Originally, I had this Long, Rambling Introduction™ about how I made a little extra cash in high school by reading Tarot and constructing astrological charts for people. Which is true. And I highly recommend every GM learn to read the Tarot. Yeah. Seriously. That is actual, honest-to-f$&%ing-goodness legitimate GMing advice. Learn to read the Tarot. It’ll make you a better GM.

And, by the way, you can all skip the sneering rationalist comments about how astrology is bulls$&% and Tarot isn’t magic. I know I’m not a wizard, okay? Trust me. That ain’t the point. I’m not telling you to learn to give Tarot readings for divinatory purposes. It may not be magic, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a useful skill to have. It’s a way more useful GMing skill than, say, plate tectonics or evolutionary biology. The s$&% people are always ruining their worldbuilding with.

But dammit, I’m digressing. Which is why I threw the original, Long, Rambling Introduction™ away.

Here’s the point. Lots of people ask me how to handle divination in fantasy TTRPGs. But that’s not what this article is about. I mean, the spells are right there in the book. So are the rules about hiring spellcasters. What’s so hard about just following the rules?

All right. Maybe, someday, I will write an article about divination-specific issues in D&D. But it’ll mostly consist of me screaming at morons about how all the issues they think are issues are non-issues and to stop overthinking things and applying real-world logic to a world where magic literally exists.

Nope. Today’s article’s about information management. And how to manage it better.

When Forewarned Meant Forearmed

I complain a lot about the lack of a good preparation phase in D&D. I piss and moan about the fact that the players don’t spend enough time getting ready for their adventures in useful ways. I whine about how GMs don’t allow their players to empower themselves with prep work. And I b$&% about how there aren’t any good mechanical bits that make adventure prep matter.

Thing is, D&D’s a game of strategic thinking and resource management and murdering supernaturally evil humans for pocket change. So playing smart and being prepared? Those should be a big part of the game. And there’s even s$&% in the game that seems to expect a little prep work before the party tromps off to slay whatever lives in the Cave of No Return. Spell prep? Vancian magic? That s$%& hinges on some forward planning, no? Buying magic items? Mixing up consumables? Crafting? Except for healing potions and static-bonus-granting-crap, most of the s$&% you can craft or carry is of the best-tool-for-the-job variety, no? Kind of needs some advance thought, doesn’t it? And the fact that monsters have resistances to avoid and vulnerabilities to exploit? Doesn’t that kind of suggest some kind of forethought is really useful?

Forewarned, as they say, is forearmed. But players rarely have the information they need to ready their forearms. And they’re usually not that proactive about getting it. So, crafting’s useless and spell prep’s a screwjob and resistances and vulnerabilities are a crapshoot. Surprise! Today’s theme is acid-based monsters! Did your wizard pick the right spell theme? You win!

As a result, modern D&D’s shifted away from any of that s$&% mattering. Crafting’s a vestigial little afterthought hidden in the Dungeon Master’s Guide. Along with the lists of all the magical s$&% you might want to buy and sell and craft and the rules for buying and selling it. Magic’s barely Vancian anymore. Resistances and vulnerabilities only exist in the places where it’d literally break the game’s scant suspension of disbelief to ignore them. Or where they’re so obvious they’d never screw anyone ever. Hell, save or die abilities once existed so that certain monsters would just wreck your s$&% if you went in wands-a-blazin’ and didn’t have a plan.

See, rather than build a game wherein GMs knew how to make information available and players knew how to find it, the designers just removed all the ways planning and strategy could meaningfully affect the outcome. Take the time to scout the opposition, research their abilities, and arm yourselves with the right spells and gear? You win. Blunder headfirst around the corner and start swinging whatever you have at hand? You still win. No brain needed. Everyone gets a trophy.

And they did such a good job of it that now you — yes, you Mr. or Mrs. GM — now you think that if the players do anything to make the challenges easier, they’re not winning, they’re cheating. And those of you who don’t subscribe to that stupid-a$& belief just suck at information management.

