it feel like a roleplaying game?

Well, let me tell you about…Scenes.

In addition to your four Spend Time tokens, you also get one star-shaped token. Wherever you place your star token is where you get to have a Scene. A Scene is exactly what it sounds like. It’s the part of the game where we zoom in and start roleplaying as our characters moment by moment, speaking in dialogue, moving around rooms, casting spells, etc.

For most players, Scenes are the highlight of the game. But to me, it’s important that they merely punctuate the game. They’re an exception to the baseline mode of play. Instead of asking, “when is it time to zoom out and switch to a downtime timescale?” like in D&D, we ask “when is it time to zoom in and switch to a real-time timescale?” If we’re resolving an event as a proper Scene, then that means it’s important….

— Seven-Part Pact: Time – A Knight at the Opera

Author’s emphases both bold and italic.

I read that blogpost and immediately saw this game mechanic as a sufficiently light structure to use with our leisurely Xenoverse free-form roleplay. My friends and I do not play there much at all these days, but we do continually discuss what we want to play. These are broad strokes that easily fit into week- or month-long “game turns”—with the Scene being a spur to actually have regular in-character (chat) session, however short.

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• Blogroll July 2025 – VDonnut Valley

Let’s consider a campaign setting dialed toward the pagan end of the spectrum. I will mostly be referencing Germanic paganism for this example because it is the historical culture I am most familiar with (note that this includes most of northern Europe from England to parts of Eastern Europe). Pagan gods are not all-powerful, nor are they omniscient or benevolent. They have different goals, biases, flaws and are more often worshipped out of reverence and respect and less out of love and devotion. They are given offerings in exchange for protection, favors, or just appeasement. On paper, this is pretty standard for your traditional D&D setting. But what we don’t really see is the implications and effects of this worldview on the setting. A pagan worldview is not one that is likely to lead to the traditions of medieval Europe nor the fantasy version of it with the holy knights, ornamented cathedrals, and battles between angels and demons.

Firstly, no place of worship was more important than the home, or more specifically, the hearth. Every proper home should have an altar around the hearth where offerings are prepared and daily prayer rituals are done. These alters can contain different shrines to different gods as well as shrines to non-deities such as ancestors and house spirits. That’s right, gods are not the only ones that receive prayers and offerings. It is just as important for a villager to give offerings to their local Kobold house spirit to keep them from causing trouble. On top of that, their ancestors are constantly watching, judging, and influencing from the afterlife. PCs and NPCs alike will want to pray to their ancestors for wisdom and seek to please them.

In general, the objects of worship: gods, spirits, and ancestors should be much more day-to-day than normally seen in fantasy settings. Farmers prayed to Thor to protect their cattle while housewives prayed to Freja to send cats to deal with mice. This doesn’t mean your adventurers can’t also summon the strength of a god to divine smite a giant, only that the gods are for everyone—not just high-level adventurers….

— Heathenizing Your RPG Campaign – Tabletop Tales

You want it? Quest for it. The moonlight sword, the favour of a cruel prince, the bio-nuclear heart of the Old Machines… These are how you will chisel your fate. So go get them….

Many games tell you to quest for the things you want. Blessings, magical swords, political favours—the big power-ups should come from going on a quest to get them.

I’ve always liked this concept. It helps to recreate the fiction that inspires these games. Protagonists should go on big damn adventures to get big damn rewards….

— How To Encourage ‘Quest for It’ – many_bubble

Witnessing unspeakable supernatural horrors—always a professional risk for any protagonist in a ‘swords and sorcery’ adventure—can drive a mortal man or woman mad. Deliberately delving into ancient eldritch secrets for the purposes of unleashing unnatural forces or contacting demonic intelligences radically increases this risk. Insane sorcerers and men whose minds have been broken by ancient evils are standard staples in ‘swords and sorcery’ tales.

