Go to Part 1

Sakurai: It was a good campaign, but I was surprised Seffi never showed up.

GM: Who?

Sakurai: Seffi. You know, the guy who betrayed my best friend and commanding officer, killing him right in front of my eyes and sending Kuradao into a fugue state?

GM: Oh. Yeah. I think I remember that. Kinda.

Whether on their own initiative or as part of a group effort to create campaign characters, your players will craft backstories for their characters. These backstories might be only a few sentences long or they might be ten-thousand-word epics, but either way they’re the foundation that the players’ characters will be built on.

And the PCs, of course, are going to be the main characters in your game. The action, the drama, the passion, the hopes, and the dreams of the entire campaign are all going to be focused on these protagonists!

Despite this, it’s shockingly common for GMs to go through all the rigamarole of creating elaborate backstories – often even encouraging the players to do so and collaborating with them! – only to immediately turn around, effectively throw those backstories into a paper shredder, and get down to the business of running the campaign they’ve prepared (and which has nothing to do with who the PCs are or what they want).

I think the influence of published adventures certainly plays a role here: The writers of these campaigns obviously can’t know anything about the specific characters that will be playing it, and so everything from the scenario hooks to the antagonists to the individual scenes must be, to at least some extent, comfortably generic.

So whether a GM is running a published campaign or simply following their example, it’s easy for them to unconsciously erect a firewall: The characters (and their backstories) are over there; the adventure is over here.

What you end up with are campaigns driven primarily, overwhelmingly, and even exclusively by a plot: By the simple sequence of what happens. It’s less than a plot, really, because even a plot in a novel or screenplay is generally understood to be the sequence of events driven forward by the actions of the protagonists. So what we’re left with here is just the shell or simulacrum of a plot; the most simplistic procedural elements of a story.

Note: What we mean by “plot” here is more expansive than simply the prepped plots discussed in Don’t Prep Plots, although prepped plots are probably even more susceptible to the problems we’re discussing here.

The problem, of course, is that our stories are not purely about plot. Arguably, the greatest stories are about the protagonists, and the plot is only a reflection of those characters (or an opportunity for those characters to be revealed and/or to develop and change).

Keeping our focus primarily on the PCs’ backstories for the moment, consider how much less interesting:

• Star Wars would be if Luke wasn’t Anakin Skywalker’s son and Obi-Wan wasn’t his former master.
• Die Hard if John McClane’s wife wasn’t one of the hostages.
• Inception if Cobb wasn’t fighting to return to his kids and if his wife wasn’t haunting his dreams.
• The Hobbit if Thurin was not the rightful heir of the Lonely Mountain.
• The Lord of the Rings if Frodo had not inherited the Ring from Bilbo.

And so forth.

USING THE BACKSTORY

There are, broadly speaking, two ways to use your players’ backstories and incorporate them into the campaign: You can either build the campaign from their backstories or you can adapt the campaign you have planned to include their backstories.

When it comes to adapting a campaign, I’ve previously discussed a technique called the campaign stitch that you can use to link multiple published adventures together into a single, seamless campaign. (The quick version is that you look for elements which can be unified:  Can the village in Adventure A be the same village as the one in Adventure B? Can you replace the dwarf who hires the PCs in Adventure B with the sorceress who hired them in Adventure A?) You can simply extend the campaign stitch, but this time using the characters’ backstories as one of your source texts. For example, instead of either the dwarf or the sorceress, what if the PC is working for their uncle?

If you’re using the Alexandrian techniques for collaboratively creating campaign characters, this stitch can go both ways: If there’s not a convenient uncle to serve as the party’s patron, see if there’s a way that you can work with one of the players (or all of the players!) to incorporate the sorceress from Adventure A into their backstories.

Do this for NPCs, locations, McGuffins, and literally anything else you can glean from your PCs’ backstories. It’s virtually impossible for a PC to be too connected to the campaign.

On a similar note, if you’re building your campaign from the PCs’ backstories, you’re basically going to loot anything that’s not bolted down. (And nothing is bolted down.)