I can’t help the a$&hats who think winning by anything other than brute force and random chance is playing wrong. But I can help the rest of you. Allow me to introduce…

The Information Pool

The Information Pool is a simple little information management tool I invented for other people to use. Based on the s$&% I’m smart enough to do without a tool. It helps them — you — manage information. That is, to make useful and helpful information available to your players so they can cheat and ruin your game.

Because that’s how it should be.

Picture this: your players are dizzily staggering through the sulfurous caves that some red dragon calls home. They go down this little side tunnel, deal with a few obstacles, and find a frostbrand longsword. Great, right? They know that s$&%’s going to even the odds in the final fight with el draco rojo. The whole side trek’s worth it, right?

Or, picture this: the party’s getting ready to fight a red dragon next week. So the wizard who’s proficient with weaver’s tools spends a bunch of downtime and money making a cloak of fire resistance. Good time investment. Good use of resources. And it’ll feel damn good when the party gets to the heart of Cueva del Fuego and confronts Calliento the Dragon. He belches out a blast of fire and the wizard just laughs it off. “Jajaja! Now die, lizard lips!”

Information works the same way. At least, it should. When the party risks sending in a scout to find out what they’re up against or calls in a few favors to get access to the temple library and then puts in the hours poring over dusty tomes and crumbling parchments, they should end up with s$&% that actually helps, no? When they take their time and explore thoroughly, they should stumble on a few discoveries that increase their odds of survival.

Information’s valuable. Big-brain players recognize it when they find it. They exploit it. Galaxy-brain players actually seek it out. But most GMs don’t know how to stock their adventures with discoverable information. Or how to respond when the players go looking for it. Let alone encourage them to do so.

Hence, the Information Pool. It’s a simple idea. When you’re designing an adventure — or even preparing to run a published adventure — make a list of useful bits of information the players would be happy to have. And then, once you’ve got that pile of little informational nuggets, you treat them like little treasures. Hide some in the adventure. Hand out others as rewards for clever player actions.

Simple, right?

Well, if it were that simple, you’d have thought of it yourself. You wouldn’t need me. Besides, it’s easy to say, “just make a list of information and give it out.” It’s a lot harder to do it. Because there’s lots of different kinds of information. And lots of different ways to hand it out. So let’s talk about that s$&%.

But first, let’s talk about why you can’t be too picky about that s$&%.

Informational Feng Shui

Down below, I’m going to describe a few different general classes of information and a few different in-games ways to present that information. But, before I do that, I want to make sure we’re clear on a couple of things.

First, Angry’s Standard Descriptive Definitional Disclaimer applies here. I’m going to define a bunch of descriptive categories. Abstract ways of classifying non-abstract things. The categories are broadly descriptive. They’re not prescriptive. And they’re not precise. And they’re not exclusive. A given piece of information can fall into several different categories. It might even be hard to define which category it falls into. And depending on the way the players use it, it might drift from one category to another.

The categories aren’t useful as a planning tool. Instead, they’re a way to evaluate whether or not a piece of information might actually be useful. That’s what I mean by descriptive. If you come up with a list of Ten Fun Facts You’ll Want to Know Before You Visit Scenic Cueva del Fuego and none of the facts fit into any of the categories I describe, the information’s probably not really useful. If they all fit into one category, you’ll probably want to come up with some other facts instead. At best, an understanding of the different informational categories will help guide you in coming up with useful information.

Point is, don’t obsess over whether a piece of information precisely fits into one category or another or decide you must dole out exactly three of each kind of information. And don’t argue over which category is a better fit for what. It doesn’t f$&%ing matter.

You’ve got to see information the way you see a chair.

A chair’s useful to have around. You can sit in it. If you want to sit, chairs are a good thing. But chairs can be useful in other ways too. You can stand on a chair to reach something on a high shelf. You can use a chair as a weapon. You can sell a chair for some quick cash. You can even make a chair to sell or use if you know how.