In order to simulate this aspect of the ‘swords and sorcery’ genre, these rules treat a character’s Wisdom score as a measurement of his/her sanity. A character with a Wisdom score of 18 has a firm grasp of the nature of reality, considerable self-discipline, and remarkable strength of will. In contrast, a character with a Wisdom score of 3 is barely lucid, easily confuses reality with fantasy, and is on the border of lapsing into madness. Characters with Wisdom scores of 2 or lower are utterly insane, and must be treated as non-player characters. (If this Wisdom loss is temporary, as explained below, the character is under the control of the Game Master until he/she regains his/her sanity.)

— Sanity – Akratic Wizardry

I have previously described the Rhydinspace plane/dimension as only a single solar system. I am embracing this preexisting lore as an inspiring limitation. This is more than enough real estate for an outer space roleplay campaign.

A single planet can be challenging to a gamemaster as a fantasy setting. Eight planets with numerous satellites and a single star is a truly intimidating canvas size to me. And that is before adding magic and travellers/immigrants from other places. I am not even thinking of space stations here. (Asteroids? Yes, please!)

Galactic Scale is wide but usually shallow and homogeneous. My aim with Rhydinspace is depth and variety.

In Tolkien the Elves were not human, and you see this reflected more in the early years of RPGs with Tolkien inspired elves in them. But in the 30+ years since they’ve been increasingly humanized (much like Vampires). Now they are just people with pointy ears (and Vampires are people who sparkle) and they’re written and played more or less like any other human character.

A lot of Elf characters in current media could lose the pointy ear prosthetics and just be a person. There’s really very little that makes them feel that different.

The otherworldly inhuman nature of Elves and other magical creatures is something you see throughout folklore. Here’s an old Irish Fairy Tale about a mermaid (not the half-fish kind, this is basically an Elf that lives in the water):

One spring morning, fisherman Patrick Gannon stood upon the seashore as the sun rose. “Lovely morning,” he sighed to himself. He puffed on his pipe, for nothing could bother Patrick this day.

Except one thing. He wished he could share his pleasure with a wife.

“Ah, a wife would be fine on such a morning,” he sighed again. Just then, he spied a rock upon the shore, upon which sat a beautiful young woman, combing her sea-green hair.

Patrick looked down at the sand. He knew this was a mermaid, a sea fairy. Beside the maiden sat a red cap with a feather—a magic cap, that is, the sort the mermaids wear to find their way home beneath the sea.

Patrick ambled down the shore toward the rock. “Hello,” he said, startling the mermaid. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “I came only to say how pretty you look this morning.”

When she blushed and looked away for a moment, Patrick grabbed her cap.

“What do you want?” the mermaid asked.

“Mermaid,” Patrick said, “I want to marry you.” The mermaid accepted.

So Patrick put her cap into his pocket, for a mermaid will lose her memory without her feathered cap.

Now Patrick and the maiden returned to Patrick’s cottage. They had three children, and no one was happier than Patrick Gannon. However, one day he forgot to hang up his fishing nets.

Mrs. Gannon was cleaning that morning, and she spied the fishing nets that Patrick had not put away. When she lifted them, she found a hole in the wall, and in that hole she found her red cap.

The moment she found it, she put it on, and she remembered her father and mother and longed to see them. She walked out the door, turning once to blow a kiss to her sleeping children. She walked to the shore and dove into the sea.

So Patrick lost his beloved mermaid. Every day he walked to the shore, hoping that his wife would return, but she never did. Still, he never forgot her, for he knew that she had truly loved him.

The Elf in this story is not human and acts in an inhuman way—just like Tolkien’s elves. Real people don’t lose their memory when you take their magic hat, or walk away from their own children when they get their magic hat back. Humans have more compassion than that. They don’t lose the will to live when faced with tragedy either. What makes humans human is that they’re stronger than that.

Perhaps part of the problem is we’ve gotten so used to characters who are alien on the outside but human on the inside that we’ve forgotten about ones who are the other way around? Or who have an alien exterior as a visual symbol that they are not human and think and act in not human ways. When we take story elements and ideas from older media (like Tolkien) this is where we run into problems with confusion about how humans are depicted and how non-humans are intended to contrast with that.

Maybe we’ve had too many pointy eared humans in our media and not enough Elves?

— Elves, Half-Elves and Humanity – Strange Magic

Author’s emphases.

