DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 34C: Back in the Tower Again

Tee slapped Elestra out of her hypnotic trance and then headed for the door.

“Tee! Wait!” Elestra called. “Help me finish off the whatsit!”

The quasit popped out of thin air and raked at Elestra’s throat, sending blood pouring down her chest. It hissed with a sneer. “Don’t call me a whatsit!”

Tor retreated back into the tower. Dominic, having finally freed himself from Ibulli’s web, infused him with a wash of divine energy that closed his wounds and soothed his battered limbs and then sent him back into the fight outside.

Ibulli flew down from above.

“She’s flying now!” Elestra cried. “That’s not fair!”

We’ve previously discussed the value of developing a toolkit of basic tactical techniques as a GM — e.g., in Half Across the River and Hear the Reinforcements. The technique that I’m referring to as an ornate checkpoint is actually one that I first discovered while running this specific adventure designed by Monte Cook.

The basic idea can be seen in Area 3 on the dungeon map:

This tower creates a chokepoint between Area 1 and Area 5. A similar effect, of course, could be created by just having a single door leading directly from Area 1 to Area 5 (as we discussed at greater length in Battles at the Door during the previous session), but in practice, the fact that Area 3 is a distinct liminal space had a profound impact on the complexity of the tactics that both the PCs and NPCs were able to employ.

Meanwhile, below, Tor threw himself against the tower door and burst it open. The inside of the tower was bereft of interior walls with a floor of sandy, hard-packed dirt. A broken staircase wound its way around the inner wall of the tower, up to a trapdoor in the ceiling above.

By the time Tor burst in, Gavele had already crossed the entire tower (with seemingly preternatural speed). Tor and Agnarr raced to catch her, but she managed to wrench open the far door, slip through it, and slam it shut behind her.

The effect was further enhanced by the vertical design of Area 3. This included windows looking out into the other areas, which created unusual multiple access points. The staircase and webs also made Area 3 an interesting tactical arena in its own right, and the presence of Area 4 above actually made it a multi-directional chokepoint.

Take all of these elements together, and you can easily see both the opportunities and challenges that are created for the PCs.

Of course, this works best when you’re running the dungeon as a theater of operations, and you can see that during this fight, with the PCs engaging foes across Areas 1, 3, 4, 5, and 7, with additional reinforcements also coming up from the south. (And Area 7 is a multi-level area in its own right.)

Here are a few random tips I’ve learned while designing and running ornate chokepoints:

• They don’t have to be ultra-complicated. In fact, they don’t need to be complicated at all.
• Personally, I find the imagery of an “airlock” useful. The ornate chokepoint is the transition between two much larger and more complicated regions of the dungeon.
• You might find the idea of the ornate chokepoint being a “pivot” more evocative. Sometimes I think of it as a “gravity well,” with the focus of the dungeon being drawn into the chokepoint.
• For the ornate chokepoint to truly come alive, you’ll want to make sure to challenge the PCs from multiple directions. If you don’t, the ornate chokepoint will usually just collapse back into a simple doorway. (For example, imagine if the PCs in this session weren’t being harried by aranea and quasits from Area 4. The dynamics of the fight would have collapsed into the doorway between Areas 3 and 5. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, of course, particularly if the PCs have earned their victory on one of the fronts.)
• This, of course, can also be very dangerous, since it can easily result in the PCs being cut off from retreat. (That’s one the tactical challenges of the ornate chokepoint, but doesn’t make it any less catastrophic if the fight turns against them.) This is where designing the ornate chokepoint as a multi-directional chokepoint can be very useful: You can pressure them from two directions, while still giving them the opportunity for escape along a third.
• Often you’ll discover – or the players will force you to discover! – an ornate chokepoint during play. This will happen more often if you make sure random encounters can approach the PCs from any direction (most notably, the rear), particularly if those encounters are being triggered due to the noise from combat.

Of course, not every ornate chokepoint you include in a dungeon will automatically become an Epic Fight Scene™. But scatter a few of them around the place, run dynamic fights across a theater of operations, and see where the game takes you!

