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Launching Your Campaign
48 Plays1 year ago
Join Mark and Ben as they tackle the exciting topic of launching an RPG campaign. Starting a new campaign can feel daunting, but fear not—we're here to guide you through the process of laying a solid foundation for your adventures. From brainstorming compelling stories and worlds to establishing player expectations, this episode covers essential steps to ensure a successful campaign launch. Whether you're a first-time game master or a seasoned storyteller seeking fresh inspiration, tune in for practical tips, creative strategies, and insightful discussion that will empower you to embark on your next campaign with confidence and creativity.
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Transcript
Introduction and Frodo's Analogy
00:00:00
Speaker
It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.
00:00:32
Speaker
folk music this time, Mark. Yeah, I think we should just go with it. It's great. I like it. I can't imagine many other kinds of music in front of a Tolkien track like that. Certainly not something on the realm of um a metal track. or ah But you know I don't want to sell those guys short. We'll see. I mean, that synthwave probably wouldn't have worked as well. Yeah, I agree. Tolkien was not so much of a synthwave fan, as I'm told. Yeah.
Meet the Hosts: Mark and Ben
00:00:56
Speaker
Well, hey, everybody. Welcome to the Tabletop Tune Up podcast. My name is Mark. This is Ben, and we're going to help you tune up your games. Ben, how is your week of gaming going? My week of gaming is going great. um I have just this week got a chance to make characters for what will be a play test of an upcoming game.
00:01:17
Speaker
that is very popular and well known, but I can't say anything about because it's under NDA, so it's my secret. What? I thought you were working on a traveler game. What happened to that? Well, that was that was earlier, and I'm still working on the traveler game. This was somebody else's game that was run. so you know Look, there's all of the above. This is not an either-or thing. It's a both-and. You can't come in here to this podcast with that NDA BS. Well, maybe I should have said nothing, but I didn't. So moving on. This is a safe place, Ben.
Small Audience Reflections
00:01:48
Speaker
You and I are the only people listening to this podcast. That's right. For our three listeners. Tell me. Thanks, Mom. I don't think she really cares. Well. Hey, as for my week, Ben, we had a... Wait, no, no, no. I should ask you about your week. Watch this. Mark, how was your week? I care. I'm a friend. It's nice to see you asked.
00:02:06
Speaker
Then I had been on a gaming drought for, for her several weeks, as you know, all of our games were on hiatus and then the clouds broke and the game appeared and we actually played this last, uh, last night. Actually, it was fun. I had a great time. game You, handed out many hit points worth of damage to our party. Yeah. Y'all deserved it. They deserved it. There was, to be sure, there was a lot of damage going every which way there were bad guys galore. environmental hazards. Yeah, it was it was really actually one of my favorite games I've had in a long time. It was just that that session worked out really good. I'm very happy with it. But so maybe just because I'm happy that I'm gaming again. So enough about our games. Let's let's let's talk about
00:02:54
Speaker
Let's talk about
Launching Campaigns: Excitement and Humility
00:02:55
Speaker
gaming. That's right. Let's do something that our listeners will actually care about and be interested in, which is their games. so yeah you guys This is going to be one of our favorite episodes. It's a good episode to do early on. We're going to talk about how to launch your campaign well. so launching your campaign. We're going to talk about middles and ends some other time. But today, the question is, how do you get the kindling started? How do you get that fire started that's going to then sustain you over a long period of time? So um Mark, ah what's the first thing we should be thinking about when we think about how to launch a game?
00:03:31
Speaker
you know ah I just want to touch base on the little token intro about the dangerous business. He's talking about a little bit about the fear and apprehension one might have about taking that step out the front door. And that's how I feel about whenever you're launching a game, I think you always feel it in the pit of your stomach. There's a level of excitement and there's also just that that new thing. That's right. You don't know what's going to happen. Where will this campaign go? Exactly. so I think one thing to to start out with is let's let's approach this with some humility. ah How many of our games have ever gone the distance? Not how many. i mean You and I have been playing games since we were teenagers. We are now middle-aged men. and we've played exactly I've played with you exactly one game that's gone to level 20, let's say.
