After a procrastination of nearly epic proportions, I finally subscribed to GameFly last week. The GameFly queue system is not nearly as elegant as Netflix (since it seems to basically amount to a crap-shoot no matter what priority you actually give the games in your queue), but the result was that Infamous materialized in my mailbox a couple of days ago.

Infamous is a sandbox game of superpowers in which you have the choice to either be a superhero or a supervillain. My initial impression could be summed up as something along the lines of Grand Theft Auto + Knights of the Old Republic + Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. (The inclusion of two Star Wars games might seem excessive: But The Force Unleashed didn’t have KOTOR’s elegant light-vs-dark story arcs, while KOTOR didn’t have The Force Unleashed’s Force lightning powers.)

Where Infamous succeeds is the basic gameplay: Parkour-inspired climbing and leaping combined with an effective and interesting mix of electrical superpowers. Where it fails is the writing, which eventually turns the interesting gameplay into a mind-numbingly endless repetition of “been there, done that”. (In a fit of dark irony, the game even has an achievement trophy called “Oh, So You’ve Done This Before”.)

What I find particularly notable about these failures is the ultimately trivial amount of effort it would have taken to vastly improve the quality of the game: Hundreds of thousands of hours and millions of dollars were spent to make this game a reality, but it would have taken only a few hours from a dedicated writer and a fraction of a percentage of that budget to take a disposable trifle and raise it to the level of the sublime.

Which is what prompted this Rewrite essay. It’s obviously not going to do all the work, but it is going to sketch out the handful of simple fixes that Infamous practically cries out for. (Be warned: There will be SPOILERS.)

FAULT 1: THE SANDBOX

The primary shortcoming in Infamous lies in the design of its sandbox. Like most modern sandboxing games, Infamous draws its basic structure from the tradition of Grand Theft Auto 3. And like most modern sandboxing games, Infamous fails to learn some important lessons from Grand Theft Auto 3 (while also failing to capitalize on the opportunity to improve the format in key ways).

To simplify things, there are four types of content in Grand Theft Auto 3:

(1) The main storyline. (A sequential series of missions designed to be completed one after the other while telling the story of the game.)

(2) Designed side-quests. (Specifically designed mini-missions or mini-quest lines that the player could choose to either play or ignore.)

(3) Procedurally generated missions. (Missions created on-demand by the game engine and, thus, creating a bottom-less supply of semi-variable gameplay. Examples include the taxi- and ambulance-driving missions.)

(4) Self-guided play. (Because the game world responded dynamically to player activity, the player could engage in rewarding self-guided play by, basically, seeing “what happens when I do this”. Grand Theft Auto 3 didn’t have much in the way of dynamic world response, but even something as simple as “police chase you if your wanted rating is high enough” resulted in an endless variety of entertaining car chases.)

The first flaw in the Infamous sandbox is the limited nature of the self-guided play: In general, this play is limited to “there are bad guys roaming the streets, fight them” — basically the random encounters of an old school Final Fantasy game. (Surprisingly, despite the parkour-style climbing, there is little or no attention given to providing massive climbing vistas like those to be found in Assassin’s Creed.) Even worse, the primary sub-quests are designed to make city neighborhoods “safe” so that enemies no longer appear — which means that you’re literally removing content from the game as you play the game.

The second flaw is the complete lack of procedurally-generated missions. This significantly impacts the long-term value of the game. I remember playing Grand Theft Auto 3 for years after “finishing” the game because there was always something interesting to do in Liberty City. By the time I finished Infamous, on the other hand, there was literally nothing left to do.

The most significant flaw, however, is that the designed side-quests are written as if they were procedurally-generated: They are repetitive, forgettable fluff.

Grand Theft Auto 3, on the other hand, used its side-quests to develop either plot or landmarks. The former is self-explanatory: The side-quests were interesting little one act plays standing in contrast or support to the full-length drama of the main storyline. The latter is about providing context for the city: You came to recognize Vinnie’s pizza because that’s where you delivered Leo’s drugs (or whatever, it’s been awhile since I actually played Grand Theft Auto 3). The side-quests helped to bring Liberty City to life. They filled the empty, gray building polygons with life and meaning and identity.