Campaign Journal: Session 34D – Running the Campaign: Combat Verticality
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 34B: Webs of Ambush and Betrayal

Tor, scarcely slowed by the lightning that had seared him, reached the spider-like creature. He cut a gash along its other side, causing it to cry out. “Gavele! Help me!”

Gavele shook her head. “You’re on your own Ibulli!” She slammed the door shut – thwarting Tee, who had just bounded back to her feet once again.

“Damn you, bell bitch!” The spider-thing skittered up the wall of the tower.

In most RPGs, the players form a team that works together to overcome the challenges that the game world presents to them. The world, of course, is created, controlled, and played by the GM.

This means, of course, that there’s a fundamental opposition between the players and the GM at the table. Yes, the GM is also acting as a neutral arbiter. And, yes, there are other layers of interaction in which the GM and the players are all cooperating towards a common end.

But this doesn’t mean that the opposition doesn’t exist. It just means that, like a high-grade steel, it is tempered and alloyed.

Of course, when the opposition is NOT tempered and kept in balance, all kinds of bad stuff can happen at the table.

One of the most dramatic examples of this is the antagonistic GM or killer GM, who believes their job is to crush, mangle, and destroy the PCs in the name of “challenging” them. This doesn’t work, of course, because the GM controls the world, making it trivial for them to destroy the PCs if that’s their goal.

But there are subtler traps that this fundamental opposition can trick us into as a GM.

For example, it’s quite easy to accidentally transition from GM vs. players to world vs. players.

But the game world, of course, should be more fractured and complicated than that. All of your NPCs may have their actions masterminded by a single puppeteer, but they don’t know that!

I’ve previously talked about how you can place your PCs into a nest of friendly factions, but you can get equally interesting play by making sure your enemies are factionalized, too. (And the difference between friend and foe, of course, may be anything but clear.)

Having enemy factions working against each other can provide a rich engine for generating new scenarios in your campaign. For example, think about how a police force needs to respond to a gang war. Or the opportunities for created for shadowrunners during a hostile corporate takeover. Or the infinite skullduggeries unleashed during a political campaign.

The friction between factions also provides all kinds of grist for the roleplaying mills, as can be seen in the interaction between Gavele and Ibulli above. PCs can obviously also be drawn into these interactions, whether to choose a side, negotiate a peace, or simply try to weather the storm.

Even better, PCs who learn about these divisions and rivalries will have the opportunity to take advantage of them! Dominic, for example, does so in a rather blunt (but nonetheless effective) fashion:

The charge came close to routing them, but then a ratling and a ratbrute emerged from the building. The ratbrute was unslinging a greatsword of leviathan proportions while the ratling lowered another of the dilapidated dragon rifles and—

“Two hundred gold pieces for each of you if you attack the dwarf instead!” Dominic was still struggling in the goopy web, but he shouted out the offer in a voice laced with sincerity.

The ratling hesitated. Then he turned to his companion with a sly grin. “I never liked that dwarf anyway.”

The ratling started to lower his rifle and turned back towards the building.

“TRAITOR!” the ratbrute cried in a thick, lumbering voice. It brought its greatsword crashing down towards the smaller ratling, who barely managed to turn the skull-crushing blow into a merely laming shoulder wound.

The ratling stumbled back, shooting at the ratbrute with his rifle. The shot went wild, but a second shot – coming from the interior of the building – struck the ratbrute in the chest. The stench of burning rat fur filled the air.

As can also be seen directly in this session, adding faction-based play to a dungeon can deeply enrich the experience, adding whole new dimensions to your scenario.

Along these lines, you may also want to check out Keep on the Borderlands: Factions in the Dungeon.

Campaign Journal: Session 34C – Running the Campaign: Ornate Chokepoints
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 34A: In the Dust of the Old City

You can assure Reggaloch that additional slaves will be sent to him within the week. We have become very interested to discover what our Brothers of Venom are doing that requires such a constant flow of common flock. We have asked Illadras, but she has told us not to concern ourselves with it. Be cautious, but discover what you can.

