IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

SESSION 14C: THE TEMPLE OF EBONY

January 5th, 2008
The 5th Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

Intrigued by these discoveries, Ranthir selected one jar from each of the six rooms and slipped them into his bag of holding.

They had now opened all of the doors on the upper level and were prepared to go down to the lower level. This proved slightly troublesome: There was a ladder on the iron catwalk in the middle of the chamber, but it had been rusted into a raised position. So, in lieu of that, they simply pitoned a knotted rope to the floor and climbed down along one of the walls.

Most of the rooms on the lower level appeared to have been kennels of some sort. Those around the base of the pit itself had metal doors, but through a set of double doors in the south wall of the pit there was a long hallway flanked by nearly a dozen more rooms with wooden doors that were almost entirely rotten away from sheer age. Large channels from these rooms led out to a 6-inch wide gap in the middle of the hall’s floor. Beneath this gap there was a 50-foot-pit down which charnel waste was apparently washed.

Another door off the pit led to a room filled with weapons hung from iron racks covering the walls. All of these weapons were designed for beasts: Claw-like tines; serrated harnesses; and the like. All of them seemed to be crafted to appear as vicious and merciless as possible. Many were stained with blood. The vast array was impressive in itself, but a closer inspection revealed that most of them were unusable: Either custom-crafted for unusual creatures; with important bits rotted away; or their metal rusting and fatigued from age.

THE TEMPLE OF EBONY

At the far end of the kennel hall, another set of iron doors led out to a hallway which took a sharp turn off to the west. From there the hallway branched again, and the decision was made – with Ranthir once again studying his partially completed map of the upper level – to return to the upper level and finish exploring there before proceeding to the lower level.

They climbed back up their rope and returned to the first major chamber they had entered after leaving the laboratories that had been inhabited by the bloodwights: The large room flanked by four massive statues of Ghul.

From here there were four halls: To west lay the bloodwight laboratories and they had explored everything to the north. This left the hall to the east – which they could see ended in a set of large iron doors – and the hall to the south.

They decided to start with the hall to the east: The iron doors opened onto a large room paved in glistening ebony. It rose in three tiers. Two horrific statues stood in the corners of the second tier. To the left a twisting pillar of coiled tendrils and to the right a squat monstrosity.

In the center of the third tier, at the top of the room, there was a slab of black ebony with the appearance of an altar.

The room seemed permeated with a palpable sense of evil, but Tee took a deep breath and slipped through the door. A cursory examination turned up no hidden exits or treasures, but she did discover that inscriptions had been written in a strange and alien tongue upon the base of the two statues on the second tier.

Ranthir, hearing this, entered the room himself and went up to study the statues. He confirmed that the language was completely unknown and, surprisingly, his magical arts gave him no translation, either.

Tee, meanwhile, had been exploring the uppermost tier. The altar or slab in the center of this tier was completely featureless, except – Tee discovered – for a small sigil that had been carved into the rear corner of the altar:

Ranthir finished carefully copying down the inscriptions on the statues into a journal and then joined Tee to inspect the altar sigil. It wasn’t familiar to him, either, but he took the time to copy it as well.

Then they left. As they passed through the doors and shut them behind them, they could feel a palpable sense of dread sluicing off of them like an oil slick.

NEXT CAMPAIGN JOURNAL

(click for PDF)

Hal Foster’s groundbreaking Prince Valiant was adapted into the first “storytelling game” by Greg Stafford back in the ’80s. Many of you likely grew up with its much diminished legacy in the Sunday comic strips of your youth, but Foster’s original strips (as you can see below) was a beautiful, atmospheric, mythic-real take on the Arthurian legend. Stafford’s game sought to capture this universe with an elegant ruleset and incredibly simple character creation mechanics, and it’s recently been republished by Nocturnal Media.

The game is divided into two parts. The Basic Game, although the first to bear the title of “storytelling game”, is very much a traditional RPG. What made it particularly innovative at the time, however, was that it eschewed simulation-focused complexity and instead stripped things down to a simple, narrative-focused mechanic.

In the Advanced Game, Stafford introduces a structure by which players can, in mid-session, become Storytellers, running the group through short episodes before returning control of the session to the Chief Storyteller. Meta-currency rewards are given in exchange for taking on these GMing duties, creating not only one of the first STGs but also an early troupe-style game.

