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

Go to Part 1

From 2018 to 2020, I ran an open table set in the dungeons of Castle Blackmoor.

If you’re not familiar with Blackmoor, it’s THE original D&D dungeon. Created by Dave Arneson in the early ‘70s, the very first people to ever play a modern roleplaying game crawled through its tunnels. When Arneson took the game to Lake Geneva and ran it for Gary Gygax, these were the rooms that Gygax’s character hacked and slashed his way through.

In 1977, Judges Guild published Arneson’s The First Fantasy Campaign. Although deliberately incomplete (because Arneson wanted to keep secrets from the people still playing in his campaign) and often frustratingly impenetrable (because Arneson sort of just gave Judges Guild a stack of various notes, drawn from multiple periods of time and with little indication of their context, intent, or even relation to each other), this slim tome provides a unique and irreplaceable insight into the early days of the RPG hobby and the campaign that gave birth to D&D.

In particular, as detailed in my Running Castle Blackmoor series, The First Fantasy Campaign includes a copy of Arneson’s dungeon maps and enough information that you can cobble together something resembling his original stocking procedures. Using this knowledge, I reset the clock on Blackmoor (so that my players would be the first to journey within), stocked the Blackmoor maps to create my own version of the dungeon, and launched a campaign that would, ultimately, last for several dozen sessions.

By the time the campaign came to an end, a little over two dozen players had delved into the Blackmoor dungeons. They’d even begun transforming the village of Blackmoor to suit their desires. (More on that momentarily.) COVID was the primary reason the campaign floundered, but there were also some deeper issues with how the campaign was set up. If not for the pandemic, I might have found the time and effort necessary to correct those issues, but unfortunately that never happened.

Nevertheless, I thought it might be useful to review the lessons I learned from running a Blackmoor campaign – both positive and negative. Some of these may be most useful if you’re interested in setting up your own Blackmoor campaign (which I heartily recommend!), but there are quite a few secrets to be gleaned that could be useful for almost any table.

SPECIAL INTEREST XP

In The First Fantasy Campaign, Arneson also describes an experience system based on “special interests.” Instead of earning XP through combat or simple looting, the PCs would instead need to spend money specifically on their special interests in order to advance.

Unfortunately, the system described by Arneson doesn’t work. (I mean this in the most literal sense: There’s missing and contradictory information that makes it impossible to use as written.) I was fascinated by the potential of the concept, however, and designed my own Special Interest XP System to use in my Blackmoor campaign:

• Special interests included carousing, song/fame, religion/spirituality, philanthropy, caranvale, hoarding, training, and hobbies.
• When creating characters, players would randomly determine which special interests would be favored by their character.
• GP spent on a special interest would translate to XP, modified by the character’s level of interest in that special interest.
• Additional rules limited expenditures by the size/quality of a community, providing motivation for PCs to either (a) pursue multiple special interests, (b) travel, (c) improve their community, and/or (d) avail themselves of trade caravans (which served as an additional font of adventure hooks).

Using Special Interest XP: Implementing (and explaining) this system did increase the amount of time required for character creation. For an open table you really want character creation to be as fast as possible, and there were a few sessions where this extra load had a slightly negative effect. It just took too long to start playing.

The solution I found was to delay explaining how the various special interests actually worked until the end of the session. This:

• Reduced the time spent at the beginning of the session.
• Engaged players when they were most excited about the system (e.g., they had money they could spend to earn XP), increasing their attention and interest.
• No longer kept existing players waiting. Since they already knew how the system worked, they could immediately begin plotting how to invest their loot at the end of the session while the new players got onboarded.

I also experimented with pushing the generation of special interests to the end of the session for new players, but this backfired because:

• Players already familiar with the system who were generating new characters wanted to immediately generate their special interests, often creating confusion.
• It created too much bookkeeping at the end of the session when people often needed to wrap things up and head home.

Effects of Special Interest XP: Tweaking the presentation of special interest XP to make it work smoothly at my open table was well worth the effort because the actual effect of using special interest XP in play was astounding.

