The Let’s Build a Good Dungeon Feature needs a little more time in the oven. It’s coming soon; I promise. Meanwhile, I’m gonna open up my Ask Angry inbox and answer a couple of reader questions.

Incidentally, if you’d like a chance to have your burning Game Mastering question abused and answered in a future Ask Angry column, e-mail ask.angry@angry.games. Tell me what to call you and, for crap’s sake, keep your question brief.

Thane asks…

How do you run a multi-path megadungeon like Castle Ravenloft as a Game Master? In those kinds of dungeons, players can go in any direction at any moment, with dynamic events happening, complex verticality, and huge rooms that sometimes lack clear landmarks.

How do you manage that without constantly keeping your head buried in pictures, maps, and books?

Holy mother of crap, I know, right?!

Thane, I am with you.

I get a lot of shit for talking about carefully designing adventures based on the players’ likely paths and using design tricks to funnel them along and constrain them. I do that mainly because I believe that people like to play actual, good games, but you’ve brought up another reason to go the actual scenario design route. It’s the only way to make huge, sprawling adventures like this actually runnable.

Don’t get me wrong; I love Ravenloft. At least, I love the original Ravenloft. At least, I love what the original Ravenloft did. I firmly think it’s one of the most important D&D modules ever published. It changed everything. I probably wouldn’t be here if it didn’t exist. Moreover, I think its significance in the history of tabletop roleplaying gaming is why it’s one of the most republished D&D modules of all time. Not that I have a lot of compliments for the reprints and reimaginements. Especially the latest ones.

Because, really, we’re smart enough now that this shit should have been fixed. But, it hasn’t been. If anything, it’s worse.

Let’s use Curse of Strahd as our stand-in for why running any modern, sprawling, open mega-adventure sucks dice bags. You’ve got several different, sprawling, labyrinthine maps just of Castle Ravenloft alone, and the players can basically get from anywhere to anywhere else. Each is keyed to a particular passage in the text. Every passage, every room, that isn’t basically an empty space with a note of flavor text describing its emptiness instead comprises a wall of prose text that runs anywhere from a half-page long to spread over multiple pages. There are nearly a hundred such numbered locations in Castle Ravenloft alone, and it takes up forty pages of the module’s textbook.

So, you’re sitting there with the book open to the map of the level the players are currently on. They enter a room, you flip a few pages to the corresponding keyed passage, and, if it’s just an empty crap room, you read the flavor text, describe the exits, and ask the players where they go next. The one saving grace here is that the writers of Curse of Strahd were smart enough to tell you, in the text, which numbered passages connect to which exits, so you don’t actually have to flip back to the map to figure out what numbered entry the players land in next. But, really, you should be tracking the players’ location on the map.

The real nightmare happens when the players end up in one of those wall of text rooms. One of those rooms with a half-page or more of prose describing features, traps, events, encounters, and whatever other bullshit there might be. None of this crap is presented in a way that a normal human could reference it quickly at the table. If you want to run that room, you have to parse the text at a skim.

Castle Ravenloft, as noted, ain’t a small dungeon, and it’s totally nonlinear. If there were only a dozen rooms and only six of them were significant, then a simple read-through before the session would be enough to make it runable. The walls of text would just remind you of what you read before the session. But with hundreds of rooms and no navigational flow to it, you’re screwed. You’re flipping pages, checking maps, and desperately skimming walls of text most of the time.

That’s running a modern, sprawling adventure module.

I’m going through this shit myself right now, and I’m not even running a fantasy dungeon crawl. My module’s a modern science fiction paranormal mystery about aliens and mothmen and clandestine government agencies and bioterrorism and shit like that. I shouldn’t have to deal with sprawling megadungeon crap. And yet, that’s exactly what the player’s visit to AHD Pharmaceuticals’ corporate headquarters and research laboratory is like. There’s 40 keyed locations in a sprawling, multi-story floor plan. Some are bland and empty; some are just offices and janitorial closets and conference rooms and bathrooms. Others are important and, because this is a complex mystery adventure, the important stuff is really important. You have to get it right. Certain locations contain all sorts of research files and evidence and shit like that. If I miss one single sentence in any of the walls of text, the adventure is screwed. So are my players. So am I.

