Who are TTRPG maps for? Because there are so many game styles, I imagine there's no single answer to this question, which is to hedge with the old “it depends”. But what this really comes down to is that different maps have different purposes depending on who is using them.

In many old-school hex crawl games, the DM might have two maps while the players have one. The DM's maps are “where everything is” and “where the PCs actually are”, while the player map is “where the players think the PCs are”. In a dungeon, the DM need have only one map unless they're running a maze, which tends to be un-fun* for most tables. The hex crawl map setup is an acknowledgement of and attempt at modeling getting lost or losing direction in the wild.

As for the player map, there are a few basic options to account for its existence. The first, and perhaps** oldest is to have the players make their own map, presumably by electing someone to the role. For dungeon maps, the idea is that the players will end up with something that looks roughly like what the DM is looking at, but marked up according to the players' priorities. The second is to swing the other way entirely and provide the map for the players. This can make sense when the PCs should know something about the place they are/are going. And the third is a hybrid of these, where some portion of the map is provided, but with blank spaces for the players to fill in as they discover things.

In my most recently published (well, my only published) adventure, I considered carefully what purpose the map should serve. I'm a longtime listener of Between Two Cairns, and I take to heart the notes Brad and Yochai have about the maps that accompany adventures. I especially took note when they reviewed Bakto's Terrifying Cuisine, which I've run now three times, and on whose structure I based Dead I Am the Rat.

The idea for Dead I Am the Rat ruminated for a while, but when I finally got around to finishing the writing and laying things out, I had a provisional map:

By the time I started work on earnest, I had already listened to the Between Two Cairns review of Bakto's, and I knew I wanted to give my players the map. But all I had was this map. I was dissatisfied with the map because it lacked the polish I wanted to present in my published module. It's perfectly fine for use at the table, however! Well, except for one problem that turned out to have a sizable impact during my first playtest!

So I sat down during my Christmas leave and started drawing. My goal was to draw one image for each point on my map, something that was roughly indicative of what was there. Also, of course, to correct the mistake I had made on the map and to adjust for my playtest notes. And since this is a player-facing map, it omits any secret pathways.

This was my first experience drawing something that would be scaled down like this, and while it does what it's supposed to do, I've learned a bit about how I'd want to approach it if I did it again. This is, however, my final version, so this one is what it will be.

I'll note again that this is a player facing map. The player rats in my adventure hail from the region and would know its rough layout. There's no reason to hide the region map from them. At the same time, there is no separate DM map, because I didn't see the necessity of it.

Anyway that's all I have for now on this. As I continue development of a handful more adventures, I'm sure I'll revisit this topic or one adjacent to it.

* You may be interested in a set of maze mechanics that I distilled from a Reddit post and decanted into more specific cave crawling procedures. You can easily reverse engineer the mechanics if you like, but part of my argument was that generic mechanics were insufficient.

** I've been playing TTRPGs for more than 30 years, and I can't remember all the ways I've played them, including how players mapped or didn't map. It's probable that as a teenager I and my friends less concerned about precise positioning and more concerned about what shenanigans we could pull. But by the time I had gotten to the hobby, play practices had already been changing anyway.

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This is my analysis of what ended up being a playtest of Dead I Am the Rat. There are spoilers ahead.

When I set out to make a “kill the cat lord” adventure using the Mausritter rules, what I thought I was making was a heist game. Some design choices turned it into a semi-tactical time crunch with a glaringly easy ending, or at least that's what played out when I ran the adventure for my local Spookyfest RPG fest.

As a reminder: Dead I Am the Rat puts the players in control of zombie rats, raised for one night only with a goal of killing or driving away the cat lord Behemoth.

Along the way I saw things I want to improve with some additional work, but I'm considering how much I want to change the ultimate outcome.

Let's dig in.

Structure

The overall structure of the game itself is modeled on Bakto's Terrifying Cuisine, which I have run now three times. I've used Troika! as the system each time, but that just adds to the surreal flair of the game and provides some very interesting character options via backgrounds. Invariably, for instance, someone chooses to be a monkey monger, with a ready supply of monkeys they can add to the dish they prepare for Bakto.

Bakto's is a game about gathering ingredients to put together a dish for the demon, and racing against time to get it all done. Time counts down per a timer, which in early versions of the game had a fairly loose structure. The main problem, something pointed out in the Between Two Cairns episode covering it, is that because the players don't have a map of Bakto's house, their choices about where to go are more or less arbitrary. I wanted to correct that.

Dead I Am the Rat preserves the countdown timer and is explicit about what counts as a turn. This aspect was a smashing success in my book, since the goal of time pressure here is to keep the game moving so it fits in a one-shot format of 3-4 hours. To counter the issue raised by Brad and Yochai, I created a player-facing map of the region (called Greater Muenster Hill). Once I explained the procedures, the players had a moment to devise a travel strategy to track down the rumors they remembered.

To summarize the structure: The player rats travel from point to point in the region, racing against time, their main currency, in search of items and alliances that will help them defeat the cat lord. They can't die, but can be delayed. And among the items they can collect are bioluminescent fungi (“witches”) that both fuel their car and heal them to save time.

Setup

This section discusses what went right and what could have been improved in setting up the game.

Character creation: Creating player rats according to the regular Mausritter rules worked just fine. The mouse backgrounds and other accompanying concerns mapped well onto zombie rats. To improve: Nothing.

Things remembered: The player rats (five in the playtest) each rolled on a table of eight possible things they remembered from life. This served as something of an initial rumors table. To improve: Add more memories! Turns out eight is too few, and even though some where incomplete, they were all true. I should consider having some misleading ones, which will offer the players ambiguity in whether to pursue them, but still offer them meaningful choices.

The map: I messed up here. The text is very clear on where the exits from each location lead, but I inadvertently left a road on the map that was no longer in the text, and that ended up shortening the potential routes. Additionally, the starting location on the map is listed as “Toad Farm”, but in the text is listed as “The Graveyard”. To improve: I really need to redraw the map, not just to account for the erroneous road and misnamed location, but also to really push the flavor of the adventure via artwork. It's player-facing, and so it should look pretty.

Gameplay

This section details the gameplay, from opening to close. It dissects and reviews each location and NPCs along the way.

The NPCs: Overall, I still liked the mix of NPCs I included. I think they're all interesting enough and have their wants spelled out just fine. To improve: What they needed was a better sense of what it would cost for them to aid the player rats. I felt myself at times stretching, a bit uncertain as to how they should react to the player rats. More guidance there is necessary, and that comes from a bit more focus and perhaps some procedures.

The opening: This part appropriately sets the tone and provides the players a chance to introduce their player rats. To improve: I needed to make it clearer that the mice that had summoned them fled the moment the player rats came to consciousness.