The side-quests of Infamous, on the other hand, have no story or life to them: An anonymous guy asks you to kill 10 bad guys. Or blow up a bus. Or kill 10 bad guys. Or kill 10 bad guys. Or kill 10 bad guys. (Did I mention they’re repetitive?)

If these were actually procedurally-generated content (as they so easily could have been), it wouldn’t be a problem. I understand the limitations of procedural content: You take a half-dozen elements, mix ’em up randomly, and that’s what you’ve got. It’s not going to fool you into thinking that an intelligent mind was authoring it.

But this isn’t procedural content: Every one of these missions has been hand-crafted and hand-placed to fill a specific and non-substitutable place in the game. But if you’re designing this content individually, why not take the effort (and the opportunity) to make it individual? And meaningful?

THE REWRITES

In Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, Chip Heath encourages people to copy success instead of trying to solve problems.

In the case of Infamous, what they got right were the Dead Drop missions.

To summarize: In these missions, you hunt down satellite dishes hidden around the city. These satellite dishes were used to make dead drops by an intelligence agent, and by accessing the dishes you’re able to recover the audio logs from his investigations into the strange events plaguing Empire City. These logs, of course, reveal a prequel-like storyline over time. (Although the game allows for a non-linear collection of the satellite dishes, the information is recovered linearly. Of course, one could also take advantage of the mechanic to do truly non-linear storytelling.)

If the Dead Drop missions had been constructed like the other side-quests in the game, the complexity of their programming would not have been noticeably affected: The player would still hunt down the satellite dishes and then push a button to access them. But rather than getting a snippet of story information, the player would just receive a tally of the number of dishes they had found.

The storytelling content that makes the Dead Drop missions work, on the other hand, is almost trivial: Less than a half dozen pages of script and probably a half hour of recording time with a voice actor.

So let’s take a moment and consider how the other mission types might have been made to succeed like the Dead Drop missions.

HIDDEN PACKAGES: Using his electrical powers, Cole is able to “hack” the brain of the recently deceased to see their last memories. At various points in the game, he’s able to use this ability on his enemies, revealing the location of hidden packages they’ve secreted around the city.

In the actual game, these packages are nothing — meaningless fluff to be checked off a quest list. But how much more evocative would it have been if there was actually something worth hiding? Perhaps something that had been split up between the various packages?

The possibilites are almost endless: The schematics for the ray sphere. Records from Kessler’s surveillance of Cole. Evidence pointing to a rebel faction within the First Sons.

TRACKING THE DEAD: Similarly, Cole is able to track the ghost-like ethereal “imprints” of a person’s recent movements. (Intriguingly, this ability is always used on murderers — suggesting perhaps that the violence of their action is responsible for leaving a stronger imprint on the world around them.) This is an evocative and interesting mechanic, but it would have been nice to see some of these end with revelations more interesting than, “That’s the guy who killed Senor Red Shirt! Vengeance!”

If nothing else, having the trails lead somewhere other than “a nondescript alley with a bunch of bad guys in it” would have helped. But it wouldn’t take much effort to explain why some of these people were being particularly targeted by the bad guys.

SURVEILLANCE DEVICES: The bad guys have covered various buildings in town with dozens of surveillance devices. It’s your job to climb the building and blow up the surveillance devices.

Oddly, the game never explains why the bad guys are interested in so heavily surveilling these particular buildings. Change “blowing up” to “hacking” and you (a) effortlessly add a new power for Cole and (b) provide an easy mechanism for revealing the reason for the surveillance.

PRISONER ESCORTS: The police periodically ask us to apprehend various bad guys for “questioning”. In other cases, the bad guys have already been caught and it’s our job to escort them to the nearest police station.

Spicing this one up is pretty easy: Have the cops actually report back what they find out from this questioning. This could foreshadow various developments, point us towards new surveillance missions, and so forth.

PROCEDURAL CONTENT: This suggestion moves somewhat beyond the intended scope of this essay (since they require more than a simple rewrite within the existing strictures of the game), but it would be nice if Infamous contained some legitimate procedural content.

