October – December 2026 Patreon Q&A

Oh gods, I love Elden Ring! I think there are a few tricks to make more Elden-Ring-Like dungeons in our games. First on physical design. Elden Ring uses a trick many designers use and love — they often show you the ending before you can reach it. You'll run into doors you can't normally open until you get much further. You'll see the arena of the big boss well before you can reach it. We can do this in our games too — big locked doors (no, it can't be knocked or picked) requiring several keys (maybe three of five keys!) to open. The standard list of good dungeon designs works well here: Include loop backs, multiple paths, secret paths, changes in depth, multiple connection points to lower maps, and so on. Cutting across several layers of a dungeon with something like a big crack in the ground is fun too. You want more than just a single stair that leads down deep. You can have several connections that connect levels of a dungeon. You don't even have to build the whole dungeon out for this — you can just hint at it, like finding a huge sinkhole that traverses several layers and goes down into the lowest depths. Adventurers would be fools to go down that far. So the list of good dungeon designs help a lot: - Multiple entrances - Loop backs - Secret passages - Changing elevation - Multiple points to cross levels A big fun one to make dungeons more Elden-Ring-Like is to have shortcuts. This is more like Dark Souls where you suddenly find yourself in an elevator that takes you all the way back to your original starting place, but you can do that here. They go super far into a dungeon and then find a shaft that takes them right up top again. It's a fun looping discovery. Elden Ring and the Souls games have two other major aspects worth considering. Environmental storytelling is a big one. It's not well know that the reason I have Secrets and Clues in my eight steps goes back to playing Bloodborne on the PS4. I loved how every object in Bloodborne revealed a little piece of the story and thought that works well in our RPGs too. You can, of course, do the same thing. Don't blurt out the whole story of a location at once. Instead, share it in little bits as the characters explore the dungeon. Second is scope and scale. Make things big and epic. Double the size of the chambers so they can feel the vast scope of what's going on here. I had a lot of Elden Ring influence in City of Arches so you can see how I took some of those ideas and put it in there. Huge statues, vast chambers, deep shafts, grand halls — signs of a mighty empire now long lost and forgotten. I think its a great way to add depth to our dungeons.

The eight steps should serve Pathfinder 2e just as much as any other RPG. But what you put *in* the steps might change. Instead of having a loose list of monsters who might go anywhere, you might instead outline encounters already pre-built that you can drop in when they feel right. Your prep might be designing the encounters. Pathfinder 2 does have some quick encounter building guidelines on page 76 of the GM Core book. - Boss and Lackeys (120 XP): One creature of party level + 2, four creatures of party level – 4 - Boss and Lieutenant (120 XP): One creature of party level + 2, one creature of party level - Elite Enemies (120 XP): Three creatures of party level - Lieutenant and Lackeys (80 XP): One creature of party level, four creatures of party level – 4 - Mated Pair (80 XP): Two creatures of party level - Troop (80 XP): One creature of party level, two creatures of party level – 2 - Mook Squad (60 XP): Six creatures of party level – 4 That gives you a good rough gauge of how many monsters at a given level will challenge the characters — sort of a lazy encounter benchmark for Pathfinder 2. I've not run it so I don't know how well it works but it's a start. It sounds like a creature of a certain level in Pathfinder 2 is roughly equivalent to like 1.2 characters or so. Three creatures for four characters? Not the easiest math but probably not bad. You know that if you have an equal number total creature levels to the total character levels its probably a difficult battle. So you can still follow the eight steps, but you'll probably want to handle encounter building differently than you might if you were running Shadowdark. Hope that helps!