Thirty years later, Prince Valiant is no longer innovative. (Quite the opposite: The industry has been following its lead and looting its corpse.) But it remains an elegant and accessible game that, although its parts have been parceled out, still provides a unique playing experience that’s not really been duplicated anywhere else.

This is actually a great time to get into Prince Valiant: In addition to Nocturnal Media reprinting the RPG, Fantagraphcs has been publishing a freshly remastered reprint series of Foster’s original comic. This new edition has been scanned from the original syndicate proofs, restoring Foster’s stunningly beautiful art and subtle storytelling.

Inspired by both, I’m currently laying down a bunch of material for bringing Prince Valiant to my gaming table. This includes assembling one of my system cheat sheets for the game. For those unfamiliar with these cheat sheets, they seek to summarize all of the rules for the game — from basic action resolution to advanced options. It’s a great way to get a grip on a new system and, of course, it makes it easier to introduce the game to new players and run the system as a Game Master.

WHAT’S NOT INCLUDED

These cheat sheets are not designed to be a quick start packet: They’re designed to be a comprehensive reference for someone who has read the rulebook and will probably prove woefully inadequate if you try to learn the game from them. (On the other hand, they can definitely assist experienced players who are teaching the game to new players.)

The cheat sheets also don’t include what I refer to as “character option chunks” (for reasons discussed here). In other words, you won’t find the rules for character creation here.

HOW I USE THEM

I generally keep a copy of my system cheat sheets behind my GM screen for quick reference and I also place a half dozen copies in the center of the table for the players to grab as needed. The information included is meant to be as comprehensive as possible; although rulebooks are also available, my goal is to minimize the amount of time people spend referencing the rulebook: Prince Valiant is one of those games which freely mix rules with philosophical discussions of how the rules can be used to best effect. The cheat sheets can’t duplicate that utility, but instead seek to pull the rules out for easy reference.

The organization of information onto each page of the cheat sheet should, hopefully, be fairly intuitive.

Page 1: Core Mechanics & Combat. Most of the game is right here.

Page 2: Skills. I went with slightly longer skill descriptions than I usually do for these cheat sheets because we found that the divisions between skills were finely defined (which makes sense given the relatively narrow focus of the game on knights and courtly life) and also not completely intuitive (because Stafford has, very cleverly, adopted a medieval understanding of philosophy in the division of knowledge and skill).

Page 3: All the Modifiers. All of them.

Page 4: Special Effects & Fame. I’ve tried to appropriately emphasize the degree to which the Fame Award values are very much median guidelines that it’s expected the GM will vary from. (Review the appropriate sections of the rulebook as necessary.)

Page 5: Advanced Storytelling. I initially played with the idea of putting all of the Advanced rules on a single sheet, but ultimately decided that I was likely to include Advanced Skills (and character creation) even in campaigns that didn’t use all of the Advanced Storytelling rules. (Partly due to the exigencies of the new open table format I’m experimenting with using Prince Valiant as its foundation.)

MAKING A GM SCREEN

As with my other cheat sheets, the Prince Valiant sheets can also be used in conjunction with a modular, landscape-oriented GM screen (like the ones you can buy here or here).

If you have the modular four panel screen, like I do, then this is quite simple: The “Advanced Storytelling” sheet is a nice reference, but you don’t need to be able to access its information in a single glance. So you can just insert the other four sheets and you’re good to go.

PLAY PRINCE VALIANT!

In this seminar, Sandy Petersen — original designer of Call of Cthulhu and owner of Petersen Games (among many, many other accomplishments) — walks the audience through his process for writing a horror scenario. Along the way he offers a prodigious grab-bag of advice. I thought the material was fascinating enough that I took notes and broke his process down into a step-by-step model. I’m polishing those notes up and sharing them here because I think they’ve got a general utility.

THE BASICS ACCORDING TO M.R. JAMES

Petersen draws inspiration from three rules M.R. James set for his famous ghost stories (a body of literature which inspired, among many others, Lovecraft himself):

1. The ghost is malign.

The antagonist for your horror story doesn’t necessarily need to be a ghost. (And, in fact, M.R. James’ ghosts were quite varied in their properties.) But your antagonist shouldn’t be revealed as having good intentions.

