How to Chew Your Food
How to Chew Your Food: Teeth & Tongue
Table of Contents
Introduction
my polemical blogpost about chewing your own food got a lot of traction and, to the confusion of many a Bearblog user, actually ended up on the "trending" section of the website. While this explosion in engagement is awesome for cretins like me who derive their self worth entirely from the analytics of their blog, anyone looking to actually learn how to put in the work to understand and run a sparse text was left basically abandoned. Whoops!
What follows is an attempt to codify important parts of the process I use and think about when preparing modules, pre-written material, or basically anything that I run so that people looking to run similar things have a framework to hang their own prep off of. I think this process works well and has lead to some awesome gaming moments and much less boring work on my end as a referee.
Teeth: Reading & Prep Work
The first part of preparing a module, sparse or verbose, is actually reading the thing. You've hopefully either already read something that inspires you enough to want to run or are looking to convert something that wasn't made for tabletop games. Maybe you're an elite gamer and already have a game going and are wondering how to prep sparse modules between sessions. This section provides some choice advice for both parties.
Close Reading
Some questions to ask on your first read:
- What is the main idea of this section/chapter/region? What is the core conflict? What is the crux of the situation?
- What are the sensory elements that stick out? What is the most striking image?
- Where are the concrete parts of the encounter? What will the players be interacting with (monsters, treasures, traps, specials)?
Let's take an example from a hexfill from Gearing's Wolves Upon the Coast, which is very illustrative for the type of exercise we're doing here. Spoilers for Ruislip:\
The centre of the city is dominated by a Temple. Moving towards it, the streets begin to fill with perfect marble statues of Goblins. It takes 30 minutes to reach from the edge of the city. The Temple is structurally sound, but has been heavily defaced. Statues of human warriors cluster around it, faces full of fear. It contains a Medusa.
- The main idea of this part of the hex is the Medusa, obviously. The Temple is its home, and the rest of the key is about describing the surrounds and the approach toward this temple.
- The striking imagery here for me are the statues, which connect once again to the Medusa in the temple. A different person might focus on the general destruction of the city, though. Gearing has a lot of strong images to pursue throughout Wolves.
- Once again, the Medusa is the key encounterable thing here; there are other things going on in the rest of the hex that characterize this part, but the main idea once you get past all of that is the medusa. The statues are in my mind the other interactable element of this section. What happens if they're un-petrified? What happens if the Medusa is slain? Are the human warriors facing inwards towards the temple or outwards towards the rest of the city? Are they tightly packed enough to form walls or loosely packed to force a party to spread out?
I'm jumping the gun here a bit on the last bullet point. The next section of the read is all about picking apart the details of the text. For this second read (or a first read once you've got a good memory or gotten good at thinking about these things) we want to focus less on the text itself and more about the stuff around the text. Things like implications, ommissions, vaguaries, and specificities are what we want to focus on here. Some guiding questions for this sort of thing:
- Where are the gaps? What does the text leave out? Why?
- What is implied here but not stated? How could you interpret that differently? Which interpretation do you prefer?
- What do you need from here to run this? What can you ignore?
Once again, I think it's instructive to stick with Gearing's Wolves for now; we'll switch to another source later in the post, but since this part of the post is text-based it makes sense to stick with a primarily text-based adventure.
- The layout of the city! How are people expected to navigate the inner city? Maybe this was left out because it's not important to the crux of the encounter, or because the author was lazy (in tabletop games this possibility can never be ruled out). The city layout will determine a big part of how this plays out at the table, so its worth thinking about what would make sense.
- I'm using another bullet point to talk about the temple, since that's another place that will need to be detailed out. The obvious choice is a Grecian temple with columns every 1d3x5 feet from one another, but a large vaulted cathedral would offer the medusa better sight-lines for petrification. How dense are the statues? If they're dense enough to form walls or barricades here, a Grecian temple would basically become a maze.
- Obviously, the statues come from the Medusa. This almost doesn't need to be written. Returning again to the human warriors, the direction they're facing is maybe the most interesting void for me. Are they attacking the temple, thereby running into the Medusa and getting petrified? Or are they defending the now-defaced temple from a horrible foe? This doesn't have any gameable implications, but it presents a World Mystery to players and is the kind of evocative image that players tend to remember.
