Mind Blast with Sly Flourish (Mike Shea)

[Music] hello guys welcome to adin's channel we try something new this time this is mind blast um a series that we would like to start and and develop as it goes uh where we discuss creating like basically we discuss our favorite hobby from a creative perspective um and discuss all the little details maybe some give some advice um maybe learn from each other hopefully learn from each other and um and we have five topics for today with Mike who's also known as Sly flourish and hello um I would like to ask Tommy to give us give a brief introduction of Elder brain so that we can start with that and then please Mike take go over and introduce yourself briefly great so uh hi Tommy here I'll be super brief so Elder brain um it's our company it's it started as a love project that that turned serious over the years um we do kickstarters we make Adventures um based on community surveys um such as crown of the oathbreaker bance of the spell border and our upcoming Adventure set of the lightbringer oh I didn't know about that one yeah it's coming soon coming soon yeah I'm getting new news right away yeah there there you go there you go Mike who are you uh so I am Mike Jay I I run the website Sly flourish and uh write books about role playing games uh including return to the lazy dungeon master the one I'm probably most most known for um I write books of tips and tricks to help people run and prep their games and then also uh write uh adventures and Source books and other kinds of more fiction oriented stuff to uh give people material they can actually use during those those games those are kind of the two the two types of products that I make I also do YouTube videos and podcasts and uh I have a Weekly Newsletter and what else I don't know lots of other things just started s coffee cups anything coming soon uh yeah so I'm working on thank you you get you say it right at the beginning so um I'm working on a project right now called the city of arches which is a high fantasy City Source book for lazy for lazy GMS uh kind of you know mostly like probably like 90% system agnostic so you could use it with pretty much anything um but certainly I have 5V in mind uh you know large 5V so 5V from the standpoint of sales of the Valiant or level up Advanced 5V 2014 D and D or 2024 D and all the different versions of 5 that we're gonna have um so I wanted to make a book that would be useful for those systems and for pretty much any other system if you wanted to play shadow dark or something else you certainly could uh I have been writing it on patreon for about two years now I've been doing like little bits of it over time as patreon rewards for about two years and people have been running it and playing it and I've been getting feedback the whole time so uh the kickstarter I've been now now we we're in Earnest making it um my my my longtime partner and editor Scott Gray has been going through and we've been Di into it deeply and we're getting page layout done and we've commissioned tons got commissioned and received tons of art for it so the kickstarter should hopefully be in the next couple of months you know two or three months the kickstarter exciting and yeah let everyone know about it it should be you know you know knock on wood should be smooth sailing to actually get the product out because we're way ahead of the game when it comes to actually building the product itself so that's the thing I've got are you self-publishing it uh yes so it's going to be an offset print but we yeah we're we're I'm not running it you know running kind of publishing it the same way I've published uh my previous stuff like return and companion and whatever book I did last Forge of foes so same way yeah yeah very all right so good to hear and very exciting uh I guess you do a lot it takes eats up lots of your time because it always does for us um and thank you for for for you know um putting us into your schedule for this conversation which which actually you inspired because yeah thank you because you inspired this this this this whole thing because you asked questions when when when when you introduced our book just recently and Tor to the SP order and you raised questions and we you know we all decided to discuss them so let me go with the first question immediately um so um it is it was your question what what what sorts of Adventures work for us and how do we build them as designers um how how do you do that how do I so it's interesting because we can kind of look at it from two different angles right I'm I am I am first and foremost a player of role playing games right before I published books on them before I did anything I was running games and I'm always and I'm still running lots of games so uh recently I had kind of a nice introspective uh um you know moment where I looked back at 10 years of campaigns that I've run uh I think I don't remember how many it was it was more than 20 you know some different campaigns that I've run and thinking about what kinds of material helped me run those games like what made them fun for me what worked what didn't and I don't think there was any like one super clear you know this is the kind of product that makes me run great adventures and these are the kinds of products that don't even even the the structures of published Adventures were kind of all over the place like my top my top four I think or top four or five included both like Wizards of the Coast published adventures and really lightweight Adventures like um shadowed keep on the Borderlands by raging Swan and they're like you set them next to each other they don't look anything alike you know or or the gloaming the uh curse scroll one the gloaming from Kelsey Deon over at Chad at um Arcane library was another one of my you know s tier campaigns and that doesn't look anything like Cura strad does right when you look at cursus strad side by side with that they're not anything alike um but for me the the some of the common elements there was there was a couple things that I discovered and uh one of them was that the the the production quality didn't have to be absolutely through the roof for me to still get a lot of value out of it and I'm not knocking raging Swan and Arcane library for for um Shadow keep of the Borderlands or uh or curse scroll but they are you know when you sit them side by side with like you know vcna Eve of Ruin right the most recent Wizards of the Coast Adventure like the art budget between those two are are totally in different playing fields and yet I would still find more value out of something like shadowed keep of the Borderlands because of what it offers me as a GM to actually prepare and run my games yeah um that was probably a surprising result for me um and and sad for those of us that's spent tons and tons of money on Art like I think Elder brain does given the quality of the Elder product I've seen right yeah but yeah go yeah no no please no I just wanted to add in s for an interruption that we enjoyed the games when it was you know all the black and white old school the same way because it was in our heads and we you know most of it is in our heads so those really I mean praise are illustrators they are gods of their art but but but you know that scene is just one of those many scenes I'm always thinking Tommy like dude we should illustrate like everything you like I I I can't get enough of it you know but but it's mostly in your head so these just help and of course you know to show quality we make them very beautiful and and and detailed and everything but yeah it was all in our head all the time so yeah yeah yeah it's interesting there's a um a writer that I was reading recently who was writing about uh the importance of leaving blanks in fiction and he was kind of talking about it from the point of view of like movies and Other Stories but he did mention role playing games and uh the idea that like and you know going to go with Star Wars nerds are you both Star Wars nerds of some degree of course of course sure you know you never know so like Boba Fett was a lot cooler before we found out that his dad was D Jango Fett and that he was like the leader of all the clones and all that well now he's now he's not quite as cool as he used to be like as good as book a Boba Fett is like it was more interesting when we didn't know who he was I I loved Darth Vader way better before it turned out he had this he was born out of this Inception of the force like what Vader Jesus right yeah so yeah evil Jes right it was cooler and that that yeah for though you know I'm not a huge fan and I'm not going to knock the people who are huge fans of episode one two and three we each get to love what we love Yeah but having grown up not having any idea what the Clone Wars was my idea for the Clone Wars was better than the one shown movies and I think that's true for a lot of times where we have these blanks and as and I think good role playing game products probably have a good way of leaving some of those blanks you know I I introduced an NPC to some patrons of mine that I have in city of arches whose name is Joselyn halfoak and they were like why is her last name halfoak like where did that come from and I'm like I don't know yeah I'm not you know I don't have to come up with and then they immediately started running off with you know with with Back stories on where the name half clo came from and I'm like great like yours is better than mine right like yeah I guarantee what you come up with for you is better than than what I would come up for you so I I think that there's there's something to like I've managed to squeeze 30 sessions so far and we're not even done yet out of like 14 pages of text that came in curse scroll one for the gloaming and i' I'm probably 20 I don't know if I'm that far 15 or 20 sessions into running a campaign using shadowed keep of the Border lands where that book is supposed to be for levels one to five and my character is a level seven and or I guess my character's like Sixth and they just got to the adventure right so I ran so much other stuff for them from in inspired by the book yeah that I'm way past the scale of the book yeah and and yet it's still considered for me like a top tier Adventure uh and then the ones that have dropped kind of to the bottom of the list mostly come with the one thing that I notice about those and this is something that I was pretty conscious of is anytime I run into an adventure where I feel like I have to fix the structure of the adventure to make it work at all that drops it you know quite quickly into the lower tiers like and it's a very fine line between wanting to change an adventure because it's fun right and having to because there's just no way I can I I want to run what's on the page right there there's there's some structural thing and an example I'll bring up is like it never made sense to me that oral the god of of WI is walking around in ice windale but is only cr11 right and you're like she's a goddess like even the little intro script talks about how oral is a goddess and that you shouldn't be just expecting to face her and win she should be cr30 right like there's there's there's no other yeah there's no other point where she shouldn't be anything other than cr30 or it's a v over I I I have to admit I've never read um the new ice industry I did yeah you're not missing a lot so um and and yeah so there's there's and I'm picking on that one but you know there's other there's other kinds of things where the way the adventures are written are too rigid and have fundamental building blocks that in my opinion like good GMS know