Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 134 - Using Source Material for Your RPG

Episode Date: July 24, 2022

This week's topic comes courtesy of Andreas Jonasson who listens from Sweden and generously donated to my ko-fi at ko-fi.com/taking20podcast.  In this episode, Jeremy talks about how to respectfully use source material from history, religion, and published game lore at your table and talks about some potential problems that can occur.   To learn more about the podcast, please head over to www.taking20podcast.com.   #DnD #DungeonsandDragons #Pathfinder #DMTips

This week on the Taking20 Podcast. History, lore, mythology, they're all scaffolding off which you can build your world. Source material is meant to be a launch point of inspiration, not shackles to which you're tethered. Trying to make sure your game stays true to all the published material can be an absolute nightmare. Here's the good news, though, you don't have to. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to episode 134 of the Taking 20 podcast. This week covering the best ways to use various types of source material. This week's sponsor, trains. Little known fact, almost no one's excited to get on a train.

The conductors know this because when it's time for the train to leave, they all scream all aboard. Board. All aboard. Are you enjoying the Taking20 podcast? If so, I am so glad. Please consider telling your gaming group, local game store, bridge club, anarchist commune, or coworkers about it. We've been growing at a steady pace, growing this little podcast from about 600 downloads a month up to a little over 1,000 now.

I'd love to see those numbers continue to grow and bring more people into this amazing hobby, so please consider helping to spread the word about the podcast. By the way, the idea for this episode comes courtesy of Andreas Jonasson, who listens from Sweden and generously donated to my coffee at ko-fi.com slash taking20podcast with this suggestion. Information about homebrewing history, lore, and mythology while still being respectful to the source material. So thank you so much, Andreas, for the topic idea. It really got the marble bouncing around in my head.

After thinking about this off and on for more than a week, I think I'm going to attack this concept of source material from multiple directions, because it really does depend on what you mean by source material. Not all source material is the same, so let's look at this from four different directions. 1. Source material from historical events on Earth. source material is the same. So let's look at this from four different directions. One, source material from historical events on Earth. Two, source material from other sources of media. Three, source material from Earth's religions. And four, source material from published adventures, novels, informational tomes, or other official published content from the game. So let's start with the first one, source

material from Earth's history. Suppose you're having an adventure that takes place in and around historical events or people in Earth's history, like a campaign during the French Revolution, or getting thrown through time and landing in the middle of the Third Reich, a game in 1826 and meeting a young woman named Clara Barton, who on Earth would later found the Red Cross. In the middle of the Battle of Stalingrad, Waterloo, meeting a cocky young general named George Armstrong Custer,

London just before the Black Plague arrived, Atlanta just before Sherman burned it, the Pequot or Yangzhou massacres. Whatever the events of the people, good or ill, suppose it serves as an aspect or a backdrop to the adventure or campaign that you're running. My fellow DMs, you know that no adventure or campaign idea survives first contact with the PCs. They easily could make decisions that would change the course of history.

They may do mass cure disease in the early days of a plague, thereby cutting it off before it could start. They may slay a future world leader while they're still young and before they take the reins of power. It's the old time travel adage of if time travel exists, why didn't somebody just go back in time and kill Hitler as a baby? And I do not have time to talk about whether or not that would be a morally correct decision. That's an onion with infinite layers. Potentially save 12 million people, but you're killing an innocent child who hasn't committed those acts yet. I remember a short story from a long time ago that I read where a time traveler did just that

and Hitler's parents adopted an orphan boy and named him Adolf. A lot of times changing the course of history, you have to figure out, okay, is like the Necroscope book series, where changing history, you're actually causing it to come about. Whereas if you hadn't done anything, things would be different. Does it break causality? Are timelines like Back to the Future, where changes in the past affect the universe as a whole? Or are they like Avengers Endgame, where if you travel forward to the past and change it,

it's still your future? Blah, blah, blah. You can spin yourself up a hundred different ways worrying about if they'll change something. If you're doing a full historical simulation somehow, just the presence of the PCs in pivotal points of history would naturally cause things to happen. I mean, it's the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which naturally leads to what's called the observer effect. Just observing or measuring something can change the outcome.

