Spoiler: I’m gonna keep posting but change how I do it a bit. Read on for why and how.

I always intended to make this site for myself, for fun and to get my creative juices flowing. If it attracted readers and they found anything useful or interesting, then that was excellent. All of these things have happened and I’m very happy about that.

Fun is one of the major goals of this venture. Two things I don’t find fun: going out of my way to constantly actively promote my site and forcing myself into a regular schedule of posts even when I don’t feel creative or that I have anything to offer that week.  

I’m not saying I don’t want people to read my site; I do. I like creative sharing and I love when others read and make use of what I post here. But I don’t plan to take over the interworld (though Vam might) and I’m not in this for the page views so I’m just going to take it easy.

I’ll post when I have a brilliant idea or something I just can’t wait to share with the world (however small that portion of the world is). I’ll post to get my creativity ablaze and I’ll post when I feel like it’s fun or that I have something cool to offer. I’m not going to force the creativity or blog out what basically amounts to filler posts just so I can have a post each week.

I plan to post about stuff I like and when I want. I won’t post anything I wouldn’t use or find interesting. I’m guessing that if I like this stuff, someone else is bound to as well. I hope anyone reading this has found something of use or interest on the site already and I hope that I can continue to provide you with roleplaying, gamemastering and worldbuilding tidbits.

Now, you remember Vam, right? The cursed immortal spirit piggybacking on my soul? Well, he made this site and then I never let him out much to post. I always say that’s about the change, but this time I think it actually might. Vam is the villain – his words, not mine – and that’s his area of expertise. You don’t see a whole lot from the villain’s point of view and I think Vam can fill that niche. His posts will focus on monsters, lairs, villains and so on. He is basically planning on helping GMs out there make adventurer’s lives miserable challenging –  he swears his advice is for in-game use only.

So that’s it. It’s not a big change, but it’s an acknowledgement of what’s going on and how I plan to continue. For you, things should be basically the same as before, but the irregular posting schedule won’t make me feel guilty any more, I won’t talk about upcoming posts unless I know for sure I’ll get around to them, and you’ll hopefully see more of Vam.

You may have also noticed a few changes to the site. I’ll be tinkering with it a little over the next few months to make posting to and reading Pyres of Vam as easy as possible. Thanks for reading. I really do appreciate it. Hit up the RSS feed or follow our Twitter for updates. We also have a new subscription option that will email you every new post, so check that out too if you’re interested. You can opt out later if you like.

I hope to see you again around the Pyres.

Life has run away on me this year, but I have finally managed to complete the fantasy newspaper I promised as my contribution for I Am Your Champion. I had some interest, but few donations, and that’s fine. I had fun making it and I hope those who donated to my charity are happy with the result. This isn’t just for them though, it’s a free download for everyone. I’ve made a parchment version and a print-friendly version. I hope you enjoy this and get some use out of it

Game masters can the newspaper for hooks, NPCs, adventures and worldbuilding or even just as a source of random rumours, information and goings-on. I think the best use for it, though, is for GMs to read it, think about it, then next time the PCs are in a tavern tell them “Someone’s left a newsletter on your table. It looks like this…” and then just give them the handout. I love doing this sort of thing in game and I hope you’ll enjoy my attempt at a fantasy newspaper, inspired by a thoughtful present my wife and friends made for me a few years ago.

If I get enough interest I might just make another issue. Enjoy

Imagine playing (or GMing) your regular campaign and the GM cuts to a scene of a character talking about the PCs’ exploits. This in itself is cool, but what if the character was talking about the PCs and how they ruined his life? What if he considered them to be the villains of the piece? What do other people think of the PCs, in the time and place this flashforward is happening in? The PC don’t know, so it’s a subjective retelling of events. Will the PCs become bad guys, or is this just one man’s opinion? When and where is this happening? Why is he telling this story?

Questions like these will arise for the players and I feel that it would create a sense of intrigue. Cutting back to this character from time to time will let the players discover a few more pieces of the puzzle, showing where they are heading. However, there’s a fine line between alluding to events and railroading. If it’s a one-shot you’re playing, or if your players are comfortable with railroading, it’s not so much of a problem. But this is often not the case.

