I’m gonna do something a little different today and, because I anticipate this being really random and stream-of-consciousy and conversationy — for deliberate reasons I may or may not make clear — I’m classifying it as a Bullshit Feature.

Today, I’m going to talk about one of the personal, for-fun campaigns I’m currently running for my own players. I haven’t done that in a while and I certainly haven’t used my games to prove what an absolute frikkin genius I am and to hopefully help all y’all run less worse games in a while. So I’m gonna do that.

There are certain questions I hear over and over from lots of y’all. Questions like, “How do you actually get your combats done in under a half hour,” and “Why do my players behave like mother frakking sociopaths,” and “Why are you such an asshole; I wish you’d die.” Some such questions are easy to answer. For instance, I get my combats wrapped up in a reasonable amount of time by forcing my players to act or miss their turns, by not running anything past 12th level, and by actually knowing my game system’s rules. Other questions, though, are harder. For example, your players are sociopaths because some people are unfortunately just assholes and there’s not much you can do about that, but many non-asshole players slip into sociopathic in-game behavior because they can’t or won’t or don’t see your game’s setting as a real world full of actual, living people. If you want your players to act with a conscience in your world, you have to bring your world to life. You have to give them a living, breathing world to act in.

“And just how the hell am I supposed to do that?”

Exactly.

Honestly, I get that question a lot. Partly because I answer so many other questions with, “Bring your world to life; that’ll fix your problem,” and partly because lots of Game Masters know the heart of the roleplaying half of the phrase roleplaying game comes down to providing a living, breathing world the players can project themselves into. It ain’t just Game Masters lamenting tables full of murderhobos.

If you want to say you’re running a true roleplaying game — not just a game of fantasy adventure — your players have got to care — emotionally — about the game’s world and its inhabitants. They can’t just care about their own characters. They’ve got to say things like “I love” and “I hate” and “I’m afraid for” the world and its non-player people.

I use phrases like bring the world to life and living, breathing world a lot. I assume people grok them intuitively and so I rarely bother explaining them. But that, there — that last paragraph — that’s the definition. A living, breathing world is one the players care emotionally about and so they think about how their characters’ actions will affect the world and its people and they generally want to have a positive impact on it. If not the whole world, they at least want to have a positive impact on their fictional friends and relations.

As a side note, the fact that caring about the world is a benchmark of my success as a Game Master is why I don’t do the whole evil character thing and tend to stick with heroic fantasy.

But I digress…

My point is that I get the question about how to breathe life into the world or create a living, breathing world a lot. It’s a question I feel both totally qualified to answer and completely unqualified to address and so it’s one I don’t tackle often or well.

I know I’m good at breathing life into my world because it’s one of those things I’ve gotten lots of feedback about over many long years of running games for many groups. The other night, during a post-session chat, one of my players brought it up again. She said, “You know what I like about this world?” I’m paraphrasing, by the by. I don’t have a stenographer. “You know what I like about this world,” she said. “I like how even though it feels grim right now and people are struggling, it doesn’t feel hopeless. And I feel like we’re on track to make it a little better.”

You don’t talk about stat blocks and game constructs that way. Hope and optimism only matter when you’ve deluded yourself into thinking those stat blocks are alive and what happens to them matters.

Now, I love a good wank as much as anyone and so I could go on and on with testimonials proving I’m the king of creating living, breathing worlds my dumb, deluded players get all starry-eyed and moony over, but I ain’t gonna do that. It’s just one of those things I happen to be particularly good at. Every Game Master has strengths and weaknesses; this is one of mine.

But I do struggle to tell all y’all how to breathe life into your own worlds because… well… there are a couple of reasons.

First, there’s the nature of the problem. Creating a living, breathing world is a very holistic, very emergent kind of hippie-dippie bullshit thing. It’s not down to any single action or behavior. It’s not even down to a list of things. There’s no process. There’s no checklist or step-by-step. It’s not mechanical or mathematical or scientific. It’s in everything you do. It’s a complete picture thing. Narration and presentation are big parts of it, but how you build your adventures and how events play out are equally important. It’s in how you keep track of crap and how things build on other things. How things set other things up.

