DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 43B: Kalerecent’s Cry

Porphyry House stood on one end of an open plaza in the Guildsman’s District near the Warrens facing a large, dilapidated open-air rotunda which stood along the Old Sea Road near East Street. It was an elegant, two-story structure constructed of dark purple and mauve porphyry. Minarets rose from each of the buildings’ four corners, and a central dome served as the roof. Its façade was decorated with several statues, bas-reliefs, and other carvings of handsome men and beautiful women (many of them striking a variety of lewdly suggestive poses).

Here’s a fun fact: For a very long time I thought porphyry was some kind of incense or spice. Perhaps something similar to frankincense or ambergris. (Although ambergris was also something that I misapprehended, assuming it be far more akin to amber than its etymology would, in my opinion, suggest.) The trick was that I had only encountered “porphyry” in print, usually as part of a pulp story where it would be tucked into a list of treasures or opulent extravagances.

(Along similar lines, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that many “serpentine statues” became significantly more orphidic in my mind’s eye than an author had intended.)

In reality, of course, porphyry is actually a beautiful, purple-red stone.

“The Porphyry House of Horrors” is an adventure by James Jacobs which first appeared in Dungeon Magazine #95. When I first read the title and even the opening pitch, I was still belaboring under my false understanding of porphyry’s nature.

“Ah yes,” I thought. “A high-class whorehouse of porphyry. The luxurious chambers must be redolent with the rich scents of porphyry.”

Sigh.

In any case, Jacobs’ adventure quickly cured me of my misapprehension and running the adventure locked the true beauty of porphyry into my imaginative lexicon.

This is just one minor example of how D&D, and roleplaying games in general, can be so potently educational. As a text-based medium, of course, they carry all the benefits of vocabulary and knowledge that any reading does. But, as a creative medium, they also encourage research into a vast array of topics.

Even more so than that, playing RPG adventures creates “living memories” that are, in my experience, far more powerful than stuff you just read in a book. It’s not the same thing as real life, obviously, but it’s still “stickier.” Sometimes, of course, this means that you know more about Ptolus than you do western European geography, but there’s also all kinds of “real” stuff you can pick up along the way. (Like what porphyry is.)

For example, while putting together the Malta chapter of the Alexandrian Remix of Eternal Lies, I did A LOT of research into the island and its history. Running the sessions built on top of that research really locked it in.

Similarly, a bunch of the Zalozhniy Quartet campaign for Night’s Black Agents takes place in western Europe. Doing research for that and running the PCs through transnational chases through the region means I’m not nearly as shaky on western European geography as I was five years ago.

The great thing is that there’s always new stuff to learn. And RPGs are a really fun – and effective! – way of doing it.

Campaign Journal: Session 43C – Running the Campaign: Running Darkness
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 43A: Scouting Porphyry House

They knew that Porphyry House was engaged in illicit as well as salacious trade, and they doubted the cultists were bringing their other business brazenly through the front door. There had to be a second, surreptitious entrance somewhere.

Probably underground.

Probably in the sewers.

So what’s happening at the beginning of this session is that, after giving up on the idea of finding an entrance to Porphyry House through the sewers at the end of last session, the players almost immediately worked their way back around to the same conclusion: There must be an entrance through the sewers!

There isn’t.

Whereas the PCs’ scouting in the last session was still taking them interesting places (because they were following paths to interesting things, even if their reasons for doing so were erroneous), we’ve now reached the point where they’re really just ramming their faces into a wall. It’s like searching a dungeon room you’ve already searched three times and hoping you’ll find something new, only at a slightly larger scale.

So, as a GM, what do you do about this?

Well, I actually have an article about this: Random GM Tips — Driving Past the Dead End.

They eventually found their way to the right area beneath Porphyry House… but found nothing except a few impassable pipes which might (or might not) lead into the House.

By the time they re-emerged from the sewers, evening was settling in and they were reminded that they had an appointment with Rehobath in the not-too-distant future. They decided to leave and try again the next day, and on their way back to the Ghostly Minstrel laid out a plan to magically tunnel their way into the house from below (if they could figure out exactly where they should be digging).

What you’re seeing reflected in the campaign journal here is a very hard frame — the time spent at the table is minimal, while the time that passes in the campaign world is significant. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but it would have been along the lines of, “Okay, going down into the sewers you begin exploring. You’re right in the heart of where the older sewer systems in the Warrens meet the newer systems of the Guildsman District and it’s all a chaotic jumble. You eventually find your way to the area right under Porphyry house, but there’s nothing there except drainage pipes.”

