The Alexandrian

Ptolus - In the Shadow of the Spire
IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

SESSION 39B: SHIVVEL, SLAVES, AND GOLD

June 14th, 2009
The 22nd Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

Treasure chest and bags filled with gold coins and gold bars

With the way cleared by Agnarr, Tee slid through the secret door. The hall beyond ended in a chamber of finished stone. Several empty crates had been stacked to one side of the room, and there were a handful of sealed crates on the opposite side. Near the sealed crates were two open crates containing small bundles wrapped in paper.

Cutting open one of the bundles, Tee discovered that it contained a brick of shivvel. At a quick estimate, she guessed that each brick contained a hundred doses of shivvel (each worth 2 sp), and there must be nearly four hundred bricks stored here.

It was clear, however, that there had once been much more of the shivvel stored here. Tee suspected that the destruction of Linech Cran’s operation was continuing to affect the ratlings’ supply.

Poking around the rest of the room she discovered that a section of the wall could be removed, revealing a detailed map of the Warrens with several locations marked with crude symbols.

Map of the Warrens, several buildings marked with red X's and O's

There was also a secret door leading to another chamber, this one empty except for an iron coffer. A quick inspection of this revealed that it was set into a depression on the floor – opening or moving the coffer would shift its weight and trigger the release of a gas (which Tee guessed would prove poisonous). She quickly disabled the mechanism and flipped open the coffer, revealing a mixture of silver and copper coins that she estimated to be worth about 350 gold crowns.

“If they’re running a major drug operation here, this isn’t nearly enough money.” (Not that this stopped her from levering the coffer into her bag of holding.)

Her suspicions proved true: There was a second secret door. Although locked, she was able to open it with the keys she had taken from Silion and Urnest, and thus discover what appeared to be the true treasury: Eight copper coffers filled with gold and silver worth almost 8,000 gold crowns.

There was also a ninth coffer marked with the skull sigil of the Deathmantle cult. It contained six masterwork daggers set on a shaped-cushion of black velvet; their blades glistening with a dark red Ptolus: Deathmantles Cult Symbol - Copyright (c) Monte Cook Gamespaste. (When Tee showed them to Ranthir, he was able to identify the paste as hellblood venom — a poison distilled from the blood of demons that, when brought in contact with a mortal wound, would cause the blood to thin and bleed more rapidly.)

In one of the copper coffers there was also a box of ebony. This contained four strange, round disks about 8 inches in diameters. Crafted from a stainless steel, each seemed possessed of strange, interlocking joints – as if they were complicated, three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles coated with viciously serrated blades. The sight of them made Tee uneasy. She carefully shut the box and slid it into her bag of holding.

Tor, meanwhile, had found himself standing over the dead body of a ratbrute in a long hall. Taking in the details of his surroundings for the first time, he discovered that there were four barred slave pens built into the walls of the hall. He approached the nearest one, and found nearly a half dozen prisoners. They cowered away from his light as he approached, but he quickly reassured them that he and his friends were there to help. He quickly visited the other pens, finding over a dozen prisoners in total (many obviously in very bad states of health).

A long, damp-eaten table was shoved up against one wall. It was covered in a variety of yellowed papers, half-eaten food, and the like. Tor quickly looked it over, trying to find a key. Instead, he found the withered, bloody stump of a human hand casually tossed in amidst the general clutter. His stomach churned. Quickly gathering up the papers, he told the others to keep a watch over the hall leading to the south, and then went back through the northern tunnel to find Tee, hoping that she would be able to pick the locks on the pen doors.

When Tor arrived, Tee was in the process of loading the crates of shivvel into her bag of holding. “Prisoners? I didn’t know we’d found prisoners!”

Tee hurried back through the tunnels. “There’s a secret door right there,” she mentioned in passing.

“How do you know that?” Tor asked.

“I can smell the rat-stench seeping through it.”

Once she had reached the slave pens she was able to make quick work of the locks. While the others discussed what they were going to do with the prisoners, Tee looked through the papers Tor had gathered up. They were mostly accounting of the comings and going of the slaves (others were completely illegible due to the poor condition in which they had been kept), but a particularly well-drawn map caught her attention.

SEWER ROUTES TO THE COAST

This well-drawn map details a route through the sewer tunnels leading to two undescribed locations near or on the Coast. One, leading north from the Blessed Bridge, appears to terminate near the Docks; the other, leading south from the Blessed Bridge, somewhere in the Warrens.

Ranthir, meanwhile, was feeding the malnourished slaves while Tor gently questioned them. It turned out that most of them had been freshly captured off the streets of Ptolus, many from the Warrens. Several were obviously shivvel addicts and easily preyed on. There was an elven prisoner, however, who had a different tale to tell: He had lived in the village of Onsafal in the Teeth of Light. He and most (if not all) of his village were captured by slavers and then sold through the black markets of Freeport. He had arrived at the Docks, been taken to a warehouse, and then sold to the ratlings.

Tee, joining the telling of these tales towards their end, removed the iron coffer of copper and silver she had taken from the false treasury. This money she distributed among the slaves. Elestra and Nasira, meanwhile, were getting increasingly worried about the dark, unknown depths of the unexplored southern passage.

“We need to get them out of here,” Tor said.

“And we can’t just leave them to find their own way,” Elestra said.

Running the Campaign: Clues Linking Scenarios Campaign Journal: Session 39C
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

Starship - Artist: Algol

In the Mothership RPG, when your ship takes megadamage it advances along track where each point of megadamage also inflicts an additional effect, as described in the Shipbreaker’s Toolkit, p. 35, and also on the ship manifest sheet:

00           All Systems Normal
01           Emergency Fuel Leak
02           Weapons Offline
03           Navigation Offline
04           Fire on Deck
05           Hull Beach
06           Life Support Systems Offline
07           Radiation Leak
08           Dead in the Water
09+         Abandon Ship!

Because you can suffer more than one point of megadamage per hit and you only apply the effect of the megadamage total you land on after, there is some variation within this system. But if you want to mix things up a bit more (so that, for example, you might suffer an emergency fuel leak after weapons go offline), you could deploy a basic megadamage pyramid:

Mothership - Megadamage Pyramid

You start on the top row and mark off boxes in a random order, once again only applying the last megadamage effect crossed off on each row.

Note: This pyramid is slightly less forgiving at the top end than the original rules, as it’s possible to hit Abandon Ship at 8 megadamage.

BRUTAL VARIANT: CAPRICIOUS FATE

Combat in the void is harsh and unforgiving, for this was a place that man was never meant to live or die.

In this brutal variant of the megadamage pyramid, each time a ship suffers megadamage roll the effect randomly:

Mothership - Brutal Megadamage Pyramid

If you roll an effect you’ve already rolled, it spills over to another effect on the same row. If all effects on the row are filled, then the effect rolls down to the next level of the pyramid.

While it’s possible for your ship to suffer catastrophic damage the very first time you’re hit in combat (Abandon Ship!), there is one glimmer of hope: On a roll of 00, you still suffer the megadamage, but it has no further effect.

Variant – Fast Escalation: If you roll an effect your ship is already suffering from, you instead sink down the pyramid to one of the two adjacent damage effects (determine which one randomly).

Mothership: Player's Survival Guide

The name of the game is collateral damage! USA Today Bestselling Author and ENnie Award-winning RPG designer Justin Alexander shows you how to get a little sloppier with your aim: Don’t just hit the PCs. Start hitting stuff all around them. Their friends, their allies, innocent bystanders, even their enemies.

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Noir detective as a red silhouette in front of gray buildings (artist: breakermaximus)

Go to Part 1

A completely reactive mystery — in which the characters simply explore scenes, discover leads, and follow those leads to new scenes (and then repeat) — can make for a perfectly lovely scenario.

