Plagiarizing Like a Good DM

Who made me the DM I am today, the referee that others all quote?

Who's the professor that made me this way, the greatest that ever got marker on her coat?

One man deserves the credit, one man deserves the blame, and Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky is his name

OY 

Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachev- 

I'll never forget the day I first heard of the great Lobachevsky.

In song form I was told the secret of success as a Dungeonmaster: Plagiarize.

Plagiarize!

Let no one else's work evade your eyes!

Remember why the good lord made your eyes, so don't shade your eyes

Just plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize-

Only remember, of course, to call it "research".

RIP the best to ever do it, Tom Lehrer

Contrary to what my chud of an ex-roommate (fuuuuuuuuuck you, Ben) would say whenever I talked about my method for building dungeons and adventures or expanding on my setting, it is in fact not a sign of a terrible DM to take what work was already done and retool it to fit whatever purpose you need it for. I would say it's the sign of a great, intelligent, and creative DM to be able to look at a megadungeon and go "wait I know exactly what I could do with this."

My primary setting of Solaria started as an adaptation of Mystara, the greatest setting TSR gave us, and after some numbers being filed off was slowly retooled into what it is today. Imagine how much effort and stress would go into coming up with details, ecologies, cultures, etc. completely off the top of my head with nothing to springboard off of. I already developed a smoking addiction in film school, that would have just exacerbated things. 

See This Map? It's Mine Now

Modules and adventure packs can be of varying quality. Maybe the writing is bad, maybe the railroading sucks, maybe the encounters just are too easy or too tough, or maybe it's something that is actually peak but gets overshadowed by being so late into a product line no one gives it the time of day (King's Festival, my beloved). Regardless of how good or bad the 16-40 page book's contents are there is always one major contribution to my tables that even the most low effort can contribute: the maps. Back when I worked at the game store, the joke would always be that I looked at module books as maps that came with optional adventures as a bonus.

From DA2 Temple of the Frog by Dave Arneson
and David Ritchie

Take the map to the right for example: this is from the TSR module Temple of the Frog and is the ground floor's layout of the eponymous location. As written in the adventure, this place has been overrun by thieves, cutthroats, slavers, bandits, and BrOSR members. What I see, however, is a perfect baseline for any temples to the various Immortals or pantheons in Solaria. Instead of broken tables and monster closets, the side rooms can be libraries or places of healing for the sick and poor. A few generic keying here and there and we can make this one of our go-to maps when the players decide they'd like to go to the Silver Cathedral in Arnskirk.

Simple, easy, effective. No needing to study church layouts or worry about making everything perfect and symmetrical, just good ol' fashioned "Mine now" and fitting it into what you want to do with it. The Typical Tavern layouts in the Mystara Gazetteers have all be repurposed when appropriate into a place like the Foamy Spoon or a meeting hall for one of the chapters of the League of Adventurers. City Layouts in supplements or adventures have been turned into whatever town or major capital I need them to be for the moment.

Megadungeon? More like Multidungeon

Megadungeons are incredible. Not because of their scale as I find them to be just too large to do anything meaningful in, not because of their quality because an overwhelming majority of them suck, and not because of their ease to run because seriously have you seen how poorly written most are? Mad Mage makes absolutely no sense and Castle Greyhawk is a bunch of in jokes and pop culture references taking the place of what was supposed to be Gary's magnum opus. To make matters worse, most of the ones like Ruins of Undermountain only have 20% or so of the actual map keyed and stocked. So why do I love them? Because those gigantic layouts are just perfect for turning into several smaller dungeons.

A lot of times if you need a quick dungeon for some eager beavers who decided to run off to a place you weren't expecting or who had the dice determine they would stumble upon a sudden cult hideout or other dungeon to delve, you can look at these titanic maps and zoom in on one specific area that you feel suits the situation. The image to the left is from the 3rd Level of Undermountain, located around the middle left of the map. Now you wouldn't have known that if I had told you (Even the few people I know who actually ran Undermountain have no shot of recognizing a random slice of it), but that's the beauty of it. This excerpt from a titanic map can easily serve as a dungeon for any number of purposes, be they dank caverns or perhaps the hive of a race of hyper-intelligent ant-men. Undermountain is full of areas you can just slice off and repurpose, or even add on to if you feel a bout of inspiration. A bit lower down on the same map are a sudden series of ziggurats that could easily become lizardmen temples or the hosts of portals which send travelers to a far off world of hyper advanced humanoids with an Egyptian aesthetic. Possibilities are literally endless.

