How to Steal like a REAL Dungeon Master

"Somewhere in the world of Domhan a teifling flees from agents of the Savit Cel Ru through the twisted streets of Selunim City. He wears the black and red of the Horned Alliance and thinks to himself, 'By Asmodeus, if I can just make it to the Dark Shroud, I'll be safe in the hands of the Zarathi emissaries.'"

Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

Note: If you are a player in my home game, turn back. There are spoilers in this article.

That's right, kids! Today we're talking about crime, the noblest of Chaotic activities. I'd bet all of my dice that there isn't a dungeon master out there above plundering maps or ideas from popular culture, history, or even other DnD campaigns! And that's what this post is about.

In all seriousness, though the title of this article accuses you of stealing and in the above paragraph I call it a crime, it's hardly an evil act. In fact, it can be argued that all art builds on the art that came before it. The trick is knowing how to take an idea that you find inspiring and make it your own. You have to add something of yourself into the mix, that's how you elevate art.

For instance, it will be plain to anyone who was a reader of Chris Perkins' incredible column "The Dungeon Master Experience", that this website is partly inspired by his format. Starting off each post with an anecdote from the world of my home game? That's a Perkins move right there. But my style of writing is much more stream of consciousness than his. Plus, I swear more than he did.

Balls. Hehehe.

As a matter of fact, there are many facets of my homebrew world of Domhan that are inspired by Chris' incredible Iomandra campaign setting. Chris is an incredible creative force, and his mind spawns all manner of mad ideas. It's literally impossible to hear him talk about Dungeons and Dragons and not be inspired.

Image by enriquelopezgarre from Pixabay 
Take the Dark Shroud. In my campaign world of Domhan, the Dark Shroud is a menacing wall of black smoke that towers hundreds of feet into the air, it was created by Vecna and until recently had hidden the undead empire of Zarath which Vecna had raised from the sea,

While in Chris Perkins' Iomandra, the Black Curtain was a wall of clouds that towered hundreds of feet into the sky. It hid the Kingdom of Vhalt which Vecna had raised from the sea.

At first glance, it seems that I just changed the names of the world, the clouds, and the kingdom they hid while keeping everything else the same. And at first glance, you'd be right to think that.

But the key to stealing like a REAL dungeon master is how you use the things you steal. That's what makes the difference between inspiration and theft.

Chris used the Dark Shroud as a mystery. What is it? What's behind it? It was a slow burn device meant to add atmosphere and intrigue until the players were high enough level to finally journey through the shroud. The kingdom of Vhalt was made up, largely, of warforged powered by necrotic energy, and was sending spies out into Iomandra to sow chaos before revealing itself when the time was right.

In Domhan however, The Dark Shroud was used, primarily as a device to imply that when Vecna died, his plans were thrown aside by his usurper. In the third session of my campaign, the Dark Shroud dissipated and sunk into the sea, creating Dead Water. Or at least, it did until one of my players used the Deck of Many Things to undo Vecna's death. Now, The Dark Shroud is back, but rather than let the players wonder at what might have been behind it, I'm telling them next session. The kingdom of Zarath is revealing itself to the world. A nation ruled by Vampires and Liches served by hordes of intelligent zombies and ghouls is striding onto the stage in Domhan, and attempting to open peaceful relations with the living. It's a bizarre situation, and since two of the characters in my party are nobles from the kingdoms bordering Zarath, they're gonna have to deal with it personally.

That's what I mean by stealing like a dungeon master. Taking an idea from somewhere else and changing it to fit in the broader context of your world.

Let's take a different example from Chris' Iomandra world: The Horned Alliance.

The Horned Alliance is a criminal organization run by teiflings. They're basically a teiflings-only mafia; they're huge, terrifying, and most places are content to let them be as they're almost too big to fail. I remember reading the article Chris wrote titled "She Eats Babies" where he delves into the Horned Alliance and being blown away.

In the context of Iomandra, the Horned Alliance is a response to the treatment of teiflings. Teiflings are treated like third-class citizens in Iomandra and many have turned to organized crime as a means of surviving. As a result of the sheer numbers of the Horned Alliance and the cunning of its leaders, it has power enough to rival some kingdoms.

Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay 

I fell in love with the Horned Alliance as a concept. Somehow, it had never occured to me what a mafia would look like in a fantasy setting. It's more than a thieves guild, it's a criminal organization with the power to level an economy. Because I loved it so much as it was, I didn't change as much for the Horned Alliance as I did with the Dark Shroud. You can't mess with perfection.

That being said, I did change some things so that the Horned Alliance would fit in my world.

