Basic ideas and choices	Fleshing it out	Planting the party	Setting it in motion	Keeping it going
-	-	PS	-	-
Campaign Creation	Dragon #93	-	1st Edition AD&D	Dragon magazine

This essay is partly a how-to article,
partly a discussion of the philosophy of
being a DM. It is not exhaustive
or universally applicable. The novice
DM looking for short cuts to creation of a
believable and fun fantasy gaming milieu
will find few handy-dandy, off-the-rack
ideas herein. But for those who have wrestled
with making a milieu, and who enjoy
the game of creating fantasy realms, it is
always interesting and instructive to find
out how another person handles the many
aspects of the work. Nothing in this piece
should be construed as a definition of how
you ought to do it; this is how I do it.

I find myself at odds with myself when I
play the AD&D® game. On the one hand, it
is always more fun to play a character,
buckling swashes for my character?s own
development and advancement, rather than
do the labor of adjudicating endless battles
and keeping track of hundreds of monsters
and NPCs, which is a large part of the
DM?s role. On the other hand, to run a PC
means surrendering a lot of artistic control
over the fantasy environment. I like to put
together kingdoms and castles, design communities
of clerics and assassins, fiddle with
maps, play with politics, define and investigate
cultures, and so on. While it is fun to
run a PC, it is more fun for me to bring to
life a whole world peopled by my ideas.

There are two types of good DMs. One
sort is the manager. I have a friend who can
handle scores of monsters with individual
hit points and weapons without losing his
place, while all the time he is rolling the
dice, giving information to players, and
running a dozen or so NPCs who are tagging
along with the party. People who can
manage a gaming session in this way are
very superior DMs, and their campaigns
may well prosper no matter how shallow
their world is.

The other sort is the designer. This type
of DM is the sort who can give you reams of
detail on every aspect of his campaign, stuff
that probably no PC will ever desire to
know. He can tell you the color of the King
of Blarney?s grandmother?s lover?s eyes, and
why that is relevant to the sale of artichokes
in a country that your party will probably
never visit. His world is so well made that it
is a joy to adventure in, for its depth and
color give it a believability that catches you
up and gets you involved, even if the DM
may be a bit awkward at handling more
than a low-grade encounter.

I definitely lean more toward the
designer-type DM than toward the
manager-type. Nevertheless, I affirm that it
takes a mixture of both to make a good
DM. I shall have a bit to say about the
manager aspect of being a DM, but the
main thrust of this piece is toward the designer
aspect of the craft.

Basic ideas and choices
Where does one begin to create a campaign milieu?
Why, anywhere. All the roads
the designer travels lead to all the places one
wants to go ? so just start with an idea,
and get going! Ideas come in all shapes and
sizes, and I usually have more in a single
day than I could fully detail in a year, but
when I begin the process of creation I usually
start with one of three things: a culture,
a situation, or a map.

For instance, one can begin one?s design
by saying, ?I want Vikings in my campaign.
? That is a cultural idea. Or one can
start with a wish to adventure in the Pleistocene
among cavemen, or in a Central
American-flavored campaign, or a
Renaissance-style collection of intriguing
city-states. Perhaps one feels a certain liking
for Japanese or ancient Greek or Arthurian
Britain scenarios. Or perhaps one starts
with a desire to adventure on another plane
of existence, such as the Nine Hells. Any of
these is starting from a culture, and that
will lead you to ask where such a culture
would be likely to live and how it would
have developed.

Or let us say that we start with a situation,
such as a conflict of civilizations or
kingdoms. I recently proposed the following
situation to a friend while camping in the
Hoosier National Forest. Let us suppose
that the elves, being longer-lived than men,
decided to take advantage of that fact by
pursuing a conscious policy of subjugating
men through reforestation. While men have
the edge on elves in their ability to spread
they have the corresponding weakness of
and reduce the wilderness to their need,
short-lived generations, which accelerates
their adjustment to present conditions and
causes them to lose contact with their (comparatively)
recent past. Thus, the numerically
and technologically inferior elves could
counter the expansion of men by planting
trees slowly, constantly encroaching more
and more on the lands of men. Each new
generation of men would forget what the
extent of their influence was only a few
centuries before ? and if the elves were
careful, the men would never be aroused to
the conspiracy. By keeping the wilderness
wild, the elves could prevent the men from
advancing socially, and their threat to the
elves would thereby be kept in check. The
elves could do this, since their lifespan
would allow them the continuity needed for
such a gradual sort of aggression. From this
idea, this history, one proceeds to drawing
maps and describing the cultures of men
and elves.