If you’re describing events that haven’t happened yet in an open-ended interactive story like a roleplaying game, you need to make sure you only allude to what has happened, not citing specifics until the PCs have experienced those events or just before. Imagine the look on your players faces when they successfully negotiate a trade deal with a powerful warlord only to have the GM cut to the future storyteller saying how badly that deal ended. What if they entered a deserted castle only to cut to a flashforward describing an ambush at that location.

As I mentioned, subtly is the key. Have the storyteller talk about how there was a massacre, not which side won and how many survived. Talk about a plan going horribly wrong, but not for who or how. Give the players a little hint at the future but make it vague. It might not be that the storyteller is trying to be vague to their audience; maybe they are many, many years in the future and the storyteller is a great bard telling the legend of the heroes, which would obviously have become embellished over time and with differing perspectives on events.

Every so often through in something crazy like a pretty clear indication that one of the heroes will die. You can make this a lie from the storyteller, but that’s not a lot of fun. You could end up having one of the PCs faking their own death for story reasons, or maybe one of them does die in an unfortunate roll of the dice. Another possibility is that someone else, an NPC, joins them and the storyteller doesn’t differentiate between this person and the PCs when he says that “one of the party was killed”. What if he said, “I can’t believe that the most clever of the group was the one who died”? Now the players wonder who the cleverest PC is and they probably hope it isn’t theirs.

Separation of player and character knowledge could be a problem with this technique, but even if the characters sort of act on this “knowledge” of the future that they don’t really have, it is vague and not enough to go on. It could even lead towards a self-fulfilling prophecy when they make that trade deal go sour as they needlessly investigate the honest warlord who finds out about their meddling and now distrusts them, ending the deal in bloody combat, thus fulfilling the PCs’ worries that the deal would go poorly.

I’ve seen this technique in media other than Dragon Age II. A similar device is used when your character dies in Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, the prince says things like “Wait… no, that’s not how it happened” and it jumps back to before you died. I think the Witcher 2 does something very similar to Dragon Age II, judging from one of the trailers. How I Met Your Mother is another great example of frame narrative. We know certain things about the future of the story, but not how events lead up to that future. It’s a powerful technique and if pulled off correctly, it could really add something to a campaign.

I actually used this technique once as a short side adventure. The PCs arrived in a ruined and devastated town finding only one resident alive. They asked him what had happened and he started with something like “It all started three days ago…”. I then handed the players some character sheets and they played some lowly commoners in this flashback. They knew that something bad was going to happen in the next few days and that they were going to not be present after those events. It was an exciting way to start off the short adventure and in the end the players had great fun being part of the havoc that destroyed the town.

If you do try this technique, I’d recommend a one-shot or a side-trek so that if it doesn’t work out you haven’t lost anything really and you can just keep going. And if your players like it you can bring it back as a recurring event in your ongoing campaign.

Very young children use the spark sporadically, for play and their own simple purposes, without thought. As children grow older, they begin to understand their powers better, using them consciously and with more control. Around age 10 for girls and 12 for boys, Transition begins.

Children undergo many physical and psychological changes during this stage and it is when their spark is at is peak, very powerful and unpredictable.

Transition is a stressful and strange time for children and many lose control of their magic as the power flares and fluctuates, burning brightly before it is snuffed out entirely. Girls usually complete the Transition by ages 15-17, while boys usually complete it by ages 16-18. After this, the spark is dead forever.

Because adults are unable to harness magic, children are highly valued for their abilities. Many children do not utilise the spark effectively and are more dangerous to themselves than others, or are merely an annoyance. However, children of particular talent and power are recruited into harsh military programs to perfect their control over the spark and harden them into tools of war. Children are taught from a young age that fighting for their faction is the highest honour and the greatest deed that one could hope for. Propaganda floods the schools, homes and streets, and armies recruit children as young as 8 to train to fight their horrendous battles.

