IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

SESSION 35A: BIRDS OF A BLACK FEATHER

January 18th, 2009
The 18th Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

Once they had reached a position of relative safety (i.e., far away from the chaos temple), Ranthir magically attuned his vision. Looking over the items they had looted from the cultists, he saw several arcane auras. These items, combined with the various coins and gems, constituted a small fortune.

“They were well equipped,” Tor said.

One of the items, in particular, held particular interest for the fighter: Gavele’s preternatural speed was explained by the enchanted boots she wore. Tor, who had struggled to keep up with the long, powerful strides of Agnarr’s barbarian-bred legs, claimed both these and a shirt of finely crafted and mage-touched chain.

Once they had emerged from the sewers, they sold the unclaimed items in various shops across Midtown and the North Market. Then they headed to the Cathedral and received divine healing, mystically purging their poison-wracked bodies. They also took the opportunity to stock up on a variety of portable curatives so that they would be able to deal with poison on site in the future. (“This probably won’t be the last time we’ll be dealing with the Brotherhood of Venom.”)

They had completed these chores as a matter of urgency and necessity, but now that the dinner hour was approaching, they realized they were still variously caked with sewer sludge, crusted blood, and other various foulnesses. And so they headed toward the bathhouse on Tavern Row.

BIRDS OF A BLACK FEATHER

When they arrived at the Row Bathhouse, however, they found a small crowd gathered around its gaping door. A carpet of black feathers covered a broad swath of the street directly in front of the building.

Ranthir turned to Elestra. “What type of feathers are they? Raven or crow?”

“I don’t know, I’m an urban druid.”

But Ranthir was thinking about what Elestra had told them of her experiences at Nadar’s Pub: Sir Kabel had dismissed the possibility that she had been a messenger from the Killravens explicitly because she had been too small to be a raven.

They approached one of the men gathered around the scene. “What happened?”

“I hardly know. I was just walking down the street when a huge flock of birds flew into the bathhouse. Several people ran out, most of them screaming their fool heads off. And then the bird flew back out again.”

“What type of birds were they?”

“I don’t know. They were just black birds.”

“Wait,” Ranthir said. “Were they crows, ravens, or blackbirds?”

Dominic sighed. “I don’t think he knows.”

With a shrug, Tor and Tee headed into the bathhouse. They found Derra, the proprietress of the bathhouse, being questioned by a watchman. Tee took the opportunity to sneak through the far door and into the baths themselves.

She found the pools tainted with blood – crimson tendrils eddying between black feathers. She poked around for a bit, but didn’t find anything notable.

As she came back into the front office, the watchman spotted her and kicked them out onto the street. As they emerged from the door, they spotted a raven watching them from the roof on the opposite side of the Row. Seeing that it had been noticed, the raven took off and began to fly away to the south.

Reacting instantly, Elestra called upon the Spirit of the City and transformed into a hawk. She winged her way quickly after the errant raven. The crafty creature managed to dodge her first attempt to snag it, but on her second pass she was able to clasp it in her talons. She winged her way back towards the others—

And then flew past them on her way to the Ghostly Minstrel.

“Where’s she going?”

Tee was exasperated. “She’s like a magpie! But instead of shiny things, it’s bad guys.”

TELLITH’S TROUBLES

Elestra flew in through the window of her room. The others followed on foot.

But when they opened the front door of the Ghostly Minstrel, they found Tellith being confronted by a large ogre and three thugs.

“—and don’t think your delver friends will help you,” the ogre growled.

“Delver friends like us?” Tee stabbed him in the back.

With a roar of pain, the ogre whirled around and lowered his hands. From the tips of his fingers a wave of fire poured forth, bursting through the front doors of the Minstrel.

But Tee, reacting in the flicker of an eye, had flattened herself against the wall – avoiding the flames completely. Stepping forward again and coming en garde, she smiled, “You shouldn’t talk to Miss Tellith like that.” She backed out of the way as Agnarr and Tor, pushing their way through the door, closed in.

The ogre growled, backing away cautiously. “Kill the woman! Now!”

One of the thugs headed towards Tellith. She screamed and ducked under the front desk.”

“Seeaeti!” Agnarr called.

The ogre was pretty much blocking the entire front hall, so Seeaeti – being a clever hound – leapt through the front window, landed in a cascade of glass on a table, jumped from there onto the floor, ducked under a club swung by the nearest thug, and then harried his leg – keeping him away from Tellith.

Two more of the thugs were heading towards Tor. Tor eased into a defensive posture and then, in a flurry of sudden motion, beheaded the two thugs and gutted the ogre. All three of them fell dead.

