So you haven't GM'd for a while?
Jan. 8th, 2026 09:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
baroque_mongooseIt happens. You haven't GM'd (or even played) for a while because circumstances happened, and all of a sudden you find you have an enthusiastic group who are all ready for you to write them an exciting adventure to get into. But you're rusty... really rusty, in fact. You can't even remember exactly how Damage Reduction works. What do you do?
I am not claiming any credit for the answer because I stumbled across it by sheer accident; but what you do is this. You write a story.
I mentioned a little while ago that I had started writing a D&D-based story with the Three Musketeers and myself as the adventuring party... wheelchairs and all, incidentally, though Athos' wheelchair and mine are both magically enhanced in the story. (They don't propel themselves around by magic because there is no canonical spell to do that, although it's certainly not beyond the bounds of possibility that one of the characters could devise one. They do, however, have inbuilt defensive capabilities.) Generally when I play D&D I play a character who doesn't have any significant disabilities, but I thought for the purposes of the story it would be intriguing to have everyone as the most faithful rendering of the original that works in the D&D world. So, for instance, the story version of me doesn't have a stoma because there's no way anyone in that world would; on the other hand, the story version of the friend with the alpha-gal allergy still can't eat red meat, but it's now because of a magical geas which prevents him from doing so, rather than an allergy (as allergies don't seem to be at all common in the D&D world). And then, of course, there's the fact that d'Artagnan's character is the bard, naturally, and bards tend to have travel spells, including interplanar ones; the D&D universe has a number of "planes", which are best described as interconnected parallel realities, each of which has its own particular features. In real life, d'Artagnan avoids air travel as much as he can for environmental reasons, so it was great fun to make his corresponding character have strong reservations about "plane travel"! (Again, the reasons are different in the story; the bard's reservations are due to the fact that it's genuinely dangerous. You can meet some seriously nasty things on alternative planes.)
I am having a huge amount of fun with this story, and it's definitely going to end up being a full-length novel; but the crucial thing is that I have to keep researching. At every turn, more or less. The party needs to get to Place X ahead of the people they're currently following, if possible? OK... let's go and see if there's a spell for that (ah, yes, there is), and if so, who's likely to have it (oh, the bard, that figures). The bard can bring the entire party with him as long as they're all touching him, but there's a problem with that because they're travelling in a cart. It's reasonable to assume that the cart will follow if he takes the horses with him, but what about the people in the cart? The books don't answer that question, so then I have to write a little section where he tests it out using the cat who is accompanying the party, because if the cat falls to the ground from the height of the cart's floor he won't take any harm, whereas two people in wheelchairs definitely would. The cat is successfully transported with the cart, so the bard returns and everyone gets back in the cart, including the stone golem, who normally walks alongside.
The party is now travelling extra fast relative to the Material Plane (which is the basic "world as we more or less know it" reality) because they are, despite the bard's serious misgivings, on the Plane of Shadows. I check the books again to see what they might encounter there. Aha - nightcrawler. That's pretty fearsomely unpleasant. What spells are they going to need? Check, check, check... ah, well, before they do anything else at all, the cleric (that would be me) is going to need to cast Consecrate over the entire area to neutralise the creature's massively evil aura, and that requires sprinkling the area with holy water and scattering powdered silver over it, and how do you do that when you're sitting in a wheelchair inside a cart with a worm-type thing the size of a respectable dwarf hall approaching at some speed and you know it can easily swallow you whole, wheelchair and all? Oh, right. You get the sorcerer, who's also in a wheelchair, to cast Mage Hand a couple of times to take care of the sprinkling and scattering side of things. Then the wizard can start throwing actual attack spells, but he gets blasted with... [check creature's abilities again]... oh, yes, Cone of Cold, pretty nasty from a creature as powerful as that, he'll need healing before he can try again. And so on, and so on. And by the time I've written four pages of gripping encounter, I know a great deal more than I did before.
It's not just encounters. Pretty much anything that happens raises questions like "is there a spell for that? If there is, who's casting it? Is it an expensive spell? (If it is, the characters will usually be looking for another way round, the exceptions being emergencies like the Consecrate spell mentioned above.) Is it possible that someone other than the characters may be casting a spell here?" And more; it isn't just spells, though, despite the fact that this particular party is heavily magic-biased (any melee fighting they need to do is done by constructs or summoned allies, because none of them is any good at it). It's all kinds of little bits and bobs about the D&D world. It's almost like learning a language by immersion, or, in this particular case, re-learning it.
