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GameMastery Guide / Running a Game / How to Run a Game

GM Considerations

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 46
One of the game’s delights—and frustrations—is that it changes over time. Every session runs a little bit differently, and whether it’s new abilities, new characters, or changes to the gaming group itself, a good GM needs to know how to roll with the punches.

Game Changers

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 46
When you play a campaign long enough, the rules change. The characters that once limped into the village to beg for healing now use magic to cross continents, consult with extradimensional powers, and rescue their allies from death itself.

Alertness is your best tool as a Game Master. Keep one eye on what’s ahead—what abilities you’ll need to account for as you plan your future machinations. Whenever you’re dealing with new mechanical elements, you should have three goals:

Don’t get surprised
Don’t let the new ability run amok
Don’t render the new ability useless

Players are inherent “surprise generators,” and being surprised by their ingenuity is one of the joys of being a Game Master. You don’t need to consider every possible power combination. But when you see a game-changing power coming down the road, take a moment to think like a player. What will Bob want to do once he can turn invisible? Once you answer that, you won’t be surprised (or at least as surprised) and can move on to the other two goals.

“Don’t let the new ability run amok” and “don’t render the new ability useless” are two sides of the same coin. Your fundamental job as Game Master is to provide entertainment, challenge, and above all, balance. Players have a natural desire to play with their new toys—you helped instill that desire in them when you put all those interesting challenges in their way in the first place. Now you have a responsibility to make sure that one player doesn’t trivialize the game’s challenges, for himself or for the whole table.

Below are some potentially difficult game elements, and some thoughts on how to manage them.

Invisibility: There’s an inherent mischief to invisibility. Consider The Invisible Man, or the iconic example of Bilbo in The Hobbit. Let the players have their mischief—it frequently costs you nothing, and they’re having a good time—and deploy the traditional countermeasures (divination magic, traps, creatures that don’t use sight) only at points where you want to preserve the challenge. If invisibility isn’t available to everyone in the party, that helps puts a brake on their invisible ambitions in two ways. First, invisible means invisible—the other party members can’t find the invisible PC for healing, communicate silently, or know where she actually went when she said she’d scout ahead. Second, for every sneaky gal in the party, there’s usually a guy buried under layers of clanking plate armor as well. That guy is the Game Master’s best friend, providing warning to enemies. The invisible player can probably choose her position and get a surprise attack in, but the presence of loud, visible companions ensures that the advantage of invisibility will be fleeting unless the group splits.

When the whole party can turn invisible, brace yourself for the entire table choosing to sneak past encounters you spent hours preparing. As long as they’re truly quiet and don’t run into monsters who can counter their invisibility, let them do so. You can recycle those encounters later, and it’s probably better for everyone’s fun to respect the party’s choice to bypass. It’s possible they’re using invisibility to tell you they’d rather be doing something else. So move along, but save those encounters for later use.

Flying: Your immediate concerns are more tactical when flying shows up at your table—do melee-only monsters get slaughtered like bison on the Great Plains? You’ll need to consider the monster mix in your encounters more carefully so that the players don’t just fly above the dire wolves and drop rocks on them. But there’s nothing wrong with letting the aerial advantage be an advantage every once in a while. Let the flying PC trivialize an encounter or a trap—there are always more of both coming down the line.

Unlike most other game-changing powers, flying comes with a hidden danger to players: altitude. When a ground-bound player gets stunned, knocked out, or dropped to negative hit points, he slumps to the ground. Depending on the exact nature of the flight power, the consequences for a flying character might be far more severe. If a character runs out of hit points and can’t fly anymore, impact with the ground will almost certainly finish him off.

When a player learns to fly, it’s worth a brief conversation with that player. Show him the math: “If you reach 0 hit points when you’re x feet in the air, you’ll take y damage on average, which leaves you at negative z hit points—dead, in other words.” Once he’s got a grasp on the inherent danger, the player can take calculated risks, and it adds even more drama to a desperate battle in the sky. Teleportation: Teleportation raises an issue similar to invisibility: once the whole group can do it, they can bypass content. And as with invisibility, if the players have done a proper job of playing by the rules, let them have their way. It’s likely not that the players want to skip the encounters you’ve made, but rather that they’re abundantly eager to get to the other encounters you’ve made. Tap into that eagerness! (And don’t forget to recycle the work on those skipped encounters later.)