With that being said, when you’re designing a mystery scenario, I strongly recommend including proactive nodes: Stuff that can (and will!) come to find the PCs even if they’re standing still. These elements put the world in motion, implying that the world exists and things are happening beyond what the PCs can immediately see. Even the lightest spicing of these elements can add a ton of dynamic life to a scenario.

These proactive elements don’t necessarily need to be (or, more accurately, contain) clues, but in a mystery scenario why would you pass up the opportunity?

This, in turn, makes proactive nodes the single best troubleshooting tool you can have when running a mystery. As discussed in the Three Clue Rule, if you end up in a situation where the players are stuck, dithering, or have decided to hide from the adventure, you can simply trigger a proactive node to bring the next scene to the PCs and keep the adventure moving forward.

But troubleshooting isn’t the only reason to trigger a proactive node.

Another option is to advance the timeline. This assumes that the antagonists in the scenario are actively pursuing an ongoing agenda (e.g., another bank is robbed; the serial killer targets another victim; the Death Star blows up another planet). You simply trigger the next step in their plan (or the next stage of the parasite’s life cycle).

The trick, however, is that the bad guys’ plan may have nothing to do with the PCs, and the next stage of the plan may happen completely offscreen without the PCs being aware of it. What you want to do, therefore, is to think not only about what happens, but also how those events end up intersecting the PCs.

This maybe straightforward. For example, if the PCs are FBI agents investigating the serial killer, then their boss can simply contact them and send them to the new crime scene. If they’re superheroes pursuing high-tech bank robbers, on the other hand, you might want to have them spot the robbery in progress while they’re patrolling the streets or, alternatively, they could spot a news broadcast mentioning the most recent crime.

Along similar lines, you can also raise the stakes. For example, the bad guys have finished building their death ray and now they start using it. Or the parasite begins transforming the residents of Evergrove into horrible monsters.

Proactive nodes can also be used to create consequences: Did the PC super-spies tip their hands and let Le Élcarlate know they were investigating him? Then it makes sense that he’d send some thugs to dissuade them! (Or a femme fatale to seduce them.)

This technique can work even if the players are clueless about what they did to earn the payback. (“Well… we clearly pissed somebody off.”) But it’s usually even more effective if they can see the connection between what they did and the proactive node that landed in their lap. It reinforces that their choices are meaningful, as are the repercussions of their successes and failrues. (If it’s unclear, you might consider including some clues or hints to help them figure out why the fish-people suddenly tried to blow up their hotel room.)

You might also employ proactive nodes simply for pacing. Are the players getting a little listless? Does the session seem to be lagging a bit? Nothing a squad of android assassins can’t fix!

TIME PASSES

Something I’ve discovered is that proactive nodes work best when the players have a clear sense of time passing in the game world.

There can be a tendency in an RPG for stuff to just kind of happen, one thing after another after another, in a sort of amorphous temporal void. It can be surprisingly easy for an adventure to start in the late afternoon and then have the PCs do eighteen different things, drive back and forth multiple times across town, and yet never have the day come to an end.

When you get stuck in this timeless state, it can become difficult to properly trigger a proactive node. (“If it’s only been an hour so since they found the body, does it really make sense that the bad guys could figure out where they lived and planted explosives there?”) And consequences can also feel capricious instead of consequential.

This can also be true if things become untacked in time: If it feels like only a few hours have passed, it can feel unfair or unhinged when a proactive event suddenly reveals that days have passed.

What you need is both a clear internal sense of how much time is passing for the characters and to clearly communicate that to the players so that their mental image of the game world is accurate.

For the first part, what I find useful is a mental model that roughly divides the day into four parts:

  • Morning
  • Afternoon
  • Evening
  • Overnight

(If the PCs are particularly active at night, you can also split that into two parts.)

Generally speaking, the PCs can each do one thing in each “slot” of the day. When they change location or tackle some completely new and time-consuming task, you can move things forward to the next slot. (If any PCs haven’t done something in the current slot, this is also a good time to ask them what they were doing while “Bob spends the afternoon at the library” or whatever.)

