It’s time close this Stupid Narration Tricks series once and for all. We had some fun, but it’s time to move on. In this final entry, I’ll share the two tricks I left unshared last week. Because, now that you’ve learned how to hide details in plain narrative sight, you’re ready to use repetition to make patterns and break them. Assuming you’re good enough.

In this penultimate lesson in my Stupid Narration Tricks series, I want show you the first of three tricks used by George R. R. Martin to hide important clues in plain narrative sight so that you can give your players a chance to spot important details and solve mysteries without falling back on die rolls and obvious expository reveals. The final lesson, next week, will cover the other two.

We Dungeon Masters often describe our roleplaying game worlds like neutral, all-seeing narrator robots, and that means we’re wasting a lot of potential. Fantasy authors use this trick of picking viewpoint characters to provide sharper, more useful, more flavorful narration filtered through their characters’ expert lenses. Of course, that would never work at a Dungeons & Dragons table. We couldn’t possibly use viewpoint characters to punch up our scene-setting narration. Or could we?

I’d love to teach you my stupid narration tricks, but not until you’ve proven you can handle normal narration tricks. Start drilling, kids.

As a Game Master, you are an author, but that doesn’t mean what most people think it does. What it mostly means is that you can learn a lot of stupid narration tricks from authors. And video games.