IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

SESSION 6B: RETURN TO THE DEPTHS

April 29th, 2007
The 21st Day of Amseyl in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

Elestra did, in fact, feel much better come the morning. The group felt that they would need more magical healing before their endeavor was complete, so they took the time to stop by Myraeth’s Oddities and pick up a partially spent wand of healing before heading back to Greyson House.

They found that the watchmen had left. In their place, the front door had been crudely boarded shut. Agnarr casually ripped the boards off the door, and the party headed back down into the dusty tunnels.

Agnarr carried Elestra across the pit of insanity, and the rest of the party crossed without incident. About two hundred feet further down, the tunnel abruptly ended in an open doorway. A brass frame in the shape of a door dangled useless from a broken hinge and old dusty shards of glass lay scattered on the ground.

Beyond the door there was a large chamber of the same cream-colored stone. Thick filigrees of dust and grime suggested long neglect and emptiness. Off to the left and the right there were sturdy iron doors. Across the chamber the hallway seemed to continue.

Testing the doors, they found one of them locked. Tee tried to pick the lock, but failed, so they decided to try the other door, which was unlocked. Opening it, however, they found nothing more than a short hallway with another door at the end of it.

Ranthir, meanwhile, noticed that the hinges for the first door were on this side of the door. He pointed this out to Tee and Tee was able to pull the hinges out. Then Agnarr stepped up and heaved the door to one side.

Behind the door they found a set of narrow, cramped hallways. There were many more of the sturdy iron doors.

Tee headed carefully into the area, keeping her eyes peeled for any sign of danger. Reaching an intersection she peered down another hallway and spotted a corpse near the end of it. She beckoned Agnarr to follow her closely and began making her way down towards the corpse.

About halfway down the hall, Tee suddenly started sweating profusely. She wiped the back of her hand across her forehead and, when she pulled it away, she was horrified to find it covered in blood. Looking down at her arms she could see that blood was literally oozing out of her pores. “Oh gods! Get out! Get out!”

Tee and Agnarr rushed back out of the cramped hallway into the larger room where the rest of the group was waiting. After a panicky description of what had happened, the group ascertained that Tee was no longer bleeding (although her clothes had become hopelessly stained). Agnarr had never been afflicted at all. Tee wondered if, perhaps, it was a curse which affected only those of elven blood. Agnarr decided to head back into the area and see if the corpse was, in fact, an elf as well.

But as Agnarr drew near the corpse he, too, found himself afflicted by the bloodsheen. He started to turn back towards the entrance, but as he did so the corpse suddenly lurched to its feat. In his booming voice, Agnarr cried out: “By the red elk!” He drew his sword.

The dry, gray skin of the corpse cracked open as something tore itself out from the inside, like a snake shedding its skin. It emerged as a glistening mass of raw muscle, pulsing with thick veins of crimson-black blood. Its fang-like teeth glittered as its mouth parted in a ghastly, hissing, guttural growl.

Agnarr retreated to the intersection and held his ground there. Tee, hearing his oath, rushed in as well, taking up a position behind him and using her longbow to shoot over his broad shoulders.

The undead monstrosity, pulling free from the dry husk of its former flesh, dashed down the hall at them. As it drew near, the bloodsheen returned – coating their flesh in a scarlet which gleamed in the flickering light of Agnarr’s sword. It made the barbarian’s grip on his sword slick, and he struggled to bring it to bear in the narrow quarters. Meanwhile, the monstrosity’s claws darted in again and again, raising hideous bleeding welts.

Elestra tried to work her way into a position where she could attack the creature too, but as she worked her way around the massive barbarian she inadvertently left her back open to the undead horror, which didn’t hesitate for a moment before tearing a huge, gaping gash across her back. She managed a single feeble and ineffective swing of her blade and then cried out in pain as her skin broke out with the bloodsheen and the wound on her back gushed a sudden torrent of blood. She fell to the floor, unconscious.

At that moment, a sudden pounding came at two of the doors behind Tee. She spun around and lowered her longbow as a desiccated corpse battered down one of the doors and shambled through it into the hallway. She fired true, but her arrow seemed to simply stick in the dead flesh of the creature.

Dominic, meanwhile, rushed in – hoping to heal Elestra and Agnarr. But the bloodsheen took him and weakened him and he was forced to turn back.