Start by identifying the goals of the PCs. Each goal is at least one scenario, and likely more than one: They want a valuable item (a stolen heirloom, the cure for their mother’s disease)? Put it some place secure and you’ve got a raid. They’re trying to discover something (the identity of their brother’s killer, the local of the Lost City of Shandrala)? That’s a mystery, so start building your revelation list. (You can spread the clues around the entire campaign and/or throw it into a 5-node mystery or anything between.)

As part of this, identify the antagonists. It’s not unusual for the PCs’ backstories to be filled with people who have wronged them; people who they hate; people who stand opposed to everything they want to accomplish in life. Grab some or all of them and start setting them up as obstacles the PCs have to overcome to achieve their goals.

Once you’ve got this material lightly sketched in, simply link the scenarios together using whatever campaign structure makes the most sense. (When in doubt, use a 5 x 5 campaign.) Or, alternatively, arrange them into multiple campaign structures, each acting as a separate arc within the greater campaign (running either concurrently or sequentially).

Advanced Tip: These scenarios are easy to hook because the PCs are already motivated to do the thing or find the thing. But mix things up a bit with some surprising scenario hooks, where the PCs think they’re doing one thing only to discover halfway through the adventure that this is actually about the ONE THING THEY’VE ALWAYS WANTED. You can also heighten the dramatic tension by using a dilemma hook as a surprising twist: Someone the PCs’ care about tells them where they can find the McGuffin from their backstory… but only because they want them to do something completely different with the McGuffin than what the PC wanted.

Continue your work by harvesting setting material (locations, factions, etc.) and pulling your supporting cast. Not every single character and location from the PCs’ backstories needs to show up in the campaign, of course, so think about which ones are the most interesting to you. And which ones do the players’ seem most invested in?

While you’re doing this, do some stitching and look for opportunities to link the PCs’ backstories: Could an NPC from Character A’s backstory be marrying Character B’s sister? Can characters be from the same place or belong to the same organizations or work for one another? Can Obi-Wan’s former apprentice and Luke’s father be the same person?

(And, as I already mentioned, you can also collaborate with the players to take two different characters and make them the same person. For example, one of the PCs’ is friends with the druid Allanon and another PC has a very similar wizard named Gandalf who was friends with their adopted father Bilbo. Couldn’t these both be the same guy? If so, it could be a cool link between these PCs that explains why they’re adventuring together at the beginning or the campaign; or an easter egg that they only discover after journeying together for many moons.)

As you’re doing this, regardless of which approach you take to incorporating character backstories, make sure to balance spotlight time. (Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that you should lay the groundwork that will ensure a future balance in spotlight time.) In other words, don’t build a whole campaign around just Frodo’s uncle and his magic ring, include some stuff about the kingdom Aragorn and Boromir have connections to; the lost dwarf kingdom Gimli apparently yearns for; and maybe toss in some elf havens since both Aragorn and Legolas talk about those in their backstories.

Similarly, don’t feel like you shouldn’t create your own stuff while doing this. In fact, you obviously should. Not everything in the campaign needs to be incestuously born from the PCs’ backstories.

Note: There are many RPGs that will help bring backstory elements into play by mechanizing them or incorporating them into core gameplay loops. For example, Trail of Cthulhu and Night’s Black Agents both use Sources of Stability – major NPCs who the PCs have to interact with in order to regain Stability through a human connection in the face of a horrific universe.

TABULA RASA CHARACTERS

In order to use a backstory, of course, you first need to have a backstory. While some players will give you paragraphs or pages full of information, others might only give you a couple sentences or even nothing at all.

And that’s just fine.

You may feel like these players don’t care about the game, but that’s usually not the case. Most of these players just have a preference for sketching in a few broad concepts and then discovering and developing who the character is through actual play.

Such characters aren’t exactly uncommon in other mediums, either. Consider Neo in The Matrix or Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit. At the beginning of their stories, both are tabula rasas serving as everymen that the viewer or reader can readily step into as a POV character. In an RPG, the tabula rasa character similarly serves as an easy role for the player to assume and begin exploring your world.