Mother puss bucket, I am so far in the weeds. Okay, anyway, suppose your game takes place in Japan, and your players want to warn the daimyo that Tokugawa Ieyasu will attempt to unify the country and rise to power. Or maybe your game takes place in 1066, and they want to warn Harold Godwinson not to fight the Normans at Hastings. Here's what I'd ask. So what? What if they do?

What if they did warn the Daimyo or Harold Godwinson? Would these leaders even listen to these PCs? Would they believe these strangers that this weird thing is going to happen? And even if they did, and they changed the decisions, would these changed decisions even lead to a different outcome? Okay, sure, if you time travel back to Viking times with a nuke and set it off in London, yeah, they're probably going to capitulate to the Norsemen. Barring that, though, there's a concept that you'll hear multiple times this episode.

But for brevity's sake, this is the only time I'm going to explain it. The history, the universe, the books, movies, published material, anything that you can find, are all chock-full of what I'm going to call nooks and crannies. Nooks and crannies are tales and stories around major events and popular culture that aren't told. Maybe because they're secret. The reason the PCs weren't recorded in history was that they were busy infiltrating the prison to shut the power off so all the prisoners could escape. Or maybe the PCs were performing a clandestine assassination of some important figures aide-de-camp, or second-in-command, weakening their ability to perform during a historical event.

Or maybe the PCs were there, but no one thought they were important. So it wasn't a secret, but everyone knew that they were doing something. But they see these weirdos in plate armor running around on Normandy Beach, and no one mentions it because how the hell do you explain that? Or maybe the PCs are there at the time of a historical event or a major event in a novel or movie or book, but they're elsewhere. They're out of the limelight of the main event. They're not participating in the riots, but they're riling up the populace against the existing rulers, just kind of elsewhere. Regardless, there are certain events from history that you will want to tread very, very lightly around,

even if you include it in your campaign. Any historical event that depicts slaughter, bloodshed, persecution, or a wound or a slight that was dishonorably received. For example, I don't think I'd ever run a campaign where the goals were to, for example, save baby Hitler, or distribute more smallpox blankets to Native Americans, or to help the Roman Empire round up and persecute those of the Hebrew faith. There's more potential for hurt in these types of campaign situations than potential for fun for your people around your table.

So my advice, unless you know your table very, very well and have extensive one-on-one conversations to give every one of your players the ability to voice any concerns they may have, steer well clear of events like this, or at a minimum, discuss them at length. The littlest things like this, by the way, can have a detrimental effect on your table. It can cause some people to get hurt feelings, and either they feel uncomfortable at your table, or they maybe even leave and never return. Even RPG publishing companies play merry hell with Earth's history in some of their products. What follows is a minor spoiler alert for anyone who may ever

play the Reign of Winter adventure path in the Pathfinder game system. So if you think you might, fast forward by about a minute. Late in the story of Rain of Winter, the party is magically transported to Earth just after the Russian Revolution and meet, among other people, Rasputin. He is given stats, class levels, spells he can cast, etc., etc., etc., that fit within the game system. Is that treating Rasputin or the Romanovs, the last Tsars of Russia, with respect? Probably not. One Romanov is killed right in front of the party, one is a ghost, one is tortured,

and Anastasia's disappearance is explained away with magic as she's whisked away to another world in time. I have no ties to that place in time in Earth's history, but I can see where someone who might be a distant relative of someone who lived through that might take offense to some of the decisions made and how it was written and maybe even how it plays out at your table. So communication is key if you're going to be using a potentially sensitive time in Earth's history in your campaign. Make sure your players are on board before you ever open that door. Second source material, other media. There's another potential set of source material would be things like books, films, TV series,

music, short stories, mythological stories, pictures, posters, cereal boxes, whatever it may be. I have said it on this podcast many, many times and I firmly believe it. Borrow, borrow, borrow. Steal, steal, steal. If there's something that looks like it would make an interesting adventure, steal it wholesale. Put a fresh coat of paint on it and roll it out to your players. Change names, locations, maybe minor plot facts like what was stolen and where it was taken, who has it and who wants it. But the idea and structure of your adventure could be damn near a shot-for-shot remake

of an episode of Game of Thrones, the movie Knives Out, or Shirley Jackson's short story The Lottery. But Jeremy, isn't that cheap and won't my players feel slighted if they figure it out? No. First off, they probably won't fucking figure it out if you change enough.