better I I feel I'm picking one that's that has had me all riled up for a while now is is uh vne of Ruin I was looking forward to it I was like oh this is going to be cool and I pre-ordered the special edition copy of my local game shop and I was excited and then luckily I had the chance to read it before I actually got it and there is like a fundamental plot point in there that I just I would never recommend a DM ever do right it's like it's on my list of like don't run Adventures like this because you know you're betraying the trust of your players and it's fundamental to the nature of that adventure and I'm like well I'm canceling my pre-order I'm I'm not even gonna try what is that can you can you pleas I can I will I will spoil it right if if you know give spoiler tags for everybody who was ever going to run Becka EV of Ruin just just to be sure because it is the kind where like in three words you can ruin the entire adventure and those three words are Moran Kanan is cause so okay it turns out that one of the three your major Quest NPC the guy who was sending you on all of these missions to go to all of these worlds to pick up all of these Pixies of the rods of seven Parts is actually the bad guy and you don't actually need to get the r of seven Parts in order to face V and uh and he's going to steal it from you pretty much no matter what once you completed building the whole rod and then he's going to go off and then you've got to chase him too oh and it's it's the whole Adventure right it's like the whole point and and they have all of these like really hamfisted descriptions of like how you can you know somebody might find out that he's that that NN Kanan is actually cause and it's like dc30 you know multiple dc30 investigation checks to figure it out and he's got this magic crown that clearly was designed just to say yeah we know that this is an adventure for highle characters but none of their High Lev character stuff would work in order to see that he's actually the bad guy because if he did the adventure is over right the minute you find out that the main guy is like I need you to go to all these worlds to pick up these rods of seven Parts the seven the parts of the rods of seven part you'd be like no I'm not doing it you're a bad guy yeah right like why would do that this is this is a very interesting point that might come up later in our discussions how to how to how to hide all of these things you know for when when you asked about the high level uh Adventures where you have access to Legend lore and all these spells how how to protect how to protect the antagonist or villain from from from spilling the information or getting the information out of it him her um but also this is very strange because I I didn't read ruin of VNA I'm sorry to say uh but uh um I don't read much I just write uh but but the batt bottleneck of of what you just mentioned that he steals it I mean how do they pull that off how how how is that so inevitable how is it in inevitable because it's God terrible thousand options of right going at the end it says like okay now if you collected the rod you go back to the S you go back to the sanctum where the the Wizards three are there the idea is there's three Wizards that had kind of sent you in all these quests and it's and two of the three don't know that the third is a bad guy even though they're all 20th level Wizards right and they they have no way of knowing that this guy is standing right next to him is actually this villain because he's got a super special crown that protects him from everything and it's even got like stuff like if you send a message it intercepts the message and sends it to the wrong guy oh rather than the right guy because it's actually two morning can out there right yeah it's really bad like it's like it's clearly like they spent a lot of time designing an item just to screw people yeah and um but anyway at the very end it's like he he comes to you and says hey I'm going to need to take that rod from you so I can go do like investigations on it oh so you and it has this write up that says and if the players are apprehensive one of the other Wizards will come and say no you really need to give it to him so that he can do his investigations and stuff and then you give it and then they're like oh it turned out as the bad guy he stole it right and you're like you freaking told me to give it to them right like how dumb are you I think I think I think Wizards need to step up their game because this is bad design and bad design put them into the position where they had to create this item and had to pull off this very very bad bottle somewhere and I don't I don't know that I even blame you know like I've recognized and i' recognize the same thing like other other Adventures that were like really low on my on my list that they' they've published like uh descent and aess is another one and rhyme of the frost maiden and this one this I'm not I can't put this in a tier because I'm not going to run it so I don't there there are other Adventures too that I haven't run so I can't really judge them completely uh but in those cases like I don't blame the designers necessarily it's not like a designer sat down and came up with a bad idea and then ran with it it's because the public I I believe that it's because of the publication process that they have at Wizards of the Coast and scheduling and you know tight timelines and weird review cycles and you know not fantastic play testing things that there's a there's a systemic issue you're giving them excuses mate I mean I I no I I I'm not because I I know it for certain because I know personally that designers of descent and aess and I know what happened behind the scenes of them making that one and they are fantastic designers who knew who who knew better and didn't put in the things that ended up causing that problem and I think that I don't know them personally but I know their the work of the designers of Ryman the frost maiden and I know that that's not the case either right that like you know a lot of times when you especially when you're bringing freelance designers to do stuff the the the the system that goes on behind the scenes to build it is is fundamentally broken now I will say somebody came up with the idea that we should have caused actually be Mor than Kanan and be the bad guy and somebody else had to make that true right and so I I I have a feeling that in some kind of design Bible early on somebody made that be the case and then later on in development they realized how problematic that was going to be and then had the right dreams of text to try to make that still be the case because it was too late for them to say maybe that's a terrible idea and we should change the structure of this adventure so it doesn't have the hinge on the Betrayal of a single NPC yeah so yeah so I I you know I I so I do I don't I don't blame and and and what's another one so another one is um and again it's another adventure that I didn't run but it has the same problem is the one from planescape uh I forget the name I don't have it on hand somewhere um but there's a planescape Venture and it also hinges on a quest NPC who actually just wants to get you killed and so if you found out what this Quest NPC and it's right in the beginning right it's early on in the adventure it's almost the exact same kind of place that it is in bechna uh it's another one who's like they're the main bad guy they're trying to send you off to get killed and only through happen stance do you actually uncover the actual situation and then at the end you face them and in the Betrayal and that's another one we're like I know the designer who made that Adventure and I know that they know better right I know that they have designed fantastic ones in fact the designer who's like the lead designer of that product also is the one of the two designers who made the product that fixed descent into aess and made it playable as a third party publisher so you know they I think that small and I think one conclusion I can come to with this is that small Publishers or more focused Publishers have a better a better ability to build Great Adventures than a giant corporation that has all of the other kind of layers of corporate stuff going on for them to be able to put out solid Adventures of course I have to say I there have hasn't been I think an adventure that we played that we didn't have to fix and especially wizard stuff you know because stuff mostly wizard stuff and pis piso stuff is is more on point I think more balanced more more thought over more more struct perfect example is the the Water Deep Heist you know which dronist another one that I had friends that worked on that one right like I know that worked on it and still has like the most you know the most hand fisted Chase right in the center of it and also is at the heist which I which I totally skied when I was dming it because yeah right I did too and there's actually really easy way to change it into an investigation yeah so that you're following the path of this thing that disappeared and you get to go kind of investigate where it went rather than you having to have this like oh you know the stone and that's another one and it's just like specna where they wrote a section that said if the characters get the stone too early the stone doesn't want to be found and will do what it can to try to get out of the hands of the characters so that they can only pick it up later and you're like even the McGuffin is trying to run away yeah right like it was it was really really you know not great and and again I I had the option I had the opportunity to talk to the designers who worked on it like yeah that wasn't how he did it yeah like something happened something happened somewhere and it changed we we defined what we don't like uh you kind of said what you like but how do you how do you build one yourself yeah uh that's a fantastic question so one thing and I I I I you know City I me gonna again city of archers because it's in my head um but I'll talk about like other ones too is uh you know I try to design the kind of I would want to buy as a product and one thing I've decided is that I I I have never written a big adventure path right I haven't written any like major large campaign Adventure uh the Fantastic so the the the three books of Adventures that I two books of Adventures that I've written are s fur's Fantastic Adventures and Fantastic Adventures ruins of the grindle rout and the closest to a campaign came from ruins of the grindle rout where it was 10 Subterranean Adventures built around one location called Deep delver's enclave and five of those 10 could be run in an order so they were they were first to first to fifth level Adventures I think they would end at sixth level and five of them could be chained together into a a kind of a mini Adventure path right not a huge one right it's only first first to six um but it it also had sort of the you know the fundamental kind of idea that existed as in in this book was reinforced by these five adventures and I and I've had people who have run long campaigns in that setting they like they like the main setting I threw a lot of other sort of lore in history and kind of like loose Source book style stuff I actually have a fifth to 20th level Campaign outline in the book so that people who wanted to take it all the way to the end had a path that they could follow or ideas that they could grab onto to build out the rest of their campaign from it U but I didn't spell out those adventures and uh I I think for the people it was a it was a slow burn product like it