Whether you have an epic story to tell or just hope your new RPG campaign survives week-to-week, mastering long-form storytelling is an essential part of being a Dungeon Master or game master in any game system. And it’s not easy.

As the person running the show, you experience the story in a way that’s completely different than the players. It may be a big picture in your head with tendrils in everything the party does, but for them it’s a series of immersive, detailed episodes that may or may not feel like they’re building a story. If you want your players to remember why they did it as much as what they did, you need to learn how to plant those story hooks deep and keep the party on them.

In this episode, Thorin, Tony and Dave talk about how they try (and sometimes fail) to tell stories that players remember in their different styles of games. While they’re at it, you’ll get deep dives into how they’re running Curse of Strahd and Storm King’s Thunder; hear how players come to each game as different people; understand that PCs are unreliable narrators of their own stories; and see why, as the DM, you need to be telling intricate, sensitive, emotional stories … narrated in Knife Hand.

1:00 Where we get our campaign ideas

7:00 How much time we spend getting the ideas together

12:00 How we structure our games and how do the players experience them

13:00 Thorin: Thinking in worlds and themes

15:00 Players don’t experience your story the same way you do

16:00 Dave: Kit-bashing modules and going location-by-location at the players’ pace

19:00 Tony: Making the story your own

23:00 How to make the players (and their characters) care about your story

27:00 How the DM experience is different than the player experience, and what that means for your story and campaign

31:00 What do you do when the players aren’t getting your plot? (Storm King’s Thunder spoilers)

43:00 How to make plot points stick in your players’ memories

49:00 How do you handle PC death, especially when they’re essential to your story?

58:00 Making resurrection and divine intervention feel worthy

63:00 What do you do when players say your campaign ideas are dumb?

70:00 Session 0 and getting players on board with your campaign ideas (hat tip to Matt Colville)

76:00 Long story pacing, mini-climaxes and story beats

84:00 Planting plot points in an open-world, player-driven game

88:00 What role does treasure play? How does giving out more magic items affect your game?

91:00 The joy of Hunger of Hadar in a 20x20 room

97:00 Tony’s manual of off-prime skill and stat boosting

100:00 Final thoughts: Advice for new and veteran storytellers