The Graveyard: AKA Toad Farm. The confusion of the location was a slight hiccup, and some of the location description was unclear. The ghosts ended up being less of a threat than I had anticipated. And the player rats found too many “witches” in the dug graves. To improve: I need to make sure the location is named properly, edit the description a bit for clarity, and consider some kind of default or randomly determined ghost reaction in case the players trigger a random encounter here. I also need to decrease the number of “witches” the player rats can forage here to put more time pressure on them.

Muenster Hill: The players seemed delighted by Pica Pica, and with ready mouse backgrounds, someone in the party had the capacity to play a new song for the magpie. The ability to spend time atop the hill scouting the keep wasn't terribly attractive given the time crunch. To improve: Remove the road from Muenster Hill to Widowmaker Lane. For the item Pica Pica had, I should consider spelling out how to find out what it can do.

Stilton Warren: Unvisited during play. To improve: Probably should add more to interact with here. A patrol by Reeve Chicory Thorne and a cultist or two might add pressure. Otherwise need to find out how it plays!

Yarrow Marsh: A lot going on here. Bramblebark was easy to bribe into distracting the vampire rabbits. The hang gliders worked well enough. To improve: I guess just make it clearer that the hang gliders are big enough for rats?

The Wyrdstone: Unvisited during play. Out of the way, but it could be necessary for player rats who have empty tablets. To improve: I can't think of anything here.

Widowmaker Lane: Occupied a good deal of time. Player rats stole silver from the church to have Thimblehammer make them a sword, which he delivered to Muenster Hill. To improve: Getting silver was a tad too easy. Could use a rumor for the bell.

Foxtower: Player rats were able to offer Zerda a battery powered lantern for information. Once again, this is where Mausritter backgrounds really sing. They collected musk but ultimately didn't use it. To improve: I can't think of anything here.

Sassafras Grove: Unvisited during play. To improve: I can't think of anything so far.

Churlwood: Unvisited during play, but the players really debated whether to spend the time to go there. To improve: In retrospect, the hourglass mechanics aren't that clear.

Copperford Mines: Unvisited during play. Since there was not an easy hint about the mines being useful for anything but silver, the players didn't see much need to go there. To improve: More rumors.

Behemoth's Keep: Mostly worked. Could have been an actual dungeon, mapped out. To improve: While it worked okay theater of the mind, I actually think structuring this as a dungeon would have worked. That would require tweaking the turn counting, though.

Behemoth: Ended up being a pushover. He certainly would not have if the players had been less prepared. The challenge here is to strike a balance between adequate preparation and time. Behemoth got off one shot, but the amount of magic the party had was sufficient to overcome him in two rounds. To improve: More hit points. I actually wasn't expecting the player rats to inflict so much damage so fast.

Other Notes: Slightly more time pressure, perhaps in the form of random encounters, seems necessary to force harder decisions or force recalculations, and as observed above, the player rats started with a few too many witches.

Summary of Improvements

The following improvements are probably necessary: 1. Tweak the time pressure settings a bit. 2. Make the NPCs a little more comprehensible. 3. Adjust the map. 4. Increase the number of rumors and distribute them around where the player rats could pick them up by interacting. 5. Consider additional pressure via random encounters. 6. Clean up some descriptions. 7. Map the keep (lightly!) 8. Buff up Behemoth

Conclusion

This ended up being an easy win. While my players assure me this was a fun time traipsing around in the dark, pretending to be zombie rats, I remain convinced that a slight increase in the overall challenge is warranted. Still, there is something quite satisfying in the idea that presenting a powerful, united front against an authoritarian is enough to expose that ruler as a paper tiger who will fold the moment any real pressure is applied. It could have been a bitter, deadly fight, and with less preparation, that was a distinct possibility. But maybe it doesn't need to be. Maybe the struggle to gather strength and present it is enough. Maybe, in this case, the easy win is the reward.

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This post is inspired by David McGrogan's post about elves and elf sex, which is both a worldbuilding issue and a game mechanics issue that derives directly from the problem of longevity, up to and including immortality. Read on if you're similarly interested in the worldbuilding consequences and how I'm trying to think of such longevity in my games.

Play enough elf games, and you start to see a major problem with race/species/kindred level longevity. “I was there, Gandalf,” Elrond says in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001). Elrond here is talking about an event 3000 years in the past. True, he is long past the time when he might be personally called to adventure, but even an average Tolkien elf who might join an army or an adventuring party is likely to be quite old in comparison to the humans therein.

The main problem in game terms is what do you do with this kind of longevity? How can mortal or shorter-lived folk even relate to someone whose concept of time stretches across mortal generations? Further, how is a GM to conceptualize the deepness of time when the resident elf has a chance of having been there or at least around during an important event? Fortunately there are many more ways to think about and play elves than the immortal Tolkien elves, but given how much Tolkien remains in the DNA of your average D&D game, there remain ill fits at the margins.

What I want to talk about here are the various means I'm thinking through to deal with extreme longevity. Elsewhere in D&D, extreme longevity is either natural, supernatural, or exceptional. For my settings, I want to think of extreme longevity as either natural or exceptional. In both cases, longevity has a cost, but in the natural case, this is something that has developed through various evolution mechanisms, including social ones. We're perhaps more familiar with the exceptional cases, namely undead like liches and vampires, who can only maintain themselves via external means.

Let's dive into some Yer Shar lore briefly to tease out the expressions of extreme longevity that occur in the setting. There are a few foundational facts to consider here:

1. The entire world is predicated on the exclusion of dragons, which are at the apex of the setting's hierarchy of bogeymen. Because they are outside the world, they have the benefit of being both natural and exceptional. More below.
2. There are no gods, per se, in Yer Shar, though there is certainly belief in them. It is a completely mechanistic simulation that likewise invents simulated gods based on collective belief. Their apparent power is just a collection of privileges that otherwise can't operate outside Yer Shar. Since they aren't beings, per se, they aren't considered in our modes of longevity. If they were, they would be “supernatural”.
3. There are numerous exceptionally powerful immortal beings that remain inside the world, but aren't gods even if they act as such.
4. There are the normal long-lived kindreds, plus others that are constructed.

Just as there are two ways to think about longevity in Yer Shar (natural vs. exceptional), there are two ways to think about them as entities: they can or cannot produce offspring. Handily, this yields us a nice 2x2, allowing us to graph or categorize our immortals and semi-immortals. We still have a gap, however, in that there are no current natural non-reproducing beings in the list. If I were to fill that gap, it might contain the incredibly rare hybrid offspring of, say, elves and humans. But I'll just leave it blank for now.