Thank the gods for the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, else I could not have linked to the source blogpost.

Prompted by the excellent essay Rethinking Fantasy Feudalism: What’s a Guild?

In addition to the real world guilds, having separate wizards guilds in every city would make things interesting. Thieves Guilds are already treated that way, in fact.

Never, ever, run a combat encounter if it’s not a defining moment in your session, adventure or campaign.

Mundane encounters don’t benefit from your games’ highly involved and time-consuming combat rules. The environment isn’t interesting enough. The enemies aren’t diverse enough. The goal is too simplistic; kill or be routed. There’s nothing to gain from winning or losing besides death and paltry trinkets. Don’t do it.

I’m not saying make combat rare. Just that if you have combat, invest the time to making it unique and interesting. Unless you’ve setup a combat encounter in a cool area with meaningful enemies and actual stakes, don’t use the full combat rules. Run an abridged version. Treat it as any other roll. Succeed at a cost. Montage it.

— Doing Crunchy D&D-style Combat Right – RPG.net

Swamps are the location for a lot of horror stories and RPG adventures, and they often come populated with zombies. Of course, once adventurers gain enough experience they begin fearing zombies a lot less, even in relatively huge numbers. But it seems to me that too rarely are the possibilities and implications of fighting undead in a swamp really used to their full potential…

Imagine tough adventurers with swamp water up to their waist, fighting off zombies. What if the zombies, instead of trying to bite, claw or swing crudely with their weapon, were instructed instead by their creator to form groups and grapple adventurers, dragging them under the swamp water where they can’t breathe (Something the undead don’t need to do) and holding them there? If an adventurer is dragged down into the water with his torch or lantern, it would also mean less illumination for the living. And sure, one zombie might have trouble grappling an energetic adventurer, but five zombies grappling at the same time?

— Fighting Zombies in the Swamps!!! What a Drag… – Eye Ray of the Beholder

A message from the gods is worth more than a plot of land. A wise party will seek these messages when possible, as they can greatly aid them on their dangerous travels. Messages of…

• …coming blessings from a deity
• …warnings against certain actions or plans
• …judgement against the party or their enemies for an offense
• …indictment for what the party has done wrong
• …instruction on what to do next

…are extraordinarily valuable. Unfortunately for the party, messages from the divine are few and far between for the common person. Even if they were to receive such a message, its meaning would be totally lost on them—they do not have the proper training! All is not lost however, as the gods are not limited in their means of communication.

Official Prophecy

Any king worth his weight in whatever is his most lucrative export is going to sponsor prophets. These prophets are no ecstatic or dreamer, oh no; these are professionals trained in cultivating prophecies and communicating the messages of the gods above. A wise king has many prophets representing many different gods, for where there is no guidance the people fall, but in abundance of counselors there is victory.

These prophets are the king’s advisers, who communicate to the king important information from the gods regarding politics, war, and religion. Besides this, the king has certain responsibilities, such as maintaining justice and caring for the dispossessed with his domain. A word from above can give the guidance necessary to bring success to the king in these responsibilities. And when the king is successful, everyone is successful.

Employing an Official Prophet

An official prophet has little need to work with such commoners as the party. Even if the party should be successful and gain lands, herds, flocks, and servants, the king is far greater, and the king is the prophet’s sponsor. The prospect of successfully buying an official prophet’s prophecy has a 1-in-10 chance.

However, all is not hopeless. Should a party member be of a noble background, the chance increases by 2. Should a party member be of a religious background, the chance increases by 1. If that same party member happens to be a strong follower of the same deity of the prophet, the chance increases by 2. In the right circumstances, the chance of successfully buying an official prophet’s prophecy in a 4-person party could be as high as 9-in-10.

That being said, it is a rare case indeed for such a high chance. The best way for the party to gain an audience with an official prophet is through the big guy himself: the king. Kings often give incredible gifts to loyal and proven servants, and a prophecy from an official prophet can be of great worth in the dangerous occupation the party has chosen.