Ranthir fired bolts of eldritch might at the first creature. These had some effect, but did not seem to dissuade it. But Ranthir, in studying the creature, saw now that its wounds were visibly healing themselves.

Tee fired another arrow at the second creature. This seemed to knock it back a step, but still had little effect. So she dropped her bow and drew her dragon-hilted longsword. A tense battle between steel and claw ensued, while at her back Agnarr bled from wound after wound after wound.

With Elestra bleeding to death, Tee struggling, and Agnarr becoming weaker with every passing moment, it seemed that flight was the only possibility. Dominic stepped as close as he dared and called upon the might of his god to drive back the foul abominations. He repeated his call to the Father and raised his holy symbol high, but the creatures still fought in a frenzy.

Agnarr, trying to clear a clean path of escape for Tee, attempted to physically push his foe back down the hallway… but a claw snapped out and left a gaping wound in the side of his neck. He stepped forward again and, this time, managed to force it back a step – but he earned another grievous wound to the opposite side of his neck in payment for it.

At that very moment, Dominic’s holy strength found some meager purchase: The desiccated corpse clawing at Tee turned in sudden terror and fled. Tee, seizing the opportunity, plunged her sword deep into its exposed back. It jerked and then collapsed into a cloud of dust.

Tee cried out in joy. Agnarr turned to see what was happening… and left himself perilously open as he did. The creature’s claw found a crease in his sturdy leather armor and dug deep. The sheer force of the blow slammed Agnarr into a corner of the wall, and when the claw ripped free it was followed by a gout of blood. Agnarr fell to his knees and then collapsed.

Tee, badly wounded herself, fled for her life. She raced through the outer chamber and back into the long hall.

Ranthir was out the door before her, but Dominic – the words of his holy invocation still echoing on his lips – was laggard in his escape. The undead thing, bursting into the chamber on Tee’s heels, saw the seemingly defenseless priest and rushed straight at him. Its razor-like claw lashed out, punching deep into the priest’s stomach.

Blood bubbled to Dominic’s lips, but there was a strength deep in the priest’s frail frame – a strength born of his god perhaps. He smiled through the pain – a sickly grimace – and the words of his prayer grew loud again. He grasped the forearm of the creature – still buried in his stomach – with one hand and held it tight as he reached out with the other…

A single burst of holy light and it was done. The creature crumbled back into the dust from whence it had come and to which it now rightfully returned.

Dominic sagged to one knee. His hand closed over his ghastly wound and, with a gentle wave of holy energy, sealed it. Then he was quickly back on his feet and rushing down the hall to where Elestra and Agnarr lay.

Agnarr was still breathing, although his breaths were shallow and rasping. Elestra’s wounds, however, had bled her dry and her breathing had stopped for the second time in as many days. Dominic quickly spent the last of his holy strength on Elestra, barely managing to restore the breath of life to her. As she awoke, he used the wand they had purchased from Myraeth to awake Agnarr.

The pounding of fists upon iron was still echoing through the narrow halls. Something was trying to beat its way out to them. So, with Elestra’s condition hopefully stabilized, the group fled as quickly as they could back into the ancient passage and across the pit of insanity. Ranthir made sure to grab the boards which spanned the pit and pulled them across to their side.

REST AND RECUPERATION

The party was in a sorry state: The wound on Elestra’s back still ached and oozed. The two deep wounds on either side of Agnarr’s neck were still more than apparent. All of them had bled profusely from their pores, leaving their clothes grotesquely stained (except for Dominic whose holy vestments apparently shunned the filth) and their skin coated in coagulating gunk.

Despite their condition, they dragged themselves across town – attracting more than a few disdainful stares as they went. When they returned to the Ghostly Minstrel, Tellith took one look at them and shooed them back outside while she fetched some buckets of water to wash the worst of the filfth off them. There was, in fact, a specially designed trough to one side of the building which sloughed the water away.

“You can never be too prepared,” Tellith said and smiled.

“Does this happen often?” Tee asked.

“More often than my mop can bear,” Tellith replied.

When Tellith was satisfied, the party headed upstairs and gave themselves a thorough and proper cleaning.