When it comes to information management, your job — as a GM — is to treat information the way an interior decorator treats chairs. You put chairs where chairs should be. So that when people want to sit, they can find chairs where they expect to find them. You put chairs in the dining room, in the living room, and you might put a chair on the porch. Just in case someone wants to sit on the porch. And if your client — the person you’re doing the decorating for — if your client asks you to put a chair in the laundry room, you do that. Because your job is also to decorate the way your clients want you to.

Your job is not to make people sit in chairs. It’s not to predict the different ways people might use chairs. It’s not to keep people from sitting on couches or the floor or the counter. Your job is to put chairs where chairs go and have extra chairs on hand in case someone asks you to put a chair somewhere else.

Meanwhile, I’m teaching you about different kinds of chairs. Dining chairs and armchairs and beanbag chairs and benches and porch swings and rocking chairs and all the other different kinds of chairs. I’m telling you which chairs generally go where and why people prefer some types of chairs over others in different places. But that’s just part of the bigger lesson: put chairs where chairs go and have a big stack of extra chairs to put out when people ask.

I hope this makes some kind of f$&%ing sense. Because GMs demand too f$&%ing much of themselves. Like, it’s not enough to make sure there are chairs where chairs should be. No. We have to make sure precisely the right chair is in precisely the right spot and force people to sit in every chair and yell at people for climbing on chairs to get things off shelves or for not climbing on chairs to get things off shelves. And we assume there’s something wrong with our chairs because no one ever picks up our chairs and smashes other people over the head with them.

Just put chairs where chairs go. And have a few extra chairs lying around in case someone asks for one.

With that idiotic analogy out of the way and the disclaimer disclaimed for y’all to ignore, let’s go back to the fact that there’s lots of different kinds of information and lots of different in-game ways to dole out the said information.

The Lots of Different Kinds of Information

There’s lots of different kinds of information. By which I mean five. There’s five different kinds of information. By which I mean there’s five different broad classes of useful informational nuggets you can stock your games with like treasure.

Strategic Information

Simply put — and it’s nice to have something simple after that idiotic chair bulls$&%, isn’t it — simply put, strategic information is information that helps the players win. To accomplish their goals, to overcome obstacles, or to avoid defeat.

The most obvious example of strategic information? Anything a GM tells a player as the result of an Intelligence check to identify a monster. Or, alternatively, anything a GM gets mad at a player for exploiting without the GM’s express permission. Which is what we call metagaming. If we’re morons.

Mechanical, statistical monster strengths and weaknesses and traits and vulnerabilities? All that s$&%’s strategic information.

But there’s other kinds of strategic information too. Information about NPC motivations and hopes and fears that can be leveraged in a social encounter? Strategic. Information about guard patrols and security details when planning a heist or infiltration? Strategic. Secret back doors and alternate escape routes? Strategic. Anything with the potential to help the players accomplish a goal, overcome an obstacle, avoid defeat, or avoid death is strategic information.

Puzzle Pieces

Strategic information makes s$&% easier. But puzzle pieces make s$&% possible. You can’t put together a jigsaw puzzle without all the pieces. At least, you can’t figure what the puzzle depicts without most of the pieces. Puzzle pieces are bits of information without which the players can’t do something. Can’t access something. Can’t accomplish something. Whatever.

Obviously, this s$&% forms the core of every mystery adventure.

But puzzle pieces work outside of mystery adventures too. And they work even if the whole adventure isn’t about finding the puzzle pieces and putting them together. Puzzle pieces can let the players access side content or optional rewards or accomplish side quests. The safe’s combination is a puzzle piece. So are the three clues that let the players deduce the combination. Without it — or them — it’s almost impossible to open a safe. Clever players can find other ways to open a safe, but the combination’s still a puzzle piece. You can argue that a combination to a safe the players can open by other means should count as strategic information, but then I get to punch you in the throat for not reading the previous major heading in this article.

Anyway, the safe might contain the plot-specific Macguffin and thus the whole adventure hinges on finding the puzzle piece that is the safe’s combination. Or the safe might contain the antidote to the slow-acting poison the villain injected the heroes with, thereby removing the time limit and making the adventure easier. Or it might contain the golden gun that deals triple damage to the villain.