To break this down, there are four key components:

• I’m shifting from Now Time to Abstract Time. (There’s no reason to, for example, play out a tunnel-by-tunnel exploration of the sewers because there’s nothing meaningful to find and no meaningful choices to be made during that exploration.)
• The PCs are still doing the thing that the players want them to do. (I’m not saying, “No, you can’t search the sewers.”)
• The passage of time is significant. (I’ve talked about handling the passage of time through a mental model of Morning, Afternoon, Evening, and Overnight. In this case, they spent their afternoon on the sewer search, thus the frame of, “By the time they re-emerged from the sewers, evening was settling in…” This is further reinforced because they have an evening appointment.)
• Their action has a concrete conclusion. (They didn’t just “not find an entrance to Porphyry House.” Their efforts resulted in them finding the point closest to Porphyry House. The distinction is subtle, but distinct: The former says “maybe you missed something, so you could look again.” The latter says, “you succeeded in your search and this is what you found, even if it isn’t what you wanted to find.”)

We have, thus, spent only a couple minutes of our valuable table time on this interaction. And while the players feel that they’ve been allowed to do the thing they wanted to do, they’re also been pushed away from the idea of “let’s just search again” because (a) the result has been framed as a definitive answer to their query and (b) we’ve also established that it will cost them a significant resource (time) to continue pursuing this.

Now, as you’ll see in the journal entries for the rest of this session, the players nevertheless did continue masticating this idea, intermittently discussing their options while pursuing other agendas. They really wanted a discreet entrance to Porphyry House. But rather than just boiling away table time fruitlessly searching the sewers, they instead turned their thoughts to more creative solutions: First by hatching the idea of drilling up into Porphyry House from the section of sewer they had identified as lying under the whorehouse, and then by refining that idea into stoneshaping through the rear wall of the building.

So, in short, I’m making a note here, “Huge success.”

Campaign Journal: Session 43B – Running the Campaign: D&D is Educational
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 42B: False Brothels

With the other mothers still trapped in the web. Tee was able to broker a bargain in which they would be freed if one of them would lead the party to the southern sewer entrance. While the mothers were carefully freed from the web, Tor started discreetly taking ears and fingers from the dead as trophies. Meanwhile, Elestra distracted the ratlings with small talk to keep them from noticing Tee looting the coffers of the nest master (which were filled with gems, jewelry, and large amounts of coin; although given the bones and skulls dangling from the ceiling, Tee didn’t want to spend too much time thinking about where it had all come from).

A surprisingly frequent critique of xandering the dungeon is that navigational choice in a dungeon is irrelevant because, when confronted with Path A and Path B, the players will have no way of knowing where either path goes. Since the choice is blind, the “logic” goes, the choice is meaningless and no different than a linear dungeon!

This entire concept is so utterly alien to my experience running dungeons that I honestly have difficulty understanding what’s happening at these tables. I try to imagine a session in which the players are repeatedly making these navigational choices without ANY insight or reason and I literally can’t fathom what it would look like. It would seem to require both the GM and the players to deliberately go out of their way to make it happen.

Let’s start with the GM. It’s a common rejoinder to the “it’s all blind choices!’ gambit that it’s the GM’s responsibility to fill the dungeon with navigational hints like:

• strange sounds emanating from a passage
• physical evidence (e.g., tracks, blood smeared on the walls)
• treasure maps or similar intel
• navigational cues used by the inhabitants (e.g., signs or runes)

This isn’t bad advice. Any dungeon will certainly be improved by including this kind of stuff. Plus, if you’re designing your dungeon as a real place filled with history and life, this stuff will just naturally find its way into your dungeon key.

But I’m a pretty big believer in RPGs as a collaborative activity, and I’ve grown pretty skeptical of design philosophies that position the GM as the sole bearer of responsibility for the group’s experience. In practice, it’s just not necessary for the GM to lard up every crossroads with clues in order for the navigational choice to have meaningful context.

For example, a pillar of old school dungeon design is that the further down you go, the more deadly the challenges become (and the larger the rewards). Even in the absence of this classic design conceit, “going deeper into enemy territory is more dangerous” is going to be generally true just as a situational truism. (Particularly if the bad guys are being played as an active opposition and not just XP pinatas waiting for the PCs to kick down their door.)