And secondly, there's only so many stories under the sun. One of the books I'm reading right now talks about there's really only about 20 different plots that you can write. Is that true? I don't know. But I can tell you that there are common themes in various stories of types of media. So, for example, let's say you use the movie Rat Race as your source material. The PCs have to beat other teams to an unknown destination and solve puzzles in order to win money. This has been done a thousand different ways in a thousand different pieces of media. It sounds fun, though.

Throw some combat, some skill challenges, some riddles, and other mechanics together. You've got a night your players won't soon forget. Even if they figure it out, this kind of sounds like rat race. They won't care because they're having fun. This kind of sounds like rat race. They won't care because they're having fun. So when it comes to borrowing from other types of media, other types of fiction, have absolutely no fear about it. Slap a coat of paint on it and make it your own.

Third type of source material to borrow from, religions on earth. Now, first and foremost, there is a huge difference between using creatures and people of myth for religions that aren't largely followed anymore versus popular religions of the world today. Think having Hercules show up in your campaign as an NPC compared to, say, Martin Luther and his 99 theses. Okay, now we're going to get into some of my house rules, and you're welcome to follow or ignore this as you see fit when it comes to religions on Earth. But at my table, unless the game settings explicitly calls for it, I don't use any religions present on Earth in my game world. Period. Hard stop. There are no Buddhists on the Sword Coast.

There are no Hebrews in the Starfinder Pact worlds. There are no Christians on Galarian. Now, if you're planning a Call of Cthulhu set in the 1920s in New York City, or in the 2020s, those religions exist in the world and you need to at least acknowledge their existence. But at my table, I don't do anything that would come close to giving statistics to any of these religious figures. The prevalence of a religion? Sure. If you look it up, in 1920 in the United States, for example, according to a PBS book called The First Measured Century,

3% of the country were Southern Baptist, and about 6% of the U.S. were Methodist. But at the same time, 17% of people identified as Catholic, and other religions like Islam, Judaism, Church of Latter-day Saints, Eastern Orthodoxy, were less than 2% of the population each at the time. This is no judgment or condemnation of any religion you may follow. That just happened to be the demographics at the time. So if you wanted to base a campaign in 1920s U.S. history,

then it might make sense for the PCs to see more cathedrals than mosques and more churches than temples. Does that mean you have to use these percentages, by the way? No, of course not. Maybe it's an alternate US where Islam was adopted much faster in the New World than, say, Catholicism was. Or one where no religions exist, but you can make any other change that you would want to make. The entire topic of religions on Earth within your RPG is fraught with danger, even if you mean no offense by it. What if, for example, you decide you're going to create stat blocks for major historical religious figures?

You do so, and Jesus is given better stats than Muhammad, who is given better stats than Buddha, who is given better stats than the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or whatever order you want to put those in. By setting the power order in that way, what you would inadvertently have said is that Jesus, and by extension, likely his church and his followers, are better than other religions. Well, Jeremy, I never intended. It doesn't matter. Well, Jeremy, I never intended. It doesn't matter. Someone at your table who is Sunni or Jewish or Sikh or Baha'i or Muslim or any other religion could feel slighted.

I remember as a young lad reading a book that was released for Dungeons & Dragons called Deities and Demigods. In it, there were stats for various past religions, Greek, Roman, Norse, Egyptian, Chinese, Native American, even Arthurian heroes and the Cthulhu mythos. They all had stat blocks and details about how gods can be harmed and even killed. They were treated just like high-level monsters. There were even stats for a deity called Al-Akbar, a lawful good deity based on the god of Islam. Even young Jeremy, and bear in mind, I was raised in the southern U.S. where non-Christians were rare, and I am white as fuck. Hell, if I were any whiter, I'd be clear. I only understood a little bit about other religions, but I still said I am staying way the hell away