Informal Prophecy

The gods don’t always use the “official” lines of communication. They are mysterious and their activities are hard to discern; that they use ecstatics and dreamers from both priests and laypersons is not surprising. Despite their lack of training and inability to cultivate messages from the gods regularly, their prophecies are no less important or informative.

A wise king has a few ecstatics in his care at all times. They are not reliable in their frequency, but are more like hot springs in the deserts: they do nothing for long periods of time…and then a sudden burst of energy from the divine! These do not function as the more learned ones, but enjoy the hospitality of the palace, if also experiencing some hostility from the temple.

Employing a Dreamer or Ecstatic

Dreamers and ecstatics are not always in the king’s care. Often they are found within the community the party finds themselves in. However, employing them for the purpose of prophecy is a gamble that may never pay off. Should it, the party will gain what they seek: a message from the gods. Should it not, the party will have naught more than a leech on their resources. Any offer above the current living conditions of the dreamer or ecstatic should be enough to gain their employ.

Those NPCs designated dreamers have a 5-in-100 chance of gaining a message from the gods during their rest. Those NPCs designated ecstatics have a 1-in-100 chance of gaining a message from the gods normally. When ecstatics are in a heightened state, whether through drugs, sex, or some other means, the chance increases to 5-in-100. Both dreamers and ecstatics will know the proper interpretation of their messages.

Those within the party have a 1-in-100 chance of receiving a message from deity when they rest or achieve a heightened state. Those of an academic, magical, musical, or religious background have a 2-in-100 chance instead. However, they will not know how to interpret the message from the gods, for the symbolism is deep and requires intense knowledge of their meanings. The party will need to gain the service of a temple consultant to discern its meaning.

Incubation

The party has another means of gaining a message from the divine, but the means of doing it are incredibly dangerous for anyone other than the king or his highest officials. If the party can enter the sacred space of the deity they wish to ask a question—that deity’s temple, garden, or ziggurat—and sleep there overnight without being killed for their irreverence and sacrilege, they have a 1-in-10 chance of receiving a message in the form of a dream.

It would be safer to gain entrance into the sacred space rather than sneak in. Gaining entrance is hard, but the best way to gain it is as a gift for services given to the temple or palace. Along with the gifted opportunity to incubate will come the offer to then interpret the dream’s message. As always, it is best to be in the good graces of the king and temple priests.

Other Means

There are other ways of discerning the will of deity, but that is through deduction, not inspiration. For a truly inspired message, directly from deity to man, one must use prophets, dreams, or periods of ecstasy. There simply is no other way to get a direct message from above.

— Discerning the Will of Deity by Inspiration – Stepped On a d4

Alas, that blog is gone, and the Internet Archive does not have a copy of this blogpost. I have copied the entire text here for posterity.

Into the Odd doesn’t have many moving parts, but your game should have lots of interesting decisions to be made. For interesting choices you need to:

1. Give enough information.
2. Have multiple reasonable actions.
3. Give actions consequences.

A particular type of choice is a Dilemma, the tough choice.

When ruling a Dilemma, remember the mantra Pick or Push.

Present two desirable, or equally undesirable, choices.

The players either Pick one OR Push for both.

If they Pick one, then they get exactly that, but they miss out on the other choice. Don’t over-complicate the choice with too many hidden consequences. Keep it real simple between two things they want.

If they Push for both they’ll have to do one of the following:

• Risk: Try something risky that could range from a single Saving Throw to a full on adventure.
• Sacrifice: Give up something else in return for both, normally a resource. Throwing time or money at a problem is usually the easy way out, so make sure those have real consequences.
• Smarts: Have a really clever idea that lets them get both without losing out. Generally I’m easily talked into this sort of thing, especially if it’s funny. There may still be minor consequences.

— Dilemmas: Pick or Push – Bastionland

…[A] common lacking I’ve seen in many role-playing games with clerics [is] the lack of importance of a holy ground. While in a lot of fantasy media and historic folklore there is a strong importance of being on holy ground, not so in most games.