So what do you do?

First, you quit whining and suck it up. I can’t pretend modules like these are easy to run. The modern format sucks. It just sucks. It’s all terrible. Even if the module itself is good, the presentational hot mess that is every modern module makes it impossible to run well.

Welcome to Game Mastering; here’s your accordion.

You can make this easier on yourself at the table, but it means doing a bunch of work before you start running the module and before every session you host. That also sucks.

Let me lay it out for you…

First, get the maps out of the book. You want copies of the maps at hand at all times. Make that happen. I can’t encourage you to do anything illegal…

Second, you need to read all of the keyed entries in the dungeon at least once before you start running it. Worse, you need to take actual notes, but I can tell you what to do.

As you go through all the keyed entries in the dungeon, note which ones are basically just empty space. Note which ones are filler. Open a document or get a notebook and write down, in numerical order, the index and name of every empty room. Or every simple room. Because some rooms aren’t truly empty, but they only have one little feature or a simple encounter to run. That’s shit you can do without cracking the book. From a room’s name, you can pull a description out of your ass. Same with a single feature and a simple note. You can run an encounter with six skeletons without a wall of text to guide you.

So you’ll end up with something like this…

18. Ruined Library
19. Scribes Study: 6 skeletons
20. Portrait Gallery: Painting of Lady Bathselda von Smeldenfirtz
21. Storage Closet: Sack of 213 copper coins and a +1 mop

Meanwhile, whenever you come to a significantly complicated room that you actually need details from the book to manage, highlight it on your copy of the map. Literally color the room in so that, when the players get there, you know you actually need the book.

Seriously. You don’t need the book to tell you how to describe an empty, ruined library or how to run six skeletons. The room’s name alone tells you enough to describe the room, and you can just make up any details that aren’t actually important.

What you’re doing here is separating the signal from the noise. In the end, you will have three things in front of you at the table: you will have your copy of the maps always visible, you will have a one- or two-page list of crap rooms you can run off the top of your head, and you will have the book to open whenever the players hit a room that demands opening the book for.

Third, get yourself a little wooden cube from literally any board game ever. That marks the players’ current location. Put it on your map and move it around. If it lands on a crap room, check your list, embellish the description, and resolve the players’ actions or whatever encounter you have to. If it lands on a highlighted room, open the book to the right page and run it.

Of course, you’re still stuck parsing giant-ass walls of text in those complex rooms, right? Well, if you’re willing to put in some work and you don’t mind marking up your book, you can make that easier, too. As you read those big, complicated encounters away from the table, don’t be afraid to highlight shit or make pen marks or whatever. Or, use those sticky flags to point to the important shit. Or write notes on a sticky note and stick it to the page over the wall of text. Turn the impenetrable prose into simple lists and notes.

It’s also worth noting that, for under twenty bucks American at Staples or Office Max, you can get a simple, spiral-bound black-and-white booklet made of any document you have an electronic copy of. A legally acquired copy, obviously. Because I can’t encourage you to do anything illegal. That’s something you can mark all to hell.

Once again, you’re separating the signal from the noise. If a detail doesn’t affect the adventure later, it’s unimportant. You don’t need to know the title of the book on Strahd’s nightstand or what color the robes are in the dressing closet. Hell, you don’t even need to know there are robes there. You’re smart enough to say the dressing room has clothes in it. You can make up clothes, can’t you?

Of course, if you notice something comes up a lot, like, say, titles of books, which players are always inexplicably and infuriatingly interested in, you can make a list of thirty random book titles to keep handy at the table and use whenever you need it.

Some modules, like Curse of Strahd, for e.g., include dynamic elements. Strahd, for example, moves around the castle. Meanwhile, different adventure elements appear in different places depending on the setup. These are things you have to track. Note them as you read the module and decide how you’re gonna track them. If you’re using the cube on a map method to track the players’ location, you can also track Strahd’s location that way, right? Meanwhile, you can use sticky notes and markups to call out, in the book, that the sunsword is under the ficus tree in 47. Strahd’s Conservatorium.

