IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

SESSION 13B: THE TRAGEDY AT THE DOOR

December 16th, 2007
The 1st Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

A sudden hush filled the long hall – the violence ending almost as quickly as it had began. But even in this unexpected lull, the threat of danger still hung thickly over them. The door may have been shut upon Ursaal, but the warcaster was still an eminent threat.

They rallied quickly, reviving the injured goblins and falling into a defensive formation that quickly moved down the hall. Agnarr, with his flaming sword, hacked through the webs that Ursaal had left behind him. Once a path had been cleared to the stairs, he and Tee climbed up to the double doors of iron.

Tee quickly inspected the doors and found that no traps had been laid upon them. She fell back into the middle of the defensive formation at the base of the stairs, leaving Agnarr alone to place his hand upon the latch and swing one of the doors open.

Beyond the doors lay a spacious hexagonal chamber illuminated by seven strangely illuminated braziers arranged in a ten-foot-diameter circle in the center of the room. The sickly green stone of the braziers was carved into the shape of writhing, amorphous tendrils reaching up to support corroded iron bowls in which sputtered foul-smelling flames.

These braziers surrounded a strange idol carved in amorphous, undulating waves. Thick sheets of dripping algae and slime coated the walls, and dark-green tentacles of the stuff dangled down from the ceiling like thick, half-congealed ropes. All of this stuff slithered and writhed – sliding about the place almost as if it were possessed of life.

Vision into the room was utterly obscured by the constantly wavering layers of gelatinous growths, but shadows could clearly be seen moving within.

As Tee and Agnarr had worked, Elestra had whispered to her python viper – instructing it to follow the scent of Ursaal. So, as Agnarr opened the door, the massive snake slid between his legs.

Agnarr moved to follow, but as his arms touched the dangling tendrils he felt waves of horrible nausea sweep through his skin and overwhelm his senses. The floor beneath him, too, seemed to reel at his tread. He lurched backwards, but the tendrils reached out as if to follow him. With a disgusted sweep of his greatsword he sliced them away.

Agnarr stepped forward again, this time planning to cut a path through the seething chaos of slime and fungus. But as he did so, the unmistakable chants of an arcanist echoed through the smoky chamber. Acting on sheer instinct, Agnarr leaped back and slammed the door shut.

A moment passed as all of them looked at each other. But then Elestra, realizing that her beloved pet was now trapped within the room, gave a sharp cry and leapt forward, shoving the door open again and crying out for the snake to return to her side. Read more »

Some of you may already be familiar with the Web DMs, but this is a really excellent overview of hexcrawl gaming.

There’s a bit of talk in the video about when hexcrawls are an appropriate structure vs. not appropriate for wilderness travel. My experience:

1. Exploration. (The “West Marches” approach.)

2. There’s meaningful consequences as a result of the navigation choices you’re making.

Anything else? Don’t run it as a hexcrawl.

When it comes to #2, the meaningful choices also need to largely be at the scale you’re running the hexcrawl at. If Moria vs. the Gap of Rohan is the meaningful choice, then 3-mile hexes aren’t the right scale. If Old Forest vs. the Road to Bree is the meaningful choice, then 3-mile hexes would probably work well.

(You might also consider the benefits of a point-crawl here if the meaningful navigation choices are actually quite limited.)

This makes for an interesting corollary to my oft-repeated comment about keying hexes: If you’ve got a lot of empty hexes or if you’re routinely keying multiple areas of interest into each hex, that’s also an indication that you’re using the wrong scale for your hexcrawl.

Blades in the Dark uses progress clocks to “track ongoing effort against an obstacle or the approach of impending trouble.” Actions, consequences, fortune rolls, and the natural evolution of the game state can all cause the clocks to accumulate ticks (or, more rarely, lose ticks). When the clock fills up, the thing it was tracking — the state of alert in the general’s compound, a faction’s goal, the sinking of a ship — happens. Progress clocks are a quick and effective way of visualizing and tracking persistent and/or impending activities, allowing the GM to juggle more of them (allowing for the creation of more complicated and Byzantine scenarios), clearly communicating the current state of affairs to players, and (rather crucially) giving a flexible mechanical structure that the players can engage with in order to affect those game states.

