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Question: Dungeon Monkey!  I need some help, I’m a rotating DM for my regular gaming group and I’m expected to run in rotation when we get together.  I am feeling uninspired to write anything, I could do a string of crappy combats put together but I’d like to do something with at least a thread of a plot, I’ve got pretty much a clean slate to do what I want.  It’s a fantasy campaign, any ideas for how to get an interesting plot put together out of nothing when you are not feeling motivated?

Answer: Probably one of the most challenging things for a Game Master (GM) to have to do is to actually write material for an on-going group or campaign when they are not feeling particularly inspired.  Almost every role-playing game (RPG) has a section on “How To Be A Game Master” and they devote many pages to the subject of how to create a campaign world, how to run an adventure, and usually they offer some advice for finding inspiration.  I will help you though and boil that information down for you to the most commonly cited central point: “Hey you know a whole bunch of professional writers and creative types have already come up with ideas, why don’t you borrow some of theirs and, you know, mix and match?”  This actually is a formula I don’t personally recommend be used by anyone, ever, if done correctly it is useful but to be done correctly you need to take someone’s already completed idea and use it as a seed for creating your own idea.  More often a GM in your situation will take a movie or book and do a close to complete theft of the idea, tossing some new dressing onto the setting and plot, and then attempt to parade it as their own pony.  Unfortunately almost every movie, book, or video game you might borrow from one or more of your players is going to be familiar with it.  Gamers usually draw on a wide pool of information and nothing will ruin your attempt at “borrowing” some material to inspire you faster then a player saying “Hey I know this story, you just used vampires rather then zombies, cool concept but it was done better in Revenge of the Monkey Lords Part VII!”  Instead I suggest that if you need to use a preheated story treatment you dispense with using a movie or book as the central point and cut directly to the core, use the classic role-playing game formula for a fun adventure.

First, create a mental sandbox, the environment in which the group will be undertaking their adventure, it doesn’t really matter what the sandbox is, just make sure that it is a sandbox that does not have any complicated buildings, structures, or other locations in it.  Now many GMs are tempted to do some sort of dungeon themed adventure in your situation, avoid this temptation, although walls make for comforting barriers they also require that you, as a GM, plan out the walls in advance and think on the fly when dealing with what players choose to do.  Instead make your sandbox some sort of exterior location, a dark forest, a desert, a series of small villages, a generic city, something that will allow the players to move around but does not require you to describe a trap in painfully intricate detail.

Second, create a really funky bad-ass villain for the players to fight in the end, a villain you don’t mind them killing off horrifically but one that will be a challenge.  Don’t worry too much about the details of motivation or back-story for this villain, his/her role is to die horribly in the final reel.  Third, come up with a reason for the villain to either hate the group and/or some sort of motivating factor to make the group care to intervene in the nefarious plot by the villain.  Some simple tags to use are: freeing slaves, preventing innocents from being hurt, preventing some sort of evil ritual, thwarting the plans of an evil wizard, or overturning a local bad leader.  The group needs to learn about this wrong quickly and be able to grasp it utterly in a few moments, so make it really twisted, depraved, and with no redeeming qualities.  Redeeming qualities confuse players, we are talking a villain that plans to murder all the babies in an orphanage to then bath in their blood, collected in a vat, so they can open the Moon Gate and become a demon prince.  An important point about this villain, to defeat him or her the group, at the start, is not equipped properly to do the job.  I don’t mean they need motivation and good heart, I mean they need to assemble the Spear of Destiny from scattered parts in the sandbox or their weapons will prove useless against the villain and by useless I mean “Does not even annoy him or her.”

Finally the most critical element, the crisis has happened to just reach a time-limited crescendo when the group arrives, to use the above example, the time for the sacrifice is right in six hours or some other tight time-table.  This forces the players to interact with the plot quickly and trims down on their time to be clever, forcing them to improvise is an excellent plan.  If you have a group that is often less then inclined to get involved, force involvement, nothing like an evil villain needing the still beating heart of an elf and, low and behold, your party happens to have two of them with them in player characters to get a group moving in the right direction.  The last thing you need is filler, this takes the form of side people who need to be rescued, generic tough minions that the players need to beat to reach the main villain, normally a good handful of conflicts will do the trick for you in this case.  If your group is really building oriented give them a small dungeon or two to have to work their way through to find key items to halt the villain.  When the group finally manages to get everything they need together and face the villain, have the villain fight them and do considerable damage until they manage to hit him or her a few times with the item of power, at which point have the villain explode in a pyrotechnic burst of happiness.

Finally allow the players to depart the sandbox reassured by some trusted local Non-Player Characters that everything is right with the world and they can move on fearing that they leave nothing behind that could be a problem.  This is vital so they don’t stick around, hunting for new plot and meaning, and requiring you to actually come up with a more solid reason for what happened.

- Dungeon Monkey

Have a question for the Dungeon Monkey?  Want to seek out some gaming suggestions?  Email Dungeon Monkey at dungeonmonkey@umich.edu and get your answers!