For example, the picture-taking missions would be perfect for procedural generation. Triage missions using our healing abilities at medical centers seems like a no-brainer. A stalker fan that pops up to ask our hero for photographs or kisses or the like (or, for the evil-siders, a would-be assassin who periodically sends robotic drones after us). “Walk me home” protection missions (or muggings for the evil-siders). Bad guys blocking roads or railroad tracks. Bomb threats that need to be defused.

THE CORE CONCEPT

The mistake made in games like Infamous and Assassin’s Creed is thinking that storytelling only needs to happen in the main storyline. I would argue that the design principle behind these GTA-like sandboxes needs to be different: Any time you’re hand-designing content (instead of procedurally generating it), that’s an opportunity to tell part of your story. And you should take it.

In general, side-quests offer you the opportunity to create storylines in addition to your primary storyline. (The successful Dead Drop missions in Infamous do this to great effect.) Some of these storylines may be short (a single quest); others may be long (dozens of missions); others will fall somewhere inbetween (three or four linked sub-quests). But the ways in which these storylines will weave together is an exercise left to the player and your game will be the richer for enabling that level of intrinsic collaboration in the creation of its narrative. The result is a unique gameplay arising out of a complex system, but the actual execution of that system is very, very simple.

Continued Tomorrow…

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 37C: Iltumar’s Folly

When everyone gathered back at the Ghostly Minstrel, they met Agnarr’s news regarding Iltumar with exasperation and impatience. They felt universally that they were facing “another Phon”, who would thank them little for trying to extricate them from a situation of their own creation.

“I’m less worried about Iltumar than about the woman who went looking for him,” Agnarr said.

“That’s true,” said Elestra (who had actually met Lavis). “I empathize with her.”

“And she shouldn’t suffer just because Iltumar is an idiot,” Tee said.

It’s not unusual – primed by published adventures, computer games, and simply practicality – for campaigns to be studded with patrons: NPCs who ask the PCs to do thing for them, usually in return for money, a favor, or some other form of remuneration. You need to hook the PCs into an adventure, and the easiest thing in the world is for an NPC to simply walk up to them and say, “I need you to go to X and do Y.” In this case, “I need you to investigate a warehouse and try to rescue Iltuamr (and Lavis).”

In fact, many campaigns are entirely structured around patronage, with either one NPC or a rotating cast of patrons cycling through to deliver episodic assignments.

Patrons can also take many forms: Shadowrun has its Mr. Johnsons. Paranoia has The Computer. You could even imagine a campaign where the PCs are Delphic Oracles, receiving their missions through divine visions.

There are ways this can go wrong, of course. One of the worst case versions is the mail carrier scenario hook, where the PCs are reduced to being mundane messengers doing boring, menial tasks. Many GMs have also experienced the potentially disastrous consequences of having a patron betray the PCs, causing a loss of trust which can permanently break patronage as a scenario hook in not only that campaign, but any other campaigns the GM might run.

(There are ways to pull off these double crosses, but that’s a topic for another time.)

But even when their patrons are playing fair and the task list is appropriately juiced with important stakes and duties that clearly only the PCs are capable of achieving, you can still reach a point where the players get fed up with a patron: Why is this guy nagging us? Why can’t he clean up his own messes? Why do we always have to do what he says?

In some cases, the solution is to up the pay. In others, it may be time to cycle in some new patrons and freshen up the premise. Or perhaps have their patron “level up” their participation, revealing some new level of the conspiracy, increasing their resources, giving them an opportunity to buy into the organization, or unlocking a new tier of targets.

This is particularly essential, of course, in an episodic campaign where you’re counting on that NPC to deliver the scenario hook each week. In a more varied campaign, the players’ interest in something getting burnt out is less of a problem: They’ll pursue a different lead. Or, in a sandbox, decide for themselves what they want to do next. When they turn down a job or duck the patron’s calls, you can just follow through on the consequences (e.g. Phon dies in a house fire) and then follow the PCs’ lead.

In the specific case of Iltumar, “the hero-worshipper who’s been following you around gets ‘kidnapped’ by cultists and needs to be rescued” was basically the endgame I’d been laying the groundwork for since introducing Iltumar at the beginning of the campaign.