In terms of the individual, we would normally expect longevity to impact the body most significantly. For anything that isn't immortal in some way, visible aging is one primary signifier. In all cases, though, since everything categorized in this list can die from injury, the main drivers of death are accident or violence. The complicating factor in Yer Shar is that, given this is both a fantasy world and a simulation, true death is hard to come by, and resurrection and necromancy are always on the table. There are even some forms of involuntary resurrection. Fear of this, and knowledge of how the simulation worked drove the Architects to create a mechanism that was capable of providing true death, but that's perhaps for another post.

We can't escape, however, the effects of aging on the mind. For reasons that aren't 100% correlated to real-world reasons, minds in Yer Shar also decline with age primarily because of the accumulation of memories and experience. As a consequence, we should expect that long-lived kindreds will have developed some evolutionary mechanisms to deal with longevity's effect on their minds. This is where we diverge the most from extant lore, especially regarding elves and dwarves. It also affects the exceptional beings, but being exceptional they don't possess innate or natural capacity to manage these things.

First up, let's talk about elves. They are usually the most problematic because they are player character kindreds whose longevity should make them among the most alien in mindset. In Yer Shar, my intention is to develop their sense of longevity as communal, with excess memory and experience siphoned off into memory hives. This offers us a bee or ant model for elven development, and further offers us some interesting reproductive characteristics, should we care to explore them. Just focusing on the memory management aspects, we expect elven communities, wherever they spring up, to maintain secretive hives in which they can deposit excess memory. From a game perspective, to keep elves on par with humans, such a thing may be necessary approximately every century, at which point an elf becomes something of a tabula rasa, starting over at level 1 if they're a PC. The memories go into a slurry that skilled archivists could mine if necessary. For most purposes, elves create diluted mixtures of these memories to share, reinforcing their collective unconscious.

As for dwarves, a similar process occurs at roughly the same rate, but being born of stone (Stonekin is one of their several names), their memories and experiences accumulate in crystals. For a dwarf, the effect is that the crystal expands in size until it must be removed. This is quite visible but could be obscured by beards, hair, or costumes. Like the excreted memories of the elves, such crystals tend to end up in curated archives, especially for those dwarves who obtain some level of prominence. Being discrete objects, they are easier to inspect individually, but also require more meticulous handling and are easily misplaced. Needless to say, finding one in the wild is like encountering a rare treasure, though the prospect of selling such a thing might not sit well with PC dwarves. Being crystals, these resist collectivization processes per se, and therefore don't contribute to broadly shared knowledge. And it's probably worth specifying that once separated they are not enough on their own to stand in for a fragment of the body, say, for purposes of resurrection magic. And finally, like the elves, sharding off memories this way provides a means of resetting the character: PCs revert to level 1.

NB: I'm still working on how I want to re-fit gnomes and halflings into the setting, but questions of longevity aside, I have different ideas of who and what they are.

Everything that's left is exceptional. This is where things get weird. Or weirder. The exceptional beings here range between living beings and undead beings: Dragons –> Hollowkin –> Liches. Dragons are the trickiest, because they are living beings that elevated themselves to immortality through monstrous means, becoming physical monsters in the process. Conceptually they cover a lot more than dragons in the strict sense, but the animating factor for dragons as dragons is that they hoard wealth in every form that wealth can take. In Yer Shar, they are oligarchs in the maximalist sense.

From a longevity perspective, dragons become sticking points for resources. In computation, something that consumes resources but doesn't release them is said to have a memory leak. These eventually destabilize a system, even a large one with a lot of resources. Something as massive as a universal simulation in the computer sense can't really abide such a thing, especially one that can reproduce itself. This, fundamentally, is what makes dragons the biggest and baddest of the setting's BBEGs. It's also why the world itself was formed to exclude them, which in turn is why they insist on intruding. They are external to the setting proper, but they remain a potent fear among all the people of Yer Shar. Further, they still exist outside of Yer Shar.

Crucially, in terms of the effects of longevity, dragons simply continue to accumulate memories and experiences, forming a cancer in the ur-setting of which Yer Shar is a part. They don't suffer from the same age problems, but their continued existence requires them to gather, hoard, and consume such things. As a consequence they are drawn to any dense stores of both life energy and memories. These, of course, occur most densely within dragons themselves, but the immense powers they wield make war between them truly apocalyptic for any caught in the crossfire.

At the other end of the spectrum are the liches, which are exceptional beings that cannot reproduce. They are dead things that will not stay dead and continue, like dragons, to accumulate memories and experiences with no particular need to deal with senescence. Also like dragons they can feed from living things to gain what they need to sustain their existence. The key distinguishing factor between liches and dragons is that liches are incapable of carrying forward any innate living or metabolic process, including reproduction. They are unmoored from the flows of time in ways that leave them functionally dead even though the resources they use remain sequestered and unavailable for reuse. Because such beings do crop up in Yer Shar, and not as outside intruders, they are more directly dangerous.

And finally we have the humble Hollowkin, somewhere between dragon and lich. They were originally created by mining the dense life and experiential energies contained in dragon bones from the long-buried bodies of those dragons who had managed to infiltrate the world, however briefly. They are immortal constructs imbued with a simulacrum of life combined with the fading life energies of the recently dead. This makes them like undead, but the combination of energy sources causes them to transcend the limitations of the undead, except that cannot themselves reproduce. Because they originate from and truck with mortals, even long-lived ones, they have developed their own strategies to manage their minds for the long term. Hollowkin reset rituals are less a firm requirement and more of a cultural commitment that reflects their longstanding relationships with mortals. The effect in game terms is that a Hollowkin can choose at any time to forget who and what they were, though the danger of doing this outside a Hollowkin community is that they are rendered feral, unable to easily rejoin such communities. This is a preferable state for some, but it naturally introduces many more sources of violence or accident that will ultimately destroy them.

This current arc of development represents many years of thought and refinement of my setting. It may or may not be the final state, but whatever that state is, I believe it will resemble this in some way.

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At the beginning of the year, I made a goal of publishing and selling an adventure. I have a handful I'm writing, but like so many other projects I have, I work on them when time and inspiration permit. Since I have the comparative luxury not to need income from them, there's no real time pressure for me, except whatever I invent for myself. But deadlines are good for my creativity, so I thought I'd try my hand at actually publishing and selling something. Enter “Dead I Am the Rat”.

You can buy it at the link below, but if you want to know more about what went into it, read on.

The concept for this was essentially a shower thought from November 2023 right after my local Spookyfest event (one of three RPG Fests we run in and around western Queens each year since 2021). I was listening to the Rob Zombie song “Dragula” when it occurred to me (via lyrics you can easily find) that I could build a Mausritter adventure structured like “Bakto's Terrifying Cuisine”, but with the goal of having rat zombies as the PCs, and their goal to assassinate (or at least drive away!) the cat lord.

