Designing and running truly fantastic Dungeons & Dragons scenarios time after time ain’t easy. More often than not your instincts and tools will help you create a great gaming session… but sometimes what sounded cool in your imagination doesn’t spark the game into life, the players lose interest and the session falls flat.
I’d be willing to bet that all your ‘meh’ sessions lacked the exact same thing that all your best gaming sessions shared.
The magic ingredient that is the secret to great D&D…
Drama.
Awakened dinos generally help dial the drama up a notch or two….
If this sounds like me stating the obvious and trying to make it seem profound, then stick around… at least for two and a half more sentences… because I believe this simple ‘revelation’ can provide a useful barometer for Dungeon Masters to measure the strength of their game night preparation.
First, examine what you’re intending to bring to the table that evening, be it a combat against some goblins, meeting the King for the first time, or joining in a harvest festival… and then ask yourself: “where is the drama?”
Because if that fight against the goblins is really just a cakewalk for the party, meeting the King is just about receiving a royal pat on the back, and attending the harvest festival just means laying some grain at the altar of the god of agriculture, then you ain’t got none.
Defining ‘Drama’ for RPGs
While we all have an inherent understanding of what drama is, trying to define it on the fly could easily lead to a Winona Ryder moment in Reality Bites.
After consideration, I would describe drama as the excitement and emotion that arises from situations containing tension, conflict and suspense.
A dramatic scene therefore is one with meaningful stakes (tension/excitement), where at least two parties want different things (conflict/emotion), and we can’t be certain how the situation will be resolved (suspense)!
I think that definition works pretty much the same for real life, TV and film, and RPGs!
Being blasted into space definitely passes the drama test!
How To Insert Drama into Your Game
In any case, we don’t actually need to intellectualise ‘drama’ to that precise degree. We just need to be able to recognise when we have it, when we don’t, and how to insert it when it’s missing…
An ordinary fight against a small band of goblins doesn’t have it because, while there’s an obvious conflict, everyone (except perhaps the poor goblins!) knows how the fight will end. What happens though if the goblins are riding wyverns? Or they have a hostage the PCs care about? Or their arrows are poisoned? Suddenly the scene is looking a helluva lot more dramatic.
Similarly, meeting the region’s King might sound prestigious and exciting, but unless there’s a jealous councillor there trying to discredit the party, or the King thinks that the party’s fighter should gift him their magical longsword as a royal present, there’s no conflict in the scene, and very little excitement is generated.
Possessed farmers can certainly spice up a harvest festival….
Meanwhile, we all love attending festivals in real life but, unless you’re the world’s most evocative narrator, just describing the PCs watching some parades and religious rites isn’t going to lead to a great D&D session. We need to insert some tension… a cider drinking competition might be low stakes, but it at least inserts some conflict, and some suspense (who will win?) and you could even raise the parties’ interest by putting up a decent prize for the winner. Better still, what happens if the town bully is the current cider drinking champion? Wouldn’t it be emotional to beat that prick? Along similar lines, you could add further drama to this kind of scenario by including the attendance of a PC’s love rival… while an even higher stakes scenario could be that someone has poisoned this year’s batch of cider!
I think every DM can fairly easily insert drama into any scenario they have prepared, if they are able to first realise that it is missing. Hopefully, going back to my definition will help.
I will say too that drama, in RPGs at least, is the bedfellow of action. So whenever you design a location or event for your adventures be sure that a) your players have something to do when they get there and/or that b) something interesting or unexpected happens while they are there.
When I designed DRAGONBOWL, I realised that there’s no point including a beer tent, poetry lounge, fairground and a fan zone unless there were concrete things to do while there… and so I ensured that run-ins with rival gladiators, thematic encounters or mini-games and competitions would mean exploring the festival grounds never felt flat.
Some Nondramatic D&D Trends To Avoid…
Drama is my D&D buzzword, and has been the defining principle of my game prep, and also published adventure design, for several years now, so I’ve been meaning to crystalise these thoughts and put them on paper for a while now. But the reason I’ve finally done so now is because I’ve seen certain pieces of D&D advice and design gain a lot of traction in recent times, which are inherently undramatic and which I think DMs should treat with caution.
1. “Run Easy Combats Too”
The first piece of advice I keep coming across is relatively innocuous, and that’s: “don’t only run difficult combats, throw easy fights at your party as well”.
