DM Think-tank: Isolation and Remoteness

[Captain Kuro]

The other day I was running a traveling portion of an adventure through some remote boreal woods, and was really taking time to drive home how isolated the players were and untamed the wilds felt. My players felt very immersed but I'm starting to worry that as time goes on I'm going to have to recycle some descriptions and encounters, which I know lessens their impact. I was wondering what other DMs have done to immerse their players in the remote and isolated parts of their worlds.

[Declindgrunt]

While I've never done this my self, my suggestion is to use like abandons ruins, he'll you could have them run across an entire abandoned town that could be cool

[2ndGenerationCleric]

Them finding the skeletal remains of some massive creature so big that it seems like a rock formation. Could be fun

[GM Rednal]

Read more bestiaries? If you expand your options for encounters in a given area, you can avoid repeating things.

[Deaths Adorable Apprentice]

Templates are a good way to change up a string of the same monster. And it is ok to have some similar things and that can make what is different all the more dramatic. Changing up the number of baddies is another way to change the combat.

[Devilkiller]

Here are some ideas:
#1 - If the PCs are low level then cold weather and storms might be a real threat to them. Simply describing the fury of Nature might help immerse the players, and once in a while when they seek shelter there could be an encounter or brief adventure (bear in a cave, undead in the ruins of an abandoned monastery/trading post/lost city, etc)
#2 - Equipment begins to wear out (ropes break, clothes tear on branches, the soles come off boots) and the PCs need to use Craft skills to fix it or come up with alternate equipment (skin some animals for furs, tie together some vines, etc)
#3 - A bear, dire racoon, fey creature, etc sneaks into the party's camp at night, but rather than attacking it steals or ruins supplies such as food and water. This could result in a fight if the intruder is spotted or perhaps the need for a forced march to someplace where the party can resupply.
#4 - The PCs could stumble out of the woods and suddenly view some natural wonder such as a giant gorge, perhaps with a dramatic waterfall.
#5 - You could have the PCs find the dwelling or camp of a hermit, exiled family, group of explorers or trappers, etc who perished in the wilderness and perhaps try to figure out what happened
#6 - You might be able to play out some of the action typically subsumed by Survival checks to find food. For instance, instead of just saying, "Ok, you manage to find some food" you could play out a hunting or gathering scene, perhaps including environmental hazards (or even monsters - maybe a bush the PCs are trying to pick the berries off of ends up being a plant monster or is animated by a Druid, angry nature spirit, etc)
#7 - The party hears an owl hooting near their camp for several nights in a row even though they've traveled significant distances. Maybe it is just descriptive flavor, or maybe the owl is a beautiful woman in wildshape, a Wizard's familiar, or a former adventurer who got Baleful Polymorphed and is hoping that the party will take him or her along and perhaps help find a cure (I guess it could be any sort of animal really - an owl just came to mind)

[Irontruth]

I'm going to take a different tack. Don't work too hard reinforcing it. Use a few new aspects/descriptions to bring back the memories of last session, but allow yourself to focus on other themes of the game.

Think of a session as a TV episode or book chapter. Typically a theme is heavily present for an episode, but then future episodes move onto other themes. The show will use reminders to recall the memory of previous episodes, but rely on those memories to fill in and spend it's time building the new theme.

This is also useful as a DM because it lets you move on to a new aspect of the game and removes the requirement to focus in a specific problem. By focusing on new themes, you'll actually free up your brain to come up with reminders of the old theme in it's own time. You know those thoughts that come hours after you're dealing a hard problem, or random moments like in the shower/driving/eating. It also changes the pace of the session so that you don't feel like you're doing the same stuff every time.

Basically, don't feel like you have to push this one thing super hard. Give yourself room to push other themes of the campaign and add this element back in whenever it's appropriate. In addition, if the players are into it, all you'll have to do is remind of their situation and they can come up with things as well.

Another option is to take some of these ideas and turn them into questions. For example you could ask questions like:

1. As you're packing your gear in the morning, you notice something important is missing/broken, what is it? Is it repairable?
2. Sitting around the cook fire you're suddenly reminded of someone you left behind in town, who was it?

Give the player an opportunity to roleplay and tell the group something; players will come up with cool things and take some of the creative load off of you.

[Create Mr. Pitt]

The key is good build up. Give them some tantalizing social hooks. Then slowly but sure there should be less and less human contact, as things visually become more desolated.

Different types of desolation are important too. Signs of other people, but none makes the contrast pretty stark. And is a nice counterpoint to the grim abandon woods. This way an encounter with a person is going to be tense both from missing people and suspicion.

Also robotic-minded constructs might be interesting. The key is lowering and raising it at the right pace and building the sense of isolation over time. At some point I think isolation needs some payoff, but it can be drilled home in different ways, environments (blizzards are really isolating), but those feelings need to be developed.

[Trekkie90909]

Irontruth has the way of it; think of the last really evocative fictional work you read/watched. For me two contenders pop out immediately: The Name of the Wind (Patrick Rothfuss), and Ghost in the Shell (Masamune Shirow); what both of these works has in common is that they lead off with these large-scale, beautiful atmospheric descriptions/shots which give you an instinctive impression for how the entire area comes together from aspect to aspect, and then they slowly build up the individual facets of that area.