- Now that we've done a second read, the main question I have is "what does the temple look like?" I think if I were to run this place the city would take a backseat to this temple, partly because mapping a whole ass city to traipse around in is the subject of many a blogpost and because it's much cooler to be in a temple fighting a medusa than walking through a ruined city fighting a medusa. sue me.
To clarify, the questions in this section aren't meant to be exhaustive. The purpose of the two reads is to separate comprehending the text as a pretty piece of information and the interpretation of the text as a pretty piece of information with a point of view. They're mindsets, not a checklist to work through.
Legwork and its Adherents
Once you've figured out where the holes in the text are, the question of how to fill them looms large. In general, I think a good product or text will give you specific numerical values for things like monsters and treasure. If they don't, or you're trying to expand upon something not covered by the text here's a rough guideline:
- 1d6 for small things, like gems, torches, and arrows.
- 2d6 for most encounters. Multiply by 100 for a rough value for any unlabeled single-item of treasure.
- 5d6 for large things, like hordes of monsters or. Multiply by 10 for a small village's population, or by 100 for treasure hoard gp values from the aforementioned monsters.
How do you know which dice range to use? Generally, you want to select a range such that the extremes of either value are interesting (or funny) for the quantity you want."Why the fuck did this goblin only have 1 arrow in his quiver?" and "Woah! 6 Arrows, this is a nice pick me up!" are both pretty nice, so scavenged arrows are something you might choose to resolve with a 1d6 quantity.
I like using these ranges because there's an oracular element to the numbers generated, especially at the extremes of the dice. Why are there only 5 villagers? Why are there 12 zombies stuffed into one coffin? Answering these questions during prep (or keeping them open for resolution in play) is a joy to me in itself! These dice ranges are also useful for improv, which I'll talk about in the "Tongue" section.
Another thing worth keeping in mind here are sets of generative tools. One of the most helpful tools for running 1000 Statues, beyond the rules text of Delving Deeper, has been the gem generator from Hyperborea 2e. Curating a list of tools like this can help you quickly sketch out a solution to a hole in the module or add on something that needs to be there. Unfortunately, there isn't really a great way to curate a list like that beyond reading too many tabletop books. Sorry.
In general, we want to prep specific things, both of a physical nature (items, monsters, etc.) but also of a logistical nature (plans, schemes, and plots). If it isn't explored in the text of the module, it's helpful to think about or write down plans of actions and come up with battle plans for any intelligent hostile factions the party is likely to encounter. Suggested reading material here is "You Jabronies Don't Even Know What Tactical Combat Means" which has a really cogent overview of the sorts of things worth thinking about, as is METT-TC for Faction Play. You can use these to rationalize defense/attack plans for factions that might not have them and think through what each group's resources and abilities would be. When the factions are scoping out their enemies, they should make liberal use of YE COMPLEAT MANUAL OF UNMANNERLY FIGHTING since at least some of their PC adversaries will be fighting at this level of competency.
I use these resources a lot when parties fail to wipe out a faction on their first hostile contact. I usually write down or remember what the party looked like, did, and their capabilities and use that information to structure a response from the enemy faction, whether that's flight or ambush or some other trick.
It's important to note that all this is without any sort of tonal indicator. The "Battle plans" your intelligent skeletons have could be bowling their skulls down a hallway towards the party. Your intelligent zombies could construct a ladder from their legs and climb the castle walls. The important thing about the specificity beyond the tone/difficulty is that it gives something concrete and interesting for the party to react to beyond "There are 12 Skeletons in this hallway," which can become stale even when run by the best of referees.
Where do we go from here? Prep past the first session
Generally speaking, with all prep for sparse modules, you want to go deep before you go broad, following the interests of the players. The joy of running a sparse module like 1000 Statues is that you don't actually need to do any of the broad sketchwork because it's all there (in detail) for you in the text. Your main job is drawing connections and understanding the broad strokes so you can dive in and make it your own in the weeds.
To that end, keeping note of things players mention (names come up like this for me a lot, so I write those down with a quickness) and either defining them on the spot or expanding upon them during prep time is the name of the game. In this way, you probably don't do any work that isn't used (though you're welcome to) and that saves you time and energy that you can use for other things, like reading a nice book or watching a movie.