And yes, not every fight can or should be a boss fight, and good pacing is important… but I’d be very cautious about leaning heavily into this advice. Because 5e characters have so many resources, and recover them so easily, there are simply no stakes at all involved in an easy fight.
To me, as both player and DM, easy fights often just feel like a meaningless distraction in the story. And a time consuming one too, because it’s hard to wrap up even an easy combat in less than 30 mins, and every game night is precious. Unless the players have no time to rest, or you’ve done the impossible and come up with a simple and playable system that ingeniously combines HP and levels of exhaustion to introduce a meaningful resource management aspect to 5e (please share if so! Maybe better on this post, where some good discussion was had on the topic…), I think the best prep policy is to plan one tense and epic combat at your party per session. It doesn’t have to be a deadly fight, provided there is something else at stake (a hostage’s life, an important item, information, pride), but an easy fight with no stakes is just filler IMHO.
If you do want to fit in a second fight within a session, or to leave room for a random encounter, try to make it just a skirmish, by having the monsters flee or surrender after two rounds. (Come to think of it, the worst combats of all are probably the medium difficulty fights, where players metagame their resources to beat the monsters with their cantrips etc. over an interminably long, undramatic encounter!).
Can probably win this one without expending a spell slot!
2. “Don’t Ask For A Roll”
The second piece of advice that I come across frequently these days is usually dished out with the attitude of someone who thinks they invented great D&D practice, when in fact they are just parroting something they picked up on Reddit… and the advice isn’t that great anyway. It goes something like: “if a character could easily do something, don’t ask for a roll… they just do it.”
But here’s the catch… automatic success is inherently undramatic. While rolling dice is inherently dramatic.
D&D’s incorrect DC ratings are the root cause of this bad advice, because they make so-called ‘medium’ tasks (i.e. DC 15) a less than 50/50 shot for most PCs, which leads to too many frustrating failures, which in turn creates advice like ‘don’t call for a roll.’
But one of the reasons we love D&D is actually rolling dice! The very act is fun, not to mention the suspense created by a chance of failure. So before you adopt a ‘don’t roll’ attitude I suggest trying lowering DCs and awarding advantage when appropriate first. Dice rolls are what create our games and explaining their outcomes can really drive the story forward or give colour to the narrative.
My thinking on this topic explains why I can’t get behind MCDM’s premise of always hitting with attack rolls, which many folks seem to be excited about in their forthcoming RPG. Yes missing sucks, but it’s the sucky missing that makes hitting awesome. Without the chance of failure, success lacks any drama.
Advanced Tip: One technique I’ve started using recently that works well for skills checks is letting PCs fall back on their passive score if they roll badly in a low pressure situation. So they have a baseline that protects them from being crap at things they should be good at, but they still get to roll to see if they can do better than their baseline. I used 8 instead of 10 for calculating passive scores, and rolling a 1 is usually still a failure.
If you’ve forked out for some fancy gemstone dice… the DM better ask you to roll them!
3. Re-rolls Are Drama Killers
If rolling dice is inherently dramatic, re-rolling dice is the opposite (yes, I will die on this hill… and one day you will consider me a martyr!). Re-rolls undermine the power of the dice, by introducing the possibility that the original roll won’t matter in the end, thus robbing the situation of drama. They also all but erode the possibility of failure in significant moments, removing suspense (for anyone who understands how the odds have been shifted at least) and therefore drama. That’s why the Heroic Inspiration that got bandied around in playtest material is so disastrous and why the Lucky feat is so annoying…
The Origins of My Drama Theory
I want to finish this post with a shout out to my first 5e DM, Juan, who helped me realise that drama is the key to great D&D.
He used to share the DMing duties with another DM in our group, Cornel, and it was fun to compare the skills of these two amazing storytellers. With a PHD in medieval history, Cornel could improvise every detail of a credible fantasy-medieval society to incredible detail, including politicking, military strategy, commerce, and bizarre local laws that you needed to work around, essentially meaning he could build immersive worlds on the fly (oh to have that skill up my DMing sleeve!). He is also a semi-professional actor, and his 20+ years of GMing various systems meant that he DMed using certain fantastic principles… he would never prep a plot, for example, only throw down complex scenarios and then stand back to see how we would react.