In Piecemeal, holy ground is a prime consideration for using Priest Miracles. Most healing and damage spells are given a re-roll, or reduced piety cost when cast on holy ground. Weapons wielded by the faithful on holy ground count as magical (making the town chapel an ideal place of refuge when the werewolves attack) and those of enemy faith’s cannot heal on holy ground.

This makes being on holy ground (and not being on unholy ground) very important to consider. But how prevalent is holy ground? “Consecrate Ground” is a priest miracle, any PC or NPC priest who wants to spend the piety may use this miracle. It turns a shrine, temple or church into holy ground for as long as the shrine , temple or church remains undefiled. Thus in conflicts it is often important to make sure you destroy the unholy sites of the enemy.

Why is this good?

1. On a tactical level this adds a spiritual element to the terrain. When fighting an evil cult to Baphomet, deep in the woods around the base of the JuJu tree you need to make some decisions. Do you focus on fighting the cultists and the high priest first and destroy the shrine afterwards? Doing so means your priest is at a disadvantage and the enemy priest is at an advantage. You could also focus on setting the JuJu tree on fire first, letting the high priest use more infernal miracles against you. And a third option is to perhaps have a thief sneak in [beforehand] and set fire to the JuJu tree as a signal to begin the attack. It adds choices and more strategy to terrain.
2. It makes the local temple or church more of a “safe house” from the supernatural and occult shrines that much more foreboding of a place to venture.
3. It allows priest characters the ability to add permanent additions to the world that will have a lasting and recurring benefit to them.

— Be Careful on Holy Ground – Unofficial Games

Thank the gods for the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, else I could not have linked to the source blogpost.

[NB: The following are threads or other sources that you might want to read as background material. Or because at least some of them contain great posts.]

• Some thoughts on Mad Max
• So who wants to talk about OD&D?
• The Opposite of Zipper GMing
• The Original D&D Setting by Wayne Rossi, which I cannot recommend highly enough.
• The West Marches

In the search to further differentiate one’s own classic D&D¹ campaign from others, it’s possible to mutate the setting assumptions in a lot of different ways without actually changing the rules much. I think we’re mostly familiar with those ideas. What’s maybe not as familiar, though, is that D&D can feel a hell of a lot different if you go back to original or later classic D&D and follow the game’s rules as written, and figure out what the world looks like given that.

In the run-up to the newest Mad Max film being released, I’ve spent some time thinking about what it would take to make D&D feel post-apocalyptic. Most of my campaigns have already been what I like to call “polyapocalyptic,” which means that they clearly take place after an indefinite series of world-altering and civilization-destroying disasters. At a certain point, people might take a somewhat nihilistic point of view about the phenomenon, and accept that everything they’ve ever built might be destroyed by insect deities or meteor strikes tomorrow. If you love the Dying Earth books as much as I do, this might feel familiar.

The thing is, you don’t have to do a whole lot different. The DM builds a hexmap and doesn’t show it to the players. There are few cities, far apart and with very little communication between each other. The PCs have at best rumors of where those settlements might be. You could walk through the wastelands for days and see nobody, or you could run into a rampaging tribe of 300 orcs/bandits/whatever. Seriously, look at those wilderness encounter charts, they are insane.

If your horse dies while you’re out in the middle of the desert, we hope you like walking. So, if you really wanted to make things look more like this kind of setting, the following are things that I would do.

1. Bands of marauders are important and need to happen. However, if the PCs do in fact run into 300 orcs that turn out to be hostile, this doesn’t mean that 300 orcs jump out from behind a bush and attack. It probably means that the PCs stumble into a scouting party or part of the vanguard, and the main body is over a ridge or something. This gives you a fight with some stakes or an opportunity to run away, makes things feel a little more realistic, and also prevents the entire party from being slaughtered quite so suddenly. Also, now you have a plot thread dangling. The marauders led by Renf the Red-Handed have seen the party’s face, and may track them across the wastelands in addition to sacking any settlements that might happen to be out there.

2. Treasure takes a nose-dive in practical value. I think that gems and jewelry are still at least somewhat important, because bling (more on this later) is a vital survival tool. However, huge chests of coins are not useful outside the largest cities. In any smaller settlements, with their relatively narrow survival margin and slim expectations of seeing a traveling merchant any given month, something you can use to stay alive is worth more than coins. Now, if you can get back to one of the few large cities with a big score…you might have hit the jackpot.

