Remember the first time you played a
D&D® or AD&D® game? You were confused,
you were nervous, and you didn?t
have any idea what was going on. It was
glorious.

Now, after months or years of play, the
thrill is gone. You and your friends reminisce
about the "good old days" when
everything was new and exciting. Then
the final blow lands: You realize that your
campaign is just as dull as the others.

Is there still hope?

You hear a lot about a "sense of wonder"
in role-playing games. For example, you
marveled at the realism and depth of the
game when you first began to play --
that's the sense of wonder. For experienced
players, this is a goal more elusive
than the Holy Grail. Therefore, let us state
a simple rule about this sense of wonder:
The less you know, the more you wonder.

Mystery is the key to creating and maintaining
a sense of wonder. Ignorance is the
key to the sense of mystery. If a DM wants
his players to believe in his campaign, he
mustn?t tell them too much. To illustrate
the point, let?s examine a bad example:

Fred is putting together an AD&D game
campaign. He and his friends have been
playing the AD&D game for years. They
know all the volumes by heart. Fred is
pleased by this; if he forgets a statistic, a
player is often able to help him out.

The campaign starts out in a village
(there?s a white signboard outside town
that says ?Village? in black-stenciled letters.
The first scene is in the generic bar;
herein, the players? characters form a
generic party to loot a generic dungeon.
Whenever a monster is met, there?s little
or no excitement. Why should there be?
The players have killed this same sort of
monster 500 times before. They use their
generic tactics, kill the generic monster,
and come home with some generic treasure.
The high point of the adventure is
the fight over who gets to keep
the generic magic item.

The problem here is that the players
know as much about the campaign as does
the DM. It is virtually impossible to
excite them; they?ve seen everything a
hundred times before. If the players know
what?s going to happen and they know
they?re going to win, why should they
bother doing so? Lots of campaigns have
died because the DM ran out of surprises.
The basic solutions are to hide information
from the players and always keep a surprise
up your sleeve ? i.e., create a
limited-information campaign.

A limited-information campaign is one in
which the players have to find out most
things for themselves. Memorizing the
rulebooks doesn?t work, because the
players don?t know what the rules are.

A limited-information campaign is easy
to set up:

1. Start the campaign with 1st-level
characters;

2. Tell the players that they aren?t supposed
to use any information that their
characters don?t know, and that their
characters are inexperienced and know
very little about monsters, traps, potions,
and so on;

3. Keep your players honest by making
their memorized information useless,
varying elements of the game to keep
them on their toes; and,

4. Make the players role-play their
search for information, forcing them to
visit nonplayer characters to discover
things. Sometimes the NPCs know, sometimes
they don?t. Sometimes NPCs lie. Most
of the time, they don?t have the whole
truth.

Campaign background
To make this work, the DM must first
have some information to hide. There are
plenty of campaigns with no secrets besides
the dungeon contents; everything
else is either well-known or completely
undefined. A DM needs to add a lot of
background material to his campaign, then
tell the players only a small fraction of it.
These items are generally not laid out in
detail until they're needed in play. For
example, deciding that the Duke of Frozbozz
is secretly a werewolf is all the DM
needs to know at first.

Some of the things that should be set up
follow:

1. The social and governmental structures
in the campaign. People in high
places make a lot of the news, and you
need to have names and titles ready.

2. The important magicians, their specialties,
and their ambitions. Some of the
magicians might be in hiding, some might
have secret ambitions, and groups of them
may form secret societies. They sometimes
kill each other, too, or are killed by their
own experiments.

3. Major monsters. Every campaign
needs some really nasty monsters that are
all but impossible to kill. These should be
relatively well-known to the PCs, so they
won?t blunder into them unless the characters
are really stupid. These monsters
are used in rumors (?Did you hear about
Smaug? He burned Dale to the ground last
month!?), in major events, and as plot
hooks.

4. Powerful heroes and villains. Like the
monsters, these guys should be extremely
tough (12th level and up). They aren?t
there to be cut down by the PCs; they?re
there to create interesting happenings in
the campaign.

5. "Accidents waiting to happen." Demons
bound by spells that are giving out,
magicians dabbling in extremely dangerous
magic, kings who disband their huge
orc armies because they can no longer pay
them, etc.: all are potential sources of
adventure (and disaster).

6. Legends, lost kingdoms, vanished
magic items, and bits of history. All of
these contribute to the flavor of the campaign
and add to its mystery as well.
 

Whispers and rumors
News often reaches the PCs by way of
rumors. They hear about local events
quickly, but news from distant places
comes slowly and gets more distorted as it
passes from person to person. This makes
it important to find someone who was
actually near the event when it occured to
get accurate reports.

