Called shots are a mechanic which seem to cause problems in a lot of game systems. They tend to combine poorly with abstract hit mechanics — like those found in D&D and most RPGs — since they frequently beg the question of why you wouldn’t aim for the bad guy’s head / other vital organs every single time. (The abstract hit mechanics, of course, are based on the idea that you are doing that, but that doesn’t always mean that you can or that you can succeed.) Even systems that ditch the abstract system and bake specific hit locations into their core combat mechanic will still frequently struggle with how to balance people’s desire to always aim for the most mechanically advantageous location (see choice vs. calculation).

In any case, there are a number of ways systems have found to try to deal with this issue. Here’s one that came to me in the shower that I don’t think I’ve seen before: When you declare your desire to make a called shot, there’s a percentage chance that you won’t be able to make an attack this round. Why? Because the shot you want isn’t available at the moment and you need to wait for it to line up. Think of all those movies where the sniper says, “I don’t have a shot!” Same thing applies in melee combat; if you’re specifically aiming to hit one specific location, then your focus on that will result in you missing or passing up on other opportunities to strike your foe.

You’d need to play with the exact probabilities involved depending on your system and the varied mechanical impact of the called shot. But I thought this was an interesting mechanical paradigm that a system designer or house ruler might play with.

This article was originally written in 2000-01. It has never been published. It is a companion piece to Monstrous Tactics: Ethereal Marauders.

The fearsome marauders possess every advantage of a natural predator, including a maw of unearthly, trilateral fangs. But to their fierce physical prowess, the marauders also adds the uncannily dangerous ability to shift at will between the material and ethereal planes – striking out at their prey from a universal hiding place of which few are aware, and fewer still can hope to detect. Their dangerous, ephemeral attacks can prove the bane of any who are not prepared for their assault.

HELPFUL TIPS

• Use see invisibility or invisibility purge to strip a marauder of its ability to surprise
• Use hold monster or dimensional anchor to trap the marauder on your own turf
• Stay together – don’t split your forces between the material and ethereal plains
• Pay attention to the marauder’s keening wail

PREPARATION

SKILLS AND FEATS: The ethereal marauder’s primary advantage is their ability to emerge spontaneously from the ethereal plane onto the material plane at will. As a result, you’re going to want to be prepared to detect and respond to the marauder as quickly as possible. The Spot skill (along with the bonuses conferred by the Alertness feat) will help you detect the marauder as he shifts into your area (preventing your from being surprised). Once the marauder has appeared, you’re going to want to be able to strike before he disappears again – so consider Improved Initiative to give you an advantage on that all-important second round. If your Dexterity score is high enough to make it worth your while, you may also want to consider Combat Reflexes.

SIGHT SPELLS: Prepare spells which will allow you to see onto the ethereal plane, stripping the marauder completely of its ability to surprise you. See invisibility, true seeing, and invisibility purge are your best options here (particularly the last, as it will grant everyone in your party the ability to see the marauder if it draws near the spellcaster).

ATTACK & DEFENSE SPELLS: Its important to remember that force effects, gaze effects, and the entire abjuration school of magic extends onto the Ethereal Plane – and can affect a marauder there. Spells like magic missile have an obvious usefulness, therefore – as does wall of force. It can be easy to overlook the usefulness of dimensional anchor (trapping the marauder either on the ethereal plane — where he can’t harm you — or the material plane – where you can kill him), so don’t.

ETHEREAL MOVEMENT: It should go without saying that spells like ethereal jaunt and etherealness may be useful. Similarly, magic items which allow travel between planes (or simply the assumption of an ethereal form) should be invaluable to the party when confronting or hunting a marauder.

TACTICS

SEE YOUR ENEMY: As long as the marauder can see you – and you can’t see it – it’s going to have the advantage. So, once you become aware of the marauder’s presence (and presumable interest in making you a quick snack), the first thing you’re going to want to do is have your spellcaster bring out his anti-invisibility spells. Even if its only the spellcaster who can see the marauder, that can still be useful – he should be able to communicate enough information to the rest of the party so that the marauder’s sudden appearances are no longer taking you by surprise.

AFFECT YOUR ENEMY: Next, you’re going to want to find ways to hurt the marauder. This is where your spellcaster’s force effects are going to come in handy – since it can take the attack to the marauder no matter where it’s lurking. On the other hand, you don’t want to neglect the ability for the other members of the party to take their shots when the marauder visits the material plane.

If you spread out, the marauder is going to able to pick you off one at a time. The best formation, therefore, is a tight circle – probably with your spellcaster at the center. When the marauder appears to make his attack, he should be within reach of at least two or three attackers: A few solid blows and your troubles will be over before they began.

