TTRPGs

God mode! You spend hours trying to find some secret code to download and hack your game. You aren’t even sure the code is going to work, you’re just hoping. And then you punch that thing in and bang! You’re indestructible! Insanely powerful! You fly around doing all the things that were nearly impossible to achieve while playing in a normal mode. And it’s super fun! 

Some people love to play in god-mode. But it’s never sustainable. Right? Maybe that’s just me? I mean, once you’ve got infinite ammo, infinite funding, infinite mana, once you’ve got infinity, things tend to grow a little stale. Dare I say “boring”. This is literally probably why real life is hard. And why elves would be … insane. 

And why From Software games are actually bought and played. 

Not by me, I have no interest those kinds of tears.

But what is sustainable is min-maxing. Surfing Wowhead to find that perfect build for maxing out the DPS on your Shadowpriest. Or looking up info on what levels to dip into for multi classing your Sorlock or your rogue bard. 

Some folks enjoy it as its own kind of mini-game, this min-maxing of stats and rules exploits. And that’s awesome. But how about one time making a character that sucks.

Greetings good humans, and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where we bite off more than we can chew by trying to arm-wrestle stupidly large concepts for use in our silly little hobby.

Is our hobby silly? No, not really. I mean, it’s not any sillier than chasing a ball around on a grass field or jumping outta perfectly good airplanes with plastic bags to hold onto. We all just wanna be Mary Poppins.

What came first, the Bag of Holding or Mary Poppins’ suitcase?

Anyway, our topic for today is min-maxing for tabletop rpgs. And yes, this is quite the iceberg. Not in an “ooh” sensationalistic way – though that would be kinda fun – but rather because asking this little anthill-sized question actually leads to a mountain-range sized plethora of topics and ideas to explore. 

I of course wanna say that playing whatever game you dig the way you dig it is always best and the coolest thing. All I want to do today is present an idea for discussion or inspiration that might be fun to try if you haven’t. At the very least it might be interesting to just think about. 

I’ve got a friend who’s tried a couple of tabletop RPG sessions and he’s been bored through every one of them. Now it’s possible some of that reaction stems from either the groups he’s played with or the game masters but I suspect it has a lot more to do with his misguided expectation of D&D being similar to a video game. I kinda explained to him that while video games can excel at “static storytelling” and action, D&D excels at “dynamic storytelling” and unpredictable character development. I should say “can” excel at those things.

Now min-maxing a character really can be it’s own mini-game sort of activity, kinda like how “building army lists” or “war bands” for skirmish games is basically it’s own pastime. But I think what can be even more interesting is how intentionally not min-maxing a character can create way more opportunities for interesting story. Versus, you know, tactical advantage. This really does just boil down to “how do you want to play your character”.

We can look at movies and books for some correlation here. Now these are just some random examples, and they’re all from media I quite enjoy. 

So how about the scene from Force Awakens where Rey just sorta suddenly figures out how to use the Force mind control gimmick. Or when she discovers she can definitely put this light saber to good use, based on her martial training with the staff thing she ran around with in the desert. You know, in D&D a fighter can just sorta pick up any weapon and go to work with it. Or how about any scene in a John Wick flick? This guy’s got gunkata down to a video game science, and it’s super fun to watch. In fact, most min-maxed characters are fun to watch. But to me they’re more like watching spectacle rather than watching story. And one is more satisfying to me than the other, in the long term. 

In contrast, we could look at, say, Ripley trying to survive her situation. Or McClane trying to survive his situation. For me, there’s a lot more investment in the character when I’m hoping John can stay alive on his godawful bloody feet than there is counting how many headshots John manages to crit in a four-second span. There’s probably just north of a gazillion other examples we could compare. None of which is to say one viewing experience is superior to the other, they are just different experiences.

And I’m not saying characters with flaws, or non min-maxed characters, are incompetent at what they do. Far from it. It’s just that they have more opportunity to create dramatic stories because they have limitations or obstacles to overcome in a more relatable manner. 

It’s hard to have a heroic moment while in god-mode.

Maybe one time you might wanna try out something like incorporating a substantial flaw for your character to overcome or contend with. You can do this even if you’re min-maxing a character. Doing something like this could inherently create the basis for a character arc without even trying.

Granted, this kind of reality bummerness might not be what you want in a fun pastime of a game, and that’s perfectly fine. I know a lot of the time we play games specifically for the power fantasy. But, maybe doing something like this once could result in a super satisfying story experience over the long haul. And maybe that would something new. It’s just an idea.

One of my favorite tables in any game book – not that I’ve read a whole bunch of rule sets, I have a pretty limited experience in that regard – but one of my favorite tables is the Permanent Injuries table found in the skirmish game Frostgrave – and subsequently in the Stargrave, Rangers of Shadowdeep and Ghost Archipelago books. I think this is pretty fun – I mean, it totally sucks in the tactical part of the game but it lends so much character to the warband I’m playing with. It almost forces story to imbue itself in what’s essentially otherwise just a chess match. Okay, chess match with ranged weapons.

So what if you’re playing a melee class and you lose an eye to some vile wizard’s bastard of an owl? Now you’ve got no depth perception and have to rely on, maybe a bow? for the first time in your life. I mean until you’ve trained your melee skills back up. Or maybe you go full Jaime Lannister, have to learn how to fight with only your off hand.

Or maybe your monk took an arrow in the knee. You try to be zen about it, but after descending into a life of crime to save up for some extravagant healing spell, you encounter something that shakes up or reinvigorates your faith in the universe and you start down a new, long and arduous path towards redemption.

This is fun, I’m gonna keep rolling.

What if you played a middle-aged merchant who’s always always wanted to cast magic. But your academic acumen has always been a stumbling block – like with me and math. Or maths. Whatever, whatever it’s called. Damn that low Intelligence score! But maybe perseverance in the face of constant failure – and a growing mastery of cantrips – starts to show some progress on the higher level, spell side of things?

Or how about rolling a straight up coward. Like maybe the character starts as a rogue, because they need to hide in the shadows and they’re afraid of things, but after one level goes into fighter class because they decide that dammit, they’re tired of being afraid of everything. Of course there’s no easy way to conquer internal fears, but through hard work, focused determination and internal struggle, they begin to master their overwhelming sense of fear. Maybe you work out some kind of fear-based constitution or wisdom save with the DM, who gets to decide when to call for it – maybe it functions a little like the Wild Magic table.