As you’re integrating or building from backstories, however, there are a few things you can do with tabula rasa characters. (After all, just because these characters are being developed during play, you don’t want them to be slighted when it comes to spotlight time.)

First, if you’re using the campaign character creation methods I’ve mentioned before, you can usually add a little flesh to the bones of these characters. Don’t feel like you need to dump a whole bunch of unwanted detail on the player — again, the tabula rasa approach is perfectly legitimate — but you can use this to plant a few seeds.

One particularly useful technique is to link them to some lore. Bilbo Baggins, for example, lives in the Shire. Bilbo’s background details can remain pretty sketchy, while the meatier lore of the Shire (and, for example, Gandalf’s long-standing relationships with the hobbits of the Shire) can do a bunch of heavy lifting.

Another approach is to link them to another PC. For example, consider Merry and Pippin from The Lord of the Rings. We know virtually nothing about them, but they’re friends with Sam and Frodo, which gives them a link to all the stuff in Frodo’s backstory that we’re building our campaign around.

GM DON’T #19.1: UNDERMINING THE BACKSTORY

Another major mistake you can make is undermining a PC’s backstory. The classic example is targeting characters from the PCs’ backstory and killing them off.

Part of the problem here is turning the backstory into an endless liability instead of a boon. It’s also about taking something that the player felt was fundamental to their character’s identity or that they wanted to be something fun to play with during the game and, instead, destroying it.

Players will respond to this by either creating tabula rasa characters (“if I don’t give the GM anything to destroy, then I’m safe”) or character backgrounds filled with endless tragedy (“if my character has already lost everything and everyone they ever cared about before the GM destroys them, then at least it’s on my terms and it’s the core identity of my character”).

The trick, though, is that the line between building on a character’s backstory and undermining it can be razor thin and very dependent on context.

Start by understanding the character’s goals and how those flow from the backstory. If you can understand the core concept of the character and how the player intends to run their character, you can make plans that harmonize with those intentions instead of harming them.

You can help yourself out here by, when the campaign is young, not leaping directly to destructive uses of the PCs’ backstories. Even if a player isn’t entirely happy about how you used their teddy bear, it’ll be a lot easier to course correct if you haven’t ripped off the teddy bear’s head.

I’m not saying that you should never burn down the PC’s hometown. I’m just saying that you’ll probably be more successful if that’s not the FIRST thing you do with their hometown: First, because after spending some time with the character (and possibly their hometown) you’ll have a much better understanding of where the players’ lines are. Second, because if the hometown has been in play for a while, then the player may have done the stuff they dreamed of doing with the hometown when they created their character and won’t feel cheated by the development. Third, because it’s more likely that such events will have grown naturally out of the narrative and the PC may even bear responsibility for what happened. (“I’m sorry your hometown got burned to the ground, but maybe you shouldn’t have told the Bloodtyrant where you lived before pissing her off.”)

Finally, when in doubt, you can just talk to the players and ask them. “What role do you see your hometown playing in the campaign? Are there any lines you don’t want me to cross?” With a little care, these are conversations you can have without spoiling anything. For more details on this, you can also check out RPG Flags: Wants vs. Warnings.

Q: What do you think about prepping and running Swords & Sorcery adventures?

Unlike “science fiction” or “fantasy” or “alternate history,” for which you can make pretty solid definitions, “sword & sorcery” is kind of an ill-defined term. If we go with the original definition  (“fantasy fiction that feels like the stuff Robert E. Howard wrote” — no, seriously, that’s literally how Michael Moorcock and Fritz Leiber coined it), the first thing on my list would be:

Don’t use Dungeons & Dragons.

Or, if you do, ban all the spellcasting classes. Or maybe only allow PCs to have two or three levels in a spellcasting class.

Because if you look at Howardian fantasy — Conan, Solomon Kane, Kull, and so forth — the sword is the good guy and the sorcery is almost invariably the bad guy: It’s the strange unknown lurking just beyond the eye line of civilization. (Or, alternatively, crushing civilization under a sanity-rending tyranny.)