Rumors should be a major way of starting
adventures. Always present the players
with alternatives; they should always
know of several possible adventures.
Rather than forcing them to pick the one
you think is best for them, let them make
the decisions. While this means that the
DM has to have several scenarios ready, it
also means that he doesn?t have to worry
about balanced adventures. If the players
hear a rumor about a gigantic dragon
hoard and don?t realize there?s no way
they can kill that dragon, that?s their problem;
they should have investigated the
situation more thoroughly. The only word
of caution is that there should be clues to
the strength of the opposition, so the
players can bail out before committing
their characters to battle. If they ignore
the signs, it?s their tough luck, not yours.

On the brighter side, players should be
able to find any number of low-risk, lowgain
adventures -- ones that are easy to
live through but provide little loot: collecting
taxes from kobolds, for instance. The
real trick -- the thing that should drive the
players nuts -- is identifying the few really
lucrative adventures that their characters
can survive. This is crucial to a limitedinformation
campaign. If the PCs get their
facts screwed up or if they're overconfident,
they're going to get burned. If the
DM warns the players about this possibility,
they won't resent it when they discover
that an adventure is more than they
can handle. By that time, they?ll be so
paranoid that they'll expect it to be a
challenge.

Towns and trouble
Towns are almost entirely ignored in the
game books, except in random-encounter
tables. The charm of towns, though, is
that they aren't like dungeons; the characters
-- problems usually can?t be solved by
swinging a sword. Player characters like
to gain the advantages of living in town
while avoiding the headaches, so they?re
usually happy -- assuming town life is
serene and trouble-free. This trouble-free
life, however, leads to complacency, and
we can't have that! Some interesting
events and situations that occur in towns
include:

1. Tax time. Don't just hand characters a
tax assessment; have a nasty little man
come to their door and demand payment.

2. Crime and punishment. If they don?t
pay the nasty little man, the characters
will be arrested and fined. If they kill the
nasty little tax man, they will be arrested
and executed. Scenarios in which the PCs
are hunted by the town militia can be
remarkably exciting.

3. Bank failures and bank robberies.

4. Protection rackets.

5. Corrupt government.

6. Theft of valuables.

7. Epidemics.

8. Famine.

9. War.

10. Pogroms (sudden fear and persecution
of foreigners). These can triggered by
some nasty event, like PCs pretending to
be royalty from another realm and creating
havoc as a result.

11. Scandal. The baron?s daughter is
pregnant and claims a certain PC is
responsible!

12. Market fluctuations. ?Oh, gee, we?d
like to buy your magic weapons, but a
bunch of dwarves came through last week
and sold us all we could use at incredibly
low prices.?

13. Rumors.

If you want to make your players really
PARANOID, have some of the towns enact
the equivalent of gun control -- no weapons
or armor are allowed inside the town.
These items must be then left in the care
of the local officials.

These same principles can be applied to
different situations, though the actual
problems may be different. Living in the
forest protects the PCs from tax collectors,
but instead gives them trouble with monsters
and raiders, and forces them to
protect their home at all times.

NPCs
There are all kinds of people in the
campaign world, and lumping them all
into a single category tends to obscure
things. Still, there are some basic facts
about NPCs that are often overlooked. One
such oversight is that NPCs are individuals.
Although they're only on stage when
they encounter the players, NPCs should
live out full lives in the campaign. They
love and hate, have virtues and vices, and
are unique. The DM has to think of his
NPCs as individuals to pull off a limitedinformation
campaign. One way to do this
is to have some friends who don't play in
your campaign run major NPCs as characters.
Give a friend a list of the local duke?s
income, assets, enemies, and so on, and
have him decide what to do with these
resources. These players will do things
you would never have dreamed of.

When players don?t understand why
NPCs do the things they do, or if the players
are too trusting, weird things can
happen. A silly example of this instance
follows:

The local magician is related to a man
who wants to become mayor. The magician
wants the current mayor to look bad,
so he tries to get the PCs to play a trick on
him. The magician won?t tell the PCs his
reasons (it would make him look bad if
word got out), so he lies: ?The Mayor is
possessed by Demogorgon?s brother-inlaw,
and the only way to save him is to
grab him at midnight, strip him, paint him
pink, and tie him to the slave block in the
square. Do this, get out of town, and I?ll
pay you each 30 gold pieces.?

The possibilities are endless. The PCs
may be dumb enough to believe the wizard:
?Come on, Mr. Mayor, this is for your
own good. You don?t want to be possessed
by Demogorgon's brother-in-law, do you??
On the other hand, they may decide that
the wizard is lying, but that the job is such
fun that they don?t care. Or, they may go
to the mayor and tell him the story, hoping
that his reward will be larger than the
magician?s offer.