Over the course of 2024, I set about writing locations. Slowly. I had a map of the region pretty early on, as well as location names and some familiar Mausritter tropes (cat lord! bat cultists!) and some that are now semi-canonical in my Mausritter adventures (vampire rabbits!). But an adventure is more than just some locations. I had to tie things together in ways that could be gamed or at least inspire creative solutions, and I needed to develop the cat lord in a way that he would be overwhelming if taken head on, but approachable if player rats could remove his supports. I hope I've captured that! In any case, I spent a lot of 2024 preparing for and running a Dolmenwood game that started in the Fall and ran through Spring of this year, which left me with less bandwidth for writing overall.

Let's talk about the structure of the game. I mentioned that it owes its basic structure to Bakto's Terrifying Cuisine, which I've run two or three times now for different groups, learning something each time. I always ran that with Troika! on the premise that Bakto's fit neatly into a surreal science fantasy concern. It's invariably fun and gross and deeply unnerving (in a good way). But it's the particular timing mechanic that makes Bakto's a great one-shot for RPG Fests.

Bakto's runs on a countdown timer, with some loose guidelines on how and when to decrement the timer. Players have 20 turns to gather their ingredients and cook a meal for the eponymous demon. If all you do with the timer is decrement it every 10 real world minutes, you can keep the adventure to between 3 and 4 hours: 3 hours, 20 minutes for the turns; and then a bit more time to cook, present the dish, and resolve the outcome. Since one of my major concerns with picking adventures for one-shot use is uncertainty in timing, being able to predict timing in some sense is incredibly helpful.

So “Dead I Am the Rat” runs primarily on a turn timer. Whereas Bakto's offered loose guidance on turn tracking, I have much stricter rules for it.

Travel between locations on the map joined by solid lines takes one turn by car, two on foot. Travel between locations joined by a dashed line can only be accomplished on foot, and takes two turns. Interacting with a location (asking for information, searching and scouting, etc.) takes one turn. Combat takes one turn (but fleeing can save time.)

You can, of course, still use a physical timer, but the idea is that most interactive actions consume a turn. And keeping it to 20 turns (give or take...) still ensures that there's a cap on the total time. Moreover, the player rats have to finish their task before time runs out, putting some additional pressure on the players.

In the process of developing this adventure, I also was fortunate in that Bakto's was reviewed on Between Two Cairns, which gave me a chance to take stock and adjust my adventure to address some of the criticisms. Only one adjustment was substantive. The non-substantive adjustment was to put the map on its own page with all the player-known locations and pathways marked out, so it could be given to the players. There's no reason that the player rats, who I assert in the opening materials are from here, wouldn't know the lay of the land.

The substantive change was to connect many of the items directly to some strength of the cat lord, primarily as a way of mitigating that strength. There are plenty of “extraneous” items, of course, and the possibility of picking things up that aren't explicitly mentioned (say, via the night market in Stilton Warren), and those can be the source of additional creativity. Additionally, I mapped out the Dramatis Animalia as a series of factions with their own likes and dislikes, and placed them at different locations across the region, with the idea that players will spend some of their precious turns backtracking to get something important, to gain an ally, or to eliminate one of the cat lord's allies. Only playtesting will reveal how effective this is, but it looks good on paper!

And finally, let's talk about the car. Yes, it is literally Dragula from the Munsters. It is also the Dragula from the Rob Zombie song, with a creative interpretation for how it's powered. You see, I like fungi. A lot. So I decided that this Dragula was powered by a fungi colloquially known as “witches” as a tongue-in-cheek nod to the song's lyrics. To find witches (which costs a turn!) player rats have to “dig through the ditches”, and then to power theur car they “burn through the witches”. Enough said, right? Well, I figure since the witches are a form of currency, they should be useful in at least two ways, so in addition to being a fuel source for the car, they are also like healing potions for rat zombies, which explains why the graveyard ghosts really want them as well.

On the whole, I am hoping that the combination of limited turns, scattered resources, and a limited multi-purpose currency offers enough unpredictability that even the GM can play to find out what happens. That is one of the OSR attitudes I have come to value.

With luck, I've created something enjoyable and memorable for your table!

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I've been tinkering around with this system for a while, with little publicly to show for it. But now I want to give a glimpse of the schematic for a character class in Weardcynn. The aim here is to show how I'm thinking about classes, and how I want them to function. I owe some of this schema to Pathfinder 2e, even though it is mechanically quite different. Whether this ends up being a final product or not, I can't say.

One thing to note about classes in Weardcynn is that they are fonts of specific expertise. Like characters in many other OSR and NSR systems, Weardcynn characters have a base set of adventuring competencies: they can fight, they can camp, they can walk long distances, they can climb stuff, they can use ropes, and they know a bit about assessing treasure, plants, animals, other peoples, and typical structures. They only need an appropriate Action to deal with these if the situation requires it. But character classes take those adventuring competencies and dial up the expertise. Anyone can fight, but a Fighter is an expert at it, trained to help his companions focus their attacks on a foe's weaknesses, or bring a fight to more favorable terrain, etc. Likewise anyone can hunt game, but a Hunter can doggedly track down even the most elusive prey, including other people if necessary.

Hopefully what I've written below captures the essence of a character class so that you can tell quickly what its expertise is, and how you might play it at the table. Don't worry too much about the mechanics for the one Action that's detailed here. The Action is included to help convey that expertise, and while the mechanics do matter, they aren't the focus here. That said, I am interested in what impressions people have of how the Action works.

Wynflæd examined the tracks on the ground. They would be nigh invisible to her companions, she knew. Lucky for them, she was here. “Three wuducynn passed through here less than an hour ago. The sæp indicates they were wounded. I think we're back on the trail of our quarry.” She could tell where they were going, but knew it would take everything she had to keep them in sight. With luck, they could catch up to the wuducynn before she lost the trail entirely.

As a Hunter:

You are a master of tracking, hunting, and wilderness survival. You possess an unparalleled ability to read the subtle signs and traces left behind in the natural world. You can track prey, identify edible plants, locate water sources, and navigate through even the most challenging terrain with ease. Your knowledge of the wild allows you to thrive in environments that would challenge others.

In Combat

While you may not be as heavily armored as a Fighter, your agility, knowledge of the terrain, and proficiency with ranged weapons make you a formidable opponent. You use your understanding of the environment to your advantage, setting traps, ambushing enemies, and exploiting the natural world to secure victory.

Around Others

You may appear quiet and observant, preferring the company of nature to the bustle of civilization. Your skills and knowledge, however, make you an invaluable asset to any group venturing into the wild. You provide food, guidance, and protection, ensuring the survival of your companions.