Here’s one I’ve always wanted to play. A surly egotistical bard who has no musical talent and feels sorely put upon by a world that doesn’t appreciate his craftsmanship. Cause he’s actually a skilled puppeteer who crafts amazing marionettes … How does a bard who’s just kind of an asshole inspire people with puppetry?

Or how about a half-orc zen cleric who’s addicted to opiates and is a steadfast pacifist. He’s a great healer but too long between fixes – or what he calls his “lunar dreams” – and his stats start suffering penalties. You can riff off of other classic existing characters, play someone like a Doc Holliday, a drunk who’s suffering from a terminal illness, but she’s still got things she wants to accomplish – nay, NEEDS to accomplish before she takes that one last long nap. 

That one last long nap? What? That’s terrible, that is terrible writing. Uh, anyway.

This is probably why I really like the idea of the Wild Magic surge or other similar mechanics. Unpredictability is another facet of great storytelling. Yes, stories typically adhere to a sort of pattern or rhythm but what makes a good story good is the unpredictable details that populate those classic patterns. This is why I think it’s fun to come up with strange or unexpected takes on character archetypes. I think Raistlin and Caramon from Dragonlance were a pair of awesome characters, of course Raistlin in particular. In literature some of my current favorite inspirational characters come from Mr. Abercrombie. He’s taken the writer’s advice “stick your characters in a tree and throw rocks at ‘em” to a whole other level. More like, stick your characters in a tree, light the tree on fire and start slinging tomahawks at ‘em. I’m sure at some point we’re gonna see Inquisitor Glokta on the big screen. 

The thing that’s cool about good stories is they typically teach us things about ourselves or about life and they kinda do it without us realizing it’s happening. There’s a reason psychologists are now getting into using role playing games as therapeutic exercises for patients and clients. Tragedy and failure are often what make stories both great and captivating, both because they are relatable to every one of us and because the contrast of those failures against hard won successes can be cathartic. And yeah, this can all be part of a Dungeons and Dragons game without really putting in too much extra effort. It’s just about approaching a character a certain way, and then rolling some dice!

And playing into story is playing into one of the strengths of tabletop role playing games versus video games. 

Like I said, this is really just a portion of an enormous conversational topic iceberg. Right now we’re just the Titanic and we’re interacting with a tiny chunk of it.

I just, I can’t hear the word iceberg without thinking of the Titanic. 

Where were we? Polishing the brass on the Titanic

Right. Well, I suppose that wraps this one up. I mean, aside from the dozens of highly sophisticated and convoluted discussions one could have over several pints of beer or cups of coffee in a dark, wood-paneled cafe. Or pub. Or, you know, wherever the story might find you.

So, go play a character that sucks. Could be fun.

See ya!

Total chaos, can’t breathe, crushing water everywhere, bubbles streaming past, darkness below, red glow of fire above. Sound is muffled, the panic is real. You struggle to breathe, to swim, heavy, sodden clothes trying to drag you down. Force yourself up, lungs burning, you need air. You refuse to drown here, push! You break the surface, gasping for breath, green and brown horizon tilting crazily, massive ship sinking all around you, salt stinging your eyes, trying to drown you. With grim determination you drive yourself through the wreckage, there, the soft beckoning pale beach … land! Grabbing fistfuls of wet sand, you claw yourself out of the water, coughing, blinking salt from your eyes as the final wedge of hull slips beneath the waves …

Not only did I write that piece of mucho cliche flavor text for the opening of any generic dnd or tabletop rpg session, but I formatted it for publishing and I’m gonna sell it.

Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where we confront our fears of inferiority with a blind case of “I’m just gonna do this thing I wanna do – even if it’s been done a hundred times before.”

And yes the lighting is changing minute by minute today, it’s cloudy outside.

Anyway, it’s taken me quite a few years to get to this level of “just take a chance”.

All right, let’s into it. I wrote an adventure for DnD 5e – really, it’s usable for any tabletop rpg – and this is how the project came to fruition. Fruition. I kinda hate that word “fruition.” It doesn’t quite roll off the tongue does it? And it sounds like fruit, and it’s not, and … yeah. Fruition. I can’t even say it! That’s why I wrote it, apparently.

Anyway, this whole project started because I wanted to just make a quick little document to help me run a little adventure for a small group of first-time players. And at this point, I hadn’t run DnD in over 20 years. So I wanted to jot down a few notes, make a little contained area for these players to start out in and just have a simple little introductory adventure. “Containment” was a keyword for me. I didn’t want any railroading going on, I wanted the players to really feel like they could go anywhere, do anything they wanted without me having to spin up too many on-the-fly scenarios. And that meant I wanted a geographical area that wasn’t necessarily leave-able. That’s not a word, but you know what I mean. And of course a location that lends itself to this containment idea really well is an island.

The other keyword I had in mind from the very start was “in medias res”. In medias res means literally “into the midst of things”. This is not only one of my favorite ways of encountering stories, whether it’s books or movies or whatever, it’s also the best way to start a new campaign or new party of adventurers – basically the best way to start a first session. 

There are countless videos about this on YouTube, all of us talking about how we’ve basically outgrown the classic “you all meet at a tavern” sort of beginning, right? Starting a group of players, whether they’re dnd veterans or brand new … noobs, starting a group of players literally in the middle of an action sequence means the game is running from minute one. The players are starting right away with decision-making. Now, maybe working with an in medias res opening might make setting up how player characters have actually met or what brought them into that particular action scene a little tricky, but I do have a cool suggestion for this, we’ll get to that. To me, the important thing was to get the players engaged in gameplay as soon as possible. 

So of course I went with one of the most cliche openings ever – and to be honest, this whole adventure is … well, it’s kinda powered by giant cliches – the first being pirates. But hey, don’t gimme that look, you know as well as I do that you love pirates. We all do. But despite incorporating a bunch of cliches, I think the adventure developed and became more of it’s own thing by the end of production. 

The opening is that the party is literally in the middle of a ship exploding and sinking in the ocean. This group of disparate characters were all on a ship traveling somewhere and now they are all dragging themselves up onto a tropical beach. They see a pirate ship sailing off around the edge of this little bay and that’s it. What do you do?