2. Place your story somewhere the players can imagine themselves.

Petersen discusses that his original intention for Call of Cthulhu was to set it in the modern day: Lovecraft wasn’t writing historical fiction, after all. He was writing cutting edge thrillers. When he wrote “The Call of Cthulhu” in 1922, for example, a steamship was the biggest and most powerful thing that had ever been accomplished with human technology. So when he rams Cthulhu with the steamship, it’s not an historical oddity — it’s Lovecraft saying “the biggest thing we have can’t stop Cthulhu”. Petersen asserts that if Lovecraft had written the story in 1945, he would have nuked Cthulhu.

This is not to say you can’t set your scenario in other settings. It’s just that you have to work harder: You can do it in the ’20s, the 1890’s, the 15th century, or on a spaceship. But you have to make the players feel as if they could actually be there.

3. No jargon.

M.R. James was talking about avoiding the terminology of theosophists and the other pseudo-scientific approaches to the supernatural that were arising during his time. For Petersen, this means using fiction-first declarations instead of mechanics-first declarations. Horror doesn’t come from game mechanics.

THE SCENARIO SEED

1. Pick a scene from a movie, book, etc. (Example: Burning the rabbit from Velveteen Rabbit.)

My thought on this (and I suspect it’s probably true for Petersen outside of seminar contexts) is that it doesn’t need to be a scene you’ve literally plucked from an existing piece of literature. What you’re looking for is a strong, emotionally powerful image or event.

2. Pick a place. (Example: Hot springs.)

3. Pick an opponent. (Example: 500 year old undead ancestor.)

THE SCENARIO SPINE

A. Look for interesting combinations/connections in the elements of the scenario seed.

For example, the ancient undead is somehow connected to the hot springs. (Note how this nicely distinguishes them from any other ancient undead.)

B. Look for connections between the PCs and the bad guys.

For example, one of the PCs is a descendant of the ancient undead. (This makes the horror personal. It also provides a convenient scenario hook in keeping with the Lovecraftian literary tradition.)

C. Start with the bad guy’s plan or purpose.

Don’t worry yet about what the PCs will be doing, but leverage the connection to the PCs if possible. For example, the ancestor calls a family reunion for the extended clan at their hot spring. His goal is to transfer his consciousness to one of the younger members of the family.

D. Check your scenario seed and make sure you’ve used all the elements.

For example, we haven’t used the imagery from the Velveteen Rabbit yet. So the ancestor will give everyone coming to the reunion a reliquary memento containing a piece of one of his former bodies, enchanted so that he can track it down in the future. (Thus simplifying any future attempts to locate his descendants when further body transferrals are required.)

DEVELOP DETAILS

From this point forward, you’re simply developing the details of the spine you’ve established. (I’ll note that this shouldn’t be trivialized, however: It’s in these details where the scenario will truly come to life.) For example:

• What is the reliquary memento? A small statue made out of scrimshaw. (Why? Because it’s cool.)
• Who’s the undead ancestor? Heidvig Petersen. He was a whaler (hence the scrimshaw).
• What happens at the reunion? Nothing, actually. It’s a red herring of paranoia. The players will constantly be expecting things to go horribly wrong or explode in an orgy of violence, but Heidvig is really just scouting his potential victims.
• Is he working alone? No. Most of the employees at the hot springs are actually cultists dedicated to him. The staff may accidentally refer to him as “The One Who’s Below”.

MEDIA INSPIRATION: As you’re developing the details of your scenario, don’t be afraid to pull in more imagery and cool ideas from favorite pieces of media. (Transform them to the context provided by the spine of your scenario.)

MYTHOS LORE: Have your scenario operate consistently with or connect to other Mythos stories… unless that’s inconvenient. (For example, have Heidvig connected to Captain Marsh of Innsmouth from his whaling days. Or look at how soul transference works in Lovecraft’s stories and see how those principles could be applied to Heidvig’s ritual. For example, in “The Thing on the Doorstep” there needed to be an emotional connection.)

THE CREEPY STUFF RULE

In order for creepy stuff to work, you can’t just open a random door and then be eaten by the shoggoth on the other side. You need to give your players three chances to avoid being killed by the creepy monster.

1. Hint. (Example: There’s strange slime and a viscous mud outside.)

2. Clear Indication of Danger. (Example: You find the slime-encrusted body of a dead, decapitated sewer worker.)

3. The Monster. (Example: Emerging from the sewage is a black, protoplasmic blob.)

When the bad things go down (and, since this is a horror story, bad things will go down), you want the players to blame themselves for what happens. (My note: If they externalize that blame to the GM, it becomes external not only from themselves but also from the game world. This robs the events of meaning, and without meaning there can be no horror.) With the Creepy Stuff Rule, if they’re still here, then they can’t blame you: They did it to themselves.