Many people also get started with maps.
I have loved maps since grade school, and I
have been surprised by how many people I
have met since who feel the same way. For
us, a map is a symbol, compressing great
associations of ideas into a single sheet of
paper. So, one can begin by doodling out a
map. Then one begins to ask fundamental
questions: What sort of people would live
here? Where did they come from? And one
is off and running, with the ideas flowing
like water.

Now, as soon as one begins to collect
ideas to enhance one?s idea, one notices that
?no? gets said about as often as ?yes.?
Ideas lead to choices. If this is to be a Norse
milieu (primarily), then Aztec types don?t
belong here ? unless the main idea is all
about a ?what-if? situation involving Vikings
and Aztecs. You see, when we get that
first basic idea forming in our head, we find
that in one sense it already exists, fully
formed, and we are not so much inventing
our world as exploring it. Again and again
we find ourselves saying, ?That doesn?t fit.?
It?s rather like the old saying about sculpting.
The sculptor, when asked how he
carved a statue of an elephant, said, ?I start
with a large block of stone. Then I chip
away everything that doesn?t look like an
elephant.?

This is important, because a lot of otherwise
good design gets muddled and ruined
by the inability of a DM to reject otherwise
worthy material which just doesn?t fit one?s
basic idea. You don?t have to design a whole
planet to incarnate your idea, nor do you
have to include all the official monsters, or
even all the official PC races, if they do not
fit your idea. The integrity of the work
stands before all. My present campaign
area measures only about 500 miles by 800
miles in area, and some monsters are never
encountered there, either because I don?t
like them, or because I cannot account for
their presence in my milieu. I reserve such
things for trips to other lands, planes, and
so on. If one begins from the premise that
at least all official sentient races listed in the
various Monster Manuals, with their attendant
religions and whatnot, are to be
included in your campaign area, then I
think you are going to have a hodgepodge
which will lack power.

When I designed my campaign milieu, I
tackled the roughing-in part of the process
in this manner. Having arrived at some sort
of understanding of my basic idea, I began
to think of the culture areas and interfaces
involved. I wanted a Northern European
feel to the thing overall, with demihumanity
related to it. I favor the feel of
Celtic, Norse, Arthurian, and Anglo-Saxon
cultures, and so began to think of these in
relation to each other. What would each be
like, and how would they react to each
other?

This led me to produce a rough map of
the area. I began to picture where the various
civilizations would be. But I still didn?t
know how to really relate them to one another.
And particularly, I was puzzled as to
how to blend demi-humanity into the
whole. So I got my geography and topography
put together in a rough and ready
fashion with my map, and then went down
to my friendly neighborhood library and
photocopied a couple of dozen duplicates of
the blank outline. There were as yet no
boundaries, no cities, no names for anything
? just a physical map of the area.

Then I began to construct something
similar to one of those historical atlases of
the world. On my first map, I jotted in
some details and features of prehistoric
peoples and monsters in the area. Then I
began to bring my map up to date in leaps
of half a millennium or so. I sketched in on
succeeding maps the migration into the
campaign area of elves, dwarves, and the
various races and cultures of men. I did
political maps of the area at various crucial
points in its history, showing the names of
places, the rise of new towns, the locations
of crucial battles. Each new map built upon
what had gone before, and added layer
upon layer of depth to the world I was
designing. When I was done, I had a fully
developed map of the state of the area at
Game Present, laden with detail and dripping
with history. Thus the locations of
towns, the present boundaries, even the
names of kingdoms and physical features
were not arbitrary, but rooted in historical
perspective.

This led me back to finishing up the basic
cultural interfaces and getting ready to add
the real detail. The whole process enriched
my campaign area immeasurably. I now
understood how the present peoples and
lands came to be, and why. To take just one
small example, the first town of true men
(as opposed to cavemen) I called Dorn. This
site was later renamed Dun Dorgan by the
Celtic invaders, who continued to occupy it.
Later invaders who conquered the area
softened the name to Dundorian. It is one
of the major cities in my area, and has been
continuously occupied for some four thousand
years at GAME Present.