Where’s it really not, though — and this is going to shock the hell out of some of you — it’s not really in your worldbuilding. I know it’s not because my worlds are pretty pedestrian, plain-Jane, generic, heroic fantasy worlds. Tolkien ripoffs. Whatever impressions I’ve given, I’m pretty lazy and I hate doing prep and taking notes, so I don’t do a lot of front-end worldbuilding. I go by the book. Mostly. Details and explanations and lore tend to pop out as I’m running my game or, occasionally, as I’m writing adventures, and it’s on me to keep track of that shit. I can get away with not taking notes because I have an excellent memory, but I should take more notes because no one has as good a memory as they think they do. Hell, one of my rare acts of note-taking led to one of the best scenes in my campaign so far just last week. But that’s not what I’m talking about.

Actually, screw it, I’ll talk about it. Take more notes is good advice and it plays a vital role in creating a living, breathing world so an illustrative example can only help.

This is about Chain of Stars. That’s the title of my astrology-themed AD&D 2E campaign. Totally by accident, my accurate note-taking led to one of the best dramatic character scenes in the whole campaign last week.

There’s this player-character named Rhesa, right? Before last week, I couldn’t have told you anything about her backstory because she was still hiding it from the rest of the party, but now it’s come out, so my vow of secrecy is at an end.

Rhesa’s a peasant girl from a small fishing village called Redshore. I use the term peasant girl not as a diminutive, but as an archetype. She’s the classic example of the kid in her late teens who ran away from home to chase adventure. That’s a good tip too: speak and think archetypally. Archetypal terms are very useful to keep in your head. They’re the narrative equivalent of mental heuristics.

The kingdom’s fallen on hard times lately. A hot, dry summer last year gave way to a short autumn and then a long and cold, but snowless, winter. The harvest wasn’t great and food stores were stretched thin. The spring this year was also quite dry so folks are worried about another crappy harvest. No one’s actually starving, mercifully, but everyone’s watching their larders and granaries closely and wringing their hands over it.

Rhesa was born of fisherfolk. She and her several siblings helped her father fish the lake to feed the family, feed the village, and make money. But the lake is low due to the drought and lack of snowmelt and fish ain’t doing better than the people.

Now, her family’s got this sword on the wall. It’s an ancient thing from a fallen kingdom of legend. See, her uncle — because every family has that one member — her uncle ran off before she was born to be an adventurer. He never came back and never sent back any gold or jewels. The only thing the family ever got back was that sword. Rhesa doesn’t even know who brought the sword back along with news of her uncle’s death. The family just clucked their tongues, shook their heads, hung up the sword, and went on fishing.

Rhesa grew up fantasizing about all her uncle’s wonderful adventures. She loved the adventure stories minstrels would sometimes tell in the village commons and on feast days. She made herself a wooden sword and trained with it and then would sneak her uncle’s sword out at night and train with that. You know the story. It’s fairly standard.

But with times getting tough, Rhesa overheard her parents talking about selling the sword to raise some coin. Rhesa, being a dumb kid, though, knew there was a better way to make money with the sword and a way to rid her family of one extra mouth to feed. She stole the sword in the night and ran off to find the Road to Adventure.

That’s how her part of the campaign’s story started. She’s a kid with an ancient sword inscribed with the name of a thousand-year-forgotten hero, a basic proficiency with it, and starry-eyed dreams of gold and glory. Which, by the way, is the maximum amount of backstory any character should ever have to start a campaign.

But what’s this got to do with how important it is to take good notes even if you think you’ve got a good memory and especially if you want to create a living, breathing world?

My campaign went on a many-month-long hiatus due to some real-life complications. So it was roughly a real-life year ago when Rhesa came out on the other side of her first, real adventure. She’d joined a traveling cleric, a dwarf-in-exile, and a wandering elf to destroy a goblin raiding camp. As a result, she ended up at a lord’s table. Technically, the dinner was hosted by the lord’s knighted daughter because he was away at war, but that doesn’t matter. Or does it?

The dame — the proper title for a female knight in my world; the distaff alternative to sir — was also feeling a bit in over her head running her father’s hold and she took warmly to the peasant girl who was feeling a bit overwhelmed by the life of adventure she’d found herself living and so gifted Rhesa the suit of mail she, herself had trained in as a teenager. It all left Rhesa feeling kind of pumped and puffed up. Thus, when the minstrel in the tavern got her talking later, Rhesa spilled a lot of her story. Given that she’d run away from her family with a technically stolen sword, that wasn’t wise, and Rhesa did hold back certain key details, but she shared enough for the minstrel to find a song in it.