However, while his technical skills were perhaps not as accomplished, Juan served up the greatest sessions of D&D I’ve ever played. And what gave him the edge (I realised after some analysis) was his amazing instinct for drama. In Juan’s sessions, we were forever being put in impossible situations (extreme danger and dilemmas are both great for creating drama!), being schooled by villains (great for building tension), or having massive reveals about our family members (back stories are another great source for drama, as they elicit a lot of emotion!)…. and that was even before we rolled initiative.
Even the lighting was dramatic during my re-introduction to D&D…
In fact, I’m getting a bit nostalgic thinking about those hazy days playing 6 or 7 hour long sessions on a terrace with a bunch of creative bohemians… the same folks who inspired me to name this blog Hipsters & Dragons.
I can only hope that my current crop of players will one day look back at our current sessions with the same rosy-eyed fondness (and Dirty Jobs is going very well to be fair!). If they do, then they can thank Juan for teaching me the one word solution to fantastic D&D…. DRAMA!
Rick Coen
Hey Duncan! I can’t let you write a blog, and not respond to it… 😉
I agree, drama keeps the interest. Not everything is or should be dramatic; sometimes they have to meet the King for the attaboy, to set up for the next hook. And, as unpredictable as players can be, frequently drama is added that you (the DM) didn’t expect!
My last D&D session actually gives some good illustrations of several of your points (or counterpoints)…
In general, I breeze past things that are no longer dramatic. On the way *to* the County capital, 6 game months ago, each stop along the way was a dramatic encounter for the bard, an opportunity to make contacts and a name for himself. Last session, travelling back the other way after many adventures, he again performed along the way. But we spent little time on it, just noting where the innkeepers remembered him – or where his newfound fame had proceeded him – and rolled a quick Performance check. Why’d we bother even with the roll? because he recently made a secret agreement with his chief rival about building up their mutual fame through this rivalry, and the PC’s performances were potentially against that agreement!
In one inn, they spotted a side quest antagonist from 5 levels ago. He noted a couple of the PCs – like the bard, up on stage! – but missed the others. The PCs… chose to ignore him. Dramatic confrontation skipped!
So… I broke your first point/counterpoint the next day, as the antagonist ambushed them on the road, seeking to eliminate potential threats. Although the PCs could hear his troop of knights coming, so they had a round or two to prepare. And thus began the evening’s fight of 4 level-8 PCs against fifteen heavily-armored and well-trained… 3HD “guard +”, and a level-4 NPC. The *warlock* facetanked three charging lance-blows. The players (and the PCs) got a fun encounter that showed how much they had grown since leaving their hometown, and they had a dramatic opportunity to confront the NPC about his nefarious dealings… (well, they would have, but they blew him out of his saddle with a critical hit on a Guiding Bolt).
Sometimes the easy encounter is a good way to show growth. Or, serves as a background to something else going on; the PCs don’t have to expend resources, but have to deal with the minor threat while – drama! – working on something more important.
As for #2: Don’t Ask for a Roll… I have come to embrace this rule in my style. Yes, I agree that rolling the dice inherently adds the frisson of excitement and risk… but my players expect something amazing if they roll a nat20 – or something catastrophic if they roll a nat1. When really, the trained ex-Marine fighter/rogue has no chance of failure climbing the tree; the rogue has no chance of failing to pick the lock on the old sewer grate; the warlock has no chance of — no, wait, that player can be counted on to roll nat1s with universe-breaking regularity!
So I have taken to using the “Emphasis Roll” in these situations. 2d20, take the one that is farthest from “10” to determine boon or bust. A low roll on picking that lock means it took longer, and maybe the rusty old grate squealed on opening. A high roll climbing the tree, maybe the warrior notes an easy path for others to climb as well. In the last session, the party wanted to “work the crowd” to help the bard’s performance; I rolled the 2d20, and wouldn’t you know it… nat1 *and* nat20! Thus we determined that Frontier Sergeant Flannery Vell was indeed present at the inn, and the crowd-workers spotted him without being spotted themselves. And I said the PCs could risk discovery to grant the bard a +d6 to his performance check, or play it safe and remain unnoticed…
I also have to keep in mind that one player for whom math is a slow activity. If I can tell him he spots the thing or finds the path (Expertise in Perception *plus* a d4 from race), I can save a few minutes of him calculating his total score – when I know he’s likely to make it anyway.
For #3… I’m split on this idea. I don’t mind rerolls – actually, I give every character a reroll every session, just for being on time – but I do demand a dramatic explanation for the *why* of the reroll. It’s not just “I failed the save! Wait, I spend my reroll, whew I made it.” Instead I want to hear what caused the failure – and how you were lucky/skilled enough to avoid/survive anyway. “The Lightning Bolt arcs towards me, attracted by my metal armor and heavy shield; thinking quickly, I toss the shield away from me, splitting the bolt [save = half-damage].” or “DM:
Caught off-balance, you can’t avoid the ogre’s club descending from overhead. Nat20, critical hit! PC: (spend reroll) I let my balance fail, going prone even as the attack descends on me… yes! I duck under the blow, and roll to my feet in time for my attack!”
All that aside, again I will agree – it’s the drama, the stakes that make the session exciting. A session where the party travels several weeks and arrives safe at the dungeon location, which is explored safely, and some lost treasure found… is boring as heck! You might have “gotten a lot done”, but where’s the fun? What about some bad weather that washes out the road or wrecks the food? Or a throwaway encounter (breaking #1) with a monster that shouldn’t be in the area… why is it there, where’d it come from? And of course, no dungeon should be without danger and excitement. Otherwise your characters are just doing a job… and we get enough of that in RL!
Star Trek has shown, failed, and had to relearn this very point. The best shows are where there is conflict, and it is meaningful. When everyone gets along, and diplomacy works… no one cares.
duncan
Hi Rick
You’re right, I probably should have clarified that not every scene should be dramatic…. you need downbeats and linking scenes. The DM’s goal however should be to have big drama within the scope of every session. So somewhere in your forthcoming game it’s good to have some reveals, dilemmas, surprises, rivalries and/or epic combats that are likely to come into play.
Re: easy encounters, they can still be dramatic as your example proves… a combat against forces sent by an antagonist, and promptly dispatched by the PCs, is building up to a bigger confrontation (suspense!), and contributes to an ongoing and deepening rivalry. A random encounter against an ankheg on the road, less so.
Re: not rolling for easy challenges…. it often is the right call, especially if failing is nondramatic. I try to climb the tree… you fail. I try to climb another one! If there’s no time pressure and they are proficient that’s fine to auto-succeed. I still would call for a roll personally however… if they roll well they climb a perfect tree with thick branches with bushy foliage overhanging the road… perfect for the ambush they are planning. If badly, they manage to get up a tree set back from the road and they need one hand to hold on. Good and bad rolls help paint a picture and fill out the narrative… similar to how you use emphasis rolls I guess!
Re: re-rolls… one a session I can get behind, and your idea of calling for an explanation links back to the point I made about the dice being storytellers. More than one re-roll a session, not for me. Why constantly be re-determining what has already been determined? You are also creating plot armour for your PCs and undermining the danger of your world when you embrace re-rolls.
I haven’t watched much Star Trek… but i have read a lot of books about writing screenplays and novels and they all say no conflict = no drama. No drama = no story worth telling.
Cheers!
Juan
Great article!
It’s difficult to articulate why drama is so important and how to include it in our games, but you have done a great job at it here.
Thank you!
PK
“`
Hi Duncan,
This is a critique (not criticism), to expand the discourse;
It’s a popular framing that DM’s are responsible for the storytelling, and in this write up, the drama too.
In my mind, drama doesn’t start with the DM, it starts with the players.
Idea 1: Drama comes from player meaning, which comes from player agency.
For those of us who have been dragged through 5e campaigns, where we follow the bouncing ball from one McGuffin to the next, from one long-text villain to the next; we are forced into the conceit that our characters are interested and our actions matter. Additionally, the party isn’t at risk (Plot Armor, encounter scaling) and the story line is set. I ask you where is the drama in this if all been foretold!
In run my games differently.
Idea 2: Drama is in the play (not the story).
To follow this method start with two principals:
1. it’s an adversarial world, and
2. “Don’t make me roll – I am not your friend.”
With this backdrop of risk and responsibility the game is driven by player agency – their actions, their plans, their play – not my own designs.
Sometimes the players take a hook, other times they spin off into their desires and wants. Drama follows … because the players give meaning to outcomes, and and attach importance of things. Flat sessions happen because the players aren’t driving the action and don’t find anything important, interesting, or meaningful.
Here are some tips for DMs (secret sauce) to play this style of game:
– ignore the trivial by using tool of “Yes, and…”,
– “lean in” to the tensions the players create – if they make it important it is!
– make your rolls consequential (dramatic outcomes), (but foreshadow deadly moments).
– make your rolls in front of the screen so the players know they are at the mercy of the dice.
– make your administrative rolls behind the screen: e.g. encounter reactions, random monsters, number appearing, nearby monsters sensing the party (seeing, hearing, smelling). Use these tools to raise the stakes (and drama) and add verisimilitude to the world.
When the players triumph, cheer. When they fail, let it be (failure adds meaning to triumphs). There is no plot armor. Let PCs die, and the party. (It’s an adversarial world after all). This is the light and shade of it. This is the drama that comes from player actions.
Most importantly this approach helps the DM:
1. relieves the burden of story telling from the DM
2. Play becomes emergent for both the players and the DM.
3. Prep and planning are minimized (one session ahead of the play),
4. Play follows what the players are interested in.
So I encourage DM’s to rip up your 5e modules – reused the parts you want without having to railroad players through 250 pages of deep text that is someone else’s story – not their own.
Rick Coen
PK, you’ve got some great points here! I follow several of them already with my own style (important if the players make it so, roll in front of the screen, adversarial world, PCs can die). What to do with a TPK hasn’t come up in a long time, partly because we are often missing a player, so there’s a PC not present that come to the rescue. But yes, the players have to buy in to a story – yours or theirs – and become invested, then drama results. Drama happens because the players care.
In the last session, I presented the party with an “environmental situational puzzle”. They have 3 weeks’ notice of an upcoming “tremor”, and a year’s notice before the “quake”. But I presented it *not* as a “Bad Thing – you must stop it!”. Instead, I presented as just “a Thing”; because Story, they got a vision of possible futures – if they try to stop it and fail, if they just walk away, or if they wanted… take advantage of it for their own purposes. And there are some long-term consequences/outcomes of each choice that make none of them the clear winner/RightThing. And then I gave them 3 questions they could ask, and let them decide how this story should play! We spent over 2 hours of the session in this discussion, before they finally decided they wanted to stop the Thing, jumped on their horses, and rushed out of town in the middle of the winter for a known-but-unexplored ruin, where 6-months earlier a foe had bested them and then fled…
PK
Hi Rick,
thanks for your comments and interest.
“Attrition” is the mindset that leads to TPKs. Hence TPK’s are a player driven outcome.
The most dangerous fights have a 50:50 win chance, these can easily kill a PC.
My players have learned to avoid them, they plan and scheme more.
A dragon is a puzzle more often than a stat block.
duncan
Hi PK
Great comment, and I agree with most of that advice… but I am not 100% sure the style of play you’re talking about (sandbox? with plenty of adventure hooks? and ‘fronts’ maybe?) is a) easier to prep or b) suitable for every table. So let the discourse continue….
Expanding on a)…. To give players absolute agency you have to have a very well developed world and any number of NPCs and locations in your mind – or, if not, have the tools and experience to develop them on the fly, and possibly you need to prepare quite a few potential adventures (as you don’t know which hooks the players will bite on) instead of just one… right?
It guess it can be done, but my feeling is when you are always reacting to what players do in the moment you will not be able to bring the level of details I like to bring to the game. Some DMs are great improvisers… but I am not one of them and I think even the best improvisers are unlikely to be able to rustle up something that beats a well planned scenario.
My philosophy is more… “here’s the adventure you’re going on (and if you don’t want to take it you’re not an adventurer!), but it’s up to you guys how you approach it.”
So their agency is how they interact with the scenario… but if they don’t want to do the adventure I prepared, they can stay at home! 🤣
I might throw out a few hooks and then develop them if the players bite (in which case the players are getting some agency about what adventures they go on), but I’ve also said no to players pursuing a goal, because I just thought I couldn’t make a particularly good session out of it, and I wasn’t interested in running it. (I have banked the NPC they cared about in this case to bring in when I think I can make it work).
Expanding on b)… if the style of play you’re talking about represents a kind of platonic ideal of what playing an RPG should be, I am still not sure it’s right for every table… for a few reasons.
i) in this style of play the players have to all agree that they want to do the same thing. I think on most tables, if you give players free rein, they will waste most of the session arguing about what to do. Pretty sure mine would at least.
ii) a large number of D&D players are what Juan and I call ‘casual’ players. They don’t think about D&D in between games… if they come up with a backstory its more or less under duress… they just want (their PCs) to be shoved into some dramatic situations and then deal with what happens as it comes along. In my pool of players for my current campaign, I would say I have 6.5 ‘casual’ players and 1.5 ‘serious’ players. Once at the table, the casual players are basically as engaged as the serious players… but D&D is just a fun social thing for them. They don’t want to have to think much, if at all, in between sessions.
iii) I think not every DM is ready or comfortable to hand over the reins to the players to the extent you describe… for reasons I mentioned in a).
Would love to hear your insights on this… is your game a sandbox? How do you run it? What do you prep?
Would you say your players are serious / casual?
Also when you say rip up your 5e modules… which are you talking about, in particular? Curse of Strahd is a sandbox, right…. Wild Beyond the Witchlight too. And I think Tomb of Annihilation and Storm Kings Thunder? Maybe they each force adventures to bite on a hook… but I am very much a proponent of the idea that players should create PCs that want to go on adventures.
As a player too, I don’t really value or desire the agency to choose which adventure to go on… I want to rock up to session 1 knowing it’s going to kick off, and I am going to get involved.
PK
Hi Duncan,
Appreciate your words and wisdom. Your posts are a pleasure to read.
I will try to be concise (at the risk of using too few words).
a) Easier to prep
– Player Agency is about meaningful choices, not unlimited choices.
– Prep only where the party is going. Learn how to pace a session to end with meaningful choices. The players tell you want to prepare for the next session. If the choice happens mid session, learn to insert encounters on the way to “X”: use player downtime for leads; put a Curiosa Shop infront of them; Role play a village scene with a moral dilema; pull a villain forward and have them casually meet them; use a random encounter table.
b) not for every table.
– It’s not for “everyone”… it’s for “anyone”! The play loop is on p.6 of the PHB. The play loop is straight from D&D Basic (I started in 1982). Use this loop at every scope of play.
– Focus on Regular Players. Build (connect) the world to their characters. Flick Casual Players who attend when they don’t have anything better to do. Casual Player culture dilutes the experience for those who really love the game.
—
If I was to setup a new campaign I would:
1. Campaign Setting (1hr)
– “Ghosts of Saltmarsh” pp.7-29 is a good campaign setting. It’s Greyhawk – so good for next D&D PHB.
– (optionally) make Profile Cards (Picture) of each of the main NPC’s in town.
2. Adventure (1 hour)
– “Ghosts of Saltmarsh” pp.37-59 is a good adventure.
– Note the conclussion on pp.59 that links back to Saltmash and the surrounding region.
3. Characters (1 hour)
– DM written origins. These are short backstories with inbuilt connections (NPCs/Characters and places). These can include secrets (motivations, quests). This technique is used (crudely) in “Rime of the Frost Maiden” with Background hooks and Secrets (pp.13). Create your own brackgrounds hooks for saltmarsh, and add some secrets.
4. Session 0. With your regular players, give them a list of DM written origins to choose from.
This is what I mean by pulling apart the big WotC adventure books.
Reuse the content.
Help your players create connection: to each other, to NPCs, to the world.
(Give them responsibility).
“Player Agency” => needs “Connected Characters” => needs “Preparation” and in game focus.
duncan
Thanks PK, appreciate the expanded thoughts! All good stuff too.
Tying it back to the subject of drama, I guess we can conclude that the more connected the characters are to the world, and the more agency they have, the more invested they will be in the game – and therefore scenes within the game will be more emotional, any conflicts will be felt more keenly, and the game will be more dramatic as a result!
Btw: Interesting to note your ‘DM written origins’ tool… because I think they mirror what I termed Background Hooks when I ran Waterdeep: Dragon Heist back in 2018. They were a way of tying each PC to at least one NPC in the campaign…. the technique worked pretty well, although I confess not to have kept up my own good practice in this regard, as haven’t used them since. Must rectify that next time!
https://www.dmsguild.com/product/261857/Waterdeep-Background-Hooks-A-Dragon-Heist-supplement
Actually, looking at sales and Waterdeep Background Hooks has proven to be one of my most popular products over the years. (Didn’t know that Rime of the Frostmaiden ran with the same ‘Background Hooks’ term actually, as I haven’t picked up that book yet…. not sure if I coined the term myself or more likely if I accidentally recycled it from someone else, as frequently happens in the RPG world when a lot of people are thinking about similar problems etc.).