Entering the Magical Kingdom of the Cake...

Game master bought a new supplement to his favourite role playing game. It was a campaign setting filled with descriptions of lands, countries, dungeons to explore, political relations and NPCs. He was amazed - the world presented in the book was picturesque and fit perfectly to his game. His head was full of ideas and the world started to live in his imagination.
Few days later players arrived to game master's home to play in this "new awesome setting", as the GM had described it to them. He did everything to present the atmosphere of the world, described common inhabitants' behaviour, introduced his players to elaborate political systems. He had prepared himself in every possible way before the play and he expected the players to be as fascinated as he had been.
After few hours of descriptions, dialogues and exploration, the game master was tired and his players... hated it. Not only that very session: They hated everything what happened, their characters, quests and the world which had been glorified by the GM. They did not want to tell that in this poor guy's face, but he is not stupid. He felt that something was not right, that something went wrong but he cannot tell what was that.

Common mistake

In fact, when working with such a complex material like world description, you can make a lot of mistakes, but the worse of them are probably caused by too much information put in players' heads in the same time. You have to realise that your players do not make notes and do not have a script of what you say. They have to imagine everything and if the pictures in their minds are not strong and interesting enough, they will not memorise any details about your world. That is why you have to give information gradually - let them process all those laws, politics, relations by giving them some time to do so.

Experiencing the world

You are entering the Magical Kingdom of the Cake. The country's society is built around magic. The people will not be surprised or impressed by your cheap tricks. The ruler of the country is Billy the Wizard but the Council of the mages are the second most important and powerful people around here. Their names are...

Maybe this example is slightly exaggerated, but think for a minute if you have not ever told your players something that they could not know and, what is more important, they have not had to know in that very moment.
My idea of first entering a country or a city is based upon my personal experiences from my childhood. When I was ten years old, my father took me abroad and after all these years I exactly remember all the details accompanying my first contact with a different country. I had general view upon Germany and Denmark, because they were the countries I visited as first, but I knew nothing what they look like.
First thing I noticed were roads in amazingly good condition in Germany. Later on, the cities of Denmark seemed to me as very peaceful and friendly places. They were very clean - there was no litter on the streets, everyone put his garbage into the bin. I saw a lot of bike lines - all picturesque little towns were connected by them and it seemed to me that people are able to travel across the whole country only by bike. Another thing were flags - in every town, beside almost every house there was a flagpole. Because of those particularities, Danish people appeared to me as a very active nation who is proud of their country.
In conclusion, people seem to build their view upon other countries and cultures by noticing small differences between those cultures and their own. To show something interesting, we should focus on details in sights, towns and people's behaviour rather than on politics and great matters of the world.
Second conclusion is a well known fact and is pretty obvious, but it is very easy to forget about. People do not notice thing which are normal - they focus on things that are different. So, when introducing a new realm, do not describe how the roads, people, towns, forests look like - tell your players how those things differ from the ones they already know!

Story hook: A mother with evil in her heart

Some time ago I found an image which inspired me to create a very interesting villain. In my belief, the best stories consist of at least one difficult choice for players to make. I do not like worlds where it is obvious which side is good and which is bad - I like when players have to choose between two bad decisions, previously having predict the consequences of every option.

A mother with evil in her heart

Possible introduction

There are plenty of ways in which you can introduce this story to your players but I think the easiest way is just a simple quest from a local governor for killing a bandit who terrorises the vicinity. In my opinion the beginning of any quest should be simple - players should be able to contain their task in one sentence. In this way they are able to fully focus on the story progression without feeling lost from the very start.

The mother

Her name is Malena and she is vicious and merciless bandit. She not only lives stealing and killing people - she also loves what she does and she is proud of that. She often prepares traps on main roads where she can meet many caravans and rich noblemen and since she is a great assassin too, she kills people in cities for politicians or just for her own - for fun or for revenge.

Apart from all of that she has her second side: she has two babies and she loves them more that anything else. One very important facet of using this story hook is that her two faces cannot be connected. She cannot be someone who steals and kills to provide for a living for her babies - she loves to be a rascal but her children are the most important for her.

The confrontation

When players finally confront the mother, they should be put in a situation when they have only two options to choose: To kill the mother and to orphan two little babies or to let her go and do what she has been doing before. Each of these choices brings evil and good simultaneously and players should know that from previous experiences with the mother's activities.

What is next?

After some time, you can bring back this story in some way depending on their choice: If they decided to let the mother go, they can hear about someone famous and important killed by her and if their choice was different and you played long enough to let her children grow up a little, they can seek for revenge. In any case make it hurt.

Feast of the Moon

As I mentioned in one of my previous post, in my D&D game I have got a druid and a bard. Tercora, the servant of the nature, had really wanted to participate in the druidic annual holiday which takes place on the shores of Lake of Steam, during the Feast of the Moon. Since I, as a game master, do not let my players to just take the prestige classes and I require them to put some effort to get one, we had decided that it would also be the time of her change into the Shifter (info).

The main problem that occurred was what to do with Arvolethe the bard. I talked to my player who plays as Arvolethe and together we agreed to let her character stay and have some rest at the their house in Elbulder. I created another druid whose role was played by her and this way she could participate in everything what took place. This was perfect solution: There was no glitch in the story, everything stood as it is in the setting and I did not have to run two stories at the same time. There were no experience points to get from this story, even if there could have been, but when one of the characters had been absent, there would have been some sort of unfairness, so the only reward from this session was the prestige class for Tercora.

The inspiration for this scenario came from Umbra from World of Darkness RPG. I have not played in WoD for a really long time, but the idea seemed perfect. After Tercora's arrival, all druids started to meditate and with a little help of some mixed herbs they entered some sort of the inner world of nature. Tercora's task was to defeat monsters destroying nature in the woods where she was naked and her magic did not work. The only ability she had was to change herself into animals. Since I did not want them to get bored, I put few old friends who they had not seen for a long time. Those friends were NPCs to save from the same creatures. At the end of this adventure was a cove of Shifters. There the other druid disappeared. Some kind of ghost told Tercora that if she wanted to become a Shifter, she had to defeat the one who she loves the most.

The main boss of this story was Arvolethe - the regular character of the second player, however, this time Arvolethe was evil. In fact, that was just an avatar of real Arvolethe, but this version of her hated Tercora so badly that the only thing that mattered for her was to kill the druid. I have to admit that the Player who played Arvolethe did the best job I have ever seen. She acted like there was real hatred in the Arvolethe's heart and soon it appeared that Tercora has only two choices: to die or to kill her best friend.

When a GM wants to do this kind of trick, there are two things that matter: First of all, you have to know well your players and you have to trust them. You have to be one hundred per cent sure that a player can act it in the right way. Second one is performance: A player who is object of this trick has to be unaware of the fact that an opponent that he or she is fighting is not in fact is not who he or she appears to be. It is important because the whole point of the trick is to rouse strong emotions and force a player to make difficult decisions. If she had known that all of that was not real, she might have neglected the whole scene.

In the end, Tercora discovered the power of the place. In that cave she could change herself into any form and that was what she did. She changed herself into a big purple worm and she killed Arvolethe. In the world of nature the strongest survives and even if some creature is the most powerful, one can still loose if one hesitates to make the hardest decisions. Tercora was more powerful in this cave but she could still loose...
...but she did not. She chose nature over her best friend and became a Shifter.