In the long hiatus and the intervening in-game events, I’d totally forgotten that scene had ever happened. It was such a throwaway bit of roleplaying in a game that’s had a lot of roleplaying and I totally pulled it out of my ass at the time. But when I was changing online gaming platforms, I was going through the chaotic mess of scrawled notes I’d amassed as I ran the game and found a very detailed write-up of exactly what Rhesa told the minstrel and what she didn’t.

And so it was that a real-life year later and a couple of in-game weeks later, as the party was relaxing in a tavern, I dropped a bomb on Rhesa. A different minstrel had picked up the song from the first and so performed “The Hero of Redshore.”

Rhesa’s companions didn’t actually know her backstory. She’d been pretty secretive about it. But Rhesa had been so emphatically possessive of the clearly ancient sword that everyone in the party knew she’d come by the sword by some shady or illicit means. Rhesa also hadn’t shared the details about where she got the sword with the minstrel, so the minstrel used some creative license to fill in the details. Thus, according to the song, Rhesa had stolen the sword from a baron and was chased, by the baron’s men, into an encounter with the goblins. Only when she was cornered by the goblins did she actually draw the sword and then it glowed and sang because, in reality, she was a descendant of the original hero of legend all along and the baron had stolen the sword from her family and she killed the goblins all by herself and the baron’s men fled and then the dame Endira Cored celebrated her victory and pardoned her and also she didn’t even need any dwarves or elves or clerics to help her because she did it all by herself. The end.

As you can imagine, Rhesa’s panicked flight from the inn followed by the intraparty fallout was an absolute frigging delight to watch and it became the centerpiece of the session. I just had to sit back and watch. None of that would have happened if I’d told myself, a year ago, “Nah, I’ll remember this if it’s important.”

But this ain’t just about note taking and how you should do it even if you don’t think you need to — especially if you don’t think you need to because you have no clue — by definition — what wonderful things you’ve trusted to your memory and forgotten over the years — and I’ve lost track of whether I’m in or out of the parentheticals at this point — this is about how to breathe life into your world.

Obviously, there are several good lessons in that story, apart from taking good notes. There’s a lesson about keeping track of the choices the players make so you can visit the consequences on them. That goes beyond the easy and obvious things like this, by the way. The butterfly effect is real. If you don’t keep track of minor actions, you can’t later surprise the players with unintended and unforeseen consequences. This, I suppose, also illustrates why you should keep track of the actions and not plan the consequences. I wrote down only that the minstrel had gotten details from Rhesa; I didn’t plan how I’d use them later. I easily could have used them to, I don’t know, have her brother track her down and chew her out for stealing from and abandoning the family or some shit like that.

Then, too, there’s the lesson that the world keeps turning even when the characters aren’t on camera. While Rhesa was off having adventures, minstrels and merchants are wandering around sharing songs and stories and rumors and gossip, and that crap sometimes catches up to the characters. Or precedes them. Some Game Masters get super obsessed with systematically determining how fast stories and rumors and reputations spread and where they get or whatever. Me, I don’t sweat it. I just take note of news that could travel and do interesting things with it whenever it seems like a good idea.

But that world-turning thing brings me to the actual bit of breathe life into the world trickery I want to highlight today. It’s about time, right? You see, now, why I had to call this a Bullshit Feature? I’m just talking about my game and then trying to highlight some of the shit I do to make my world feel alive. And really, that’s the best I can do.

As I said above, I don’t feel like I can teach anyone how to create a living, breathing world partly because it’s unteachable but also partly because I don’t really know all the things I do to make it happen. It’s one of those things I’ve figured out intuitively and experientially over the years. I can’t really isolate individual bits until someone says something that on reflection and analysis — and sometimes experimentation — makes me say, “Oh, hey, this thing I did? That’s part of the formula.” Then I share this shit.

Remember, years ago, when I talked at length about how my world has a sky? That was because a player commented on my habit of making a big thing about the weather and the sun and the moon and everything whenever the party was outside and I realized, “Oh, hey, that’s part of the formula.”

Anyway… The Seconds Story.

It’s obviously smart to keep track of the players’ characters’ actions and then expose them later to the foreseen and unforeseen consequences thereof. That reminds the players that the world is alive. Or, at least, that it’s reactive. When they provide a stimulus, it’ll respond. But that puts it on par with an amoeba or an AI bot. It’s good to say, “Do you remember a time when you told a minstrel too many details about yourself. Pepperidge Farms remembers.” But that ain’t enough to pull off the whole living and breathing thing.