Ranthir gaped. “That was amazing…”

“Keep one of them alive!” Tee pushed her way to the front of their line and thrust her dragon pistol into the face of the last thug. “Surrender!”

“No problem! No problem at all! I’m just the hired help!”

Without taking her eyes off him, Tee called over her shoulder. “Are you all right, Tellith?”

“I think so… Is it safe to come out?” Tellith crawled out from under the desk and patted Seeaeti on the nose. “Good dog!”

Questioning the thug they discovered that he and the other two had been hired by the ogre – who had been named Fatok – to provide an intimidating front. (“The ogre wasn’t intimidating enough?” Dominic wondered aloud. “Strength in numbers, I guess,” said the thug. “I just took the cash.”) They’d been extorting various businesses up and down Tavern Row in the name of the Killravens when Fatok had decided that the Ghostly Minstrel was a rich and tempting target.

They cut him loose with a message for the Killravens: Stay away from the Minstrel.

Dominic healed the other two thugs and got them on their feet – they had, after all, just been hired help.

By the time he was done, a member of the watch had shown up. Looking at them, the watchman smirked. “You again? I thought you were keeping your noses clean.”

It was the same watchmen they’d run into so many times on their second day in town. He briefly questioned them and Tellith, and then took the two thugs into custody.

“What about him?” Tee asked, nudging the ogre with her foot.

“Huh…” The watchmen looked down. “Well, he’s too heavy for me to carry. I’ll grab some of the others and come back to haul him out of here.”

After the watchman left, they quickly searched Fatok’s body. They found that he wore an ebon ring shaped like a curved feather. (“We need to get rings,” Dominic said.) They were discussing how they could move him to some place secure where they could revive him and question him, but then the watchman returned with help and hauled the corpse away.

Running the Campaign: Withdrawing in Victory – Campaign Journal: Session 35B
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

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A few years back I shared the Universal NPC Roleplaying Template that I’d developed for recording NPCs in my campaign in a way that both (a) focused prep on the essential elements for running a great character and (b) organized that information into a format that makes it easy to pick up the NPC during a session and play them with confidence.

(And also to rapidly swap between multiple NPCs in a single scene.)

It’s probably worth checking out the full breakdown of the template, but it basically involves splitting the NPC’s description into four major categories:

• Appearance
• Roleplaying
• Background
• Key Info

And, generally speaking, the result will be a briefing sheet for each NPC. You can attach a photo or illustration of the character if you’d like, and then you’re good to go.

I’ve used this template for years to great success. You can find it in a bunch of different published scenarios I’ve written or developed. I’ve gotten feedback from a lot of GMs who have had tons of success with it.

But there is one question about the template that I’m asked perhaps more than any other:

“You expect me to do this for every NPC in my campaign?!”

And the short answer is: Nope.

The template is intended for significant NPCs: Ones who will either be the primary focus of a scene (e.g., a major suspect being interrogated) or a supporting cast member who will be featured across multiple scenes (or possibly even multiple scenarios).

Obviously, there are lots of other NPCs in the world, and they don’t all require the same level of care and attention. Your goal with these NPCs should be to keep your prep tightly focused and as short as possible.

THREE BULLET POINTS

For quick NPCs, whether prepped ahead of time or spun up on demand during a session, I’m generally aiming to capture the essentials of the character in three bullet points. Each bullet point should generally have no more than 1-2 sentences, and each bullet point actually corresponds to one of the categories in the Universal NPC Roleplaying Template:

• Appearance
• Roleplaying
• Background

The “Roleplaying” bullet point is a good example of my intention here: The full template features multiple roleplaying bullet points, but with a quick NPC I’m looking to boil that down to just one essential bullet point. Because the type of information you need to run the NPC hasn’t fundamentally changed; you’re just trying to keep that information short, simple, and to the point.

Here are some quick examples:

KAIRA LIGHTBURN

• Appearance: Blond hair, but with half her head shaved to reveal a large, blue, runic tattoo.
• Roleplaying: Kaira closes her right eye when thinking about something or considering a deal.
• Background: Kaira has managed the Annodyne Armory weapons shop for mercs on Lytenol Station since her father was killed by Imperial troops during the Union Riots of 2432.

CJ ASSANTE

• Appearance: Pale, coppery skin with large blue eyes. He wears an immaculate Brioni suit.
• Roleplaying: Believes that Matani is innocent. Will react very badly to anyone suggesting otherwise.
• Background: His parents were Palestinian refugees. He worked his way through Yale, then worked his way up, and now owns CJA Investments.

PAUL ASAFIELD

• Appearance: African American man in his late ‘50s. A cigarette hanging out of his mouth.
• Roleplaying: A wracking cough.
• Background: Works in Manhattan’s 7^th Knows his partner, Kira Butterfield, is on the take for the Bonetti Family, but isn’t willing to put his neck out.