This otherwise irrelevant bit of naming
symbolizes for me all the ebb and flow of
civilization that has washed over the area
where Dundorian stands, and has stimulated
my powers of creation as I continue to
ponder over the long view of how the
present came to be as it is. Such a process
leaves your area scattered about with holy
places that are holy because of miracles that
happened there in the past, shrines and
abbeys and castles and towns placed according
to the logic of the time of their founding
instead of arbitrarily, ruins where ruins
ought to be, and so on. All of this makes a
more believable and enjoyable world to
role-play in.

Fleshing it out
After one has got the basics settled, one
must go on to make one's milieu ready for
use with the game. And here is where one
really gets into the nitty-gritty of detail,
detail, detail, and more detail.

First of all, there is the map. It is a largescale
map, showing only the principal places
and features. It is not ready for players to
explore. After I had finished with the rough
historical maps and the ?state of the area at
present? map (which would be given to all
the players), I tackled the real mapmaking.
I drew small-scale maps which would show
every prominent castle and hamlet, all the
major rivers, every major religious institution
? and I named them all. As I did so,
the process of further creation and understanding
of how the peoples and kingdoms
related to each other deepened, and I began
to understand the economy of my area
better. Here was a fishing village, here a
mountain village of herdsmen, there was a
swamp, there a reef. All of these things have
a great influence on the kinds of people
living nearby. Lakes, roads, baronies, cultural
ties, mountain passes ? all were
noted. I began to realize that you wouldn?t
find a branch of the assassins? guild operating
in Norland, for there was no metropolis
nearby for me to locate the main guild in.
Similarly, rangers would be hard to find in
the capitals of the greater kingdoms, since
those would be very urban indeed. I pondered
the shipping lanes, and located my
pirates accordingly. I found my remotest
wilderness places where I would place my
most furtive peoples.

And all of this led me on to developing
the detail I needed on persons and politics. I
sketched out the histories of some of the
greater ruling families, and toyed with
systems of government. I saw natural and
historical rivalries, and pondered such
things as border patrols and import duties.
Having placed two universities on the map,
I thought about who founded them and
what you could learn there. I grouped the
religious institutions together and began to
work out the government and internal
politics of the church.

And then, of course, there were the other
things to think of. Like weather and climate,
and what sort of calendar was in
common use. Having decided to use a
universal currency, how did I explain it?
What languages were spoken, and what was
the degree of their mutual intelligibility?
Where were all the monsters?

This sort of detailed designing is a continual
work, always changing as new possibilities
present themselves. And if the above
outline of how I made my campaign milieu
sounds laborious, let me say that it was not.
I enjoyed every minute of it, and still do.
Those of us who have design in our blood
all know what the creative itch is like. We
spend spare minutes and hours and even
days in this sort of pursuit. Tolkien pointed
out that this sort of sub-creation is an imitation
of the Creator in whose image we are
made, and we find it no surprise when
someone tells us that God must have enjoyed
making the universe: we think we
know exactly how it feels. (Of course, when
you are working against a deadline, instead
of just for your own recreation, laborious is
not the word for describing the burden of
this sort of work. But that?s a whole ?nother
thing.)

It is the detail that brings a world to life.
The best role-playing is done by players
whose characters ?feel at home? in the
milieu. To make them feel at home, you
have to make your campaign area as familiar
to them as their own hometown. When
my players? characters are walking along
the docks, I throw in bits of description, like
the cry of gulls and the smell of the salt air.
When they are wandering through a castle,
I try to give them just enough detail to fix
their cultural locality, to make this castle fit
in its own culture area and economic place.
I use accents and dialects that change depending
on where my PCs are. They already
know that Roderick the brownie?s
Scottish accent is almost impenetrable, but
when I refuse to come out of character for
their cries of ?What? What?? they too,
learn to remain in character. Their being in
character gives added depth to those times
when they step out of their cultural backyard.
They feel the contrast between themselves
and their new environment deeply,
instead of all cultural environments in the
campaign feeling the same. They had gotten
used to the way the high elves in their
home area spoke and acted, so that was
familiar to them. But they felt the contrast
when they were presented with a bunch of
wood elves whose command of the common
tongue resembled Tyneside dialect.

