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Exploring genres beyond fantasy can make you a better Dungeon Master

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Being a Dungeon Master or Game Master is more than just rolling dice.

You’re the Dungeon Master, or Game Master. You’ve spent hours planning out an adventure for your players. You wrote down all the stats for potential opponents. You painted the minis. You hand sculpted the walls and bric-a-brac that make up the dungeon layout you present before your players. Maybe you even made some phone calls or sent out online messages to make sure everyone is going to make the game.

It can be a lot of work.

And then within the first minute of play one of the players pipes up and says something like, “Oh, yeah. I remember this. The same thing happened in the last Forgotten Realms novel I read.”

It doesn’t matter that you, the Dungeon Master, has not read that novel. Or seen the movie. Or played the game. Or experienced whatever piece of media that was brought up. You’re likely to feel a little let down. You might even feel as if you’ve ruined the night for your players by giving them something familiar. Heck, your players might even grumble a little.

And all that hard work feels like a waste.

However, there is a way to improve your chances of surprising your stout adventurers. It’s quite simple, actually. A little thing.

It’s this: Expand your horizons.

Moving beyond fantasy to other genres

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Fantasy is great, but looking into other genres can help a Dungeon Master to grow.

What I mean here is your media-consuming horizons. There’s nothing wrong with being a fan of a particular genre, but if all you read are fantasy novels and all you play are fantasy games and all you see are fantasy movies, then your viewpoint is going to be somewhat limited and you’re not going to be able to offer your players your full potential.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not knocking fantasy nor any other particular genres. From a literary, film and game play point of view, there are lots of things that can be done in fantasy that can’t in other genres. But still, any fantasy fan who has soaked up enough of the genre will recognize the familiar tropes when they come rolling around.

The farm boy who could be king. The seedy tavern where even seedier adventurers gather. The magic ring. The magic sword. The dark lord who wants to rule the world.

We’ve all seen them a million times. That doesn’t mean they are necessarily boring, especially if there are some new twists, but still, if anything familiar like the above shows up, players are probably going to have certain expectations, or they might think you as Dungeon Master may play against those expectations. Either way, the players aren’t going to be surprised.

Let me add that “surprise” isn’t everything, but it is one tool in the DM’s tool box, and many a DM finds some pleasure from surprising his or her party, and some players enjoy being surprised.

Experience can improve your Dungeon Master skills

By diversifying what you read, games you play and what you watch or even listen to, you can stretch your bounds as a Dungeon Master, becoming familiar with tropes of other genres. Then you can utilize those tropes within your fantasy game, or whatever genre you play, and provide your players something fresh and new.

For instance, if you want to run a darker game, perhaps even a horror-related game, it would probably serve you well to watch at least a few horror movies, older ones as well as more recent, and you might consider reading a few Stephen King or Richard Laymon novels. This way you could pick up on not only a few horror tropes, but upon the feel of the genre, allowing you to help bring that vibe to your game table.

Or maybe you don’t know exactly what you want, just that you want to do something different as a Dungeon Master, something that would not only surprise your players, but might even surprise yourself a little as well. I mentioned horror, and there’s always science fiction, but those two genres are close enough to fantasy that your players might also be familiar with them. What about trying something truly different, like lifting a plot from a lesser-known 19th Century novel, or maybe making some non-player characters based upon villains in a 1930s movie?

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More than 50 novels in this series, and any one of them could teach a Game Master how to run a gritty noire and/or detective game.

Even less speculative genres such as thrillers or police procedurals can provide new ideas. Want to run a game about city guards? If so, why not base them off the detective characters of Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels?

Or maybe you would like to spin gothic fantasy upon its head. Guess what? It’s already been done. Jane Austen did it nearly two centuries ago with her novel “Northanger Abbey.”

Want to run a caper adventure? Watch “The Italian Job” or even “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.”

The limits are curtailed by your own willingness to expand your horizons and your own imagination. Read deeply, but also broadly. Watch movies you normally wouldn’t watch. Listen to new music. Take part in games that normally wouldn’t appeal to you. Step outside your comfort zone from time to time.

It all adds up to experience, and it can help make you a better Dungeon Master.

As can remembering to Stay Nerdy!

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Ty Johnston

A former newspaper editor for two decades in Ohio, West Virginia and Kentucky, Ty now earns his lunch money as a fiction writer, mostly in the fantasy and horror genres. He is vice president of Rogue Blades Foundation, a non-profit focused upon publishing heroic literature. In his free time he enjoys tabletop and video gaming, long swording, target shooting, reading, and bourbon. Find City of Rogues and other books and e-books by Ty Johnston at Amazon.

1 Comment

  • John McMullen
    March 9, 2016 at 5:25 pm

    Because we're all smart about genre tropes, it pays to have broad interests. Some of my interests don't translate particularly to rpgs (as a former biologist, I like reading about parasites, and I think I've hit my players' limit) but some do. And having a broad spread of interests that aren't just reading one particular subgenre means that I can steal from nearly everywhere. (Having friends who are writers means that they sometimes recognize the sources, but heck…we all know that nothing is original by itself, it's what you do with it.)

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