Featuring Ludwig von Hendricks as...

Every story needs characters, otherwise the PCs are just talking to cardboard cutouts named Butcher, Baker, and Candlestick Maker before they go fight [Evil] in order to appease [King], get their reward, and possibly get to shag [Princess]. But sometimes it's hard writing interesting characters from scratch, and why should I have to come up with an entire cast of people for my players to interact with? 

Fortunately, most sourcebooks and modules come with a whole range of daring-doers, mundane citizens, and antagonists that you can just pop right in to your game. A name change and possibly a redirection of their goal and now instead of Baron Desmond Kelvin III, the accomplished militarist who wants to impress Archduke Stefan Karameikos and become ducal heir, we have Lord Eram Blackmoor with mostly the same personality traits and upbringing but instead wants to prove himself to the other lords in Galanov and has just enough paranoia that his actions make the PCs unsure they can trust him. You don't even have to adjust stats as they rarely become relevant. Players won't know they're interacting with a new coat of paint over characters as old as their parents, and you saved yourself a weekend generating "ok" canvases on Kassoon and then doing all the work to make them actually usable.

Everything is up for Grabs

And that's the whole point of this article. There's no RPG police that's going to knock down your door and confiscate your books or PDFs because you're "misusing them" by not running them RAW, so grab whatever you can and worry about actually running the game instead of how sensible the small village you built is. So do like great Lobachevsky and plagiarize to your heart's content! Can't do worse than some of the Youtube DMs out there...

 

Your Wizards Need to be Weirder

When you read what I write, just picture
this but a semi-attractive femme person
Art by Doug Beekman 

Every so often in the Purple Gay Beholder OSR Server, I will lament the quick death that occurred to the classic Wizard/Magician/Sorcerer/Enchanter/Mystical Man of Mystery look and aesthetic. Those of you who have read pulp magazines or looked at the gorgeous painted art that was the norm for fantasy media until the early 2000s will know what I'm talking about: silver skull caps, starry robes, impossibly shaggy beards... all have been thrown aside in modern media in favor of some relatively handsome 20-something in business casual or a fantasy equivalent of a three-piece suit. If you're LUCKY, they might actually wear a cloak with this as some slight compromise with the old aesthetics.

The major person to blame for this, like many problems with modern fantasy, is a woman in the UK who apparently wasn't content getting away with worse worldbuilding than a Youtube DM with an Appendix N comprised of children's cartoons from the 2010s and a few books that came out when they were in secondary school. Now our manipulators of arcane magic are expected to be well-dressed, well-spoken, and (worst of all) sane people with a formal education and a code of ethics about their mystical ways. Talking heads and people who allege to have run games decry the eccentric who shops at the same store as Boyd Pierce as hokey, overdone, outdated, and more. Horse hockey, I say! If anything, a return to form would be a breath of fresh air after all this time.

Seriously, the man looked like he wore my grandma's drapes

 

Wizards look WEIRD

"Appearances can be deceiving" is an oft-repeated phrase, warning people that their first impression of someone could be completely wrong and baked in either prejudice or ignorance.

If your mage can't serve like this,
should you even get art of them?

For Wizards, this idea needs to go right out the window. Yes, that dude wearing a glittery bathrobe is actually as nutty as he might come off, and yes you will be courteous to him as he also happens to be able to shove a lightning bolt right up your ass and cast Power Word: Hangnail. Your wizards need to look off, very off. Much about their appearance has to differ from "the norm" in your setting: their mannerisms, their shiny pants, their odd amount of guyliner, their propensity for funny hats... All of these things stand out compared to the more mundane soldiers and priests in both the party and the setting. This is a person who has dedicated their life to learning secrets of the universe and manipulating reality to perform what could be considered miracles, that doesn't sound like a job that appeals to the most put together people on the planet, that sounds like the kind of thing that would appeal to a fucking nutjob. As their understanding of the arcane grows, their desire to conform to the standards of the ignorant masses weakens. "I can move mountains, cause floods, and invert the testicles of the guys who bullied me in primary school. Why should I lower myself to the level of mere men when I have become so much more?!"