There are a few ways to prep and run dungeons and I don't focus on only one. I think it's fine to prepare and run dungeons in several ways depending on the time you have, the effort you want to put in, and what you're comfortable with. I'll offer up a couple of ways. First, you can print out a map and take a pen and write down one or two words to describe what each of the rooms are. You can write down traps if you want or note things you know will be in any room. You can list out NPCs and monsters separately or if you know certain ones are in certain chambers, you can do that too. A looser way is to list out *potential* chambers in their own list and then improvise the rooms as you run the dungeon, dropping in particular chambers when they make sense depending on where the characters went. This is looser, and requires more improvisation at the table, but it's faster to prep I think. Here are two examples from my Nimble game this week: - **Vaults of Nevernight**. collapsed walls, ancient sarcophagi, Ruined demonic cage Lord Scale the Knight of Chains; Ornate primeval spire of tentacles of Gothin the Thing in the Pit; Secret relic vaults and guardians; decayed walls and slimes; collapsed vault; relic portal chamber. Secret door of teeth. - **Nevernight**. Outdoor patio, inner foyer and greeting room, sitting room, kitchen and dumbwaiters, fighting room, library, relic chamber, private relic chamber, dining room, upper serving room, servants quarters, upper patio, private patio, guest quarters, master bedrooms, outdoor roof patio. Outdoor fighting pit. This worked out well because I ended up not using the vaults of nevernight. They just went in for a party. I did find myself with extra time to prep this game so I also hand-wrote notes on a map too. Probably more prep than I needed, but it helped me when I ran the location. So it's really about doing what you have the time to do and are comfortable doing. Try a few different methods and see what works.

I think I had problems with a few parts of Blades. I think it's a great game and I totally get why people love it. But I had some hard issues. First, it's actually pretty complex in a few ways: - The world is rich and there's a lot going on that I felt like I needed to processes to run a game. - There's not only character sheets but crew sheets, region sheets, and headquarters sheets. So there's a lot of mechanics across the whole game. - There's so much character-driven narrative that it's hard to make anything solid for the game itself. It's been like five years since I ran it so I don't know if I would have the same problems with it now that I had back then but that's what I hit. I still think it's great, but I don't know that its for me.

I'll start off with a few things. First, I'm not your priest. Nor am I your role model. We each have to decide what we're going to do with this new technology taking the whole world by storm. I think it's always worth keeping in mind the environmental, economic, and social impacts AI is having. AI isn't going to kill us all — we can do that all on our own with massive economic funneling to the top, filling the atmosphere with carbon, and using AI to push totalitarian regimes. But generative AI is just technology, as Cory Doctorow points out. We have to decide where it helps us do what we want to do and where it's taking away the things we enjoy doing ourselves or where we should be putting that effort. I don't condemn anyone for their use of AI as long as they're not hurting other people (stealing their work, lying to them, filling the internet with slop, etc). Nor do I condemn those who want absolutely nothing at all to do with it. There are good reasons to feel this way. I think it's probably a better conversation to have with your group to see how comfortable they are with it. For me, the question is whether generative AI is doing the things I really want it to be doing or if I should be doing these things myself. Handling tedious work that no one wants to do? Probably ok. Doing creative work? I'm not a fan. I don't think it destroys humanity to generate an image of an NPC or a token or a map but also, we have lots of pictures of NPCs, tokens, and maps available made by actual human beings. Maybe take a look through those first. So yeah, we each have to decide where our lines are on this one. I'm not going to draw them for anyone else.

This is really tough. I would probably break away from longer form stories and build more episodic games, which can still be a lot of fun and still tie into a larger story but something more like the Mandalorian than the Star Wars movies. You can probably fit two to three scenes in two hours — two big ones or three smaller ones. Sometimes you can run shorter scenes with fewer elements, as you describe, and other times you can shrink the overall story. Fewer rooms in a dungeon, fewer encounters along a journey. For something like Empire of the Ghouls, you'll almost certainly want to cut down the travel. The travel in Ghouls is really long. One encounter along the way is probably good. Think about running shorter dungeons and ensure the scenes you run all have a meaningful motivation in the campaign. Also, fewer players and lower levels in less complex systems can help =)

I would probably avoid reading the adventures you're currently playing in. Do your best to just enjoy the game you're in. Find positive and constructive ways to dive deeper into the game and take some of the burden off of the DMs your playing with. Offer to be the note take for the game, or the cartographer, or the quartermaster, or all three! Build characters that tie into the hooks the DM is bringing to the table and those that complement the other characters in both mechanics and story. When you're done with a campaign, you can look back to see how yours differed but looking at them while you're running could break your connection to the world actually taking place at the table and move you towards "that's not how I would have done it" territory which isn't great for you or the DM.

A lot of people like Affinity Publisher. https://www.affinity.studio/page-layout-software I use Word for my layout and you can actually get pretty far with it but it's not fantastic. Others like Pages which comes for free on Macs. I'd probably take a look at Affinity and some tutorial videos.