So here’s my “what I think is a cool” suggestion: I made a note to myself to ask each player to write on the back of their character sheet one or two sentences explaining – briefly – WHY their character was traveling on a ship. They could literally make up anything they wanted to. And that actually works out really well. That little activity at the start of the game becomes a little bit of a kickstarter for character backgrounds, especially for new players who may or may not even know about creating character backgrounds. It also gives them something to either share with other characters in-game, or, just as good, something to keep from the other characters as their own character’s secret. Obviously as the DM I wanted to see everyone’s answer to the question so I could A) know a little bit about each character and B) start thinking about some details and plot lines that could come into play later in a campaign for each character.

So “in medias res” and “containment”, my two starting concepts. Shipwreck – island. Again, at this point, I was just trying to get something down in a notebook that I could run an adventure with. I knew my group was all brand new to role playing games, so something familiar like pirates is an easy way for them to kinda get ahold of the game conceptually and understand what’s going on, and the setting means we’re gonna need a map of the island. 

Now, of course I knew this island was gonna have some stuff on it other than the pirates, so another cliche – fishmen! That’s right, there’s gonna be fishmen to contend with as well as pirates. Cool, couple of things for the players to deal with. And of course the island is mysterious. Right? Mysterious islands are captivating even if they’re cliche – cause it’s the Mystery that’s captivating. Whatever’s gonna be discovered on that island doesn’t have to be cliche at all. But with the fishmen thing, I had a name for the island – and now, for the adventure: Mystfin Isle. 

I say that with such confidence like it such a fantastic title. Anyway, I like it. Mystfin Isle. 

So I was gonna draw a quick map of Mystfin Isle in Photoshop but I came across the Inkarnate site from my various YouTube watching and web surfing and they had a free trial. It looked like it’d be really fun to work with and I’d be able to create something way better looking than relying on my own stick-figure drawing skills. So I tried it out, found it to be pretty cool, dropped $25 bucks or whatever for an annual subscription and spent a few days – all right maybe a few weeks – building my Mystfin Isle map. 

It was while working on the map that a lot of the ideas for the larger adventure started to form. As soon as you draw, like a circle, and you say, players are gonna land here, well then you start thinking about what’s actually in the circle. What are they going to see, what are they going to encounter. So you draw a little pyramid and you say, “There’s a mountain.” But then because it’s on the map and players are gonna see it or go there, you gotta start thinking about what are they gonna encounter on the mountain. The whole process just sorta starts to steamroll.

And Inkarnate – which is not sponsored, I swear – has all these pre-fab textures and foliage and terrain you can paint onto your map. And at first I was just tripping out on the different trees I could paint all over, and the different kinds of mountains and hills. And then I found the pre-fab structures. And I was like, oh, there’d be a ruined temple on this map for sure. Right? Of course. Another perfect DnD cliche. But then you know I’m thinking about: what is this ruined temple? Who built it? Why’d they build it? What’s inside of it? So more ideas just started to bubble up and I was writing them down and pretty soon I had some cool little set pieces established.

Now, quick break here: I gotta put a spoiler warning in here for my current players – turn this video off, you guys haven’t escaped the island yet and you don’t want any spoilers. Which doesn’t matter anyway, the players I play with get outta everything with rope. It’s bizarre how much rope a DnD party can roam around with. They always, always have rope.

Anyway, another thing I’m a huge fan of are Tom Sawyer style underground caverns. I mean, who isn’t, right? So I was like, yes, let’s put an underground cavern system in there for the players to explore. This fit in with the whole fishmen thing, I figured they might live underground and maybe come up to the surface in patrols or scavenging parties. And of course, what’s more Goonies than underground rapids and waterfalls and great big underground lakes with glowing water plants and glow shrooms and glistermoss? Glistermoss is a word. I smithed it. It means moss that glistens. In the dark. It’s my glowing moss that provides light for my river cavern playground. 

Anyway, so then I was kinda building out this idea of the underground cave system and I thought it’d be cool if there was like a dungeon down there somewhere. I mean, it’s a Dungeons and Dragons adventure right? Gotta have a dungeon. So I figured there’d be some place down here to explore and here’s where some real world inspiration hit me. 

I’ve always been fascinated with the “Egyptian” pyramids. Those are the most sarcastic air quotes you’ve ever seen. I have no idea if Egyptians built those pyramids or not. But you know, what’s more Indiana Jones in our real world than the ancient pyramids? And no I don’t buy the ancient aliens thing. I do honestly question the commonly taught stuff about how and when they were built, but that’s a whole YouTube genre, right? so we’ll just sidestep that rabbit hole today. 

BUT – you knew there was a “but” coming – there’s a particular phenomenon that really plugged right into my dnd adventure: the granite boxes. If you haven’t heard of or seen these things, you gotta check ‘em out. Near the pyramids are these sites that contain these crazy big rectilinear boxes that basically seem like they’re machined outta granite. The tolerances of the angles and the smoothness of the finishes just flat out contradict any notion that they were carved with chisels or sanded down with … sand. Seriously, these boxes are nuts. In one particular example, it’s physically clear that the pyramid it’s under was built AROUND the box rather than the box being brought in, because all of the tunnels aren’t wide enough to fit the box. Check out the links below, they’re pretty fun. 

Anyway, I really like this idea of something ancient feeling bizarrely advanced in strange ways, so I modeled the “dungeon” – which is not really a dungeon – with this in mind and started describing everything as being built out of precisely etched panels of obsidian. So this entire dungeon space developed as I worked on it – meaning I’m just writing about it – it became what is now called The Atheneaum. Which, it turns out, was built a thousand years ago – cause you know, everything in DnD is a thousand years old, even though we all still wear the same fashion and fight with swords and daggers and no one invented anything new in the intervening millennia. But this is just our fantasy game, it’s not here to make sense, right? 

So then I started to think about what this Atheneaum structure was, who built it, what was it’s purpose. And basically what I came up with is really just sort of a DnD dwarven mage version of a We-Work building. 

But I had fun developing the Athenaeum and the Conclave of mages who built it and lived there. But then I was like, hmm, there’s all this cool stuff underground on the island, but the whole underground area could easily be missed, and I kinda want the PCs to at least become aware that this underground system exists, so how could I pseudo railroad them in a fun way. Quicksand. That’s right. Another perfect cliche for a mysterious tropical jungle island. I looked up some quicksand rules and they’re out there, typically pretty simple, like combined Strength checks or whatever, but that just seemed boring. And also, easily beatable. I actually want a PC to drown in the quicksand on Mystfin Isle. Because, they won’t drown for real, they’ll become submerged and then fall through the bottom of the pit and then fall another hundred or so feet into the middle of a great big underground lake. Now that’s fun, right? Say yes. Say it’s fun.