In the Wild

You are in your element, moving silently through the undergrowth, reading the signs of the land, and using the resources of nature to your advantage. You find peace and solace in the wilderness, drawing strength from its untamed beauty.

In Downtime

You maintain your hunting gear, practice your skills, and scout the surrounding lands. You share your knowledge of the wild with others, teaching them how to track, hunt, and survive in the wilderness.

You Might

• Feel most at ease in the wilderness, surrounded by the sights, sounds, and smells of nature.
• Possess a deep respect for the balance of nature, understanding the delicate interconnectedness of all living things.
• Find satisfaction in providing for others, ensuring their sustenance and safety through your hunting and wilderness expertise.

Others Might

• Misinterpret your quiet nature as aloofness or a lack of social skills.
• Perceive your tracking abilities as supernatural or even magical, attributing them to powers beyond the natural world.

Things You Can Do

You can spend EP and use an Action to make a check for any of the following:

Track

(1 EP/x) Track a creature through any terrain, no matter how faint or obscured the tracks or how long the trail is. Spend 1 EP from Body for each level of faintness to detect and then follow the tracks. The level of faintness is determined in secret using the faintness table below. For each distance interval passed, a new faintness determination is required, as well as a new point spend. Note that spending too few points for the faintness means you lose the trail or never find it in the first place, as circumstance dictates.

Faintness (d4)

1. Clear. Tracks run through soft ground, mud, or some other easily readable medium. Tracks are not mixed with other tracks. Other clear signs abound: blood, spoor, fur/feathers/scales, etc.
2. Accidentally Obscured: Tracks pass over harder ground, rocks, etc., as well as softer ground. Tracks may be mixed with other tracks. Other signs aid in keeping the trail: blood, spoor, fur/feathers/scales, odors, etc.
3. Deliberately Obscured: The tracks are occasionally still visible, but pains have been taken to obscure them. They have been brushed over, or they deliberately pass over hard ground. Other signs are occasionally useful in finding and keeping the trail.
4. Expertly Obscured: Only the faintest signs remain: blood, spoor, broken or disturbed plants, faint odors, etc. The tracks are completely erased or keep to hard ground, travel through flowing water, or otherwise are nearly imperceptible.

Success: Only one success is required. A success means you are able to pick up the trail. Check again: At each distance interval (usually a hex), and after each rest. Faintness determination: After the first determination, changes in faintness can be communicated to provide an indication of how many points may be required to continue.

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“What should I prep for my session?” you ask, mere hours before the session starts. This is something that happens regularly in the DM Academy Discord. We field questions routinely about how much of anything a DM should prep.

Understanding, of course, that different games have different preparation demands, there are nevertheless some principles one can apply broadly. The five room dungeon is one example, and my go-to scale for hexcrawls is 7 or 19 hexes (a hex flower). But when sketching out preparation from the largest to the smallest scales (worldbuilding all the way down to individual encounters), I keep circling around one number: three.

A “rule of three” for TTRPG prep goes like this: Focus on three things. Zoom in or out and focus on three more things. In this way, you can build complexity without overtaxing yourself. But don't forget that most of this prep is just window dressing if it's not immediately gameable by your player characters!

Let's look at this more closely with some particular examples.

Worldbuilding

At the scale of the world, your main concerns are the shape of the world, its major historical arcs, and the people who shaped it or were shaped by it. So think of:

• Three continents, countries, kingdoms, or regions, depending on the precise scale you're looking for.
• Three historical eras at any or all of these resolution scales.
• Three peoples involved. (Sure, you can just adopt the generic D&D fantasy races/species, but ask yourself: are all of these peoples the major players of every era?)

Then zoom in or out and repeat until you have a sketch of what your world looks like. One of the benefits of doing things this way is that you also get some hints on what might be interesting factions, situations, and even points of interest/adventure sites.

Campaign or Adventure

Campaigns often have a beginning, a middle, and an end, unless they are open-ended sandboxes like my current Dolmenwood campaign. But if you were following along above, you might already have some ideas on when and where to set them, as well as who might be involved. Campaigns usually zoom in considerably. For the start of a campaign, you need any of the following:

• A place to start: a town, a forest, and a dungeon. This was the name of a Cairn game jam, but it's also a good heuristic for thinking about location building.
• An alternative: A point of interest, a person, and a situation.
• Some hexes, each with three things: something visibly interesting, something hidden, and something secret. The visibly interesting thing can be found by traveling there; the hidden thing can be found just by searching; and the secret can be uncovered only by gaining specific information.
• Some people, you guessed it, with three things: a thing they know or have, a thing they want, and a thing they're willing to do to get what they want.
• Alternatively or in addition, your people can each have: a distinguishing feature, a mannerism, and some likes/dislikes. Is that three things? I'm counting it.
• People don't always act alone. They join groups, like factions. Make three of them!
• Each faction has a set of resources, a set of goals (and current progress), and an attitude toward at least one other faction.
• A dungeon. But you know what I'm gonna say? Model what it has using the same approach as for hexes, but also consider: a threat, a treasure, and a secret, perhaps something that connects to other secrets.

Encounters

Can we build encounters with a rule of three? Why not? I'd focus on these three things when setting up an encounter:

• What are they doing now? And how will they react to the PCs?
• How likely are they to stay and fight if things go sideways?
• If they fight, why?

These are nothing more than “reaction”, “morale”, and a sense of motivation, which can also speak to tactics (if you know why they fight, you'll know how they're likely to fight). Use your favorite tables to determine these during play.

Okay, what about the composition of enemies in a more tactical setup? In this situation, you can think of a defense (or offense) in depth scenario. You need:

• Front-line warriors.
• Mobile skirmishers.
• Ranged attackers (weapons or magic).

Which of course means thinking about what groupings go well together and create good battlefield synergies.

So that's it! A rule of three you can use for any kind of preparation. Is it comprehensive? I doubt it. There is undoubtedly more to say. Is it simplistic? A little. But layer these things on and jam them next to each other, and you get a lot of interactivity and apparent depth without too much work.

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I was originally going to write about how the existence of gold-hauling, tomb-spelunking, monster clearing adventurers spoke to a world that was fundamentally broken. I think this is mostly true, but it's only part of the story. Worlds that support semi-independent adventurers are usually broken at the interstices, like fault lines building pressure ready to rupture. Mountains are made and destroyed in such places, and likewise many of our most storied mythical heroes are forged in them. What we rarely have in the real world is unoccupied space, a place that is livable now, but where nobody has ever lived, though at times in various places we might have arrived to where nobody currently lived. Such pristine wilderness is the stuff of pure myth. So we're left with the interstices, the places where civilizations meet, amicably and otherwise.