Teleportation can also challenge your preparation and ability to improvise. If your players can open a portal to the throne rooms in any of the Hundred Sacred Kingdoms, how do you cope with the mountains of preparation that come with unfettered, instant travel?

You improvise and cheat, of course. You don’t have a hundred throne rooms (with a hundred high-level monarchs, royal guard complements, and sets of court intrigues) prepared. You have one prepared, notes for a second, and a good idea for a third. You rename your prepared stuff on the fly—the Peaceable Kingdom of Jarrach becomes the Shadow Duchy of Sindrauta. Prince Karelius becomes Countess Kar’than’draya. The royal guards become elves—and you just describe them as having pointy ears, because nobody really cares that their Perception scores are +2 higher. You’ve got better ways to spend your precious time, and your players will never know the difference.

For that second kingdom the PCs teleport to on a lark, go with your notes. Steal stat blocks as needed, from any source. A devil’s stat block works just fine for the sinister seneschal who’s rumored to consort with dark powers. Likewise for the third kingdom. And if you feel like the PCs are teleporting around too rapidly for you to keep up—well, you have a whole book full of monsters right in front of you, don’t you?

Lie/Evil Detection: This magic can be exceedingly troublesome, especially in mystery adventures, yet instead of banning it outright, your best alternative is to stick with the three goals. First, don’t be surprised. When your NPC schemers start scheming, consider how the players will put divination magic to use. Second, make sure that discern lies and detect evil don’t run amok. You have magical countermeasures, of course, but save those for “this guy absolutely must be able to fool the PCs” moments. When you can, use low-key solutions such as:

The NPC can use nonmagical but expert means (high Bluff score, natural defenses against divination) to thwart the PCs.
The NPC can tell half-truths and leave the really incendiary stuff unsaid.
The NPC gets caught lying, but that doesn’t help the PCs uncover the truth.
The NPC is serving evil under duress or is otherwise sympathetic.
The PCs spot the lie, but jump to the wrong conclusion— they know that “troops are marching to Declanburg” is a lie, but it’s a lie because the troops are already there, not because they’re marching elsewhere.

NPCs—at least some of them, anyway—know how the world works. It’s reasonable to assume that just as you thought about what your players would do with divination magic, so too will an NPC consider what meddling PCs might do and prepare accordingly.

Third, let the magic work—as a clue delivery system for you. PCs sometimes make astounding deductive leaps, but sometimes they ignore the blindingly obvious. Use discern lies and detect evil to get important information in the players’ hands fast. Players might find a traditional interrogation of an NPC riveting, but they’re unlikely to find the fifth such interrogation as interesting. Put a little divination magic to work, and watch your table quickly get the information it needs to get on with the fun.

Remote Viewing: Clairvoyance/clairaudience and other scrying magic poses many of the same issues as teleportation. On the one hand, remote viewing is less work for you because the PCs aren’t interacting with the NPCs and places they’re observing. But on the other hand, remote viewing is generally easier and less risky than teleportation, so PCs are more likely to employ it.

By now, you’re likely accustomed to the familiar refrain of “think like the players,” and are largely concerned about remote viewing in two ways: Reconnaissance: PCs use clairvoyance and similar spells to get a look at adventure sites beforehand. On balance, this usually works in your favor, because players will then plan a route (often when you’re within earshot) that tells you exactly what they want to experience. That makes your job easier—now you just provide encounters that either support or confound their expectations. That’s the beauty of remote viewing—it’s more of an information trade than the players realize.

