DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 36D: Crypt of Webs

“Maybe it’s a magic box. Maybe our memories are trapped inside,” Ranthir said, only half-joking. “We just open the box and we get our memories back.”

But wishing the box open wouldn’t make it happen…

… unless they’d been over-looking the solution.

“What about the key from Pythoness House?” Tor asked. “The one that can open any lock?”

“Would that work?” Tee asked. “There were no moving parts in the lock.”

Ranthir shrugged. “I don’t know. It might.”

This moment from earlier in Session 36 – where the PCs abruptly realize, completely out of the blue and more than a dozen sessions after getting the all-key, exactly WHY they were looking for the all-key in the first place – is the one of those moments that would feel completely “wrong” in a film or book. After a hundred pages, the detective just suddenly realizes something for no reason? Just because? That feels forced and unsatisfying.

Authors, therefore, feel compelled to offer some explanation for what prompted the character’s sudden insight or new idea: Another character will say something innocuous, but it has a double meaning that ignites a light bulb! Or a beam of a light falls on something that jars their memory. Or a burnt out neon sign transforms its meaning. Or, if all else fails, a montage of flashbacks reveals the hidden pattern.

At the game table, though, these moments feel completely natural and are often deeply satisfying. Because they are, of course, really happening, in a way that the events of a novel or film can never be.

On the other hand, you might be looking at this and thinking: “Hang on… They found the all-key in Session 23 on June 7^th, and then they just… didn’t do anything with it until Session 36 on January 24^th? And the campaign just stalled for seven months?”

Well, no. The campaign didn’t stall. As you can see from the campaign journals, lots and lots and lots of stuff was happening. But this can be difficult to wrap your head around if you’re used to prepping and running linear scenarios and campaigns. In those campaigns, if the PCs don’t trigger the next scene or scenario in the sequence, then the whole campaign runs into a brick wall.

What we have in this case is a meta-scenario that’s running alongside the primary campaign structure. One of the great about meta-scenarios like this is that you can just let them simmer — often for very long spans of the time — while the main line(s) of the campaign continue apace.

But you can get similar results from any non-linear campaign structure: For example, in a hexcrawl the clues pointing the PCs to Siren’s Cove can be ignored for almost any length of time while the players are exploring any number of the other hexes available to them. Similarly, in a node-based campaign, the hook to a scenario can lie dormant while the PCs are busy engaging with the other options they have.

In some cases, these lengthy delays will be entirely due to the decisions the players are making: They know those clues point to Siren’s Cove and they could choose to go there at any time, but they were simply more interested in the Fane of Pandemonium and, while they were trapped within the Fane, the situation in Bluewood has turned into a crisis that they need to deal with immediately.

In other cases, though — like the current session — the players literally haven’t solved the mystery yet: They haven’t figured out how to decipher the map to Siren’s Cove. They don’t make the connection that “M.R.” are the initials of Montgomery Rosemount. They haven’t realized the all-key can unlock the box.

Those are the times when you can get the big payoff — that ultimate moment where they decipher the map, abruptly discover who the mystery “M.R.” is, or open the box that’s tantalized them for months or years — by just being willing to give your players the space to struggle for a while.

And what is the payoff?

It’s that little thrill you feel in knowing that if you HADN’T figured it out, the GM was never going to give it to you. It’s the tingling little frisson that runs up the spine when you discover that your actions in the game truly matter. There’s no script and you’re certainly not following it. The good stuff happened because YOU made it happen, and if you don’t want the bad stuff to happen, you’re going to have to try a little harder.

I said that this moment works in an RPG because it’s really happening, and that’s also the root of what makes the payoff so satisfying.

What can make these payoffs feel HUGE for the players is literally the anticipation: They’d been wondering what was inside this box for nearly two years at this point!

Of course, I’d figured that the pay-off for that wait would have come when they snagged the all-key… but it didn’t. They didn’t make the connection. And I really wanted to see that payoff. I’d been waiting for it, too! It was so tempting — and so easy! — to say something like, “Do y’all have any locks you haven’t been able to open?” or, “Do you remember that box your woke up with?” Or maybe I could have had them make an Intelligence check to see if one of them had the idea to use the all-key on the sealed box? (Ugh.)

But I didn’t succumb to that temptation, and the payoff was even better for it. Because it was worth the wait. And because it was their reward. They’d earned it. I hadn’t stuck my nose in and undermined their moment.

Of course, not every instance of “missing the obvious” will burn low for multiple sessions. Often the payoff comes a lot quicker. For example, at the end of this same session the PCs went looking for Alchestrin’s Tomb:

It was only a couple of hours before dusk and the sun was already low in the sky, but they felt they had already wasted enough time. They headed to the Necropolis, aware that they would need to finish their work there before darkness fell.

Once they had reached Darklock Hill, Dominic used his connection with the gods to fixate upon Alchestrin’s sigil and locate its nearest occurrence. He led them to a crudely built crypt with thick walls built from heavy stone slabs. Elestra recognized that these slabs were, in fact, repurposed stone sarsens. Several of them had the distinctive – yet heavily worn – sigil of Alchestrin worked into them.

This scenario was designed to be deliberately deceptive: Someone had scavenged the sarsens from the stone circle above Alchestrin’s Tomb and used them to build their own tomb nearby. So somebody looking for the tomb would likely spot Alchestrin’s sigil on the false tomb instead, become confused, and go on a little mini-dungeoncrawl.

At the actual table, though, I was surprised when Elestra made a point of specifically examining the sigils. I don’t remember exactly what skill check I called for, but she rolled well and would clearly recognize that the sigils were carved into stone sarsens that had been repurposed for the walls of this tomb.

At this point, I figured the jig was up: If the sarsens weren’t originally part of this tomb, then obviously this tomb couldn’t be Alchestrin’s Tomb.

But then the players… just didn’t see it. They missed the obvious.

It was only later, as more and more stuff about the false crypt didn’t add up, that Ranthir suddenly realized the importance of what Elestra had seen and doubled back to check his hypothesis.

“I think I have the answer,” Ranthir said, coming back down the stairs from above. “The stones on which Alchestrin’s sigil is marked are stone sarsens – originally designed as part of a stone circle. They must have been scavenged to build the walls of this crypt.”

Now, in this case I could have been tempted to fudge Elestra’s original check so that she wouldn’t learn that the walls were repurposed sarsens.

Or, after she made that check, I could have been tempted to spell it out and make the connection for her: “No, no. I said they were repurposed sarsens from a stone circle! So the sigil doesn’t belong to this crypt, but to wherever those stone sarsens came from!”

But how much more satisfying was it for the players to not only (a) finally make that conclusion for themselves, but also (b) realize that they’d had the solution the whole time and could have avoided the whole fiasco!

This wasn’t something that I had, as the GM, had done to them. I hadn’t pulled a fast one. I hadn’t cheated. And so the outcome was infinitely more satisfying on every level.

(And, of course, if it had all played out differently, that would have been okay, too. That is, after all, the whole point.)

Campaign Journal: Session 37A – Running the Campaign: The Adventure Not Taken
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index