from this at my table. One of the wisest things that Wizards of the Coast ever did was to stop publishing statistics for gods. Paizo did something similar. They don't want a campaign where the ultimate goal is to go kill Zeus. By their very nature, gods are so far above the abilities of man that the writers decided that there was no point in even publishing stats for RPG campaigns, and I think that was a good thing long-term. stats for RPG campaigns, and I think that was a good thing long term. Unless done so with a tremendous amount of respect, deference, and plenty of communication with your players beforehand, I strongly recommend not using any religious events or iconography for religions that currently

exist on Earth. Even if none of your players said anything, they could still be upset by the inclusion or exclusion of powers by intended or inadvertent favoritism shown towards one religion or another. This is best shown with a concrete example. Imagine you're playing a Call of Cthulhu game, and you decide as the GM that the players can get eight safe hours of rest in a Catholic cathedral, but not get that same guarantee of rest in a mosque. The fuck? You can't do that. I have my beliefs about religion, but so do every one of my players. Around one of my tables, there are six players, four different faiths, including atheism, which, by the way, could be another potential problem. To be respectful of real-world religions,

I strongly recommend you only include it if the game world requires it, and then push it to the background as much as possible. If you do have to have religions front and center, or if one of your characters' religions is a core concept, treat the religions the same. The protections provided by the high priest should be the same as those provided by an imam, or a catholic priest, or a lead pastor, or what have you. as those provided by an imam or a Catholic priest or a lead pastor or what have you. Years ago, I had a very religious Protestant friend that I had repeatedly asked if he wanted to play Dungeons and Dragons with us. He had fully bought into the satanic panic and that Dungeons and Dragons was a bunch of people meeting in dark places to cast spells, curse people, and sacrifice goats. Which, of course, isn't true. Do you know how expensive goats are? goats. Which, of course, isn't true. Do you know how expensive goats are? I finally convinced him that it was a game where you just use your imagination and dice, and he finally agreed

to play, and I was so excited. We talked about the classes, and he was drawn to the idea of playing a cleric, a righteous representative of a god, and I helped him build his character. Then we came to the moment where he needed to pick the in-game god that his character worshipped, and he froze. He didn't feel comfortable saying he was a cleric of Pelor or St. Cuthbert or Hieronius because he believed it would be blasphemy to his earthly religion for him to do so. We discussed the differences between what players do and what characters do and that this is a game and we all crafted the story, but I finally capitulated and I said, okay, you know what, that's fine. Let's just say you worship a deity just called God. No formal name was given,

but the game mechanics wise, it works exactly the same as if you'd named one of the other deities and he was all about it. He said he could live with that and he was looking forward to evangelizing Jesus both in game world and at the table. And at this point, I had to slam the

brakes. When I told him I had a player at my table of a different faith who probably wouldn't like Jesus Christ in the game world, he balked. I explained that we all have beliefs that we all bring to the table, but we're trying to be inclusive of all, and he kind of stormed off. To the best of my knowledge, he still never tried Dungeons and Dragons, which saddens me because he's a little nerdy. I doubt he's listening to this, but I'm sorry, brother. I love you, but you're nerdy just like the rest of us. And I think he'd enjoy the game if he gave it a real try. If you are a very religious person away from the table, faithfully attend the gatherings of your religion and use the tenets of your religion to try to make the world a better place using the

religious teachings as a shield for others and not a sword to separate us, good. I'm very happy for you. And if we were having a dinner or a meeting where the purpose was theological debate, I'd be happy to have that discussion in a respectful and intellectual manner. But this is an RPG gaming table. The people sitting around it are your friends and acquaintances who came to roll dice and create a narrative,

not be browbeat into believing the same way that you do, or be denigrated for believing differently. Okay, this religious topic went on way longer than I thought, and I apologize for spending so much time on it, but I have seen groups break up over the way religion was handled in-game. If you do want to include religion in your game or at your table and you're not careful, you're riding a pogo stick in a minefield and eventually it's just going to go boom. There's nothing wrong with respectfully using religious stories as the basis of your adventures, but if you do, I would recommend re-skinning them for the world you're gaming in and change the names of those involved in order to minimize the potential for hurt feelings. The last type of source material I want to talk about is published adventures, novels,

informational tomes, or other official published content for the game. Okay, so here we go. I don't know this for a fact, but I bet this is what Andreas was referring to when he mentioned staying true to source material. Dungeons & Dragons has been around since the 1970s. Pathfinder's been around since 2009. Those are games that are long in the tooth with a ton of published material about them. And let's not even go into something like Warhammer 40k, which has hundreds of novels and dozens of game systems that are available. Geography, ecology, economy, religion, demographics, trade, commerce, government, who leads whom, and what their personality is. It's all been documented a hundred times over in these older game systems.