TRAP YOUR ENEMY: If you can use force effects or dimensional anchor to trap the marauder (either where you can hurt it, or where it can’t hurt you) you will have essentially stripped the marauder of its primary advantage – making things far easier for you. At that point, you will either have completely eliminated the threat (by trapping it where it can’t hurt you) or reduced it to little more than a common wolf.

PURSUE YOUR ENEMY: If the marauder escapes death, he may come back later to trouble you again. Pursuing a marauder onto the ethereal plane may be the only way to finally rid yourself of its threat. However, an important cautionary note should be made here: It can be very tempting for someone who can move in the ethereal plane to do so the minute the marauder shows up. In doing so, however, you need to be aware that you are – in fact – dividing your forces. If you’re a spellcaster, in particular, isolating yourself on the ethereal plane may not accomplish anything more than making yourself the marauder’s next meal.

PAY ATTENTION TO THE WHINE: Ethereal marauders have an unearthly, high-pitched wail or whine which they emit almost constantly. Its quality and pitch varies depending on its physical health – so keep at least one ear trained on it.

This article was originally written in 2000-01. It has never been published.

As a DM, using ethereal creatures like the marauder can be something of a challenge: Keeping track of one plane is difficult enough, after all. However, the rewards of doing so can be quite large – particularly against neophyte players or characters who lack the experience to figure out where the lumbering blue behemoth which attacked them appeared from, and where it disappeared to again. In fact, you can use an encounter such as this to introduce your players to the concept of planar travel – perhaps paving the way for future adventures.

ORGANIZATION

According to the Monster Manual, Ethereal Marauders are solitary creatures. However, there are certain times when this may not be true. For example, marauders form mating triplets on a semi-annual basis – and this occasionally leads to the formation of temporary pride structures (particularly in situations where triplet compositions are unstable). So don’t be afraid to have higher level PCs run into a pride of marauders – particularly if they are already familiar with ethereal combatants: It can provide an interesting twist on an already complicated situation.

PREPARATION

STALKING: Although strong, the tightly compact forms of the marauder result in a low constitution. As a result, although they are able to hold their own in physical combat, they typically prefer to rely on their wits – particularly when hunting more dangerous prey (such as sentient humanoids, like the PCs).

Marauders will stalk their chosen target for as much as three days – presumably unseen upon the ethereal plane – waiting for the right moment to attack. Let the encounter simmer (you can think of it like a horror flick), and don’t be afraid of letting the marauder wait until a PC is in the worst possible conditions (fleeing a dungeon while badly hurt, separated, trapped in an isolated location away from the other PCs, etc.) to attack.

If the PCs are hunting the marauder for some reason (perhaps it has been preying on the local village), they may be entirely unaware that the marauder has already begun hunting them.

UNSEEN KILLER: One common trick of the marauder is to attack while its prey is sleeping. It will shift onto the Material plane, bite its victim once, and then shift back to the Ethereal before the victim has time to awake and see what’s attacked it. If the marauder is quick enough and clever enough, it may be a long time before the PCs figure out what’s whittling them down every night.

TACTICS

HIT AND RUN: Once combat is engaged, ethereal marauders rarely stand their ground for long. Shifting to the Material Plane is a free action for them, and shifting back to the Ethereal is a movement-equivalent action (or part of a movement-equivalent action). This allows them to, essentially, appear, attack, and disappear again before anyone can do anything about it.

Note that if the marauder always does this, it will essentially be invincible against a party which doesn’t possess the right magical effects. Fortunately, marauders will occasionally become overzealous – prolonging their presence on the physical plane to finish a kill (particularly if they have successfully separated one target from the rest of the group). On the other hand, don’t be afraid of forcing the PCs to think their way through this one if they do have the proper magic at their disposal.

If the PCs successfully figure out a way to track the marauder on the Ethereal Plane (or follow it there), the marauder will adjust its tactics accordingly. If the PCs have split their numbers between the Material and Ethereal Planes, it will typically choose the easier target – and attempt to isolate the ability for one group to help the other (typically by drawing its Ethereal opponents below the surface of the earth). If things look particularly bad, it will abandon the hunt.

RECOVERY: If the PCs successfully hurt the marauder upon the Material Plane, it will withdraw to the Ethereal Plane. This doesn’t mean, however, that it will simply give up the hunt. To the contrary, one of the marauder’s primary advantages is its ability to continue tracking – and harassing – its prey, even when badly injured itself. So long as the PCs cannot pursue or affect the marauder upon the Ethereal Plane, the marauder will stay in the area – recovering as it continues to pursue.

WHINE: Ethereal marauders emit an eerie, high whine that varies in pitch depending on the creature’s speed and health. Here’s a good rule to follow: The faster it goes, the higher the pitch. The more injured it is, the lower the pitch.