The rule, then, is this: Work out the
details. Make your PCs ?at home? in a
particular locale. Appeal to the senses when
they are adventuring in (or even just passing
through) an area: touch, smell, taste,
sight, hearing. Play your roles with gusto.
This way, if your NPC spy is caught and
prodded for information, you aren?t caught
flatfooted. You aren?t stuck trying to account
for something that you hadn?t anticipated.
You have so much information at
your command that it?s easy to come up
with rumors, gossip, secret diplomatic
information, treasure maps, and so on. The
game doesn?t lag while you try to figure out
who sent you.

Planting the party
We now have to consider how to move
from the making of a milieu for its own sake
to the task of orienting a group of PCs into
what will be their fantasy home. The best
design in the world will not play itself. The
other human beings involved must be integrated
into your whirl of human (and demihuman)
activity, and there has to be
something for them in this place, or there is
no game to be played. Designing a campaign
is not the same thing as designing a
campaign milieu.

The first task is to define the grand purpose
of the campaign. Your characters will
be starting as first-level nobodies, and their
first task is to get some experience, learn to
know each other, and acquire familiarity
with your world. But it is best to have in
mind a grand purpose for them to ultimately
achieve. The grand purpose of my
campaign is the manufacture of the Philosopher
?s Stone. The player characters were
given a riddle right at the very start of their
adventuring, but not told anything about it.
While they were getting grounded in their
fantasy home, they were also discovering
what the riddle (and other information I
had provided them with) was all about.
Eventually, they discovered enough to begin
the process of pursuing the grand purpose
of the campaign. This will take them a long
time to accomplish.

The grand purpose is the overall backdrop
of the campaign. While pursuing it,
the members of the PC party will develop
their abilities, make new alliances, dally
with the locals, acquire property, go on
hunts, waste time in traveling and going up
levels, ransack libraries, follow up interesting
possibilities that merely present themselves,
and so on. They are not always
grimly pursuing the grand purpose, but it is
always there to give coherence to their
miscellaneous activities. A campaign without
such a grand purpose soon disintegrates
into a repetitive series of expeditions unrelated
to one another, and the fun leaches out
of the playing.

Everyone knows that fantasy role-playing
is wildly uneven in its experience. One day
we have the thrill of victory and the agony
of defeat, while on another day we experience
the mindless tedium of fencing stolen
goods, doing one?s bookkeeping, going up
levels, gathering information, and all that.
The grand purpose ties it all together, and
gives unity to both the thrilling and the
mundane times in the campaign. Characters
are always keeping their ears cocked for
news and gossip that will give them more
than they presently know. And when they
achieve the grand purpose? Why, by that
time, they will all be ready to retire from
adventuring.

It should be noted that I never dragoon
player characters into following the grand
purpose. I do not quest or geas them.
I tease them, convert them, persuade them,
and in my role-playing as DM I help them
decide for themselves to adopt the grand
purpose as their own raison d'etre for adventuring.
If the grand purpose is a worthy
one, the DM should have no trouble selling
it to characters and players alike.

After settling on what one's grand purpose
is to be, one must turn one's attention
to the problem of the party composition
itself. While the campaign was still in its
formative stages, I approached the members
of my playing group and gave them some
indication of the kind of culture it was to
be, and surveyed them as to what races and
classes they were interested in playing. Our
group has been going for several years, and
we have all played many kinds of PCs, so
we have dispensed with the arbitrary way of
rolling up stats and seeing what can be
made of a particular character.

The group decides in a general way what
kinds of characters they would like to run,
and I ratify or modify the choices. Once
that is fixed, each player rolls up his PC in
the following manner. Let us suppose that
one person wishes to play a gnome
illusionist/thief, that being a type of character
he has not played before. If I tell him
that there is room for such a PC in the
party and the milieu, he then proceeds to
roll the character up. A gnome illusionist/
thief has minimum ability scores of 6-1 5-6-
16-8-6. This takes into account all basic
factors relating to race and class(es). The
player then rolls 3d6 for each ability. If the
3d6 score is less than the minimum required,
he takes the minimum in that category.
If it is greater than the minimum, he
takes the greater score. After being rolled
up, the finished statistics are referred to me
for my approval (and perhaps a little judicious
tinkering). After that, the PC's ability
scores are fixed.

