Making Your D&D Sessions Immersive Without Being Boring

Tags Dungeon Master Tips Magic Items Worldbuilding evergreen campaign-building author-john-roy

A detailed, engrossing campaign setting has always been always important to me in Dungeons & Dragons. Immersion in a magical world seemed like the point of the game, or else the character classes would have names like 'Tank/Support Hybrid A' and 'Tank/Support Hybrid B' instead of 'Paladin,' and 'Druid.' The game offered a chance to sink into an all-encompassing fantasy world with its own culture and history, like stepping into the Holodeck on Star Trek, only with more dice-rolling and less chance to unleash a deadly AI. I wanted to throw myself into an epic struggle, and have my investment pay off in an emotional climax like a season finale of Critical Role. I wanted jaw-dropping revelations that hit harder because of the time I had devoted to understanding the world, like Jon Snow's discovery that Valyrian Steel can kill a White Walker.

A few years ago I had a chance to play in just such an immersive campaign. I couldn't wait. The kingdoms and legends of the Dungeon Master’s home-brewed world filled many notebooks. My fellow players had adopted accents, carefully drawn their characters' portraits, and written out complex back-stories linked to his creation.  We were all in to plunge into this new world and find our fortune. Yet three minutes into the Dungeon Master's intricate treatise on the society, geography, and factions of his city-state, and his words began to fade like those of Charlie Brown's teacher. He had printed out maps and glyphs and holy symbols as visual aids and none of it mattered. I could see my fellow players' eyes wander to their phones and snacks and beer labels. They had checked out. The Dungeon Master's earnest attempt to draw us into his expansive world had done the opposite.

His words began to fade like those of Charlie Brown's teacher...

A half-hour went by before I found the immersion I sought. By that point our party was on a “missing person” case in a tavern, rolling Investigation and Persuasion checks, trying to find a Dwarf. In short, we were playing the game we came to play. All the background information presented before that moment was a waste of effort - a pre-game cut-scene we weren’t allowed to skip.  Dungeon Masters – at no point during a game of Dungeons and Dragons should you find yourselves reciting facts about your setting.  Your players already have plenty on their minds. The person they normally think of as Brian, for example, they are for the next three hours to think of as 'Lord Argon Havelock III.' The accent they settled on for their Gnome Ranger keeps coming out like Brad Pitt in Snatch, and they can't remember exactly what a Gloom Stalker does. A history lesson on top of all that is bound to be ignored. Having an NPC deliver the same lecture to the party “in character” isn't much better. Telling your players a story and telling them the same story in a Liam Neeson voice will achieve similar results.

Fortunately, with the wealth of resources on D&D Beyond, you can inject immersive mythology right into the game-play of a session of Dungeons & Dragons. Just introduce each element of lore in the form of an environment, object, or character your players' characters can directly interact with. Never tell your players about important events in your setting's history when an illusion spell or astral travel can give them a first-person glimpse. Need another way to bring the past to life? Tasha's Cauldron of Everything contains rules for Magic Item creation. Write up a Harry Potter-esque magical oil painting that depicts an event on a loop like a movie. Such paintings could be placed throughout your campaign world whenever past events needed to be witnessed. Several might hang in a single dungeon, revealing a larger story when viewed in sequence.

As Dungeon Master, you may give a magic item any property you like. A ring of protection might provide a vision of its last owner, or someone who died wielding it. Such a scene might flash into a player character's mind the first time they used it. Perhaps the item talks. The Dungeon Master's Guide has rules for sentient magic items that communicate through speech or telepathy. A sword can be an entertaining teacher as well as a way to inflict piercing damage. The gift of speech need not be reserved for Infinity Gauntlet-level artifacts either. There's no reason your first-level players' Rogue can't find a talking 'dagger plus one' that won't stop warning its wielder about the imminent threat of a returning ancient evil.

Keep your 'lessons' simple...

It helps when imbuing your world with a history that the past is closer to the present in a fantasy setting. If you want to teach your players about a significant battle, their characters can fight the re-animated skeletal remains of its combatants as easily as read a plaque about it. The Monster Manual and Volo's Guide to Monsters are full of undead stat blocks to provide in-game vessels for voices from the past. Ghosts and Specters give players an opportunity to encounter historical figures and fight either against them or at their side.