Petersen applies the Creepy Stuff Rule to the example scenario like this:

Hint: Heidvig’s hot-spring cooked body stalks the halls at night, leaving behind a distinctive odor of cooked flesh and, upon closer inspection, bits of boiled flesh.

Clear Indication of Danger: The PCs dicover that there are multiple levels of hidden hot springs underground, each more intense than the last. This progression leads to Heidvig’s pit, which lies adjacent to a bubbling pool of lava.

The Monster: Heidvig.

THE SOLUTION

The GM needs to come up with one viable solution to the problem they’ve created. (If the players come up with something else, more power to them.)

For example, they can throw the scrimshaw reliquary they were given into the lava pit. Its destruction will break the emotional connection between them and Heidvig, preventing him from possessing them.

In this process, revisit the points of inspiration in your scenario seed. For example, a ritual is being performed, at the end of which he will walk into the lava pool, burning his body away (like the Velveteen rabbit) and freeing his spirit to inhabit its next host. The PCs need to STOP the monster from being destroyed!

RANDOM TIPS & INSIGHTS

• When running games, Petersen will generally summarize NPC-to-NPC interactions rather than trying to talk to himself at the table. (I think the implication is that he will rarely if ever do so when the NPCs are talking to the players. Which is a technique I agree strongly with.)
• Have people see things out of the corner of their eye that aren’t there. (He takes this technique from the movie Night of the Demon, which was adapted from M.R. James’ “Casting the Runes”, in which characters keep asking the protagonist if they can take their bag or assert that the character can’t bring their dog on the train… even though the protagonist doesn’t have a bag or a dog.)
• Let the characters think they see one thing, but then it moves. (This is from “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas”: Someone reaches into a niche to pull out a satchel containing the treasure… and then the satchel wraps its arms around their throat. I would generalize this to anything so alien that the mind would first interpret it as being an inanimate object.)
• Be okay with the players failing. That’s when a lot of interesting options open up.
• Give NPCs a method for disengaging from questioning. (An activity they have to do; a pager that goes off; they stop understanding English; etc.) In other mediums, the author can simply choose to end an interrogation scene. In an RPG, players tend to zero in “like a hammerhead shark” and just pound away on every NPC.
• As part of your scenario prep, think about what happens if the cops are called. (Blocking the cops from taking meaningful action is fine — the cops are cultists; the cultists can talk their way out of it when the cops show up; etc. — but try to be creative about it and be prepared for it!)

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

SESSION 14B: MALKEEN DAWNING

January 5th, 2008
The 4th Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

It was still the dark of night when Tee woke up to find Malkeen Balacazar in her room.

The crime lord was sitting on the chair in the corner, the light of the bedside lamp that he must have lit casting shadows that turned the star-tattoo across his eye into a pit of darkness. “Good morning, Tee.”

Tee’s heart was trying to pound its way out of her chest. “What are you doing here?”

“I thought we had an arrangement, Mistress Tee.” Malkeen’s voice was hard and cold. “I would let you and your friends live, and you would never interfere in my business again.”

Tee glared. “And we haven’t.”

“Then explain this.” Malkeen flicked his wrist, throwing a piece of paper onto Tee’s bedcovers. It had been crumpled, burned around the edges, and badly water damaged – but Tee recognized her own handwriting. It was the note that she had written and left for Dullin at the Cloud Theater.

“Dullin was connected to you?”

“My nephew. You didn’t know?”

Tee shook he head.

“Then why were you trying to contact him?”

“We thought his life was in danger.” Tee took a deep breath, and then spilled out the story of finding the note in Helmut’s house. (Although she was deliberately vague on the details of exactly why they were in the house.)

“Do you still have this note?”

“No, but I made a copy.”

“And do you have the copy?”

She did, and was able to produce it from her bag of holding. Malkeen inspected it closely, then folded it and slipped it into a pouch on his belt. “I’ll take this with me and investigate thoroughly. And I’ll be keeping an eye on you. I hope, for your sake, that we will have no more misunderstandings.”

“So do I,” Tee said. And meant it with all her heart.

Malkeen smiled coldly and then disappeared into thin air. Read more »