In the meantime, I am working on the
personal background of the PCs.
Each PC is given a capsule life history,
a family tree, a small-scale map of one?s
home area (in addition to the vague and
general large-scale map given to everybody),
and information on what (and
whom) this PC knows which is peculiar to
the PC. Every PC knows something that
nobody else knows, at least at the start.
Every PC knows somebody (see below,
concerning the DM's special NPCs) who
can help acclimatize the character to the
campaign by being a reference source and
general helper to him. Each PC is also
given a capsule history of the campaign
area, and a couple of pages of information
on money, laws, religion, politics, and any
peculiarities related to my campaign (rule
interpretations, for instance). This wealth of
personal detail enables the player and his
character to be ?at home? in the campaign
more quickly, and gives the party members
something to learn about each other.

Then comes the START of actual playing.
There must be some reason for these dispar-
ate people to make each other?s acquaintance
and decide to adventure together. And
there must be something for them to do. I
sketched out a dozen easy, first-level adventures
and dropped hints at them their first
few times together. None of these had anything
to do with the grand purpose of the
campaign. They were more in the nature of
shakedown cruises. There was a shark to
kill, an alchemist who wanted some live
green slime, a rumor of a werewolf living in
a swamp, a hunt for a lejendary white stag,
and so on. The party members chose what
they wanted to do and wandered from
adventure to adventure, learning what to
expect of each other and of my milieu.
Gradually, they gelled as an adventuring
party. And while they were doing this, I was
filling them with news and gossip, teasing
them with hints of things they didn?t yet
understand, and helping them to gradually
discover the grand purpose of the campaign
for themselves. By the time they had found
out what that was, they were ready to start
on it in earnest.

Setting it in motion
Having designed the best of all possible
worlds (or a reasonable facsimile thereof),
and having integrated the player characters
into it, there still remains the most formidable
of all tasks: playing in it. Here is where
campaign design begins to merge into campaign
management, for we do not want our
worlds to be frozen in beauty like a daffodil
hit by a late frost. We want our environment
to live and move, and to interact with
the PCs.

The first trick that I use, especially in
getting started, is that of the DM?s special
NPCs. These are the people whom the PCs
?know.? They are relatives, friends, mentors,
local government officials, and whatnot.
I have already mentioned Roderick the
brownie. Roderick was the familiar of one
PC's slain master. Therefore at the commencement
of play, he is known to the first-level
magic-user in the group, but is under
no obligation to him. Roderick is a source
of guidance and information for the beginning
PC (and has been known to occasionally
accompany the party). A ranger PC in
the party was given a relationship (by letter
of introduction) to a retired king?s forester
named Hugh de Cawdrey. Hugh is an 8thlevel
ranger, but no longer goes out on
adventures. He is, however, a combination
counselor, trainer, and source of information
that is available to the ranger in question.
And so on.

As the PCs begin to feel
their way through the campaign, they come
back to these special NPCs with their problems
and questions. However, these NPCs
are not the DM. None of these special
NPCs knows everything the DM knows
(and any attempts to get information out of
them which they could not possibly know
are turned aside, or misinformation appropriate
to the NPC in question is given).
However, they are vital to the process of
acclimatizing the party members to the
campaign and making them feel ?at home.?
As the PCs advance in level and experience,
they no longer need these middle-level
helpers very much, and the special NPCs
tend to fade from play. (Although it?s interesting
to put them in jeopardy, and make
the party the rescuers of their erstwhile
helpers.) In addition, I find that using these
special NPCs eases the DM?s frustration at
not being able to play. Although Roderick
cannot advance in levels, I enjoy playing
him. The same is true of a half-dozen other
special NPCs. They not only help the players,
but they offer to me a means of playing
inside my own milieu along with the PCs.