If you’ve been following these campaign write-ups for a while, you’ll probably also be unsurprised to discover that I’m not actually invested in whether or not the PCs help Iltumar: If they do, things go one way. If they don’t, then Iltumar-as-chaositech-altered-cultist would be a fascinating subplot to see play out.

(As you’ll see by the end of this session, the PCs figured out an option I had never even considered.)

Not caring whether the PCs do what a patron asks them to do, of course, makes everything easier. And if your players can break the ingrained expectation of “you’re supposed to do what the NPC tells you to do” (dilemma hooks are useful for this), you can get really liberated. Now patrons aren’t a method for the GM to take control of the campaign’s agenda; they’re just another vector for information, and the players remain in charge of their destiny.

Campaign Journal: Session 37D – Running the Campaign: Losing a PC
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

A couple weeks back, when I was chatting with Baron de Ropp for Dungeon Masterpiece, we had a fun little idea for a unique (and slightly kooky) way to think about roleplaying characters, particularly if you’re a GM who needs to roleplay a bunch of different characters in every session.

Before we can dive into that, though, I want to have a quick word with the people reading this who are looking for the One True Way™ of roleplaying games, because that’s an attitude that can create a lot of cognitive dissonance here on the Alexandrian, where my philosophy is much more about finding the Right Tool For the Job™. There are lots of different techniques you can use while playing a character, prepping a scenario, or running a game, and I’m far more interested in adding new tools to my toolbox and learning new ways to use the tools I already have than I am in trying to raise one of those techniques onto a pedestal.

Nevertheless, I still see people trying to use node-based scenario design for everything and getting frustrated when it doesn’t work. Or getting confused when I talk about how to structure a linear campaign, because I’m “supposed” to be the Oracle of Sandboxes. Or deeply angry with me because I know that Once Upon a Time and Eclipse Phase can’t be played in the same way.

The reason I say all this is that I’m really hoping you can approach this article as a fun little way to think about roleplaying. I think there’s some cool stuff to discover thinking about roleplaying this way, but I really doubt that’ll happen if we get stuck trying to think of it as the One True Way™ of roleplaying our characters.

SPELL COMPONENT ROLEPLAYING

The Universal NPC Roleplaying Template is a tool for efficiently describing significant NPCs in your campaign, organizing the information in a consistent format that (a) makes it easy to pick up and quickly start playing the NPC, while (b) making sure you don’t miss any details that are essential for the current scenario.

One section of this template is literally “Roleplaying.” I recommend including two or three bullet points here, each describing a distinctive trait of the character that you can use to bring them to life. The idea is that each trait provides a “hook” that you can very easily reach out and grab, giving you a quick grip on the character.

For maximum effectiveness, I further recommend that each trait be significantly different from the NPC’s other trait. A distinctive physical mannerism, for example, is great, but three different mannerisms may be more difficult to use or they might turn into a bit of a muddle compared to, for example, having both a physical mannerism and a unique accent.

This isn’t a hard-and-fast rule, of course. But it’s a useful guideline.

But how can we know if two traits are sufficiently different? And is there anything that could help us brainstorm different roleplaying traits?

Well… An accent would be a verbal trait. A nervous twitch, on the other hand, would be a physical one. Or, instead of “physical,” we could say somatic.”

… can we classify roleplaying traits as if they were D&D spell components?

Of course we can.

VERBAL COMPONENTS

When we talk about roleplaying, we often default to the verbal components. Since we’re all sitting around a table (or in a group call) talking to each other, this makes a lot of sense.

Furthermore, a lot of attention — probably too much attention — is given to accents and other “funny voices.” Obviously, though, if you can affect a wide range of distinct vocal personalities, use those as appropriate.

You don’t need to be able to do full-blown voices or accents, though, to vocally distinguish characters. You can often create a very distinct and memorable voice for an NPC by just focusing on a single vocal character, such as:

• Pitch (a voice deeper or higher than you normally speak)
• Speed (slower or faster than your normal speech)
• Volume (e.g., always speaking in a raspy whisper)
• Vocal tic (e.g., rolling your R’s, a lisp, or stutter)

A distinctive pattern of speech can also be useful. A classic example of this Yoda is. Alternatively, you might have a character who:

• Almost always responds to a question with another question.
• Yells when they’re lying.
• Says, “Don’t you think?” whenever they finish speaking.

