The Explorers' Guild: The Game

The Explorers' Guild game is a pencil-and-paper roleplaying game that evolved over more than a decade of regular play sessions. Beginning in 1975 with the original three-volume set of Dungeons and Dragons rules (sometimes called OD&D), we immediately began to add our own content and change rules that we found restrictive or cumbersome. Eventually, the game we were playing used no material at all from OD&D, or from any source other than ourselves. This page describes how to play the game we developed.

The Explorers' Guild game is looser in structure than most other pencil-and-paper roleplaying games, and has simpler rules. It relies more on the imagination of its players and their ability to improvise. You can think of the Explorers' Guild game as an exercise in improvisational theater—or as a structured form of 'playing pretend'.

The game is not for everybody. Some people prefer the more highly-structured rules of traditional pencil-and-paper roleplaying games. But if you want a truly open-ended roleplaying game in which all the players are very free to create new things and new stories as they go, then The Explorers' Guild game might be what you're looking for.

What You Will Need

A Game Master—the Game Master is the storyteller. He describes the initial setting to the players, plays all the non-player characters, and controls the environment, providing weather, accidents, and other events that affect the progress of the players. He also plays the hand of Fate, deciding the success or failure of the players' plans and gambits.
Two or more players—the players each play one or more characters, the heroes of the story. They drive the story forward by deciding what they will do at each stage. While the Game Master produces the circumstances around them, the players decide what to do with them, and it is the players who reap the rewards and the punishments for their decisions.
Dice—one six-sided die is enough. You can use more if you find you have use for them.
Pencil and paper—used to keep records of the characters and their progress.
Maps—the setting for the adventure, in schematic form.

You will want enough area that a party on foot will not be confined, drawn to a scale that permits you to describe what the players see at each stage of their journey. You can draw these maps beautifully, and hand out appropriate sections of the map as players reach those locations, or you can just sketch them out roughly in pencil and describe what they see instead. The second method works just as well for the purpose of the game, and is a lot less work.

The scale we use makes a single eight-and-a-half by eleven sheet of paper roughly equal to an area around a quarter mile on a side. This is not a precise measure; it's just a general idea. Make the scale bigger or smaller, as you need it. Draw all the buildings, roads, and natural features that will serve as scenery and obstacles for the players. If you like, you can set Bait on the maps. The concept of Bait is explained below.
A Story—the story is extremely important to the way the Explorers' Guild game works. A game story is not a complete, detailed story; that will be created as the players play. Instead, it's a simple theme, some villains, and a few significant incidents that can change the lives of one or more characters.

Don't work out any of these things in too much detail beforehand. You'll see why in the section that explains how the game mechanics work. An example story is this one, taken from the adventure "The King Under the Lake," which occupied our group for an entire summer:

A wizened old man with one eye approaches our heroes in a pub and asks if they'll take on a task. He wants them to recover a small gold snuffbox from some bandits who stole it. The old man is actually a king of Faerie, whose castle is at the bottom of the nearby lake. His snuffbox contains his mount, a mighty Phooka who usually takes the form of a huge black horse with fiery eyes. The bandits are formidable hobgoblins of a rival court of Faerie in the mountains to the east.

This sketch is almost enough to run a game, but not quite. You need to know what will happen if the group turns down the adventure (the King will put a geas on the group that forces them to seek some kind of help); you need to know in a general way what rewards he plans to offer them, should they accept the adventure and succeed (each will get some magical item that grants them a really cool, but limited, magic power that reflects the nature of the character, and also contains some reference to the adventures they go through to get it); and you need to know in a general way what he will do if they accept the adventure, but fail (he will punish their failure by laying a curse on each of them; but since they were brave and generous enough to accept the task in the first place, the curse will also have a good side-effect that is similar to the reward they would have gotten for success).
Goodies—goodies are the final ingredient that really makes the Explorers' Guild game work. A Goody is either a Good Thing or a Bad Thing. Good Things make your players happy; Bad Things make them sad. In the game-mechanics section, below, I'll describe more about what they are and how they work.