When they reconvened in Elestra’s quarters, Dominic gave their injuries a thorough examination. He concluded that his gift of holy energy from Athor the Father would be strong enough the next day to rid them of their injuries, but only barely. As such, they would wait until the day after to journey back down to the ancient complex they had discovered.

Ranthir decided to spend the afternoon at the Delver’s Guild Library to see if he could find any reference to the blood-drenched creatures they had faced. (Perhaps they had some weakness.)

Ranthir had little luck in his research, but the rest of the party tried a different tack: They headed down to the Delver’s Guild office in the Undercity Market.

As they entered, Gorti Jurgen greeted them with a big smile. Agnarr quickly spoke up, “Do you know anything about undead who cause you to bleed from your pores?”

Gorti’s eyes grew wide, “Oh no… I don’t know anything about that.”

“Do you know anyone who would?”

“Not exactly. You should check at the library.”

“We’ve got a man on the job there already.” Agnarr looked around and tried to spot somebody with the air of experience to them. He saw a muscular, bald fellow leaning against the wall. The man had a scar which ran from his right temple down through a milky eye to his jowls. Agnarr strode over to him.

The man eyed him up and down as he came and grunted. “What do you want, barbarian?”

“Do you know anything about creatures like this?”

The man shrugged. “They sound like undead who cause you to bleed from your pores.”

“Exactly!” Agnarr jubilantly walked out.

While Agnarr had become the center of attention, Tee idly scanned the postings on the wall. She noticed that, in addition to the usual postings about equipment for sale and wanted expertise, there were several pro-Republican and several anti-Republican flyers posted as well. Once Agnarr was gone, she went over to the scarred man and asked him if he did, in fact, know anything. He didn’t.

They came up out of the Undercity Market and headed over to the Ghostly Minstrel. Agnarr had already hit the bar, hoping to soothe the ache from his wounds with a few women and a lot of alcohol.

A letter had arrived for Elestra. It was from Iltumar Shon and written in a crude hand:

Mistress Elestra—

I think I have a riddle to match your skill:

Oft I must strive with wind and wave.

They wish to capture what I must keep;

But in lying still am I strong in strife.

I can master them both if my grip holds out;

If the rocks bring succor and lend support.

Iltumar

Elestra was too tired to truly puzzle over the verse. Folding the letter carefully, she headed up to bed. The others soon followed her.

NEXT JOURNAL ENTRY

Places to Go, People to Be, a French RPG ‘zine, has posted a translation of my review Ten Candles. (The original review in English can be read over here.)

They’ve also done a translation of Opening Your Game Table, which I promptly rendered obsolete by writing the Open Table Manifesto. (Sorry, guys!)

Node-Based Scenario Design has been translated into Hungarian by LFG. (The original for that is located here.)

Go to Part 1

A subject somewhat related to hidden vs. open difficulty numbers is the matter of open and hidden stakes. In other words, whether or not the players know why they’re rolling the dice.

In most cases, of course, the stakes are known: If you’re trying to jump over a crevasse, the dice roll is determining whether you do so or not. But there are action checks where that isn’t necessarily true: If the GM calls for a Perception test while the PCs are traveling through a jungle, the players don’t necessarily know if it’s to notice a tribesman lying in ambush, a hidden treasure, a treacherous piece of terrain, or something else entirely.

Perception tests are, in fact, probably the most common form of this. (Since they literally determine whether or not you’re aware of something.) But the principle can be applied to other tests and reactive mechanics, too. Calling for a saving throw against undetected dangers or unknown spells before explaining what the consequence of a failure will be is a great way to ratchet up the anxiety at the table (particularly if it’s the exception rather than the rule).

I’ll sometimes do the same thing with Sanity checks in Call of Cthulhu, Stability tests in Trail of Cthulhu, and similar mechanics: Call for the check (the magnitude of which in Trail of Cthulhu can foreshadow just how bad things are about to get) and then describe the eldritch horror, allowing the players to immediately respond according to whether or not (or how badly) their character failed the test.

(Enabling this immediate, immersive response to narration by preemptively resolving a mechanical component which might normally follow the narration is why I also roll initiative at the end of each encounter and keep it stored for future use.)

One potential pitfall of such checks, however, is that you’re unable to take advantage of a player’s familiarity with their own character: If you’re asking them to make a saving throw vs. fireball, it’s much more likely that you’ll forget that they have a +2 bonus to saving throws involving fire than it is that they will. And if you do forget, then the subsequent revelation can deflate as the mechanical resolution needs to be revisited.

ROLLING MEANINGLESS DICE

The existence of hidden stakes also opens the opportunity for another technique: Rolling meaningless dice.

This generally falls into two categories. First, rolling dice behind the screen for the sound effect. That can be valuable as a tool of misdirection, but it’s not primarily what we’re talking about here.

Second, having the players roll for checks that don’t mean anything.

Now, we’ve already established that dice should only be rolled if the potential failure state is interesting, meaningful or both. And if it is neither, you shouldn’t roll the dice. If that’s the case, it would seem to follow that you should never have people rolling meaningless dice.

But here’s the exception: You only roll if failure is meaningful or interesting… but sometimes you’ll roll the dice because the character believes failure could be meaningful or interesting and saying that dice will not be rolled will reveal information that the character does not have.

Searching for a trap that isn’t there is an obvious example of this.

Paradoxically, the reason you roll the meaningless dice generally isn’t to the benefit of the meaningful roll; it’s to enhance the meaningful rolls of the same type. For example, there’s seemingly no harm in cutting to the chase with exchanges like:

Player: I search the hallway for traps.

GM: There are no traps in the hallway.

It even seems to follow logically from the principles we’ve established. The GM is defaulting to yes (the “yes” in this case being “yes, your search of the hall is successful in determining there are no traps”; don’t be fooled by the presence of the word “no” in what the GM said). But if do that a dozen times and then have this interaction:

Player: I search the hallway for traps.

GM: Okay, make a Search test.

The player automatically knows there’s a trap in that hall before they even pick up their dice. The GM’s pattern of behavior has revealed metagame knowledge that puts the player in the position of knowing something that their character does not.

And sometimes metagame knowledge is unavoidable (but in this case, it’s unnecessary). And sometimes that’s desirable (but in this case, there’s nothing being gained). And some players believe it won’t make any difference (but for someone who values immersion, it will). In my experience, nothing ever seems to be gained from this interaction and almost always there is something lost, so I recommend rolling the meaningless dice and preempting the loss.

USING MEANINGLESS DICE TO EFFECT

In some cases, you can deliberately use this effect reactively.

For example, as I’ve discussed previously in Metagame Special Effects, I not infrequently call for Perception checks even when there’s nothing to perceive. In addition to camouflaging which Perception check failures are important and which aren’t, this can also be an effective technique for heightening paranoia at the table.

The biggest reason I do it, though, is that I’ve found it’s the single most effective way to refocus the table’s attention on the game world when extraneous distractions and chitchat have derailed the players. (You’d think that just saying, “Okay, let’s focus.” would be equally effective, but I’ve found that it isn’t. Ask people to focus in a kind of general way and they engage in a “focusing process”. Ask them to do something specific and concrete, on the other hand, and they become immediately focused.)

Eventually, of course, all of my players eventually figure out that I’m frequently “crying wolf” with these checks. But it doesn’t matter: The more experienced heroes may no longer be quite so skittish or paranoid as they jump at imaginary shadows, but the tool still works.

And, of course, in a dangerous universe filled with wandering encounters, some of the Perception tests you use to refocus the table won’t be meaningless at all.

Go to Part 14

BETWEEN THE STARS

It was a kind of death when you volunteered, but it was also the promise of new life: A unique life. A life unlike any that had been lived before.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

You were supposed to be placed into cryosleep, loaded onto the ICS Ultima Thule, and sent hurtling across the void to the first nearby, habitable planet discovered by the Artemis satellite network. You were part of the maintenance team, scheduled to be periodically awakened over the course of the centuries-long voyage to make sure that the ship was still operating properly.

The first two maintenance wakes passed normally.

The third… didn’t.

The stars are missing. Everything outside of the ship is a blank, empty void.

Actually, you’re not even sure it’s a wake. The internal chronometer is screwed up and the beacon from Earth has gone dead. The onboard computer responds to queries with some garbled nonsense that looks like Aramaic had a baby with Ethiopic Ge’ez, and the voicebox produces nothing but modulated static.

The scans are running. Maybe you’re where you’re supposed to be. Maybe there’ll be a hunk of rock nearby, or an entire planetary system. Or maybe you’re lost. Off course. Slipped into the cracks between the stars.