TAKING THE BODY: Although the marauder cannot take living creatures with it using its ethereal jaunt ability, once its prey is dead it can take the body with it. Once the marauder has successfully killed someone, it will attempt to grab the body and then return to the Ethereal Plane to finish its meal in peace. Realize that this is, essentially, permanent death if the other PCs don’t have some means of pursuing the marauder and recovering the body.

DISGUISE TRUE NUMBERS: As noted above, marauders seldom form prides. However, when they do they will typically take advantage of their ability to shift at will between the planes to disguise their true numbers. Their first step when approaching large groups (such as a party of PCs), is to draw the individual members apart from one another – typically by making large noises just out of sight in multiple directions. Once their targets have separated, the pride will then begin its attack – rarely revealing more than one of its number at a time, but striking at each of its chosen targets as often as possible (attempting to drive them even farther apart if possible).

If done successfully, it can appear to the PCs that they are facing some horrible creature which is capable of popping into and out of existence (and attacking!) three or four or half a dozen times a round. It might even appear that the creature is capable of magically regenerating damage (since wounded pride members will withdraw from combat, while the uninjured ones remain).

NEXT: vs. the Ethereal Marauder

Over the years, I’ve run into a number of GMs who are nervous about running a game set in an established setting. Sometimes that’s an established media property (like Tolkien’s Middle Earth or Lucas’ Star Wars), in other cases it’s a published RPG setting. This becomes even more true, of course, when the lore of the setting is particularly dense or particularly expansive. Common examples include Tekumel, Transhuman Space, or even the Forgotten Realms. The perception is that, in order to run such settings, the GM must be possessed of an encyclopedic mastery of their minutia. A similar problem seems to often afflict historical settings.

“I’ve gotta get this right!” is a mental trap that I can understand, but as a GM you need to be comfortable letting it go because it will consistently limit your gaming. Want to run a game set in contemporary Toronto? Well, even if you’ve lived there your entire life, you’re probably going to end up contradicting reality at some point while running it. Ditto if you’re running a World War II scenario or a Victorian London scenario or a Samurai Japan scenario. Running only settings which you’ve created for yourself completely out of whole cloth is a really strict straitjacket that’s going to rob you of a lot of great gaming experiences.

On the flip-side, that doesn’t mean you should get flippant with continuity either. Nobody playing a Star Wars game wants to see the Death Star show up as a giant cube. What you’re looking for is the “grok threshold”: The point where you fundamentally understand how the setting ticks so that you can make up new details about the setting in a way that’s consistent with the setting as a whole. Once you’ve hit that grok threshold, however, you should then feel free to own the setting (which can also mean making significant changes to the established canon).

Often the quickest way to hit that grok threshold is to actually start using the setting. A few tips that I’ve found useful:

(1) If you want to look up a detail, give yourself 30 seconds to find it. If you haven’t found it after 30 seconds, make it up. If it turns out that you’ve contradicted something, sort it out after the session (by either revising the setting or explaining the necessary retcon to your players).

(2) If you’ve got a player at the table with expertise, don’t be afraid to leverage that expertise. (“Hey, Bob, what’s the name of the Archduke of the Red Isles?”) On the other hand, if you’re feeling pressured by the expert to “always get it right”, it can be useful to establish upfront that you’ve customized the setting and that people can expect changes. Don’t be afraid of accepting corrections if it’s not a big deal; but if it would mean that you have to scrap all of the prep for your current session just retcon the setting to match your prep and move forward from there.

(3) Dip your toes into the setting starting with areas which aren’t heavily described. Eclipse Phase, for example, is an incredibly dense and complicated setting, but there are thousands of habitats and settlements which have no description whatsoever. Even official locations within the setting will often have only minimal descriptions. For example, this is the description of the Carpo habitat:

Carpo is one of the few moons of Jupiter that is in its own group. This irregular moonlet is only about 3 kilometers in diameter, yet hosts a population of around 17,000 transhumans; over 98% of that number are infomorphs and the remainder synthmorphs. The Carpo infomorphs reside in a simulspace designed and managed by an infomorph calling himself Da5id. The simulspace itself is an alternate historical America, in which transhuman ethics and morality are being applied to 1800s sensibilities. Admission is very strict and seemingly completely arbitrary.

It’s easy to completely master those details and then build on top of them.

(4) With particularly expansive settings, it can also be effective to limit the “official canon” for your games. For example, when I run Star Wars campaigns I have virtually always limited my canon to the six movies created by George Lucas (unless I’m specifically running a game to explore some other chunk of official lore). I’ll freely reach out and grab other interesting bits of lore (planets, characters, etc.) from novels, comics, and animated series (or even the Holiday Special if I’m feeling perverse) — they become resources I can tap without being restrictions which I feel bound by.

WHY BOTHER?

The primary reasons for using a pre-made campaign setting are the extant expectations/knowledge of the players, the sense of shared community, the reduction in prep time, and the injection of someone else’s creative vision with your own.

