Dungeon Master: Know Your World

Introduction

By this point in my tabletop career, I've had the pleasure of running many a module and many a campaign (as relative as that measure is). I've also had the opportunity to take part as a player. As a result, I've come to see certain things that give people issues when running published adventures. The one I want to cover today is the issue of not knowing the world the adventure takes place in. I also want to go over what knowing it well buys. 

Adventures Are Incomplete

Adventures by their nature cannot cover everything. They tend to focus on the most obvious options and the way the author originally envisioned. Players can and if you run enough adventures eventually will run off the rails. However, as a Dungeon Master you don't really want it to feel like the adventure went off the rails. You want it to feel like one big whole. If there is a big difference between the two parts there is going to be a disconnected, which is something you probably want to avoid (in the right cases it might be exactly what you want).

Adventures typically give you a few of the solutions that the author thought of. One of your players might think of a clever (or not so clever) alternative to the situation. In these cases it's even more important to try to be consistent with the rest of the adventure. It's fine if a brief rest has a different feeling than the long journey to the destination. However, it probably won't be fine if a slightly different route than was intended contradicts the themes of the adventure.

Improvisation

The overall idea is simple. If you have a good feeling for the world you are in, you can better improvise and make your additions feel natural. For this goal there are some things that I think are more useful than others. Knowing the themes an adventure is chasing after is important. It is hard to build up a theme and atmosphere but easy to accidentally tear it down. Being aware of them is important. However, it can be quite nuanced and specific. A setting can be dark, but that may not give enough credit to the themes. Themes such as “death comes suddenly”, “power corrupts”, “anything can be bought for the right price”, “it takes a monster to kill a monster”, “for there to be light there must be darkness”, and “anything can be forgotten” can all contribute to a dark setting. However, the specific themes that are being addressed will contribute to the overall feeling. Switching themes and switching back can be a bit jarring.

Another thing to know and understand is the characters. You can of course modify characters to your liking, but understanding them beforehand helps to better make such changes. More often, if you understand your characters you can better and more believably react to your players. Having characters acting out of character is usually more jarring than going off theme in my experience.

Knowing the general area and environment is also important for consistency. The choices you make in populating the environment as well as the locations contained within influence the themes but also build up the environment. You usually want to have some level of consistency in an environment. How that consistency looks may differ (the trees, the foliage, the general darkness, language spoken, etc.). At the very least, feeling comfortable in the environment and knowing what it generally looks like makes improvisation and exploration far easier.

More Important for Longer Adventures

I typically find this kind of knowledge is more important when running larger works. The currently published 250+ page adventures by Wizards of the Coast are examples of large works where the above considerations are important. You want the parts of the campaign to fit together and after you make the improvisation in the current session, you have more to go. However, if the adventure you are running is a one-shot you can easily morph it into anything you want and fit it in anywhere.

When Making Your Own Setting

When you make your own setting, you typically know all of these things already. You generally know your characters and your location. For this reason, I find it much easier to improvise when it is my setting or at the very least my adventure. I know the themes I'm shooting for and the characters. I also know what kind of location I want. Translating someone else's adventure is harder because you don't have that same knowledge or understanding. Instead, you try to gain it as best you can from what you read. Only so many words can fit into a book. Eventually you'll reach a point where you won't understand it any better and you'll just need to give things a shot. When it's my own setting, I don't really experience this problem. The only main problem left is accidentally writing myself into a corner or making something that my players just don't get (it's my job as the Dungeon Master to communicate the adventure to my players).