Espionage: Players love to scry on the Big Bad Evil Guy when he’s going about his sinister business in his chambers. This is a test of your ability to improvise— you’ve got to describe an interesting scene on the spot. Espionage-style spying can also be a clue delivery system for you. Decide what information you want to impart, surround it with enough dialogue and detail to make it believable, then get on with the fun.

But what if you don’t have specific information to deliver, and in fact you’re trying to keep the PCs and the antagonist separated for a while? If you don’t want PCs tuning in at the dramatic moment, then you have two choices: describe a realistic but utterly mundane scene in the villain’s life, or come up with a scene that refers at least obliquely to the ongoing narrative.

When the PCs are scrying, the players are pure spectators—a recipe for boredom for everyone but you. It might be realistic for most espionage-style scrying to reveal the mundane, day-to-day life of the villain (and a nice reminder if the players seem to be overusing it), but that doesn’t do anyone any good. So accept the blow to realism and give the PCs tangible—if sometimes obscure—information with each scrying attempt. Even a mundane conversation about troop movements can have a little hook (it takes 2 hours to reach the northern watchtower) that makes the players say “Aha!” They might never go to the northern watchtower, but in that moment, they get a little “I know something I’m not supposed to know” feeling—and that can propel them into action.

Portents and Omens: Few things are as difficult as predicting the campaign’s future. How can you tell a player her future when the campaign’s conclusion might make her a demigod—or a string of bad rolls might make her a halfling-kebab on an ogre’s spear?

First, do what real-life oracles and fortune-tellers do all the time: couch your predictions in symbolism and metaphor. Don’t say “Your father won’t give up the throne for you.” Say “Winter refuses to acknowledge spring.” It sounds more ominous—in the literal sense of the word—and gives the campaign’s plot some much-needed elbow room.

Next, be specific, not general. At first, this advice seems counterintuitive. Isn’t a general prophecy easier to keep than a specific one? That’s true, but specific details are easier to insert into the narrative. Don’t say “You shall become the king of the elves.” Say “When winter’s moon is nigh, the fey will dance to the tune you call.” You have a likely fulfillment of that prophecy in mind (a formal dance at the coronation ceremony), but if the campaign goes off the rails, there are other ways to make that prediction come true. Specific details have another benefit: they make the players feel like they’re getting their money’s worth out of the prophecy. If you try too hard to leave yourself room with a prophecy, you risk a prophecy so vague that the players find it useless or feel deliberately cheated. You’re smart enough to engineer something interesting involving the fey near a full moon in winter—even if you aren’t sure what it is yet. But based on that detail, the players will think that the oracle—and by extension you—has it all figured out.

If you have to hit the reset button, make it obvious that you’re doing so. The campaign may have gone in a bold, player-driven direction that you weren’t anticipating. And when it did, all that talk of destiny from the crazy lady back in the starting village was invalidated or became completely irrelevant. If you feel like you’d have to stretch the narrative too far to cover an out-of-date portent, then make it clear in the story of the world that the old destiny no longer applies. Perhaps the stars rearrange themselves in the sky (due to the PCs’ actions, ideally), and now everyone’s fate is uncertain, or can be perceived anew. Maybe the goddess of destiny appears and says that the trickster god has stolen threads from her loom of fate—including the threads that represent the PCs. You’re operating in a realm where anything is possible, so avail yourself of that power.

Emergency Game Prep

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 48
Sometimes day-to-day life conquers even the most committed Game Master. You meant to get that dungeon ready, but then the boss/spouse/kids/friends/lottery office called, and now everyone’s gathering at the table. It’s time for emergency game preparation.

Sometimes you’ll need emergency game prep in the middle of a session, too. The party may get an urge to visit the Astral Plane. They may give the all-powerful scroll to the obviously disguised villain, just because he asked to look at it.