00:04:20
Speaker
There's so few and for all the the failed games I've had, it's, you have to approach this with a little bit of humility because you want to, and in within in that regard, you want to start small because you can't really think about such a big task. Let's think about a small task. And I think that's, that's actually kind of an important bit of expectation setting too, right? Like I don't think of the other games I've played with you as failures. Some of them weren't intended to go long distance like that. A great game is one where you and your friends can tell a complete story. And that might be a few sessions or it might be a couple of years. Whatever size it is, that's fine. But when you're starting a game, when you're launching a brand new campaign, it's important to just start slowly and start small and kind of start feeling your way through it.
Starting with Short Campaigns
00:05:06
Speaker
You might even want to purposefully have the expectation that this is going to be a short game. Here's a few examples of when you might want to try a short game intentionally.
00:05:15
Speaker
and you might not even want to set your ambitions that far. One might be when you want to try out a new game system. You don't know if you're going to like it. You don't know if your players are going to like it. So it's good to keep a short form game so it can be experimental. Yeah, there's always going to be somebody who's like, I don't like D6 systems. I refuse to play them. and you know Or i don't you know I don't want to rule D20s and blah, blah, blah. So you just don't know. So let's not waste a lot of effort. Let's try to figure out if they want to play that game, if they like it. And similarly, sometimes you're trying on a new campaign setting, and maybe not everybody likes that. I have players who definitely don't like post-apocalyptic settings, regardless of what system it is. You could have the best game system in the world, and they're just like, I do not want to play in a world where it's been destroyed. What? You don't want to play in my Dark Sun game, Ben? I mean, I might play in you.
00:06:07
Speaker
I might play in your dark sun. No, I won't play in your dark sun game. You keep your dark sun game to yourself. How dare you? Well, so look, you might be trying out a new game system. You might be trying out a new campaign setting, or you might actually be trying out new group members and seeing how everybody plays together. You don't want to try to commit brand new people that have never played together to a long-term thing. Yeah, this is something I've actually dealt with a lot and in a ah game club I ran some time ago.
Running a Game Club
00:06:34
Speaker
I was seeing new players all the time. And it was interesting to see what groups stuck together afterwards, which ones gelled. You just, you never know the kind of synergies you're going to have. This is kind of a cool thing, Mark. Take just a moment and tell everybody about what it is that you were doing with this game club thing. You were, you were literally spawning new game groups like all the time.
00:06:54
Speaker
Yeah, I was working on a project for a he actually a bar related tavern that we would be, you know, game related themed tavern. And one of the things we want to do is get an idea of how many, how much sales people were buying in liquor and drinks and stuff. So we had a deal with the ah a bar up in Minnesota and we were doing exactly that. But what I would do is I would bring people in every week with new games and ah I would run a game maybe one or two weeks and I'd leave it off for one of the players to continue. And a lot of them kept going. Some of them did not.
00:07:31
Speaker
So you were incubating new game groups and yeah, it's really key. ah Not everybody gels together. And one of the most important things we talked last week about kind of rule one is listening to your players. I think rule two is any game is a good game if your players are having a great time in it and if everybody gels together. The group chemistry is the core of a great game, I think. So the basic idea we're talking about by starting small is there's a risk in starting the campaign. And you you don't know those risks if if it's going to pan out until you've played for a while. So let's not spend an unreasonable amount of time you know world building, mapping out entire cities, alien civilizations, or whatever might fit your game.
00:08:17
Speaker
Start small. Just create what's around you. Don't generate deep political factions and a cast of dozens of NPCs for a game that's going to last two sessions. Fair point. OK, so let's say we have set our expectations appropriately. We've got some players that may want to take a shot at this, maybe take a longer term game but and see if they can get that started. So how do we prepare for something like that?
Proactive Visualization in Game Design
00:08:40
Speaker
Well, again, let's let's start small. ah We're going to build upon a foundation and we're going to create this foundation. But before we do any of that, let's start with some visualization. Okay. What's visualization?
00:08:56
Speaker
Well, proactive visualization is, in the game sense, you're visualizing your game, visualizing your realm, and you're imagining your players and their characters inhabiting that world. This visualization will give you an idea of like where you want to go, what you want to do, It's daydreaming. and yeah We all do it. It's daydreaming with a purpose. So you're imagining locations that you might like to go. You're imagining key NPCs that could be interesting in a story. You might just dash those off onto notes. You might have like a notebook that's
00:09:30
Speaker
looks like the Grail notebook from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. It's it's just got this collection of of loose ideas that you've put together. And at some point, you're going to also start pitching this to your players. You're going to say, hey, I've got this idea for a desert campaign where we're going to deal with X and Y and Z and and see if they're into it. right If they are into it, then great, you've got a place to go next. But if they're not, or if they have ideas of their own that might be different, then it's important to listen and to try to incorporate and find something that everybody wants to do.
