Zoltar

[Music] all right welcome to how to be a dm i’m shelly mason noble and i am still way too scared to try to be a dungeon master you gotta change that but my guess here isn’t i am talking to one of my favorite wizards co-workers trick jarrett who is senior content strategist which is maybe the most unintuitive title i’ve ever heard what is it you do here trick uh i am focused on helping define and scope and shape this con the content strategy uh you know working with the different stakeholders the different brands uh magic and dnd and the different parts of both brands to figure out content that accomplishes their needs that uh um is stuff our fans want to watch all that sort of stuff like like this segment perhaps this segment that’s right okay well hopefully they give us an a good thumbnail unlike you know some of those other ones i’ve seen out there um but i’m excited to talk to you because i’ve heard about your um campaign for a while now and i know that you uh you you do homebrew is that so you you have been building your own world for how long now well i’ve i’ve been a world builder and fan of that for years i actually uh my high school senior year i had two free periods uh i think it was the last half of the year i had two free periods and was given a self-study project and i made a world uh so basically for five days a week i had two hours of school literal school time that i was able to do world building and that’s not even the world that i’m playing dnd in that’s that’s stuff from you know back in the day when i was a kid um that’s incredible i’ve been working on this world as an idea for probably two years as a concept it really started to come into its own i would guess october of 2019 of me sort of like okay i understand i understand what this world is now uh and then i’ve been running an active dnd game almost every week uh actually since january last year we just crossed the one year mark in this world so what was it like so this world lived in your head for a long time and then you actually got to see people experiencing your world i imagine that’s probably like seeing somebody in the wild reading a book that you wrote yeah uh what was what i did was i actually put together a primer on the world for the players because it it has stuff that is relevant and recognizable to dnd as normal you know there’s a lot of the same races but there’s also twists on each of them i have different sub races and stuff like that for elves and dwarves and um i also put the disclaimer in here is like not everything in this document like the document was like here’s what you your character would know of the world but i also put the disclaimer for the player of not everything in this document may be true like okay i want them to be there are things in the world that are common knowledge and common belief but are not necessarily the actual facts which is an actually incredibly important feature of the world because of how the magic and cosmology of it all works uh is knowledge and truth is a core facet and feature that’s being explored in it oh okay that’s cool i was gonna ask if that is part of the world or just your way of saying i made this up give me cut me some slack here guys a little bit of column a little column b um primarily for the the narrative purposes but uh also some leeway for myself to say i might end up changing things as we go along as you should um so i i like the concept of world building but mostly because if i screw up some rules which i inevitably will which is really one of the biggest deterrents for me in dungeon mastering but if i mess things up i can just be like nope that’s how it works in my world i just feel like i’d have more freedom but i think a really big drawback would be that you don’t have a book that’s already published and printed and that you can go back and reference if you forget something or if you know like i mean it’s already tracked in in a nice bound publication for you when you’re building your own world that onus is on you right so that’s what i want to talk about is how the heck do you keep all of this stuff straight and clear and organized uh well when i first started and actually when the campaign started i had a 40-page google doc that was just a compilation of every single thing that i knew i wanted to talk about in this world or things i needed to write down the different regions who they are what they are about and and a lot of it was nothing more than a couple of sentences or even just bullet points like for a lot of the world i i fully fleshed out or or strongly fleshed out the starting location of the players that’s okay i know that they’re going to start in this place this is where i want the adventure to start and they’re going to take a journey from this small town to the major metropolis and so i defined that continent really well and then i took the rest of the map that i had drawn and i literally would just write three facts about these other continents such that i could call upon them as rumors that people might hear or or use them as potential plot hooks when i’m in need of something that i just need to grab and dangle out there that we might come back to later and so that document was really my main source but as i said it was a long document and it was actually unwieldy to use and hard to easily access and so i started looking for other tools and um i’m fairly tech savvy i like what i did web development for several years i’m i’m capable in that area and so i was exploring you know making my own thing using a wiki solution and i actually came across a tool called notion which is a knowledge management tool it’s like a wiki but it’s actually got a lot of features it’s designed for teams and corp companies to use for collaboration it’s used it can you know stand in for your own website if you want to use it in that way um and it’s great it’s got a free free user level this is i’m i’m not officially involved in the company in any way obviously yeah this is not a sponsored this is not a sponsored segment notion has really enabled me to run the game that we’re talking about because of one key feature that is incredibly useful for me which is um databases and the database in here is essentially like excel documents you put a bunch of information in but they give you the ability to have different views so like if you’re for example i have i have a database of all of the npcs that i’ve created in this world