Of these, I consider the last to be the most valuable: Just as actors perform the role of Hamlet because they want to take Shakespeare’s creative vision and expand it with their own, so your goal in using a pre-made campaign setting should be to take the creative vision and expand it with your own. The actor playing Hamlet will learn things and create things they would never have created if they had simply improvised their own dialogue; similarly you will learn things and create things you would never have created if you had simply created the setting yourself.

(Which is not to disparage the art of creating your own campaign setting or improv acting, obviously.)

My point here is that the degree to which you accept the creative vision and the degree to which you transform the creative vision will vary in both part and scale. You want to take the setting of Eclipse Phase, for example, and consciously make some huge changes to the setting like moving the Jovian Republic to Mercury or having the Factors waging a guerilla war against humanity on Mars? Go for it. After you ran the last session you discovered that you were referring to Carpo’s AI as Mel1ssa instead of Da5id? It’s similarly fine if you simply embrace that change and then move forward to see what happens next.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Session 10C: Back to the Labyrinths

Opening the box of cherry wood they found a manuscript entitled Observations of Alchemical Reductions and the Deductions Thereof by Master Alchemist Tirnet Kal. The book seemed untouched by age, and Ranthir was immediately enthralled – this had once been a well-known alchemical text, but the last copy of it was thought to have been lost several centuries ago.

Treasure is something I left under-utilized in my games for years: Looting X number of gold pieces and maybe some magic items was simply de rigueur. And, honestly, the psychological pleasure of an escalating numerical value (particularly as it counts its way towards the anticipated acquisition which it makes possible) shouldn’t be undervalued.

But as I mentioned in Getting the Players to Care the Golden Rule of Gaming is that players pay attention when you describe treasure. So if the only thing you’re offering to that undivided attention is generic numbers, you are wasting a golden opportunity.

(I may be gilding the lily here with all these gold puns.)

What you want to do is create treasure which contains meaning; which has specific, creative content. The Observations of the Alchemical Reductions and the Deductions Thereof are one example of that. (Saying that there are “rare books” worth X number of gold pieces is more interesting than simply a sack of gold; specifically listing what these books are is more interesting yet.)

At its most basic level, such treasure increases the player’s immersion and interaction with the game world. But you can use this to additional effect:

• As with the Observations, such treasure can reward character skill (or player insight) by making the treasure more valuable than it first appears. This creates an additional layer of arguably more meaningful reward.
• As described in Getting the Players to Care, treasure can be used to package exposition into an attractive and memorable package for the players.

Simply providing intriguing chaff – little bits of random “cool” that have no purpose or intended greater meaning, like Tolkien’s reference to the cats of Queen Berúthiel – are nonetheless valuable because they provide texture to the improvisational texture of the game world. You can never be entirely sure what uses your players will find for items similar to my 101 Curious Items, or how they’ll combine with other elements of the campaign to create memorable events.

But then Ranthir raised the possibility that they might find a way of transporting the entire orrery to the surface and selling it intact.

The orrery that the PCs also discovered in this section of Ghul’s Labyrinth is an example of this: You’ll see a whole sequence of events spill out over the next few campaign journals which I had no way of anticipating when I created the orrery as a form of nifty and evocative treasure.

The orrery also shows how the context you add to treasure can be used to create obstacles and interesting challenges for the PCs to overcome. One of the most basic ways you can do this – as exemplified by the orrery – is to make the treasure weighty, bulky, or otherwise difficult to transport. Successfully getting the treasure home now becomes part of the challenge. (In the case of the orrery, this took the form of Ranthir’s player eventually coming up with the very clever idea of selling the location of the rarity and letting the buyer of that valuable information deal with the difficulties of transporting it.)

Personalizing this sort of treasure can also be effective. In another D&D campaign, there was a player whose character spent the first ten or so levels stripping dungeons and enemy lairs of interesting pieces of furniture, art, and other accoutrements in order to furnish the fortress-temple he wanted to one day build for his elemental goddess. You can be sure that these features received extra care and attention from me for the duration of that campaign.

Doing so revealed a large room filed with cages of wrought iron. Tee saw that there were age-yellowed skeletons lying in dusty heaps within several of them.

You can also make the creatures the PCs fight a form of treasure in themselves. Pelts, furs, and other animal products have possessed great value throughout history. In the case of this particular session, the creatures were long dead, but there’s no reason the PCs can’t harvest from their own kills.

In setting this up, however, you want to be careful: If you make a particular animal’s carcass too valuable, you will curtail your ability to use that creature ubiquitously.

This can also become an interesting way of complicating combat: You may not be able to fricassee the golden wombat with a fireball if you want to be able to sell its fur, which will limit the tactics you can effectively use while fighting them. (The old school rules for subduing dragons have a similar dynamic.)