3. Make encumbrance matter. I would suggest importing one of the more closely-tracked encumbrance systems from any retroclone you like. Food and water need to be heavy. Carrying enough water to get through a desert is a big, big deal. Animals need water too! Your horse is vitally important for carrying more weight than you could by yourself, but that means you need to spend an appropriate amount of effort taking care of them. The next town you encounter might not be willing to let a horse go for mere gold.

4. Market Classes: One of the oddities of D&D is that it isn’t uncommon for a gold ring to be worth 100gp, when that amount of coins might weigh ten pounds. I have generally assumed this to mean that the coinage is highly debased, whereas the metal used in jewelry is close to pure. I’d stick with that, and maybe say that coins are worth even less than usual. You could use something like the market classes from ACKS, and rule that a market counts as one or two classes lower if you are trying to buy things using coins. This means that, basically, you won’t be able to buy much stuff if all you have is GP. However, markets could be treated as their actual class if you are using gems/jewelry, and maybe one class higher if you are attempting to barter with things that people can use to live. A sack of gold coins and an oxcart full of steel ingots might have the same theoretical value, but in fact people are much more willing to trade goods for the latter, since you can do things like make a plow out of it. Now, that isn’t quite the way that supply & demand work, but it’s a starting point for a post I’m writing off the cuff.

5. Bling: One of the things that D&D has historically not paid enough attention to is playing dress-up. I don’t mean that the players should show up in costume. I mean that the PCs should be spending much more time on fantastical Vancian couture, terrifying battle-masks or makeup inspired by various parts of real-world history, necklaces made of their enemy’s teeth, and actually wearing the jewelry they’ve pulled out of various tombs in order to advertise that they are successful stone-cold badasses. I’ve instituted a rule in a lot of my campaigns that if you openly wear articles of jewelry, they don’t count towards your encumbrance. Ten CN worth of encumbrance here and there can make a big difference when you want portable wealth. Also, you can use it to modify reaction rolls (people can immediately tell that a sorceress with a 5,000gp crown of onyx and platinum is a VIP, and they’d probably better not fuck with her, or anyone else who can accumulate and keep that kind of wealth) and morale rolls (enemies might fight harder for a chance to loot the PCs’ goods.) So! Add rules for this. I suggest moving reaction rolls and morale rolls to 3d6 instead of 2d6, so you can make the range bands a bit wider and have room for a 1 or 2 point modifier without breaking the tables.

6. Goods. Going back to market classes. There are tools in ACKS (and probably other systems) for converting treasure into trade goods. So, if the PCs beat some bandits and the treasure table gives them 3,000gp, then what you might actually want to do as the DM is to say that in fact they just have 3,000 gp worth of trade goods, and then convert all of that to incense sticks, spices, valuable monster parts, wine, furs, et cetera. In a literally postapocalyptic campaign, I can’t recommend that highly enough. One, it makes encumbrance way more of a problem. They can’t just run off into the night with a purse full of jewels, they really need to get to that next big city while guarding a caravan of ox-carts full of whatever if they want their XP.

7. Slaves. This is kind of important. Forced labor is a huge economic driver, and also it gives you a powerful excuse to take PCs captive. You might want to insert some variant of the rules that let PCs survive being reduced to 0HP, so that they can wake up in shackles with all of their shit stolen. Furthermore, it’s close to always justifiable to kill off slavers, and lets you thematically wonder about if civilization is really worth rebuilding after all.

8. Constructions from different eras. I would strongly recommend a bit of historical grounding that the PCs can use to get a practical read on things. New settlements are wooden palisades, earthworks, log cabins, sod houses, crap like that. They’re crude but honest. The newer but still decadent cities are made of big stone blocks, quarried and hauled into place by slaves that live in thatch longhouses or something. Probably a lot of dry masonry there. The perimeter of the old civilization might have well-mortared fortresses or similar types of structures that are still standing, maybe occupied by tribes of people who couldn’t rebuild it if they wanted to. The dungeons underneath them are possibly still intact. The actual cities of the ancients might have glowing towers of crystal that are hard as steel, domes of pearlescent glass, remarkable types of concrete that none now know the making of. Those places aren’t typically squatted in because they’re full of weird alien horrors. It’s also where the miraculous devices of the ancients are to be found, of course, or piles of gold simply laying where it was left, never more than a bauble in the first place to the High Men who once lived there.