For starters, teiflings aren't treated like third-class citizens in Domhan, so the motivations for the organization's creation had to change. I decided to give the upper echelons of the Horned Alliance connections to the Nine Hells, making them an even more dubious organization. While the majority of the Alliance doesn't know it, their dealings are consigning souls to hell.

Next, I went into more detail on the inner workings of the organization. The biggest difficulty with borrowing from other sources, like the "Dungeon Master Experience" is that they don't always go into the detail required to make something work when holding it up to scrutiny, so you have to fill in the blanks yourself. I added a military-esque ranking system and made it so that members of the Horned Alliance each carried a sigil coin that proved their allegiances to other members. This way, not just anybody can claim to be in the club.

Lastly, since my campaign centered in the elvish kingdom of Elbereth, it didn't really make sense for it to be a teiflings-only group, they would never have enough members to do anything impactful in that part of the world. So, I switched things up so that other races could join the Horned Alliance, but decided that only Teiflings could hold an officers rank. This way, it is still a teifling led organization And with this small tweak, I've added racial tensions back into the mix.

In this way, I've taken something that, by and large, was made for an entirely different type of world and fit it into my own game.

"But wait!" you cry, not understanding that this is a blog and I can't hear you, "What about maps?!"

And ooh boy, can I tell you about maps.

Battlemaps have become a cornerstone feature of tabletop gaming, it brings a little real-world perspective to the classic theatre of the mind gaming that Dungeons and Dragons has always consisted of, no longer are we describing every 20ft by 35ft by 60ft stone room. It's made the game even better.

But with this renaissance has also come one more thing DMs have to worry about. Where the fuck am I gonna get all these goddamn maps? And that's a fair question. Most people work for a living and we already devote so much time to creating the world and writing the adventures and creating interesting NPCs and working on character-driven arcs and researching monsters and... wait what was I talking about?

Oh, right! So we don't always have time to dream up brand new maps. The answer to this is simple. STEAL THEM. All around the internet, there are battlemaps that people are dreaming up. Just searching "Battlemap XYZ" produces numerous options. You can subscribe to people who draw incredible maps for a living and throw them up on a screen or print them out, or you can pull out a good old fashioned Chessex and draw out the lines on the stolen map that you have cleverly kept hidden behind your DM screen.

But that's bush league, this article is about theft. And right now, we are stealing from the real world.

Image by Lorenzo Cafaro from Pixabay 

Looking around online you can find blueprints suitable for almost any location you could need! From the layouts of Parisian catacombs to medieval German castles and Japanese cities, the internet is truly a land of wonders. For the most part, you can simply slap a grid on these with very little tweaking and BAM you got yourself a map. Hell, if your feeling adventurous, you can even smack a grid on a top-down photograph of a landscape and BOOM, there's a battlemap you can print out or pull up on a tablet.

The point of this article is that not everything has to come from your own head. You can take bits and pieces from other sources and put them through the filter of your campaign. Not everyone is Matt Mercer and has to the time to craft intricate maps and locations because the majority of us don't get a salary for our work. But that doesn't mean our work isn't worthwhile, it just means that we need a little help.

And what better place to get that help than from the noblest of all Chaotic activities, theft?

Thanks for reading and stay Chaotic!

Why I'm Glad I Gave My Players a Deck of Many Things

"As the dust settled on the edge of the refugee camp and the rest of the party rushed to their aid, Vendrin and Kandra breathed a tentative sigh of relief. Kandra had just watched Vendrin draw a card from the mysterious deck and had seen an Avatar of Death appeared and attack him. Vendrin explained to the party that his grief over their inability to save the city of Alkori and the millions of souls lost weighed on him so heavily that he was prepared to risk everything and draw from the deck for the chance to undo it. As the party took in the possibilities and the risks, an unexpected voice broke the silence first. 'I draw three cards from the Deck,' said the barbarian, Thokk."

Photo by Kayla Maurais on Unsplash

This was the scene that played out at my table last Saturday night. My players had just suffered the largest defeat of the whole campaign thus far, having seen the city of Alkori raized by a swarm of Kyuss Worms. I suppose, in retrospect, I shouldn't be so surprised that they turned to the Deck of Many Things. But, in my defense, they weren't really supposed to have it.

Let's back it up a few sessions. My party was in the city of Thrynn investigating allegations of corruption against the city's baron. They had discovered a cache of illegal magical items hidden beneath a store of relief supplies in a city warehouse. Digging through the crates, they found Potions of Mind Control, Mind Blades, and Mind Lashes. In the kingdom of Romalia, any magic that deals in mind control is illegal, and so the party believed that they had found the jackpot. Then they opened the final crate and found a small black wooden box.