When this happens, don’t try to find the right section of the book to reread. Every minute counts! In these situations, it’s good to have an emergency game kit containing raw adventure fuel. That’s stuff like:

Stat Blocks: Any opposition appropriate for the PCs works, even if it doesn’t “belong” in that part of the campaign world. Coming up with reasons for monsters to hang out together and fight the PCs takes less time than flipping through the books to find the perfect monsters. That’s particularly true in an emergency situation where you’re likely going to “reskin” the monsters anyway. That armored knight? You can just describe him as a hill giant and your players will never know. Then you can make him into a dire wolf, or a swarm of killer bees, and still your players may never know. Sure, you’ll know that the damage dice should have been different, the skills were completely irrelevant, the Armor Class was wrong, and the special abilities were made up on the spot, but you’re the only one who sees the stat block. Everyone else is just rolling dice and having fun.

Ten Proper Names: Write down 10 names out of thin air—names that have a “mouth feel” appropriate to the setting. You’ve now got your answer when the PCs ask what the name of the bartender is, or the name of the river they just crossed, or the magic words that open the portal. Nothing makes you look like you’ve prepared more than a confident answer to the “What’s his name?” question.

A Basic Flow Chart: Take a blank piece of paper and draw roughly 10 bubbles on it, scattered around the paper. Then draw some lines between them, trying to make interesting clusters but not connecting everything to everything else. Now you’ve got a rudimentary dungeon map and a basic event flowchart—whatever you need in the next few hours. If you use the flow chart as a map, of course it won’t have proper dimensions and everything laid out in proper architectural fashion. But your concerns are more basic. You want to keep track of the rooms so that when the PCs retreat from the map room, they come back to the observatory, not the barracks they visited two encounters ago.

Remember, thrust matters more than direction. As you improvise your way through a session, it’s tempting to worry about whether you’re making decisions—especially plot and setting decisions—that will come back to haunt you later. Ignore those concerns; you’ll have plenty of time to tie up loose ends, patch over plot holes, and bring the players back to the main plotline later. You care that the PCs are doing something interesting. The pause while you figure out the perfect encounter diminishes everyone’s fun more than the out-of-place detail or the tangential plotline ever could.

TPKs

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 49
It’s a constant threat, but every so often it happens for real: every single PC is dead, petrified, or possessed by demon lords.

That’s a TPK—a total party kill.

The good news is that, as a Game Master, you’ll probably see the TPK coming before the players will, simply because you’ve got more information. You’re seeing all the dice and stat blocks. But the bad news is that the players will be demoralized, and possibly angry with you or each other— and they’ll be looking to you, the guy at the head of the table, for guidance. You have the power to “fix” the broken table while making sure that the TPK stings a little so that the PCs might be more cautious next time.

For starters, give everyone a break once the last PC falls. Either end the session or at least send everyone to the kitchen for snacks. Some “Monday morning quarterback” analysis is inevitable and probably cathartic, but the players don’t need to do that in front of you.

Besides, you’ve got work to do. You want consequences to matter at your table—that’s one of the great things about RPGs. But you also want your friends to have fun, and you don’t want them to stop playing. So you’re looking for a way forward that makes the TPK matter, but keeps the momentum and desire to keep playing alive.

Send in the Next Party: The stereotypical solution to a TPK is to have everyone make up new characters on a mission to find out what happened to the original group. That gives the new group direction and a basic reason for cohesion. The players might be eager for a rematch—and it’s probably a good idea to soften the table’s stance on player knowledge/character knowledge in this instance so they don’t just repeat the fate of the first group.

When the second group succeeds and finds out what happened to the first group, the players can pick up the ongoing narrative where they left off. If resurrection is possible in your world, you can have the second group bring the first group back to life. It’s possible that some players at the table will like their new characters better than the old. Mix it up—let a composite group tackle the challenges of your campaign together.

Meet Your New Boss: If new characters don’t work with your story (or players balk at creating new PCs), it’s time to call in the cavalry. Have a powerful patron or mysterious presence somehow resurrect the PCs (or restore them from petrification, etc.) for some greater purpose. The resurrecting agent might be on the up and up, wanting the PCs to continue their campaign efforts (though you should make sure the players know they won’t always be bailed out). But the mysterious power might also have a divergent or sinister agenda, or demand tremendous compensation.