Appearance is just a quick sketch, usually focused on a single detail that will evoke the character in the players’ imagination and let them fill in the rest.

Roleplaying for a quick NPC is something I usually default to a mannerism. For me, that’s the most useful hook, and I find that the rest of the character will usually flow easily through that mannerism. Your mileage may vary, but try to identify what that actionable hook is for you.

Background is very much just the broad concept of the character. Just enough to give them a specific place in the world and perhaps just the lightest hint of what their life is like. You can, of course, improvise more details on top of this barebones foundation as needed.

Tip: If you’re wondering how to pick names for NPCs you improvise during a session, I recommend prepping a list of generic names that you can grab from as needed. Check out Fantasy Names for a sample list and some of the tricks I use.

KEY INFO

Conspicuously absent from our bullet points is the Key Info section, which is used to separate and highlight the key information an NPC has which is required by the scenario. (Which helps make sure you don’t miss this key information while running the scenario.)

Even though these are minor NPCs, they can — and arguably should! — still play key roles in how your scenarios play out. For example, a passerby on the street can still give vital information about the bank robbery in their eyewitness report during a mystery scenario. Or a goblin cult leader might have a useful map they’d be willing to trade in a dungeon scenario.

What this really boils down to is that if you an NPC has Key Info, then that should be handled in a distinct section which contains whatever amount of information (and however many bullet points) are needed for the information in question.

In other words, Key Info for a quick NPC is going to be handled exactly like it’s handled in the full roleplaying template.

EXPANDING THE QUICK TEMPLATE

As you’re roleplaying these quick NPCs, you’re quite likely to discover things about them: Where did CJ Assante and Matani first met? What was the name of Kaira’s father? What brand of cigarettes does Detective Asafield smoke?

You can just jot this stuff down in the margins next to the NPC’s bullet points.

The next thing that’ll happen is Neel Krishnaswami’s Law of the Conservation of NPCs kicking in: You’ll need a rich kidnap victim… couldn’t that be CJ Assante? And what if Asafield was assigned to the case?

In fact, a piece of advice I frequently give is to pay attention to which NPCs “click” at the table: Which characters do the players really respond to? Which ones do you have a ton of fun roleplaying? Which ones do you notice the players keep talking about even after they’ve left the scene?

It’s almost always a good idea to grab those characters and figure out how to bring them back.

All of which is to say that, at some point, you’ll almost certainly find a minor NPC blossoming into a major one. When that happens, of course, you’ll likely want to expand their write-up into a full universal roleplaying template.

And because the quick NPC template has a structure that mirrors the full template, it’s super easy to make the swap. You just take the bullet points from your quick NPC write-up — plus the notes you’ve been making! — and split ‘em up into separate sections. Then you can just fill in the gaps!

FURTHER READING
Universal NPC Roleplaying Template
Advanced NPC Roleplaying Templates
Campaign Status Module: Supporting Cast
Random GM Tip: Memorable NPCs

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DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 34D: The Battle Turns Again

Tee, now outside the tower, levitated into the air and tried taking potshots at the ratbrutes… but the dwarf, having safely retreated down the hall from the melee but still with a clear line of sight, started summoning fiery-eyed hawks with metallic, razor-sharp feathers to harry her. Their cruel beaks and claws took bloody gouges of flesh out of her.

2D battlemap = 2D thinking.

But if you neglect the third dimension in your game, then you’re flattening the game experience. (Pun intended.)

This session provides a pretty good sampler platter of third-dimensional stuff: The multi-level tower. The structure with both a rooftop and interior level. Windows looking down on the battlefield. Spider-creatures crawling around on the walls and swinging on webs. Flying imps. Levitating heroes. Leaping and climbing and all kinds of stuff.

A few things I think about when combat goes vertical.

Multiple Elevations. When designing your dungeon and/or battlemap, don’t forget to include multiple elevations. It won’t do you any good to remember that the third dimension exists during the fight if you get trapped by 2D-thinking during design and everything is flat as a pancake.

I kind of roughly think of this in terms of bumps and levels. The distinction here is not a particularly firm one, and I may have just made up those terms as a convenient way of leveling thoughts that have been pretty vague in my own head. A bump is basically just something that alters a continuous floor level — a dais, a rocky outcropping, a treehouse, etc.

A level, on the other hand, is a completely separate floor. A balcony flanking one side of a courtyard is a great example. You might also have a floating platform thirty feet above the ground, or a cliff that leads to a lower pit. It’s possible the two levels are directly connected, but they might have completely separate exits and entrances.