00:10:04
Speaker
you know Visualization was something that was very important when I first started running longer term games. Probably more out of necessity. I lived in Seattle at the time. I was spent a ridiculous amount of time in traffic, Ben. Hours. Seattle is not a good commuter city, I'm sorry to say. oh i I didn't have a lot of time to write stuff, Dan, so I had to really kind of practice visualization on my commutes so that I was prepared at the table. I found it to be more useful than writing notes at the end of the day. Interesting. See, I'm the kind of person that when I'm visualizing stuff, I want to keep it and I'm going to start writing it on post-it notes.
00:10:41
Speaker
And I'll start putting those in different places. um I don't tend to use notebooks as much. I don't know why that's just not how my brain works. But if I get a good whiteboard with a bunch of Post-its, I'm going to start having a lot of fun and things just start to grow. And it's interesting how the act of kind of unloading your mind is so sometimes very creative as well. You know, one idea starts to give rise to two or three more. Yeah, one thing to to really be cognizant of though in your practicing visualization is not letting your mind get locked into a scenario or locked into things too much. This is kind of a rule. Don't fall in love with your ideas. It's it's a real trap. The best ideas come from your players and you want to be receptive to those. And if you've locked an an idea in your mind about the campaign, about the story that's so solid that it can't be moved,
00:11:32
Speaker
What if your players aren't aren't as fond of that idea as you are? That's right. So have that discussion with them early. Pitch that campaign idea early. The longer you're rolling that idea around in your mind, the more you're going to fall in love with it. And you do need to listen to your players and make sure they're ready to come along with you on that journey. So Ben, we're going to start this adventure pretty small. and we're going to let it We're going to let it kind of percolate. We're going to plant some seeds. How small is
Low Stakes Campaigns: Local Heroes
00:11:56
Speaker
small? What do you mean by small? Well we're talking about like if you're looking at a story we're talking about you know local heroes I guess if you're thinking about the tears of play and obviously we're talking about level based games. But if you think about like Star Wars. He was a local I don't even think it was a hero. It's kinda whiny at the beginning but yeah that that that street kid the desert planet farm boy the that's episode four for the ah the Orthodox.
00:12:23
Speaker
Who knew that picking up, ah you know, was it batteries from Tashi station was so important? murders I think it was. Yeah. Oh yeah. I mean, he, he had dreams, not really, but we're talking about starting small and that's kind of what we're looking at. We're looking at these little, you know, these little characters. This is your Bilbo Baggins. This could be, you know, your Luke Skywalker, but it also could be just like a local person who's trained to become maybe a warrior or a fighter or a, you know, something of that nature. but A friendly neighborhood arachnid themed superhero, perhaps. yeah Exactly. This is kind of the genesis of about every type of fantasy story, every type of science fiction story is starting small. So in the beginning, you're not necessarily going to start hitting players with the world will end if you don't do this or that. It's going to be something more like, hey, there's like an ogre who's menacing you know the mill over there. Maybe you need to go take care of that.
00:13:18
Speaker
We're talking about building up the confidence of the players, building up your confidence as a GM, and we're creating a scenario that's gonna bring them into, to become a local hero of that that area. Well, and importantly, this is gonna give them a low stakes domain, a low stakes context in which to test out all of the things that they don't know, all the things you don't know about this game. Are these players gonna gel? Well, let's see what it's like when we're dealing with small stakes. how does this character work, your player might wonder. They've never played this game before, or you're trying to do something simple with the system. You don't want to have a super big, complicated scenario for them to run through to do that. So it should be pretty straightforward. Now, just because it is small, it doesn't mean you can't even now start laying the seeds of something that might be going on later. But I think the idea right now is just keep it very loose. So if you've got an idea for how stories might go later,
00:14:15
Speaker
Great. You don't need to plot the entire campaign. Maybe just drop the name of that key villain that you're thinking about. Yes. Start planning those little story seeds, see which ah see what grows over the course of these early levels. you know If you're going to think about like things that might be important for later in the campaign, maybe prioritize who the major players are. You don't necessarily you have to plot out the whole game to do that. You can just maybe have an idea of who who your villains might be or who the factions in the area might be. You don't even have to flush them out to a great extent at this point. That's right. It could just be a name. Similarly, have a relatively loose idea of the setting and the world. You don't need to define what's going on on other continents. You might not even need to define what's going on the next county over. You just want to do enough that your players have a sense of what's around them and what kind of agency they can exercise in the very small world and the small adventure that you're creating.