Now, I did a traditional sorta dungeon floor map for the Atheneaum in Procreate on the iPad. And then stumbling around in the Procreate menus, I discovered a super cool feature: the ability to pull up a guide overlay. And you can set the guide overlay to almost anything you want, including an isometric view. I love all different kinds of maps and isometric ones are pretty rad, so I was like, oh! I wanna draw an isometric map for something. What on the island needs a map? I looked around, and there, the temple! The temple needs a map. Duh! The temple, by the way, is called the Ruined Basilica in the adventure. Cause, you know, temple is so cliche.

I was having so much fun in Procreate with the map drawing that I moved on to doing a full multi-level map of the central pirate ship. I really had a good time doing these maps. They aren’t the best by any means and because I’m just noob “artist” I was doing a lot of tracing and sort of mechanical drawing, but I was having fun. And again, working on the maps of the ship decks had me coming up with all the crew members and the captain and his collection of higher level NPCs just by drawing sections that I was labelling as crew member quarters. Overall this is just to point out how working on a map alone can help inspire tons of ideas for an adventure. 

At this end of the process looking back, I can say that it feels like a sort of disparate puzzle at first, just a collection of random things, random ideas that got jotted down here and there, and then as time went on and I continued to work on the thing, I started to feel like things that were disparate suddenly started to become related and things started to click and all of a sudden I felt like I was working on a clockwork puzzle box where the pieces started clicking into place of their own accord. And then, of course, Pinhead showed up.

We have such sights to show you.

I don’t wanna see those sights, man, I’m not a Kushiel’s Dart audience member. 

Over time the adventure just became bigger and more cohesive and more detailed, and at some point, earlier on in the process, I think maybe when I started working on the Ruined Basilica, it occurred to me that I was doing a ton of work I didn’t really need to and I thought hmm maybe I should just go all the way and try to make a publishable product since I’m already putting all this work into it. Maybe other DM’s could run this adventure themselves if I kinda fleshed it out enough, maybe even more specifically, NEW Dungeon Masters would find it a good adventure to start out with. So I started working with that new perspective. And the first thing I thought about from that angle was the graphic design aspect of the document. 

Now, a couple years ago, I did a tabletop hobby podcast and I did quite a few interviews with different artists and creatives. It’s kinda weird cause the title of that was CryinMo’s Tabletop Alchemy, and that’s because I did it on my Minecraft YouTube channel. Yeah, I know, I’m an idiot. Now I’m just an older idiot, but at least I came up with a cool name, right? Say yes. Make me feel better. 

Anyway I had interviewed Kelsey Dionne of The Arcane Library. I really liked how she designed and wrote her adventure modules, they’re concise and designed well and short and during the interview I asked her what software she used to lay them out, figuring it was InDesign or something and she said … Apple Pages. 

Apple Pages? I was like, seriously? I mean, I have Apple Pages, it’s free. I thought it was just a word processor. But yeah, turns out you can do some pretty slick stuff with Apple Pages as far as graphic design and layout goes. Now, it’s nowhere near what you can do with Adobe InDesign or Photoshop, et cetera, but for a free app, it’s kinda ridiculously powerful. I’m sure there’s a free Windows app that can do similar work. So I used Photoshop to create like the page background texture and to finish out the maps with legends and some other things, but then all the layout and text and text formatting and links and stuff, all that is just done in Apple Pages. And you can export from Apple Pages in the Epub format and then open that document up in Apple Books. 

Boy the light is all over the place today, I have no idea what my exposure’s doing. This might be terrible. 

So another thing I wanna bring up has to do with play testing and getting outside opinions on your work. I think that’s always necessary but it can be hard to do. As the creator of something, you’re always going to miss mistakes or not have certain ideas occur to you without some kind of outside opinion or alternate set of eyes or at least a lot of time between when you wrote something or created something and then going back and looking at it. 

One day, while I was shooting some interviews at a writer’s conference, one of the people my director was interviewing turned out to be Clark Rowenson, you can find his YouTube channel, The Magic Engineer, linked below. He specializes in helping people create magic systems. He’s also a tabletop rpg player and a writer and all kinds of stuff and I just hit him up after the conference cause I thought he was cool and into some of the same stuff as me. He did me a huge favor and looked at a couple pages of my adventure, which at that point was what I thought was 95% ready to go. I was just waiting on some interior art my friend was contributing, but I definitely wanted Clark’s outside opinion on what this thing looked like to him from a third-party perspective. 

He did initially bolster my confidence quite a bit by telling me the overall look and quality of the piece seemed solid. But then he asked me something that ended up resulting in my kinda going back to the drawing board – not totally by any means, but I did end up doing a bit more writing, some re-jiggering of things and some finessing. 

And I’m so, so so glad he asked what he did. He asked me: how many ways are there to escape the island?

I said, one – via the pirate ship. Because that’s what I figured was the main goal of the player characters and it’s set up for them pretty clearly at the beginning. I mean there very specific dialogue bits that come from an NPC that let them know that the pirate ship is pretty much a guaranteed way to escape the island. 

And Clark said, “You should have three ways off the island.”

I was like, oh. Really? I mean, I could immediately feel that he was right. We all have that intuition sometimes, where we just know something is right but we ignore it for a while cause it entails work or something. It just took me a day to get over the idea of going back to the writing work. But man, I am SO glad I did. Working on these alternate ways off the island actually ended up making Pinhead’s puzzle box come together way tighter and more logically than before. There are literally two or three NPC back story changes that I love and that I would never have fixed or come up with without Clark’s suggestion. And there were completely serendipitous connections and plot hole fixes that came about just from working with the different NPC backgrounds and location details to make these new alternate escapes viable. 

Here’s an example. Actually here’s two examples. One of what Clark’s suggestion helped spur and one that’s a direct example of realizing something is not right and not wanting to re-do it. I already recorded this example bit and the day after I woke up knowing it was the wrong example to share. So this right here is footage recorded on a different day. Sigh. But this is a better example for sure.