(Moorcock’s Elric and Karl Edward Wagner’s Kane are both sorcerers, but they’re also deconstructing the genre by making the bad guy the protagonist.)

THE WORLD OF SWORD & SORCERY

But how do you make a story or adventure feel like sword & sorcery, as opposed to epic fantasy or paranormal romance or whatever genre you want to assign a typical D&D campaign to?

Ultimately, my advice — and I think all advice when it comes to sword & sorcery — will be tempered by my own idiosyncratic and imprecise “feel” for what “sword & sorcery” means. But here’s a few thoughts:

• The “civilized” portion of the world is, on some fundamental level, barbaric. There is no glittering, chivalric ideal; no ethics-enforcing Empire (except possibly far, far, away). If city-life seems sophisticated, it’s merely a veil behind which the “sophisticates” indulge heinous pleasures.
• “Civilization” is pressed right up against uncivilized enigmas, which are heightened through the fantastical and the magical. This happens as soon as you walk out of the city gates. It also happens when you journey into the black abyss of the wilderness beyond civilization’s borders. But it can even happen inside the city: “Tower of the Elephant” and “Rogues in the House,” for example, are both Conan stories in which a single building within “civilization” is revealed to contain barbaric horrors.

Civilization is, thus, the dark mirror of barbarity. It attempts to seal that darkness outside its cities, but its cities nonetheless give birth to it.

To perhaps get a clearer sense of this, consider Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Obviously neither of these are sword & sorcery fiction, but they view civilization and high society through a similar lens: As a veneer covering a festering boil of sublime cruelty and murderous amorality.

On the flipside, the things that civilization describes as “barbarian” — Conan’s Cimmerians, Fafhrd’s Snow Clans, Belit’s pirates, Tarzan — are where nobility and chivalry are actually found. The mythic root of these stories is Robin Hood, whose idyllic society of Merry Men living in the barbarism of Sherwood Forest achieves the ideals of chivalry and nobility which are falsely claimed by the corrupt powers of “civilization.”

ADVENTURE & CHARACTER

We now know both the heroes of swords & sorcery and the source of conflict for our stories and adventures, but I think there’s a final component missing that truly gives a good swords & sorcery tale its unique “feel.”

This is sometimes described as sword & sorcery stories having “low stakes,” but I don’t think that’s quite right. A lot of the archetypal S&S heroes — Conan, Elric, Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser, etc. — all end up in reality-defining conflicts. So it’s not as simple as “Frodo saves the world and Conan doesn’t.”

I think what it boils down to is the primary motivation for a swords & sorcery hero: Survival.

This may be very literal (any number of S&S stories begin with the main character marooned or abandoned or left for dead), but often also manifests at one step removed: The desire for treasure and coin.

(And this, of course, ties into the broader themes of the world: The corruption of civilization strips the common people of wealth and power, creating a permanent lower class desperate just to survive. And the dark enigmas of the world are a constant source of deadly danger.)

Importantly, however, this base need for survival is always displaced by a selfless heroism: When given the choice between securing his treasure and rescuing the maiden, Conan will always rescue the maiden. Robin Hood doesn’t simply steal from the rich, he gives to the poor. (Which is, of course, why both we and Maid Marian love him.)

Where civilization fails to protect the innocent (and is, in fact, often the ones victimizing them), it is the “outsider” that civilization teaches you to fear that will ultimately sacrifice to help those in need.

For similar heroes in other genres, consider Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark or the vampire hunters in John Steakley’s Vampire$.

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 37E: On the Iron Mage’s Business

Tee and Ranthir both rose early the next morning and went shopping for potions. (Without Dominic’s divine aid, they needed more healing resources.) By the time they returned to the Ghostly Minstrel, the others were awake and they breakfasted together.

The Freeport’s Sword was due to arrive that day, but – as Tee had learned – it was unlikely to arrive until the afternoon. They decided to spend the morning attending to minor chores and the like.

Elestra decided to spend the morning gathering information from around town. But as soon as she walked out the door and bought a newssheet, she turned right around and went back inside.

“Shilukar has escaped.”