Veterans of more structured roleplaying games may say to themselves, "wow, that's not a lot to go on," and they would be right. The Explorers' Guild game is much simpler and looser in structure than games like Dungeons and Dragons, GURPS, Chivalry and Sorcery, and so on. We found, though, that our approach was a lot more fun than those other games, as long as the players have imagination and a good sense of fun.

The next sections explain how to turn these meager starting points into a fun adventure.

The Game Master's Job

The Game Master's job is to tell a ripping good story, in which the players are the heroes. It's absolutely vital that the Game Master understand his role correctly and play it well. A Game Master with the wrong goals can ruin the fun in no time flat. The Game Master should not be in competition with the players; he should be trying his best to make sure every one of them has a really great time. In conventional pencil-and-paper roleplaying games, the role of the Game Master or Dungeon Master is something like that of referee; in the Explorers' Guild game, it's much more like party host, or maybe the director of a play—but the actors are also the audience, and it's their applause that you want.

Above all, don't make the mistake of many first-time Dungeon Masters: don't look at the game as an opportunity to compete with and dominate your players. That is a recipe for disaster, and your players may quit in mid-session and never want to play again.

Never forget your primary goal: set up a great story, give the players the tools they need to turn your setup into an epic adventure, and help them make it work.

The Player's Job

The job of the player is to understand his or her character, and do what that character would do. Along the way, your character will gain reputation, experience, and treasure. He or she will see fantastic sights and meet amazing people. But none of that stuff compares with the fun you will have if you make the other players and the Game Master laugh, or cry, or gasp with surprise, or go white-knuckled with suspense. That's the real reward you are striving for. The way to get it is first of all to create a character that makes the other players care about him or her, and then play that character for all you're worth.

Once a group of players was working their way into a creepy cavern next to a beach. They rounded a turn and saw, by torchlight, one of the villains who had been trying to kill them for weeks. He was about thirty yards ahead, on the other side of a great big pit. One of our player characters, Mongo, immediately rushed straight toward the villain and fell right into the pit. The other players spent the better part of the night trying to get him back out and tend to his injuries.

Was charging into the pit a bad idea?

For the other characters, it was a terrible idea.

But for the other players, it was fantastic. Mongo was an idiot, and a violent one. Mindlessly charging straight into the pit was exactly the kind of harebrained move he would pull. And the other players knew that, because Mongo's player had been playing him to the hilt all along. As soon as the group caught sight of that villain and that pit, the whole group went, "NO! Mongo! Don't do it!" But it was too late.

They knew Mongo was going to do that because Mongo's player made them believe he was Mongo, and they knew Mongo.

So for the characters it was a disaster. Instead of finally catching the villain, who got away in the confusion, they spend hours rescuing an injured Mongo. But for the players it was great. They got the suspense, the comedy, and the struggle to recover from a disaster. Sure, it would have been quicker and more profitable to have behaved sensibly and trapped the villain. But it would have been nowhere near as much fun.

The player's job is to create and understand a great character, and play that character.

Game Mechanics

This section describes how the game is played. I'll begin with a very brief description of how it works, and then go into a little more detail about each of the elements.

A session begins with a story, like the one I described above. You don't tell the players the full description of the story. Instead, allow them to choose or create the characters they will play, and then together you and the players decide on a story of how those characters happen to be in the right place at the right time to start the adventure. Then you can begin.

Start by describing the setting they find themselves in, including any Bait. When the description is complete, wait for the players to decide what to do.

If it takes the players longer then a minute or two to decide what to do, choose a Goody, and see what happens. This is a common theme in playing The Explorers' Guild game: any time things start to get slow or boring, choose a Goody.

When you judge that enough time has passed, and the group is immersed in the story, give them their first Plot Point.

Repeat the above until you have given out the second and third Plot Points. The third Plot Point should make a capper for the session, and a good place to stop.

Make sure you have more Goodies and at least one or two spare Plot Points, in case the group is really excited and wants to run long.