This can bleed over into having an actual catchphrase or unique turn of speech. For example, I played a pulp detective named Jack Hammer who liked to refer to his punches as jackhammers — e.g., “Have a taste of my jackhammers!” On another occasion, I had an elf noble who said, “Let the wizard speak!” so often that it became a running joke in the campaign.

Alternatively, you can boil this down to a single, distinctive favorite word. Pick something exotic or esoteric — perhaps even something from a foreign language (e.g., a Russian who always says “Nyet”) — and then find every opportunity you can to drop into the character’s dialogue. Distinctive epithets are great for this. For example, if I say, “By Crom!” you likely instantly know who I’m talking about.

SOMATIC COMPONENTS

Even though we’re just sitting around the table talking, there’s still a wide range of physicality you can use to embody a character.

The most basic somatic component is a physical gesture:

• Stroke your chin
• Pull on your earlobe
• Tap you nose
• Wink
• Tug your braid
• Drum your fingers on the table
• Scratch your elbow

The possibilities are almost endless! And take note that the gesture doesn’t have to be large or gaudy. Subtle gestures, in fact, can be even more useful because they can often be repeated more frequently without becoming tiring.

Another option is a physical tic, which is similar to a gesture, but is usually involuntary.

Posture can also be a powerful option. Think about how you’re sitting in your chair, where you hold your hands, and the inclination of your head.

I really like having a distinct somatic component for each NPC, because it not only provides a clear signal to the players for who’s talking; it’s also a great way for you to jump into character: Just hunch your shoulder like Rodrigo or give Roberta’s sly wink and you’ll instantly slip into the role.

If you’re struggling to come up with a somatic component for a character, think about each part of the body – head, face, neck, torso, shoulders, arms, legs, etc.: How could you use it? Move it? Touch it?

MATERIAL COMPONENTS

Material components probably the last thing most tabletop gamers think about when roleplaying, but they can pack a big punch when you can figure out how to use them. For example, when running Trail of Cthulhu games set in the ‘30s, I’ll often buy a pack of candy cigarettes. Invoking the ubiquity of smoking really brings the time period to life, and cigarettes offer a huge range of characterization — from femme fatales gracefully asking for a light to gambling addicts with nicotine-stained fingers to a nervous witness who can’t keep the cancer-stick steady in their hands.

You probably don’t want to haul around a huge chest full of objects and need to go digging through it every time a new NPC pops up, of course, but small, handheld props can provide a great touchstone for a special character: The henchmen who rolls a coin across his knuckles. The nervous damsel in distress clutching her rosary.

Keep in mind that you don’t need the perfect prop: Proxies are perfectly acceptable, whether it’s a modern quarter standing in for a fantasy gold piece or a convention lanyard serving as an ersatz rosary.

Similarly, when improvising characters, be aware of the props and proxies and you’re already carrying: Got a wedding ring? Great! The witness can be nervously spinning theirs. Wanna smoke? Light up a pencil. The archvillain should be peering at the PCs through a ruby? Pick up a d20 and pretend!

The other major category of material component is costumes. These probably need to be used with even more caution than props, and I’m certainly not suggesting you do full-fledge quick-changes at the gaming table. But one or two items you can quickly affect can have a large impact. (I once carried an eyepatch around a convention and roughly half my PCs that weekend used it for impact.)

Even better, don’t forget that you can use the clothes you’re already wearing for effect: The Picard maneuver doesn’t require you to be wearing a Starfleet uniform. Taking off your glasses and slowly polishing them can be a wonderful character affectation, as can be loosening your own tie, tugging at your collar, or snapping the band of your watch.

As a final note, if you’re comfortable doing it, mime can be a great way of invoking material components even if you don’t have any to hand: You can smoke with out a cigarette, tighten a tie you’re not actually wearing, or even gesture with a sword made out of air.

Because, after all, when it comes to roleplaying, the only true limit is your imagination.

Go to Part 1

Let’s do some quick review.

The Three Clue Rule maintains that for any conclusion you want the PCs to make, you should include at least three clues.