Urnest

Sauron and Saruman.

The similarity in their names — and the confusion it’s engendered in generations of book-readers and film-watchers — is often held up as a cautionary tale to writers: If character names are too similar to each other, it will make it difficult for your readers to differentiate them.

In the specific case of Sauron and Saruman, the confusion was so feared that, infamously, Saruman’s name was changed to Aruman in Ralph Bakshi’s animated version of The Lord of the Rings.

The questionable wisdom of Bakshi’s decision aside, this is nevertheless advice also well-heeded by GMs.

This confusion of names is actually something I ran afoul of in this session. In brief:

• Urnst is the name of the Commissar who rules the city of Ptolus.
• Urnest is the name of a chaos cultist based out of the Temple of the Rat God.

So when my players encountered this note from Urnest, the entire group was suddenly filled with dread: Oh, no! The Commissar is in league with the cultists!

… and this was despite the fact that they’d already made this mistake once before.

In that older installment of Running the Campaign, I talked about how and why you can maneuver your way out of that situation, but I wanted to approach it from a slightly different angle today: While acknowledging the logistical challenges that can be created by similar names, why would you want to nevertheless have similar names?

First, if you’re dealing with a sufficiently large cast of characters (which is not unusual in a long-running RPG campaign), it can simply be a matter of necessity. For example, you’ll sometimes hear the Sauron/Saruman rule given as, “You should never have two character names with the same first letter.”

Except that would mean never including more than twenty-six characters, and then only if you’re willing to include some exotic X’s and Z’s and the like. (Although this is quite a bit easier in your typical fantasy fare.)

Second, there could by any number of practical reasons for doing so. Tolkien, for example, may have chosen the names deliberately for their similarity and the thematic resonance it would have in the book. Or, because the names were ultimately derived from the languages he had created from Middle Earth, the linguistic world-building may have been the most important factor for him. (He never commented on this issue, so we don’t really know if it ever occurred to him.)

Similarly, in the Ptolus sourcebook there are two more characters named Urnst: Vladimir and Taltos Urnst are alchemists operating a shop in the Undercity. Unlike Urnest, however, the similarity of their names to Commissar Igor Urnst is not a coincidence, as they “claim to be distant cousins of the Commissar…”

When you have similarly named characters, though, there are a few things you can do to help your players (and maybe even yourself) keep things straight:

• Keep the characters in different spheres of the campaign from each other — different locations or different factions, for example.
• Is there a different name that they could be referred to? (A first name or nickname, for example.)
• Give one or more of the characters a title (Lord, Chancellor, Empress) and use it consistently to distinguish the characters.
• Provide context reminders to help nudge your players’ memory (e.g., “Tessa, who you meet at the tavern last week…”).

Some of these tips are a good idea even if the character’s name ISN’T similar to anyone else!

Campaign Journal: Session 34B – Running the Campaign: TBD
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 33E: Maggots & Ratsbane

Someone threw themselves against the door Dominic and Tor were propping themselves against. It barely budged. They glanced at each and made a quick, unspoken decision. Dominic stepped away and Tor, timing things perfectly, yanked the door open at precisely the right moment.

A young elf woman – ebon-skinned like Shilukar – came stumbling through, thrown off-balance by the sudden disappearance of the door she had been planning to throw herself against.

Dominic and Tor were quick to take advantage – the former’s mace crushing her upper arm and Tor’s sword cutting deep into her thigh. She stumbled further down the hall, shouting over her shoulder. “Theral! There are six of them! Grealdan’s dead!”

Dominic looked through the open door and spotted Theral – the Brother of Venom that Tee had seen discovering Reggaloch’s body – beginning to cast a spell. He promptly slammed the door shut.

Back in Session 13B: The Tragedy at the Door, the PCs lost control of a doorway and nearly paid the ultimate price. In this session you can see them take control of a doorway and repeatedly use it to their advantage during the fight.