I had these two completely unrelated areas on the map – this spot right here which is Area 2: The Totem Garden, and this small cavern at the end of the underground river system, Area 9D: The Dryad Oasis. Both of these were just dropped in at different points in the writing process as random ideas. The Totem Garden originally was just an idea for a large space full of carved wooden totems the PCs might run into. Later, as the Athenaeum and temple developed idea-wise, I thought maybe this was another spot to drop like precursor bit of that weird obsidian architecture for players to discover. So I just randomly wrote down there’s like a 10’ diameter disc of obsidian in the ground in the center of the totem garden, it’s etched with runes, and there’s a giant totem pole on top of it. That was it. It was purely intended as a curiosity for the players. 

Now down here in the caves, I was in the process of just populating the caverns with possible encounters. And I did have this vague idea that maybe the dwarven mages disliked the Fey, like maybe the Fey or Fairies kept coming through some kinda portal onto the island and messing with the mages. So the Conclave of mages did some crazy magic and sealed off the island from the Feywild. And I thought, oh, a really lush underground cave would be cool to run into, like it’s really overgrown and dense with this underground foliage and stuff, and then the two ideas sorta clicked into there being a dryad down here that can’t escape the island because her ability to make portals or to travel to the Feywild has been cut off. 

It’s DnD, we just make stuff up, it’s fine.

And that was all I had. Just a random dryad encounter and a random point of visual interest with totem poles. Which I know is kinda dumb, but that’s how this whole thing started, just a bunch of random ideas of things to encounter. So then after Clark suggested the three ways off the island, these two separate, random areas clicked into place together. The mages created some sort of magic Seal against the Feywild – that’s seal with a capital S – and the dryad wants the PCs to break that seal. And where’s the Seal? It’s the obsidian disc in the Totem Garden. Of course, right? It’s perfect!

I added a few more details around here and there and wrote up some post-seal-breaking action the dryad could do for the PCs that would help them get off the island and voila, synergy! Or … that’s not the right word for it, I don’t know what the word is. But it works! As silly as it might sound.

So now there are three distinct methods of escape from the island, each one having nothing to do with the other, they are all independent and independently discoverable in different parts of the island. And on top of that, they each require some additional exploration of the island as part of little mini-quests to achieve that goal.

All right, so that’s a huge bunch of yada yada about the writing process, but I also wanted to make this adventure specifically tailored for both experienced DMs and new DMs. Cause I’m a new DM and I think this would be cool to have, a completely specked out location where no railroading is necessary and it also includes … that’s right, a whole section of Tips for New DMs! And here I just share a bunch of stuff I’ve learned from other YouTubers (along with links to their channels and other resources). I just wanted to be helpful for new DMs, and of course experienced DMs can just ignore this section.

And of course I made some random encounter tables, a random weather table, some custom creatures, magic items, et cetera, and I made some Player Handouts, cause Player Handouts are awesome at the table. Couple of maps the PCs can find in the pockets of slain or captured pirates, some journal pages they can find in a little cave campsite behind a waterfall, you know, pretty typical cliche stuff. But it’s always fun to hand something physical to a player that helps with immersion. 

As I mentioned I asked my friend to contribute some original art and he did 10 custom drawings that came out pretty spectacular. I ended up having to do the cover myself and that was a huge issue for me. I mean, it’s the cover, right? And yes, I would be the first person to advocate hiring an artist. But, you know, ducats aren’t always in the pockets, so I used the midjourney AI to create specific pieces that I spent a couple weeks doing my best with photoshop trying to make something that didn’t look absolutely wretched. Side note: mid journey just dropped an update and I think now I’ve gotta redo the cover with this newer algorithm’s better art. 

Nothing is ever finished, everything is just abandoned, that’s the saying right? 

All right, well, this video is proving to be way too long, kinda like this adventure itself, which started in my head as a 10 or 15 page one or two session adventure and now clocks in at 108 pages and if played a certain way is basically a mini-campaign. To be honest, I could have just said the TLDR – which, you know, in pure Tabletop Alchemy fashion, is appropriately at the end of the video – the way I created my DnD adventure was I just started writing it for myself and it got out of hand, so I decided to lean into it and polish it up. But I thought you might get some inspiration from some of my techniques and whatever, especially the idea that working on a map is an excellent catalyst for drumming up more and more ideas. 

And I’ll let you in on a little secret – years ago, I made a map of a small village in my DnD world. And I’m feeling like that might be my next publishing attempt.  

And speaking of publishing, I’m just now figuring out how to actually publish Mystfin Isle on DriveThruRPG. But when I get it up there, I’ll be dropping a short promo trailer for it, cause I like making trailers and I’ll also be posting a much more concise sort of “how to use” or “here’s what you’ll find” sorta video that should be embedded on the actual DriveThruRPG sales page. And I’m thinking of charging $2.99 or $3.99 for it. Let me know if you think that’s too much. I won’t be offended. Cause the only thing I’m absolutely sure about is that there are going to be mistakes in the published version. I just know there’s gonna be something I’ve missed. Or a few somethings. 

That’s it for now. Go write something! 

See ya!

Wave your wand, something happens. Wave your staff, sling your buddy around. Stick your hand out, [bleep] explodes. This is the state of magic in movies. Magic in Dungeons and Dragons, though, has always felt much more interesting, like there are esoteric processes and verbal, somatic or material requirements, and we hardly ever see that sort of thing in film and television. But I wanna talk about one show that I feel is full of wonderful inspiration for D&D and other tabletop RPGs in its portrayal of magic – the BBC mini-series Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.

Greetings good humans and welcome back to Tabletop Alchemy, where your host labors under delusions of mad metaphors and sick similes. And also … random alliteration. It’s almost like I’ve been cursed with some weak version of a D&D spell, Samwell’s Slippery Spell of … something clever that, on a failed Charisma save, causes the target to constantly alliterate. 

Oh and check out my tee shirt today! I made it, I gotta like rise up here so you guys can see it. Here we go, yeah, there we go. Yeah, check out my shirt. all by myself. I’m looking – I’m looking over there, that’s my, that’s where my monitor is … to sorta see what I’m – making sure my headroom is all right and all that other stuff, but anyway! Yeah! I made this all by myself. With an app. Online. At tee spring. Which is not sponsored in any way. But hey,  it’s my first tee shirt and you can buy it. I don’t know why you would, but this seems like a very YouTuber thing to say and do.