But what are heroes, then? There are always those among us who are, by nature or nurture, ready to walk into dangerous places to do dangerous things. But the point is they are among us, as members of society. Historically, did such people, having survived their earliest adventures, arrive at a place leading some army, prepared to build minarets from the skulls of their enemies? Fine, but in that case are they not the heroes of another social order? Did our ancestors lead such armies? Then are they not our heroes as well? The heroic in such cases has nothing to do with right, good, or just. We assign those terms when they fit our purposes.

The point about this is that under ideal conditions, we often are able to channel our monsters into something that is somewhere between neutral and helpful, to transform those who would do violence from monsters to heroes, or, in other parlance, to beat our swords into plowshares. But the transformation to heroes does not make them not monsters, nor does defanging them render them inert. The moment their adventurous impulse exceeds the opportunity to pursue it, they turn on society. And the moment society provides gaps in its social conditioning, monsters begin to fill the crevices. We possess many archetypal stories of heroes forced into lives of thievery to survive. We are bad at predicting the contours and crevices born of unintended consequences, and therefore all manner of social ill persists within them. These are the internal interstices, the places where a society's internal conflicts meet.

To reinforce this point, let us turn to a useful term which, in its original apparent (cited) uses, probably did not contain the dichotomy articulated here, and in fact is a source of debate among scholars. In Old English, the two possible definitions of aglæca are 1) ferocious fighter or formidable opponent, and 2) a miserable being, wretch, or monster. The seeds of heroism lie in the first, which is a poetic origin of the term, but the true poetry here is that the term can be at all tied to the second, that these might be two sides of the same coin.

Now, hero-building is indistinguishable from other socio-political projects, including myth-building, state-building, and nationalism. If it were, historical leaders would not have spent so much time tying their own sense of heroism to the heroes that came before them. We cannot ignore or dismiss as inconvenient the fact that that leaders throughout history invent entire genealogies to turn their claims to power from mere might to successional legitimacy. They are not, they claim, mere monsters, villains sacking cities for their riches, but instead legitimate successors to the heroes of old, carrying on their legacy. But of course they are both.

And finally, we cannot elevate such heroes without the conditions that produce them in the first place, and that is where our humble adventurers thrive. Most will never bear the title, but their ends and means are all the same. They are the sick souls of a sick world, and if they are tools or weapons to be wielded, we would do well to remember that they cut whichever way they swing.

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Yet another stab at exploration procedures.

The problem with procedures in TTRPGs that are on the lighter side of the rules divide (generally in the OS[R] space) is that they are sparse and leave much to DM ruling. “But,” you say, “isn't one of the core principles of the OSR (if not the old-school games themselves) 'rulings over rules'?” And sure, that's a principle. And what this write-up represents is probably nothing more than some fancy house rules. But the procedures here help me answer some key questions that I'd rather generate than improvise.

The questions:

1. What does it mean to get lost?
2. Why did the party get lost?
3. When in the adventuring day/march does the party veer off course?
4. Where do they go instead?
5. What are the consequences?
6. What do they meet on the way?
7. If they meet anything or anyone, when does the encounter occur?

What does it mean to get lost?

Under optimal circumstances, the party knows where they are now, where their objective is, and which direction will get them there. Getting lost means losing track of one or more of these aspects, so the procedures here supplement the question of what it means to be lost. For practical purposes, we focus on deviating from an established course, but there are also interesting matters contained in the question of why the party got lost. I feel this requires a more holistic treatment than the chain of simple procedures that are common.

Before I proceed, I should note: getting lost does not automatically denote lack of skill. Rather, the point of these procedures is to help explain why competent characters get turned around and find themselves somewhere they didn't expect.

For reference, the most basic procedure is: conduct a navigation or exploration check of some sort at the beginning of the day; on a failure determine (usually randomly) which direction the party goes instead of the direction they wanted to go. Repeat for each day.

Not contained in this procedure is a sense of why the party got lost, or when the course deviation occurred. So let's add those considerations.

Why did the party get lost?

This is the additional procedure that creates the most potential work for the DM, but that's because it both demands foreknowledge of the terrain and promotes creativity with respect to terrain and weather, among other things. But if you're running a sufficiently detailed point or hex crawl, one where terrain matters, you already have some idea what the terrain constraints are. Let's take a look at a few natural consequences of terrain that could result in getting lost.

Terrain: Mountainous

In the mountains, a party might get lost because there are mountains in the way, and the guide couldn't find a way from point A to point B without deviating. They might also get lost because the mountains or vegetation around them and above them obscure the sun and make it difficult to keep a directional bearing. They might veer off course because they can't cross a river. And finally, they may encounter some kind of hazard, such as a rock slide, a flash flood, an avalanche, or other event that forces them off the path they were on. (Hazards and disasters will be a recurring feature in this discussion, and this is an invitation to consider the effects of such events on both course and progress.)

Terrain: Rolling hills

With gentler terrain, one might veer off course only slightly, rather than getting turned around entirely. Nevertheless, lack of landmarks, presence of uncrossable rivers and streams, marshy lowlands, and the presence of thick vegetation (forests, jungles, etc.) make wayfinding a lot more difficult than it could be. And weather will affect the visibility of landmarks that do exist. Additionally, there are still possible hazards here: flash flooding can wash a party out of a gully, wildfires can force the party in a less optimal direction, and storms can force them to take cover somewhere to wait it out.

Terrain: Flat plain

The biggest impediment to navigation over flat plains will be lack of clear landmarks. A party can presumably navigate by the sun and stars with some degree of competence, so unless thick vegetation (forests or tall grasses) obscures the celestial bodies, keeping a straight course should be feasible. Weather can also affect the visibility of both landmarks and celestial bodies, making navigation more difficult even on flat, open ground. And finally, there are still potential hazards at play, including wildfires and storms.

Terrain: On the water

Generally we mean open sea, but sizable lakes can also qualify. Landmarks at sea may be few and far between, and obscured by weather. Additionally, weather may affect how fast the party can sail or if they should (assuming they can) row. Rough seas and unexpected currents, as well as difficulty catching the wind to propel in the right direction can cause course errors, and of course storms can threaten the boat and move the party off course.

What this section adds up to is the possibility of populating some quick tables to help explain why the PCs got lost in the first place. I find that such randomness helps me to fill in blanks in my own reasoning, or provide natural stepping stones to complete my explanations. But whereas we now have some idea of why a party might get lost, we still need to know when it occurs.

When did the party get lost?

This section and the next require thinking not just about time, but also distance, and are really only separated for practical reasons.