didn't it it it did fine it funded itself but it didn't like blow the doors off and uh I I I always kind of like looked at I don't know maybe I just didn't hit the mark but then it kind of picked up some steam and later I get lots of feedback from people who are like oh yeah no I'm running it now and I love it and I'm I'm running campaign there and I love it and so it kind of you know built up over time as as the kind of product that certain people really liked um Fantastic Adventures did not have any kind of campaign connection it was just 10 Adventures set from first to fifth level in a kind of a generic fantasy area uh with the intention that it was a book of short Adventures it was a book of Adventures that yeah pretty much Standalone Adventures but they were all set around this town they were they did have an area so that like again if somebody wanted to run and I did right when I was play testing it and running it I ran them as a bunch of different Little Adventures that the characters could go on while they're in the town and U that actually continues to sell pretty well I look back at it and I'm like oh man there's a lot of stuff I'd love to fix in that um but but people really dig it and they're they're straightforward Adventures they're simple Adventures they're they're low level which I think is helpful because you know they're they're easier for people yeah right like it's hard to it's hard to like make them really unbalanced or or or have them you know you know have characters come in and completely wreck them uh because of certain things that they picked up at high levels when you know the characters aren't going to be higher than fifth level um Mike how how do you create these how do you start from scratch what's your process oh boy yeah that's that's that was your question how do we create them so I throw it back at you we we will tell you we will tell you also how we do it yeah do you do you want us to go first and then give you an example no no sure yeah no you I've been talking for a half hours no no no you can you can if you have you know if you have it constructed and you know you can yeah sure so um I mean so I I usually so the funny thing is they do not come from the campaigns that I run uh I I haven't I haven't said like oh I'm running and I think a lot of designers uh uh a lot of kind of you independent designers probably I don't know if a lot I don't know what the you know I don't know if this is true or not but it feels i' I've heard certainly that people have their own Homebrew setting that they like because you know from polls and surveys that I've run roughly half of and you guys have run a bunch of polls on this so you probably know better than I do and maybe tell I'm gonna say it and then you tell me if you have a different lot of 50% home brew yeah that exactly what I was gonna say 50% home brew okay so so good we have data from two different angles that are and we match them and they match and they are same yeah yeah yeah so they're true right so about half of the people are running Homebrew adventures and I think you know we I think we kind of recognize that people GMS who really into their hobby are also kind of designers right they're kind of already designing their own stuff they're already into that thinking about mechanics and thinking about adventures and they get excited about it and now we live in a world where it's not too difficult to get a product in front of people even if it's like I took my word document saved as PDF and made it available on the internet um so a lot of designers I think start with my home campaign they their home campaign and then grow it out and one that's like a good example would be Monty Cook's uh tollis Campaign which I think is the second largest role playing game book that I have next to Crown of the oath Breaker by you guys so uh Tois is like 600 Pages it's enormous right and that was Monty Cook's home brew campaign that he designed for the Third Edition of d and d y when he was brought on as the designer of the Third Edition so that was almost like a Homebrew setting that became a published setting that actually is a pretty big setting um but I I so I didn't do that so I when I when I did Fantastic Adventures and did ruins of the grindle rout and when I started with city of arches uh I had kind of a product in mind from the beginning I knew I had heard very common complaints early on in the third in the beginning of the fifth edition days that Wizards of the Coast is putting out these great big campaign Adventures nobody can actually get through them all this is back when they were doing two of them a year as well so they were doing like you know you know they did like the first four Adventures that came out for fifth edition had new ones coming out every six months and nobody could get through them all like literally people that were running weekly 4our games exclusively Focus know strugle they could not finish them know so and wizards eventually stopped and said okay we're gonna do like one a year right and which seemed to work a little bit better and it made sense um but there was a big complaint that there weren't Standalone Adventures that there wasn't like a place where you could get good good Well published well produced well play tested good artwork all the stuff that you needed but were only like one one session or two session Adventures instead of these great big campaign settings so I said okay Fantastic Adventures is going to be the opposite of that Fantastic Adventures I'm going to have a starting town it's gonna be a town that you could drop in into any fantasy role play game it's not I'm not going to build a whole campaign world it's just this town and the regions around it and the regions are like hey there's a desert and there's rivers and there's an a water area and there's a swamp all the kind of locations that You' need in order to drop in typical adventures and I'm going to write 10 adventures and so I sat down and and that in that case I I don't know if I started doing this but I do it now where I would these days I would say okay I'm going to come up with 30 ideas and then I'm going to cut down that list of 30 until we like what we've got left until I like what I've got left and I did that for ruins of the grender rout when I was partnering with Scott Gray and James incasso on fantastic layers we did that we had I think 30 or 40 different Lair ideas and then cut them down to the 23 that we ended up in the book and that was a good process because like we really in some cases we'd look like man it's really good it's just not as good as these other ones and we'd throw it away M and so we really feel like the ones that we had there all three of us in that in fantastic lair's case uh all three of us said yeah these are definitely ones that we want to write to we're excited to write to them and and we think that they're useful uh grindle rout I did the same thing where I had I think 20 or so Adventure ideas and then narrowed them down to the 10 that I thought I really was excited about that I thought people would really like that had kind of an exciting hook that you know had had all the the fun that we expect and weren't you know a big a big thing that I always keep in my mind whenever I'm designing any of this stuff is what am I giving GMS that they can't do themselves right like what am I designing that they couldn't just make on their own and that's obviously a really hard question because many GMS many GMS do make it all on their own and or they have no time to do because you know drawing Maps describing rooms creating NPCs it the big on are like nobody's going to spend 20 th000 in artwork like they're just not so you're like well I can do that right I can I can I can put a lot of resources towards and and and and and commission really good artists to make art that you would not be able to just you know be able to whip up on your own or that would be better than something these days that better than something you'd whip up on chat GPT and you know uh uh actually throw into a book uh Maps like you say good good well-designed maps right maps that are fun to navigate maps that offer interesting decisions for characters to make yeah um was a process that I learned through I don't really know how much of that I had in mind and I'd have to go look at the maps themselves for for um Fantastic Adventures because I don't I I never really was clued into the idea of like maps that are designed in the style of Janelle J quaz with level changes and secret you know secret passageways and loopbacks and you know kind of interesting things will Doyle uh excellent designer who has worked for Wizards of the Coast on a bunch of stuff had really good map ideas of like can you show the end but not let them get there until they've accomplished other things you know these kind of neat design ideas for physical locations I don't think I had those in mind early on um grer rud I did uh more so but I think even now even even more so now uh I have these ideas in mind but now I look at him and I'm like well I'm going to go take a look at the maps that Dyson logos is making because his maps are excent and he's got a thousand of them for free so you know you can go look at those designs and learn a lot from the designs that he's been putting out a t so yeah and and and most recently the thing from a from a design perspective that has helped me considerably and I've done this now for two books and kind of a third is I've I have a very healthy group of patrons that like the work that I do but are going to push back on it as well and offer very good useful feedback and for me to be able to release stuff on patreon in small bits and get feedback from them and and iterate on that feedback and then expand it a little more and then put that back out there and get feedback on that and have this like cyclic Loop of producing stuff and getting feedback on it I think has made way stronger products like lazy DM's companion is a much stronger product because all of the stuff that's in that book had been released literally one page at a time over like a year period and and I got feedback on every single page which is different than like making a big thing and then putting it out there and saying now play test it and city of arches has been that same way that like as the city has expanded significantly from the first 10 pages that I put out but i' it's been based on feedback that I've gotten from people about what they like what they don't like what makes sense what doesn't make sense you know how does this thing grow uh has been just Priceless like I the product wouldn't be nearly as good if I hadn't been going through that process so that's been a new style that's helped me uh significantly with with thank you for sharing this yeah thanks kind of similar to our approach actually because we do the survey based Adventures so so which is a of course a positive kind of feedback mechanism that we find out you know what plot twist people actually want in the adventure and obviously if we in that then they're going to like it right so you know that that's that's very similar I think and I I I also feel that the the the feedback kind of mechanisms are are super important but tell them tell tell Tomy how how we how we do this well we're a little bit different you know because as as Mike said we we make massive campaigns so which is actually obviously not preferred by by everybody you know it's a because people might not have time to play you know a 900 pager for two years but I think this reflects our preferences so your question was what sort of what sort of Adventures