And now I even know how Damage Reduction works.
I am not claiming any credit for the answer because I stumbled across it by sheer accident; but what you do is this. You write a story.
I mentioned a little while ago that I had started writing a D&D-based story with the Three Musketeers and myself as the adventuring party... wheelchairs and all, incidentally, though Athos' wheelchair and mine are both magically enhanced in the story. (They don't propel themselves around by magic because there is no canonical spell to do that, although it's certainly not beyond the bounds of possibility that one of the characters could devise one. They do, however, have inbuilt defensive capabilities.) Generally when I play D&D I play a character who doesn't have any significant disabilities, but I thought for the purposes of the story it would be intriguing to have everyone as the most faithful rendering of the original that works in the D&D world. So, for instance, the story version of me doesn't have a stoma because there's no way anyone in that world would; on the other hand, the story version of the friend with the alpha-gal allergy still can't eat red meat, but it's now because of a magical geas which prevents him from doing so, rather than an allergy (as allergies don't seem to be at all common in the D&D world). And then, of course, there's the fact that d'Artagnan's character is the bard, naturally, and bards tend to have travel spells, including interplanar ones; the D&D universe has a number of "planes", which are best described as interconnected parallel realities, each of which has its own particular features. In real life, d'Artagnan avoids air travel as much as he can for environmental reasons, so it was great fun to make his corresponding character have strong reservations about "plane travel"! (Again, the reasons are different in the story; the bard's reservations are due to the fact that it's genuinely dangerous. You can meet some seriously nasty things on alternative planes.)
I am having a huge amount of fun with this story, and it's definitely going to end up being a full-length novel; but the crucial thing is that I have to keep researching. At every turn, more or less. The party needs to get to Place X ahead of the people they're currently following, if possible? OK... let's go and see if there's a spell for that (ah, yes, there is), and if so, who's likely to have it (oh, the bard, that figures). The bard can bring the entire party with him as long as they're all touching him, but there's a problem with that because they're travelling in a cart. It's reasonable to assume that the cart will follow if he takes the horses with him, but what about the people in the cart? The books don't answer that question, so then I have to write a little section where he tests it out using the cat who is accompanying the party, because if the cat falls to the ground from the height of the cart's floor he won't take any harm, whereas two people in wheelchairs definitely would. The cat is successfully transported with the cart, so the bard returns and everyone gets back in the cart, including the stone golem, who normally walks alongside.
The party is now travelling extra fast relative to the Material Plane (which is the basic "world as we more or less know it" reality) because they are, despite the bard's serious misgivings, on the Plane of Shadows. I check the books again to see what they might encounter there. Aha - nightcrawler. That's pretty fearsomely unpleasant. What spells are they going to need? Check, check, check... ah, well, before they do anything else at all, the cleric (that would be me) is going to need to cast Consecrate over the entire area to neutralise the creature's massively evil aura, and that requires sprinkling the area with holy water and scattering powdered silver over it, and how do you do that when you're sitting in a wheelchair inside a cart with a worm-type thing the size of a respectable dwarf hall approaching at some speed and you know it can easily swallow you whole, wheelchair and all? Oh, right. You get the sorcerer, who's also in a wheelchair, to cast Mage Hand a couple of times to take care of the sprinkling and scattering side of things. Then the wizard can start throwing actual attack spells, but he gets blasted with... [check creature's abilities again]... oh, yes, Cone of Cold, pretty nasty from a creature as powerful as that, he'll need healing before he can try again. And so on, and so on. And by the time I've written four pages of gripping encounter, I know a great deal more than I did before.
It's not just encounters. Pretty much anything that happens raises questions like "is there a spell for that? If there is, who's casting it? Is it an expensive spell? (If it is, the characters will usually be looking for another way round, the exceptions being emergencies like the Consecrate spell mentioned above.) Is it possible that someone other than the characters may be casting a spell here?" And more; it isn't just spells, though, despite the fact that this particular party is heavily magic-biased (any melee fighting they need to do is done by constructs or summoned allies, because none of them is any good at it). It's all kinds of little bits and bobs about the D&D world. It's almost like learning a language by immersion, or, in this particular case, re-learning it.
And now I even know how Damage Reduction works.