Using Modules in Campaign Design
00:15:11
Speaker
Mark, talk to me about modules.
00:15:14
Speaker
A lot of people like modules. Is this a way to get a whole campaign started? ah For myself, the way my my brain works, modules tend to get my way a little bit. However, I've found some use out of modules. I've taken modules that I think have a great, maybe a great hook or a great premise, or maybe they have a fantastic map. I'm going to use an example of like, I think Forge of Fury has one of the greatest maps I've seen in a game. I look at it and and and i I get ideas for it. So what a lot of times what I'll do is I'll i'll take that module and I'll strip it out of all of its interiors and use it to my own agenda. It saves me a lot of work. If you're of the mindset that you can you can read and memorize some of those elements that I'm not particularly very good at, you could learn a lot from a module about how designers think, how they paste the story, how they've laid things out. You can take what you want out of there and use what you want.
00:16:10
Speaker
I'll say this, when I'm starting a game, I usually run the module as vanilla as possible. I don't tend to mess with it too much because if I'm just learning, then I don't yet know how strong an NPC is or a bad guy, a monster, a trap, whatever it might be. I don't yet know how the pacing of this game system works. Is combat slow? Is it fast? How does is it feel to do skill challenges? right These are all things that I'm going to learn as I play through the module as the designers made it. That doesn't mean I'm not going to make adjustments and and feel my way through as any good GM will do, but it does give me, as you said, sort of a view into how the designers think about the game, and I think that's really cool.
00:16:49
Speaker
Now the cool part about that too is that even if you are running it pretty straightforwardly, you can always add neat little character layers and traits and backstory elements on top of what's in the module. The diary from your long lost brother might show up in the dungeon or something like that. It also frees up your your mind a little bit, not having to stress over all the details, because some of the details will already be presented for you. This will allow you to do other things as a GM, allows you to maybe observe a little bit more, which is an important trait for GMing, is observing the players. We'll get a little bit more into that ah later. Ben, I want to talk about organization, because as I stated earlier, this is not a trait that I possess. I'm a very disorganized person.
Organizing Game Notes Effectively
00:17:35
Speaker
um what is some of the the tips you have for organization it's a great question i think there's a lot of great organizational tools out there that i mean i think when you are starting it was basically like you take your college rule notebook and you start working on it. and You might treat different chapters of your story like different subjects in a multi-subject school notebook. Later on, of course, you could go by specialized notebooks. I had one from the Rook and the Raven that I thought was really cool. It had all these places for who are the main NPCs and what are the main factions. It had all these neat prompts to get you thinking about other things in your world.
00:18:08
Speaker
But you don't have to do anything especially elaborate. Most time when I'm working on this stuff now, I'll just, as I said before, I'll use Post-its. I'll use a whiteboard. I'll color code those Post-its so I can kind of quickly see who my NPCs are, what my locations are, what some key hazards or traps or who knows what. you know I'll use those interesting different color Post-its to kind of map out what's going to go on. And then I'll just kind of lay those out. Sometimes what I'll find is that having a loose organization like that, I can actually start moving posts around and reorganizing. And then once that's done, I'll start writing that and coding that down a little bit more in terms of into notebooks or into ah other tools that help me manage the game.
00:18:48
Speaker
I hear all that Ben and honestly, all I could think of is that gift of Charlie Day in the basement with the strings all over attaching everything. You need one of those murder boards that all the detectives have in the stories. Yeah. Again, this is not something, this is not in my wheelhouse. Let me just put it that way. But I appreciate it. You do carry off good games. The important rule, maybe the best thing to mention is whatever works for you, that's what's best. I don't know if it's best, but it works for me. Well, I say that's what's best for you at least. Yeah. Let's get started though. Let's get started with our game.
Discovery Phase in Campaigns
00:19:24
Speaker
You know, we've kind of laid out some of our preparations. We talked about proactive visualization. We talked about.