Every year, new drugs are trialled in attempts to keep children young and keep their spark alive for as long as possible. Experiments are conducted upon children’s brains, leaving many permanently damaged or worse, in attempts to unlock the secrets of the spark. Some believe that it is the mental state of children that is the key to their power, and so they experiment on the mentally disabled as an alternative route to the answers they seek.

Schools are hotbeds of propaganda but some children catch on or have different ideas and sow the seeds of rebellion. Such children meet in secret after classes to discuss what the adults are really up to, what the war is all about, how they are developing in their talents, and what they will do to avoid being recruited. Groups of children roam adult cities and towns as rebels, vigilantes or criminals, using their powers however they see fit.

Rumour has it that there are hidden towns out in the wilderness populated entirely by children. Gangs of teenagers rule these child towns and the children live however they can free from the control of adults, but left to their own devices to learn about the radical changes they are going through. All the while, they must deal with the normal trials and tribulations of puberty – sexuality, friendship, bullying, and growing up – as well as the great unstable power that they wield, its consequences and the reality of life after the Transition, when their power fades and they find themselves as young adults in a world that considers them past their use-by-date.

Inspiration: Ender’s Game, Lord of the Flies, Dark Angel, Neon Genesis Evangelion

Be Willing to Let Go

I wrote a love interest into the story within the first few paragraphs. She and the main character connected a few chapters later and then agreed to meet up in two days. I spent the rest of my 50,000 words on the next day and never got to the point where they met up to continue that relationship. By the time I had done this, I realised that the relationship was interesting, but not as interesting as the rest of what I had written.

I had run out of time, so once I hit my word goal for the month, I summarised the rest of the scenes. I included scenes about the love interest, but I felt that in a rewrite, it might be best to just let her go, or maybe kill her off before the hero got a chance to know her better.

Sometimes when GMing you come up with an NPC or a city or some cool thing that you really love… and it falls flat. PCs ignore the city and don’t connect with the NPC. It happens. In cases like this, sometimes it’s best to just let it go. Don’t push them. Instead, just let the NPC or city or whatever quietly slip away.

Alternatively, you could twist it. If the NPC is being ignored or poorly treated by brash PCs with god-complexes, maybe they become a villain intent on putting the PCs in their place. The Incredibles is still one of my favourite examples of this, and its plot is easily tweaked to many different genres (particularly fantasy and sci-fi).

Improv Can Be Better than Prep

I prepped a basic outline of the story I had in my mind, but let the details fill themselves in as I wrote. In particular, there was a fae woman who I described on a whim as having burning golden eyes. In a blur of keystrokes, I instantly decided that they were literally burning and she was a sun fae. I doubt I would’ve thought of that during laborious, detail-oriented prep.

Another good example of this was the spells my hero was casting. He was just learning magic and music was his means of casting. He listened to songs and they would allow him to cast certain spells. Only he – and I – didnt’ know what spells each song let him cast. So, I had the songs on my playlist and listened to them as he used them, coming up with much cooler descriptions of how they worked than if I had prepped.

His healing song became one that let him issue healing water from one hand and a soothing breeze from the other, rather than a generic white light sort of thing. His song that I knew was going to save him in combat against a giant creature didn’t give him miraculous fighting strength, but the grace and timing of a dancer to dodge the beasts’ attacks.

Improv can be difficult, and sometimes you stuff it up (in which case, you can sometimes twist it or just let it go). When it works though, you can surprise yourself and hopefully your players.

Prep Can Be Better with Scrivener

I use Windows, so I have been deprived of Scrivener in past years. But now, there is a Windows version too! For those of you who don’t know, Scrivener is a popular writing program with an in-built corkboard/overview function. It allows you to break your text up into scenes or however you see fit. You can easily view them on the corkboard and even give each a category and a little description on their virtual index card to quickly refer to them.

After using this to prep an outline of the scenes for my story, I felt much more confident about filling in the content of each of those scenes, splitting the scenes into several scenes where needed, and deviating from that outline. I haven’t had the chance to yet, but I plan to use Scrivener to prep some RPG sessions. I found it a very useful way to organise my thoughts, as well as disparate plot threads.

