Dungeons & Dragons gives most DMs a good idea of how to start running high fantasy games, but where do you go from there? Or if you started with another genre of role-playing game, like horror, how do you make a high fantasy game feel alive? What mechanics, details and dungeon master tricks (or GM tricks) can you use to make your players feel what’s unique about your setting?
One of the cool things about 3 Wise DMs is that we do get to play a lot of games and try a lot of genres and settings. With active campaigns that run from high fantasy to gothic horror (Curse of Strahd) to eldritch horror (Call of Cthulhu) to superhero gaming (Marvel SHRPG) — and past campaigns that covered intrigue, sci-fi and more — Thorin, Tony and Dave are always looking for ways to make their settings stand out to the players in them. Here are 13 tips we use to bring different RPG campaign worlds to life with players who’ve seen them all (and could easily start forgetting which game is which if we’re not on top of our genrebending).
Note: Episode contains paid promotion.
Click here to listen to the episode if the player doesn’t load.
1:00 Paid Promo! Our first sponsor is Crit Academy’s Capes & Crooks: A 5E Superhero RPG. Visit the Crit Academy’s Capes & Crooks Kickstarter for more information.
2:00 A listener question: How do we DM different genres and different levels of technology so they feel different from D&D.compaignworld?
4:00 Respect your players’ lore tolerance and don’t over-work your details —you may be wasting your time
7:00 If you spend a lot of time describing a detail, make sure it has a point, or the players might give it one (like Dave’s overly personal Curse of Strahd Tarokka Deck Reading)
12:00 How DM Dave sets the tone for Curse of Strahd, or as he calls it, “D&D’s Universal Monsters”
14:00 How over-the-top characters and events brought out the high fantasy in DM Tony’s Storm King’s Thunder D&D campaign
17:00 What makes high fantasy feel like high fantasy? Magic item shops? Lost civilizations? The fall of Rome and Irish mythology?
26:00 How do people in this setting get things done? Can the party kill every problem, or do they need to solve the mystery or save the day?
28:00 Superheroes don’t kill people — how we define superhero settings
33:00 Investigators can’t kill eldritch horrors — how DM Thorin brings historical reality to 1920s Call of Cthulhu and then cracks it with Mythos abominations
38:00 Changing genres in response to player agency — or how we made Storm King’s Thunder a game of court intrigue
40:00 Make friends and influence people: What sets intrigue games apart from classic fantasy hackfests?
43:00 Not all of these games can be done with improv, you might actually have to prep
46:00 Building steampunk and magicpunk worlds — science vs. magic or science via magic?
58:00 Fantasy and guns: If you’re in a fantasy setting and a player wants to do some technology stuff, like be a gunslinger, should you let them?
61:00 Final thoughts