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DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 40A: Rats of Kennel and of Brain

But it may have been for the best that Tee was watching. A piece of crumpled paper flew past her head and something about it caught her eye. Snatching it out of the air, she unfolded it to reveal a crude map.

Tee cleared her throat and held up the map. Agnarr turned around. His face split into a huge grin. “You see? You do search trash better than me!”

Tee wasn’t sure whether she should think of that as a compliment or not. She suspected not.

RPGs usually include some sort of Help action or Aid Another option, and if they don’t then you’ll probably want to figure out how you’re going to adjudicate it quickly, because it’s a pretty common situation to crop up during play.

(The two broad mechanical approaches are to either (a) have all of the helpers roll and take the best result or (b) have one of the characters “take point” as the primary check and have the helper(s) give a bonus or advantage to their roll. Check out Art of Rulings: Group Actions for a deeper dive on this topic.)

But the mechanical resolution, of course, is only half the picture, and this is where I see a lot of GMs make the same mistake: Someone declares an action, another player declares that they’re helping, the check is rolled… and then the helper disappears from the resolution. When the outcome is narrated, only the point person or highest roller is described as contributing to the success or failure of the action.

This is unfortunate.

First, it disenfranchises the helper. You have the opportunity to put multiple PCs in the spotlight simultaneously — seize it!

Second, it creates a mild dissociation between player and character. If the character’s actions are never reflected in the fiction, then the declaration of “I help!” at the game table has become a purely mechanical catechism that can rapidly degrade into a declaration gotcha.

Finally, as the GM, you’re missing out on the opportunity to draw inspiration from the characters’ collaboration to create novel interactions and descriptions. For example, when you’re describing how a character acting alone is going to “search X,” you can take some degree of inspiration from whatever X is (e.g., rummaging through a pile of garbage is different from tossing hotel room, which is different than searching a mobster’s office when you don’t want them to realize anyone was here), but as this basic action pattern is repeated dozens or hundreds of times over the course of a campaign, you’ll discover that there are only to many ways to describe it.

As soon as you add a second character, on the other hand, the potential dynamics of the check can multiply exponentially.

IN PRACTICE

To put this into practice, start by encouraging the players to work collaboratively and help each other. If your game of choice doesn’t already have an Aid action or the like, don’t just think about how you might resolve these actions, but come up with a concrete solution and let the players know that it’s an option.

Then, when a player announces that their character is going to help on a check, prime the pump for yourself by asking the player how they’re actually helping. The declaration to help is just like any other action declaration: It needs to be actionable in the fiction, and therefore you need player expertise to actually activate character expertise. You need to be able to clearly visualize what the character is doing and how they’re doing it so that you can resolve the action.

Finally, depending on the specific mechanics in your current system, you may be able to pull additional inspiration from the dice results — e.g., who had the best roll vs. who had the worst.

However, don’t fall into a default of simply determining which character “actually succeeded” while the others failed. That’s an option, but it’s only one option among a vastly larger variety of true collaborations in which multiple characters contributed to the final success.

Along these same lines, instead of imagining all the characters doing the same thing, try to think about how they could each be doing completely different things that are all contributing to success in different ways.

One way of doing this is to work backwards: Look at the result of the check (whether success or failure) and think about how that result could be split up into distinct chunks. Then simply give each chunk to a different character and explain how their actions achieved it (or caused it). Gathering information or research is an easy example of this, where you might have three or four different facts about a topic — e.g., where the target works, where they live, who they’re married to, who they’re having an affair with — and if the PCs are all doing the legwork, you just need to assign each fact to a different PC and give a brief explanation for how they found it. Creates a little extra texture for the game world and makes everyone at the table feel included.

(Note how you’ll also get more interesting failures with multifaceted consequences out of this, too!)

While doing this, try to avoid an unconscious bias about what it means to Help on a check. I, personally, find it easy to imagine the person on point in the check or rolling highest to be the one actually doing the work, while others kind of hover around them, run around as gofers, or offer helpful advice. But, depending on the interaction, it’s just as easy to imagine the experienced character mentoring, overwatching, and/or advising a team effort where it’s actually all the other characters who putting in the work under their guidance.

For example, you might imagine that Agnarr’s player was the one making the check in this scene, since it was Agnarr who was actually digging through the pile. But it was actually Tee’s player who made the check, receiving the +2 bonus for Aid Another from Agnarr. In this case, if I recall correctly, it was actually Tee’s player who proposed that she’d just keep an eye on the garbage Agnarr was throwing around, making my job as the DM describing the outcome incredible easy.