I’ll probably have more to say about progress clocks and countdown clocks and similar mechanics at the some point in the future (probably as part of the Art of Rulings), but at the moment I’m gearing up to a run a Blades mini-campaign and so I’m focused on the actual tools involved in using them. I like to do my campaign prep primarily on my computer (I think best with my keyboard), and since like 90% of Blades in the Dark is either assigning a progress clock or tracking a progress clock, I wanted digital resources for doing so. And I was actually surprised to discover that these resources did not, in fact, already exist. (Or, at least, my Google-fu was unequal to the task of locating them.) So I ended up creating them scratch, and now I’m sharing them here.

IMAGES

Blades in the Dark uses a 4-segment clock for complex obstacles, a 6-clock for more complicated obstacles, and an 8-clock for daunting obstacles.

The zip file below contains a full set of images in both both SVG and PNG formats for each clock (ranging from empty to full).

FONT

The file also contains a TTF, EOT, and WOFF font files for the clocks. Use the following characters with the fonts, from empty clock to full clock:

4-CLOCK: A B C D E

6-CLOCK: a b c d e f g

8-CLOCK: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

(This information is also contained in a text file in the zip.)

Permission is granted to use these resources for all commercial and non-commercial use, as long as credit is given.

PROGRESS CLOCKS – FONTS AND IMAGES

(zip file)

A common form of mapping for RPG cities is the block map. For example, here’s the city of Kintargo from the Hell’s Rebels adventure path:

A common mistake when looking at such a map is to interpret each individual outline as being a single building. For example, when I posted a behind-the-scenes peek at how I developed the map for the city of Anyoc years ago, a number of people told me I’d screwed up by leaving too much space between the buildings. Except the map didn’t actually depict any individual buildings: Each outline was a separate block, made up of several different buildings.

When people look at a block map and interpret it as depicting individual buildings, how far off is their vision of the city?

Well, we can actually see this exemplified in a few cases where artists have (in my opinion) misinterpreted block maps. Blades in the Dark, for example, has a block map for the city of Duskwall. Below you can see a sample of that block map (on the left) next to a block map of a section of Paris (on the right).

If it was not self-evident, the interpretation of the Duskwall map as a block map is supported by this description of the city from the rulebook:

The city is densely packed inside the ring of immense lightning towers that protect it from the murderous ghosts of the blighted deathlands beyond. Every square foot is covered in human construction of some kind — piled one atop another with looming towers, sprawling manors, and stacked row houses; dissected by canals and narrow twisting alleys; connected by a spiderweb of roads, bridges, and elevated walkways.

You can see that if you interpret Duskwall’s map as detailing individual buildings, the layout of the city actually becomes far more organized and well-regulated than seems intended by the text. This is, in fact, a common problem when GMs misinterpret block maps: Their vision of the city, and the resulting descriptions are heavily simplified.

For example, when Ryan Dunleavy decided to develop a large version of the Duskwall map, he interpreted each block on the map as being an individual building (or, occasionally, two). Compare the resulting illustration of a single block in Duskwall (on the left) to what a single block in Paris (on the right) actually looks like:

(Please don’t interpret this as some sort of massive indictment of the artist here. Ryan Dunleavy’s cartography is gorgeous, and I recommend backing his Patreon for more of it.)

You can see another example of this with Green Ronin’s Freeport. When first revealed to the world in 2000’s Death in Freeport module, the city was depicted using a rough block map:

In 2002, for the original City of Freeport, this was redone with most of the blocks being represented as individual buildings:

The map was redone again for The Pirate’s Guide to Freeport, this time reinterpreting the original outlines as a block map:

I pull out this example primarily to point out that sometimes a block map outline IS, in fact, a single building. Because some buildings are really big. Or, in other cases, they might represent walled estates, as shown here with the estates along the western edge of the map.

And here’s a real world example of this from Paris with both the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais:

(click for larger size)

The north-south cross section of the Grand Palais is fairly comparable to the Parisian block shown above.

CONCLUSION

My point with all this basically boils down to don’t mistake the map for the territory. One of the great advantages of the block map approach to city mapping is that it leaves so much to the imagination, allowing both you and your players to lay in immense amounts of fractal complexity onto a simple geometric shape.

(Which is not to say that block maps are the be-all or end-all of utility at the gaming table. You can take my copy of Ed Bourelle’s Ptolus map when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.)

And when you miss that opportunity — when your mental image of the block map reduces each geometric shape to a single building — you’re robbing the city of its grandeur, its complexity, and its flexibility.

Take a moment to go back and look at the map of Kintargo, for example. Imagine what that city would look like if each block were, in fact, a single building. What you’ll probably end up with is a modest city still possessed of some good degree of size. But what you should actually end up with in your mind’s eye is this: