Hey all, Ian here - welcome back to another GM Tip Tuesday! Today, we’re covering a technique that should save all you beginners out there a ton of time when deciding what and how to prepare, while really helping you bring your world to life - Justification!

1. Decisions Are Not an End Unto Themselves

So there’s a lot to cover here, but this is so important that I’m just going to slap it right up here at the top so nobody misses it: Nothing you write matters if the players don’t know about it. Seriously.

It may sound harsh, but I consider it by necessity: as a beginner GM, it took awhile for that lesson to set in, and caused me to waste so much time in planning & writing things that just didn’t matter because they never came up - to the point where I might as well not even bothered in the first place!

So, with that framing in place, lets jump into the implications! We’ll start with a definition:

JUSTIFICATION: Showing or demonstrating why something happened the way it did

As DMs, we make lots of choices. Like, lots and lots of choices. City names, bar names, NPC quirks, plot events, enemy types, enemy locations, dungeon shapes, NPC accents & voices, NPC age/gender/look, adversary skill level, city geography, government figures, milieu composition, the list goes on. Of course, we take most of these choices for granted:

• You don’t need to explain why the burly half orc speaks with a grizzled voice, that description encapsulates all the context you need

• You don’t need to explain why barkeep called their tavern “The dusty goat” - he might have a good reason, he might not - it generally doesn’t matter for the overall story

• You don’t need to explain why the wolf wants to bite a PC’s face off - that’s just how they do

Things get interesting, though, when you start to introduce randomness or unexpected choices. If you head over to r/d100, you’ll see decision-makers abound which help you decide this that or the other thing.

• What loot do you want to put into a dungeon?

• What side quests do you want to run?

• What’s an NPC doing when you bump into them?

(Yes these are all tables you can roll against on there)

Which is great - decision fatigue is real, and these tools contain tons of great ideas for your campaign! If you think about it though - while the decisions might sound interesting on their face, and they might help break up the usual monotony of a DnD campaign (get quest, go to dungeon, slay beasts, get loot, rinse and repeat) they don’t, by themselves, really mean anything in the broader context of the world or the plot or the story.

Brains hold on to things by attaching and relating those things to other things. Sure, it might seem super interesting to get attacked by a flaming antelope skull in a Necromancer’s cave, but unless you can draw connections from that to some other stuff so your players’ brains can hold on to it, the antelope skull just represents another thing to fight in a dungeon. Add in some context, though - maybe this particular antelope killed the Necromancer’s favorite dog, and he inflicted this fate as the antelope’s punishment - and suddenly your brain gains a few handles. And with those handles, it can tie that fight into the larger memory-fabric that lights up whenever you think of the Necromancer at the end of the dungeon, or sad pupper stories, or antelopes - making the fight feel more salient and stand out more in your and the players’ brain space!

For instance: I held up Rise of the Runelords last week as an example of good combat, and I’m doing it again this week as an example of good Justification. The writers littered Rise of the Runelords, especially book 1 & 2, with tons of fun, well thought-out details that help bring the world to life (at least from the perspective of the GM, which we’ll get into in a bit).

In particular, the pickle thieves stand out to me as a great example of justification - the gist is:

2. Context is not an End Unto Itself

But there’s a good way to do context, and a bad way to do context - and 90% of DnD modules I’ve read are just god awful at it (including Rise of the Runelords at other points, but we don’t need to get into it here).

See - context is cool, and it might really help the event or encounter or whatever stick out in your mind, but does it matter if only you ever know about it? One of the things that infuriates me about DnD modules & adventure paths is that they put in pages and pages and pages of context, details, background, and then give basically no way for player to understand what’s going on behind the curtains.

Adventure Paths abound with details like that - genuinely interesting context that goes completely unexamined and unrecognized because the book gives no reasonable mechanism to expose it to the players. I’ve read books worth of cool backstory that just straight up doesn’t matter because it doesn’t make its way into the game’s Cannon Narrative - that is, what the players actually hear and experience! So consider this some homework: next time you run a module or adventure path, keep an eye out for cool details that otherwise might get glossed over, and find some way to highlight it or draw it out for players!

3. Justify, Justify, Justify

Ok, so we know that we should provide context for our actions, and we know that we can’t just stop at explaining it to ourselves - we also need to explain it to our players. But how do we use this information?

Next time you roll against a loot table, or pick Lord Mayor’s weird quirk with a d100, or come up with a neat, elaborate trap to slap on the door to the Big Bad’s room, take a step back and think: “Why is this the way it is?”

Then, once you’ve got that down, take another step back and think: “How will the players know why that is the way it is?”