Equally vital in managing a campaign
and continuing its development is what I
call ?politics and other disasters.? If your
world is static, with nothing much happening
but what the player characters induce,
then all the detail you can think up will not
rescue your campaign from inevitable boredom.

In the real world, the affairs of kingdoms
and companies go on whether or not you or
I do anything about them. Indeed, they
form the backdrop of news against which we
make our plans and judge our opportunities.
We worry over what the world is doing,
and always find it a matter of vital
interest. This is also a necessity in a wellrun
fantasy campaign.

While I was doing my basic design work,
I worked out a table that generates random
political, physical, and social events. Such
things as scandals, treaties, alliances, untimely
deaths of important people, border
raids, and blizzards were all assigned probabilities.
As the party approaches the end of
a given Game Year, I sit down and roll some
dice and do some quick creating. Month by
month, I develop the major ?news stories?
of my campaign area for the following year.
Thus I know what is happening, and what
will happen. Then, every time my PCs take
a rest in an inn, or inquire for news of
somebody, I have a full repertoire of assorted
facts and rumors to give them. Out
of this mass of detail, the party members
must ponder which events will affect them
and their purpose. It keeps them involved,
to say the least.

Every campaign milieu needs to have
conflict at its base. Without conflict no story
can be written, and we are creating a story
together, with our characters as the main
protagonists. The most basic of the various
conflicts inherent in my campaign is that
between Morgan le Fay (Her Nibs, as she is
often called, or Her Ladyship), the shadowy
ruler of Feywood, and the other kingdoms
of the area. Morgan imagines herself to
have a claim to the entire area, and her
intrigues and power plays are going on all
the time. On top of this, many people doubt
that such a person exists. It took the PCs
quite a while to figure out who Her Nibs
was, and to realize that she was really who
she was rumored to be. She is the single
most sinister threat to the security of the
area. Figuring out what she is up to from
the fragmentary and often irrelevant news
that the PCs pick up is a major challenge.
Her Ladyship dare not be ignored, but she
does not operate in the open. So the party
must always be looking over its shoulder, so
to speak, and this increases the player characters
? involvement in, and concern for, the
flow of events in the campaign area. (By the
way, the party in my campaign still has
some interesting misconceptions about
Morgan, but I haven?t given them the
straight stuff yet. I?ll let them go on thinking
what they?re thinking for as long as it
takes for them to find out the truth ? if
they live that long.)

Keeping it going
Having set out all the foregoing about
how to get a campaign started, it remains to
say a few words about managing the ongoing
campaign. It is my settled conviction
that the presence or absence of a small,
stable group of regular players makes or
breaks a gaming group. It is very hard to
work the occasional player or visitor into
the flow of the game. Both drop-ins and
drop-outs hamper the other players. In an
ongoing campaign, the party is very likely
to end a gaming session stuck in some place
where they must ?freeze time? until the
next get-together. A new player, or the nonattendance
of a regular player, in that session
creates a problem when the game is
resumed. I have many, many friends and
acquaintances who ask if they ?could drop
by and play with you guys sometime.? I
return a courteous ?no? to such requests. I
am more than glad to set up an occasional
tournament or one-shot adventure (often
with the help and attendance of some of my
regulars). But to move heaven and earth to
involve someone in an ongoing adventure
on just a one-shot basis is very difficult, and
I only rarely allow it. If I do accede to such
a request, I hand the visitor a ready-made
NPC to play, which allows him to participate
but not to muck up the overall structure
of the campaign. Similarly, only PCs
?born and bred? in my campaign are allowed
in my campaign. I suppose I could
gate in someone?s PC from another campaign,
but I avoid this on general principle.
Special gaming times are when ?canned?
modules come in handy.

I also find that there is an optimum size
and party configuration for playing. I have
played with as many as twelve players at
once, and I have done some one-on-one
scenarios. I find that the large groups disintegrate
into rowdy or boring sessions, or
both, depending on the behavior of the
players. In any case, too many players
overwhelm the DM and obstruct each character
?s participation in the game. At the
same time, too few players rob the participants
of the vital fun of interacting with
each other, and what was designed to be a
group experience suffers. I believe the optimum
size of an adventuring party to be no
fewer than three players, nor more than six,
and I personally prefer four. And in that
party, I like to see a balance of character
classes and abilities. The ?super-character?
who can do everything unbalances the
game. One ought to strive to put together a
party where the players complement each
other?s abilities. No one character should be
without his own strengths and weaknesses.
My present playing group includes a magicuser,
a fighter, a ranger, a thief (who was a
fighter, and is heading for bard status), and
a cleric (who used to be a monk). Any
further need for more muscle (physical,
mental, or magical) is supplied by the PCs
acquiring henchmen and hirelings.