If you must detail out something that they haven't asked for yet, try and shoot for the minimum viable product before you get all fancy with your prose and the amount of effort you put in. Here's what I started with for the village in my 1000 Statues table (stats and unknown information removed; spoiler-free for anyone at that table!):
The town is quiet when you arrive. The rain is relentless and never ends. Long wooden boards serve as impromptu gangplanks between the buildings over a pit of mud. No one but The Priest can remember what has happened.
* The General Store owner wears large glasses that make his eyes look like pinpricks in his large doughy face. Quiet and Professional.
* The Inn has more dust than drink. The barmaids are quiet, and the owner looks sickly. A child shoots marbles in a chalk circle framed by a sunbeam.
* The Church is deserted and falling into disrepair. A single priest, aged into placidity, is the town's only sympathetic face. He stopped before he reached the bottom.
Ultimately, notes are meant to evoke and to jog memory, not to serve the function of a module text. The notes don't have to be prose (though for me I find prose to be more memorable) just enough written word or shitty drawing to jog your memory. Embrace lists and bullet points. This isn't your novel, it's your tabletop game.
Tongue: Feeling It Out
While the busywork of prepping a tabletop game is important, there is an often under-served part of the prep-posts that has to deal with the soft skills of the game, like talking, explaining, and actually conducting play. To that end, here are a few selected topics about the finer, looser arts of running a sparse module and observations I've made about them in my time playing and running them.
Table Emotions and Flow
learning to read both the emotional state of the players and their relative engagement with the fiction of the world is probably the key technique I've developed that's made modules like 1000 Statues work in an open table format. There are two axes here that I try to pay attention to at the same time while running and modulate my refereeing skills to compensate.
Axis 1 - Emotional State
I'm not gonna run a sad dungeon if I know the people at the table are struggling in their personal lives; it's rude to knowingly spring that onto someone in an open table without warning. Similarly, I'm not gonna try to emphasize the emotional beats of the dungeon when I'm playing with a bunch of high-energy gamers who are excited to bash skulls in and kill things. It just won't work. It'll feel like you're trying to chew a tire with marshmallow teeth.
Axis 2 - Investment State, or "How into the nerdy shit they are"
One of these days, I'll get around to writing an article on something we've been calling "Arcade Play" in the Gay Beholder OSR server. Before that is this, though, so I'll sketch it out briefly before moving on to the main point.
Sometimes, you just want to play the game. You don't want to roleplay a character, or explore a fully realized world with interiority and depth, or solve a world mystery based on your meticulous notes about the world. Sometimes, you want to roll a d6 and try to bash a door in, check surprise, and then roll a d20 1d6 times to try and kill the 2d6 Goblins that were behind it. That's the crux of Arcade Play, which is focused on playing older dungeon-crawls or wilderness adventures not as a way of interrogating the fiction but of engaging with the pure fun of attritional play. When you've got the right group, this play can be fun! It's all the fun hype moments of your classic D&D fare without the buy-in from a complicated setting or plot.
Other times, you want something different. Variety is the spice of life, or whatever.
The point being is that keeping track of the rough preferences for your players and what they like in the game can help you emphasize or elide over the stuff that you run that is problematic. If I know that I'm playing with Arcade Archibald and his League of Arcade-Bros I'm not going to prep (or improv at the table) a deep character with a lot of interiority. Similarly, I'm going to emphasize certain things playing with Arcade Archibald's arch-nemesis, Immersed Emory and the Immersion Sisters, that I wouldn't otherwise think about if I'm running in the Arcade-Gamer style.
A good example of this in practice is the real-life open table I've been running for the past six months for my university tabletop club. Most of the people there are either neophytes or come from a play culture that is wholly unprepared to deal with managing inventory. So, because I know my audience/conspirators, I'm not really sweating their coin-weight or how many slots of hammerspace they have free in their packs. It would be more trouble than it's worth teaching and reteaching some silly inventory system to a bunch of people who will never use it again in their whole entire chud life.
Wait a minute, aren't I supposed to be running what I want to run? Whatever happened to Referee authority?