00:19:31
Speaker
Thinking about starting small, we've talked about some of the organizational skills. Let's talk about, let's just get started. All right, so when you get started, the first thing to be thinking about is now we're going to sit down at the table and the first few sessions, the first short story that you're going to get involved in, you remember when we said start small, well what we mean is do two or three sessions, which is enough time for you to learn what you need to know to know if this thing is going to go the distance. so Discovery let's just call this whole initial phase discovery and what you're trying to do is you're trying to build a strong flexible foundation engage your players interest so a self-contained adventure maybe with a strong cliffhanger at the end that
00:20:10
Speaker
could lead you any one of a number of different directions, that will be a great kind of story to start with. Mark, what are the things that you're looking at? When you were incubating those groups, what were you looking at that would tell you if this was going to go further or if you thought, hey, these guys have been fine for two or three sessions, but this isn't really going to work out? I'm looking to see if the players are engaged, not just with the story, because in the scenario I was you know running these games, I was never going to be there for the long haul. I was going to be leaving these for somebody else to run. My job was to create a cliffhanger for them to continue. So I was really just trying to watch the players to see how engaged they were, to see if this is a group that was going to keep playing after I left. And I think that that's important to watch your players. What is working? What's not working? Are they enjoying the game?
00:20:59
Speaker
I think one of my favorite sayings about good GMing is that good GMing is when you're kind of playing the players and the game is the medium for that. You're looking at the players, you're watching how that's going. What kind of things are going to make it really tough for a group to gel? Well, scheduling issues is going to be number one. That plagues many games. You know, if you can't meet, you can't game. Having that regularity is going to be broken. It's it's tough. That's a tough way to start. Yeah, I often say games are things we get to do. They're not things we have to do. So we want to make sure that everybody knows that life happens, family first, health first, those kinds of things. But at the same time, we've had games. You've had games. I've had games where I've had to bow out or I've had to talk to a player and say, hey, is this really going to work for you for a while here? Because
00:21:42
Speaker
If you've got to be gone for a long period of time, that's okay. We'd love to have you back, but it might be that we need to write you out of the story for a little while until you're ready to come back and and enjoy this on a regular basis. Yeah, when I have a player who's missing multiple, multiple games over and over, to me, that just says they're not interested. you know Whether they are or not, it that's what it tells me. Because if there's something I want to do, I generally would make time for the things that I love to do. I think that's right. i I will say, I think you and I differ a little bit on this in that you know I'm willing to write people out for a few sessions. And if if I think they're going to be gone on a more regular basis, I'm going to have that conversation with them.
00:22:21
Speaker
But I think if they're gone for a couple of sessions, then I've got to find a way to write them back in. A lot depends on how much that player is contributing to the group. And so you'll find that some players, you think, you know what, that guy's worth it. I'm going to go to some extra trouble to to make that happen. Other people, you're like, you know, it's been fun. And this this actually plays into the other bit about group chemistry, right? I find that that people who understand that this is an ensemble, that they understand they're a part of a bigger group and that we're all kind of trying to have fun together, They're playing with us that's that to me is what good chemistry is like mark what are your kind of top couple points about what makes good chemistry in a group is loving players give each other space to kind of. Do something spectacular and not like try to get horny and all the time on their excitement you wanna be a part of it you know you wanna high five them when they do some awesome as a GM if i see a high five across the table that's a good night.
00:23:17
Speaker
That's right. Wonderful. Okay. So let's say that we've gotten through the first few sessions, we've done our discovery phase and you know what? It looks like this is going to work. Now we're going to try to convert this to a longer
Transitioning to Long-term Campaigns
00:23:28
Speaker
campaign. So let's talk about how to expand your story. We'll call this the commitment step, right? This is when you put a ring on it. Yeah, they're they're in a relationship now. Yep. So, okay, now the group is engaged, and we mean that in a couple senses clearly. So, we're going to start dreaming big, and we're going to start thinking about longer-term character arcs. And that's that's the thing that I think matters to start, right? Now you've got these characters who you know pretty well, and we're going to start thinking about what their futures look like in the world that you've set up for them. Ben, this is where we're going to put in the work.
00:24:01
Speaker
Yeah, I'll say this. I tend to spend the most time on any campaign at the very beginning. ah Right at this step right when I'm when I know okay now We're gonna do something bigger and I I need to figure out what the story is and where it's going You know, I need to start laying some track at this point. We're going to commit we're going to start dreaming big and thinking about the longer-term shape of this campaign and Just like we did in the early steps. We want to start with the characters So when I'm thinking about how to map out a character's journey What are my options? What does that map look like? How do you map that out?