 

Need inspiration? Look to Bowie, P-Funk (especially George Clinton and Bootsy Collins), Sun Ra, Dr. John, and Dschinghis Khan, and really any Glam Rock that features shiny outfits in far out colors. All are flamboyant, beautiful, and have looks that say they aren't even in the same galaxy as you and they know it.

 

Wizards talk WEIRD

Everyone loves Dr. Byron Orpheus. No seriously, I cannot think of a single decent human being who uses their left and right turn indicators that has both seen Venture Bros. and doesn't get a kick out of Orpheus's entire character and the first bit to sell people on him is often that insanely high-energy flowery speak of his, complete with almost yelling his words in an over dramatic tone and you know what? He's earned it. The man is the show's equivalent of Dr. Strange after all.

Your mages are the same, they've peered into the realm of infinite possibility and ascended past the dreams of most men. Simple words will not suffice, they must speak with gravitas and an overly elaborate verbiage not because they choose to, but because they are compelled to. They are the commanding voice from the top of the mountain, they are the only ones who understand the severity of any situation, and they are going to speak in a prose that would give Gary himself a headache.

Don't want to have your wizards speak as if they're doing Shakespeare in the Park, but still want to get the point across that their consciousness is on another planet? Study depictions of the hippies and the flower children, or grab your favorite wrestler that says a whole lot of nothing (in a believable fashion) and start turning their promos into a sorcerer's primary vernacular. My players will sometimes get very intimately familiar with the verbiage of Handsome Jimmy Valiant and Dream Machine Troy Graham without ever seeing a single video of them.

 

Wizards have WEIRD names

That's right buddy, chew that scenery.
Earn that fucking paycheck.

There's a popular tumblr post that gets around every so often which states the best wizard names are just prescription meds and then for about 2 weeks people who see it will joke about making their next character Naproxen the Enchanter. You know what's annoying? They don't actually do it. One of the most grating developments of modern fantasy is that no one gives their mage-types nutso names anymore and instead just calls them Valerie Brightstar or Derrick. Even a very popular cRPG had its main Wizard named Gale. Fucking Gale. Bland, uninspired, and as much of a wet blanket as the character himself.

In the olden days, a Wizard would eventually take a name worthy of remembering not only to fully shed the unenlightened person they once were, but also as a way to protect themselves from the extra-planar threats they may face. After all, a true name is a powerful tool and no one in their right mind would actually name their kid Kalador. Despite the Dungeons and Dragons movie's sins (and they are legion), one of the few things they got right was Jeremy Irons's character's name, Profion. Now THAT'S a mage name. It's just the right level of stupid and brilliant, something that can be shouted from the heavens by a cool guy with a sword coming to kill him. Unfortunately, we got Justin Whalin and not Darkwolf. The prescription drug method is good, but we can go so much harder. Grabbing random words and European names and adding whatever suffix comes to mind at the end (or just making it sound vaguely Roman) gives you Sorcerer Corneos and Prinzor the Magnificent. The Great Mage Darrux is certainly better than Helen Arugula. These push harder into the weird area because they aren't normal names that even the wilder cultures in your setting would come up with, they're fucking nutball things that only could be dreamt up by the guy who insists that his vest needs to show off his pecs in order for him to properly cast spells.

 

Wizards ARE WEIRD

AND THEY'RE COOL FOR IT! I bagged on it earlier, but it really has to be mentioned how there are infinite possibilities of what can be done with magic and the Wizard School books picked the most absolutely boring, basic, and nothing spells and then the only remotely "exciting" ones happened to be 3 forbidden spells that amounted to removal of free will, torture, and death. But you know, it fits the heavily uninspired and droll world that it takes place in which turns the fun of practicing your magic in a tower full of strange items with your aged teacher into a boarding school.

Think of wizards as the equivalent of New Age adherents and how their practices seem to the average person. Hell, you can even take some of those and apply them as wizardy things (plenty of potential in GOOP and Pyramid Power) that do have some actual basis in reality in your setting. Remember that they go to great lengths in their study of the mystic world, much like some of the nutjob upper class of our world have these strange regiments to keep their skin "flawless" and bodies free of evil outsiders. Our modern day pseudoscience and woo-woo stuff can be their rituals of power.

At the end of the day ask yourself what would be cooler to play: the jive-talking guy in flip flops and a Hawaiian robe that does goofy hand signs to shower his foes with a rainbow of light, or Keith Wilson who looks like he's from the magical equivalent of IT?