I described to the party that when they lifted the box, a rush of excitement passed over them. Knowing my players, I was aware that they would immediately distrust this box and rush it to their wizard, Vendrin, who was keeping watch outside the warehouse. Vendrin opened the box, found the Deck inside, and, much as I had expected, immediately hid it from the rest of the party. Vendrin is a lawful good human noble, and I was aware that he would never allow his friends to risk their lives by using the deck. I had expected Vendrin to simply turn over the Deck, along with the illegal magic items, to their trusted contact on the city council when they removed the Baron from power.

What I didn't take into account, however, is the fact that, though Vendrin Daltumel is lawful good, his player Brian, is very much chaotic neutral. 

You have to understand, the Baron of Thrynn paid a great deal of money for the Deck and had made even more money by charging his noble friends for a chance to draw a card from the Deck in his casino. It was meant to make the Baron seem crazy and greedy and to underscore the corruption of the nobility in Thrynn, not give my party the most dangerous item in the game!

But, it seems, I had forgotten a core tenant of Dungeons and Dragons. As anyone who has been a DM for any length of time can tell you: If you dangle a unique and obscenely powerful magic item in front of your players, they will find a way to roleplay it so that they can keep it, regardless of alignment. Because, in the end, collecting powerful magic items is a big part of what makes D&D so fun.

Now, fast forward to the refugee camp. Vendrin was in a place where he felt like he had failed millions of innocent people and he knew full well the power of the deck. He figured he had a 1 (maybe 2) chance in 22 to pull a card that would undo what had happened. He drew his first card away from the rest of the party, but his fight with the Avatar of Death alerted the group. Once the cat was out of the bag, they each had to decide what they were willing to risk.

Now, we come to Thokk's cards.

And, just to be clear, I shuffled the shit out of that deck of cards. So what happened next was literally destiny... Thokk drEW THE FATES! It's literally the card about explicitly undoing something that happened in the past!

My table exploded in disbelieving laughter: Dice were flying, papers were crumpled, and my two dogs were jolted out of their slumber by the uproar. Then Thokk asked an unexpected question, "So how far back should we go?"

I nearly shit myself. Because when Vendrin had started pulling cards, I was nervous but figured that if he did somehow draw The Fates, he would just undo the fall of Alkori. But Thokk realized that he could undo what was essentially, the main thread of my campaign.

Basically, in the first adventure of my campaign, my party was dealing with a group of Vecnite cultists at the behest of a local lord, blah blah, yadda yadda. The interesting thing happened when, in the middle of their fighting the Vecnites, Vecna was killed and usurped by one of his servants, Kyuss.

And Kyuss, being a little more hands-on than Vecna was, had taken to essentially destroying the world, piece by piece, much more quickly than Vecna ever would have.

So, Thokk's player, JT looked me dead in the eye at the table and said, "Sorry bud. I use the fates to make it so that Kyuss never killed Vecna and never ascended to Godhood." And my table lost it again.

BUT HERES THE THING: The moment he said that I wasn't overcome by grief or anger at the loss of my plans, as JT had expected. Instead, I found myself overwhelmed by excitement at the possibilities!

If Kyuss never killed Vecna, then Vecna is still the God of Undeath and all of his plans are still in play. This also means that almost everything the players did either didn't happen or happened for a different reason. And most excitingly, it means that a subplot I've been toying with could lead to a new BBEG. (Big Bag Evil Guy).

Thokk drew two more cards, and Kandra drew one as well. I'll cover those cards in a future article because honestly, they deserve their own story as much as the first card. And that's really the point of this article, the potential for awesomeness that comes from the Deck of Many Things!

A lot of DMs might say that the Deck of Many Things is a game-breaking item. But, I think that feels a little bit like a cop-out, knee-jerk reaction. JT expected me to be upset that he was totally changing the story that I had worked so hard on; he actually came up to me after the game to check if we were cool. But the thing is, it's not just my story. It's our story.

Am I a little bummed that the party may never discover Kyuss' ultimate plan? A little. Are there storylines I had been seeding that don't really work anymore? Of course. But is everything lost? No. Absolutely not. If anything, this has given me the opportunity to toy with plots I had never even considered and revive ideas that I had thrown out before the campaign began!

The group isn't able to get together for a couple of weeks because of scheduling conflicts, which is giving me more than enough time to figure out a new story and work out the minutia of what has changed and how it did. (I get the feeling that will also end up being it's own article.)

Frankly, I couldn't be more excited.

In conclusion, giving your party a Deck of Many Things is like giving a first-year art student a chainsaw. It's a tool. It's very dangerous and very powerful, and there's a chance they might slice right through your table, but there's also a real possibility that they might use that chainsaw to carve something beautiful that you never would have dared to dream of.

Thanks for reading and stay chaotic!

Photo by Michael Fenton on Unsplash