Furthermore, we can classify clues as being either leads (which point to places where you can continue your investigation by collecting more clues) and evidence (which point to other revelations; e.g., the identity of the killer or the method for creating red mercury). This distinction is valuable because one is how you navigate the scenario, while the other is usually the goal (or goals) of the scenario.

(Plus, only leads need to obey the Inverted Three Clue Rule. See Node-Based Scenario Design.)

Now that we’re all up to speed, brace yourself because we’re about to go even deeper:

Leads can also be divided into two types: existential leads and access leads.

Existential leads literally indicate that the target node exists and/or that the PCs would find the target to be of interest (e.g., because they might find clues or treasure there).

Access leads, on the other hand, tell the PCs how they can go to the target node.

It’s not unusual for there to be little or no difference between these two types of leads because access to a node is often trivial: If the PCs know the Morning Star Nightclub is significant to their investigation, they can trivially use Google Maps to figure out where it is.

On the other hand, consider a runic inscription in some ancient ruins that says, “The Lost City of Shandrala is possessed of many treasures!” That’s an existential lead. It might get the PCs interested in Shandrala, but if they don’t know where it is, there’s nothing they can do about it. A map indicating the location of one of the Jade Portals that leads to the Lost City, on the other hand? That’s an access clue, allowing the PCs to go to Shandrala.

TROUBLESHOOTING

The distinction here might seem exceedingly esoteric, but it has practical applications.

First, it can be essential when troubleshooting a scenario. For example, you might look at your revelation list and say, “I’ve got three clues pointing to the Lost City of Shandrala! I’m good to go!” But if some or, worse yet, all of those clues are existential leads, then you haven’t actually fulfilled the Three Clue Rule.

This problem can even be hard to spot when it’s actively happening at the game table: If you think your players have all the clues they need, but they’re nonetheless spinning their wheels, it can be worthwhile to make sure that there aren’t roadblocks by a lack of access to the nodes they want to investigate.

The reverse can also be true: The PCs may have multiple leads giving them access to a node, but if they don’t have a reason to go there it may not matter! In my experience, this problem is much rarer because the dramatic nature of the game itself strongly implies that if something is mentioned, then it’s significant (e.g., I’m not giving you a random map with a location circled on it for no reason; therefore the location is inherently worth checking out). But particularly in a sandbox campaign, players not understanding the significance or value of a node may isolate material that you erroneously think is robustly linked to the rest of the world.

You can think of existential leads as pointing to existential revelations, and, naturally, access leads as pointing to access revelations.

In practical terms, as described in The Secret Life of Nodes, it’s not unusual for my node list to directly double as a revelation list. Most of the time this works just fine because, as we’ve noted, your existential and access leads for a node are usually one and the same thing. But when they’re not, obviously, your revelation list can become a trap, artificially conflating revelations that are actually separate from each other.

The solution, of course, is to separate your existential revelations into a separate revelation list and supply the proper clues for both lists. (In this sense, the existential revelations act much more like evidentiary revelations, insofar as they are conclusions you want the players to make, but which do not allow the PCs to navigate through the scenario.)

PAYOFF

The distinction between existential and access revelations can also be used to your advantage when designing scenarios by creating payoff.

Take the Lost City of Shandrala, for example. If the first time the players hear about it is when they find a map indicating its location with a hand-scrawled note reading, “Home of the Jade Masters!” that works: The clue combines both the existential and access leads, and it’s quite likely that the players will check out the Lost City at some point.

But consider what happens if you instead spend several adventures dropping existential — and only existential! — leads to the Lost City of Shandrala. Now you’re building a sense of enigma: Each clue builds the rep of the Lost City a little more, and possibly gives the PCs more and more reasons for finding it.

This built-up anticipation then pays off when you finally start delivering the access clues that will let the PCs plan their expedition to Shandrala.

To generalize: Separate and foreshadow your existential leads in order to build anticipation and turn the ultimate revelation of access into a reward.

(Check out Getting the Players to Care for more along these lines.)