See, a living, breathing world turns independently of the characters. Everything’s not about the players’ antics. There are millions of stories in the world; their characters are just four of them. Sure, the players’ characters’ stories might be the most interesting, exciting, and ultimately impactful stories in an epic fantasy campaign, but they’re not the only stories that exist. Every nonplayer character has crap going on too.

My campaign, Chain of Stars, is about an ancient order of astrologer-priests who knew too much or did something they shouldn’t have or whatever and so they had to die. It’s about a scholar who got killed trying to dig up the astrologers’ secrets. It’s about a diabolist — or maybe a disguised demon — trying to keep those secrets buried. Maybe. It’s about how those secrets maybe doomed a kingdom. It’s about how history might be repeating itself right now. Or maybe on a specific date a few months from now. And it’s about a group of unlikely adventurers who tripped over all this crap and intend to prevent a terrible thing from happening or make a good thing happen or, at least, avenge a couple of deaths.

Honestly, the players aren’t sure yet just what end game they’re pursuing. All they know is that the astrologers hid the keys to doing something or undoing something or… something… in sites around their ancient kingdom and the players have got those locations marked on their map. They’re hoping some good, old-fashioned MacGuffin hunting will reveal what the hell is going on and what they’re supposed to do about it. Or not do about not it. They’re pinning their hopes on a lot of Soulsborn-esque environmental storytelling. And they’re hoping collecting the MacGuffins won’t lead to a classic Ganondorf at the Temple of Time Screwjob.

See what I mean about my running simple, dull-ass vanilla fantasy? Though, to be fair, there’s a lot more to this than meets the eye and I’m really proud of the underlying structure and design. I’d love to write about that.

But I digress… again…

That, there, is the story of my campaign. At least, it’s a plot outline. It’ll be the story once the heroes win, lose, or die. Story isn’t plot and story is holistic and emergent and all that crap. Blah blah blah.

But there’s another story in my campaign. Actually two. I mentioned them both above.

First, there’s the story of a kingdom that’s having a bad year, meteorologically speaking. The weather has been harsh and dry and that’s impacting people’s ability to feed themselves. Everyone’s responding to the stress in different ways. As time goes on and if things get worse, you can expect people to respond in more chaotic ways.

Second, there’s the fact that Dame Endira Cored’s father has raised his army and marched to war. Actually, several of the  kingdom’s prominent lords have done so. The king called on several of his lords to follow him to war because of rumors of orcish warbands amassing beyond the kingdom’s western border. So, the greater part of the kingdom’s military might and several of its most powerful rulers are spread along the western front in a show of force to prevent an attack.

Spoiler alert for my players: one of those two stories is indirectly tied to the campaign’s plot. The other is just a thing that’s happening. I won’t say which is which. My players think it’s all interconnected right now. They’re half right. But they don’t know how. But I didn’t want to miss the chance to share this shit about The Second Story.

There is always — well, almost always — a Second Story in my campaigns. There’s always some other plot going on in the world. It’s not one the characters can really impact or affect or do anything about; it just is. Of course, it affects the character’s adventures. Sometimes, they get distracted by the fallout from The Second Story. Other times, it’s just something they notice happening around them.

For example, as time goes on, the players will have to pay more for food. Meals at inns and even at lord’s and lady’s tables are going to get a bit spare. That won’t be a big deal for the player-characters, but it’ll be a thing worth mentioning. I’ve taken pains to describe the decent food the characters have been enjoying thus far so that when it changes, they’ll notice.

For another example, with the kingdom’s primary military leaders and many of its able-bodied men away at war, the roads aren’t well-patrolled. The players have already dealt with goblin raiders and seen signs of banditry and they can expect more as time goes on. They’ve also noticed the kingdom’s inns, markets, and common spaces aren’t very crowded and most of the people are young, old, or disabled and there’s a lot more adult women than adult men doing everything right now.

Most nonplayer characters are affected by one or both of those stories. Lesser lords and knights are stuck managing the kingdom. Some are doing the best they can with the resources they’ve got; some are plotting and scheming to take advantage of the situation to advance themselves. The common people are doing all the same things. Many are working extra hard and everyone’s a little anxious and a little depressed. Some folks are banding together and finding solace in community. Others are responding with self-interested greed.