In Ghost in the Shell this comes from slowly peeling back the relationships between the important personages to the show by emphasizing how those relationships interact with the different organizations of power, and then through that lens taking a raw unfiltered look at the way people view society, the people in power, and their own role in their everyday lives. The end result is a very successful look into our fundamental nature as human beings, and an anime which remains thoroughly enjoyable more than a decade after its first airing. The key to this success, in addition to having interesting characters and engaging combat, is that it takes that initial feeling of awe and mystique, and it builds upon it in little slices to gradually give the viewer the artist's sense of the whole.

The Name of the Wind does almost the exact same thing, setting the tone of the book with a beautifully evocative introductory sequence which paints Kvothe as both something more than a simple bartender, and something less than he once was all while hinting ominously of a dark past. Rothfuss then uses this hook to slowly unveil Kvothe's past, starting all the way in childhood and working his way up slowly towards the present, presenting Kvothe's character evolution and presenting more and more hints to the reader about the form of this dark, ominous feeling they were instilled with right from the first page of the book.

Now of the two Ghost in the Shell is probably the ore direct analogue for a good campaign given its more team-centric tone however I use both works to illustrate that if you want to really drive a theme home what you don't want to do is give the party a brand-new super-immersive description every session. What you want to do is start off just the way you did; get them fully immersed, give them the big-picture view, and make them feel like there's something more to it that they can't quite grasp just yet that the show's true identity is just around the corner. Then gently lead the party through encounters which really emphasize how diverse your chosen setting is; this is most easily accomplished by focusing on your player character's backstories--creating ever new, immersive locales based on where they say they've been and where your players want to go, but you should also have an idea for where you want the campaign to go and what the different settings should be in your chosen area. That idea is what's going to drive the mystery, to keep the party driving to uncover your plot, and in the meantime try to develop the specific locations you have and create situations and encounters which drive home the important distinctions between the different realms of your boreal forest.

I think your biggest mis-step here is focusing on isolation; even a desolate taiga isn't isolated, there should be all kinds of wildlife around there. Where there's wildlife there will be things eating the wildlife, and in places civilization or some remnant of it--yes it's going to be more sporadic than if they were in absolom but that should just reinforce the importance of every encounter with a thinking, reasoning being. Make it a journey of discovery where the remoteness from 'civilization' provides them with a brand-new view of the world, where they have the chance to interact with 'barbaric' cultures whom those in more 'civilized' parts don't regard as reasoning beings. Reinforce the difficulty of surviving in these regions without some support from the natives, using the environmental rules for saves against cold and such. Fording a river? Easy take a 10 on your swim check, now make a fortitude save or suffer from frostbite. Then, once the sickness sets in have some predator slink in to take advantage of their weakness, and set up some terrain so that they have to really interact with it. Some of these encounters might be random, or feel random, but make sure you throw in a few which are actually plot important and will give the party clues to follow up on to drive them from one area to the next before things start feeling stagnant.

Think of some things which would be easy to fix or replace in the middle of a busy city; what happens when the group runs out of that, or it breaks? You could create a table of random events (things going missing, breaking, running out) to keep things moving when the party's really at an impasse, and to give yourself a little more creative leeway towards keeping them on track.

The real key, in any event, is to have some goals in mind as well as some location and character ideas to flesh out the journey so that when the players decide to go somewhere you can quickly come up with something.

[Captain Kuro]

WOW, this is think tank gold. Thanks guys, these will really help with what I'm setting up for the group, especially the random things going wrong and letting the players work up their own feeling of isolation without me havinv to rub it in.
Thanks again, I hope this proves as useful to other DMs as it did me.

[Cuup]

If you have a way to dim the lights, it could help detach the players from their real environment. Maybe even turn the lights off, and only keep them bright enough to see their character sheets during encounters or moments requiring skill/ability checks.

Add some white noise. Many-hour-long videos of static noise can be found on youtube, or wind or rain, if you want to add some weather effects. There's a great one titled Celestial White Noise that's 10 hours long. The sound of nothingness will constantly remind them that they're alone without being distracting. For particularly jarring effects, you can suddenly pause the video. Let the absolute silence fill them, and then tell them they get the feeling they're being watched.

As far as in-game suggestions, having the group come across a house, or other structure, only to find it long abandoned can really twist the knife in their "you're alone" wounds - kind of a dangle-the-string effect.

[Carl Hanson]

I am currently running the first book of the Serpent's Skull AP, which is entirely set on a smallish island with no notable civilization. The PCs are survivors of a shipwreck and have to figure out how to survive and get themselves rescued on their own.

I have spent almost zero time driving the isolation in to them (though they have had to deal with disease and other natural hazards that would be a non-issue a standard game), but after a level or two with no place to buy gear or supplies believe me that they feel pretty isolated.

I guess what I am trying to say is not to be too worried about overdoing it, the lack of civilization will make itself felt sooner or later regardless of how much you focus on it.