If the PCs pull off the job, the mayor will
be their enemy for life. If the wizard has
second thoughts after he sobers up, he
may be too embarrassed to want anything
more to do with them. The mayor may put
out a warrant for their arrest, and send
out a posse to bring them in for trial. All
sorts of fun things might (and rightly
should) happen.

Illicit happenings aren't the only reason
for hiding motives, however. An NPC may
hide altruistic motives because he thinks
the PCs are too crass to appreciate them.
Others will lie to hide their sources of
information.

Withholding information should be even
more prevalent than lying. Information is
valuable, after all, so NPCs aren?t going to
be free with it. Don?t think this means that
all NPCs need to be liars or cheats. A hardworking
group of PCs may find several
NPCs who tell them useful bits of information
on a regular basis. Don?t forget that
there are zillions of people in the campaign
world who know nothing of interest
but want to talk anyway. The bars are full
of gossips and bores.

Your NPCs shouldn?t sit around waiting
for the player characters to blunder into
them, either; they should be doing things
all the time. Every few game weeks, the
DM should decide what all the NPCs are
doing, and what the effects of their actions
are. If a hero kills one of the biggest
dragons in the world and hauls the treasure
into a city, magical-item prices may
be depressed for years, and inflation may
shoot up by 10% or more. On the other
hand, if a war cuts off the major sources
of magical items, the prices will skyrocket.

Variable monsters
Generic monsters are boring. Everyone
has the Monster Manual memorized, so
nothing therein is likely to surprise anyone.
The other sources for monsters (the
FIEND FOLIO® Tome, Monster Manual II,
and DRAGON® Magazine) have the same
limitations, since players can memorize
them, too. The solution is variation. So
what if orcs are supposed to have one hit
die? Those are natural orcs -- your orcs
are different! They have a better diet, so
they're tougher. Maybe they?re different in
other ways, too -- they learned stealth
from a thief or were converted to Mithraism
by a demented priest.

This idea applies to all kinds of monsters.
Go through the Monster Manual and
pencil in changes for each kind of monster
you expect to use. Change their statistics,
their appearance, and their habits, and
make up some little piece of history to
explain these "abnormalities."

But don't tell the players the details. Tell
them only what their characters would
know: what the more common monsters
look like, vague descriptions of some of
the rare ones, and rough estimates of their
fighting ability. Let the players use their
Monster Manuals, if they want; it will not
save them. Some examples follow.

Dragons: You can drive the players into
convulsions of paranoia by making dragon
colors inconsistent. You could decide that
the color associated with a dragon is only
the most common color, so 75% of all
chlorine-breathing dragons are green, but
10% are red, 10% are black, and 5% are
yellow with pink spots.

Armor classes: The Monster Manual lists
typical armor classes for creatures. You
can certainly change this for your campaign.
There's nothing to keep an orc from
stealing plate mail from a dead fighter, for
instance, and people who hire mercenaries
often give them new gear. It's unnerving
to run into an ogre in field plate.

Frequency: Most of the monsters you
see listed are rare or very rare, and should
seldom be seen in your campaign. As a
matter of fact, many of the very rare
monsters should be completely unknown
in your campaign (none of the NPCs have
ever heard of them), and many others
should be "known to be extinct." "Known
to be extinct" means that the local experts
think these creatures are extinct. The
experts should be wrong on occasion. It's
very pleasant to hear a once-jaded player
scream in horror, "It can't be a dragon!
Dragons have been extinct for a hundred
years!" There's also a chance that monsters
will cross the hills or leave the
swamps, repopulating an area that hasn't
seen them for many a year.

On the flip side of the coin, the Monster Manual 
puts encounters with common
monsters at 65% of the total. This would
work fine if anybody paid attention to it.
The problem is that everyone overuses
exotic monsters. Most encounters should
be with common ?monsters,? such as
wolves, orcs, beggars, and peasants. This
provides contrast when a really nasty
monster shows up. It can also drive the
players nuts. Orcs and wolves can cause a
lot of trouble, even in the case of ?nuisance
? encounters. But, even if often seen
and fought, common monster types can
prove quite uncommon in their equipment,
their tactics, their motivations, their
personalities, etc.

A DM should spend some time fleshing
out the human and humanoid societies in
his campaign. Orcs are an especially interesting
example, since they have so little
going for them. Some of the characteristics
that can be attributed to orcs are:

1. They can't compete effectively with
humans, because they're not creative and 
they fight too much among themselves. In
my campaign, orcs live in abject poverty in
rotten parts of the country -- eating turnips,
acorns, and fish, for the most part. Is
it any wonder they're obnoxious?