As a side note, the reason there’s a Third Story — the one about the kingdom’s armies off at war — was less about this Second Story crap and more because I knew the players’ characters were going to do be doing most of their adventuring within the kingdom’s borders. The sites they need to explore are fairly local and they won’t need to go too deep into the trackless wilderness for too long. I needed a way to justify making the kingdom a little more wild and dangerous so I could have goblins and bandits and monsters wandering about. Call that a side lesson in Scenario Design or something. I don’t know. It does illustrate putting game design first and then building a context to follow. I guess.

Put aside, though, that I have two Second Stories. That ain’t the important part. The important part is having a single, overarching background story separate from the players’ characters’ adventures going on. It provides two key benefits.

The first, obviously, is that it demonstrates to the players that the world doesn’t exist just so they have a place to adventure. While they’re running around killing demons and solving astrology-themed puzzles in themed dungeons, the people in town have their own shit to worry about. Now, you can accomplish this just by ensuring every character’s got hopes and dreams and aspirations and life events and all that shit. I do that too, of course, but, let’s be real: that’s a lot to handle. This brings me to the other benefit of The Second Story approach.

By having a Second Story, you don’t have to keep track of dozens or hundreds or thousands of stories for all the characters in the world. Instead, you have to keep track of one story. The Second Story. Then, every time a nonplayer character ends up on camera, you can just ask, “How is The Second Story affecting this dude or dudette? What can I show the players as they interact with them?” Innkeepers apologize about the poor fare or patrons complain that there’s barely any meat in the stew. The inns and markets are sparse so the merchant is clingy and desperate to make a deal. The armor’s going to take an extra day to repair because there’s only one elderly dude with one arm and a green apprentice to do the work.

Basically, the Second Story makes it really easy to pull interactions with nonplayer characters out of your ass and show that they’re preoccupied with their own shit and don’t just exist as background extras in the heroes’ journeys. If you’ve got nothing else for a nonplayer character — if you can’t come up with hopes, dreams, plans, or a plot — you’ve got the Second Story. And it totally makes sense for lots of people to be preoccupied.

Whenever my players encounter a nonplayer character, I consider three things in descending order of importance when deciding how to play it out. The first is whether I already know anything about that nonplayer character and the events of their life. That’s either because I’ve written shit in advance or because they’re a recurring character and I actually remember — or kept notes — about their last appearance. The second is whether they might, in some way, be connected to or affected by the characters’ adventures. When it comes to random characters in the world, they usually aren’t. The third is how they might be affected by The Second Story. That saves me a lot of inventing and improvising character traits while also showing the players that the world’s a real place and its inhabitants have to live in it.

All this shit is what my player picked up on when she noted that she’s sad for the people in the world because they’re having a hard time in it. The reason she said the world feels optimistic is because I made a conscious choice with this campaign to lean optimistic rather than pessimistic at this point in the campaign and maybe throughout the campaign. Family, community, and faith are important values in this kingdom so when stressors happen, most of the people respond by reaching out instead of doing the “screw you; got mine,” thing. As crazy as this sounds, most of the people in my worlds mostly try to be good people. Not that there aren’t a few dickhead bad actors out there. About one-third of the characters in the world, currently, lie on the Dickhead end of the spectrum.

But that’s neither here nor there. Though I guess there’s another good lesson there about how Game Masters populate their worlds. Lots of them tend to fill their worlds with lots of selfish and corrupt people. Especially their institutional people. One of my current players was shocked to hell years ago when they joined my game and encountered a lord who was actually motivated by a desire to be a good ruler and protect his people.

But I digress…

My point is… well… my point is already made. I’m kind of just spinning my wheels. In my campaigns, there are always at least two plots or stories or whatever going on. There’s whatever the hell the characters are involved in — whether that’s a big, epic adventure or just adventure-of-the-week lootin’ and killin’ — and there’s The Second Story. The one that’s running in the background. Sometimes there’s more than one. Sometimes there’s one for every city. But there’s always at least one Second Story that I can use to remind the players that the world doesn’t actually revolve around their characters.

And sometimes, you get lucky and the Second Story actually drives a player-character backstory or two. But I’m really lucky for my current batch of players. Well, mostly lucky. Sometimes they drive me totally nuts. But that’s another story for another time.