we like we always enjoy these long campaigns where you can evolve and and and and and and that are very intricate and and our main thing is is I think sandbox Adventures which lend themselves to huge areas with with many locations and all of them kind of interconnected and and you know building a whole world in sandboxes and you know connected by main plot threads and side quests and you know um everything with something unique so I I think another another one for us is which is very important is is that to to keep it fresh you know because all of us have been playing for you know me and Gabor for 30 plus years so you know we always see the same monster the same there's a limited number of of elements that you can work with but of course it's infinite so we can always put some kind of twist on on things you know that's also because you know we we work by the SRD so we don't we have limited space for new monsters which we also create but but we have to work with the troll so let's make it a mutant mutant troll with three arms you know um and all of that either build a character around it or add the new feature or make it a subvar variant or or something like that yeah go ahead Tomy I'm sorry yeah and just in terms of process so our process uh is of course we start with the survey we have a a a plot concept uh you know that we come up with and then a story flow so we start from the plot um and then lately we've been doing you know flowcharts to kind of connect the the plot threads to each other and then we go into several rounds of of uh uh you know concepting and adding details and changing things and um so but but very fluid it's a fluid process for us and obviously the we're the counter example to to a big conglomerate is because there's you know two of us with with gor so um we're we're basically the ones that come up with everything and we can easily change everything because of that it's really strange for me that Wizards can but I'm I'm really not into I really don't want to to to take time and go into discussing how possibly uh Wizards works but it's really strange that they they can go back and and can go a higher level back and say look this this is this ain't going to work so let's come up with something smoother uh we do this many times we have antagonists who have either a subass or something that hides their true identities or they canot be divined or all that but but you know hanging the whole Adventure on such a a a measly idea is is not really a good one I mean they should and everybody better makes the whole thing brittle right when you have a br you don't want you don't want to have an adventure where one thing or one bit of knowledge ruins everything ruin the whole thing right but are you a discovery writer are you like changing everything as you move along or or or you you have the I mean if we focus you told us how when and what books but if you focus let's zoom in on one Adventure or just just you know a gen one Adventure in general to put it so or you sit down you're in the bathtub you're thinking you know on the the beach I don't know where if you have a beach next to you or whatever walking the dog or whatever yeah walk walking in the woods walking in the woods that's what we do here as well so um hurting children around but but uh what when you have these you know I will write these story so what do you have first because for us it was uh very easy with the um before you answer can I just give you a hint on what I'm trying to ask here so we we were playing and said okay let's let's we cannot we cannot play enough we need to make this or work okay so that's why this way we could do something do it all do it a lot yeah and then okay what to write and then we had this discussion and and then we could not desend and said okay let's make a survey let's make a survey and see what other people like you know that simple simple simple as that and then they constrained our infinite infinite creativity into into boundaries you know they said they want Dark Angels to be the creatures ruling the ancient times you know and then we were okay that okay good one um and and then we worked with all that so that constrained us and then we had these we have created actually based on the survey we have created the regions and whenever we write an adventure now this is where I want to get to we we know already know okay this is going to be an urban something this is going to be a sea Adventure this is going to be a regular fantasy Kingdom this is going to be barbarians on the mountains um so so we have that constraint already so how do you come up with the idea and how do you see the whole process through you know are you do you already have the the complete I will tell you in a moment or Tommy will tell I will tell you in a moment how we do it but I'm really interested to hear and maybe you know hopefully our viewers are also interested in learning from you how how you craft literally craft Hammer iron andil what do you do you know how do you do it from scratch sure so so specifically for Adventures uh I I feel like I'm pretty boring about it because I I have a particular I I have like Adventure structures that I keep in my mind that I think work well and and we were talking about the whole idea of like leaving blanks and I feel I actually had a when I was doing some freelance work for Wizards of the Coast back in the fourth edition days uh one of their producers kind of gave me a thing where like I made a funny name for a NPC that I that I liked and he just wrote a note back and said players are going to come up with their funny names on their own you don't need to give them one right like they're like they're gonna they're going to run with that and that bit of information kind of expanded out even further into like a lot of times the levels of complexity that can hit an adventure are brought on by how it plays out at the table more so than what the author puts into the adventure itself so uh my my my adventure structures and and again I don't write a lot of I mean I say I have few dozen so I guess it's not none um but like I don't I don't write those big sprawling ones right I don't I don't have huge plots other than these campaign guides that I do write and that might be you know something to look into something to dive into a little bit more but um for Adventures like I'm a big location-based adventure writer I really like having an interesting location and I often follow the model of like the characters are hired by an NPC to go do a thing at a place right and that and that structure of you know NPC hires the characters to go to a location and accomplish something yeah is like the model that I use for like pretty much but that's that's the hook that's a separate thing so you you start from location yeah but it spells out like what they're doing and why can be you know can can sort of grow so an example of like a a grle rot Adventure that I've got had a priest you know there there was this the whole concept of the grindle rout is that there's this weird almost Black Stone likee root structure that has laced through this Giant mountain and the the stonework of this weird place like they're almost like tendrils or tentacles but they're frozen in place is that they're unbreakable you can't you can't shatter them you can't break them and anybody who would might collapse the entire mountain right it's like a root structure that's all through this mountain so one of the adventures is like hey we found out that there's a priest and he thinks he's going to be able to break these things he showed that he can and he's headed to this big Central column in the center of the mountain and if he accomplishes what he does it could collapse the entire Mountain down he thinks it has to be done because he thinks that these roots are part of an elder evil so you know stop him somehow and you know that's like the premise of the adventure and then I like okay what does the map look like of the location and what are some interesting encounters that the the players might run into while they're making their way to the priest and then the situation with the priest can go a few different ways because he's not really a bad guy he just doesn't he thinks that this is evil and he thinks like if we don't do this now it's going to be far worse so we need to do it but you also think yeah but if you do it you're going to destroy the whole town full of people that we love yeah so there's lots of like interesting ways that the characters can kind of work can kind of work with them but pretty much all the adventures kind of have that that core structure and then I and then I fill out that structure what is it that they're trying to accomplish at the place what does the location itself like what is interesting about the place that they're going to what was it before what is it now what are the you know who are the antagonists that you're going to have to deal with um you know these are all kinds of questions that I then fill out and then look at it and say is this interesting enough that a GM couldn't have just made this up on their own quickly right so like I want to know that the thing that I made is interesting and unique enough that somebody would read it and go oh that's interesting I didn't I didn't think about that I want to run that right and yet still have common elements like you're going to an old Crypt where a vampire is hanging out right only the the the Crypt where the vampire is hanging out has a town around it and she's been feeding off of the town for centuries they know she's been feeding off of them but that's the symbiotic relationship that they have she gives them you know greater power and extra life and they give her you know nice fresh tasty blood and then you're involved and it's like do you keep you know do you stop this symbiotic relation stus Co yeah right and so you know I I I try to come up and and look at whatever the end result is but I think yeah when I when I would sit down and you know I'm think ruins of the grener RO is the one that I'm thinking about where like I would write basically a paragraph to start to say what is this adventure about and then I'd look at the paragraph and say is that cool enough to then take to the next step is that cool enough to you know flesh out the location flesh out the story that's going on there um but I but I do have a a pretty firm grasp on the idea of like keeping because again I don't write giant sprawling campaign Adventures I write I write shorter typically right shorter Adventures when they're Adventures at all um you know is is it is it straightforward enough that a DM can get their hands around and say yeah I know what this is about and I can run this and that'll be it won't be hard for me to run and they're and they're they're resilient right that they the adventures themselves aren't going to be they're not going to fall apart because one thing happened right they're not gonna finding out that Mor Kan finding out like finding out that Mor Kane is the bad guy so I have some where like you you discover that somebody wasn't who they said they were going to be but you're the way you you don't have really an option the way that it's coming about you don't have an option other than discovering it after the fact because they're not even around right they're not like hanging out with you and they're your pal and then aha I'm actually a secret Assassin of the the you know the blood order you know the the blood elves it's like no you found out that there was a priestess who was at this Temple and had been there for a hundred years she's an Elven Priestess and it turns out