There’s a question I’ve been asked a few times about the newssheets that appear throughout the In the Shadow of the Spire campaign journal: Are these props that you’ve prepped? Are the players actually reading through these articles at the table?

Short answer: No.

I’m not averse to ginning up full newspaper articles as props for the players. I created quite a few of them as part of my Eternal Lies remix, for example, even going so far as to purchase actual newsprint paper that could they could be printed on.

Bonus Tip: You can easily find period-appropriate newspaper ads online. To go the extra mile, print the ads on the back of the sheet. Now, when you cut out the article, it will look like an actual clipping.

Bonus Bonus Tip: Take half of your newsprint and store it on a shelf in direct sunlight. Take the other half and make sure it’s hidden away in a dark closet. Newsprint yellows surprisingly quickly, and you’ll shortly have a supply of paper for both aged clippings from the morgue and new ones from today’s paper.

In fact, I’d originally planned to do something similar for this campaign, likely involving full daily broadsheets that I could hand out. There are a couple reasons, though, why this never panned out.

First, I wasn’t happy with the results I was getting. I’m not a fan of producing something that looks like a modern newspaper for a D&D-esque fantasy city like Ptolus; it feels anachronistic and cheap. Even historical analogues don’t quite feel “right” to me, and the aesthetics still weren’t great. There was some room for correction here: In my head canon, the newssheets of Ptolus are produced by enchanted quills, not a Gutenbergian printing press. Unfortunately, I just lacked either the artistic skill or vision to produce something that felt “right” to me.

In short, I just wasn’t getting much value-add from this.

Second, it was obviously very time-consuming: Both the trial-and-error of the graphical design and the work that would have gone into writing up all of the articles in detail.

In the Shadow of the Spire is a big campaign: There’s a lot of adventures. There are lots of factions and NPCs in motion at any given time. There are backdrops and subplots and chaos lorebooks. There’s just a lot of stuff, and I am kept more than busy enough juggling all of it!

The principles of smart prep decree that you should only spend your prep time on stuff that you can’t improvise at the game table, and fully written newssheets would definitely qualify. But smart prep also means prioritizing: Your time is not infinite. Your resources are not infinite. There’s a limit to how much you can achieve, and so you want to prioritize prepping, first, the essential, and then whatever’s most important and/or most rewarding.

For this specific campaign, the limited value of the newssheets bumped them down and then off the priority list.

So I launched the campaign without newssheet props, instead satisfying myself with a short section in my campaign status document:

NEWSSHEETS

• Has a story about another high-profile robbery in the Nobles’ District, which is being attributed to Shilukar. The master thief and mage is said to have broken into Dallaster Manor and assaulted the Dallaster’s daughtetr and heiress, Tillian.
• More reports of ratmen openly prowling the streets of the Warrens after dark. The City Watch still refuses to patrol the streets, although they say that they have increased their patrols along Old Sea Road to keep the problem contained

(This section has since grown to become considerably larger.)

Initially, I believed that I would later find the time to start prepping these newssheets, but I never did.

I also discovered in play that either the pace of the campaign or the inclinations of the players led to a pace where the “news of the day” was actually being split up and parceled out in smaller chunks throughout he day: The PCs were checking the newssheets (or their equivalent) not just once a day, but in the morning, around noon, in the afternoon, and in the evening (or some combination thereof).

So even if I’d started out writing up full newssheets, I might have ended up dropping the idea because it lacked flexibility: The props would be cool, but for this campaign they would be a less useful tool. I need to be able to flexibly figure out how to dole out the headlines to the players depending on when and where they’re trying to snag them, how events have evolved as a result of the PCs’ recent actions, and even the form in which the PCs are trying to find the information.

(And, as noted, some of those forms in actual play aren’t even newssheets.)

Campaign Journal: Session 38A – Running the Campaign: Heists That Just Work
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

SESSION 37E: ON THE IRON MAGE’S BUSINESS

May 9th, 2009
The 21st Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

TO THE DOCKS

And then the vision shredded, passing away like the drifting trails of the incense smoke in her room…

Maybe I don’t want to remember what happened… Or was that something that’s still to come?