00:24:36
Speaker
When I think about mapping out a campaign, I often think about Joseph Campbell's hero's journey.
Hero's Journey and Character Arcs
00:24:42
Speaker
um It has 17 steps to it, so I'm not gonna get too in depth with it, but the basic premise is there's a whole arc to a story. and You see these in film, you read these in books, and you kind of think about laying out a storyline that will reach a kind of a certain kind of crescendo that you want. But keep in mind, you have X amount of main characters you have to consider. Yeah, I think that's a good point. like When you think about people that have done this really well, I actually think the Marvel movies...
00:25:10
Speaker
They have their problems, they have their ups, they have their downs. I have to say, when you look at some of the early Avengers movies, like the first Avengers movie, that was a movie that served a lot of different moments for a lot of different characters. And I think there's a lot of great opportunity to look around and find out how ensembles work. And and we're we're we're looking at this. you You have four or five different characters. Each one needs to have their own individual hero's journey that's unique to them within the confines of an ensemble hero's journey. One of the things that's going to work for you is that you have a lot of time in gameplay to actually tell those stories. So when you think about how much time any given play session is, three, four hours maybe let's say, if you're doing one of those every week, let's say that it takes you a year, a year and a half worth of
00:25:58
Speaker
play sessions to go through a long campaign, or maybe even six months. You've got far, far more time than any movie has to tell your character's ensemble stories. And by practicing visualization as you kind of continue on through the game, your mind's going to go to those places as you prepare for your next session of like, what if this character did this? This plays into his hero's journey or her hero journey. And so like, never stop practicing visualization as you play. That's great. OK, well, guess what? If you've done those things, you've started into this cycle of visualization and listening to your players and crafting these longer term journeys that will take you to the upper reaches of whatever the long form of your campaign is going to be. If you can start that way, then you've started well and you've launched your campaign. So there you go.
Creative Encounter Design: Space Hamster
00:26:49
Speaker
We're now going to move on to our tune-up segment for this week. Well, this week's tune-up comes from my friend Miles. He came to me about a month ago. He wanted to terrorize his players with a giant space hamster, Ben. A giant space hamster. and be honest i The only thing I could think of was Boo. So I did a little looking up on a giant space hamster and I pulled up some stuff. There is a such a thing, apparently. Now this is a D&B creature, right? This is if you're playing Dungeons and Dragons. Yeah, this is a Dungeons and Dragons creature. It's called a giant space hamster. It's a large beast about the size of a bear.
00:27:23
Speaker
It's OK, hold on. It's a hamster the size of a bear. Yeah, and it's dumb as rocks. They can burrow underground. OK, and yeah, you got to pull up a picture of it. It's adorable and I can't imagine fighting this thing. So let's think about that first. Does anybody really want to kill a giant space hamster? I don't know, but I will say this. I love this idea out of the gates. So the thing I think would I would do at the start is just. emphasize that cuteness factor. And then the size.
00:27:57
Speaker
And then I would try to bite somebody's head off with him. You know what I mean? I would say this, because it's so gosh darn cute, I think we should maybe just think about this thing as maybe a captured or maybe a creature that's fighting the party, not really of its own volition. Maybe it has some sort of control collar or something on it that's making it act a certain way in antagonizing the party. So maybe the party has a couple of things you have to deal with. Finding this creature this giant space answered it's adorable and maybe somehow free it from this control yeah i like the idea that you could increase the difficulty of the encounter by making it something other than just can i kill the monster let's talk about um some of the things that this giant space hamster could potentially do when did you did you have a hamster as a kid i did ah my brother had a little hamster called him speedy cuz he would run really fast run his little wheel.