Another technique here is that you can sometimes nest your existential and access revelations:

• You need to talk to the Immortal Sorcerer. (Existential)
• To talk to the spirit of the Immortal Sorcerer, you need the jade amulet. (Access)
• The jade amulet is hidden in the Lost City of Shandrala. (Existential)
• The Lost City of Shandrala can be accessed through the Jade Portals. (Existential)
• A Jade Portal is located at such-and-such a place. (Access)

You can see how this thread of the campaign builds over time. In fact, you could also imagine separate existential revelations about the Lost City of Shandrala that are built up over time, so that when the PCs also learn that the jade amulet they need is located there it will just pump up their desire to reach Shandrala even more.

Next: Hints

Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk can really only be described as a book of two parts, and it’s basically impossible to review it as anything else.

The first part is more or less a reprint of Lost Mine of Phandelver, the classic adventure that went out of print in 2022 when the original 5^th Edition Starter Set was discontinued. I strongly suspect that this was the entire modus operandi for Phandelver and Below: Wizards of the Coast wanted to replace the Starter Set with Dragons of Stormwreck Isle, but they knew Lost Mine of Phandelver was a great and well-loved adventure, so they wanted to find a way to keep it in print.

Unfortunately, Lost Mine of Phandelver wasn’t large enough to be its own hardcover release, and so it was grafted to The Shattered Obelisk, a Tier 2 adventure in which mind flayers search for the seven pieces of an obelisk which they can use to power a ritual which will transform the Phandelver region into… uh… let’s say an extrusion of the nightmarish Far Realm. The book is kinda vague about this, presumably because it will go to any lengths in order to railroad the PCs to ensure the pre-scripted outcome, so the specific details of what the mind flayers are trying to do doesn’t really matter.

On that note, it feels weird that “take a decent Tier 1 sandbox and then awkwardly bolt a Tier 2 railroad onto it” should be a recognizable formula from Wizards of the Coast, but I guess somebody thinks that’s a good structure for a campaign.

(It isn’t.)

And if you think that bodes ill for The Shattered Obelisk… well, strap in. Because we’ve barely gotten started.

GRAFFITI ON A MASTERPIECE

In my original review of the 2014 Starter Set, I described the original Lost Mine of Phandelver as being “the single best introductory adventure D&D has ever had.”

The version of Lost Mine of Phandelver found in The Shattered Obelisk is largely identical to the original, and it therefore remains a good Tier 1 campaign… mostly. The problem is that the designers have, in fact, made a bunch of minor changes, and, as far as I can tell, every single one of them makes the adventure worse.

Imagine you’re looking at Michelangelo’s David, but somebody has decided it would look better if they spraypainted some random graffiti on it. Fundamentally, it’s still Michelangelo’s David. It’s a masterpiece. But the graffiti seems problematic, right?

For example, the original adventure hook is that the PCs have been hired by Gundren Rockseeker to escort a wagon of supplies to Phandalin while he rides ahead to begin making arrangements for his business affairs. This hook is specific, detailed, and directly tied into the first encounter that actually kickstarts the campaign: The PCs find Gundren’s dead horse on the road, realize he’s been kidnapped by goblins, and need to rescue him.

For The Shattered Obelisk, the designers decided that they should include alternative hooks. This isn’t a bad impulse, but the hooks they came up with were:

1. The PCs randomly decide to head to Phandalin because… uh… maybe they can do something there (what, exactly?) that will impress the Harpers so that they can join up.
2. The PCs decide to head to Phandalin to meet with a representative of the Order of the Gauntlet so that they can then… join up somewhere else?

The problem here is not just that these are just generic mush. (Although that is a problem.) They’re also not hooked into the actual structure of the adventure. In fact, they actively muck up the original, organic pacing of the original Lost Mine of Phandelver, in which the PCs are assessed by local faction reps and offered membership based on their actions. Reversing cause and effect here isn’t a neutral change; it makes the adventure worse.

To be fair, the original Lost Mine of Phandelver never actually pays off the PCs joining one of these factions, which is too bad, but understandable because the adventure ends before that can happen (and it’s left as a seed that the DM can use to plan out their Tier 2 campaign). The Shattered Obelisk, of course, provides the Tier 2 campaign, and so it has the opportunity to actually develop and pay off the PCs’ relationships with these factions.

… an opportunity which it does not take.

