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Ambience Events:

Originally published in Issue #1 of EN World Player's Journal

By Kevin Chenevert and Don Chenevert, Jr.

Sometimes the dungeon crawl gaming session becomes a bit stale and predictable.  The referee or Dungeon Master vaguely describes the sequence of passages and rooms.  Some poor sucker draws out the map on graph paper or the battle map if the DM is not nice enough to draw it for the group.  The rest of the players stack dice into precarious towers between eating Doritos and licking the orange cheesy powder off of their fingers.  No one really perks up until the DM begins to read the grey “boxed text.”  With the change of tone in the DM’s voice, players begin talking over each other, “I draw my sword!,” “Hey, remember, I always have my crossbow notched!,” and “Why is my halfling miniature in front of the line?  He always stays in the back!”

When the DM describes something in detail or reads the boxed text, the DM “telegraphs” that an encounter of some sort is about to occur.  The players become alert and begin searching for foes or begin checking for traps, secret doors, etc. You can avoid this common mistake by adding additional detailed sensory events – Ambience Events – to keep your players guessing and alert throughout the gaming session. 

Use Ambience Events to build suspense and to maintain the anticipation and adrenaline as you develop the plot and storyline.  Ambience Events are a creative and imaginative alternative to the clichéd battle with random monsters that eats up precious gaming time without developing or advancing the storyline.  You can use them as part of a linear or open-ended storyline, depending on your gaming style.

Sensory Rich Descriptions are the Key to Good Gaming

To be a good DM, you have to be a good storyteller.  To be a good storyteller, you need to be as descriptive as possible.  Consciously utilize all five senses as you describe an encounter.  Whenever possible, describe what a character sees, hears, feels, tastes, and smells. 

By using descriptive sensory words, you provide a more complete and accurate description of what each player’s character perceives.  In describing an encounter, weave several different sensory adjectives into your narrative.  For example, “The cold, dank tunnel drops off into an ink-black pit.” is much more sensory rich than “The tunnel dead-ends at a pit.”  Another example, “The hot, sugar coated blueberry tart melts in your mouth.” is much to be preferred over “You eat the pie.”

Ambience Events go beyond the five senses.  You can create additional atmosphere, or ambience, during an adventure by telling the player that their character “senses” something, has an “impression” about something or someone, “perceives” something, or experiences a particular sensation (e.g., “Your cleric feels a palpable sense of anarchy and utter disarray emanating from the plum-colored, pock-marked stone altar.”).

As you use, modify, or create Ambience Events, remember that each player character perceives the world in a different way and that the player characters’ perceptions should affect your description of the Ambience Event.  Tailor the events to reflect the race, class, skills, and personalities of the characters in the group.  For example, a smell event for a Human Fighter may be “an acrid burning smell” while an Elf Wizard may perceive the same smell event as “the crisp smell of Tangi incense, often used by undertakers and necromancers to ward off scavenging insects from corpses.”  A Dwarf Fighter seasoned with years of fighting hobgoblins may identify the body odor of his old foes, while the young Halfling Rogue will think that those old stained garments in the corner just stink like rotten turnips.

As a DM, you may use this article in several ways.  First, you can use it as a quick reference during a gaming session.  Simply substitute an Ambience Event for one or more random encounters from the adventure you are running.  Second, you can use the extensive lists of sensory rich words in this article to embellish your descriptions of locales, creatures, and encounters in your adventure.  Third, you can weave the following Ambience Events (or slight variations) into an adventure to provide subtle clues or to foreshadow upcoming set encounters.  

Before running an adventure, scan through this article and then read through the encounters, events, and places in the adventure you plan to run.  Look for long stretches of corridor and bends where something interesting may have collected or occurred.  Jot down a few special descriptive words or phrases in the margins next to several encounters.  Your notes will remind you to employ descriptive words when you describe the encounter; the words and phrases will trigger your creative juices.  This will add dimensions to the adventure deeper than the statistic blocks and the maps provide. 