2. Orcs love to fight, but only if they?re
assured of victory. They prefer raids and
ambushes to fair fights, and run away the
instant they start to lose. There are two
exceptions to this rule. Orcs fight to the
death to protect their women and young,
and they can be whipped into a berserk
frenzy by those who know how. Some
human wizards might know the secret.

3. Most orc tribes have some contact
with humans, which show up in their
daily activities. Many have picked up bits
and pieces of human customs and fighting
techniques.

4. Some orc tribes have human chieftains.
These are usually the most dangerous
tribes of all.

None of this information contradicts the
Monster Manual, but my orcs have a lot of
surprises for players who are used to
generic orcs. The CHANGES keep the players
interested and the campaign going.
 

The uses of magic
The simplest way to create a sense of
wonder about magic is to make magic
spells hard to get. The AD&D game rules
already support this. Follow the rules in
the Dungeon Masters Guide about acquiring
spells (page 39). The DM may want to
make some of the higher-level spells secret;
the characters may know the spells
exist, but no NPC admits to knowing them.
<Day-to-Day Acquisition of Cleric Spells>
<Acquisition of Magic-User Spells>
        <Acquisition of Cantrips, Magic-Users>
<Acquisition of Illusionist Spells>
        <Acquisition of Cantrips, Illusionist>

For example, the fireball spell is powerful
enough to kill any mage. No mage in
his right mind will give this spell to anyone
he doesn?t trust, and adventurers don?t
appear trustworthy (?They say they got
that loot from a monster, but how do we
know they didn?t rob a monastery??)

Magical research makes it possible to
add new spells to the lists. The DM should
make a secret list of new spells that exist
in the campaign world, and keep track of
who knows them. Many of these ?new?
spells should be variants of old spells. A
fireball with greater range would be very
valuable, and one with a smaller blast
radius would be safer to use in dungeon
and corridor fights. Most common spells
could have two or three variants that
would be favored by different groups of
magicians.

Having new and variant spells keeps the
players on their toes and adds lots of new
spells to collect without greatly altering
game balance. Before creating these variants,
read the DMG, pages 115-116, regarding
spell research. The simplest
variants are ones that trade an advantage
for a disadvantage. A safe assumption is
that the ?normal? spell is optimal, and the
disadvantages of any variant outweigh its
advantages. For example, to double the
range of a fireball, more than half of
something else would have to be given up,
such as doubling range at one-third damage,
or doubling range with both damage
and blast radius reduced by half. Such a
spell would still be effective in some circumstances,
such as one-on-one magical
duels.

Find familiar with different animals as
familiars.

Cure light wounds with a high minimum
healing rate, such as d6 + 1 or d4 + 2.
Both these variants have the same average
healing of the normal (d8) spell, but the
minimum healing is better, and the maximum
healing is worse. With d6 + 1, a
player character is guaranteed 2 hp
healed; with d4 + 2, he?s guaranteed 3 hp.
Another variant is a second- or third-level
spell with 1½ dice of healing (d8 + 4,
d6 + 3, or d4 + 2 points).

Magic missile with greater range but
lessened damage, or vice versa

Tenser?s floating disk in a variety of
sizes, shapes, and colors. Ones that look
like monsters would be particularly useful,
although one can always drape a monster
costume over a regular floating disk.

Oral histories
Players tend to forget things fairly
quickly or get mixed up about time and
place. (DMs do, too, but they?re supposed
to be keeping notes.) The players can
become quite confused, going on long
adventures to the wrong dungeon because
they misconstrued a cue, or blaming the
wrong NPC for something because the
players forgot how it really happened.
This is a good thing. Don?t correct players
when they make wildly inaccurate statements;
it?s their own fault, and it can lead
to a whole series of wild adventures. Players
can avoid this trouble by keeping notes
? but if they don?t, why complain?

Conclusions
Putting these ideas into action is simple.
A few changed statistics, bits of local history,
and a few well-characterized NPCs
are all that is necessary to start. Unlike
other prescriptions for long-lived campaigns,
it isn?t necessary to design thousands
of towns and NPCs before starting.
It?s enough to stay one jump ahead of the
players. Improvisation works in limitedinformation
games, so long as the DM
writes these tangent thoughts down to
make certain they?ll be there next time.

Running a limited-information campaign
gives players a new set of challenges,
allowing the sense of wonder to rush back
into an ailing campaign. Create some
mysteries today and see.