All right, you and I both know we’re thirsty for good movies that visually depict magic in ways that feel like how magic feels in our D&D world. Showing magic and magical effects in ways other than just the typical “have an angry face, thrust out a hand and something explodes”. It’s pretty rare for that to be a satisfying visual depiction of magic because that particular action phrase is basically cinematic cliche at this point. Even in the Lord Of The Rings, Gandalf’s casting of magic is pretty lackluster, as far as how us D&D players perceive it. All right, at least how I perceive it. Harry Potter’s another example sort of on the other end of the spectrum, where you just wave your wand and literally anything can happen, without rhyme or reason. 

Don’t get me wrong, there are some very cool scenes in both of those series. 

But let’s face it, first off, GOOD fantasy flicks are kinda few and far between and then on top of that, really cool interpretations of magic within those good flicks are fewer and farther in between. Fantasy movies and tv shows are hard to make, they’re period pieces so you’ve got wardrobe and locations you have to build or dress and they typically have tons of visual effects and other cost-intensive stuff that impact the budgets. It’s just cheaper and easier to make something that takes place in a contemporary setting. 

All that said, I thoroughly enjoyed the BBC series based on Susanna Clarke’s book, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. I enjoy it as an adaptation, which in and of itself is a rarity. I mean, as a filmmaker I know how hard it is to adapt something and I typically I’m prepared for the changes and compression that has to happen to stories being adapted. And even as adaptations go, I think Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell the show is a pretty decent adaptation of, let’s face it, a pretty large book.

But we’re not here to review the show overall, I just want to go on about one of the things I really, really like about the show, which is how the filmmakers depict the use of magic and its effects. I think there are numerous examples in the show that can be inspirational for how to describe magic in a role playing game session. Both from a player and a Dungeon Master perspective.

And of course, Spoilers. I mean, the book came out in 2004 and the show dropped in 2015. But nonetheless, SPOILERS – consider yourself warned. 

All right, let’s start with the idea of hard vs soft magic systems. I’m not a magic system scholar and to be honest, I think I can only just grasp the general concept. Like, I know an example of a soft magic system is Lord of the Rings, where the magic isn’t described hardly at all and how or why it works is intentionally vague, and that’s totally cool, it generates a certain kind of feeling, like magic is more mystery than anything else.

I also know there’s a lotta chatter online about how the author Brandon Sanderson writes hard magic systems and this seems to imply the magic functions in almost a technological way, with detailed information on how or why a magical effect occurs or is produced. 

I feel like D&D is kind of a hybrid, somewhere in the middle. Of course, it’s an RPG so it’s completely customizable. Some folks might like the granularity and precise description of how the magic is produced and some might like the more esoteric, mysterious manifestation of ethereal power. Personally, I’ve always liked this sort of hybrid approach. I like that there are some technical aspects, like ingredients – or, you know, I mean, “materials” – and somatic gestures – specific hand movements that aid in calling forth magical effects. I always kinda thought of these somatic gestures as kinda like playing a musical instrument. You move your hands like this, and a certain sound is produced. You move your hands like this, and I just airdropped you a fireball. I don’t – I’m just – I don’t know what this is, doesn’t feel very specific but you know, it’s somatic! Somatic.

Anyway, all this is to say that I think the magic in Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is in the hybrid arena of soft versus hard magic systems, but it definitely veers closer to the Charmin side of the spectrum. Versus, I guess the … sand paper side of the spectrum? Sure.

Something I like that Matt Mercer does on Critical Role, and I’ve tried to keep in mind running my own D&D games, is how he asks a player to describe what their spell looks like. And I remember the Caleb character in Season Two, the Might Nein series, when he first cast Wall of Fire. 

And her eyes kinda flare for a second and she says “But that is okay, because I can.” I take a bit of phosphorus and squelch it through my hand and cast wall of fire across the entire length of the boat between them and us. That’s where we’re gonna pick up next week.

I just thought that physical description and actual somatic gesture he made at the table was so cool. And Liam O’Brien did that a lot through the Mighty Nein season, describing how his wizard character actually produced the magic.  

I don’t know if a lot of DMs treat magic this way or if a lot of players do or don’t, my guess is a lotta games just have folks saying, “I cast magic missile” and then rolling for damage. And that’s totally fine, and probably the norm. I just like the idea of adding a bit of detail here and there. Flavor, you know?

So how about some examples?

In the Strange and Norrell show, there’s a really cool version of the classic detect magic spell in action.

Some water! What on earth are you doing? Has Strange been here? Course he’s not. Where’s Norrel? Someone’s doing magic here. It’s in the square. What on earth are you talking about? What’s in the square? Magic! What are doing, man? Tell me, tell me, tell me. Madam! Madam!

I love that scene. I love that he asks for the glass of water, that’s he’s stumbling around in the street like a maniac with this glass of water, trying to look through it to see where the magic is coming from. I think part of what intrigues me about this type of thing is it places the magic in the world, so now the magic user is contending not only with generating magic, but also dealing with real world limitations. Like if he drops that glass of water, he can’t detect magic any more. And doing something physical always has inherent risks of failing, which automatically imparts – even if small – some sense of risk, of danger, of obstacle to overcome. Just feels like good storytelling. 

This here is just kind of an aside to the whole magic thing, but one little bit I really enjoyed in the Strange and Norrell story is the whole chasing of books at the beginning. I mean, that’s some classic D&D wizard [bleep] right there, right? I mean, how many times does the wizard in the party go shopping for books, or scrolls, or searching bodies and treasure for magical texts, looking for precious pages of spells to add to their spell book? It’s not even cliche, it’s literally an intrinsic part of being a wizard.  

Can you believe there are no books of magic to be had? In York? Books about magic are rare enough. Books of magic. Sir! We need fresh opinions. Oh I’m afraid that those books have been sold, sir. I reserved them! Yes I am sorry for it, sir. It is no matter. Do you have anything upon the nature of clouds, rain, atmosphere? Yes! Yes I do as a matter of fact! Oh that’s interesting. I’m most fascinated by clouds myself. Keep an eye open. Mr. Segundus! At least I can find the devil who keeps swiping my books! Yep, there. Norrell.

Here’s another fantastic rendition of a classic D&D spell that pops up in the show, the whole Speak With Dead incantation. 