I Want Them Alive: Perhaps your villains were actually swinging for non-lethal damage on their last rolls, and instead of being dead the players wake up hours later in cells, stripped of their gear and forced to engineer a daring escape.

Let Failure Be Failure: If the PCs failed at a climactic moment, consider letting evil seize the day—let the players see the consequences of failure when they make up their new characters. If mid-level characters suffer a TPK when investigating the actions of a demon cult, tell the players to show up at the next session with high-level characters. Then reveal that those characters have recently been taken out of suspended animation by a ragtag band of humans—scattered remnants in a world utterly ruled by demons and their army of tortured slaves. The demons conquered and enslaved the world due to the actions of the cult the PCs couldn’t stop. Now your players get to see the consequences of their previous failure, and the new PCs have their work cut out for them.

Rewind: Sometimes accidents happen. Someone reads a rule wrong, you design an encounter that’s unfairly lethal, or the game otherwise goes off the rails. If a fundamental misunderstanding or error led to the TPK, don’t feel like you have to let it stand. Just hit the rewind button and play the encounter over again. You want decisions at your table to have consequences, but simple errors shouldn’t steal everyone’s fun.

Overpowered PCs

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 50
Characters naturally accumulate power over time. And in a game that relies on random resolutions of complex interactions, that power accumulation isn’t always smooth. If one PC—or all the PCs—at your table makes a quantum leap in power, it’s worth taking a good, hard look at whether that power is disruptive to the ongoing narrative and sense of fun.

Consider the Cooperative Dynamic: The Pathfinder RPG differs from most games in that it’s fundamentally cooperative. Because you aren’t playing “against” anyone in a meaningful sense, it might not matter that the PCs suddenly became much more powerful. You aren’t likely to run out of powerful monsters. You might have to alter encounters to compensate, but once you’ve done so, your game continues unimpeded.

When You Need to Rein It In: By the same token, the cooperative nature of the game is why you sometimes need to “nerf ” a character’s power. Do so when one PC is too powerful relative to everyone else at the table. Before you take action, though, consider the following steps:

Provide early warning. Say a player comes up with a devastating combo—something that takes a monster out of a fight with a high success rate and no countermeasure. Let it happen the first few times, but tell the player, “I’ll let you know when that combo gets tired.” The player can still feel clever, but you’ve delivered notice and the whole table knows you take the balance of power seriously. Sometimes the problem power doesn’t emerge at the table anymore—and you’ve got time to plan further. And the player might volunteer to be part of the solution, a “negotiated settlement” you can work out at the end of the session.

Know what you’re nerfing, and why. After the session where something overpowered emerges, it’s time to hit the books. Read everything relevant, even if you think you know the rules backward and forward. Think like a player and explore the problematic power, then put your Game Master hat back on and search for countermeasures. A complex game system has lots of moving pieces, and it takes effort to isolate which components and combinations are actually overpowered.

Nerf it to the ground, but make it a surgical strike. Once you’ve isolated the problematic element, bring it back into line with similar powers available at that level. Do your homework in terms of rules study and arithmetic; you want to make sure that the overall technique is no longer overpowered, not just the specific application you saw at the table. But make sure the PC still has viable options—and that the player still has interesting choices to make during an encounter.

Explain it outside the game. It’s tempting to solve a balance issue on the spot, but consider the other players at the table. They might be bored by a rules discussion about somebody else’s character. They might leap to the player’s defense, or recommend a harsher nerf because they’re tired of being second banana. Talk to that player away from the table before the next session begins, so that everyone’s got time to pore over rulebooks and consider alternatives. It’s also a good time to tell the player that you’re acting for the good of the table, not to save your monsters. Most players respond better to a nerf when they realize they’re diminishing others’ fun and the change isn’t driven by Game Master competitiveness.

What you break, rebuild. Overpowered situations rarely emerge overnight. They’re often an intentional or serendipitous collection of smaller elements acquired over time. Spell x, magic item y, and feat z are fine by themselves, but you’ve got a problem once a player has all three. When you change the rules to make something less powerful, it’s only fair—and certainly doesn’t hurt anyone at the table—to let the player retroactively make different character advancement choices to compensate, so they haven’t wasted half the game achieving a build that’s no longer viable.