Campaign Journal: Session 40B – Running the Campaign: One Scenario or Two?
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

SESSION 40A: RATS OF KENNEL AND OF BRAIN

July 25th, 2009
The 22nd Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

The tunnel was long enough to take them out of the bridge, and, judging by the damp stench filling the air, they suspected they were drawing near the sewer system. A little further on the tunnel dipped steeply and Tee, who was scouting ahead of the others, found herself entering some sort of warren-like antechamber: More of the ratmens’ refuse nests pocked the corners of the room, but the filth here was thicker and viler, forming a thick and treacherous carpet of trash on the floor. There were two archways in the far walls of the room, each veiled by a ragged tapestry of blue fabric.

A closer inspection revealed that there were actually two or three ratmen sleeping here and there amid the refuse piles. With a smile, Tee notched an arrow in her bow and fired at the nearest one.

The arrow neatly pierced its jugular, ending its life silently. Tee turned her bow to the next—

Unfortunately, there was a fully awake ratling crouching in one corner that Tee hadn’t noticed. He gave a cry and fired a dragon pistol at her head. Tee narrowly dodged the blast, but the other ratlings were beginning to stir.

Agnarr and Tor came charging into the room. They converged on the ratling firing on Tee, even as he fled towards one of the veiled archways. They easily cut him down as Tee caught another ratling in mid-charge with a second arrow.

Unfortunately, the last of the ratlings managed to duck out of the other archway before they could stop him.

Tor quickly took up a watchful station in the second archway. Agnarr called out for Tee to wait, but she was hot on the heels of the escaping ratling. Passing through the arch, she found herself in another trash-filled chamber –  this one nest-less, but with deeply-rutted paths leading through more tapestried archways. One of these tapestries was still rustling and, in the absence of any wind, Tee guessed that the ratling had gone that way.

Passing through this second archway, however, Tee came face-to-face with nearly half a dozen ratlings who were being rallied in a squeaking, gibbering mass by the ratling she had been pursuing. With a little squeak of her own, Tee backpedaled into the antechamber.

Agnarr, Nasira, and Ranthir, meanwhile, had quickly gathered themselves. As Tee fell back, they came charging forward. A brief and chaotic skirmish erupted as more ratlings – attracted by the sound of the battle – came pouring into the antechamber from the other archway. But once they managed to bring their full force to bear they were able to quickly overwhelm the terrified ratlings.

With Tor and Elestra keeping an eye on the explored archway (to make sure they didn’t have any more uninvited guests), Tee performed a quick, cursory search through the nesting chambers.

She found nothing of interest. But Agnarr, who had been following her around, grunted. “Don’t you want to search more of that?”

Tee eyed the fecal-filled refuse piles. “I want to keep moving. Why don’t you search them?”

Agnarr shrugged. “You search trash better than I do.”

Tee turned towards where the others were waiting, but Agnarr was now convinced that there must be something valuable hidden somewhere under the refuse piles. He started digging through them with gusto and seemingly endless enthusiasm, sending trash flying through the air.

“What’s going on?” Nasira asked.

“Agnarr’s throwing trash around,” Tee said, watching the whole thing with a bemused look on her face. She was trying to keep a safe distance, but Agnarr was achieving some impressive distance on his flurrious cloud of trash.

But it may have been for the best that Tee was watching. A piece of crumpled paper flew past her head and something about it caught her eye. Snatching it out of the air, she unfolded it to reveal a crude map:

Tee cleared her throat and held up the map. Agnarr turned around. His face split into a huge grin. “You see? You do search trash better than me!”

Tee wasn’t sure whether she should think of that as a compliment or not. She suspected not.

RATS OF KENNEL AND OF BRAIN

The archway Tor and Elestra had been watching opened into a much larger chamber. Much larger mounds of garbage were piled high near their end of the chamber, but these petered out a little further to the south, allowing clear access to a western and a southern tunnel out of the room.

The southwestern corner of the chamber had been boxed in with an eclectic assemblage of wooden slats and this immediately attracted Tee’s interest. She stole her way across the chamber (pausing only for a moment when she noticed a green, effervescent glow at the far end of the western tunnel) and peered over the edge of the make-shift fencing.

Inside were several dire rats with leather hoods tied around their heads. She grimaced and pulled out her dragon pistol: The last thing they needed were trained attack rats being used against them.

But then a sudden realization made her stop.

Elestra, who had carelessly followed her across the chamber, looked over her shoulder. “Why don’t you shoot them?”

“I think they’re the kennel rats,” Tee said. “They can take us to Malleck.”

They resolved to come back later and use one of the kennel rats to reach the Temple of the Ebon Hand, but first they wanted to finish routing out this nest. “We don’t want to give them time to reinforce,” Ranthir said.