Name a campaign setting. Greyhawk, Dark Sun, Ravenloft, Galarian. And you can find maybe dozens of books detailing source material. Trying to make sure your game stays true to all the published material can be an absolute nightmare. Here's the good news though, you don't have to. Matt Mercer in the video, Game Masters of Exandria Roundtable, said some wonderful things about a highly recommended video, even if you don't watch Critical Role. Matt, Abrea, Brennan Lee, Mulligan, they all share interesting perspectives about DMing in a shared world with shared history. Matt Mercer said,

and I quote in this video, when you're at home, the only people you have to impress are the people at your table. And adding to what he said, At home, when you're running your game, you're adventuring in your table's Galarian, your table's Sword Coast, your table's Exandria, your table's 1920s Earth. Coast, your table's Exandria, your table's 1920s Earth. By contrast, Matt goes on to say that if you're running a live play that's recorded and published for consumption, sometimes on a paying or sponsorship basis, people create wikis and webpages about the contradictions in your history and lore that your world has. If you're playing at home and you screw up the name of the goddess that sliced open the rift that trapped Rovagug in Pathfinder lore,

Sarenrae, by the way, oh, I think that'd make an interesting lore episode about Rovagug. So, yeah, okay, there's a lot of Pathfinder mythology that need to be covered, but if you're interested in this topic, send me an email to feedback at taking20podcast.com. Let me know if you want to hear about the capture of Rovagug, if you will. Anyway, Matt Mercer wrote an entire book about the world of Exandria that is hundreds of pages long. In the roundtable video I referenced earlier, when asked how he knew he was done with the book, Matt simply said, you don't.

And Brennan Lee Mulligan lost his damn mind. I say that with love, by the way, but yeah, he lost his mind. Matt went on to say, you are never done with world building. There's always nooks and crannies of both the past and the present that haven't been codified. There are always stories that haven't been told, battles that haven't been documented, struggles that have been overcome that have not yet been recorded in official lore by official people who write official books about the subject. I know Matt Mercer has discussed this, and so has Jason Bowman in various videos, but

I'm sure there's a blurb in some Wizards of the Coast book somewhere that I haven't found that says this as well. But when you're playing with an official game setting, an official game lore or history published by the manufacturer or the original muse for the topic, you don't have to impress them. You're playing your version of the published campaign setting, location, history, whatever. You can incorporate all of it, none of it,

or just pick and choose as you will. History, lore, mythology, they're all scaffolding off which you can build your world. Even if you're playing a game world that's so heavily documented it's just nauseating. Imagine you're playing a Call of Cthulhu game set in the year 2020. In modern society, fucking everything is documented, from big news events on multiple websites all the way through individuals' thoughts and concerns on social media. You don't have to align your world with everything that actually happened. How would

you even do that? You'd go insane. Source material is meant to be a launch point of inspiration, not shackles to which you're tethered. I don't know how many of you watch hockey, but I've been a fan for the last about 20, 25 years or so. The team that wins the National Hockey League's championship in the U.S. wins a trophy called the Stanley Cup, and it is beautiful. Names of past winners are etched into the side of it. It's 37 pounds of silver and nickel alloy, and for the championships decided,

it is handled like a religious artifact. Some players won't touch it or even look at it for an extended period of time until they win it. There are dedicated keepers of the trophy, charged with taking care of it. They wear white gloves when they handle it. There are dedicated keepers of the trophy charged with taking care of it. They wear white gloves when they handle it to eliminate the possibility of it getting tarnished by skin oil or having fingerprints on it. And then one team wins it, and that poor cup gets treated like shit for the entire offseason. It's tradition that every member of the winning team gets to keep the trophy for part of the offseason, and the stories that every member of the winning team gets to keep the trophy for part of the offseason, and the stories told about what happens to this trophy are legendary. It's been

thrown into a pool, dropped in a lake, babies have been baptized in it, people have snorted cocaine out of it, it's been used as a cereal and soup bowl, it's been accidentally left by the side of the road, and if at least one story is true, has been used as a toilet. So why the hell did I go into the Stanley Cup? Because published source material for your game system is the Stanley Cup. You can be as reverential or blasphemous with it as you would like. You can treat it as sacrosanct, handle it with white gloves, never take any risks with it, and ensure that any adventuring that's being done won't change the major or maybe even minor lore that's canon for your game world. Or you can disregard it all. Toss out all the published material, just use names or maps of an area, and do your own thing with it.