 

Not gonna find this dude at Hogwarts
Art by David Mattingly 

 

You SHOULD be Antagonistic to Your Players

Layout ready, topics chosen, controversial and discourse creating title set, oh baby we are gaming now.

 

    Now I'm not saying that you should outright yell at your players that they are mindless, mouth-breathing wastes of carbon that would do better to return to the earth they came from (barring some notable examples... IT'S A D20 TO ROLL FOR ATTACK, JEREMY, JUST LIKE THE LAST 30 TIMES YOU ASKED), nor should you send them into endless battles with the dark lord Nelbren's horrid hoards of goblins or into a trap-laden dungeon that makes Sen's Funhouse (the sweet 20fps version on the Xbox 360 release) seem like a good time. That's mean-spirited and doesn't do anything but make everyone feel miserable.

    The players, however, should be reminded that you aren't playing the role of a guiding hand through a story (unless you are, in which case why are you reading this? This is not a space for you.), but rather an organic computer which handles the mechanics of the game and controls the men and monsters the players will be facing. Men have brains and can devise tactics, make guesses, and most of all can react to what is going on around them. Some monsters have these attributes as well but less intelligent ones could be vicious, feral creatures that lock on to what they perceive as the weakest prey and react to the threat of the big guy who hit them in the head with a stick the last time they tried to attack him. Creatures do not just need to take their turn, attack, and then wait for the next turn, they should react dynamically to whats going on just as your players should.

    That last bit is key. Your players SHOULD be reacting to what you throw at them, what threats or problems they're running into in the world, and what the overall game or general plot of the adventure is setting them up to deal with. Are the players being tasked with traversing a large mountain pass? A good player would prepare Feather Fall or similar anti-fall-to-your-death tools. The last known whereabouts of a missing priest is in an expansive tomb? They should be bringing Holy Water, Alchemist's Fire, and spare blunt instruments in the event of skeletons and other undead creatures. Are there rumors of bandits attacking people at night? Someone better set up an Alarm spell or volunteer to keep watch while the rest sleep. If your players don't do any of these? Fuck 'em.

    And that's what I mean by being antagonistic, fuck 'em. My players' failure to plan or strategize is not my problem and maybe when they roll up the next set of characters after a TPK they'll have learned that there are no free rides to the end of the campaign and play a bit more carefully. Too many times nowadays players will just assume that you are a monkey to dance to their tune as they trot their merry way down the yellow brick road and the best way to remind them that this is a tango where both player and DM work together to make something fun and memorable is to create memories. I'm particularly fond of the memories made by someone's 8th Level Fighter standing in the middle of a field waiting for the dragon they just had to harass to land, only to be incinerated into nothing as the scaly beast flew by and took a pot shot with its breath weapon. If you were a giant adult lizard that could breathe fire, you wouldn't fight fair either; That's how you got to be an adult.

 

Other Ways to be Antagonistic (but not unfairly):

• Is your party's Magic User dressing in a point-ed hat and robes and carrying a staff? Humans and demi-humans (and the non-feral/stupid humanoids) immediately recognize that they could be a threat and go after them first. Would you take a risk with a guy who could potentially shove a lightning bolt up your ass?
  Bonus points for parties that recognize this and disguise the fighter as the stereotypical wizard. 
• Fighter doesn't like to bring anything but his sword because that's all he took feats for (yet another reason I despise feats). Next time there's a group that attacks the party in the forest, make sure its from tree forts and the attackers are using bows/crossbows/javelins. You're gonna learn to bring something, Grabnar.
• Party that thinks anything that isn't offensive is worthless? Teach them that the MMO adage of "the best defense is a dead mob" doesn't work here... by using the spell list against them. There's been plenty of times that a well-used Sleep has led to a knocked out or dead party, or a Darkness ended up being the reason the cultist they were chasing got away.

 

I don't hate my players, I just want them to become better and step out of the mind prison that video games and modern play cultures have taught them is the proper way. Sometimes, that requires a dead character or a person peeved after a session. Remember that as long as it's never unfair and there's a clear place to point to that shows there were solutions and options to be victorious in the scenario that ended up with a dead character, the player will 9/10 times understand even if they had an initial outburst of frustration. The ones that don't aren't worth my time, nor yours.