that before that 100 years she was known as the king killer because she was an assassin that killed numerous Kings and now some kids vandalized her place and now she's gonna go hunt those kids down and kill them you don't get a chance to intercept her before she started doing the things that she's doing you're kind of following the trail yeah of what she's done discovering these elements as you go until the final conf a okay so basically basically you get inspired by a location and and an end result of a story that will work that will play out and you fill in the gaps in between the your Hook and the end result and then figure out what works best and what is least probably yeah I don't I don't I don't really so one thing I try to avoid and I don't know that I've avoided this completely is I don't think about a story right I don't think about an arc that is going to occur I don't want to I probably do but I don't want to I want to think about setting things up I want to set up a situ create a problem that needs to I want to create the problem and create the environment around it and then give the GM and the players the freedom to figure out what they're going to do so I don't know how the characters are going to deal with the priest of course who's trying to blow up the big Central pillar this is our philosophy as well we set up set it up and then and then let and I've I've even sorry I was one more thing so I've even taken it to a new stage where I have two new things that I've worked on both for the city of arches one of them I think will almost certainly be in the book The other one maybe depending on what page count looks like which are like uh adventure toolkits and so an adventure toolkit it doesn't have everything tied together but it has like a central location and descriptions of all the different areas of the location it's got inhabitants and the behaviors of those inhabitants at the location but not necessarily spelled out room by room it has hooks on why the characters might go to this location and it has sort of like situations and things that could evolve depending on how things go but they're all separate from one another so that you don't instead of the typical Adventure design where you go into a chamber and there's three Orcs that are there playing cards you instead say well here's what the chamber looks like and then over here there's so many Orcs that are often inhabiting this place and they could be in any of these locations M and you I'm I'm offering it all up to GMS to say ah now I have this setting and this sit and this place and I have the inhabitants and I have like random tables for what could happen in different chambers and I've got reasons why the characters might go here and then they piece together the adventure that they want to run from all of those pieces they've got the location pre-done they've got the situation pre-done they have secrets and Clues you know big thing from my return to Lazy dungeon master of what are information the characters might discover when they explore this place regardless of where they go yeah and it's all split out into those separate pieces so that you can build it and I i' I've written two of them one of them I've now run a couple of times and uh and it it works well for me because I can use the same scenario multiple times and it plays out in totally different ways M so one of them is like a noble house and the woman who runs the noble house is is like an evil cultist kind of person but one time you might go there she's running a big party for all the the ho pooy of the city and your job is to kind of investigate what's going on at the Manor while this big party is going on but in another one she might be bringing all of her secret cult people down into the basement to go do some terrible thing and you have to infiltrate it and there isn't a party going so there's different ways that you can approach this one location depending on the hooks and depending on the situation which could evolve and I I like that structure a lot and and the people that I've that I've offered it to patrons of s FL have seen it like it and I'm eager to kind of put it into city of arches and see how that goes but that's been another way that I've been thinking about this this whole design I think uh I think this works perfectly well and this is very similar again to to what we're doing on on probably a longer uh campaign level uh where you need to evolve the story into new phases basically we either do that with locations or we either do do that with certain events that change the the the the status quo or the the the flow of the story but uh um yeah um I just wanted to tell you how we do it because uh it might be interesting to you and very similar but again we we start from the survey we get inspired and our creativity gets Bound By by these by these answers that we get so now we have to work with those and it's always fun that they throw up these these volleyballs which we which we hit you know and and and we do the same back to them in our adventures where we where we leave some part some minor Parts open you know what is this tower on the shore no entrance and that's it and then players come up with their ideas for that or or a name how he gets the name or why is this and that we we leave actually we took this I think we learn this or we we get soaked in this basically in for Forgotten Realms the the campaign set where it was all little open hooks you know that you could incorporate into a complete adventure they just left these half sentences there which is perfectly inspiring and the DM could work with um but we we we we go with the location the same way we create the location we we know that this is a sea Adventure there's going to be an island it's going to be ruled by half dragon slavers and then we start to to incorporate put put in front of us all of these survey feedback you know information and try to VI it into into a single story um and and we of course based on this we create the location itself so the World building um which which which is basically the environments the threat religions ecology economy you know all of these stop how do they trade what what you know they trade with gemstones you know they they they they they don't use coins or something like that you know what are the what what's the law you know of the land and and who who who who are the the ones who who who who keep the law you know and enforce the law and and um and then we we go to the we go to the to the plots and try to try to which is actually the hardest to to pull um especially on a long campaign um where we where we usually run not like you that we have an umbrella stuff that they are each separate connected with this town that you just mentioned and then you can there's few or or not even any connection between these but we need to of course create a Sandbox and and and create uh we usually create several plots that are stretched all over these I don't know hundreds of literally hundreds of places all building up your information about and advancing the story on all three lines simultaneously some of these main plots come together some maybe one of them just you know self-contained going on its own or has it's repercussion of the other two or whatever but but these plots evolve through subplots and en encounters and and even these little volleyballs we throw like a little piece of information in the corner of the room that you can find and adds to your so of course it's a Sandbox so you won't probably find all of them but we try to you know give you 80% of it through as you progress so that you can you can find your way and and and resolve the story and of course we had you know based on these surveys and and they request to have all of the villain to be paladins all the time I don't know why but we create these paladins who and all these villains and and factions and of course the the villains the Allies we put them into factions the neutrals the neutral factions and and try to you know spies the whole already set setting with these so for for example the new adventure Urban Adventure uh here in Europe we have this I don't know if it's just Eastern Europe or the rest of Europe or wherever it maybe even in the world we have this we have this uh thing that um uh once a year you put put all of your stuff out of on the street like all of your on you so F not everything that you can't throw in the bin like big stuff you know like garbage you know like what well it's like a like a garbage day yeah garbage day so like you put all your sofas and ruin television and fridge and all that out in the streets so we were like okay maybe they do this in this Urban Adventures and and we always have people who come up and try to dig some treasure out of it you know like some some do it for fun but some do it for a living you know they take the metal out of it or whatever you know so we created this faction in the city setting in the urban setting that the hoarders are you know going around and collecting like reaching into your garbage can and looking for stuff you threw out you know being super annoying and trying to calling calling dibs on the garbage you know yeah and selling stuff back to you and maybe you can find treasures with them that they don't even know what how valuable they you know sell you back the stuff you threw away yeah exactly um so so creating you know everything comes together but but we need to separate World building maybe I was yeah so I was watching too much Brandon Sanders Brandon Sanderson lately but he he he put it really nicely the World building the characters and the plot but that's what we do we we and then that's how we build this up and and as you said leaving the blanks is very important we leave little things and we had some some some we always try to add some flavor like in Crown the oath breaker we had the mass combats and in the sea faring Adventure we had the naval combat now in this upcoming Adventure we have running the business which is you know an encounter table some rules some roles you get lucky you get unlucky you do this well you know your trade you know whatever and then you can run a business and in your downtown you can earn money but that's just an extra flavor that you know could add to the the whole you know of of of the feeling of an urban Adventure or a naval combat to a seaf firing Adventure um yeah is it is it the two of you writing or do you like how how really you guys write all of it that's the two of you yeah we we write it we run it how long does it take you to write like something like Tor of the spell hoarder I mean it's huge like a year about a year about a year and then you also of course during this here we do the and this is one of your questions maybe we can progress to the next question which is pretty similar how to construct large adventures and what's the art process which I might answer here yeah there's so much art Tommy can Tommy can do so um but basically yeah it's it involves everything so like it's not just writing of course we do we brief the designers we run the website we do the logistics we do the printing that's amazing yeah well we don't draw so that that we have and we have right you you commission the art yeah yeah and we had to have uh one guy who's working us with us uh a fantastic uh young guy called Tony who does the support because that became quite you know exaggerating to I'm sorry not exaggerating exhausting to to handle um CU yeah I mean like Tor of the spell hord is like a you know it looks like it's about 200,000 words is that is that we never counted it it's 500 pages I I just stuck in a do word