Like Matt Mercer said, it is your version of Tal'Dorei. Change the lore, break the history, make it your own however you want to. Personally, I've always viewed source material as LEGO pieces that can be taken apart and reassembled however you see fit to make your version of the game, whether you're talking about the Sword Coast, Galarian, the Pact Worlds, or Exandria. I'm currently running a Pathfinder first edition campaign, Skull and Shackles, right now, and one of my players had played fifth edition but had never played Pathfinder before. We started designing her character and she was drawn to being a cleric, but since it's a, you

know, swashbuckly type campaign, she wanted to be able to use a pistol, and off I went to publish lore to figure out how to get a cleric proficiency with a pistol. Boy, options were scarce. She could have taken a dip in the gunslinger class, but she said she'd prefer to stay straight clerics, okay. Rules as written, then. The only other way to do it was to her to take multiple feats to give her the ability to be effective with a firearm in combat.

But I've played second edition as well, and there's a second edition deity named Cassanda Lee that granted clerics proficiency in firearms. But the problem was that according to official Pathfinder lore, Cassanda Lee didn't exist on Calarian until two to three years after Skull and Shackles. I felt telling the player that they'd be punished because feat taxes and level requirements and lore just felt unsatisfying, especially since this is our first time playing.

So, I bent the lore a bit. I rearranged some historical events, and now Cassandra Lee is a brand new deity, and her cleric is one of the first worshippers of the Iron Goddess. Will the authors of Pathfinder 2e's gods and magic books show up at my house with torches and pitchforks, ready to run me out of town on a rail because I dick with the timeline? Doubt it. Paizo, like Wizards of the Coast and Matthew Mercer, wants you to take the lore, the history, the campaign setting that they have made and make it your own. Now, did I talk about it during session zero and explain to a couple of my veteran players who know the timeline that things are

getting shifted around a little bit? Absolutely I did, because I wanted to make it clear this is our Galarian, but not the only Galarian. So back to original topic. How respectful do you need to be with the original lore? About as respectful as you want to be with the Stanley Cup. You can treat it with holy writ, never change anything, do all the research and effort and take the time and care to make sure that you absolutely align with everything that's been published up until now. Or you can set it down and take a giant dump all over the top of it and sully it however you'd like. The way you treat published lore, the way you treat existing mythology, is yours and yours alone. Adjust what you need to, twist what you need to, change what you need to, to fit the campaign world that

you and your players want, and I guarantee you and your players will have fun doing it. Andreas, I really hope this answered the question to your satisfaction. If I missed the intention of the question, please accept my apologies and do not hesitate to reach out to me and I'll give it another shot. If you have an idea for an episode, donating to my coffee is a surefire way to push it towards the front of the line and means it's going to come out very soon. Please consider donating to the podcast

because it's been a rough couple of months since I've been off work. Thank goodness I'm heading back here in a few weeks. But just because you didn't donate doesn't mean I'll never cover your topic. It just means it'll get slotted in and I'll get to it as soon as I can. But if you do have an idea for an episode, please send it to me at feedback at taking20podcast.com and I'll add it to the queue.

Speaking of which, next week, I want to talk about a critical DM tool called the rule of three. So that's what I'm going to cover next week. But before I go, I want to thank our sponsor, Trains. Be careful when you're talking to a train. Their minds only have one track. This has been a, wow, supersized episode number 134,

Best Ways to Use Source Material. My name is Jeremy Shelley, and I hope that your next game is your best game. The Taking 20 Podcast is a Publishing Cube Media Production. Copyright 2022. References to game system content are copyrighted by their respective publishers.