All you need to do now is communicate that passage of time to the players. Fortunately, you don’t need to make a big deal out of this. In fact, asking, “What are the rest of you doing while Bob spends the afternoon at the library?” neatly takes care of the problem. You can also make a point of including time of day when describing new scenes: “As you pull into the hotel parking lot, the sun is setting…” or “When you reach Aunt Cass’ house, she’s in the kitchen making lunch for the kids…”

Collectively, this temporal awareness will give a concrete sense of structure to the events happening in the game world; it’ll help you balance spotlight time; it’ll impose a sense of urgency in the players (even if there’s no clear time pressure); and it’ll let you naturally slot in your proactive events.

Frankly, it’s just good praxis in general.

CRAFTING PROACTIVE NODES

Our discussion of proactive nodes has mostly focused on various forms of trouble: A crisis happens.  The bad guy’s do something horrible. A guy with a gun walks through the door.

But proactive nodes can also be opportunities. In fact, probably the most ubiquitous form of proactive scene is the scenario hook at the beginning of an adventure: The PCs are minding their own business when they see a damsel in distress. Or a patron offers them a job.

A key insight is that these kinds of opportunities can also be offered in the middle of an adventure: A local gangbanger hears the PCs have been looking into the recent disappearances, so when her friend goes missing she comes to the PCs hoping they can help. Or maybe the antagonist decides it would be cheaper to offer the PCs a payoff to go mind their own business.

(If you’re running a more complicated campaign structure in which scenarios can overlap with each other, you might even have situations where the players don’t immediately realize that the new offer is connected to the ongoing scenario.)

What if you’re in the middle of a session, discover that you need a proactive node to get things back on track, and then realize that you don’t have one?

You can improvise something, of course, but it may also be possible to repurpose a static node.

For example, maybe the PCs were supposed to track down the safe house where the vampires are keeping a bunch of blood-addicted Renfields. Now they’ve pissed off the vampires enough that it would seem to demand a response… so why not grab some or all of those Renfields and throw ‘em at the PCs?

The all-purpose version of this, for scenarios that have gone completely imploded, is to just have the Big Bad Guy show up wherever the PCs happen to be and trigger the final showdown. In practice, of course, this is insanely unsatisfying for the players. You’re almost always going to be better off using a proactive node loaded up with clues that point the PCs to the Big Bad Guy (wherever they might be), so that the players will have the satisfaction of “figuring it out.” (This is, ultimately, a form of Matryoshka technique.)

NEXT: Background Revelations

Strange Passage

The spell was cast, and just in time. You and your friends were in dreadful need of respite, and you gratefully climbed up the rope and through the unseen portal.

Now you’re huddled in a small, featureless room of stone that has been conjured into some proto-dimensional pocket by your party’s sorcerer. A single small window looks out into the material plane.

And then, in the middle of the night, you hear something…

…tap. tap. tap.

A tapping on the wall.

…tap. tap. tap.

From the far side of the wall.

After a few minutes it stops.

Maybe you panic and drop out of the rope trick. Maybe you stick it out until morning. But that’s it.

For now.

But the next time you crawl up into a rope trick (or maybe it’s the time after that)…

…tap. tap. tap.

…tap. tap. tap.

When the tapping stops, maybe you listen at the walls. Is that whispering you hear?

And then, whether it’s after hours or days, the tapping comes again. And it goes on longer this time. It lasts for several minutes, and then — BAM!

Something on the far side slams into the walls of the rope trick hard enough to make the whole thing shake. Maybe the window back to the real world cracks.

There’s no question now. Something out there is hunting you. And what, exactly, is beyond these inert little gray walls of seeming sanctuary?

Maybe you decide to dig out. Maybe something digs in. Maybe the next time you come up into the rope trick you find a neat little hole burrowed into the wall.

If you’re looking for inspiration on what might lie beyond the rope trick, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves seems like it might be a good place to start.

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