We have some dead ones for all the good that will do. The magic I will do this night is not modern magic. In fact it is very ancient. Enough, that’s enough. Is that for the magic? Tis for the smell. You didn’t say they were so mutilated. Does it matter if they are? I suppose not. Only I have to look at them. Sharp knife please Ned. Borrowed life. Borrowed life. Borrowed life. Dear god, what language is that? Believe it may be one of the dialects of hell. They’ve learned it very quickly. Can you speak this language? Is that Italian? Be my guest. That’s more like it. Come along Grant. Ask them where the guns are. We have it sir! It’s in a small town called San Jacamore, on the road to Ville Torre, they’ve hidden it by the church.

Another thing I like about how Strange and Norrell treats its magic is how there are consequences the magicians have to deal with. Like how Strange is visibly upset when he discovers he doesn’t know how END the zombie spell.

What the devil are you doing up there? I do not know how to make them dead again. Set them loose and let them wander in the bushes. We have the French on the run and we need to press on. His Lordship is asking for you. We’ve not seen you in days, man. Look at them, poor wretches. What do they say? They, uh, they beg you not to send them back to Hell, they, uh, ask you to send them home to their little sons and daughters. No such power in this magic. I cannot in any way reverse it, I’ve tried everything. Everything?

Detailing consequences could really be cool when used appropriately in D&D games. It’s not something that can be hard ruled or anything, it’s just something a Dungeon Master can keep their eye out for and spring consequences on players when the time and story are right. 

How about the home security system Mr. Norrell has installed to protect his library? 

Come here and face me! Mr. Lascelles! We mustn’t leave the library! Come back! Mr. Lascelles! Stay with me, you’ll get lost! Mr. Lascelles! Childermass! Come out and face me! Mr. Norrell? Mr. Lascelles! Mr. Norrell!

Such a cool use of the labyrinth idea, the labyrinth as a spell or enchantment – in D&D it’s an eighth level spell called Maze. The spell description states that the wizard is sending the targeted entity to a “demi plane” to wander a labyrinth for a set duration of time, so not a far cry to sort of have the Maze spell function like a trap that characters fall or wander into. 

Another detail I dig in the show are the audio cues when magic happens, it’s like the world is bending slightly and warping all the wooden structures. 

And there’s this cool spell, it would certainly be from the school of Illusion in D&D, I don’t know if there’s a straight one-to-one correlation to a particular spell in the Players Handbook, but to me this feels like a very DnD style cantrip or something. Or maybe a first level spell with the ability to be cast at higher levels to allow larger and larger objects to be … mirrored? 

Why Mr. Strange! Oh my dear Mr. Strange, this is remarkable! I have never even heard of such magic. This is not recorded, sir. This is not in Sut- this is not in Sutton Grove! Is it a different color? Pick it up. Pick it up, pick it up! It is backwards. That is the reflection! The real one is in the mirror. I apologize sir I do not know how to bring it back. To earn the truth, I have only the haziest notion of what I did.

And of course you’ve got the classic water scrying spell, that’s used quite a bit in the show.

Arabella! She is not in the house, sir. We do not know where she is. She’ll freeze herself to death. Bring me some water, Mary. Now! Fill it up. Mr. Strange – quiet! Quiet! Sir, what is this meant to do? Find her. Not in England, not in Wales, not in Scotland.

And there are just cool phrases and little tidbits I find really inspiring for D&D role playing.

That place just breathed magic. I would think one would have to negotiate with the trees. A magician is not an easy thing to kill. Wherever magicians used to go perhaps. Beyond the sky, on the other side of the rain.

This next idea is just a cool example of the Susanna Clarke’s imagination – I’m sure something similar has been used in an RPG campaign somewhere or in another piece of media but I love the sort of Neil Gaiman-esque story of the origin of a certain book.

Show me this book. Show me this book if there is one. My rotten, no-good, bastard father was stupidly entrusted to deliver the book of the raven king. To a man in the Darbyshire Hills. The last man in England who could read the king’s letters. Unfortunately, en route, he got himself embroiled in a drinking competition with a blacksmith in Sheffield. And when challenged, proceeded to eat the book. Four years later I was born. With it written all over my infant body. You … are the book of the raven king.

And I love this next sequence where the two magicians – side note, I really like how the wizards or mages are called magicians, just a – it’s cool like that – sort of like taking back that modern day term of magician is you know an illusionist sort of a thing and applying it to actual magic users. But yeah, here the two magicians discuss how to summon an entity they don’t know the actual name of, ‘cause a classic trope in historical magical mythology is the idea that you need something related to or know the “true name” of to be able to summon it.

It need not matter that we do not know his name. Of course it matters! He was stolen into Fairy before he could be christened. He became the nameless slave, Mr. Strange, nameless! But if we use an ordinary English spell of summoning, we can make the elements of the spell identify him for us, can we not? No no, of course we cannot, I’ve never heard of such a thing! This house was built upon the raven king’s land, correct? With stones from the king’s abbey. The river that runs outside bore the king on its waters. And in … and in my garden is a pear tree … that is a direct descendent of some pips the king spat out when he sat in the garden. If we let the abbey stones be our envoy, the river be our path. The orchard pears be our hansel. Then we may name him simply the king. And the rivers, the stones, and the trees, they don’t know any other!

And you’ve got classic fast-travel by mirrors and of course the whole idea of a hidden world BEHIND the mirrors is another classic fantasy thing, right?

Good lord! Where did he go? It is the most amazing place I have ever seen. But what happened behind the mirror? I discovered … the king’s roads. The ancient paths between this land and the other realms.

And then there’s the whole idea of Fairy. Now, D&D itself is of course inspired by tons of classical English and European mythology, and Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is drawing directly from that same historical and ancient content. The way Susanna Clarke and subsequently the filmmakers depict both the realm of Fairy – in D&D that’d be the Feywild right? – and Fairies themselves, the Fey, is super cool and illustrative of what I think original Fairy legends were like. Talk about being a shadowy place of twilight and grim shadows.

Currently, elves and fairies and whatnot are typically portrayed as things to aspire to or adventure with, et cetera. But back in the old days, the old days of Earth, I understand that Fairies were essentially stand-ins for demons! Like don’t make a deal with the devil is essentially don’t make a deal with a Fairy. And that’s a huge part of the plot of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, and it couldn’t be more apt, right? Wizards having to deal with these dangerous but alluring entities that, if one took the right risks, one might reap powerful rewards in the form of having a Fairy servant or utilizing a Fairy’s magical knowledge or power for one’s own purpose. There are definitely echoes of the D&D warlock class drifting around in here.