Yeah sure man, it's your pretend little world and all the times you've written "2 HD, Armor as Chain, Damage as Weapon" are directly correlated to your chances of getting into heaven. It's what all the cool kids are doing, right now, you better get on it.
There's a (pretty healthy) impulse in a lot of referee advice that places the referee's authority above the needs/wants/impulses of the players. This advice is accompanied by a snide, condescending attitude to the ephemeral "opionated player" that wants you to run their version of the game on their terms.
This advice is ultimately directed towards players who overstep their authority at the table when it comes to tone/content/whatever. In my mind, it isn't meant to inspire this weird sense of superiority or divinity in the referee such that they believe the way in which they portray their world ought to be wholly separate from the people they're running for. Ultimately, a game is the referee and the players, and a good referee should make concessions to their players's whims as readily as the players submit to the referee's. It is, as most of the finer points in this section, a matter of conversation and understanding between a group of people.
Inspirations
You should be consuming media you like as much as you can! Beyond just being good for the soul generally, the more you've read/watched/listened to the more you have in the noggin to draw upon when you're both prepping, as in the last section, and running, as in the next section. Cultivating an Appendix N for a campaign, having a playlist or a piece of art you look at before a game, and just generally looking for inspiration in your daily life are all ways of enriching some of the soft skills of running roleplaying games.
The point here isn't to be referencing Book of the New Sun every time you run, but to learn language, sensory details, and sounds with which to explain concepts and portray what's happening in your game. Language is beautiful, art is beautiful, and while tabletop books continue to be woefully unpoetic it would do you good to consume and internalize pretty things.
For the Wolves example, it might be helpful to watch Enemy At the Gates with your game group to get the type of gritty, ruined city vibe that the hexfill has going on. I'm also partial to consuming all sorts of classic oil paintings for visual inspiration on basically every subject, so landscapes with ruins or other such things might come up for me here.
This is another axis (see the previous section) on which to modulate your conduct of the game to match your players. I'm not even breathing Book of the New Sun when I'm running the real-life open table; instead, I'm whipping out Dimension 20 references, or referencing art in the 5e Player's Handbook. You can modulate your language beyond just referencing media in this way too, but it's less obvious. I'm not going to whip out a line like "inchoate hordes" when I'm playing with my videogame friends. Similarly, though I am often overtaken by the urge, I try to avoid using videogame terms like "stunlocked," "air juggling", and "kiting" when I'm playing with people who I know don't understand those terms.
Bonus Inspo: The Subtle Art of Noticing
We should all be going out into public and talking to people. Stealing mannerisms, like a stumbling gait or a thinking motion (A lot of my characters stroke their chin or tug their earlobes) can go a long way towards characterizing characters that are written or portrayed flatly. Voices and quirks of speaking are also another way to create a sense of depth that may not be present in the module. Catchphrases like "hon hon!" at the end of sentences are infamous and annoying and memorable in a way that a gorgeous sentence often isn't when spoken aloud.
Improvisation and its Discontents
Improv is one of those things that always starts a huge conversation in tabletop games. The limits of what a referee can feel comfortable improvising vary wildly even between games and there's a considerable amount of stress deciding where that point is.
It's most helpful for me to think of improv as a function of the "axes" I've talked about in the previous Tongue sections. These are all things you want to consider while you're improvising. Careful readers will notice I didn't mention the "lore" or "consistency" of your world at all in those sections. For those of you who were about to realize that, quivering in fear like a babe un-swaddled that your lore be unspoken for, have no fear. The lore of the game world should be like the last thing you worry about, but you should worry about it! In the context of a sparse module, you've probably already sweat bullets for too long about how your setting's goblins fit into the thing and made adjustments accordingly. If you haven't, it's probably something so small as not to matter and the previous important things (mood at the table, keeping a congruent set of references with the rest of the table) should take precedent.
But what if it does matter? The last piece of advice that I'll leave you all with is pretty simple. Ultimately, the game and the world and everything we're supposed to care about in this cringe little hobby is what happens at the table. Misspeaking, and bringing about some cataclysmic change in the setting is scary, but it's also wildly exciting. You've discovered something completely new, live, with all the people who are supposed to care about this sort of thing around you. That's not scary, really, that's exciting! Lean into it and see what happens.