As far as mystery adventures and plot-required puzzle piece assembly? I feel like that’s a whole different article. I wonder if that’d be worth writing.

Spoiler Information

Strategic information and puzzle pieces are gameplay information. That is, they have to do with the game’s challenges and the players’ abilities to overcome those challenges. But there’s more to the game than just the challenges, right? RPGs are narratives. And narratives have plots. And plots have… well, plots have lots of things. Developments, twists, turns, reversals, revelations, climaxes, all that s$&%.

A plot’s just a sequence of events. When you’re inside a plot and any event can catch you off guard or even kill you, anything you know about the plot can only help. Spoiler information is information about the plot. Who’s a double agent, what’s going to happen at midnight, whether the baron is going to take your side at the trial, whatever. Obviously, spoiler information will eventually reveal itself. That’s how plots work. But advance warning of plot developments? That’s useful information.

A good spoiler can be worth more than a dozen frostbrand longswords.

And yes, sometimes spoiler information is also strategic information. Let’s not have that fight again.

Backstory Information

As I said, an RPG’s about more than just challenges. It’s also got a narrative. And every narrative has a backstory. That is, there’s a bunch of s$&% that happened before the story started that explains why the story’s happening. Why are people doing what they’re doing? Where did these things come from? Who built this dungeon? Why did the Seal of the Gods fail and release the eldritch evil into the world for the seventeenth f$&%ing time? Why does the mercenary have so many friends inside the Imperial army? That’s all backstory.

Some backstory information also counts as strategic information. Or it can provide indirect spoiler information in the form of foreshadowing. And we’re okay with that, right? But backstory information is also useful in and of itself.

Backstory information provides context. It helps people make sense of the story. And without that, people can’t emotionally engage with the story. Most people will mentally check out if the story doesn’t make sense. Especially if they can’t understand the human motivations driving the story.

Thing is most people don’t know this s$&% matters. But even the players who claim they don’t care about the game’s story? They do. There’s a reason they’re playing TTRPGs instead of video games or board games or sports. And that reason might just include participation in a well-structured narrative.

Backstory information won’t make your game better in any quantifiable way. But your game hurts without it. And it hurts in ways that are hard for people to see. So backstory information’s important unless you want your players to stop caring about your game for reasons no one can identify. And it’s especially important for the players who value it enough to go looking for it.

Worldlore

Speaking of s$%& that doesn’t make your game quantifiably better but will ruin your game with its exclusion, there’s worldlore. Worldlore is information about the game’s setting. The world. Its history, its people, its places, its things, its events, how s$&% works, how people think, what gods rule over it, what planes exist outside of it, where the dead go, all that s$&%. That’s worldlore.

Whereas backstory provides context for the adventure and helps the players get invested in the narrative, worldlore makes the setting feel like a real place that’s worth caring about. Basically, another tool in the quiver of emotional investment. All the same arguments for backstory information apply to worldlore information. It’s valuable. Don’t ignore it.

The Lots of Different Ways to Dole Out Information

Now, all this s$&% about pooling and classifying information? That’s considering information as facts. Individual little true statements about obstacles, challenges, the plot, the backstory, or the world. S$&% like, “a behir lives in the cave” or “behirs can spit lightning through a whole line of single-file victims” or “the behir hates humans because his parents were killed by humans after they went on a human hunt in a human village and killed a bunch of humans.” But a factual bit of information’s a little like a +1 bonus on attack rolls. It’s an abstract game element. You need to get it into the game world somehow. Maybe in the form of a +1 longsword or in the form of a blessing from a priest that grants a +1 bonus on attacks while the party is on the quest for the church.

A Note on Delivery

First thing you’ve got to understand is this: information can be delivered directly or indirectly. Direct information is information that can’t possibly be missed, mistaken, or misunderstood. It’s a fact and it’s presented as a fact. Like “trolls can’t regenerate if they take fire damage” or “Barachia holds Altol responsible for all her problems; that’s why she wants him dead.”

