Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 christopher_rowe Oct 15, 2008 10:59:36	So, I'm told that the Running the Realms forum needs more participation! :D I'm starting this thread in the hopes that a conversation will occur among Dungeon Masters and others who are running or designing 4E games in the 4E Realms. More specifically, I'm hoping that those of us who are interested in "getting it right" in terms of the lore will be able to provide ideas and strategies for one another. So, here's what I do when I'm working on a Realms project and want to know what the 1479 "state of play" is concerning whatever it is I'm looking at (in my case, I tend to start everything with a geographical location and work out from there.) I think the easiest way for me to describe my method is to give an example. Say I want to design an adventure for my group set on the coast of Dambrath. The first thing I do is check the current lore. For me, the current lore that "counts" is what's listed here. For other 4E Realms DMs, it might be some subset of that list. Once I've figured out what's been said about Dambrath so far, I take step two, which is to read what's gone before. In the case of Dambrath, I first check for references in the three "top level" campaign sources that preceded the current Forgotten Realms Campaign Guide. That's the gray box, the 2nd edition box of 1993, and the 3.0 campaign setting hardback of 2001. From there, I cast a wider net, looking for more detailed sources in both fiction and gaming supplements. In this case, my two main catches would be the second and third edition Shining South supplements. At that point, depending on my needs, I might drill down on particular details (they got great horses in Dambrath, where are there details about Realmsian horses? might be a good idea to know more about the flora since it's a southern coast, what's the best source for trees of the Realms?) Now I've got a bunch of older lore. How does that help me with the adventure I'm going to run my PCs through in 1479? This, for me, is the part that's the most fun. I update my previous edition lore based on two parameters. The first parameter is defined by the "Ten Important Facts" on pp. 4-5 of the FRCG. What in my old lore is no longer relevant because of what's listed here? In the case of Dambrath, the most relevant facts are numbers one—which will influence which NPCs from published lore I have available to me—and two—which explains the changes in topography I see on my 4E map. The second parameter is defined by my knowledge of the status of Dambrath and its neighbors in the 4E Realms, which is takes me all the way back to step one, checking the current lore. I think of this as a sort of echo or waveform of research and writing. I start at one point—the "now" of 1479—and then go backwards to the beginning of the Realms as a published game setting and bounce against the gray box. Then I move forward through the timeline and the lore again, coming to a rest back at the point in time and space I began. And then I write! Anyway, that's what I do. What do y'all do?
#2 Mr_Miscellany Oct 16, 2008 0:22:02	My campaign planning for 4E consists primarily of winging it. Truth! I like to read the adventures a little and get the general idea of what’s going on in them, then I just play off of the PC’s personalities and what I know of the minds of the players who are roleplaying those characters, and I also roleplay the NPCs like crazy to make things come alive. Even though it’s the Realms, playing D&D is still an intensely social, interpersonal activity. That requires spending as much brain time on the players as it takes to bring out the flavor and lore of the Realms in the adventure (at least for me). I like to let adventure and campaign ideas be generated spontaneously on the drive up to game each Monday. I drive like a maniac, screaming down the highway with the pedal to the metal and the windows down, blaring Metallica or Disturbed or Tool or similar and the ideas just pop right up. When I get to the house where we game I write them down as quick as I can and that’s like the starter that gets my DM engine running. In terms of continuity for my campaign, I write down notes all night long, then read and review them at the next session just before getting started. Since we alternate weekly between our 3E and 4E Realms games, this is the best way I know to keep things consistent. This also means I will often need to read bits of the notes aloud, to remind the players of important facts from two weeks ago that they may have forgotten (such as story notes, plot points and interesting things the players did/accomplished during the last session; also game stuff like how many milestones the players have achieved, how many action points are left to them and when the last rest was taken). Oh, and plastic miniatures in ziplock bags (divided up by encounter) are a good idea. Makes setting up between encounters go a lot faster. For example, in the adventure H1: Keep on the Shadowfell, the dungeon encounters are labeled numerically. So I have little baggies with the appropriate minis in them, labeled numerically also. Easy peasy. Finally, I try to remember that these characters are most of them descended from the characters in our 3E Realms game, so I like to interject bits of history (from the 4E point of view). For instance, the H1 adventure has a hard faced, bitter elf NPC named Ninaran. After encountering her a few times in the 4E game and establishing her hard-edged personality, I had the characters in the 3E game run into her as demanding and imperious little elf child. While one player joked about altering the flow of time by “killing that elf,” another player just sat there and said, “Dude, that’s bleeping cool!” That’s how the players (and the 3E characters) know she’s a scion of a major leader of the Eldreth Veluuthra, though the 4E characters don’t know this. The whole creating-links-between-the-two-campaign-eras thing is fun for me as a DM and for my players. The players have to juggle their metagame knowledge, but that naturally gets them thinking about both campaigns and so puts their minds squarely in the game world. Lastly, during the week I spend a lot of time thinking about how I should be planning for the Monday game, but I mostly spend time on these forums causing trouble and rambling about my campaign. ;) That’s how I do it. Next!
#3 Stigger Oct 16, 2008 0:42:18	Well, while I don't play 4e rules or Realms, styles of DMing are fairly universal beyond the rulesets being used. Mostly, I just make it up as I go along, much as Misc does, without the mini's, since my group doesn't much care for them, mostly because my wife tends to do pervy things with them while no one's looking, just to see if we're paying attention. Not kidding about that actually... Certainly I keep notes between sessions, not that anyone else could interpret them besides me, but planning out the campaign isn't something I do much beyond a story arc, and even then its just a very general outline in my head. I want this vague outcome, a couple of things need to happen along the way at some point, sometimes in a particular order, other times not, and just go from there. I think more about NPCs more than I do the plot, since I found early on that when I try to actually structure a plot, the players always found a way to torpedo it to the depths of RPG history as soon as I started floating it, so I just gave that up and started improvising everything. Been much happier since really, now that I got out of the straightjacket. Really though, I think every DM has their own style, and well they should, but its been my experience that my players shaped my style as a DM as much as, if not more, than I tried to shape myself in a conscious way, so I guess I could say that the most important thing I do to prepare for a game is to listen to what the players say about the last session and take things from there, in a very casual way, and without asking direct questions. So far its worked out pretty well.