If time permits before a gaming session, you should customize and adapt the listed Ambience Events to your adventure or create your own Ambience Events to flesh out the desired atmosphere for the adventure.  For example, the Ambience Events for a recently opened tomb with dry, dusty undead will be very different in nature from the Ambience Events for an abandoned and partially flooded mine now inhabited by goblins.  During a gaming session, glance back through the Ambience Events and select one or two to drop into your adventure.

Even with lots of preparation, however, players can throw you for a loop as they head off into unexpected directions and your storyline ideas fall by the wayside.  Be spontaneous!  Remember to allow the players’ actions to affect the storyline.  A player’s investigation of an Ambience Event may set off an unforeseen chain of events, inspire you to create a new storyline, or reveal a clue.

The Ambience Events described in this article are designed to be used in a classic “dungeon crawl” environment reminiscent of the “Ruined Structure” and  “Occupied Structure” settings described in the Core Rulebooks.  The Ambience Event Table below uses the traditional “encounter” occurrence of 10% per hour.  If the characters get into combat, make lots of noise, or dawdle as they investigate an event, roll more frequently or add a modifier of +5 to +25 to the roll.

The Ambience Events listed on the Ambience Events Table are divided into broad sensory and “extrasensory” categories and may be used to supplement or replace random encounter tables in a published adventure.  When a roll on the main Ambience Event table results in “Nothing,” simply follow the adventure and use the set encounters.  Of course, you are always free to select and insert an Ambience Event of your choice to foreshadow the next set encounter. 

Ambience Event Table: 
(click hyperlink to go to specific event page in a new window)

01-39   Nothing

40-49   Sound

50-59   Smell & Taste

60-69   Sight

70-79   Strange Feeling

80-89   Benign Encounter

90-99   Malign Encounter

00        Roll again twice ignoring “Nothing”

SOUND:
Creaking boards, distant screams, whispering drafts, crunching gravel underfoot, squeaking and scuttling vermin are some of the myriad sounds a party may hear in a subterranean environment.  The Elf Ranger may recognize the chirp and skittering noise as that of a harmless, but rather fierce looking giant millipede (“good to eat if you have nothing else”).  The Dwarf Fighter with the smithing Craft skill may hear the distant metallic clinking sound and recognize it as that of a hammer and anvil (“beating out adamantine, if I am not mistaken”). 

Direction of a sound can also be very important.  A sound coming from behind the party may cause great consternation.  Recurring sounds may increase the level of tension during the gaming session.  Also, the complex acoustics within stone corridors and rooms may cause characters to disagree about where a sound originated.  This may call for the DM to make some hidden Listen skill checks.

SMELL & TASTE:
Since these two senses are so closely related, they are addressed here together.  Smell comes into play more often than taste, but try to work tastes into the game session when possible.  Extremely powerful smells are sometimes detectable on the palate.  Potions and dried rations are also opportunities to bring the sensation of taste to the forefront.  After weeks away from civilization, characters will be extremely tired of hardtack, brackish water, beef jerky, and moldy cheese.  Reminding the players of their character’s suffering and privations will add depth to the gaming session.

Remember that the archetype dungeon in the dungeon crawl is home for a wide range of flora and fauna.  Rotten vegetable and fungal matter, rotten flesh, and body odor are just a few smells one expects to encounter in a dungeon. 

Without plumbing and regular garbage pickup, the sanitation level in a typical dungeon is extremely low.  Air circulation will be poor except in subterranean dungeons built by sophisticated tunnelers such as Drow and Dwarves.  A large amount of clutter, refuse, and offal will accumulate throughout the normal life cycle of a dungeon.  Also, consider the biological processes taking place in a space or area.  Based on its depth and geography, decide whether the dungeon is dry or moist and hot or cold.  More often than not, the dungeon will be cold and moist.  If there is moisture and heat, algae, bacteria, and fungi will flourish.  Exceptionally dusty or moldy areas may make a character investigating a space sneeze if he fails a Fortitude test, alerting a sentry around the corner.