Tee nodded. “They aren’t expecting us right now. That gives us an edge. Next time they’ll be waiting for us.”

Tee didn’t trust effervescent green lights, so they decided to explore the western tunnel next. The roof and walls of the tunnel were slick and wet, and a thick, turgid liquid was slowly dripping down onto the floor below to form deep puddles. Tee, not wanting to risk an untimely splash, used her boots of levitation to pull herself along.

She stopped at the far end tunnel, looking into a long cavern. Toxic sewage seeped down into a long crevasse that ran the length of the chamber, and it was from this that the sickly green light emanated. Every surface glistened with moisture, and sopping wet refuse had been gathered into mounds here and there.

Situated around the cesspool crevasse were five massive ratbrutes sitting in what appeared to be meditative trances: Their eyes were open, but milky white and seemingly sightless. Crawling over these ratbrutes were swarms of large, over-sized rats – the tops of their skulls translucent, revealing swollen, enlarged brains which glowed with an unearthly blue aura.

“That’s disgusting,” Tee murmured. “Disgusting and disturbing.”

She returned to the others and they decided to try mounting an assault.

They made their way back down the dripping tunnel as quietly as they could, but the rats were waiting for them. As the twisting swarm of bulbous-brained rats rippled towards them, blasts of distorted air struck at them. Agnarr’s senses were immediately dulled at their touch, sending him into a kind of dazed stupor.

“They’re mind blasts!” Ranthir cried.

“Wait,” Tor said. “Mind blasts? Why is Agnarr affected?”

The transparent skulls of the rats revealed brains seething with bursting pulses of pure energy.

Ranthir was the next to feel their stupor-inducing telepathic assault overwhelm his mind, and then the swarms began sending out blasts of magical blue energy – their collective mental might serving as some sort of living focal point.

The cranium rats swarmed under Tee’s floating feet and climbed up like furry fountains around Tor and the quiescent Agnarr – their filthy claws and yellowed teeth tearing at any bit of exposed flesh, while others burrowed into their armor.

“Should we attack the ratbrutes?” Tee asked, trying to dodge the blasts of blue energy.

“I don’t want to risk waking them up!” Tor said, staggering in a desperate effort to keep the rats from reaching Nasira and Elestra.

“I don’t think they’re sleeping! I think they’re controlling these brain rats!”

Tor could give no answer: The mind blasts of the rats had overwhelmed him.

Elestra rallied briefly – in the process managing to blast the swarming rats away from the stupefied fighters – but in that instant Tee saw the blind ratbrutes stagger to their feet.

“We’ll leave!” she shouted. “Call off your rats and we’ll leave!”

Everything suddenly fell perfectly still. The moment stretched for a tense eternity, and then the cranium rats swarmed into the middle of the slippery tunnel and stared deliberately up at where Tee clung to the ceiling.

Keeping her eyes focused on them, Tee carefully levitated over them and picked her way back down the tunnel. The cranium rats followed her with their eyes, but held their place. Tee lowered herself to the floor and directed Nasira and Elestra in gathering up Agnarr, Tor, and Ranthir. Together they led them out of the complex and back the way they had come.

Running the Campaign: Show the Help – Campaign Journal: Session 40B
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

M. asks:

I want to run a post-apocalyptic campaign with the PCs stuck in the middle of a war between multiple factions, but I’m struggling to set it up. I want a lot of inter-factional politics and for the struggle just to survive to be a big part of things. The PCs should start as grunts, but I’d like them to get more involved in the decision-making later on. I’ve read So You Want to Be a Game Master, but what do I actually prep? Should I write up the whole military campaign as a hexcrawl?

To get started, let’s keep it simple.

Your campaign is going to start with an EPISODIC STRUCTURE with mission-based scenarios: The PCs are grunts. Maybe for a specific military. Maybe as part of a small band of scavengers trying to survive w while the larger war rages around them. Or maybe they’re mercs getting orders from different factions each week.

Regardless, your basic scenario hook is simple: They get orders to DO A THING from their commanding officer or scavenge elder or whatever.

And, from that, the basic rhythm of play will flow pretty naturally: They go and do the thing (or fail to do the thing). Then they go back to their commanding officer and they get their next mission.

Each MISSION is a scenario. You told me you have So You Want to Be a Game Master, and that book is primarily designed around scenario structures — how to design and run different types of scenarios.

DUNGEON SCENARIOS

• The enemy has dug a tunnel network; we need you to go and clear it out.
• We’ve discovered an old Fallout-style Vault. We need you to explore it and verify there’s no enemy presence.

RAID SCENARIOS

• We need you to take out the enemy’s mobile transmission tower.
• We’ve found a secret tunnel going into Base Frozen Alpha. Use the tunnel to infiltrate the base, then lower the shields.