Let’s talk about PCs investing in their community – buying houses, founding businesses, establishing strongholds, etc. My typical experience with D&D across many different editions is that, unless the DM specifically frames up an opportunity (e.g., an NPC giving the PCs Trollskull Manor as a quest reward in Dragon Heist), it usually takes somewhere between seven and twelve levels before the PCs start setting down roots like this. In practical terms, it requires not only a certain amount of money, but also for the players to have bought all the other goodies (armor, equipment, etc.) they desire.

Special interest XP, on the other hand, saw the PCs immediately start investing in the local community. Within just a couple sessions, a cleric had built a healing chapel on a hill just outside of town. He only had a limited number of healing spells, but even when he wasn’t playing other PCs could visit his character at the chapel and pay for healing.

Other characters established a meadery, erected an elven tree shrine, took over the local church, bought a house, and all manner of things. When one group found a flying machine, they decided that they should donate it to the Steward and his Council, who then charged them with conveying it to the capital of the Great Kingdom as tribute.

To be clear, this was all happening with characters who were below 5^th level. I’ve run a lot of D&D over the years and, as I say, I’ve never seen anything like this. If you’re interested in exploring this sort of thing in your own campaign, I definitely recommend adapting Special Interest XP to your system of choice.

STOCKING ISSUES

Almost certainly the biggest problem I had with the campaign was stocking the dungeon.

First, Arneson’s stocking procedures simply didn’t generate enough treasure. (This was even more true when it came to restocking.) Since GP = XP, this meant that the PCs were stunted in their leveling. The lack of leveling also meant that the PCs couldn’t penetrate into the lower levels of the dungeon, which exacerbated the problem.

At a certain point, the PCs were just kind of stuck wandering through rooms that had been thoroughly picked over. Obviously not ideal.

I began experimenting with different solutions, but hadn’t found a completely satisfactory solution before the campaign ended. Therefore, I’d suggest going big for your own Blackmoor:

• Double the amount of treasure in your initial stocking.
• For restocking, double both the likelihood of a new treasure and the value of that treasure.

You should be able to dial it in from there.

(I will note that this might be less of a problem if you’re running Blackmoor as a dedicated table instead of an open one.)

Exacerbating this issue is that the first level of the Blackmoor dungeons is rather small, the second level is only of moderate size, and then difficulty leaps up substantially if you go down to the third level.

Related to this is the lack of variety on the stocking tables. Taken directly from Arneson’s manuscript, for example, the list of possible creatures on the top two levels of the dungeon are:

Orcs, Elves, Dwarves, Gnomes, Kobolds, Goblins, Elves, Fairies, Sprites, Pixies, Hobbits

Not only is the list limited, but it also contains some problematic elements in the Pixies, which appear in large numbers and, according to the 1974 D&D rules, “are able to attack while remaining generally invisible. They can be seen clearly only when a spell to make them visible is employed.” Low-level characters wisely learned to simply flee whenever they encountered a pixie.

These problems only became more pronounced with some of the foes encountered on lower levels. As a result, the dungeon slowly became overwhelmed by impossible foes, further limiting where the PCs could safely explore.

Finally, partly as a consequence of all this, there just wasn’t enough of the cool stuff that Blackmoor offers: The ghosts, weird items, spell eggs, Arnesonian machines, etc.

Some of these problems could have been mitigated if the PCs were leveling up (with more powerful PCs clearing out problem spots and leading expeditions into the lower levels), but it was clear to me that all of the stocking and restocking procedures needed an overhaul if the campaign were going to perform to its best potential.

Go to Part 12B: More Lessons Learned in Blackmoor

Review Originally Published January 8th, 2001

Tomb of the Overseers and Against the Barrow King are the third and fourth D20 modules in AEG’s Adventure Boosters series. (The first two – Castle Zadrian and Sundered Faith – were reviewed previously.) To recap briefly: The Adventure Boosters are 16 half-pages long, with a map in the middle of the pamphlet, a new monster, and a new magic item. Eight of these Boosters have been released so far, and, at $2.49 each, they’re a great way to pick up a cheap, single session adventure for your gaming group.

