Their unspoken, unwritten character has just as much influence and force on the in-game world as anything else. You interact more with individual objects, characters and monsters in the world, but you don’t have a living, breathing entity in front of you that gets amused, perplexed, frustrated or visibly unlucky.Īnd maybe that’s why the DM should always be present from the first night. They’re a force you can’t see, an entity you can’t physically or visually engage with as the campaign unfolds. And while those games use D&D as a foundation, the developers are the DM. This was only my second experience with D&D proper, outside of the confines of Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights and so on. What if all the characters struggle in this room - what can you tailor from here on in? And what does the environment around them look like? What details are missing from the campaign? What details would be useful as a red herring? What things would you like to add? You think about the campaign days beforehand, reading up on the surroundings, areas you might want to tweak, possible hypotheticals, considering what kind of questions and actions each of the characters want to take. I can almost see it as the equivalent of being a teacher. He’s the bartender at the innkeep, the one who greases the wheels of adventure with an appropriate backhand when necessary. The DM is as much our ally as he is the instigator of traps and tricks. And there was also a pantry, the innards of which were so dark that even Darkvision (a racial ability that does what it says) couldn’t penetrate it.

It had a stove, some bench tops, implements in draws, the usual stuff you’d expect.

There was nothing particularly fancy about the kitchen. We’d get 100 gold pieces for our efforts seemed simple enough. Everything seemed fairly straightforward: the party was hired to break into the mansion, retrieve a magical artifact, and bugger off. It’s a kitchen on the first floor of a three-storey mansion, the centrepiece of a campaign that I’d later discover was called the Mad Manor of Astabar. And Christ how I wished I did - because what nobody told me was just how much you need to rely on the DM’s good graces. What I didn’t do was spend some time with the DM, finding out the way they like to run campaigns, their particular idiosyncrasies. That was how I was introduced to D&D: a night spent creating groups called the Nigerian Scam Fam, discussions about the lack of a dedicated healer, the initial crafting of backstories, and the pondering of abilities. We’d spent hours the fortnight prior discussing, rolling, and pouring over our character sheets.

The mad manor of astabar map