Do What You Know and Love, Try Something New

I write about fantasy stuff mostly. This time, I went a little different and did modern urban fantasy (I did this the year before too, but it was different again from 2010′s stuff). I wrote about things I really like, namely fantasy, an unlikely hero, big responsibilities suddenly gained and putting twists on classic creatures. But I added things I wasn’t very familiar with. It worked well.

Doing this in a ratio is a good way to go about it (I read this somewhere, but can’t find it right now). Try keeping 80-90% of what you’re good at, what you know and what you love, but try adding 10-20% of something new and exciting. This way you aren’t throwing yourself in the deep end and if the new stuff falls flat, at least you know that you’ll like the rest.

Lead With the Cool Stuff

This article from Treasure Tables sums this one up nicely, but I’ll put my own thoughts forward here. I had an idea in my head for a scene where the hero would get his magical powers. It happened like I planned, but that was 20,000 words into a 50,000 word story about that character. I had all sorts of cool scenes in mind about how to introduce the various factions he was helping/avoiding and my twists on several folkloric monsters.

I got some of that done, but I ran out of time for a lot of it. In fact, I stopped writing and started summarising just before an awesome mage-vs-mage fight scene. In a story you’re writing for yourself, this might be okay. You can go back and edit. In fact, I’m quite happy with the pacing of my story, it just turned out that I need more than 50,000 words to tell it at that pace.

In roleplaying games, though, if you’re running a game about fighting a dragon or killing an evil king or confronting the dread pirate lord, you want that to happen. If you spend all your time getting to the lair, infiltrating the castle or following sea charts and then the game ends… well… you’ve missed out on all the cool stuff.

If your game is about radioactive vampires, have one in the very first session. It can be too tough for the PCs and maybe they have to get saved, or maybe it attacks and then tilts its head and leaves for some unknown reason. Now they’ve seen its power and are probably pretty freaked out. You’ve got them hooked.

If your game is about political intrigue, you want the PCs to be wrapped up in it from the start. Trysts, accusations, lose-lose decisions, imposters and more. Have these things present in the first few sessions so that people can see how the game is going to be and what it’s about.

Think of it like this: your first session (or two or three, maybe) is the pilot for the series that is your campaign. Yes, it needs to tell them what the game is about, but it also needs to be awesome enough to get people hooked and make them want to come back every week.

50,000 words sounds like a lot when you start, but you quickly realise it really isn’t. When you know you’ve only got six sessions left before someone leaves the group to go live overseas or something, make sure you fit the cool stuff into the time available.

Know When to Stop

Just as important as all the rest, be aware that you can ruin a campaign by stretching it on and on long after the spark that made it special has died. Most of us have TV shows we once loved that got stale after too many seasons. Some ended too soon, so it’s also important not to cancel your campaign short. Some of the best campaigns I’ve played in and run were about a year in length. Although, more recently, I have run some very poignant campaigns that were much shorter and much better for it. They wouldn’t have had the same impact long-term.

It’s important to know when to stop.

The End.

• 2121 words left. Tomorrow, I win! #nanowrimo
• I have few words to go but a fair chunk of story left. I feel like this is one I actually care enough about to keep writing after #nanowrimo
• VICTORY!!! I wrote 51,145 words in 30 days. I am a #NaNoWriMo WINNER!
• I’ve participated in #NaNoWriMo for 4 years, enjoyed it and won each time. If you didn’t join us this year I highly recommend you do in 2011
• I’ve neglected my website this month. Now, I want to focus more on it and try to post more regularly. I’ll have some new content up soon.
• Making a note here, HUGE SUCCESS! Jonathan Coulton + Portal + #Nanowrimo = http://bit.ly/hQM8zM
• December’s Fiasco playset is fantasy-based! Play as dragon-slaying adventurers who “saved” a town. So much awesomeness! http://bit.ly/fLctIj
• Order of the Stick is exceptionally good right now. Great story arc.
• Donkey Kong Country Returns is a nostalgic fun-fest. It’s challenging and I’m having lots of fun. Great music, graphics and level design too