And so forth.

As a general rule, though, giving the PCs a specific objective, but leaving the players free to figure out HOW they want to achieve that goal will result in more interesting and engaging scenarios.

After running a couple of these missions, you might want to get a little fancy by experimenting with surprising scenario hooks. (For example, the PCs are sent to clear out a tunnel network suspected to be infested with enemies, but when they arrive they instead find it full of refugees. What do they do?)

But mostly you can keep it straightforward. Expect to run at least a half dozen of these scenarios to kick things off. During this time you’ll be learning a lot about the game, scenario design, your group, etc. Design each new mission based on (a) what the PCs are doing, (b) how their actions are affecting the world, and (c) what the PCs’ goals are/become.

• Look at things they care about, put them at risk, and say: “How do you save them?”
• Plague them with hardship (an enemy has infested their food supply with a bio-weapon), listen to the solutions they propose (“let’s raid their food depots!”), and then design the next scenario so that they can go and do that.

Along these same lines, have the mission outcomes be big and meaningful:

• If they find a large cache of rations, make a point of how the lives of their scavenge band have improved. Little Timmy, who was all skin-and-bones, is actually looking healthy!
• If they fail to take out an enemy communication tower, their unit gets ambushed. Now they’re on the run, pushed back by the enemy (and we need to scout out Death Rock Canyon to make sure there aren’t any muties laying an ambush before we can escape through it!) and their friends are crippled or dead.

Honestly, you could run the whole campaign like this and accomplish a lot of what you want to accomplish, but after running a bunch of episodic scenarios, you may be in a place where you want to reposition the PCs from “somebody tells you what to do” to “you need to figure out what to do.” This means putting the players in the driver’s seat so that you can directly engage them with the type of deep conflicts and meaningful choices you want to happen in this campaign.

This is the point where you’ll need to transition to a different campaign structure.

The first thing you’ll need to do, though, is look at how this shift happens diegetically: The PCs have been taking orders, now they’re not. Why?

• Maybe the leaders of their scavenger band get assassinated when they go to a meeting. Or blown up by a radiation bomb. However it happens, the PCs are now in charge of the scavenger band.
• If they’re military grunts, maybe they get assigned as an advanced scout team to explore a new region (where they’ll largely be autonomous in their operations).

You might plan ahead for this, but the nature of the diegetic shift may also develop organically through play.

The second thing, in my opinion, if you’re going to have the players making big, strategic choices that will affect the course of the war, then you need to give them some sort concrete structure to base those choices on.

This doesn’t have to be super robust. You don’t need to design a fully functional 4X strategy game. But you want something that will guide your own rulings and, by extension, let them make meaningful choices instead of just trying to influence your whim.

The most basic structure here is:

• A list of resources (food, ammunition, etc.) and where they’re produced/storehoused.
• A list of infrastructure (population/settlements, military units, etc.) and the cost in resources to maintain it per month, season, year, or whatever other time period makes sense.
• An understanding that a resource shortfall will result in either severe consequences for a piece of infrastructure or cause that infrastructure to collapse entirely.

The exact lists you use here will depend a lot on what you’ve discovered about the world, game, players, and characters while running the episodic portion of the campaign. (And you can actually start laying the groundwork for this stuff and experimenting a bit before the PCs are in a decision-making position.)

I recommend also adding FACTION DOWNTIME to this. A system for this is included in So You Want to be a Game Master, p. 342, and you should be able to adapt it pretty easily. The basic idea is that various factions will have agendas and they’ll be able to pursue those agendas as the campaign clock ticks forward. It’ll be up to the PCs to figure out which agendas they want to support, which they oppose, and which they ignore.

Since this is a military campaign, it’s also likely that you’ll want some sort of structure/system for resolving MASS BATTLES. What exactly this will look like will likely depend a lot on which RPG system you’re using and how large the conflict really is, but it’s once again something that doesn’t have to be super complicated in order to be effective.

Finally, make sure that (a) these three structures are linked to each other (e.g. specific faction projects should require specific resources; claiming those resources — or denying them to another faction — will likely require military action) and (b) the PCs can still take meaningful individual actions (i.e., go on adventures) to influence and/or participate in each structure (e.g., instead of a military action, they can go on an adventure to get the necessary resources; they can participate in the battles; they can provide security for the scientists researching the lunar lycanthrope raygun).

Along these lines, at this stage of the campaign (or perhaps even earlier), you may it useful to start experimenting with troupe-style play, in which each player controls a stable of characters and chooses which character they’ll play in each scenario depending on what the focus of the scenario is.

Go to Ask the Alexandrian #14

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