Various systems provide a sense of what an adventuring day looks like. I prefer a day divided into six or eight parts, half of which are part of the movement portion of the day, and the other half of which are spent not moving. In this scheme, movement takes 12 hours of the day. The remaining 12 hours are spent either resting or preparing or breaking camp. I prefer a breakdown like this because a 12 hour stretch of movement, whether you want to further break it down or not, maps to a d12. This allows a quick d12 roll to determine at what hour the course deviation occurs. It also allows you to figure out when an encounter occurs, in case you're checking “day” vs “night” encounters, for instance (see “When did the party encounter something?” below).

Why do you want this information? Well, if you are sizing your hexes in a manner such that the party can travel through one per hour, or you can easily determine how many hexes they've covered in one hour, you can more easily plot any course deviations that result from getting lost. Same for points, distance between, and directions they go to get there, or the time it ultimately takes to get there.

Where did they go instead?

Once a course deviation occurs, and once you know when it started, you can plot out the arc to its conclusion. Again, sizing your hexes or spacing your points in a way that allows for easy single hour travel calculations will make this procedure a lot smoother. Fortunately, hex sizes (I can't speak as easily for point distances) tend to come in some easy to calculate flavors:

1. The 1 mile hex is amenable to x miles per hour travel speed (usually about 3 walking and 6 sailing).
2. The 3 mile hex is amenable to x hexes per hour (1 hex walking, 2 hexes sailing).
3. The 6 mile hex is amenable to x hexes per day (2 hexes walking, 6 hexes sailing).

And so on.

Now, armed with time and some basic distances, it's time to articulate the procedure. If you're using a hex, roll a d6. Compare the result with the intended direction for the day.

1. Fail forward. The party still goes in the intended direction, but progress forward stops at the appointed hour. This means it could be possible to spend 1 hour marching forward and the remaining 11 hours of the day looking for a viable path forward.
2. Veer 45 degrees to the right.
3. Circle back in a direction clockwise from the intended direction. If course error occurs early enough, the party may walk in a clockwise circle.
4. Fail backward. The party doubles back on its original path.
5. Circle back in a direction counterclockwise from the intended direction.
6. Veer 45 degrees to the left.

Start the course error after the party has traveled in the intended direction for the time you rolled on your When? d12, then either continue true or in the clockwise or counterclockwise circling directions until you run out of hours to travel. Make random encounter checks at appropriate intervals (often when entering a new hex, but it depends on terrain and overall encounter density).

In cases where the party circles around or backtracks, you can provide some hints, which could allow them to course correct. Otherwise, only a change in navigational circumstances will help them get back on course.

What are the consequences?

The first and most obvious consequence to this procedure is that a lost party ends its adventuring day in a place other than where it intended to go. The second consequence is that getting where they want to go will take longer than they anticipated. The third consequence is that they will consume more resources than they anticipated, potentially having to delay further by stopping to hunt or forage. And the fourth consequence is that they increase their chance of random encounters, including additional weather hazards, disaster conditions, and wandering monsters, which means more danger overall.

What do they meet along the way?

This is where you develop your random encounter tables. If you've been paying attention, you should now have an idea that the random encounter tables a) should be tailored to the locale, and b) should not be limited to wandering monsters. If you like, divide up a set of encounters into two categories: monsters and hazards. Monsters, of course, are probably already on your tables. You can find plenty of resources to populate wandering monster tables. Additionally, you might want encounters that aren't intended to be dangerous or provide avenues for combat (though never rule those out completely), but instead just serve to reinforce the flavor of the world by offering tailored points of interaction. Hazards, on the other hand, may not yet be on your tables, so let's talk about hazards.

Generally, hazards should be one of a few types: sudden disasters; significant and especially dangerous obstacles; or mishaps. In all cases, hazards should threaten some aspect of continued travel (even to retreat). The main threats are to mission, course, speed, provisions (both consumable items and gear), and the life/health of the party members (including retainers). Some will vary by locale, and others are generalized across many terrain types, though terrain will play a part in how easy such hazards are to survive.

[Side thought: It occurs to me that the threat hierarchy looks somewhat like the old saving throw setup, where you go down the list and choose which saving throw applies by ruling out the previous ones. In that case, the order should be life/health, provisions, speed, course, and mission.]

Sudden disasters include earthquakes, (flash) floods, avalanches, rock slides, tsunamis, tornadoes, etc.; basically anything that can have a quick enough onset that the party can only react by taking shelter (stalling progress) or taking another route (losing course). In some cases, the party may be in the path of these disasters, in which case you can determine what threats they pose. For instance, getting caught in a flash flood while walking through a canyon is an obvious threat to life, but also to provisions, which can be swept away. Riding those sudden rapids represents a course change as well, so is a threat to course, assuming survival.

Dangerous obstacles are things that are risky or impossible to overcome without threatening the lives of the party members. Deep, swift rivers are a usual example, and historically the only way across one without a boat or bridge was to either find a ford or tie ropes and try to swim across (though this doesn't eliminate the threat to provisions).

Mishaps are any minor obstacles, missteps, or events that pose a threat, usually to speed, course, or provisions. Thick undergrowth, for instance may serve to slow the party or turn them off course, while insects or animals may rummage through the party's food supplies.

I'm not going to detail a host of hazards here, but this is a topic I've been thinking about for years, and this post has reignited my interest in developing more hazard procedures for my games.

When did the party encounter something?

If you've rolled up a monster or hazard (or any other kind of encounter you've primed for your location), and your encounter tables aren't on a per-hex basis (i.e., rolling an encounter check when entering a new hex), you will want to know when the encounter occurs. Again, use a d12 to determine the hour of the adventuring day. Similarly, you can figure the same thing out for resting encounters. But this part of the procedure isn't strictly necessary, especially if you have a different encounter pace in mind.

Putting it all together

Have your populated tables at hand: 1. A weather table, with some idea of how the weather affects the terrain the party is crossing. 2. Random encounter tables, some regional, some hex-based, tailored as much as you need. 3. Hazard tables that provide interesting and meaningful threats to life, provisions, speed, course, and/or mission.

An entire procedure for a day of traveling looks like this:

1. Determine weather and its effects in the terrain the party intends to cross.
2. Have the navigator or guide make a relevant check (x-in-6, skill vs DC, whatever your system has).
3. If the roll is a course error of some sort, determine when it happened (1d12 hours after starting out)
4. Then determine what direction the party went instead (1d6).
5. And then attempt to explain the course error based on the weather, terrain, and directions. Consider when it might be appropriate to let the party know of the course error and correct it.
6. [Throughout] Whether a course error occurred or not, make appropriate random encounter checks at established intervals (time or distance), including for hazards to help explain course errors.

And that's it!

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Like most esoteric pursuits, tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) attract weird terms that serve as shorthand for bigger concepts. In the TTRPG space we have our Quantum Ogres and False Hydras, among many others. Permit me, perhaps, to add one more.