Obviously, this principle won’t apply to every dungeon, but there are other diegetic cues that emerge from even the most cursory understanding of what’s happening and where you are. For example, “Should we finish clearing out this tower first or make a beeline for the central ziggurat?” or “Should we chase those goblins that ran away before they can reach reinforcements or should we move to a completely different sector of the dungeon to avoid pursuit?”

Similarly, if the PCs choose to “always go right,” that’s a meaningful navigational choice, as are other maze-solving techniques.

All of these provide a broad context for the players that can meaningfully guide navigational decisions even if they lack all other knowledge about the dungeon.

That lack of more specific knowledge should also be considered, however, because even if the PCs end up faced with a navigational choice for which they truly have no information, that only makes the choice meaningless if they ALSO lack the ability to gain that information. As long as they have that ability, the choice to NOT get that information is, in fact, a meaningful choice in itself.

And the truth is that, even without the GM seeding specific hints and clues into the adventure, the players have ample opportunities to gather the information they need.

Let’s start with the ubiquitous opportunities for interrogation. Almost anyone you can fight, you can also hold at sword point and demand answers from. “Which way to the lair of Bartox One-Eye?”

Note: This is a good place to mention that if you, as the GM, don’t want to bear sole responsibility for force-feeding information to your players, then you also need to make sure you’re not blocking the players from taking that responsibility. An occasional henchmen biting down on a cyanide capsule is all well and good, but if you teach the players that they ALWAYS bite down on cyanide capsules and they should never waste time trying to gain actionable intelligence, then you’ll have needlessly flattened — and perhaps even crippled — your game.

Even if there are no bad guys they can question, you can often just ask the gods. D&D comes well-stocked with divination spells that can be used to glean information about the dungeon. Augury, for example, is a 2^nd-level spell and I’ve often seen it make the difference between life and death.

Then there’s literally just physically scouting your options. From a central junction you can go left, take a peek around, then come back, go right, and poke around a little more. With information about both options in hand, you can figure out which direction seems the most promising and/or least dangerous.

Often, though, you don’t even need to personally go and check things. Given what you’ve already discovered about a dungeon, it’s often not difficult to use logical induction to make informed choices. For example, “We know the kobold warrens are in that direction, so it’s likely this tunnel will also lead us to them.”

You’ll also obviously have navigational information if you’re revisiting a location. This might be because you’re mounting a fresh expedition into the dungeon after returning to town or taking a long rest. It might be because you’ve been repelled by the kobolds and are trying to figure out a way around them.

You can also see from this how these different methods of gathering information can combine and reinforce each other: If you’ve previously been repelled by a kobold stronghold and encounter a small force of koblds while physically scouting, you can easily conclude that this passage must also be connected to that stronghold somehow. This conclusion would only be reinforced if, consulting your maps, you can see it’s also heading in the direction of that stronghold. This might prompt you to cast speak with dead and question one of the dead kobolds, which could lead to you learning that the passage does lead to the stronghold, but via a rear entrance which is only lightly guarded. Do you use this information to mount a fresh assault on the kobolds or choose a different path and avoid them?

What we’re beginning to touch on here is the dungeon as both a tactical and strategic battlefield. I’ve previously talked about Dungeon as a Theater of Operations, and once you start thinking of the dungeon experience in this more holistic fashion it’s easy to see how it can inform almost any navigational decision the PCs are making.

AN IMPERFECT WORLD

It should be noted, though, that the goal of all this is generally not for the PCs to end up with a perfect understanding of the dungeon. That might happen occasionally, but it’s not to be expected and, even if it does happen, it’s likely to pass quickly (as the PCs’ information becomes dated or irrelevant).

Sometimes your educated guesses don’t turn out right. And that’s just fine. Desirable, even.

It turns out that one of the key ways you can distinguish choice from calculation is through imperfect information. And these choices — rather than calculations — are the heart and soul of meaningful gameplay.

You can see an example of what it looks like when the PCs have made a mistake in the current campaign journal. The PCs have formed a goal (find an underground entrance to Porphyry House) and are actively pursuing it. You can see that they’ve engaged in a bunch of the different information-gathering techniques we’ve discussed:

• They’ve found maps.
• They’ve interrogated prisoners.
• They’ve used inductive reasoning to figure out where various passages are likely to lead.

The only problem?

Elestra flung open the shutters on a nearby window… and looked out over the Southern Sea. They were on the coast cliffs deep within the Warrens. Far from Porphyry House.