whether the players know them or not and i can have this searchable thing and i can actually change the view and if i have art associated with the characters there’s a portrait view there’s a there’s a gallery view oh my god and the step that goes further than that and it’s kind of hard to just talk about and not show but the database view also lets me pull essentially subsections of that database for different views so like i can go to the page of one of the continents and i can embed a part of the database that says okay i want all of the npcs who i’ve marked as being on this continent and it automatically updates and keeps that all straight for me such that i only make a change in one location and everywhere else is updated about where is this npc currently located things like wait no yes so they i mean like because they’re going to move around and so you can you track them this way so in case you were like oh let’s have them talk to old man wilbur from the the the inn but then a year ago old man wilbur went to go visit his daughter in some other continent you can right if i decide that an npc has changed locations then i change it in the database oh my gosh and i mean i don’t do this largely outside of planning for sessions there’s not there’s not a there’s not a you know i don’t spend hours a day just simulating the world in my mind outside my next dnd well and that’s fine that’s great but i just wanted to manage expectations around what i do i’ve also used the tool i don’t use it as much right now because they aren’t in a segment that says npc heavy but i also like when i do session notes when i’m playing dnd when i’m doing my prep i can tag npcs that i think they’re likely to run into or i’m planning for them to run into and then i can embed a view of the character database that is here are all of the characters that i need at a glance of information they’re gonna need or things like that so you just keep this up and running while you’re dming yeah i cannot run i cannot run this game and maintain the story and world without the access to my notion database and it’s not just for npcs i also actually just over the holiday migrated all of my geographic data like i said i have continents i have mountain ranges i have all cities moved all of that into a similar database so that i can have similar views and have a centralized management system for tracking that geographic data and again this is super hardcore this is this is way above and beyond that you what you need to do for running your own homebrew world but i love world building i love knowing that this world exists in my mind and having this information to reference well i know that a lot of of our dungeon masters love world building too and i think a lot this is a good tool for for a newer dungeon master because like you’re saying like you can do a lot of prep before you even have a group together to run a game so this might be a good way for them to just use it to start building absolutely and one of the things that i would also suggest is have the idea for your world but accept that by putting players in this world you don’t get to own the world whole wholly anymore like if they’re going to go and blow up a castle you don’t get to you know i mean you can say in terms of the records or whatever that sure the castle exists but have that acceptance and willingness and also well but like it’s fun to let my character my players create npcs and tell me who they’re going to talk to or who they’re going to run into or i tell them a name and then they tell me what this character looks like things like that um and so just having that communal storytelling also added into the narrative of dnd is another thing that i like to do and then is there any sort of like output feature that for the the players because i imagine that they don’t have access to your data they don’t have they don’t have access to the entire corpus of the world obviously but um in terms of running the game i have a separate section in inside of my notion um account i guess uh that’s sort of like where i run where i track my playing of dnd or my running of dnd and i gave each of the players their own essentially page uh and they’re then able to go in and keep their own notes like the player who’s the note keeper he goes in and writes the session notes that he keeps in the database and that actually allowed for me to pull a really fun thing early on in this campaign where um i don’t know if you’ve heard of the um what’s now i’m forgetting what it’s called the false hydra do you have you heard the false hydra no it’s a creation from a blogger online um i’ll provide the link to the team so they can be in the show notes it’s a super fun concept that’s very reminiscent of some of the villains and bad guys we see in like doctor who or other fantasies where it starts messing with your memory when this creature is around if you can hear its song you blank out and lose track of time and you and it starts messing with your memory and then if it kills someone you forget that person ever existed you you start coming across these rough edges in your memory where it’s like how did this happen and your brain tries to make things work uh i won’t give away too much because if if players are listening i don’t want to ruin it for dms but it’s a great fun thing and what i did with because i had access to his notes was i created a copy of his notes and then i went through and modified it for the moment of the reveal of what was going on and i revealed to the characters that they had had another part play another character in the party that they had not known about for any session up until this moment oh my god and when they vanquished this monster the memories came rushing back of this character who was gone and they were yeah and they were forced to reckon with this and reconcile the fact that this character who the players had never had an association with but suddenly learn had been with them on this entire journey and i had put that into his notes so that uh when i made the reveals okay now go check your notes for the this new section now that is such a cool this was a character that you just made up there was never yeah no i knew i was gonna do a false hydra pretty early on because i just thought it was such a cool idea and the false hydra is meant to be a much bigger boss so i mean much about like they were i think third or fourth level when they faced it so i made