Really, this comes down to understanding that you can’t run an adventure from a module alone. The module is not in a fit state for running at the table. The module is crap. So you can’t just read the module passively and call that prep. You need to read it thinking, all the while, “I’m going to have to pull this off at the table; what do I need to make that happen?” Excise all the noise from the module, summarize the shit you only need summaries of, make information findable, figure out what you have to keep track of, and invent a way to keep track of it.

I’m sorry it has to be this way. I really am. For whatever reason, the biggest and best designers of our favorite games absolutely suck at making games a Game Master can run at the table, and everyone else in the industry keeps copying their so-called best practices. I really want to solve this shit with my own products that may or may not already be in development. But that’s a story for another time, unless, of course, you’re supporting me and have joined Club Slapdash.

Meanwhile, though, here’s one more tip. This one’s tricky, but it’ll help you a lot.

First, you need to figure out how far your players go in a session. How many crap rooms do they get through? How many significant encounters do they clear? Think back to your last three sessions. Try to retroactively map your players’ journey through the dungeon so far. By the way, printouts of the maps let you record the players’ journey and keep track of rooms they’ve cleared, rooms they’ve missed, stuff they’ve left behind, and chalk marks they made on the walls. A physical copy of the map you can mark up has a thousand uses.

Anyway, once you know how much ground your players cover in a session, look at where they are now. How far can they get in any given direction in the next session? Count it out. Check the different paths they could take. What you’ll probably discover is that they’re only in range of maybe two or three of those really significant encounter rooms. Those are the only ones you have to review before the next session.

In the end, I can’t make running sprawling, published adventure modules painless. They’re being written by people who have clearly never been forced to run one of their own modules at a table before. You have to accept that reality; you have to accept that modules are not suitable table references and must be converted into a usable form before you start running them. Game Mastering is work.

Fortunately, you were smart enough to come to me to find out how to do that.

Three weeks ago.

Man, I really have to find a way to work these Ask Angry things into a regular rotation so these questions don’t sit long enough to go moot by the time I do an Ask Angry column. I’m sorry about that.

Grant asks…

How do you pick up a campaign after a sizable number of players leave, and you bring in new people with the old? How do you handle a soft reboot?

Speaking of questions that I let sit long enough that they’ve probably gone stale…

I’m sorry, Grant. I hope this is still useful to you. I know it’s been a while. I have plans to do more regular Ask Angry mailbags without derailing other content plans. It’s all part of my Angry Rebirth this year. Stay tuned.

Anyway…

I’ve talked about rebooting campaigns after long hiatuses before, but that was a while ago, and it’s a topic that’s become important to me again for reasons, and you’ve added an interesting wrinkle. Your player base has been shuffled. Some of your oldbie players have moved on, and you want to replace them with newbie blood.

My first suggestion is about mindset. I know that seems like fluffy crap, but it’s really not. I promise. Even though you know this is a reboot and so do your oldbies and so will your newbies, you nonetheless need to plan this like it’s its own new thing. That’s the best way to pull this off.

Imagine you’re starting a new campaign based on a previously published work. Imagine you’re writing a campaign that’s meant to be a sequel to a movie you loved or an unfinished book series you want to finish at the table. There’s backstory, there’s open story lines, but you’re also starting fresh.

Now, do whatever campaign planning you normally do. Take any old ideas you remember, mix in some new ideas, and outline them like you would any new campaign. Note, by the way, that I do recommend you bring in some new, fresh ideas. Don’t just try to continue your old plans.

Assume, as you do this, that all the players are new and that the campaign will need a solid beginning that establishes the goals and the major conflicts and sets up the ending.