They retreated back to the sewer, retraced their path, and used the kennel rat to take the sewer route they hadn’t chosen before. The rat brought them to another tunnel leading away from the sewer proper, and although this one bore no resemblance to the work of Ghul, they sought out the nearest sewer entrance, poked their heads into the street above… and concluded that this wasn’t Porphyry House either.

In utter frustration at the time they had wasted, they left the sewers altogether and decided to head straight to Porphyry House’s front door.

The route to Porphyry House that they concluded must exist… doesn’t. Whoops.

But that’s OK. The choices they made along the way were still meaningful. They still led to interesting adventures. And, at every step along the way, the PCs were continuing to gather information and feeding that information back into their choices (both navigational and otherwise).

Campaign Journal: Session 43A – Running the Campaign: It’s Gotta Be Here!
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 42A: Rat Mothers

But Ranthir, upon hearing the word “flee”, whirled around and webbed the far side of the room: The mothers, the albino, and Berq were all helplessly caught – except for one mother, trapped in the corner, who futilely screamed for help in her despair. Tor closed on her and ruthlessly killed both her and the baby ratlings.

With the other mothers still trapped in the web. Tee was able to broker a bargain in which they would be freed if one of them would lead the party to the southern sewer entrance. While the mothers were carefully freed from the web, Tor started discreetly taking ears and fingers from the dead as trophies. Meanwhile, Elestra distracted the ratlings with small talk to keep them from noticing Tee looting the coffers of the nest master (which were filled with gems, jewelry, and large amounts of coin; although given the bones and skulls dangling from the ceiling, Tee didn’t want to spend too much time thinking about where it had all come from).

“Killing orc babies” in D&D is a trope not so much because DMs are deliberately trying to present their players with this moral dilemma, but rather because it arises pretty naturally out of the standard D&D adventure type: Dungeons inhabited by X. “Inhabited” leads to community; community leads to babies. And, of course, it’s not just orcs. In this session it happened to be ratlings.

Now, there’s a whole discussion to be had about the colonialist themes in D&D and also the degree to which the traditional fantasy tropes of “species which is inherently evil” and/or “humanoid species with sub-human intellects” are manifestations of and/or informed by real world racism, but I’m going to put a pin in that.

What I’m focused on at the moment is less the specific moral dilemma, and rather the phenomenon of emergent moral dilemmas.

There can sometimes be the impression that moral dilemmas are something that GMs need to specifically create, frame up, and present to the players. But the real world is filled with moral dilemmas with nary a GM in sight, so it’s not really surprising that they’ll also crop up more or less unbidden in our simulated game worlds – whether that’s ratling babies in the ratling nests; the decision to betray a friend; or the opportunity to profit at the expense of others.

Whether a particular moral dilemma is crafted by a GM or emerges from the narrative of play, it can offer a rich opportunity for roleplaying, allowing players to explore their characters at a deep and meaningful level. Like any form of play, it can also be a way to safely explore complex issues.

Or, alternatively, being a form of play, it can also provide an escape from the complexities of the real world.

This is where moral dilemmas can create strife at your table: When some players are approaching the game world as a place of deep meaning and other players are approaching the game world as an ephemera of casual play, this can easily create discordant perceptions. To some extent, of course, this is always true, but when it comes to moral dilemmas, the inherently heightened takes – e.g., killing babies! – will naturally amplify the discordance.

(The issues of how much a player’s actions/beliefs are separated from their character’s actions/beliefs also complicates this, but I’m going to put a pin in that, too.)

Not only will different players have different responses to these situations, the same player can easily have a different response depending on the nature and context of the moral dilemma.

To use a video game analogy, I’ve never seen anyone seriously object to Mario curbstomping koopas to death, but change the context to running down pedestrians in Grand Theft Auto and now there are many people who would find it distasteful. But some of the people who object to running down pedestrians have no problem with stealing cars in the same game! Others who will happily go on mass murder sprees in the game will draw the line at running over a sex worker you just paid so that your character can get the money back.

Why?

Because people are complicated.

In the case of the ratling babies in my own campaign, what happened was a combination of several factors:

• A general coarsening of the group’s morality in the face of hardships. (Something which has been commented on several times in recent sessions.)
• The perceived moral positioning of ratlings, with some of the players/characters perceiving them as being more like worgs or cannibalistic apes than human-equivalent sentients.
• The moral importance of the game world. The group was largely on the same bandwidth here, but there were definitely some players with a slightly more casual approach.

