IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

SESSION 10C: BACK TO THE LABYRINTHS

November 3rd, 2007
The 30th Day of Amseyl in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

THE BLOODY ORRERY

The next morning, at breakfast, Cardalian came over to their table. She received a rather frosty reception from all of them as she introduced herself to “their new friend”, Tor. She invited them to attend the funeral of Devaral Unissa at the Cathedral of Athor on the 1^st of Kadal and then headed back to her own table.

They shrugged her off and headed back up towards the North Market and Greyson House.

There was still one mystery left in the outer area of the complex: The room with the orrery. Something in that room – or adjacent to that room – was inflicting them with the bloodsheen.

Ranthir had specifically prepared spells to get to the root of this mystery. Working his incantations he carefully circled through the room, trying to ignore the thin sheen of blood springing up across his body. “I am certain,” he said at last, “That one of bloodwights lies within the orrery. I think—“

At that moment, the glistening pink form of a fully regenerated bloodwight smashed its way through the wooden panels around the base of the orrery. Ranthir’s momentary outrage at seeing the ancient orrery damaged was quickly replaced by concern as he realized that the creature had effectively cut him off from the room’s exit… and the blood was pouring ever faster from his pores.

Tor and Agnarr rushed into the room, gladly braving the bloodsheen in order to come to their companion’s aid. Tee kept her distance, but drew her dragon pistol, carefully choosing her shots to blast hunks from the bloodwight’s undead flesh.

It was short and bloody work, but at last it was done. Agnarr grinned. “Well, I think that’s finally the last of them. So…”

Ranthir was lying unconscious in a pool of his own blood.

“Dominic!”

The priest came rushing in from the outer room. Fortunately, Ranthir – although faint from the shocking loss of blood – was not physically harmed. With the strength of Athor flowing into his flesh, the wizard and scholar was soon back on his feet.

His attention turned almost immediately to the orrery, which he had not previously been able to devote proper attention to. After years of neglect it was in very poor condition and utterly inoperable, but after careful study and the taking of many notes, Ranthir was able to reconstruct its basic principles.

He was intrigued to discover that the motions of the heavenly bodies it tracked were not accurate to a modern understanding – there were several minor inconsistencies reflective of a much older cosmological theory. But, even more fascinating, the orrery featured no less than seventeen heavenly bodies which were completely unknown to modern observation. What had the makers of the orrery been thinking? What did those bodies represent? Had they, in fact, existed at some point in the distant past?

Tee, meanwhile, was inspecting the orrery with a more practical eye. She confirmed that the bloodwight had, in fact, been resting within a secret compartment of sorts within the base of the orrery – it had probably once been used for maintenance. But she also discovered that the seventeen spheres representing the unknown heavenly bodies were not made of brass like the other spheres in the orrery, but were instead forged form pure silver and worth a small fortune (at least 425 gp).

Tee began looking for ways to break off these silver spheres, but then Ranthir raised the possibility that they might find a way of transporting the entire orrery to the surface and selling it intact. This seemed a daunting task – the orrery must have weighed at least 14,000 pounds – but Ranthir suspected it could be worth as much as 12,000 gp.

After much debate, it was decided that they would leave the orrery for now. Tee was skeptical that they could move it (even if they followed Ranthir’s suggestion of hiring workers to perform the necessary excavations) – there was, after all, the pit of chaos in the way. But there was also the possibility that Lord Zavere of Castle Shard would be interested in it – perhaps they could sell the mere knowledge of the orrery and allow the buyer to extract it for themselves.

With these thoughts in mind they moved through the deserted corridors that had been expurgated of the bloodwight plague and passed through the doors of bluesteel… Read more »

(click here for PDF)

Here we have another one of my system cheat sheets, this time for a game that I was Lead Developer for. Like my other cheat sheets, this one summarizes all the rules for the game — from basic action resolution to advanced combat options to the nuanced gear options of the Human Sphere. It’s a great way to get a grip on a new system and, of course, it also provides a valuable resource at the table for both the GM and the players. (For more information on the procedure I follow when prepping these cheat sheets, click here.)