count we do that in terms of art I I know it has 1,500 hours worth of of art work wow how many pieces you know how many total pieces of art like are in I think like 450 450 pieces right that's amazing I mean because like you know so my wife and I run F flourish right we're we're we're working together and I have other partners that I that I work with to do a lot of this and it's not even close to that right like you know it's it's a lot but but again it works so that as as the art process maybe Tommy can drop it yeah I can go into that it's Christmas every day just too long don't read it's actually the the for me at least and and I'm sure for gabra as well writing for me actually the brainstorming phase of it is is the funnest so that that's that's what I enjoy the most coming up with the concepts and you know thinking about and and fin finalizing finalizing it writing is of course also super fun and and uh briefing the art and then having it materialized into a finished product also super rewarding so so those those are the the three uh for me at least the the most uh mate I I tell you I tell you rewarding uh phases of the project I think I think Mike you share the same experience with us I mean you have the same same experience like we do like every time our designers in our share chat drop a message I drop the kid I don't care about the oven being on I'm just checking my mobile what's what's next you know and they show us this sketch and oh wait wait yeah I don't care you broke your leg wait I need to check this vampire design here and then you know right IM okay his fans should be bigger and the cloak should be more like blood then yeah yeah yeah I see yeah you it hurts a lot I know so it's it's it's such a great experience to to have your thoughts and Imagination M M M materialized materialized oh such a hard word in English um yeah yeah so it's it's it's always really fun and and they are excellent they work for visards they do magic cards as well so they are excellent designers established establish artist the RO let's go to our next question maybe maybe that's finish please in terms of Art and and this is I don't know if it's Unique to us but it's it's definitely something that that we you know put into the projects is that through our our kickstarters we we uh we offer backers the chance to become NPCs in yeah I saw that right and and our families and our families and friends and friends you want to you want to be in the book yeah okay you'll be a Sprite Warrior okay cool right and and of course it's it's it's super nice to be in the book and IM more moralized in in you know fantasy setting but I 100% I I feel that the the NPC pictures are way more lifelike because they're based on actual people that's interesting so it helps the art as well so it's you know not only maybe even the immersion yeah yeah that's really interesting which which I think it was a it's not always the Volo biged muscle chicks you know standing above the the the slain Dragon yeah so um next question which is very interesting and might be helpful to Our Kind viewers um also who want to DM highlevel parties how to defend yourself against high level pieces ruining your plot and saying hey um I cast Legend L I remove the crown when he sleeps and I cast Legend lore on his face you know right yeah more more than Kanan is the killer yeah right right so how do you do that cuz we have our our how do you design why you don't so like I don't I'm thinking back so we did write that's not quite true so for in fantastic layers we wrote layers all the way up to 20th level they're kind of like tiny Adventures right there were like three chamber three chamber Adventures that you know the intention was there was like a central boss and there was like a a layer that you could drop into an existing adventure and and sort of you know you could build them out into bigger things if you wanted to um but they were really intended to be kind of small things and and we worked on a bunch of high level ones of those now in that case they were just big combat encounters so we didn't have like you know the the the risk of like how do you run a murder mystery when you have somebody who could cast you know the penar connections and talk to the gods and find out exactly what happened we're in the same situation with Toran into the spell order you can download the free chapter people there's a mystery your 16th level and we we use the subass we use the subass he's an agent cult agent he has these powers that you can't Divine them I mean there's sometimes you're put into the corner you know you don't have other options but to fight yeah yeah and so it's but but I think to me you know and high it's not even necessarily at high level play I think it can kind of happen at at any level um I feel like good Adventures like you have to say like well what would happen if they found out early like just pretend they do would the adventure still work would it still be interesting and the example that I love to bring up wasn't one that I that I published but one that I played which was uh ghost of salt marsh which was Wizards of the Coast Adventures of of sea fairing seing stuff yeah and um one of the they have a secret cult organization uh Crimson something or other and they were kind of operating behind the scenes and if you read the adventure if you if you run that that that book can either be run as separate Adventures independently or be be run as a campaign and I ran it as a campaign for two groups and really loved it and um one of the things that happened in one of the games was uh that they knew that there was like this they knew that there were these two boring factions what they didn't know is there's a third secret faction that was involved and I kind of in my head was like getting what what that secret faction is doing behind the scenes but at one point the characters released a very old vampire who had been intmed beneath the city like imprisoned beneath the city and I he was like he's way more powerful like anybody else in the town and at one point and the players half the players were like oh you know he's like a nice guy you know he's not so bad and the other half are like can't believe we released an elder vampire into this town like he's what do you think he's going to do right he's just going to kill everybody and he said look You released me and I'm very grateful for that so in return I am not going to kill all the people in this town I will only eat bad people and they'll just be like Bandits on the road who are causing problems so I'll I'll you know I'll I'll stay to your alignment you know and just kill people you don't like um and then they were still like I don't know if I trust this guy and then at one point the characters show up and this this wasn't like the characters found out it was like me thinking oh this would be kind of fun like the vampire would immediately know who this secret cult was right because like he could charm anybody so he's like so the character show up at his Manner and he says hey I've got something for you and they're like what he says you remember her and this woman comes out and she's like hi I'm so and so and they're like oh yeah she's the one that she's like she works with the other dwarves in the area and he's like yeah tell her who you really are and she's like yeah I'm actually like second in command of this secret the the Scarlet Brotherhood I'm I'm second in command of the Scarlet Brotherhood that's a secret organization and here's our whole here's a whole flowchart of all the people and here's like where we hide out and here is our secret yeah right and and and the vampire is like smiling at her and looks over at the characters the characters like oh my God like we we've completely disassembled this secret Network because we allied with this vampire and and it made it way more fun like it was so much more interesting and more fun for them to have somebody who just completely destroyed all of the secrets of this secret organization yeah and then the organization found out and they're changing their behavior so when you when you can kind of design it so that it doesn't matter if the characters find out or not um and that the the whole story can still evolve in a new way that to me is more fun and more interesting exactly than saying like no you have it has to happen a certain way that is that is that is there is that's not going to work ever if the DM wants to to to constrain the players and the the the base of this the base of this game is twofold the the player decides what to do and then the dice decides if it succeeds or not and that's that's how this play this game is played um I will give word to Tommy in a sec because I know he wants to we discussed he wants to tell something about how we consider high level Adventures but this is the say I just wanted to grab the opportunity to say that this is what you exactly you asked in your video how do we manage you know sea faring yeah right like you could wind walk and you could teleport and you could turn into Airness like I hadn't really read your whole do matter it's the same is yeah no no no worries I tell you in a moment all the all 500 pages of it uh the the thing is that the thing is that it doesn't matter we have a Sandbox the point is that you uncover a mystery find some stuff uh talk to some talk to the right people maybe even meet the the sub quests you know they are fun they are somehow maybe one some a few of them are interconnected you just need to travel you travel by by ship you travel by windwalk you travel by whatever means it doesn't matter we even give in the sh in the in the story we give you a um an apparatus of quish you know you can you can travel however you want under sea oversea whatever the Random Encounters will be different uh you might not even meet them you know because you're wind walking and super jet speeding through the realm but you you might miss Naval combat or you might want to land on a ship and help in Naval Combat because the DM evolves a situation into something like that but it's not you're not bound to travel with a ship at all you know and that's the that's the beauty of it you know and that's the same stuff as you're saying yeah yeah yeah I've run it like so in Eon for example I ran an eon campaign that I loved and the characters got an Airship and you know you're like well I guess we don't have to worry about Random Encounters going along the road find your and then I'm like well but every so often you're getting attacked by like Angry silver dragons or whatever they're around the right and a rock and I remember my players like you know why do we spend all this money as this Airship we still get hit by Random Encounters we should have just taken apart you can't avoid you know right and the guys on the road would have been far easier than these jackasses flying up here actually it was funny I I calculated how many hexis people can travel in in windwalk you know yeah oh really with windwalk to be like 32 per day you the whole map the whole map is like 50 hexes 50 hexes across so yeah I mean and that's really a fifth edition thing right like Shadow dark that never happens like Shadow dark you're you know like there you know it's it's really interesting to play a different style of game where like light is always a problem you know because in in fifth edition you know food never matters like after once you hit like level three light never matters food never matters if you have a priest if you have a priest but you can you can I I kind of like sometimes to play these survival Adventures to go against you know you know no food