If retention of setting lore is your goal, keep your 'lessons' simple. Pick one aspect of your world you'd like your players to understand peradventure and use everything you've got to drive it home. For example, in my Greyhawk (Ghosts of Saltmarsh, Tales From the Yawning Portal) campaign, I wanted to introduce the concept of The Great Kingdom, which once ruled most of the world but was now a decadent ruin. My players were hired to clear out an abandoned wizard's tower from the Kingdom's golden age guarded by animated suits of armor from the era. A series of magical paintings around the tower portrayed a young woman graduating from the Kingdom's magical university centuries ago. In the tower the players could find her graduation present, a sentient, talking pearl of power that boasts of the Kingdom that created it. I introduced the common magic items from Xanathar's Guide to Everything to my campaign as examples of the lost magic of the Great Kingdom's height. At the end of the adventure, the player characters could free the young wizard herself, magically frozen for two hundred years like Captain America, full of fresh memories of her homeland and desperate to return it to glory.

Don't spend preparation time on anything else...

No matter how many pages have been written about your setting, which, in the case of the Forgotten Realms, is millions,  your players can only experience it in the form of objects and persons their characters can interact with. Don't spend preparation time on anything else. For example, faction membership can help embed player characters into the conflicts of your setting. Rather than draw up lists of operatives, ranks of command, or maps of their headquarters, think about how your players will encounter this faction. Most likely it will be in the form of a single non-player character representative. Spend your prep time making that character memorable. Give them an interesting set of challenges and opportunities for your players or they may not interact with them again no matter your plans. This character should embody everything the faction is intended to represent. If you want your players to understand that the Thieves' Guild of Greyhawk controls the city government, make sure the character you create to represent them does some city-controlling! Better yet, have them give your players' characters the means to do some themselves. Authors are told the first line from a character's mouth should show a reader all they need to know about them. Faction representatives should tell all there is to know about their faction by their actions.

Finally, when thinking about immersion, never forget that one of the core joys of Dungeons & Dragons is the rush of a series of high-stakes dice rolls. Their consequences for the character that the player identifies with make those dice rolls feel like life or death- and when connected directly to the lore you want to be communicated, will make it feel just as important, too. Those tense throws of multi-sided die are the heart of the game. If your players are to care about an aspect of your setting, it must affect the stakes of those rolls somehow.  If you want it to matter that the wizards of the Circle of Eight wish to control magic in Greyhawk, make them the only source of a type of magic your players rely on. Reflect it in saves, advantages, and disadvantages. Want your players to understand that Mordenkainen from Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes is dedicated not to fighting evil but to maintaining balance? Just telling them won’t have much of an impact, nor would having Mordenkainen tell it, no matter how good your Ian McKellan impression is. Nor would reading it off worn parchment hot from the laser printer, even if you spent a few hours covering it in dirt and running it over with your car to age it. If you want that bit of lore to help foster the fantasy world immersion that is Dungeons and Dragons at its best, have Mordenkainen give your player's Paladin a quest that embodies his goals. Perhaps they must steal a powerful item from a Good-aligned castle full of elves and unicorns, lest it makes the elves too powerful, thus upsetting the balance. The Paladin's faith, of course, forbids them to kill anyone- so make sure it leads to plenty of difficult dice rolls with monumental consequences for everyone at the table. That's the kind of thing they just might remember forever.   

Candlekeep Mysteries is on sale now, and Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft is available for preorder now in the D&D Beyond Marketplace! All preorders come with digital dice, as well as character themes, frames, and backdrops! Subscribers are able to share all of their purchased content with their table!

A Special Thing recording artist John Roy (@johnroycomic on Twitter and Instagram) is a comedian, writer, and podcaster based in Los Angeles.  He  has appeared on Conan, the Tonight Show, and Sirius radio and headlined clubs and festivals across North America.  His writing has appeared in Vulture, Dragon Plus and Image Comics’ Radiant Black as well as numerous tv projects including Trump Vs Bernie and Maron in Space.  He co-hosts wargaming podcast Legends of the Painty Men.

 

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