Overpowered Monsters: Sometimes the proverbial shoe will be on the other foot, and a monster will be unexpectedly powerful. At first, let it play out a bit. Once the power disparity is clear to everyone at the table, take action—either nerf the monster on the spot and tell the players (in general terms) what you’ve done and why, or forego use of that monster, telling the players that “the dragon turtle has some problems, which I’m going to fix before our next session.”

Personalizing Published Adventures

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 51
It’s not easy to be a Game Master; of all the roles in the game, the GM has to put in the most work, and sometimes you’ll want to relax and use a published adventure instead of creating your own. While many such adventures are ready to go straight out of the box, so to speak, the key to integrating one seamlessly into an existing campaign or setting is adapting the adventure to suit your campaign and your PCs, and this means you have to recognize whether or not the adventure is a good fit for you and your party.

Presuming the theme or feel is suitable for your campaign, you need to look at the game mechanics in the adventure, particularly the monsters and how they compare to your PCs’ abilities. It’s possible that the party composition may make an adventure too easy—a party with a paladin, good cleric, and good necromancer is going to blow through an undead-heavy adventure with little trouble (though that isn’t a bad thing, as letting the PCs feel powerful is nice now and then). You should always feel free to adjust the power level of an adventure’s monsters (using the simple templates in the back of the Pathfinder RPG Bestiary is the easiest way) or swap them out for other monsters with similar CRs.

What it comes down to is that you have to make the adventure your own—whether a Pathfinder Module, a one-session Pathfinder Society Scenario, or a third-party adventure. If you’re lucky and choose well, you can save yourself a lot of work. Make changes to the story if you have to, embrace tangents the PCs introduce, and always feel free to point the story in the general direction of your campaign’s primary plot if the PCs decide to abandon the story in the published adventure.

Converting Content from 3.5 or Other Systems

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 51
Roleplaying games have been around for over 30 years, and there’s a huge library of materials out there for other games which you can use in your campaign. One particularly easy conversion is from the 3.0 or 3.5 edition of the world’s oldest roleplaying game to the Pathfinder RPG.

The Pathfinder RPG was designed to be backwardcompatible with the 3.5 rules set. It’s possible to integrate the two seamlessly with almost no work; the only big difference in most games is that Pathfinder PCs are a little stronger overall than 3.5 PCs, so your PCs may have an easier time battling things from the old rules. You can run with that, or apply one of three simple fixes below to balance things out:

Reduce the CR by 1: Treat anything from 3.0 or 3.5 as 1 CR value lower.

Add the Advanced Creature Simple Template: Use the easy “+2 to everything” version rather than rebuilding all the old stat blocks.

Add Improved Initiative and Toughness: Pathfinder creatures get more feats than 3.0/3.5 creatures (every odd level rather than ever 3 levels). Adding these two feats for mid-to-high-level creatures helps make up the slight power difference between the two systems.

Of course, you can also look to other game systems for ideas and adventure materials, it just requires more work on your part. In most cases, searching the internet for fanmade conversion suggestions is a timesaver; most of these suggest skill DCs, replacement spells and magic items, and rough stat blocks or simple replacements (such as swapping the tcho-tcho people of the Lovecraftian mythos for goblins). Use the Pathfinder RPG rules as a resource— the Bestiary includes a wide variety of monsters so you can create the sort of fantasy that you want, and by trading a few proper nouns, you can convert even a superhero, space opera, or hard SF scenario into a fantasy plot.