Something else makes a great difference
in playing, and that is sharing the load of
the DM?s duties. I mentioned above that
my personal strength is design over management.
In our group, I am not the only
DM. Others have had that responsibility,
and our group has previously adventured in
their worlds. So, I share the drudgery of
DMing with them. One guy is so good at
weaponless combat that I have never bothered
to get really good at conducting it.
Whenever it occurs, we all defer to his
ability to rapidly tell us what is needed to
hit and what damage is done. Similarly, I
am the resident expert on psionics in our
group, and when something to do with
psionics has cropped up in someone else?s
campaign, I have always functioned as a
temporary assistant DM to adjudicate the
situation. In a sense, we are all player-
DMs, as some athletes are player-coaches.
Mine is the responsibility for the conduct of
this campaign, but I welcome help with the
mechanics of the game from anyone qualified
to give it.

Non-DMing players can also do this sort
of thing. For instance, some of my players
like to acquire lots of henchmen for their
characters, while others prefer not to. So I
let them handle the cannon fodder. For
instance, let us suppose that the PCs have
hired a ship to get somewhere, and on the
high seas they are beset by pirates. Now, as
DM I must handle all those pirates. So I
will typically assign the ship?s crew (except
for the captain, who is a major NPC) to the
less-encumbered players to run. This keeps
the players with large personal followings
from dominating the action to the detriment
of the solo players, while it relieves me of a
lot of the burden of managing the encounter.

The same sort of thing happens in rules
adjudication. RPGs require
the DM to adjudicate situations from life
experience where rules do not apply. I realize
that I am not so expert at everything
that my word is final on every subject. One
of my players is a small boat sailer by
hobby, a craft that I know little about from
the practical perspective. So when there is a
question of what a ship can do, or a question
of naval tactics involved, I defer to his
judgement before I declare the actions of
my pirates. This works as long as players
and DM respect each other, and do not try
to usurp each other?s roles. Everyone knows
that the DM should not rely on arbitrary
direction of someone else?s PC to manage
his adventure. By the same token, as long
as a player doesn?t abuse his superior
knowledge to his sole advantage, the DM
will welcome his opinion on what PCs and
monsters alike should be doing.

Postscript
And what happens when the characters
achieve the grand purpose of the campaign?
What do you do with all that wealth of
material? In our group, we change campaigns
every year or two, retiring our now
high-level PCs and giving the DM a chance
to play under someone else?s direction. But
that doesn?t mean that you have to abandon
your campaign milieu. The next time it
devolves upon you to be the DM, you can
simply rework what you?ve already done,
projecting your campaign area backward or
forward in its history. This preserves the
work you have put into it, while creating a
fresh situation and a new grand purpose for
your beginning player characters to get
involved in.

And one final word. When I began playing
the AD&D®game six years ago, there
were very few playing aids on the market of
the type that are now so abundant. There
was no WORLD OF GREYHAWK? Fantasy
Setting, no Harn, and very few canned
modules in print. Very nearly all of our
adventuring had to come out of our own
heads. And I still think that?s fantasy gaming
at its best. I now meet players, especially
young ones, who think that, in order
to play the AD&D game or some other such
activity, they must invest megabucks in
someone else?s ideas. It shocks many of
them when I suggest that it?s more fun to
make it up yourself.

Alas for them! No canned module, no
playing aid, no set of rules, no list of NPCs
can quite become your very own. As enjoyable
and thought-provoking as all the published
material may be, it is a poor
substitute for creating your own campaign
milieu, designing your own castles, and
exercising your own brain. Creativity is
what the game is about. It would be a
shame if the success of fantasy gaming
contributed to the stifling of creativity in its
own enthusiastic adherents.

JANUARY 1985

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