Game Master Guidance: Someone Has to Clean Out the Stables

One of my favorite pieces of Warhammer Fantasy art ironically features one of the weakest parts of the setting. Illustrated by the immensely talented Karl Kopinski, it depicts Archaon the Everchosen, Warhammer’s dull anti-christ figure, triumphantly beseeching his dark gods while offering up the skulls of slain foes. As he surges with arcane power, anonymous hooded figures toil in the midground, restraining his demonic steed and carrying his belongings. In the background, the rest of his army waits for him to finish up. Like all great tabletop game art, Kopinski doesn’t just depict a figure from the setting. He provides a glimpse of how the world they inhabit functions and that even harbingers of the apocalypse need workers. The lesson to be learnt from this as a game master is that nothing in your stories, no matter how fantastic, should exist in a vacuum.

Even the most miraculous figures have underlings and some sort of logistics to back them up. If a spellcaster hardly ever leaves their tower, who gets the tomes and supplies needed for magic rituals? Who builds and maintains the dictatorship’s superweapons while its leaders are running the galaxy with an iron fist? Who cleans out the stables of an exemplary knight, busy earning the favor of their patron deity? Even the most alien and distant figures will have some sort of network to sustain their activities, often in the form of worker drones or even specialized organisms. A being that exists outside of whatever reality your game takes place in needs something keeping it tethered. And odds are it has a boss or servants back in whatever hellscape it calls home.

This might seem like the last thing you, as the GM, want to pay attention to. But showing these smaller parts will build up your story as a whole. Firstly, it lends a depth to the setting that it would have otherwise lacked. Not only does this approach show how a certain element or character fits into the larger world but it conveys that actions happen without the player’s involvement. Besides creating a tighter story, this focus adds believability. As I said, your story elements now have some kind of explanation and don’t just magically appear when the narrative needs them to. It can also give the players a tangible link to the world, as it provides some sense of order to even the most abstract concepts.

This logistic approach can serve a mechanical role in addition to its narrative purpose. By adding complexity to these individuals and institutions, the players have more ways to interact with them than just facing them head on. A bureaucrat might not want to waste time with adventurers but their hapless aide might be more amicable. Nearly every heist movie has the protagonists disguise themselves as janitors or maintenance workers at some point. A villain might be nigh invulnerable at the start of the campaign but the same might not be true of their underlings. Logistics can be a good way to have the players tangibly interact with the antagonist, without necessarily needing them to show up directly. No matter how mundane these additions might seem, they are more than worth the effort for how it will augment the RPG experience.