it's cold right maybe maybe it's more the twoo RPGs that we play like that but you know in in mondan world but but uh yeah that's also and we we have a maxim with with the with Gabby with Gabor is uh you know we always think what would four Dwarven barbarians do in this yeah when you ride the adventure yeah so no no magic nothing how do how do these guys solve it yeah yeah we need to take care of those little DWS all the time do do you think about the opposite of like what would for wizards wizard of we have to and and I think play testing definitely helps you know so that that's that's super important that that in terms of motivations and balancing and workarounds yeah you know what would what would the legend and and in Torrance because it's a high level we always had to think what would the legend Lord and reveal and we even wrote it in you know it's an option so if you cast Legend Lord you you know everything yeah and it doesn't hurt you know more information you can make better choices yeah we make we we play this actual uh Play video or series with these uh very nice friends of ours and they are all non-c casters basically I mean there's a paladin there's a ranger but they can you know they can get to information through spells you know and and it's always always like oh they are missing out on so much information so much and they're like ah okay whatever okay but but uh but they will they will find all that out it's just they will find it out later through the game you know learning from the game not not in advance because all these Legend Lords and Bs and wizards and Sorcerers and warlocks and Priests they could they could easily you know get the information beforehand and adjust their story accordingly um so that's you know again what players do what characters they bring what the dice roles and the story needs to be stable at all times and that's I think a very important thing um there was a yeah Mike you rais that character agency question so how how to influence yeah that's what I wanted to get to yeah which is touches on this this topic yeah um how do you how do how do I maintain character agency I mean I think that idea of situation-based design helps where you know thinking about um you know instead of worrying about how what the characters are going to do um just kind of setting up the situation overall so that whatever they do there are options available to them to kind of navigate it and some of those might be much more effective than others I think like when you're trying to get something to fit into a certain amount of time that can be tricky like you know what if they find the secret entrance right away they just get right to the boss and they skip 28 rooms of of stuff right so a little bit of the design to kind of say like okay if they do they do bypass this what happens or if they bypass it is there a way that this can kind of turn around I think I think that matters a lot um one of the and i' I've talked about this in other ones which is the idea of like lightning rods that a lot of time this is more of like an combat thing but I think it can probably also relate to um uh all all of the different kind of capabilities that characters can bring which is instead of trying to resist the things that characters bring to the table you lean into them heavily uh the the common example is like throw tons of low-level Undead against clerics right like let them have opportunities to cast turn Undead and destroy a 100 skeletons yeah um you know throw your you know put in huge creatures that have terrible Charisma saving throws just to be banished right because you you you want players to feel good about having banish and using banish and also make it a tactical choice of like we don't want to get hit by that you know like a rock is a really good one a rock is a low Charisma High hitting 5V monster that's perfect for banish right because it's not going to it doesn't have legendary very resistant so it's not going to resist it and that way you get rid of it for a while while you're doing whatever else you're doing yeah um but I think the same is true of like you know there are characters who picked the is it the alert feat that gives you like a plus five bonus on perception checks yeah yeah advantage on perception and plus five on your bon on your passive and like you know it's not uncommon to have like passives of 21 right like a passive perception of 21 and you know in that case you lean in by like showing them all the stuff that they managed to avoid or the stuff they managed to discover because they made that choice yeah instead of saying like oh sorry it was a dc22 right like you know instead of trying to resist like oh I don't want them to learn the secret and they should still have to roll it's like they made a choice to pick a feet and to put their ability scores all into an area so that they can learn a fair bit without having to make any R yeah you know leaning into it and I think that yeah from the design from an adventure design standpoint I think there are options it's it it works better at the table itself because you know what your players are bringing and you can't really say I mean I guess you could offer things like you know here's an encounter where you know if they're gonna want to use area area of effect spells because there's going to be a lot of small dudes and then they're going to want to use crowd control on these great big dudes um you know you could you could put advice like that in there and you could also say like especially for higher level stuff I mean there's a reason why I don't write a lot of high level stuff and that's because it's just easier to write lowle stuff um and and you know that you you could write in things of like look if if people are able to discover this easily this is where it goes instead of like forcing it down that one path again right and sort of saying like oh no like you can't you know for some reason you can't use speak with dead to figure out what happened um it's like no just assume speak with dead would work and then what would they learn what would they learn from that yeah I think I think Dynamic secrets Clues also help with this the idea of like here's a bunch of information the characters could learn without necessarily tying it to anything means that a GM can drop those in when the players do come up with creative ways to kind of learn information that you might not have even thought of and a and a published Adventure because you don't know who the characters are uh it gives some flexibility to the GM to say hey however they figured this out history checks or you know talking to people or you know Legend and lore spells or whatever can reveal whichever of these secrets you think might be you know might be relevant to the situation I I really consider these as loose kind of sort of loose ends like the speak with dead or the Divination spells and you just need to give some advice to your readers on what will happen if this is discovered so that they are not left without any ideas you know as a DM to to how how how this will ruin or not ruin what the information in the future especially in case of 900 100 page book or 500 page book what future information they miss that we so we always always always tie these loose ense and and give advice on on how to to to use them and uh yeah um but I I have to say that that as a as a DM I love giving out information so that that's as much information as I I'm happy to share the the secrets with the players yeah they're designed to be discovered yeah and they can make better decisions and they can make better plans and and yeah sometimes it's too much when you have to give out like 20 pieces of the the the a concrete example is when we play the the under Mountain you know mad Mage lein thing uh gab was the DM I played a a low master you know Wizard and every layer yeah we started with Legend lore but it was funest you know because we knew of course this is what we do this is what happened here and layout you know yeah and I didn't reveal everything but I revealed enough to make it you know interesting for them so they could they could delve in they could prepared but there were some surprises left sure and inevitable things whatever you know there's a dragon in the middle well well there was no dragon but there's there's a threat in the middle there are drw here and then right and then are are you a big fan of D did I notice well yeah right are you're asking like that's what you ask in the game or you asking me if I'm a no I'm I'm just I'm just just totally IM immedia stressing into this idea or thought I just saw the design on your you know Channel you're you're writing underd dark Adventures like are you into the underd dark a lot I I I I like so I did it for grener rude in particular because I wanted to have like that central theme um I actually have a fun thing that been doing with d i kind of picked it up a bit from Eon um and I think it helps get away from sort of the you know the problematic nature of of of d as a species um that they're all evil and they have a matriarchal society and all L and everything like that all yes which is for me I like to say Dr are elves and they can look like elves you know their their appearances are as widely you know as as as wide in nature as elves are and in some cases you could be dealing with an elf who is actually a d and not know it right and and Dr is almost like more of and and there could be and that kind of gets you know I don't know if that gets away from the idea of good Dr but like a d of Loth wouldn't necessarily be someone that you'd be able to identify on site unless they're wearing like all of their Lo gear right they got a big spider neck if you have you know a good idea like big lth headdress um but that that has been kind of more fun for me because I can have circumstances where there are people who are like oh no they're they're elves of saline Saloon and they're great and that she said actually no that's a lie they're actually you know their Dr of Loth and you didn't know it and so U Eon kind of did that a little bit and um I'm running a sort of a very loose greyhawk uh uh setting now and that's something that I added in there which I think has made them far more interesting like instead of just the kind of complete you know idea that that there is a a race who is fundamentally tied to Loth which even Wizards of the Coast is getting away from now yes they are escaping but but I think for me more interesting is the idea that like and and I'm doing this across the board I do it with all of the species Orcs And hobgoblins and everybody else you know nolles are an interesting one um but I think because I like the nolles from midgard from from uh Cobalt press that that they aren't you know they NES don't necessarily have to be demonic spawn of yigu that they could be they can have children too is the idea that like your your your your species it's it's it's it's it's easy to kind of just say look Orcs of grum are a bunch of [ __ ] right but like Orcs of T of tier are not and and then it's it's who you believe and what you follow more so than you were I'm just asking I was just asking because I'm a we I we I don't know we both actually started out with these underd dark and the menar and boxit set when we were like really like 12y old kids and it influenced me so much I love the Dr setting and what Mr salvator did to this to to the to my brain um and my creativity um and and just to reflect on what you're saying we also have this in our world you can have the the we have the bog bear running the casino and the the null uh being you know the bar made or