She cleaned up the remnants of the ritual and stored the rest of the incense back in her bag of holding before heading back downstairs to meet up with the others in the common room. They headed down to the Docks together.

Once there they still had to wait for the better part of two hours, but eventually – under the mid-afternoon sun – they saw the Freeport’s Sword pulling into one of the deep-water piers.

Heading down the long length of the narrow pier, Tee hailed the captain of the vessel, who introduced himself as Captain Bartholomew. He was a dashing fellow, with a broad and merry grin.

“Aye, I have such a crate. And am glad to be rid of it.”

“Why?” Tee asked, casting a worried glance to the others.

“It came strangely from the hand of the Iron Mage. My crew thinks it cursed and have stayed well clear of its hold.”

“He is strange,” Ranthir said.

“You think we can trust him?” Elestra asked.

Ranthir shrugged.

In short order, Captain Bartholomew’s crewmen had unloaded the crate onto the dock. It was marked with the Iron Mage’s sigil (a plated visor beneath crossed wands), and it also proved quite large (nearly six feet square) and impossibly heavy.

“If I’d known it was going to be this large, I could have prepared a spell to move it,” Ranthir said.

Tee turned back to Captain Bartholomew. “How are we supposed to move it?”

“I was hired to deliver it to your care,” Captain Bartholomew said. “And that’s been done. So it’s no concern of mine.” And he ordered his men to start work on unloading the rest of his cargo.

Tee scowled, but there wasn’t much they could do about it.

THE YELLOW TEETH

Elestra volunteered to fetch and hire a cart. The others stayed behind to keep a guard on the crate while she walked back down the pier.

As she reached the Wharf Road, Elestra spotted a small huddle of cloaked men lurking down the alleyway opposite the pier’s end. The ambush was obvious, but thinking that it wouldn’t be sprung until they were leaving with their cargo, she turned down the street and hurried along to find a cart for rent.

Unfortunately, she was scarcely out of sight when the ambush was sprung. Casting off their cloaks, the “men” were revealed to be ratlings. They stormed the end of the pier, joined by nearly half a dozen ratbrutes as well.

Although caught by surprise (as Elestra had sent them no warning), the others were already on their guard against potential mischief. Long before the ratlings reached them, therefore, they were already moving quickly and efficiently into defensible positions. Ranthir wrapped his magicks around Agnarr, enlarging him to giant-like proportions. The barbarian, his stride increasing with every step, turned and marched down the pier.

The ratlings swarmed to meet him, but were met by Agnarr’s flaming greatsword – working like a scythe through fresh hay. Their assault quickly fell into disarray before him and then, a few moments later, Tor – similarly enlarged by Ranthir’s spells – stepped forward as well. The two of them, standing shoulder-to-shoulder, blocked the pier from side to side.

Tee, meanwhile, had been calling out to Captain Bartholomew and his crew. After a quick bout of negotiation, she successfully hired their aid (at the rather exorbitant rate of 25 gold pieces to the head). With the price settled, Bartholomew led his crew into the fight with whooping war-cries.

The initial assault had now foundered completely. Only two of the ratlings had survived, and these wilier fellows now drew their dragon pistols and fell back to take potshots from the end of the pier. But the battle was far from over, for now the ratbrutes were coming forward.

Agnarr met the first of the brutes as it lumbered near. He cut the creature down easily, the flames of his sword cutting deep into scorched flesh. But one of the other ratbrutes – shouting orders and clearly in command – approached more carefully, with a third ratbrute serving as his second. Their swords scissored out, and Agnarr was caught viciously between them. With a gurgling cry, he stumbled backward and collapsed.

Tor fell back a few steps, but largely managed to hold the line against the renewed assault from the ratbrutes. With Tor occupied, however, the rat-leader gestured crudely and, a moment later, two of the ratbrutes dropped off either edge of the pier and began swimming underwater.