Indirect information requires a bit of reasoning or deduction or guesswork to distill its meaning. When the trolls attack, for example, they come from the direction opposite the campfire. And they won’t approach the campfire. And they keep glancing furtively at the campfire. Same fact, but indirect delivery. The players have to see what’s happening and draw a conclusion.

Barachia screams, “it’s too late for you to stop me, Altol. This is one thing you can’t take from me!”

Angry’s Standard Descriptive Definitional Disclaimer applies here too. This s$&%’s not binary. There’s a lot of spectrum between direct and indirect. Hell, most of the information your players discover is going to be at least a little indirect. When there’s a plaque identifying the statue as Kingston, King of the Region, Third of His Name, 76 ZE to 107 ZE, it doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to deduce that the region was ruled by King Kingston III at the turn of the second century. But there’s still a deduction to make.

Sometimes, a pretty direct piece of information carries a bunch of other indirect pieces of information with it. That’s loaded information. Savvy players can draw a lot of conclusions from the fact that the primary baddy is a red dragon. They know its vulnerabilities and resistances, they know not to clump up directly in front of its fire hole, and so on.

Sometimes, a piece of information is so indirect, it’s actually broken into pieces. That is, the fact has to be deduced from some kind of pattern or from a bunch of smaller bits of information. Often, that’s the case with worldlore and backstory. Most people don’t tell their whole life stories or share all their personal details outright. Instead, they emerge from behavioral and speech patterns and word choice and s$&%. Call that piecemeal information.

You can purposely break a single piece of information into a bunch of different pieces. Maybe your Information Pool’s a little light and you need to stretch out the useful information so you have enough. Or maybe you’re running a mystery adventure and there’s a certain key piece of information that’s supposed to be a challenge to deduce.

You can deliver any piece of information directly, indirectly, loaded onto some other piece of information, or broken into tiny pieces of information. Now let’s talk about the specific in-game forms information can actually take.

Exposition

Exposition is the quickest, easiest, and surest way to hand your players an informational treasure nugget. Basically, you, the GM, tell them the fact. Pure and simple. You usually use exposition to impart information that the characters already know — or should know — and the players don’t. Maybe because it’s common knowledge. Or maybe because the player made an Intelligence check and it turns out the character knows a thing or two about behirs.

Beyond that, exposition is clumsy and contrived and boring. It doesn’t require any decision-making or thinking on the players’ parts. Because asking, “can I roll a die to know a thing about this” is not a decision. It’s pushing a button. But exposition is fast, clear, and reliable. If there’s information the players absolutely have to know and you need to get it to them fast and clear, exposition’s the way to go.

Interaction

You can also impart information to the players by building it into interactions with NPCs. Direct interactions involve the NPC simply telling the characters something flat out. Basically, it’s exposition but it comes out of an NPC’s mouth. Indirect information can be deduced from what an NPC says or what they don’t say. Mannerisms, word choice, and delivery can also impart indirect information. Even nonverbal behaviors — like the trolls’ fire avoidance — count as interactions.

Players can intentionally seek out information through interaction by talking to NPCs. Either by asking direct questions or by feeling out an NPC. A person can learn a lot about someone else just by spending time with them and getting them talking. Consider that an active use of Insight. Meanwhile, you can plant information in an NPC easily enough just by working it into whatever interaction the players have with the NPC. “If the players meet with Sage Joachim and mention anything about their upcoming expedition, he’ll share his theory that there’s a lightning monster living in the ruins.”

Remember, too, that interaction isn’t just a thing PCs do with friendlies. Again, consider the fire-phobic trolls.

Research

Players can seek information by digging through documents and records and s$%& like that. Usually in libraries maintained by temples, monasteries, academies, or by noble families. The availability of such repositories of information varies by setting. You can plant information for research simply by dropping a library or vault or scriptorium in the players’ path for them to scrounge through. But, usually, this sort of information’s the kind the players have to go purposely looking for.