What do you mean by summoning me here? What have you done to Lady Pole? I am bringing my lady to a ball. A gentleman must prepare. I summoned you because you cheated me. I have kept to the terms of our agreement. Half a life. Yes, but I thought she would just live to forty and then she had to die. I never said so. No one will ever know where she is when she sleeps. Half a life. That was our bargain.

That’s such a perfectly diabolical deal, right? Just a perfect example of twisting or undermining someone’s greedy goal. And of course there’s the necessary quest item, the token the Fairy takes to seal the deal. 

I should take something of the lady’s to signify my claim. One of her rings? No. Ah, I have it.

That token, in a D&D game, would obviously be the subject of a quest or campaign goal, for sure.

Who was the last English magician you dealt with? I do not have to tell you that. What token did he give you? I do not – Bring it to me! Bring me what you gained from your last dealings with an English magician. No. It is worthless. Utterly. A binding agreement, I think you said. Bring it to me.

And the Fairy, in the show played by Paul Kaye and in the book the character is known only as The Gentleman With The Thistledown Hair, this character is such a great demonic personality. He’s egotistical and ruthless and petty and cruel, all while confidant he’s leagues better than any stupid human. 

Watching this fellow try to do magic is like seeing a man sit down to eat dinner with his coat on backwards. And how did you come by this fortune, little pig person?

I love the enchantment he places on his victims – maybe it’s a curse versus an enchantment in game terms, I don’t know – but to protect his investment, he enchants them so that during their waking hours, they cannot inform anyone of their plight.   

I should warn you, I have made many attempts to tell people of what’s been done and I have not yet succeeded. In 1607, there was a silversmith named Redshaw who lived in the kingdom of Halifax West Yorkshire who inherited a Turkish rug. I’m sorry, that is not what I meant to say. What is the matter, Stephen? Madam, in 1349 there was a parson in Dunbridge, he was followed by a tiny man – I’m sorry Madam!

And the stakes are all very high in the story. I mean, the already once-resurrected Lady Pole feels so miserable under the curse she just wants to die again.

What can be done? I cannot free you of this enchantment milady. No! How old are you, milady? I am nineteen. I may tell you that you will live another 75 years under these circumstances. I’m sorry. No! Mr. Norrell! Mr. Norrell!!

Towards the latter half of the series, Strange is trying desperately to summon a fairy in order to bring his wife back from the dead. Of course, she’s not dead, he’s been duped by another great, flavorful use of magic by the Gentleman With The Thistledown Hair. 

We must find and awaken a moss oak. The moss oak is in there. The tears of the lady, shed in pain.

But he keeps failing, Strange can’t SEE the fairy when he summons him. So he goes on this quest for knowledge, looking for a way to see that which he can’t see. And this drives him finally to the conclusion that perhaps he needs to go mad in order to see things that are unseeable.

I did not see the fairy, that is the difficulty, to see and hear them. Yet there was one present who perceived him very clearly. Why could he, when I could not? Was this fellow a magician? No. No, this man was just … mad. But how does one work up a little madness in oneself? Perhaps I should go wandering, perhaps the wilderness will make me mad. I think you hit upon something, Grant.

And this is a concept I really, really get a kick out of. He kinda goes on this whole rampage of drug-addled craziness, trying everything he can to alter his perception so he can tune into whatever mysterious frequency will allow him to see a Fairy. To me it just feels so real, it’s like riffing on the idea of how people today go off searching for shamanistic psychedelic experiences, whether for entertainment or treating psychological conditions. 

And I am studying, experimenting. New magic. With what object? I wish to secure myself a fairy servant. I’m working to uncover the magic that might bring such a spirit forth. I have tried everything. None of it with the slightest success. But are they not wicked creatures? Is it not very dangerous to entrust with such a disreputable companion? To be sure. Fairies are naturally full of mischief and exceedingly difficult to control. Were I to succeed, I would have to proceed with the greatest caution. And besides, their knowledge and power are such that a magician cannot likely dispense with their help. Not unless that magician is Gilbert Norrell. Well, who are we to say that madness is a curse? For many people, poets for instance, it’s a gift.

And in the show, the pinnacle of this is when Strange ends up distilling madness down into a drug. That feels so Dungeons and Dragons to me! He finds an old woman who’s quite mad and works a deal out with her, she gets to be a cat and he gets to have her madness in physical form.

I want you to teach me … how to be mad. You question my wisdom? Now, madam, I will give you what you wish but in return you must give me something. To serve as a symbol and vessel of your madness. Do you agree? Capital. Well, one thing is certain madam you were very mad indeed. Just a drop or two I think. I have been thinking about your proposal and I perceive it to be an excellent plan.

I love all the alchemical laboratory gear and instruments, the sort of visual riffing on scientific pursuits theme, it all just feels like what I want in a DnD game. Like if my character walks into a mages tower, that’s all the kind of stuff I wanna see and interact with. 

There’s just so many cool things in Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell – I mean, obviously I dig it, I had to make this whole video about just some of the magic. There are of course other scenes with more of that, you know, point your hand and things explode sorta gimmick but even those are typically executed in such a way that there’s some mock up of logic behind the casting of the spell.

What the hell are they? They’re called horses. I made them out of horse sand.

Even prophecy is treated in a way that I liked. Typically I really dislike “prophecy” type story gimmicks, they’re just so overused and usually really boring in and of themselves. But in this story the prophecy is genuinely obscure and yet fulfills itself in the end in a satisfying way. It’s definitely on that Charmin side of the magic spectrum, but something about the turn of phrase or whatever, I find really evocative.

Do you still not understand, John Childermass? They are the spell. They are the spell the raven king has spun and that is all they have ever been. He’s spinning it now.

All right, well, that’s probably more than enough. I hope you find some inspiration here for your D&D or RPG game, obviously I think you should watch the show or read the book if any of this looks interesting to ya. 

I’ll leave you with one of my absolute favorite lines in the show – which has nothing to do with magic.

Forgive me lady, you are his, uh, his special friend. What is he about in there?! Do you wish to be shot? No. Then behave differently.

Behave differently. See ya!