Tee, who had been shooting from the far end of the dock, saw the ratbrutes disappear into the waves. Dispatching one of Bartholomew’s sailors to bear a healing potion to Agnarr, she drew the rest of them into a tight defensive perimeter around the crate.

It wasn’t long before her fears were realized: The two waterlogged ratbrutes clambered up onto the dock behind Tor and rushed the defenders around the crate. Tee and the sailors leapt forward to counter-attack, but in mere moments two of Bartholomew’s crew had already been grievously injured.

At almost this very moment, Elestra finished haggling for the cart and turned back to discover the chaos breaking out down the Wharf Road. With a cry she transformed into an owl and began flying back as fast as her wings would carry her.

Meanwhile, the pirate Tee had sent with healing potions had reached Agnarr’s side. Although he had been cut down only a moment later by a particularly vicious back-handed blow from the leader of the ratbrutes, he had managed to press one of the potions to Agnarr’s lips.

Agnarr was conscious once again, but one of the ratbrutes – who had stepped forward as Tor fell back – was now straddling him. Still badly hurt and separated from his sword, Agnarr knew that he wouldn’t live long if the ratbrutes realized he was a threat. So, for the nonce, he contented himself with surreptitiously sipping healing potions.

But the instant that Tor cut down the ratbrute standing over him, Agnarr leapt back to his feet. His sudden presence distracted the ratbrute leader, who had been moving to flank Tor. Tor seized the advantage and focused all his fury upon him.

The ratbrute seized a healing potion of his own, quaffed it, and fell back. But Tor pursued and cut him another wound for his troubles. The ratbrute might yet have recovered, but Ranthir – from the far end of the pier – struck him in the face with a bolt of magical energy. The blast left him momentarily dazed, and Tor had little trouble finishing him off.

Seeing him fall, Tee cried out to the ratbrutes fighting near the crate, “Your leader is dead! Turn and look!”

But the ratbrutes merely snarled. “The Yellow Teeth never turn! They never retreat!”

They cut down another of the sailors. Tee, enraged, pressed her own attack and killed one of the brutes. But in the action she left her back open, and the second brute – with a hefty swing of his massive blade – cut her down.

One of the sailors cried out. “The pretty lady is dead! She’s dead!” A general panic settled into Bartholomew’s men and a rout had begun.

Agnarr, seeing the danger, ran down the length of the dock. But the remaining ratbrute ignored him and ran for the now utterly unguarded crate. Agnarr’s last, desperate sword swing narrowly missed the creature as it reared back its own massive sword and—

Smashed open the crate!

An inky, stygian darkness suddenly enveloped the end of the pier. The sailors trapped within it began screaming in terror. One, who had been attempting to flee back aboard the Freeport’s Sword, fell from the gangplank into the water below with a gurgling cry. Others, halfway down the dock in their rout, came to a stumbling and bewildered halt.

The ratbrute’s huge rat ass, however, was still hanging out of the darkness. Agnarr chopped him down. At the far end of the pier, Tor was doing the same (although he needed to chase the last of the cowardly ratlings half a block down Wharf Street before cutting him down from behind). “I thought the Yellow Teeth never turn,” he said sardonically over the corpse.

A DARK BEYOND DARKNESS

Elestra alighted on the dock and resumed her human form. She quickly healed Tee (who had been merely injured, not killed).

Ranthir, meanwhile, examined the crate-born darkness. It could be easily identified as a point-source effect, but he needed to know more. He quickly weaved a few spells—

And was blasted into unconsciousness.

When the others managed to rouse him, he told them of a magical aura so powerful that it had literally obliterated his senses when he tried to look upon it. From this, he concluded that any effort on his part to negate it would fail. However, since the effect had previously been occluded by the crate, it might be possible to physically impede it.

To that end, they paid an egregious and ridiculous sum to Captain Bartholomew for a large piece of sail cloth. By wrapping this around the damaged crate, they were able to blot out the darkness. Then they were forced to pay a similarly ridiculous price for a larger crate, which they levered into position and, thus, sealed the broken crate inside.