The starting point, by the way, is the trickiest piece of this puzzle. You need to figure out where your campaign starts, but it should not start exactly where the previous campaign went dead. You want to start it in a neutral place that would be good for any new campaign to start in. If the old campaign died with the players in the middle of something, write an ending for that something. A prose ending. Close the loop. Then explain where the missing players’ characters went off to and what the remaining characters did next. Put them in an in-between state. Somewhere between finishing the last thing and starting the next. That’s where they can meet the newbies and have an adventure that brings the party together and establishes — or re-establishes — the conflicts and goals. Try, also, to add a fresh element to the campaign’s plot that the oldbies weren’t aware of before. You don’t want it to feel like the oldbies are just continuing their plans, and the newbies are coming along for the ride. Unite them against a threat or with a goal or something.

Let me try to illustrate this with an example.

Imagine, in my old, dead campaign, the party had discovered that the Imperial Emperor, Imperious, was actually a thrall of the Demon Lord Diabolicus. The campaign died just when the party stopped an Imperial general from burning down the Library of Biblioque. Therein, the heroes found a journal with instructions for remaking the Sword of Demon’s Bane.

That’s my starting point. I need to get rid of the missing oldbies, move the remaining oldbies to a neutral place to meet the newbies, and start my plans for the new campaign.

I decide, on my own, without input from the players, that the missing oldbies split up to evade Imperial agents. With the key to reforging the Sword of Demon’s Bane, they’ve been escalated to a major threat. The oldbies who left the campaign? Their characters went off to do anti-Empire things befitting their skills. One is fomenting rebellion in the Imperial capital, one is training knights to fight a demon army in a secluded fortress, and one has gone off in search of the Prophetess Hermititia on the Jade Islands.

The two remaining oldbies have kept the journal and spent the last few weeks evading Imperial agents. They intend to remake the Sword of Demon’s Bane and confront Diabolicus. They’ve come to a secluded mountain town, and they’re no longer being followed, so they can finally regroup and study the journal. But the mountain town has some kind of problem with cave monsters or bandits or something. The townsfolk plead for help. Maybe someone in the town knows of a retired smith who can help the oldbies interpret the instructions in the journal, but he’s withholding that information until the town is saved. Meanwhile, the newbies are also there and agree to help the town. That’s a nice, simple starter adventure to bring the group together.

But when they return from the adventure, a new villain has appeared. A half-demon knight who you’ve invented for this new campaign and who will serve as the antagonist for the first major arc of your new campaign. He sics his demon soldiers on the party, oldbies and newbies alike, and flies away, assuming they’re dealt with.

So, the united group fights off the demon soldiers, the oldbies explain to the newbies they have this journal, which will help them make a magical sword, and that the Imperial Emperor is actually Ganon’s puppet, and they all agree to gather the components of the sword and save the world.

Once you’ve figured out how and where to start the campaign, the last step is to write the prologue for the benefit of both the oldbies and the newbies. Your goal is to write a definitive, comprehensive, and, above all, brief summary of the prior campaign. Only include the details that are truly important and truly connect to your now future plans. Otherwise, imagine you’re writing the prologue chapter to a fantasy novel, because that’s all your prior campaign was. It was just a prologue.

Because you’re running this campaign as a complete, planned campaign on its own, you don’t need more than a prologue chapter, right?

For the oldbies, this partly serves as a reminder of the events of the previous campaign and partly helps explain what happened in the gap between the last session they played and the new starting point. And, yes, they are going to have to accept that you made some off-screen decisions for the sake of starting the new game. Tell them to suck it up. For the newbies, the prologue represents the oldbies bringing them up to speed once the party unites to take on the campaign’s threat, conflict, or whatever. In fact, you can hold off giving the newbies the prologue until after the first adventure ends with the party forming up.

I hope that’s all useful to you. Without any details, it’s hard for me to give you specifics, but my example should have given you an idea of the shape you’re going for. I also hope, Grant, that in the time it’s taken me to get to this, it didn’t become a moot point. But if it did and if you did reboot your campaign, well, I hope it’s going well, and I hope this advice is useful to someone else.

I’m sorry. I’m really trying to suck less. Please stick with me. And thank you to everyone who has. I am grateful for all of your readership and your support. It matters so much right now as I rebuild.