Sunday, August 24, 2025

#RPGaDay2025 Day 24 Reveal

Every game has that moment.

The moment when something slips out of the shadows. A secret comes to light. A mask comes off. The moment a reveal hits the table and changes how everyone sees the world, or themselves.

As a DM and a designer, I live for those moments.

They don’t have to be big. Not every reveal is a secret villain or a hidden bloodline. Sometimes it’s just a player realizing they’ve been wrong about their character’s path. Or that the “harmless” NPC has been manipulating things since session two. Or that the relic they’ve been carrying isn’t what they thought it was, and never was.

One of my favorite reveals was during my series of 5e Gen Con games my family played in. There was this elf-girl who kept ending up on the PCs tail. She would be in the same dungeon, or be in the slaver’s camp, or just following. She was Evelyn, the Princess Escalla, and she was leading the rebellion of elven slaves in the drow city of Erelhei-Cinlu.

But every reveal has weight.

In my worlds, especially the occult ones, revelations aren’t always helpful. They don’t always come with a neat explanation or a reward. Sometimes the truth is confusing. Frightening. Half-seen. And that’s the point. Not every mystery needs to be solved cleanly. Some truths don’t bring clarity, they bring consequence.

Another one was Yoln as The Hand of Leviathan. My players (and ther characters) thought the hand was a weapon. It was a person or a former person. 

Speaking of which. 

Lately, I've been threading something into my games. A presence. A name. A whisper behind other plots. He’s not always visible. In fact, he rarely is. But he’s there, like a recurring nightmare that no one talks about. A cosmic echo that appears in different guises across different campaigns and settings.

The players don’t always notice it at first. But eventually, someone will ask:

 “Wait… haven’t we heard that name before?”

 “Didn’t someone else dream about that same phrase?”

 “Why does this ruin in the Realms have the same symbol we saw in a galaxy far, far away?”

And that’s when I smile. Because the reveal isn’t just a plot point. It’s a pattern. Something reaching across time and space and genre, pulling pieces of itself together.

I’ve started calling him The One Who Remains.

He’s not just a villain. He’s not even entirely real in the way most beings are.

 He’s the echo of something that broke too long ago to remember.

 A shadow stitched from regret and silence.

 A thought that keeps trying to remember itself.

In some campaigns, he’s just a whisper. In others, he’s the secret patron behind a warlock’s power. In still others, he’s already won, and no one realizes it yet.

He’s been revealed slowly, in fragments.  And he’ll get more detail in just a couple of days. Day 26 is coming.

Sometimes the best reveals aren’t about answers. They’re about realizing the question has been with you the whole time.


Questions

How. Proud. Person. 

Easy. I was proud of my kids in their first Gen Con game and then really got into the spirit of it right away. The GM later told me he didn't normally like having kids so young, but they did great.

#RPGaDAY2025

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