While those with mightier thews tended to this business under Ranthir’s instruction, Tee and Elestra quickly searched the bodies. In addition to a few small sums of coin and the like, they found upon the body of the leader a letter of some considerable interest:

LETTER FROM SILION TO BATTACK

Battack—

I have need of the Yellow Teeth. A vessel named the Freeport’s Sword will be arriving in port tomorrow. It carries a crate bearing the mark of a plated visor beneath crossed wands. The Tolling Bell has commanded that the contents of this crate be secured.

We have a rare opportunity: None of the other brotherhoods have managed to ascertain the crate’s location. Many still seek it among the islands. If we can obtain it and deliver it to Wuntad’s hand, we shall be honored not only by his hand but in the eyes of the Sleeping Gods.

Do not fail me in this.

Silion

Running the Campaign: Newssheets – Campaign Journal: Session 38A
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 37D: Affairs of the Evening

“He’s going to come looking for us,” Agnarr said.

“Not if he can’t get out of the prison,” Elestra said.

“If they couldn’t keep him in his cell, how likely is it they’ll keep him in the prison?” Tee asked.

“If he hasn’t gotten out already,” Tor said.

When Sera Nara arrived at the beginning of Session 37, collected Dominic, and disappeared into the night with him, this was because, sadly, Dominic’s player was leaving the campaign.

Dominic was gone.

I’ll have more to say about Dominic’s departure (and the ensuing consequences) in future installments of Running the Campaign, but for the moment I want to discuss the most immediate consequences: The party had lost its most powerful and dedicated healer.

One of the most basic foundations of tactics and strategy in D&D (and many other RPGs) boils down to a simple mathematical question: How much damage can you take vs. how much damage can you deal out? There are obviously A LOT of variables here that complicate things substantially, but on the “how much damage can you take” side of the equation the big X-factors are:

• What are your maximum hit point totals?
• How many hit points of healing can you do each day?

An important secondary consideration with healing is how fast you can add hit points to the active pool. (A periapt that can heal up to 1,000 hp per day at a rate of 1 hp per round is an incredible “deep reservoir,” but probably won’t help you keep standing in the middle of a fight where your opponents are dealing out 30 points of damage per hit.)

The departure of Dominic hits the group across the board:

• Their maximum hit point total has been reduced by his hit point count.
• Their maximum healing potential per day is drastically reduced.
• Without their specialized healer, their rate of healing per round is also drastically reduced.
• There are now fewer PC targets in combat, meaning damage will become more concentrated.

This is a really risky moment for most groups. In my experience, far riskier than they may realize.

The trick is that most groups – even groups with a lot of experience and skill – don’t really think deeply about this sort of stuff. They aren’t, for example, doing explicit analysis of their hit points vs. healing vs. damage output. Instead, over the course of the campaign, they’ve developed a sort of evolving gut instinct for what they can handle and how fights are going to play out.

It can be really easy to know that you’ve lost a PC and understand that it’s going to have an impact, but then drastically underestimate the actual impact it’s going to have. The loss of a PC – particularly a primary healer liker Dominic – isn’t a linear loss of capability. It’s more like an exponential one.

That means the group’s gut instinct is going to be LYING to them. Not only will they be prone to biting off more than they can chew, but when a fight goes south on them it’s going to go really bad and spiral out of control much faster than they anticipate.

Fortunately, in this case, the players were at least partially aware of the danger. Throughout Session 37, you can see it affecting their decision-making: They’re more conservative in the dangers they’re willing to face, and they’re more cautious in engaging with those dangers.

Complicating this even further, however, is that YOUR gut instinct, as the GM, is also going to be skewed. So it can be quite possible for you to push them into the abyss without meaning to. When you lose a player (and corresponding PC), therefore, you’ll want to spend a few sessions being hyper-alert to this until your gut has a chance to readjust.

Tip: One way you could help adjust for this a bit is to level up the other PCs in the group ASAP after losing a player. The extra power up will partially compensate for their diminished capacity.

You can, of course, experience this same danger even if a player is only missing for a session or two, rather than permanently departing.

So check your gut.

Campaign Journal: Session 37E – Running the Campaign: Newssheets
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index