it like a super old version and it has ties to the larger story arc that i was putting together but it was like session five when i did this to the characters and one person had never played d d before so this was a complete mind warp for them yeah to wrap their mind around of this is what d can be i mean that’s just like i’m just thinking as a player like how the head that would be hard hard to to deal with like the thought of like like but i want to grieve this person that never existed yep and they actually the group just at the end of last year got an airship and they decided to name the ship after this character which i thought was also a really amazing narrative that the characters the players did and where they brought it back to this character who we had like they could easily forget about this character and move on with the game right but the characters have kept it close and and involved which is great and it goes back to what i mentioned earlier on that truth and in fact is a big core part of this campaign and memory and recognition of that sort of stuff so i i wanted to do that early on in the game to sort of hammer home that this is going to be a theme that i’m looking to explore with this campaign yeah and so i mean i guess that’s another good reason why you need good notes um so talk a little bit like more about the session notes and i always hear people talk about session notes but like as the dungeon master how much do you actually keep track of and what is is that just like stream of consciousness or what are you actually tracking there so again a feature of notion is that you can have template templates so i have a template that is my where i start every session note document and what it does is if the first thing i always do is like okay here are the bullet points of what i think the characters are going to do this session sometimes i’m wildly off okay but this is sort of the path i’m laying out and if they want to go off of it i will roll and we will we’ll play this game um but i start with the bullet points figuring out what are like they’re going to meet so and so they’re going to get a quest here they’re going to start their journey and then i flesh out further from that okay here’s the npc they’re going to meet here’s what i hear are the here’s the information that they have um a rough description of what they look like i i don’t i tend to write an intro that’s sort of like a brief recap of what happened last session um but i i don’t stick to it too tightly and and we usually are chatting when we get going so it’s kind of an awkward okay everyone i’m gonna i’m gonna monologue for a little while right so i don’t i don’t do that too often or much it’s usually a paragraph um and then it’s just me making notes of what i want to go if they’re going to a new town i have to flesh out the town what are the names of the buildings what are the names of the taverns who are the npcs uh not not the again not the entirety of the town but the top level of what i expect and then i keep a list of npc names that i draw from or anything like that when i need to make something off of the cuff but generally it’s again where i think the path is going to go and i’m probably 60 and if the session goes differently and we’re going to instead do what i planned next session then i’ll just copy stuff over to the next session notes if it’s uh not going to be relevant if it’s stuff that needs to be you know added to my if it’s a new character i need to add to the npc table then i’ll go in and add that if it’s a city i’ve defined then i’ll add it to the the larger information so i’ll keep whatever information i need from that session note and then import it into the larger world database and then i’ll start it all over again for the next session oh my god um i’m such like a on like a notes and like i love organization and so like this is actually getting me really excited about it yeah because i’m just like i just want to take notes i just want to organize things i just want a database that i can search it just seems like just a fun creative exercise to just make stuff up it really is and that’s one of the reasons i love world leading and like the one i’m playing the indian is the one that i have by far the most on but i’ve got two or three other worlds that i’ve got concepts for that i haven’t really started to flesh out or build on so like ilsanya which is the world that i’ve been playing in is really focused on it is its own bubble um it’s its own bubble cosmologically because of necessity for the narrative and and what’s going on in the world but there’s also a very strong magical reason for the world to be built this way is that there’s actually an everlasting afterlife um in a more real world than in most dnd campaigns like there’s what i call the infinite court so when someone dies they go to this vast wasteland of a world called the infinite court they don’t need to eat they don’t need to drink they just exist and so does everyone else who has ever existed and so and then there’s communication between the living world and the infinite court via this church group organization called the vast collective and they’re sort of like the catholic church crossed with ma bell at the top of its uh monopoly like they’re for the most part a beneficial good organization but they have so much power they wield so much power they could easily turn evil and then the world’s in real trouble and so there’s this like ascending spell essentially between the living world and people in the infinite court and so you can have communication back and forth which is where the knowledge comes from like no knowledge is lost how does that change an existing world where you’re no longer like oh let’s find an uncovered tome instead it’s like let’s find the right person in the infinite court or let’s let’s ask the right question of these people and i forget what led me down this this description of my world but there’s a lot of notes that come along with this idea because i need to keep track of who’s alive who’s dead who knows what all that sort of stuff have the players ever tried to contact their missing party member through the infinite court so that that also plays into this world um it’s not as i say everyone who’s ever died and it’s actually not uh there is a group of people in the living world who don’t go to the infinite court uh of largely based off of ancestry and race uh and the missing uh