But whatever the problem is, it’s on you to fix it. You’re all alone out here.

You hope.

Areas of Note: bridge, cryochambers, supply caverns, galley, engine room, AI core, the shuttles Copernicus and Kepler, Jefferies tubes, antenna array, hydrogen collector

Goal: Find your new home

Special: The first appearance of Them should happen shortly after the scenario begins. You might also choose to start this scenario from the maintenance team awaking from cryosleep, allowing them to discover their predicament. Alternatively, the scenario could be tweaked so that the PCs are just normal colonists who awaken onboard the ship, unscheduled, and discover most or all of the other cryo-chambers broken open and empty. The mystery of what They have done with the other colonists would be resolved through play.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Session 6A: Blood in the Depths

In which a hole in the wall leads to an unexpected labyrinth, and one pest problem quickly leads to another…

This section of the campaign is notable because the dungeon complex they begin to explore at the end of it was directly adapted into the The Complex of Zombies, a mini-module which you can purchase on Drivethru (among other places).

Adapting material from your personal campaign into a published form can be very rewarding, but there are a number of pitfalls you need to avoid.

The first thing you have to do is purge the material of any material inherited from other creators. Personal campaigns are, I fervently believe, strengthened beyond measure by becoming a beautiful mélange of influences and inputs. Copyright law, on the other hand, has other opinions.

In the case of The Complex of Zombies, fortunately, I’ve already “translated” Monte Cook’s Ptolus into my own campaign world (which I’ve been running and developing since 2000), which often has the effect of preemptively scrubbing off many of the serial numbers. But some work still needed to be done.

This process is less simple than it may first appear because you can’t just go through and delete everything. That would leave the material feeling hollow and incomplete. Nor, in my opinion, can you just replace other people’s creative content with generic versions of the same: “Generic” isn’t good. Generic lacks identity. Generic lacks interest.

So you have to go in, take this one really cool thing that has a bunch of specific context and content that you can’t use, and you have to replace it with something really cool and creative and detailed in its own right. And that usually has a cascade effect, as one change affects another. A well-designed scenario, after all, isn’t a bunch of unrelated stuff: So once you start changing some elements, the rest of the scenario can and should change, too.

(This process is often beneficial, though: Re-contextualizing material from one context into another often lends richer and unexpected depths to the new context which you might not otherwise have considered or created.)

For The Complex of Zombies, the most notable example of this was swapping out the deep background of Ghul’s Labyrinth (beneath Monte Cook’s Ptolus) for the research complex of the Sons of Jade. If I recall correctly, the Sons of Jade were an original creation for the adventure module, but I tied them into the mythology of the Jade Magi and the Lost City of Shandrala, which I had originally developed for the background of the gemstone golems I’d designed for the Penumbra Bestiary (although that background was stripped out of the final book) and which had also featured in a proposed mega-adventure in the pre-3.5 says of the D20 license. (A project which I occasionally play with the idea of returning to, but probably won’t all things considered.)

And although this didn’t really apply to The Complex of Zombies, the other thing you have to be wary of when going from table-to-page is trying to recapture the campaign instead of the scenario. For example, I’ve actually encountered multiple published scenarios where the author, seemingly out of the blue, suddenly starts talking about what the GM should do if one of the PCs falls in love with a seemingly random NPC.

This is almost certainly because that’s what happened in their campaign. In one case, this ended up being an extended subplot that chewed up almost half of the published scenario. Twenty or thirty pages of material. And I’m willing to bet hard currency that it was an absolutely, positively amazing experience at the table; probably one of those gaming memories that you’re still talking about fondly twenty years later.

But I’ll also guarantee you that literally no one else playing in that scenario will ever duplicate that precise experience. And you have to be cautious of those moments — at both the seemingly obvious macro-level, but also at the more insidious micro-level — when attempting to offer the material to other people. If you do your job well, then the odds are that the other GMs running your scenario will experience similarly amazing, spontaneous, and memorable acts at the gaming table. But they won’t be the same moments that you experienced. (No matter how much you try to craft a railroad to force that moment to come again. It’s like when things go sour in Groundhog Day as Bill Murray’s character tries to recreate the perfect day.)