I often see doors getting ignored during fights. I think part of that is tied into some of the issues I discussed in Dungeon as a Theater of Operations: We have a tendency to get strongly locked into the idea that there’s a “fight keyed to Area 5” and, therefore, the fight takes place in Area 5 (and nowhere else). This, of course, frequently eliminates the door leading into Area 5 as being irrelevant.

I’m uncertain how much the proliferation of VTTs may be affecting this (since they often persistently feature the entire map of the dungeon), but “put the PCs in the room and then start the fight” is an attitude that you can even find infecting published adventures.

But just look at what a door can do for you! (Or to you.)

They’re natural chokepoints, allowing small groups (like PCs) to control their front line against much larger groups.

They can be used to control line of sight (and also effect), as seen here with Dominic using a readied action to slam the door shut and negate an enemy spellcaster’s entire action.

They can be used to separate groups, tactically isolating them and allowing them to be defeated in detail. (This is similar to attacking an enemy force when they’re halfway across the river.)

Conversely, if you move through a door and engage an enemy on the opposite side, then the doorway becomes your means of retreat. If you lose control of the doorway or are otherwise cut off from the doorway, then you’ll become trapped.

If someone is holding a door and using it against you, then you need to develop some method for breaching the door. (Or, alternatively, creating an alternative method of egress — using a window, teleporting, blasting a hole in the wall, turning ethereal, etc.)

In practice, of course, all of these myriad tactical considerations will be swirling around each other in the chaos of battle.

And we haven’t even started looking at doors with special features!

• How can a trapped door be used to your advantage during a fight? (Particularly if the trap resets whenever the door is shut.)
• What about doors that have magical effects attached to them? (Like magic portals!)
• You can get similar effects with non-magical portals, too! (For example, you might have a portcullis that’s rigged to come crashing down when someone pulls a lever.)

Some of these will create unique tactical opportunities. Others will simply complicate the ones we’ve already discussed!

Campaign Journal: Session 34A – Running the Campaign: A Confusion of Names
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 33D: The Hell Hound at the Door

At the far end of the room there was a small wooden bookshelf containing a dozen assorted volumes. These, of course, caught the particular attention Ranthir, who was also delighted to discover that one of them was a thick tome of spells.

Ranthir was not able to study the spellbook completely, but the illustrations of eyes being burnt away with acid were enough to leave him concerned.

NPC spellbooks are a huge pain in the ass to prep.

I’ve previously shared a tip for improvising NPC spell lists, but when it comes to their spellbooks, there is no shuffling: You mostly just need to commit yourself to the rote task of writing down lists of spells for each level.

I guess there is one potential cheat: Just replicate the caster’s prepared spell list and call it “good enough” for the spellbook, but I generally try to include at least two or three “extra” spells per level. (Partly for the sake of verisimilitude. Partly because it gives me some stuff to play with if the spellcaster should become a recurring characters. See, also, The Principles of RPG Villainy.)

I heartily recommend prepping these spellbooks as handouts. You don’t have to get fancy or anything: But a prepared piece of paper with all the spells listed on it that you can hand to the player at the table is just a great way of making the spellbook a concrete and persistent resource.

Way back in Session 3, we actually saw Ranthir loot Collus’ spellbook:

COLLUS’ SPELLBOOK

0 – acid splash, arcane mark, dancing lights, daze, detect magic, detect poison, disrupt undead, flare, ghost sound, light, mage hand, mending, message, open/close, prestidigitation, ray of frost, read magic, resistance, touch of fatigue

1^st – animate rope, burning hands, comprehend languages, detect undead, feather fall, floating disk, shield

For a low-level wizard, this was a treasure trove of new spells. Deciphering and copying this spellbook became a significant, long-term project for Ranthir. In every spare moment he could afford— and Ptolus certainly makes it difficult to find a spare moment! — Ranthir bunkered down and studied. You can find references to this in Session 7 of the campaign journal, but it was actually happening quite regularly:

Dominic expended himself in channeling the holy energy of Athor to heal as many of their wounds as he could. Elestra’s battered body was restored entirely and Ranthir was left with only a weariness from the blood he had lost. But the painful wounds to either side of Agnarr’s neck refused to close and, after inspecting them, Dominic concluded that Agnarr would need a full day of rest under his ministrations.

