Dungeon Master Notes

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Shadowlords Campaign
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These are the notes used to create the Shadowlord modules. If you plan on playing this game, I strongly advise that you do not read on. For DMs, use the navigation on the right to move through the modules and areas.

Note that these aren't "true" DM notes. It's quite messy and primarily used by me to create the modules themselves. There are also differences between the documents here and the actual modules, as some things were tweaked during development.

If you plan on DMing these modules, it's probably going to be a very different experience than what you're used to. In almost all cases, the game runs itself. In fact, while play testing the last module, I folded clothes while the players ran through the game. In some cases, you can break quests and cause problems by intervening too much. It's especially problematic to posess NPCs, as many are scripted so that they are supposed to do certain things in reponse to player actions. A possessed creature can't do that.

I spent most of my time DMing doing a few different things:
  • Pointing players in the right direction if they are confused.
  • Adjusting combat difficulty (spawing extra monsters, for example).
  • Healing, curing, and identifying items if the players complained loudly and I was feeling generous.

That's about it. DMing is often a fairly boring task because the campaign is so automated. I'd be tempted to give up on DMing and play through the campaign with them.