Well, that was a huge post, and I’m not sure if I actually said much of anything useful. I just wanted to get some more of my weird ideas written down while I had a bit of time.

¹ OD&D with or without supplements, Basic Set, B/X, BECMI, most retroclones.

— RPG.net Forums

Author’s emphases in italic. Mine are in bold.

Something that always interested me about undead creatures in certain systems is their XP-drain or level-drain. I enjoyed the concept because it made something as simple as a zombie unique mechanically. Other types of monsters didn’t have the same effect—a badger didn’t drain your levels, nor did a goblin. Among all the fodder available for adventures, it provided something unique mechanically that set undead apart and made them slightly more dangerous at the low level and extremely dangerous once you were dealing with vampires or liches.

I had a conversation awhile ago with a few others on the glog-ghetto discord channel about XP-draining undead and I recently remembered this conversation. The discussion included the mechanical side of things and its complexities, but what interested me more was the narrative side of things. How did losing experience from being damaged by an undead creature look in-world?

The Unbecoming-ining

Chances are you’ve read, watched, or played something that involves undead, probably zombies. Within popular media, they are an ever-present monster, though their popularity has waned somewhat in recent years. Usually, during the story involving undead, someone gets “bitten”. This is a problem because “undeath” is spread by undead-ness getting inside the body. This is usually done through being wounded, such as a bite or scratch, and the infection quickly overtaking the body, though there are occasions where it is spread through the air or water instead.

Once the infection happens, there is very rarely a chance to stop it. Few stories involving undead have a “cure” readily available, and if one does it exist, it exists too late for our dear secondary character. Instead, over time our beloved secondary character becomes worse and worse, to the point where they are no longer them but something else. Then they are dispatched and left behind. It is this “unbecoming” that is closest to the narrative progression of XP-drain.

You-ness and Experience Points

It isn’t that you are losing experience, per se; you are losing “you-ness”. When the zombie scratches you, narratively you slowly are becoming “not you”. You become an undead version of you or “you-adjacent”: like you, but not. Slowly or rapidly, the infection takes over and the same flesh sack is no longer inhabited by you, but an undead abomination.

I believe this narrative change of “you” to “you-adjacent” is best expressed through experience points. For those systems which use levels and experience points, experience points are a representation of your character’s past experiences. You only get experience points from battle you’ve won, not battles you will win. Thus, slowly, your character becomes better, stronger, wiser, smarter, whatever-er because they accrue more experiences and therefore more experience points.

In real-life, hopefully those who have more experiences under their belt are better than those who have less experiences. Hopefully they are wiser, smarter, stronger, whatever-er than someone with less experience. But as these experiences take place, the person changes as well. You are (hopefully) not the same you from 5 years ago, and (hopefully) the you of 2025 is different from the you of right now. Experience points then represent this life journey of growth, in a word. Just as in real-life we become someone different and hopefully better, so do our characters.

Not You, But Them

Your character grows into a better version of themselves, hopefully. More “whatever-er” than when you started. The growth is a positive change—something is being added to our characters to change them. Narratively, undeath is a negative change—something is being removed from our characters to change them. Mechanically, this is experience points; narratively this is you being converted to “not you”. And this is not a static process, but a slow bleed.

Undeath is converting living cells into undead cells, to the point where you die because of it. Except you don’t die as many think of it; you turn into the undead abomination. So when an undead creature drains your XP, they are taking “you” and converting it into “not you, but them”; they are taking your XP which is going to your levels and putting it into their levels which are now inside you. You are losing your “you-ness” and becoming “them”—same flesh sack, totally different entity. Those experience points become undead experience points, and once you hit the threshold to “level up” you “convert” into the undead abomination. Thus, you are not so much losing experience as you are converting experience into something else; in this case, undeath.