Infinity is a game of epic science fiction, mixing together transplanetary empires, alien invasions, existential threats, cusping transhumanism, and rich historical allusion into a kitchen sink of thrilling science fiction. The Wilderness of Mirrors scenario meta-structure will create wildly memorable gaming experiences, while the triple battlefield of Warfare, Infowar, and Psywar is implemented using a set of unified core mechanics which strips away the mechanical complexity so often found in cyberpunk-inspired systems.

I’m more than a little biased, but I think you should check it out.

HOW I USE THEM

As I’ve described in the past, I keep a copy of the system cheat sheet behind my GM screen for quick reference and also provide copies for all of the players. Of course, I also keep at least one copy of the rulebook available, too. But my goal with the cheat sheets is to consolidate information and eliminate book look-ups: Finding something in a couple of pages is a much faster process than paging through hundreds of pages in the rulebook.

The organization of information onto each page of the cheat sheet should, hopefully, be fairly intuitive. The division of pages is mostly arbitrary.

PAGE 1: CORE MECHANICS. As a 2d20 game, the core mechanics of Infinity revolve around skill tests, but (perhaps even more importantly) the concept of Momentum & Heat. Infinity Points are also summarized here for easy reference.

PAGE 2: ACTION SCENES. This page summarizes the core mechanical chassis on which all Action Scenes in Infinity are built.

PAGE 3-6: TRIPLE BATTLEFIELD. These pages detail the rules for Warfare, Infowar, and Psywar.

PAGE 7: ACTION SCENE MOMENTUM & NPC PROGRAM TEMPLATES. These two things don’t really have anything to do with each other, but the Action Scene Momentum page had enough space left over that I could put the NPC Program Templates on it, and those are too useful not to have at your fingertips during play. (They provide a a couple dozen hacking devices that you can give NPCs, allowing you to quickly customize hackers without needing to build a custom deck list every time.)

PAGE 8-9: VEHICLES, STEALTH, BASIC INTERACTIONS. Wrap up of some additional rules that flesh out the core engine of the game.

PAGE 10-14: GEAR. Based on playtesting with these sheets, the gear section was significantly expanded. Like a lot of science fiction games, Infinity has a need to cover a lot of different types of gear. We’ve kept those systems as streamlined as possible, but there are still specialized rules that are pulled out here for easy reference. Of equal importance are the Qualities cheat sheets, which chew up a lot of space but are really useful to keeping things moving in actual play.

PAGE 15: ADVERSARIES. They key info for running NPCs. This wouldn’t take up so much room, but the specialized rules for Fireteams (which make running large engagements much easier) and the full list of common special abilities (included for reasons similar to the gear qualities based on actual playtesting with the sheets).

A SIMPLER SET

These cheat sheets are sufficiently expansive that it would be very time consuming to review them in their entirety. If you’re looking for a quick introduction to the system for new players, here’s what I recommend:

• Page 1: Core Mechanics. (You can skip the specific details of how you, as the GM, can spend Heat. But the players need to understand how to flexibly use Momentum.)
• Page 2-5: The Triple Battlefield. Covering Warfare, Infowar, and Psywar does carry a heavier load than systems that only handle one of them.
• Page 7: Action Scene Momentum. (Emphasize that these are examples. The 2d20 System is nice if you run it as a RAW-above-all bundle of crunch, but Infinity really sings when you embrace the system’s potential for player improvisation.)
• Page 10: Lifestyles & Acquisitions. (It’s not a bad idea to take a look at the Lifestyle descriptions in the core rulebook, starting on p. 388. It’s a fairly short section, but it really encapsulates what it feels like to live in the Human Sphere, and that perspective can be really useful for players trying to create and get into their character’s heads.)
• Page 14: Remotes. (You can skip most of the other gear rules and bring them in as they come up in play, but I think the pervasive domotics and ability to take action at a distance through a variety of remotes is something that players really need to grok about the setting.)

Of course, you’ll also want to do a quick introduction of the setting. This can prove challenging because there’s A LOT of stuff going on in the Human Sphere. Standard advice about focusing only on the stuff that’s immediately relevant to your first 2-3 scenarios still applies here. But take a specific look at the “Human Sphere” sidebar on p. 8 (specifically designed to introduce all the planets) and the “Factions of the Future” sidebar on p. 27 (which introduces all the factions). Between those two, you’ll get a pretty good overview for the setting. The “Life in the Human Sphere” chapter (p. 140-145) is also something you might consider excerpting and giving to the players to read before your first session.