Warning: From this point forward, this review will contain spoilers for Tomb of the Overseers and Against the Barrow King. Players who may end up playing in these modules are encouraged to stop reading now. Proceed at your own risk.

TOMB OF THE OVERSEERS

Tomb of the Overseers is an excellent, tightly constructed dungeon crawl. Surprisingly, despite its short length, it also has a definite – and effective – epic quality to it, which earns Ken Villars and John Zinser, the designers, high kudos from me.

The background for Tomb of the Overseers is evocative: Nearly a century ago a paladin by the name of Lord Eriador led his people to freedom from a great evil. With the land freshly united he was called to continue his fight upon the higher planes, but he left an Overseer to watch over the land in his absence and promised that, if his land was ever in need of him again, he would return upon being summoned from Mount Anduin.

Now, with the Third Overseer upon the throne, the land is in trouble: An evil mage has sent forth his humanoid hordes to oppress the people. The mage has also filled Mount Anduin with foul creatures in order to prevent the people from calling upon their legendary champion. Although three parties have gone and never returned, it is hoped that the PCs will succeed where they failed.

The dungeon itself is, as I’ve noted, of excellent design. Although I would’ve liked to see a greater impact left behind by the three adventuring parties who came this way before, the complex nevertheless has a layered complexity that gives Tomb of the Overseers a nice dynamic during play. Basically there are three things at work here: First, the creatures left by the evil mage. Second, the natural guardians of this place (who will test the PCs to see if they are worthy of summoning forth Eriadon). And, finally, the puzzle of how to access the magical chamber from which Eriadon may be summoned.

The only flaw in this package is the back cover text and adventure hook (which casts the PCs as the long-time residents of Eriador’s country). I consider this to be unnecessarily intrusive upon the DM’s campaign, and a liability in terms of making the adventure truly flexible. Fortunately, this is neatly sidestepped by simply ignoring it.

At $2.49 this one is a definite steal.

(Tomb of the Overseers is designed for 5-6 characters of levels 3-5.)

AGAINST THE BARROW KING

Against the Barrow King is not as strong as Tomb of the Overseers, but is nonetheless well worth the meager price you’re being asked to pay.

The premise: A village believes itself to be under attack by the disturbed spirit of the Barrow King, whose burial grounds (steeped in legend and superstition) are located only a few miles out of town. It is hoped that the PCs will be able to track down the Barrow King and rid the village of his plague.

The twist: If the spirit of the Barrow King truly rests still within his burial ground, then it slumbers still. The village is actually being victimized by a cult of Vroodith, god of Slaughter, which has moved into the abandoned burial grounds.

That’s not much of a twist – but it adds spice to what is otherwise a straight-out dungeon crawl: The PCs go into the burial ground, root out the cult, and solve the village’s problems.

(Against the Barrow King is designed for 4-6 characters of levels 3-5.)

CLOSING NOTE

As a closing note, let me say that it’s nice to see a D20 producer who’s willing to jump immediately to mid-level adventures. With Atlas Games, Green Ronin, Necromancer, Wizards of the Coast, and several others already turning out high quality introductory modules, I don’t think it’s necessary to keep pumping more material into a market sector which has been safely sated for at least the next year.

Style: 3
Substance: 4

Title: Adventure Boosters: Tomb of the Overseers and Against the Barrow King
Writers: Ken Villars & John Zinser (Tomb of the Overseers) and Against the Barrow King (Steve Hough)
Publisher: AEG
Price: $2.49/each
Page Count: 16
ISBN: n/a
Product Code: 8303, 8304

As I mentioned last time, I had intended to review all of the AEG Adventure Boosters, but stopped after being hired by Fantasy Flight Games to write for their competing line of Instant Adventures.

I might not have finished the project in any case, as after the first batch, AEG published I believe two more batches, for a total of 40+ adventures. That’s a lot of adventures! These were later updated to the 3.5 rules and collected in the Adventure I and Adventure II compilation volumes.

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.

Last weekend I attended the Philadelphia Area Gaming xpo (PAGE). While there, Questing Beast interviewed me and a bunch of other guests.

You can check out all of our responses on Youtube now!