party member was a tabaxi and tabaxies are one of the races who don’t go to the infinite court oh so i did that partly purposefully uh for the ease on me as a narrative of not having to flesh out every story again but also because it hammers home again this idea that not everyone who’s in the party gets to be there okay that makes sense so the this this tool notion which was not designed to be uh for dungeon masters but you’ve made it work is there a a way that you can keep track of like stats like monster stats or have you have you uh yeah if it’s a if well if it’s a creature in one of the monster books then what i actually do is either i save a link to dnd beyond or wherever i’m going to reference it from or i make a note to myself it’s on this page um if it’s another creature like it’s a fan brew homebrew one or one that i’m modifying then i’ll copy and paste stuff in and just make a notes of here’s the hit points um i have a very rudimentary combat tracker that i build in there which is again a simplified table it brings in the characters i put in initiatives for my monsters i put in initiatives hit points in armor class but it’s very rudimentary it’s purely for my reference and um it works but the answer is yes but it’s not like a robust tool okay yeah as long as you it’s just for your tracking and ease of of reference but if monsters were a big thing you wanted to do again you can make a template that has all of the base fields you want to fill out as a page save it as a template and then you can just easily create a new template and fill it in with each new monster that you want to track in your database this is super cool so it seems like it’s very modular that you can extremely modular and flexible i have not yet run across something that i’ve wanted to do for the purposes of tracking my world that it’s not able to do it it’s been able to do every single thing i’ve wanted um i can save images i can i actually my group records our sessions not for publication but again for my need for be able to reference things i can go back and listen to the old sessions and i i store all of the audio files in the it along with the session notes things like that so it’s all up there okay so do you think maybe one day you would publish any of this content but this world sounds pretty cool uh yeah i mean i’m sure as as most dm’s who do world building i’ve got an idea for a story to tell that could be a novel or whatever if wizards ever wants to do a supplementary novel i’d be more than happy to publish her supplementary book i’d be more than happy to put it out um but i i don’t have any plans for it right now it’s it’s definitely just meant for my news right now well we know that you’re capable of writing a novel in a month because you did it the question is if it’s a good novel i i wrote 50 000 words in a month yeah you leave it to me well i know uh i know happened to know the editor for uh dragon plus so if you’re ever interested in like a short story or something you might be able to facilitate an introduction the short story is tough because like i said i i only gave you sort of the the very very high level about setting up the world and to understand the world you have to under you have to understand a fair bit of the cosmology or cosmic cosmology yeah that would be that’s a challenge for i imagine a lot of dungeon masters just hone in on one section and still have enough of the backstory to understand what’s happening in the world yeah um this is very exciting and uh it’s it sounds very inspiring and cool so uh i hopefully there’s some dungeon masters out there that are gonna be able to or even players i guess there’s no reason why a player couldn’t also keep track of no like i said my players love having access to it for their character information and and i as a player i have a section that’s like okay here are all the different games i play in here’s my character here’s my the back story here’s you know my my game notes i have that all in there just not part of the the world building section so it’s a it’s a i think it’s a super useful tool in dnd and out of dnd so i highly recommend it awesome okay and again that is it’s called notion notion you go to notion.so as their website and i think it’s notion hq on twitter um but it’s it’s a really cool tool it’s got a free user tier that should be enough for most people only if you need access like i said as a company or you want to upload large files essentially is where the the limits can hit for a free user i think all right that sounds awesome um thank you for taking the time to talk to me i happen to know how busy you are because we work together um but if people want to follow you or learn more about you is can they can they do that and would you yes absolutely all right i have uh two twitter handles one for magic and dnd and then one for everything else so trick mtg uh for magic the gathering because that’s what i was originally hired to wizards to work on audusta for so trick mtg is my twitter handle for gaming for magic dnd trick jarrett uh two rs2ts in the last name is my everything else tech politics sports lots of soccer uh things like that uh i have trick jarrett.com though again i don’t write too much on there these days um but yeah that’s those are the main places you can find me that sounds awesome all right well follow trick because he’s awesome and uh that’s cool anyway thank you so much for being here again and uh we will we’ll we’ll talk soon i know thank you i’m sure we’ll talk we’ll probably have a meeting later on probably i’m probably late for it right now okay thanks trick thank you

Sage Advice D&D

Questions on Dungeons & Dragons answered by designers

Widgets

Author: Zoltar

Have you ever incorporated Psionics into the Forgotte Realms?

Is “Ed Greenwood Presents Elminster’s Forgotten Realms” still accurate for the Forgotten Realms of the 1490s?

Have acolytes of Gond, tinkerers, smiths, or artificers set up amusement park style rides somewhere in the Forgotten Realms?

How to be a DM – Worldbuilding with Trick Jarrett

Oath of the Open Seas looks good except for the way overpowered Channel Divinity Options

I was wondering if there’s any kind of symbol of marriage in Waterdeep, similar to rings in the real world?

70s: The origins of “Rule Zero”

Tressym and the primal fruit tree for Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything

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