Because the players were mostly in alignment with each other – and also because they all had the same clear understanding that character actions were not player actions – these factors kind of balanced each other out: While one player might be slightly more cavalier than another, a player who was taking the world a little more seriously could nevertheless interpret those actions as being consistent with the other character “losing their moral compass,” and it would all sort of muddle out in a collective experience everyone was happy with.

Of course, this will not always be the case! It’s quite possible for disparate reactions to a moral dilemma to cause serious strife!

And the broader point is that, because moral dilemmas will naturally emerge from your narrative, you can’t dodge this issue by just saying, “Well, I just won’t include any moral dilemmas in the campaign, then.” You need to be aware and stay aware of what’s happening at your game table, and when player expectations get out of alignment you need to be prepared to hit the pause button and help everyone get back on the same page.

Safety tools – i.e., structures for having these conversations in clear and productive ways – are obviously helpful with this, and I particularly recommend using them if you’re playing with someone for the first time or with familiar players in a new genre. But a lot of safety tools are focused on identifying topics or themes, and moral dilemmas can often hit the group from unexpected angles and in unanticipated ways. So keep your eyes open!

Campaign Journal: Session 42B – Running the Campaign: Scouting Dungeons
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 41E: Return to the Lower Nests

By the time Agnarr had forced the board aside, Tee had joined him. She ducked through first, finding the ratlings waiting with another volley of fire that she narrowly dodged.

If she worked her way carefully down the tunnel in an effort to avoid the traps she knew were waiting, the ratlings would tear her apart with their rifle fire. Throwing caution to the wind, Tee threw herself down the hall – trusting to her instincts and reflexes to avoid the seemingly never-ending stream of dangers.

In Rulings in Practice: Traps, one of the advanced techniques I discuss is combining traps with combat encounters to make them more dynamic and fun in play. It’s a tip you’ll find — either implicitly or explicitly — in a bunch of GMing advice. But if you’re wondering exactly how to do this effectively, you can see on simple recipe for success in the current session: Position the traps as a dilemma gauntlet.

1. Fill a space with traps so that moving through that space becomes a dangerous gauntlet.
2. Put some or all of the bad guys on the far side of that gauntlet.
3. Give the bad guys the ability to attack the PCs while they’re on the far side of the gauntlet or moving through it. (This doesn’t have to be terribly fancy; any effective ranged attack will get the job done.)
4. Make the PCs aware that the traps exist. (Which may simply be accomplished when the PCs trigger the first trap and realize it may not be the only one.)

The PCs will now be faced with the simple dilemma of rushing through the trapped area (unleashing the fury of the traps) or trying to work their way carefully through the trap by detecting and/or disabling them (but also enduring the attacks of their enemies).

And here are a few ways to make things even nastier:

• Have some of the trap effects push them back to the beginning of the gauntlet. (Or set things up so that the NPCs can do the same.)
• Stock the gauntlet with traps that reset. (This prevents, or at least complicates, the strategy of having one character brute force their way through as a human mine detector, clearing the path for the rest of the party behind them.)
• Create the gauntlet in multiple stages, such that — when the PCs penetrate the first stage of the gauntlet — the bad guys can fall back through another section of traps and present them with the same dilemma all over again. (Or, rather than having the bad guys move from one stage to the next, simply position different groups of bad guys between each stage.)

Use them to season your dilemma gauntlet to taste.

You can set up dilemma gauntlets like this when you prep an adventure, but one of the great things about the simple dynamic of this setup is that it’s easy to deploy during play when you’re using adversary rosters to actively play the opposition in a scenario: Simply make note of where traps are located in the complex, and then have your bad guys position themselves to take advantage of them (or even lure the PCs into the gauntlet).

Even more fun is that the PCs can almost as easily create their own dilemma gauntlets: Once they learn where the traps in a dungeon are located, they can similarly force bad guys into the gauntlet. This may work less well, of course, if the bad guys know where the traps are located, but just knowing the traps are there may not help much when you’re getting pelted by ranged attacks.

Creating a dilemma gauntlet can also be useful when you’re restocking a dungeon area to reflect defensive measures being taken by the inhabitants: While the PCs are taking their long rest, the abeil are buzzing away setting (or resetting) layers of traps to help them defend the hive.

Campaign Journal: Session 42A – Running the Campaign: Killing Orc Babies
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index