How might you go about doing that? I’ll spend a post in the future going over this more at-length, but, broadly speaking, you can choose one of three options:

• Show your players - craft events or scenes to spell out the justification for your choices

• Tell your players - have an NPC explain things through exposition or dialogue

• Metagame it - tip your hand and just explain things out-of-character

Let’s walk through an example: we’ll say you need a library for your cultist leader (we’ll call her Uzariel) in an upcoming session, and you decided to put a deadly, deadly pit trap filled with snakes smack in the middle of it. First question is: Why is that the way it is?

• Maybe your cultist leader likes taking underlings she hates to the library and dropping them in the pit trap in the middle of some chit-chat over a nice cuppa tea

• Maybe your cultist leader fought off one too many assassins, leading to deeply-ingrained paranoia and a proclivity for leaving inane traps all over the place, “just in case”

• Maybe the architect snuck the pit trap into the plans of the library in order to execute an Wile E Coyote-esque plan to eventually off his employer

Of the three, I like #2. So let’s look at ways we can show that to our players:

• We could leave traps all over the place - not just in the library, but even across different dungeons controlled by Uzariel. If we wanted this to stick out to players, we’d really need to really go all out though - something needs to seem truely “off’ to players for it to register, which means, when dealing with really subtle details like this, we have to really bash them over the head with contrast

• We could leave notes lying around with Uzariel asking for more traps, the workers incredulously gossiping to each other about this paranoid nutcase they’re working for, and internal memos telling people to calm down about the recent attempts on Uzariel’s life

• We could stage a chase sequence between Uzariel and the players where she interacts with the traps while running through rooms, throwing in lines of dialogue like “I KNEW THIS WOULD COME IN HANDY”, and “HA, AND PATRICE TOLD ME I WAS BEING PARANOID WHEN I ASKED FOR THE BEAR TRAPPED DOOR HANDLES! SHOWS HER!”

• We could have the players interact with some imprisoned former cultists somewhere in the complex and have them spell out what’s going on - “Oh yeah those got put in after Uzariel got attacked a few times - she kinda spun out into a paranoid mess”

• A friendly NPC could act incredulous upon encountering the snake-filled pit trap in the middle of a library, cluing players in that they should not consider this trap “normal”

• Finally, we could just have Uzariel spell out the whole thing in some exposition during the climactic final battle with the party, or in a speech to her minions that the party happens to overhear

As a bonus for all the effort you put into this exorcise? All of this work helps round out how you should play Uzariel. Suddenly:

• You know her Character: Paranoid, slightly unhinged

• You know her Objective: stay alive amidst an onslaught of unseen assassins

• You know some more about her “Where”: She likely surrounded herself with inane traps

• Depending on which of the above you picked, you even know some more about her Relationship with the party: she likely views them as yet another assassin come to “take care” of her

I’ll talk more about C.R.O.W. in a series I have planned later this year, but these aspects act help act as the fundamental building blocks for breaking down a complex character into something you can reason about and begin to intuitively understand.

In closing, while I definitely don’t mean to say you need to justify Every Single Choice - plenty of choices don’t need justification, and plenty of others could serve as a reward or easter egg for good rolls - what I do mean to say is: If you don’t justify your choice, it won’t have as big of an impact as if you do, and if you do justify your choice but your players can’t find out about it, you might as well not have justified it to begin with!

So next time you sit down before your next session: examine the choices you made, pick one out, and really make sure to justify it to your players. Then come back and tell us how it went! Trust me when I say it’ll bring a whole new dimension to your narrative. Or, if you’re like me and tend to over-justify your plot, take a second and think “What of these things will really make its way to the characters?” - then focus on that!

Anyway, that’s it for this week. Be sure to come back next week when I talk about collaborating with your players! Also, don’t forget to stop by tomorrow for another World Lore Wednesday giving you a peak behind the curtains for our upcoming campaign setting, Sigil of Dusk - this time diving into the Towan Calendar!

Still here? Awesome! Here’s some bonus content! Below is last Wednesday’s HNEW episode, plus [hh:mm] formatted timecodes demonstrating what we went over in last week’s post:

• [01:00]: Stage setting for combat - you can see from the top that the map is really claustrophobic and includes water elements (which come into play later) - PDF, DPS (map software)

• [01:08]: I had the two Quove acting on the orders of the boy at the end of the pier, while the boy hung back, acting like a 12 year old playing with his puppies - neatly tying in with this article since it tidily justifies why demon dogs attack the party

• [01:20]: On the orders of the boy, the Quove try and throw the party into the water

• [01:25]: I had the boy summon a swarm of piranha-esque creatures as an intensifier - making it clear that getting dragged into the water would hurt if you didn’t get out ASAP