You Should Practise Foveated Campaign Design
Details matter.
Having a detailed, believable setting laden with verisimilitude is the foundation of a successful campaign. That said, designing an entire world for your game is exhausting, impractical and unnecessary.
That’s why you should practise foveated campaign design.
What’s foveated campaign design, you ask? To answer that, we must dive into the thrilling world of digital imaging processing.
Foveated imaging is a digital image processing technique in which the image resolution, or amount of detail, varies across the image depending on where the viewer focuses.
You can (and should) apply this principle to campaign and adventure design.
Foveated campaign design keeps you sane, your workload manageable and adds longevity to your campaign. It helps you focus your energy on and design the things that will have the most effect on the quality of gameplay—the things that the characters will “touch”. It helps you determine what is important (and what is not) and what needs your focus.
You provide the most detail for things the characters will interact with in the next few sessions—the local village, the orcs’ subterranean tribal lair and suchlike.
You provide less detail for things out of their immediate field of vision and concern—the realm, other monsters’ lairs and suchlike.
You provide even less detail on things beyond this, such as other kingdoms, minor gods and suchlike.
In this way, your workload becomes more manageable, and the quality of gameplay is elevated. This translates to increased fun at the table, which should be the goal of everything you design and prepare.
Details matter. Practise foveated campaign design; your players will thank you.
"Here are the bones of the adventure. You must breathe life into the framework after you flesh it out."
Gary Gygax
You are a GM, but you are busy. You want to write your own modules, but you just don’t have the time. And you don’t want to use commercial modules. You want to make your campaign your own. That’s where the Dread Dungeononomicon comes in!
Find within over 30 fully fleshed-out and lovingly detailed self-contained adventure sites. Stock the dungeon with your own monsters (and—perhaps—their treasure), decide their back story, and you are good to go.
The Dread Dungeononomicon is a System Neutral book compatible with any fantasy role-playing game, particularly ones featuring dungeons and/or dragons.
Get all the maps for the Dread Dungeononomicon here.
Members of our Patreon campaign pledging as little as $5 a month got this download as just one part of their rewards. Join today.
Are you a busy GM? Does session prep take too long? Do you never have time to design the cool little details that bring your game to life? Fear not! That’s where the Dread Thingonomicon comes in.
Crammed full of system-neutral themed lists, flavourful NPCs and more, the Dread Thingonomicon is designed to give you—the time-crunched GM—the tools to effortlessly add flavoursome verisimilitude to your game.
If your campaign features abnormal lesser undead, alchemist’s laboratories, ancient necropolises, archives & libraries, bandits & brigands, besieged castles, black dragon lairs, blue dragon lairs, bustling marketplaces, corpses, creepy graveyards, crypts & catacombs, cultists’ lairs, curio shops & pawnbrokers, dark caverns, fairs & festivals, fallen dwarven holds, fanes of evil, fanes of good, farming villages, fecund jungles, forts on the borderland, ghostly hauntings, goblin lairs, green dragon lairs, haunted houses, henchfolk & hirelings, hill giant steadings, items most wondrous, kobold warrens, lich’s lairs, local landmarks, lunatic asylums, merchant caravans, minions of evil, necromancer’s lairs, noble’s manor houses, noisome marshes, noisome sewers, ocean voyages, orc villages, red dragon lairs, roads, ruined castles, ruined cities, ruined monasteries, ruined wizard’s towers, seedy taverns, shadowed borderlands, slavers’ compounds, smugglers’ villages, smugglers’ lairs, snow and ice, subterranean mines, sun-scorched deserts, sunken ships, thievish doings, torture chambers, travellers’ inns, troublesome treasures, urban chases, urban events, urban landmarks, urban oddities, vampire’s castles, war-ravaged lands, white dragon lairs, wilderness camps, windswept moors, wizard’s towers and wrecked ships (and whose doesn’t?) the Dread Thingonomicon is for you!
Comprising the entire 20 Things line, the Dread Thingonomicon weighs in at 476 pages of content and is the culmination of seven years of design.
Use the system-neutral material herein either before or during play and bask in your players’ adulation.
A System Neutral Resource by Alexander Augunas, John Adams, Aaron Bailey, John Bennett, Creighton Broadhurst, Simon Butler, Ronald Calbick, Kalyna Conrad, Seamus Conneely, Jeff Gomez, Rikh Hart, Eric Hindley, Taylor Hubler, Steve Hood, Anthony Jennings, Cole Kronewitter, Jacob W. Michaels, David Posener, Paul Quarles, Alex Riggs, David N. Ross, Mike Welham and Bart Wynants.
Digital Files
The download for this book includes print- and screen-optimised PDFs along with individual text files complete with markdown formatting for each of the 20 Things instalments presented within.
Print Editions
Print editions of The Dread Thingonomicon are available at DriveThruRPG by following this link.
Members of our Patreon campaign pledging as little as $5 a month got this book as just one part of their rewards. Join today.
Are you a busy GM? Does session prep take too long? Do you never have time to work on the cool little details that bring your adventures, dungeons and campaign to life?
Fear not.
This dread compilation gives you, the time-crunched GM, the tools to effortlessly add verisimilitude and detail to 100 different types of monstrous lairs. Use the material herein either before or during play and bask in your players' adulation.
You can use the lists herein before or during your game to help breathe life into a monster’s lair. Adding depth and verisimilitude to your game helps the players’ (hopefully willing) suspension of disbelief and leads to a better game.
Check out the Contents below or download the free Monstrous Lair Index to see exactly what is in this monstrous tome.
The Download
The download for this book includes print- and screen-optimised PDFs along with individual text files complete with markdown formatting for each of the Monstrous Lairs instalments presented within.
PRINT EDITIONS
Print editions of The Dread Laironomicon are available at DriveThruRPG by following this link.