00:28:50
Speaker
Mine was mister geebles one thing i always remember is they would store stuff in their cheeks and i'm kinda wondering like what kind of stuff a giant hit space hamster might. Having his cheeks we have a cheeks of holding is that your concept here that sounds awesome yeah i mean why not i mean it is a cosmic space hamster or something about that's already kind of off so you might as well. that sounds amazing yeah let's let's have him have cheeks of holding and let's take this up a another notch i just have this idea of a hamster ball and maybe he has this globe of force that he can roll around and try to crush the players with like he's like he's inside it just rolling around
00:29:32
Speaker
You've got a large creature inside a global force rolling around crushing people with it and he occasionally can spit out items from his cheeks of holding. Are these going to be just random stuff or are these going to be hazards for the players or what do you think? They could be all manner of stuff. He could be spitting out an anvil on top of one of them. I don't know. This is actually getting you to start thinking about a phased fight. Think about it this way. At the beginning of the fight, he's so cute, and then something on his control collar goes, and then he bites the head off of something that you care about, or he chews up something, or he maybe he even just takes that artifact that you guys were hanging on to, and he stuffs it into his cheeks. ah That would piss him off. I love that.
00:30:14
Speaker
And the chicks are holding so they can't just go get him. yeah And if he's like, in ah ah ah you know, maybe a global force, maybe the first stage of the combat is to try to get maybe somehow lure him into somewhere where he gets trapped, where he has to relinquish the wall of force to continue the battle. Maybe that could be part of it. interesting I see I'm thinking that the global force is kind of like your next phase because that's when he becomes invulnerable for a while because he's inside that globe okay so initially he takes your stuff stuffs it into his cheeks he spits out something else that you didn't want
00:30:45
Speaker
like it was some kind of sick trade and then you're starting to attack him. But you know what, he's not having that. He runs or maybe he attacks you a little bit. And then maybe when you get to a certain threshold in the fight or when some other condition happens, all of a sudden he activates his global force and then he starts rolling over you. Well, think about in that environment, maybe as he transitions from one face to the next, he burrows into the ground like hamsters can do, and then all of a sudden comes out of the ground in that global force. So you got a little ah break in the combat, just maybe around, maybe two, where you can see something moving under the ground and it kind of creates that separation, yeah allowing the players to have regroup. One of the things I like here is that we're thinking about the environment. We're thinking about the tropes that are associated with the creature.
00:31:30
Speaker
We're thinking about the creature's behavior. It's not necessarily evil. It's probably being controlled or manipulated in some way. It's got some training. And we're trying to put that into a coherent encounter that has a beginning, middle, and end. And all of it is ridiculous and goofy, which I love. Yeah. Now let's talk for a moment about some risks here, right? So one risk that I think is maybe front of mind is, think about whether or not this kind of encounter fits with the tone of your game. And it might not. I mean, if you're playing like a Curse of Strahd game and you're really hyping up the horror elements of it, like you do not want to break that with a giant space hamster just showing up. A fair point. What are the risks do you see, if any? I would say, what's your plan afterwards, after they free this giant space hamster? Maybe they're just going to be at risk of having a ah companion space hamster. Do you want that in your game? I don't know.
00:32:15
Speaker
I mean, it could be the kind of thing where the hamster is grateful to you afterward and he becomes kind of and a friend, but like an annoying friend because he's constantly stuffing his cheeks with stuff that you're trying to keep track of. And maybe it's a tough time to get him to spit it out. Maybe you have to like start rolling animal handling if you want to get that thing back, that rope that you had or the whatever it was that was useful to you. It could also just be a really awesome mount that you can ride into combat somewhere down the line. I love it. Okay. Well, I think that's our tune-up segment for this week. And that brings us to the end of another episode of Tabletop Tune-Up.
Episode Wrap-up and Listener Engagement
00:32:47
Speaker
My name is Ben Dyer and I'm with my co-host Mark Lehman. If you like what you're hearing, we would love to hear from you. Give us a rating. Tell us how it's going in the comments. If you have specific kinds of topics or other things that interest you that you'd like to see, we'd love to hear about the two. If you would like something tuned up, we'll take all ideas, including giant space hamsters, apparently. These things could be ideas for locations. It could be ideas for other kinds of world building, monsters, ways to manage what's going on at the table. Whatever it is that you think needs getting tuned up in your game, we're all ears and we're here to help you. Go ahead and email us at tabletoptuneup at gmail dot.com. We're going to let you guys get back to gaming. Appreciate your time. Until next time, keep those dice rolling.
00:33:35
Speaker
True love, true love True love, true love True love, true love True love, true love
00:34:24
Speaker
you
00:34:58
Speaker
You love, you love along with your fun and return Till you love along with all the love we've got and the matter we've done Dogs from you, I'll starve To love, I'll show you, I'll starve to love To love, to love, to love, I'll starve To love, I'll show you, I'll starve to love
00:35:31
Speaker
Don't