Playing with senses are the EASIEST way to level up your game mastering. So just started adding them to your games. Sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste. Well, taste can get a bit difficult. Now go out and have fun!

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More details? I mean... ok...

WHAT SENSES CAN WE USE?

Well, contrary to popular belief, we have over a dozen senses, and depending on who you ask, it may stretch to over 20, but I'll talk about the core 5 that we're aware of - Sight, Hearing, Touch, Smell, and Taste first, and maaaaaybe some other weird senses. I will try my best to give some practical examples for you to try out when you run your own games, so that you can immediately test something out. I recommend trying them out one at a time, but of all the "auxiliary" stuff a Game Master can prepare, this is definitely one of the first things on my list that I'd work on. Even before extensive worldbuilding (e.g. pantheons, faction relations, etc.) or Fronts, Dangers, and Grim Portents (I can talk about this another time?).

On top of all of these, I'll try to mention free options, cheap options, and paid options. ALSO, TL;DR, most of these options relate to the two main senses used in TTRPGs, Sight and Hearing. Inevitably, these are the core senses used to communicate, and hence will have the most flesh. 

One caveat here is that I'm assuming you're using some sort of laptop or tablet device to run programs like youtube or some music streaming service.

HEARING

The first type of hearing based improvements I'd like to suggest are based on ambience.

The most popular way to improve the immersive experience here is music. There's youtube royalty free tracks that you can save into a custom playlist, countless playlists dedicated to TTRPGs (if you search for Triangle Agency playlist, or Heart: The City Beneath playlist, you'll find a few already well curated lists), and tonnes video game sound tracks to steal from.

The first real suggestion I'd make after music is to get some sound effects. Youtube again is a sea of sound effects, but google for free SFX! There are tonnes of websites like freesound.org, zapsplat.com, this and so on so forth. Common paid options include epidemic sound, envato, and whatever you can google. I've used the Cero sound from Bleach for Eldritch blasts, and some of my players still have trauma responses whenever they hear the initial formation of the blast. If you have any video games, there are tonnes of sound effects you can borrow for your games. Better yet, if you have Baldur's Gate 3, you have tonnes of already D&D specific sound effects to borrow from. I'd also suggest searching for a good fireball sound. If there's a good set up leading to a satisfying boom, it'll only elevate the fun of casting fireball in an enclosed space.

The second suggestion for ambience would be environmental sounds. This is very straightforward - a forest sound, dungeon sound, tavern, town, and ocean sound will go a long long way in setting up most of your settings. There are again many royalty free 8 hour videos of ambience of these types of settings. 

How do you combine all of these together? A hundred youtube tabs will cause an explosion somewhere... You could use pre-made programs like syrinscape or tabletop audio. My preferred method is through Kenku.fm. It's primarily a discord bot, but it's organisation structure is something I find very appealing. Set up your playlists within Kenku.fm (or open your preferred streaming service on one of Kenku's tabs), and create SFX soundboards based on what you need - I separate my lists by physical attacks, spells, and monster sounds. I have several enviromental sound effects as well (such as wind or traps) that I squeeze into a fourth sound board. If you play Star Wars TTRPGs, you could add robot sounds or quotes from the creatures that don't speak English (such as the Eewoks or Wookies). Depending on budget, I'd suggest getting a 15 key or bigger stream deck if you want further customization. 

I have also housed my sound effects on virtual tabletops (VTTs) like roll20 or Foundry VTT, but have since shifted away so that I'm not entirely dependent on a single program.

A quick side note hear is that your descriptions are also important for immersion by involving the imagination through words, but I'd say that's another article on it's own.

SIGHT

Not gonna lie, the Hearing section is the thickest section as there's just so much you can do with sound now with the internet. Sight however has a mix of digitally available assets, and physical things. 

For digital assets, get images of your characters and locations where possible. You can either get really gosh darned good at describing characters in a evocative way... or just go through your favorite artists art for inspiration in your own games. Wanna custom something? Commission or use Heroforge. I'd bet that someone has already come up with something more interesting than whatever I have in my brain somewhere in the world a thousand times over. Recently, I ran Bluebeard's Bride and really wanted to lean into the body horror aspect and just searched for horror brides, body horror monsters, and other terms I came across after searching for these and kept a library of these characters. You don't even have to know where they are from, you can come up with their little tale after. Instead of assigning a story to each of these "brides" in fact, I pulled in the ones that felt the most appropriate for the scenario. The art I found far exceeded my ability to describe them. 

How do you describe whoever this is???

Do this for characters, locations, and objects. While doing this, explicitly describe them out loud. I'll get more into this in the how to describe things article, but for instance just adding in that the mushroom lady above smells like petrichor and fresh dirt is enough to make it an immersive character. 

For physical objects, I'd start with lights and props. For investigative games like Vaesen or Triangle Agency, I try to print out posters, papers, and maps whenever I can. I've also bought a small usb powered light (mine's a nanlite PavoTube II 6c); I have players who go into a panic whenever I change the light to red. I've seen GMs set up tarot cards, ouija board GM screens, and tea cups.

Of course, the most infamous way to visually appeal to players is with miniatures and maps (for D&D and other grid-based games). Learning to paint miniatures and terrain is an intense skill that requires time and money to learn. I can only paint a bit, and it took me a year to be decent at it. For the longest time, I was a hybrid digital and physical GM - I used virtual tabletops to display maps and character tokens. The free versions of virtual tabletops are extremely useful to start off with, and are an amazing guide on how to get started with physical games too. Maybe I'll make a primer on miniature priority lists in the future...

TBC

I think that's enough content for now - the next couple of senses (touch, taste, smell and BONUS) are harder to get free stuff on, but we'll see what we can do! We already lowkey mentioned a touch based item (miniatures), but we'll go into other details in the next article. Lemme know if I missed anything here, but otherwise, see you NEXT WEEK!

Don't forget, who's awesome? You're awesome.