Words Every Game Master Should Known

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 55
Abase, abash, abattoir, abhorrent, ablution, abscess, abstemious, abstersion, abstruse, accoutre, acephalous, acrid, aesculapian, affusion, ague, alembic, alluvium, amanuensis, ambergris, ambrosia, ambry, amorphous, amphora, anchorite, anfractuous, anodyne, anserine, antechamber, antediluvian, anthelmintic, antic, aquiline, ardent, argot, ascians, asperity, astomatous, atavistic, ataxia, augean, autarch, avuncular, bacchanal, badinage, bagatelle, baksheesh, balderdash, baleful, baleen, ballyhoo, banal, bannock, banns, bantam, barque, barmy, baroque, bashi-bazouk, bas-relief, bathos, bawdy, bayard, beadle, beatitude, bede, begum, beldame, beleaguer, belfry, beltane, belvedere, benefice, benison, benjamin, beshrew, besot, bete noire, bewray, bibliolatry, bibulous, bier, bijou, bilbo, billingsgate, biltong, biretta, bivouac, blague, blain, blandish, blarney, blaspheme, blowzy, bodkin, boeotian, bombast, boreal, bouffant, bourse, bower, braggadocio, bravo, bretwalda, brine, bruin, bucolic, bursar, cache, cachinnate, cad, cadaverous, cadge, cadre, caitiff, calumny, camarilla, canard, canny, canticle, caparison, caper, carillon, castigate, casuistry, cataphracts, cateran, caudle, caustic, cavil, celerity, cenobite, chancellery, chary, churl, chyme, cinerary, circumvallate, cistern, clamber, clamor, cockade, cognate, cognomen, coif, collet, colporteur, comely, commodious, compurgation, concatenate, condign, condottiere, connubial, conterminous, contretemps, conundrum, convalesce, convivial, coomb, coppice, coquette, corban, cornucopia, coronach, coruscate, cosset, coterie, coven, covenant, coxcomb, coxswain, cozen, crannog, crenellated, crepuscular, croft, crone, crony, crotchet, cruciform, cubit, cuckold, cuirass, cur, cuspidor, cyclopean, cynosure, dacoit, damask, dastard, dauphin, debauch, decuman, defenestrate, deglutition, demesne, desiccate, diadem, diarchy, dictum, dirge, distaff, dobbin, dodder, dolmen, dolor, dotterel, doughty, dowager, doyen, dragoman, dross, dudgeon, duffer, durbar, ebullient, eclat, eidolon, efface, effigy, elan, eldritch, eleemosynary, elegy, empyreal, ensanguined, epicure, epigraph, equerry, escutcheon, eviscerate, excoriate, factotum, falderal, fallal, fardel, farrago, fasces, fester, filament, firmament, fitz, flagellate, flagitious, foozle, fop, formic, fracas, fresco, friable, frippery, frolic, fulgent, fulgurate, fuliginous, fulminate, fumarole, fustigate, gaffer, galleass, gallipot, gallowglass, gammer, gardyloo, gentry, genuflect, geophagy, gewgaw, gibbet, gimcrack, glaucous, gloaming, glower, gossamer, gralloch, grippe, hagiography, halcyon, halidom, harangue, harbinger, harlequin, harridan, hauteur, hebdomadal, hecatomb, helot, heriot, hermetic, hircine, hirsute, hoary, hoyden, humbug, hussar, hydrargyrum, ichor, idolater, ilk, imbroglio, indurate, ineffable, inexorable, infrangible, iniquity, inosculate, insouciant, intaglio, inveigle, invidious, irascible, irk, itinerant, jabber, jackanapes, janissary, jaundice, jeer, jejune, jeremiad, jingo, jocund, jongleur, jorum, joss, jougs, jowl, jubilee, juggernaut, ken, kern, khamsin, kine, kirk, kirtle, kittle, knacker, knell, knout, kowtow, kulak, laager, lachrymal, lackadaisical, lacuna, lade, laggard, laird, lambent, lampoon, lanceolate, lancet, languor, lank, lanyard, lapidary, lares, lariat, larrikin, lascivious, lassitude, laud, laureate, lazar, lazaretto, leal, leaven, lector, lees, legate, legerdemain, leman, lesion, liege, liniment, lissome, lithe, littoral, liturgy, loam, logogram, loll, lour, lucre, lupine, macerate, machinate, madrigal, maelstrom, mafficking, malediction, mammon, mandarin, mange, martinet, mawkish, medicament, mendacious, mendicant, métier, miasma, missive, monomachy, mordant, mulct, nadir, naphtha, narcissism, narcosis, nascent, naught, navicular, neap, nebulous, necromancy, necrophagous, necropolis, necropsy, necrosis, nectar, ne’er, neuter, nexus, nightshade, nihilism, nirvana, nitrate, noctule, node, nostrum, noxious, noyade, nubile, nucleus, nugatory, nullify, obeisance, obese, oblate, oblique, oblivion, obloquy, obsequious, obstinate, obstreperous, obtrude, obdurate, obtuse, obverse, occult, ocular, offal, officiate, offspring, ogle, olfaction, omen, ominous, onerous, onslaught, opaline, opiate, ordinal, ordure, orgy, orpine, oscular, ossify, ostracize, ovoid, ozone, pact, palpable, palpitate, palsy, panacea, pandemonium, pang, pannage, parabolic, paradox, paragon, parallax, paranoia, paraphernalia, parasite, pare, pariah, particularism, partisan, pathetic, paunch, pawky, pediment, penchant, pendant, pendulum, penitent, penology, pensile, pentacle, pentagram, penumbra, penury, peptic, perdition, perfidy, perpendicular, perpetual, persecute, pervert, pestilence, petty, phalanx, phallus, phlegm, phosphorus, pillage, pinion, piteous, plague, placid, plead, plenitude, plight, pock, polemic, pollard, polyglot, pompous, pontiff, porcine, potash, potent, primal, profane, prolate, propagate, prostrate, pulverize, pumice, purgatory, purulent, pustule, pygmy, quagmire, quarantine, quarrel, quasi, quench, quoin, quotient, rabid, rake, rampage, rampant, ramshackle, rapacious, ravage, reap, reave, reckoning, recluse, redolent, refute, regicide, regorge, regret, relapse, relic, relish, remorse, resinous, resurgent, retribution, revenant, reverie, revive, rhapsody, rhetoric, rictus, rigmarole, rime, rind, riparian, rookery, ruinous, runt, sable, sabotage, sacrilege, salve, samite, sanctify, sargasso, scabious, scallywag, scalpel, scandalize, scapegoat, scathe, scion, sclerosis, scour, scrag, scrimshank, sebaceous, secession, secretion, secular, semblance, seminal, seminary, senile, sepulture, serpentine, serrate, servile, shade, sham, shamefaced, shanty, shoddy, shorn, shrill, shun, silage, silvanus, simulacrum, sinuous, sitar, skewbald, slander, sluice, smattering, smock, sneer, snide, sordid, spawn, speculum, splay, spume, stagnant, stagnate, stake, strangulate, strigil, stub, subjugate, suction, sulphur, supernaturalness, supremacy, surge, suture, swagger, swamp, swank, sweat, swill, syringe, taboo, taint, tallow, tangible, tardy, tariff, tatty, temerity, temperance, tenuity, terret, terrify, tether, thane, theurgy, thews, thorn, thou, threshold, throb, throng, thuggery, thy, titillate, topsy-turvy, torpid, tortuous, totem, toxin, tractable, transform, trauma, tremulous, trigon, trotter, truncate, truss, tumulus, turgid, tyrant, ugly, ulcer, ululate, umbral, undulate, unhallowed, unman, unravel, unspeakable, uproar, usury, utter, vainglory, valgus, vapid, vault, vegetal, venerable, vengeance, verdigris, vigilance, violate, viridescent, virus, viviparous, voiceless, volition, voluble, vulgar, vulnerable, waif, wan, wangle, warn, watchfulness, waxen, wean, wheedle, whorl, widow, , wince, wreath, writhe, xanthous, xenophobia, xiphoid, xylograph, xylophagous, yearn, yule, zeal, zealot, zenith, ziggurat, zounds.

Archives of Nethys

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