MAKING A GM SCREEN

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

Personally, I use a four-panel screen and use reverse-duplex printing in order to create sheets that I can tape together and “flip up” to reveal additional information behind them.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Session 10B: Retreat to the Surface

Ranthir began marking their path back to the entrance with chalk marks. He also took out pen, ink, and parchment and began drawing an ornate, beautiful, and highly detailed map of their explorations.

Any character, regardless of medium, can be interpreted as a collection of specific traits: They’re brave. Tall. Conflicted. In love. Impatient. Educated. Handsome. Et cetera.

It’s also not particularly revelatory that, in a roleplaying game, the traits of a character will often by mechanically defined: It’s not just that a character is “smart”, that intelligence is given a number and the effects of that intelligence will manifest through the mechanics of the game.

(Of course not all of the traits of an RPG character will be mechanically defined. And even those that are will often – or should often – manifest themselves in non-mechanical ways: Being “smart”, for example, should have impacts on many actions that are not resolved through mechanics.)

It’s perhaps most typical for a character’s mechanical traits to be designed: The player wants Ranthir to be smart, so they assign a high score to Ranthir’s intelligence. They want Ranthir to be trained in the arcane arts, so they assign skill points to his Spellcraft skill.

By contrast, what I often find interesting are the traits which unexpectedly emerge from the mechanics.

For example, Ranthir’s player thought it would be appropriate for the character to be skilled in calligraphy, so he put some points into Craft (calligraphy). When Ranthir began mapping a dungeon during play and the player decided to make a Craft (calligraphy) check to see how attractive the resulting map was, what was unanticipated was the high die roll would cause the other characters to remark on the map. And, more importantly, that high check resulted in Ranthir’s beautiful maps (and his peculiar obsession with the accuracy of those maps) becoming a recurring theme of the campaign and a memorable trait of the character.

Dominic, meanwhile, was wandering the city and trying to get his bearings. (But, for some reason, he kept finding himself back at Delver’s Square…)

Of course, success is not the only way such traits can emerge. Dominic’s poor sense of direction, for example, was not something that was specifically designed. In terms of mechanical definition, in fact, the character wasn’t particularly stupid or anything. But a pattern of poor rolls on very specific types of checks (across multiple skills, actually) caused this element of the character to emerge, at which point the player (and the rest of the group) took it and ran with it.

This would notably lead, at one point, to a skill check where Dominic succeeded and knew which way they needed to go… except none of the other characters believed him, because of his notoriously poor sense of direction.

Obviously any trait can be improvised into existence as one explores their character through play. But I think these emergent traits – aspects of the character which would not exist without the mechanical impulse – are a particularly fascinating part of what happens at the table during a roleplaying game. They’re a great example of the sense of discovery which is one of the primary attractions of the medium for me. They’re also exemplary of the fact that the division that some see between the mechanical component of an RPG and the creative component of an RPG doesn’t really exist: When used correctly, mechanics are an improv seed. They’re the equivalent of an audience member yelling out a random word and pushing you in directions you could never have anticipated or prepared for.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

SESSION 10B: RETREAT TO THE SURFACE

November 3rd, 2007
The 28th Day of Amseyl in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

With Tee in such a state, they really had no choice: They had to return to the city and seek the healing they had foregone before.

They carefully bound Tee’s arms and legs – partly to stop her from injuring herself; partly to stop her from injuring them – and Agnarr gently lifted her and carried her back down the corridors they had already explored.

It took them the better part of an hour, but they finally emerged – bedraggled and soaked with blood and ichor – into Greyson House.

They headed down Upper God Way to the Street of a Million Gods and the Temple of Asche, attracting many stares. The priests there explained that Father Mand Scheben was not present in the church that day, but he had left instructions that they were to be offered healing at the lowest of possible costs. This was good news for the party, who still had to dip deep into their funds to afford the several hundred gold pieces required for the necessary components and divine casting.

When the clouds of madness cleared from Tee’s eyes, she was left with two sentences burning in her mind: “The lance is being built. The runebearers will not come in time.” She wasn’t sure what to make of it.

The priests allowed them to use their baths to clean up, and then they headed back towards the Ghostly Minstrel. On their way back, a flying ship passed overhead. This startled most of the group, but Tee described it as a common sight in Ptolus – the aeroship of House Shever.