On that note, something to think about here is what the transition from one elevation to another looks like: Is it as easy as just stepping from one to another? A set of stairs or a ladder? Do you have to climb or jump? This will obviously have a profound impact on how the fight plays out, so think about the chokepoints you’re creating on the battlefield and how limited access can create challenges for both PCs and NPCs to overcome.

(And since NPCs can often have access to abilities that the PCs don’t — i.e., a dragon flying or giant spiders climbing on the walls — this can also create asymmetric battlefields.)

Levitation v. Flying. Of course, being able to move through the air is a great cheat code for navigating spaces with multiple elevation.

I think it’s important for levitation to feel distinct from flying, particularly in D&D. (They’re separate spells for a reason!) The key thing is that levitation only allows you to move straight up or down unless you can push or pull yourself along a wall or ceiling. This is fun in its own right because it creates a unique challenge for levitating characters, but in D&D it’s also how you set up the reward of unlocking full-blown flight later in the game.

Fun levitation “hacks” you can play around with: How far can you go by pushing hard off a surface? Do you just float in a straight line until you hit another obstacle (like an astronaut in zero-g)? Or is it more limited than that? (Maybe you could determine distance from a push-off the same way you would with a jump?)

Can you push off other combatants? Or be thrown by them? (And if so, how would you want to resolve that?)

Something else to think about is aerial strafing. The image of a dragon flying past a battlefield and unleashing a torrent of flame is pretty awesome. Some games will try to enforce that “realistic flying” (as opposed to magical/Superman-style “perfect” flight) mechanically, but many won’t (in part because a lot of those systems just turn into a huge bookkeeping headache).

If you want to try to enforce “realistic flying,” it’s probably enough to just require a minimum movement each round, and just assume that somehow the character is doing aerobatic maneuvering to pull off whatever path that movement actually takes.

Either way, even if it’s not mechanically “required,” you can still describe your dragons strafing the battlefield.

Tracking the 3^rd Dimension. If you’re using miniatures, how do you keep track of all this?

If you’ve only got one or two or maybe a few fliers on the battlefield, I find it’s usually enough to just provide a clear indicator of THAT CHARACTER IS FLYING to help everyone keep track of things.

The most effective — and also visually pleasing — way of doing this, in my experience, is some kind of platform that the character’s miniature or token can sit on.

• You can buy combat risers specifically made for this.
• The dice cubes that d6s or other dice sets are sometimes sold in can be a great solution.
• The little plastic platforms that pizza places use to hold up the box lid are also great. Plus, they’re free. All you need to do is start a collection.

I’ll often track the elevation of a flying character by just writing the number on the Chessex battlemap right next to them. If can’t write on the map, or don’t want to, you can also use numeric tokens or a stack of blank chits.

If you want more than that, more sophisticated combat risers will incorporate height-tracking, either through a gauge or through stackable pieces.

(The stackable risers are great because they give an easy visual reference for where different flying combatants are located in relation to each other. In my experience, though, it’s best not to get too tightly trapped in the idea of tracking specific 5-ft. or even 10-ft. increments with the risers. Partly because you can easily limit the flexibility of your three-dimensional space. But more importantly because fidgeting with stacks of plastic bits can be a real drag. So I tend to use the stackable risers to broadly indicate which vertical “level” combatants are on — these guys are all about ten feet up; these guys are about forty feet up; etc. — and, if more precision is needed, it can be handled through the other tracking methods we’ve described.)

Mapping 3D Spaces. Of course, if you’ve been designing areas with multiple elevations, it’s not just the combatants you need to depict verticality for.

If you’re using 3D terrain, of course, this problem can often take care of itself.

If the separate elevations are fairly clear, just noting the height difference on the map is often enough. For more complex spaces, you might want to sketch a side-view next to the primary battlemap, providing a quick reference for, e.g., how high the tower is vs. the carriage-house vs. the boulder vs. where the harpies are currently flying.

Tip: Duplicate minis or other tokens can also be to track figures simultaneously on both maps; the battlemap giving X-Y coordinates, and the side-map giving a X-Z coordinates.

Calculating Movement. Tracking the elevation of characters moving straight up and down isn’t too hard, but as soon as characters start moving at angles through the third dimension it’s easy for your brain to break.

Your grade school math teacher told you the Pythagorean theorem would be useful! And they were right!

But what I’ve done is actually prep an Aerial Distance Table: Calculate the horizontal distance and vertical distance traveled, and a quick cross-reference on the table will tell you far the character actually traveled in a straight line.

This table appears on page 78 of Legends & Labyrinths, so you can grab a copy for yourself.

Campaign Journal: Session 35A – Running the Campaign: Withdrawing in Victory
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index