That's an Explorers' Guild game session in a nutshell. The key to making it work is in understanding Bait, Goodies, and Plot Points.

Bait

Bait is anything that you can describe, and that the players will want to mess with. When someone messes with a piece of Bait, it triggers a Goody. At first you'll have to make your Bait really obvious in order to get the players' attention. And you mustn't rely on just one piece of Bait in a scene, because they might not take the Bait. You need to scatter lots of Bait around to get their attention, so that you can be pretty sure that eventually someone will mess with something and trigger a Goody.

A piece of Bait can be anything: an unusual flower; a bag or box discarded by the road; a dirty kid who looks really sad; an injured horse; a nice belt that someone lost; a sign pointing the way to a town no one has ever heard of; anything. You just want your players to notice it and mess with it, so that it will trigger a Goody. You can scatter Bait all over the place, putting in notes on your maps to keep track of where all the Bait is. Or, if you have a nimble imagination, you can make up Bait as you go along. We often did both.

Goodies

A Goody is something that happens that the players care about. It can be a Good Thing or a Bad Thing. Choosing the right Goodies is how you make players remember the game session and want to play again.

A Good Thing is anything that will make the players happy. It can be a friendly stranger who tells them how to get where they need to go. Or it can be a Fairy Queen who grants them fabulous wealth and power. Large or small, it doesn't really matter; what matters is that it makes the players happy, and it fits the events that are happening in the story when the Goody gets chosen.

A Bad Thing is anything that makes the players unhappy. Just like a Good Thing, a Bad Thing can be big or small: a dam that bursts and threatens to wipe out the town where the players' friends are sleeping, or a pebble that gets stuck in someone's shoe, and he just can't get it out. Sometimes the tiniest Bad Thing can cause the most trouble in a story, and can be the thing that players remember for years.

Plot Points

A Plot Point is a Goody that advances the story in a major way. For example, suppose you used the setup for the adventure "The King Under the Lake". Now suppose the party decides that the King's offer sounds fishy, and decides to turn it down. When the King gets offended and lays a geas on them, that's a Plot Point. Now they are in a different story: they have to eventually do something about the geas or else suffer some sort of dire consequences. That Plot Point now becomes the focus of all their activity.

That's what sets a Plot Point apart from ordinary Goodies: the Plot Point becomes the focus of the players' activity. In order to create a good story, and a good gameplay experience, the Game Master needs to prepare in advance. He needs to select a few Plot Points—at least three—and be ready to bring them out when the game needs them.

How do you know what makes a good Plot Point and when the game needs it?

A good Plot Point is a Goody that gets a strong reaction from the players, and that moves the story forward to a new phase. Before the King laid the geas, the players were just hanging around looking for something to do. Afterward they are desperately looking for a solution to their impending doom. The Plot Point has totally changed the nature of their situation, and in a way calculated to cause them anxiety.

When you set up your story, break it up into sections divided by Plot Points. In "The King Under the Lake" there is the beginning, then Plot Point One (the geas or, if the players chose to accept the offer, the agreement), then the quest, then Plot Point Two (the players encounter their opposition), then the struggle to find a way to overcome their opposition, then Plot Point Three (success or failure), then the conclusion, in which they reap their reward or punishment. At that point the session is done and the Game Master begins planning for the next session.

An experienced Game Master will always hold an extra Plot Point and some more Goodies in reserve, just in case.

How Do You Know What Happens?

You now have everything you need to create and play a session of The Explorers' Guild game. But you're probably wondering about things like, how does combat work How do you know what monsters appear? How do you know if the players succeed or fail at what they're trying to do?

Like the rest of the game, the mechanics for these things are very simple. This section describes our standard way of handling them. You are free to make your own additions and changes to this procedure.

Whenever a player tries to do anything that has possibilities of success or failure, the outcome can be either good or bad. Acting as referee, the Game Master randomly chooses a good or bad outcome and then describes the result. You could play by flipping a coin. We've played this way, and it actually has an advantage: there is something very primal and dramatic about a coin-toss at a critical point in a story. Normally, though, we used a 6-sided die.