whatever so that they are not you know tied to their Origins naturally because it also spices up and mixes up it does it actually World a bit yeah right beyond beyond what I you know and I'm I'm a good believer in making the game better representative game that people are comfortable playing in orign it also just makes it more fun right and so you can still have Beno BR and and lo and the of course that's not forbidden for the drought still do it they can still do it if they want they're not the only ones right it's not it's not like you know you know they're not they're not all they're not yeah you don't you know you don't have to say oh they're all bad it's like no there's plenty of plenty of yeah um there there was there was a I don't know if you want to reflect on the the character agency question more uh Tommy um but maybe we could move to the to the to the last question about uh keeping it fresh which is especially when you're playing for 30 years I mean how long have you been playing RPGs yeah about 35 years yeah years right so keeping it fresh is always um challenging to say the least and and and keeping every part of it fresh you know the fresh dungeon the fresh plot the fresh and the fresh character the fresh world the fresh monster so we will tell you how we do it and where we where we what what and hopefully this will help others as well what uh um what methodology we follow where you can place into X and Y and Zed to to to to make it work but how do you do this you know and yeah for for me it's about the story and the lore and the the you know I'm when I can wrap you know and I think we do this in all our game all of our games when we can wrap them in new ideas of the story and the lore uh it kind of makes everything fresh right that like I don't know how many freaking encounters I've had where the characters go after a bunch of cultists in a in a old Temple right but it's a lot right and I've been doing that for 35 years but when you talk about who they're worshiping and the weird masks that they wear and the strange stuff that they find in their book variability rituals that they're involved in right like all that like I mean I've been playing with the same group for 20 years you know in my home game and they've they've you know I've got I've got players who have literally been in 20 years worth of cult fights they still like it like we joke about it we joke oh hey look Cults right like who have thought it oh You Adventure we will have Cults a lot of them you you you love them well and I love Cults because like you never feel bad about killing them right yeah yeah when we talk about that like you are what you do kind of idea like Cults are you know depending on the cult like it's it's sometimes it's fun to put Cults where they don't really cause any harm right they're just weird right and they're like oh it's just weird but I guess there's nothing wrong with it right oh wait no they're throwing a baby in a pit May that there you go so um but I I really think that lore helps setting setting helps a lot um you know wrapping it in information about who the who the gods are and the history of the location and old Wars and and lots of different things that we can sort of wrap it around and you know I mean midgard Cobalt presses midgard I've run a couple of campaigns in the midgard setting now and like it's a pretty straightforward fantasy setting but it's got some really interesting ideas to it and I've run it for players that also have been playing for 35 years and they're like man I love midgard like this setting is really cool like there's a lot of new things a lot of neat things a lot of familiar things like it has the whole Norse you know all one thing about midgard is it has sort of like real world connections to lots of things so the gods of the Southlands are very kind of you know Egyptian sort of you know Middle Eastern gods and the ones of the north are very much sort of Norse gods Gods but but slightly changed like changed just enough that it's still you you still want to learn about it um I think that helps a lot I think um like I was one one Adventure I bashed a bunch of watsi Adventures but I'll I'll point out one that I really like which is uh dragon of storm wreck isle is the new starter Adventure uh in their in the starter set that they put out a couple years ago and it could be super boring if it was like a bunch of characters are going around an island you know going into the caves and fighting mikid and going to you know a shipwreck and fighting zombies and Ghouls and whatever but that Adventure did a really good job of introducing the the dragon you know uh uh the dragon gods and introducing orcus and introducing you know like the lore of Forgotten Realms to brand new players right brand new brand new groups and it means that even as a you know I ran that adventure for people where I think like everybody there had played for 30 years and knew the Forgotten Realms like the back of their hands and it was still fun for them to to learn about these factions because their characters were learning about them for the first time uh I think that that that really helped um and I think some advice that that in our products that we could offer to GMS sometimes you don't want to define something you want to describe something this is something I I I I I had reinforced in a game I ran recently where like I was describing these Bulbul bellied weird bipedal insect creatures that had spidery eyes and fingers that were too long and mandibles and their lumbering about and everyone's like God what the hell are these I'm like Eder caps they're like oh oh right and it was like but in the descriptions the players didn't quite pick up what the hell these things were yet yeah and it was scary until I accidentally wrote Eder cap on my like little thing that keeps track of hit points they like oh Eder caps right and I'm like if you describe this like in tattooed husk monstrosity who's wielding a axe the size of a carriage door in one hand you're like that's scary as hell but if you say you're getting attacked by an ogre like oh it's an ogre yeah yeah so so being able to to to describe something instead of defining something can make things that we fought a hundred times can still be interesting yeah and and what what we what we're playing around with very heavily is is is making the ogre limp half you know maybe give little details yeah put put a little rule even around it you know if you you know if you attack from the left it's different than if you attack from the right because it has the right eye you know and and and as I said the I mentioned uh the the troll that is a is a mutant and has three arms and and and we also have at caps and then we just made it large you know so really scary yeah yeah and and and and and playing around and this is just monsters and we're not only talking monster so when you're designing dungeons I think for me it's dungeons the most problematic most challenging because you need to come up with something really fresh you know we had the rock nest with the baby chicks in it and Crown of the oath breaker and you're running like inside the nest and they can pick you out and there's somebody living in the Rocks Nest actually um making a little space for herself um or or or or or or even the the gibbering mou dungeon which is a gigantic gibbering mouther uh which actually was of course again inspired by the survey because they said they want something living to be the dungeon but but you know you you can't come up with a you know coming up with a second living entity or you know some sort of creature to be inside is is is not such a good I mean in the next book if you have another whatever that you can be inside is not really that fun so need to you need to come up with something totally new and also populate it well and put it into the adventure that's really challenging for me at least but we manage um and yeah and all I think when I said XYZ it's always basically I can break it down to one thing the variations that that need to be implemented because that's very important mhm I think but we we always include a a mimic of some sort in our adventures and and and all always some we we creature is is always a new one yeah for me it's definitely cultist I just I riddle we also love cultist we have cultists all around the adventure and always again the the the next one secep of the the the lightbringer is going to be about basically two Cults racing against each other and the player needs to be in middle and race against both and yeah that's perfect lots of Cults uh involved so yeah um well I think uh we are we have gone through our questions any any other questions you might have we still have some some time no I mean I'm kind of I'm in awe of the the products you put out for the for the two of you and for the time that you put into them that's fantastic like really really cool really cool product iate uh opinion this um yeah we we love the game as you can see as sure you do as well and our our viewers as well we just love it and we love to and and we hope that uh uh we can get our uh Community involved you know through the surveys through our Discord feedback through our well little small group but play tests and and and get all incorporated into everything and and incorporate everything every feedback into one as as you do with patreon uh Y and and and and do it like a hive mind like together sort of it really yeah it really helps getting that Fe feedback yeah it I've often heard that I've often heard advice that says like you shouldn't get feedback too early in a process but I don't know that I found that to be the case like I no I have enjoyed getting feedback as early as I can get it and I've never found it to be like demotivating to to hurt a to hurt a situation it almost always the the other thing and it's it's a form of feedback is the game logs that we read on Discord you know people playing crown of the oath breaker mostly still into it being super long and taking them years and and and old the you know how they they sorted stuff out and how how certain situations evolved and and how players solved certain you know there's there's unlimited number of solutions and it's lovely that it's it's always different you know it's always it's different for everybody and that that that that makes that teaches us that teaches us you know how the the this volleyball with throw how they they they spike it and where it bounces and what results that has and okay we will incorporate this knowledge into the next one and hopefully get better ourselves like our dear viewers are getting more experienced and informed by watching us in mind blast Mike thank you so much for your time oh you bet this has been this been a great time let's do this sometimes again you bet you bet and and uh thank you for all of our kind viewers Please Subscribe and like and spread the word join us next time and um yeah thank you so much thank you byebye guys take care guys take care bye-bye [Music]

Channel: Elderbrain

Views: 3,150

Keywords: Dungeons, dragons, gameplay, d&d, character creation d&d, d&d homebrew, d&d rules explained, d&d storytime, best d&d moments, d&d lore, d&d live stream, d&d campaign ideas, d&d funny moments, d&d world building, d&d player tips, d&d adventure, d&d class guide, d&d monster lore, d&d miniatures painting, d&d tutorial, d&d review, dnd, rpg, d20, ttrpg, criticalrole, critrole, dandd, dndbeyond, fantasy, tabletop, roleplaying, liverpg, 5e, actual, role, dice, dungeon, master, actualplay, games, monster

Id: dj8swTyKmgs

Length: 94min 43sec (5683 seconds)

Published: Fri May 31 2024