So Dominic settled into Agnarr’s room, praying occasionally and generally tending to his wounds. Ranthir retired to his own bed and set to work copying an additional spell from Collus’ spellbook into his own that would allow him to detect the presence of the undead – he wasn’t sure why, but he had a sneaking suspicion it might come in handy.

Magic being as powerful and versatile as it is, of course, the power unlocked by virtue of an NPC’s spellbook can often be the greatest and most valuable of treasures. In Session 12, for example, there was a direct pay-off for all of Ranthir’s hard work:

Tee led them to the river’s edge and then glowered down at it. Seeing the noxious water again – the edges of the cavern floor corroded and blackened where it met the river – did nothing to distill her fears. She had no interest in trying to wade these waters, no matter how calm the current might be.

Ranthir, however, was able to tentatively offer a possible solution. He had never stopped using the few spare moments in his day to study the spellbook they had wrested from the body of Collus (Toridan Cran’s arcanist), and one of the spells he had deciphered from its contents would allow him to conjure forth a floating disc of pure energy. It was a small disc and would only carry one of them at a time – but it should be a relatively trivial matter for him to ferry them across the river and, when the time came, to ferry them back again.

With the spellbook as a tangible prop (tucked away with the PC’s character sheet) and its study as a project, an NPC’s spellbook becomes a lovely and persistent reminder of everything that the PCs have accomplished — their history made manifest in the present.

I also love to use NPC spellbooks as a delivery mechanism for non-core spells. This might be a spell of my own creation, but more often than not I’m just culling awesome stuff from a variety of supplements. Perusing Vocaetun’s spellbook, for example, gave Ranthir access to a couple new spells:

VOCAETUN’S SPELLBOOK

0—acid splash, arcane mark, assess creature, dancing lights, daze, detect magic, detect poison, disrupt undead, flare, ghost sound, light, mage hand, mending, message, open/close, ray of frost, read magic, resistance, touch of fatigue

1st—acidic curse, color spray, comprehend languages, endure elements, protection from chaos, protection from law, ray of enfeeblement, reduce person, shield, silent image

2nd—invisibility, minor image, mirror image, obscure object

3rd—displacement, fly.

Assess Creature
Divination
Level: Brd 1, Clr 0, Drd 0, Rng 1, Pal 1, Sor/Wiz 0
Components: S
Casting Time: One standard action
Range: Close (25 feet + 5 feet/two levels)
Target: One creature
Duration: Instantaneous
Saving Throw: Will negates
Spell Resistance: Yes

With a wave of your hand, you determine the Hit Dice of one creature. This spell is foiled by any type of magical disguise, polymorph or shapechange.

Acidic Curse
Evocation [Acid]
Level: Sor/Wiz1
Components: V, S, M
Casting Time: 1 standard action
Range: Close (25 feet + 5 feet/two levels)
Target: One creature with eyes
Duration: Instantaneous
Saving Throw: Fortitude negates
Spell Resistance: Yes

You cause a victim’s eyes to fill with acid, inflicting 1d6 points of acid damage and blinding the target for 1d4 rounds. Creatures who suffer no damage from the acid (due to a successful saving throw, an immunity, or a spell granting resistance) are not blind.

Material Component: A bit of ragweed.

Open Game License

Using loot as a vector for delivering original spell content was once quite common in the earliest days of the game, when the core rulebooks featured only a paucity of spells that were “commonly” known. Then, as now, when your players learn the benefits of getting their claws on a spellbook, an encounter with an NPC throwing around strange eldritch arts becomes not only terrifying, but also exciting — redolent with the promise that they’ll soon have the opportunity to loot and learn those arts for themselves.

Campaign Journal: Session 33E – Running the Campaign: Battles at the Door
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index