When they reached the Ghostly Minstrel, Tee pulled Ranthir to one side and told him the phrase she had emerged with from her madness. He wasn’t sure what it meant either, but he promised to research it the next time he went to the Delver’s Guild Library.

…which turned out to be immediately after dinner. Ranthir and Elestra both headed to the library. While Ranthir researched the things Tee had asked him to look into, Elestra read up on Ghul the Skull-King. What she found confirmed their suspicion that the complex they were exploring was connected with him: There was, in fact, an expansive construction beneath Ptolus referred to collectively as “Ghul’s Labyrinth”. The Delver’s Guild believed that these were the breeding chambers, barracks, and laboratories of Ghul during his dark reign. Much of the treasure drawn up from the depths came from chambers within the Labyrinth. Many delvers were even reporting the discovery of chambers protected with ancient preservation magicks – their contents untouched through the eons. (When Elestra briefed the rest of the group on what she’d found, Dominc grimaced: “Preserved corpses… No… Well, I hope not…”) To find an unexplored section of the Labyrinth, as they had done, promised many rewards.

Tee, meanwhile, bought a newssheet for a copper piece and browsed through it while she taught Dominic the rules of dragonscales. She discovered that earlier that day an older, well-known, and well-liked City Watch guard named Devaral Unissa had been found killed with the shape of a raven carved into his chest. This was the sign of a gang-killing by Kevris Killraven’s men.

Agnarr, boozing it up, was hearing the same thing from others in the Ghostly Minstrel’s bar. Tee was surprised to hear that the Killravens were now considered to rival the Balacazars as the premiere criminal gang in the town. When she had left Ptolus a little more than a year before, the Killravens had only just arrived in town. It was rumored that many of Kevris’ top lieutenants had come with her from out of town.

After talking it over, Tee and Dominic decided to head over to the Cloud Theater and try to talk to the “Dullin boy”. Tee was convinced that this boy’s life was in danger, and she wanted to warn him.

Read more »

Go to Eternal Lies: The Alexandrian Remix

Mirroring my experience with airports when I originally ran Eternal Lies, those instances where a very specific hotel was established in both my imagination and the imaginations of my players resulted in much richer and more interesting play than when a generic hotel served as a generic homebase for their operations in an area.

In returning to the campaign, therefore, I decided to get much more deliberate in setting up these hotels. And, once again, this afforded me the opportunity to inject more historically-sourced material into the campaign. Although some of the hotels in this addendum are fictional, the significant majority of them are real hotels that you could have rented a room at in 1934-35.

Simply prepping a single hotel for each locale, however, was generally not sufficient. Deciding on where they wanted to stay (and how that would inform their strategy in approaching each locale) was actually quite important for my original group, and quickly proved the same for my second group.

As such, for most locales these addendum contains three different hotels, each representing a different class: High, Middle, and Low. (There are some locales where accommodations are scant and beggars can’t be choosers.)

• High class hotels require a 1 point Credit Rating spend.
• Middle class hotels have no mechanical effect, but they generally lack the security of higher class establishments (and the GM should take that into account when the bad guys become aware of them).
• Low class hotels also have no mechanical effect. They, too, lack security, but this can be made up for by the fact that PCs may find it easier to fly under the radar here. On the other hand, these facilities can often create complications in their own right. In addition to the mundane, they’re often an appropriate milieu for some of the grubbier floating scenes (as described on pg.125-144 in the campaign book).

The GM should also keep in mind that these hotels can be used in other ways than simply PC accommodations. For example, when the PCs concocted an unexpected strategy for pursuing the cultists in Savannah, they were able to track them back to their hotel. Since I had two other hotels on tap, it was easy to just pick one on-the-fly and decide that the bad guys had been staying there.

Make sure to also grab the Props Packet for this addendum, which contains photos and other props for many of the hotels. (This packet includes a video that can be played for your players.)

Note: There are no hotels given for New York (as it is not anticipated that the PCs will spend significant time there). No hotels are given for Thibet, as that’s a traveling scenario and the PCs are not anticipated to remain in one location for prolonged periods of time.

ETERNAL LIES ADDENDUM – HOTELS

(PDF)

PROP PACKET – HOTELS

(Zip File)