The die has another advantage: it can help you choose randomly how good or bad the outcome is. Basically, the six sides of a die get these values:

Disastrous
Very bad
Bad
Good
Very good
Spectacular

There's nothing special about that order; you could instead make one Spectacular and six Disastrous. You could even switch partway through the session. Just don't tell the Players; you want them to enjoy the suspense that comes from not knowing what the die means.

Let's see how this might work in a typical case. Suppose one of our adventurers gets mad a the King for laying a geas on him, and decides to throw a pitcher of beer at his head. Here's what might happen:

Disastrous: the King sees the movement out of the corner of his eye, turns, and interrupts the throw by summoning a horde of dark, winged faeries that drag the guy away to a dungeon under the lake to torture him. Now the whole group has to lift their geas and find a way to get the guy out of the dungeon.
Very bad: the pitcher hits the back of the King's head and knocks him down. He arises enraged and turns the guy into a large toad. Now he has to find a way to lift his geas while he's a large toad.
Bad: the pitcher hits the wall next to the King, splashing him and ticking him off. He places an extra curse on the guy who threw the beer
Good: the King turns and catches the beer. He takes a drink of it, smiles, and thanks the guy who tossed it, and gives him a magical gift that makes it easier to get the geas taken care of.
Very good: the beer hits the King's arm, making him drop his staff. Furious, he turns and explains that the beer has fulfilled an ancient prophecy by knocking the staff out of his grip, and that the staff now belongs to the guy who tossed the beer. He scowls and leaves. The beer-tosser gets and ancient staff full of Faerie magic.
Spectacular: the beer splashes over the King, washing away an ancient curse. Freed from his wizened old shell, the King steps forth in splendor. All the folk of the village are likewise transformed into shining Fairies, and they lavish magical gifts on the whole group to help them in their quest to lift the geas. Once the geas is laid, even the King cannot lift it, but he can tell them how best to lift it, and give them mighty magical gifts to make their adventures easier.

The outcomes don't have to be this elaborate. They can be quite simple. A player tosses a rock in a pond. Maybe it goes plop. Maybe it bounces on an old barrel that turns out to have a treasure inside. Maybe it awakens a huge monster that shambles out to attack. Roll the die, take the players' situation into account, remember what your next Plot Point is going to be, and use your imagination.

Improvisation

Improvisation is a crucial part of The Explorers' Guild game. Dot try to make lists and tables of everything that can happen, and of every kind of monster, trap, and loot the group can encounter. Instead, list your Plot Points; make a long list of Goodies; draw maps of where your group might reasonably go, and litter those maps with Bait. Then let the players decide where to go and what to do. When they mess with some Bait, or when things are getting slow, choose a Goody. When enough time has passed, give them a Plot Point.

Divide up your Goodies into Good Things and Bad Things. When you choose a Goody, you can roll the die to decide whether to give the group a Good Thing or a Bad Thing. That works very well. But don't be afraid to ignore what the die says, if it will be more fun. For example, if the group has had a run of bad luck and their spirits are down, you don't have to give them a Bad Thing just because the die says to. Give them a Good Thing instead, if it will lift their spirits. But roll the die anyway. If their spirits are down, they will dread that die when you roll it. On the other hand, maybe they've had a run of bad luck, but their spirits are good. Instead of being depressed, they're feisty and riled up. In that case, it might be a good idea to give them another Bad Thing even if the die says to give them a Good Thing.

Use the die to mix things up, but always be ready to do what will make more fun, even if it's not what the die says to do.

The Toy box

That's all there is to playing the game, but it's not quite enough. You also need settings, characters, maps, monsters, treasure, Goodies, Bait...in short, you need a toy box full of stuff to use. The World of Ymra is a huge toy box full of those things. I'm in the process of gradually converting the Ymra materials into a form that I can post to this site. For now, though, you're on you're own. Go build some toys and play with them.