Sauron's Dog is what I am terming the illusion of planning. Whereas the Quantum Ogre is an evocative shorthand for illusion of (player) choice, I haven't yet come across a similar term for when the roiling chaos at a dungeon master's (DM's) fingertips begins to look like a real plan. There is long held recognition in DMing circles that amounts to “no plan survives contact with the enemy”, where “the enemy” is another way of referring to the player character party. The reality at the table is that players throw curve balls more or less continuously, and the resulting emergent narrative is one of the several wonders of this hobby.

More specifically, I am thinking of several scenarios. 1. Those times when the players' ideas are better than the DM's ideas for something. More minds are better than fewer minds, etc. 2. Those times when what emerges from incoherent and random events becomes a coherent narrative (sometimes with work). 3. Those times when something inconsequential thrown in via improvisation becomes integral to the emergent narrative.

#3 is the dog, but the concept covers the other two as well. It's the dog the player characters (PCs) encounter on the road between adventure sites, the one that ends up captivating them for no reason than that it's a dog. And because it captivates them, it achieves narrative heft that was completely unintended. It is therefore not just any dog, but Sauron's dog, because by being consequential, it must in some way connect to the larger narrative. The end of that road is the big bad evil guy (BBEG), who in classic fantasy literature is Sauron.

The illusion is preserved as long as the players are willing to believe it, and as long as the DM can sustain it. “Of course this is all planned this way,” the players might say, and who is the DM to disabuse them of the notion? Paradoxically, DMs have less chance of creating and sustaining this if they plan for it from the beginning. Or maybe that's a whole other debate.

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In conversation with someone in DMAcademy, I was spitballing a monster concept that was the personification of paranoia, and then it occurred to me: the best monster for instilling paranoia is no monster at all.

That's not to say there was no monster to begin with, only that there is no monster now. What happened to it? It was probably defeated. Or it fled. But what it left behind was doubt. As long as that doubt persists, the monster still lives, in a way. It can generate sightings, clues, rumors, etc., indicating its continued presence. Those indicators all have non-monster explanations, but a monster remains a plausible explanation as well, so the doubt and paranoia linger.

Now, if you were to introduce this monster into a TTRPG, you might wonder how to run such a thing, as well as whether it can be done again. As for the second question, the fun thing about doubt is that you can instill this over and over again in your players. Think, for instance, about how many players instinctively have their characters reach for 10' poles.

But running the absence of a monster will take some work. It's not enough to come up with a monster stat block and run it according to the monster's tactics. There is no monster, remember, though because there WAS one, you can use its modus operandi as an inspiration for the various acts of malfeasance that will be attributed to it in absentia. These acts of malfeasance do not need to perfectly correlate with whatever the original monster did, would have done, or is even capable of doing, since the monster itself is not the point. That said, there are still some concrete things to consider:

1. The original monster should be something that is strong or vile enough to instill fear, especially in the public mind, if not the PCs' minds. Things that are known to hide well and wreak malicious mischief are good candidates. Think along the lines of gremlins, grindylows, etc., but less joyous in their mischief, perhaps. Vampires and werewolves make sense for this as well.
2. You'll need a table of acts of malfeasance that can be attributed ambiguously, but with a monster always a plausible explanation. Mysteriously dead animals? Monster. Missing person(s)? Monster. Something prowling the woods at night? Monster. Food, tools, or something else goes missing? Monster.
3. But it's not enough to have the acts themselves. They all have to be interpreted and reported with the idea of the monster already in mind. So for each act of malfeasance, you will need not only the true cause, but also the monster-based interpretation, what gets reported to PCs who go looking around for clues.
4. Which also means that the clues themselves should be reported to PCs rather than directly observed by them whenever possible. This limits the tools PCs can bring to bear on the clues, tools which, depending on the TTRPG system in question, may unmask those clues quite easily. You can do this by making sure the evidence itself is always contaminated in some way, reported through hearsay, or in other ways passed through unreliable (and biased) people.

So with all this in mind, let's create a scenario in which the absence of a creature is the animating force.

The monster archetype: A werewolf. Werewolves are good for this exercise because the lore surrounding them is often contradictory, they may or may not be aware of their nature, and while they're not in their animal form, they live among regular people. Additionally, according to many traditions, lycanthropy is a transmissible curse, so you can rely on this to infuse the community with a fertile doubt.

The acts of malfeasance/clues, and the truth in parentheses:

1. Local livestock has been found mauled and partially eaten. Farmers have dispensed with the carcasses already by the time the PCs arrive. (Truth: there are wild animals who sometimes raid farms).
2. Villagers report having heard sniffing and growling, or having smelled the musky scent of some predator, then seeing tracks the next morning “too big to be a wolf”. The PCs may catch hints of the remaining tracks, but should not have any conclusive proof that the tracks are too big/small or even wolf-like. (Truth: more wild animals, and/or a prankster or two.)
3. Local children have reported seeing a furry creature walking upright in the woods on their way home in the evening. They ran away before they could get a closer look ... or be eaten. The creature left prints, but they're a confusing mishmash of shod feet and paws, and it's difficult to know when each was made. The tracks lead off toward the village but disappear on the cobbled roadway. (Truth: A villager was out hunting and ran down a bear or dire wolf; the children saw that and conflated the two, which also explains the tracks.)
4. Several village teenagers have been reported as “missing for a good part of the night” for some nights, and are either cagey about their whereabouts or convincing in their assertion that they don't remember. When they return, they are dirty, scuffed up, and reek of animal. (Truth: the teenagers have found the cub of a predator and are taking turns caring for it in secret. It's caged up in a nearby cave, but getting to and from the cave in the dark is difficult.)
5. The family who recently moved to town? At least one of them appears to be quite hairy, causing people to gossip, especially since in the villagers' minds their coming is correlated with the rise in “werewolf” activities. The family is standoffish and a bit dour. (Truth: they're regular people who are being unfairly maligned, and their standoffishness is a result of the whispers that started the moment they set foot in town.)
6. Villagers are reporting that some animal appears to have dug up a grave or two in the cemetery. The digging was not done with shovels, that much is apparent, though there aren't any identifiable tracks around. (Truth: there's a grave robber in the area, and they dig with a pickaxe. By the time the PCs get involved the grave robber is probably moving on.)

Feel free to repeat these in variations, especially while the players have yet to uncover the truth behind the clues. Add some atmospheric details like howling at the moon, dogs and horses acting skittish, odd musky smells, etc., and let the players run with them. You'll be able to maintain doubt for a while, but players may eventually give up and just accept the hauntedness of the situation rather than trying to resolve it. That's okay too.

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