Discovery

Information imparted through discovery is information that comes from environmental details. That includes archaeological crap like architectural details, reliefs, inscriptions, plaques, statues, urns, artifacts, and all the other crap that “belongs in a museum.” But it also includes just about anything else that might turn up in the environment. Corpses, discarded journals, the remains of sprung traps, hasty little shrines, scorch marks, claw marks, all that crap.

Most discoveries impart information indirectly. Except, of course, for random documents and audio logs. But don’t do too much of that s$&%. Everyone knows it’s just another kind of exposition.

Players rarely intentionally seek discoveries. They kind of can’t. For obvious reasons. They usually just stumble over them. As such, discoveries are a great way to plant informational treasure nuggets throughout your adventure.

Reconnaissance

The players can seek information by scouting, spying, shadowing, stalking, and staking out. When a player scouts ahead to see what’s waiting in the next room, they’re gaining strategic information through reconnaissance. Or spoiler information. Or both. Technically both. Point is when the players take the time and the risk and spend their resources to learn whatever they can about whatever they’re doing by using their eyes and ears? That’s reconnaissance.

Divination

Information that’s imparted through magical, divine, or supernatural means? That’s divination. There’s a crapton of spells that provide specific kinds of divination information. Yes, I know you hate them and I know they ruin your beautiful mystery game. But shut up. I don’t care.

Players can seek information through divination either by casting divination spells or by seeking oracles and fortune-tellers and seers and mediums and diabolists and whatnot. All of which should totally exist in a magical fantasy world. And you can plant information through divination with dreams, divine or fiendish visions, mushroom-induced hallucinations, psionic psychometry, or spirits from behind the veil.

Information gleaned through divination is famously indirect. Divination’s always cryptic and metaphorical. It always requires some kind of interpretation. And its accuracy is sometimes suspect. That’s what makes divination feel like divination. And truth be told, this whole Information Pool thing started because it’s hard to deliver information in symbolic rhyming couplet form without a little prep work. So it’s a good idea to set aside some facts you’re happy to impart before the adventure starts in earnest and then pre-obfuscate them because “clouded, the future always is.”

But again, I think I could get a whole separate article out of dealing with divination. Because no one but me seems to realize just how awesome divination actually is.

But whatever…

Building and Using the Information Pool

Back to the Information Pool itself. As I said, the idea’s simple. After you’re done designing the majority of the adventure you want to run — or after you’ve finished reading the published adventure you plan to run — write a list of, say, ten bits of information that the players could probably make good use of. Ten facts. Nice, simple, clear, concise facts. Mix the informational types so there’s some strategic information and some spoilers and some backstory and some worldlore. If you want, add an optional objective or side thing and gate it behind a puzzle piece. Or several puzzle pieces. If there’s a particularly good piece of information — or if your list is too short — break a piece of information down into piecemeal bits. Whatever.

That’s your Information Pool. A little treasure hoard of informational nuggets. Now, take some of them — half, maybe — and plant them in the adventure. That is to say, shape them into a form and shove them into your game. This NPC knows this fact and will share it if the party talks to him. In this room, there’s an urn with a scene painted on it that depicts that. If the players specifically search the library in location 7A for information about the town, they’ll learn this fact. And so on. Plant the s$&% the way you’d plant magical items in your game. Some of them get attached to encounters the players are definitely going to have, others get hidden down side paths the players might never explore, you know the drill.

Meanwhile, keep the entire list handy while you run the game. When the players do something to purposely seek information, pick an appropriate fact from the Information Pool and deliver it appropriately. If the players scout the enemy base, for example, they see a wagon delivering crates of “Alpo Brand Behir Food.” Whatever. Don’t worry if you give them information you planted somewhere else. Just make sure you give them something appropriate to the action they take. Assuming the action’s successful.

And if you know there’s a diviner in your game, translate a few juicy bits of information into seer speak so that the players won’t know what the hell the warning means until it’s too late.