Be Afraid

Hopefully, everything I wrote above makes sense. It probably doesn’t in such an abstract form, but I tried. This narrative of slowly converting into something “not you, but them” is, to me, horrifying. It is a slow, nigh-unstoppable creep which will eventually claim you, like time! Having the narrative understanding alone makes even a zombie something any sensible adventurer, regardless of level, would avoid without proper protections or preparations, like holy water or a holy flamethrower.

That a single scratch, a single gulp of tainted water, or a single inhale of unfiltered air could begin the process of conversion is realistically terrifying. The closest analogy to the real-world I can think of would be radiation and cancer. Few would willingly go into a highly irradiated zone even with proper protections; fewer still without any protections. The radiation would produce something perhaps similar to undeath—cancer—which would slowly kill you if not treated. It isn’t body horror or jump-scare horror, both of which are lazy and uncreative derivations of horror. Rather it is something to be rightfully afraid of, for one does not want to become them.

— Narrative of Undeath – Stepped On a d4

Author’s emphases.

Alas, that blog is gone, and the Internet Archive does not have a copy of this blogpost. I have copied the entire text here for posterity.

Make very wounded creatures run away in fear for their life. Most do not feel like they need to fight to their death. Have enemies get killed by traps mid combat and make the players freak out that there are others in the area that they don’t know about. Raise the tension!!!

NARRATE. NARRATE. NARRATE. Combat is SOO BORING when it consists of: Attack. Roll to hit. Damage. Move on. NARRATE WHAT THE CHARACTERS ARE DOING. DESCRIBE YOUR ACTIONS. Make silly sound effects, crank it to 11. It’s more memorable, dynamic, and fun every single time.

Attackers only actually “miss” if they roll a 1. Instead attacks that don’t beat AC are dodged, blocked, ricocheted, bounce of armor, literally anything but the word “miss.” Players know their attack mattered at least narratively and they don’t look like fools for trying.

The objective of combat should almost never be to just defeat the opposition. Maybe you’re trying to rescue a hostage, maybe you’re trying to get away with a piece of treasure, maybe you’re trying to buy time for an evacuation. A fight for the sake of a fight is boring.

— @MagicMissilePod – Twitter

The body count in D&D really bums me out, especially when it comes to my players (my kids).

The kill count of an adventurer who makes it to level 20 is only one seen by a small number of machine gun operators in modern times. Soldiers who kill in war have high incidence of PTSD and other mental illness. I have a hard time getting away from that idea that this “Robocop 2”-level bodycount really makes the game bleak and sad.

What if…

• most enemies stopped attacking after half damage, and tried to reach safety instead
• when you take half your hit points worth of damage you get a level of exhaustion
• when you come back from zero hit points you have a level of exhaustion
• most opponents swoon or cower after 3/4 damage
• if you have killed a person, on a long rest you had to make a flat d20 roll and beat 10+ the number of people you killed or your rest doesn’t clear any exhaustion

Does that just ruin D&D or could it still be fun?

— Enworld Forums

One of the interesting effects of enforcing encumbrance is that you realize how useful porters and linkboys can be. Hireling loyalty is a fun mini-game in and of itself.

— Dragonfoot Forums

…An increased importance of leveling up comes from the campaign itself being unrewarding. When gaining levels and ability becomes the center of playing the game, it’s a substitute for lackluster events and stakes.

— Enworld Forums

Low level D&D play is about struggling against the [ever-present] specter of Death in a dark, lonely dungeon filled with monsters.

High level D&D play is about the monsters trying to survive the PCs.

High level play should be about your PCs having fun and going nuts with their power. Too many DMs and system designers don’t get it and don’t like it, and try to find ways to bring PCs back down to the relative power of beginner characters. Players, on the other hand, have an instinctive desire to make their characters ever more wildly powerful.

— Low level vs High level chars – Farooq’s Gaming Blog

Thank the gods for the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, else I could not have linked to the source blogpost.