SIGHT:
Sight focuses on light and dark; color or lack of color, small or large.  Remember to take into account that low-light vision or darkvision that may reveal things otherwise unnoticed by those without special sight abilities. 

Sight events typically involve inanimate items while “Benign Encounter” involves animate items or creatures.  If you do not wish to role-play it out, a hidden Search skill check may be called for to get more out of the event.  The initial Sight event should just happen however.  

Dungeons are filled with all sorts of natural and “man-made,” mundane and fantastic sights not mentioned in the text of the adventure.  Consider the accumulation of detritus and wear and tear caused by the inhabitants and visitors of an underground complex.  A strange rune, a broken shackle, chicken bones, snail shells, torch sconces, bits of rope, shards of glass and pottery are just a few sights one may encounter in a dungeon.  The rune on the door may be meaningless to the Wizard but tell the Cleric that followers of a Nerull death cult have used the room for sacrificial ceremonies.  A Ranger may recognize the rune as a secret sign meaning “Warning-Aberrations”.

STRANGE FEELING:
The hackles raising on the back of your neck, that heavy feeling in your stomach (or is that just gas?), paranoia of someone following you, a twitch in your eye as you approach the purple stained door, are some of the unexplainable events picked up by the characters.  Rogues may especially be tuned into hunches or bad feelings about certain courses of action.  A Ranger may suddenly think that the tracks he is following look strange, kind of artificial…  Sorcerers and characters with Psionic abilities are especially perceptive of “extrasensory” disturbances and feelings.  Clerics and Druids are also often privy to positive or negative energies related to their focuses or their deity. 

BENIGN ENCOUNTER:
This encounter is not directly dangerous to the characters.  It could be a colorful mushroom or a rotten dog carcass.  If the players eat the mushroom or disturb the dead animal, however, it may not be so benign…   A hidden Spot skill check may be called for to provide more information to the character(s) but the initially the event will just occur.

MALIGN ENCOUNTER:
Use the adventure’s encounter table or have a creature/encounter come out of its set location.  Perhaps the characters can pass a Spot skill check and then act to go unnoticed.  Alternately, the characters may be surprised and ambushed or the enemy alerted to the intruder’s presence.

Conclusion:

Dungeons are filled with many sights and smells from past and present residents and visitors.  Keep mentioning lots of junk and see how often the players explore it.  However, be careful not to overuse these events, especially “dead end” Ambience Events that do not develop or advance the adventure storyline.  If you do, game play may slow down and players may become fatigued.

Characters closely investigating every bit of detritus will waste time, makes noise, and distract the characters.  Make additional random encounter and/or Ambience Event rolls as the characters tap and sniff at everything you mention.  Players may assume that while their character is rooting around looking for that special tidbit, someone else’s character is keeping guard.  Have that inquisitive 5^th level Barbarian ogre dispel that notion by surprising everyone and shaking things up a bit! 

If you like this article, write the editors of EN World Player’s Journal at http://enworld.org/journal.htm.  If this article proves useful and popular, we will develop additional Ambient Events for coastal towns, old empire city sewers, natural caverns, dark forests, and other archetype settings.  Either way, we would love to receive your feedback and constructive criticism.  As an additional aid, go to www.LyonStudio.biz for the Ambience Events in this article formatted to fit on note cards.    

Kevin Chenevert                                                           Don Chenevert, Jr.

www.LyonStudio.biz                                      Chenevert@mindspring.com

Kevin lives in New Orleans , Louisiana .  When not pretending to be an Architect or learning to be a father, Kevin enjoys playing Dungeons & Dragons and sculpting fantasy miniatures.

Don lives in Peoria , Illinois .  A lawyer during the week, Don enjoys wandering in the woods on the weekends.  On occasion, he and his son join forces to rout out the brigands and Orcs who dwell nearby.