This is really indicative of how half-assed these changes are, which is also evidenced by the fact that the opening boxed text of the adventure is completely unaltered and still refers exclusively to the original Rockseer adventure hook.

The immediately ensuing opening encounter, however, has also been changed: In the original adventure, the PCs discover two dead horses lying in the road. In the revised version, the two horses are still alive and just kind of wandering around the road.

Again, this seems like a minor change, but it isn’t: Dead horses send a clear message of DANGER, which is important because there are four goblins waiting to ambush characters who approach the horses. Furthermore, the tactics section for these goblins have been changed, making it much more likely that this initial encounter will result in an immediate TPK.

As I mentioned, these changes are frequent and the problems they create are pervasive, which can perhaps be best demonstrated by looking at the “foreshadowing” for the mind flayer portion of the campaign which has been introduced into Lost Mine of Phandelver.

Again, this makes sense. Obviously you’d want to foreshadow the new adventure and link it to the existing material so that the whole campaign would feel like a cohesive whole! And there are a bunch of obvious ways you could do that:

• The titular shattered obelisk is a Netherese artifact. The original adventure includes a Netherese archaeological expedition, so you could plant links there.
• The titular lost mine of Phandelver includes the Forge of Spells, a site where dwarves once studied arcane secrets. Maybe they studied the Netherese obelisks!
• There’s a nothic in the Redbrands hideout, a type of creature with specific ties to the Far Realms, Vecna, and the mind flayers in this adventure. We could link him to the mind flayers, perhaps as an advanced scout in the region?
• The Spider, who is the main mastermind villain of Lost Mine of Phandelver, seeks the Forge of Spells. Maybe he could also be looking for pieces of the shattered obelisk, allowing us to plant lore in his lair.
• We could actually just put an obelisk fragment in the Phandelver mine itself! Finding this fragment alerts the mind flayers to the presence of a shattered obelisk in the Phandalin region, triggering the next phase of the campaign!

But the designers do none of these things. Instead, they “foreshadow” the mind flayer plot by randomly pasting psionic goblins into various encounters. These psionic goblins do things that are best described as LOL-so-random-LOL, and it’s difficult to really convey just how dumb this is. Here’s the first reference to them, which comes from questioning the Cragmaw goblins from the first encounter:

Strange Goblins. Recently, strange goblins have sometimes joined the Cragmaws in their road-ambushes, though not today. These strange goblins have elongated skulls, and glowing green energy surrounds their weapons when they attack. The Cragmaw goblins don’t know who these newcomers are; the new goblins simply cackle and leave after each attack.

None of this makes any sense. Why would you allow random people to join your ambush? More importantly, why are the psionic goblins doing this? It’s not just the Cragmaw goblins who don’t know. The designers don’t either.

Even the decision to choose psionic goblins to be the minions of the mind flayers is fraught, because — as you’ve seen — the completely unrelated bad guys in Lost Mine of Phandelver are also goblins. You could have added the word “psionic” to literally anything else in the Monster Manual and it would have been a better choice: It would have mixed things up and helped keep the campaign fresh. It also would have made things significantly less confusing for the players.

STOP HUFFING YOUR OWN HYPE

I have unfortunately learned that if Wizards’ marketing promises some big, amazing thing in their next adventure book, it’s a virtual certainty that the book itself will completely fail to deliver on that promise.

• Dragon Heist doesn’t feature a heist (and also doesn’t include the promised links to Undermountain).
• Descent Into Avernus breathlessly promised Mad Max in Hell, but then only included a couple pages about infernal war machines before immediately forgetting that they exist for the rest of the book.
• Shadows on the Dragon Queen promised full integration with Warriors of Krynn so that you could play your own PCs on the battlefields of the wargame… and then just forgot to do that.

So when the marketing for Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk promised to reveal the TRUTH ABOUT THE OBELISKS which had been seen in previous 5^th Edition adventures like Tomb of Annihilation, Storm King’s Thunder, and Rime of the Frostmaiden… well, you know what happened.

First, the “truth” about the obelisks is completely irrelevant to The Shattered Obelisk. In fact, I’m uncertain how the PCs could even learn the “truth.”

Second, literally nothing new is revealed about the obelisks. The four paragraphs tucked away into the “Netherese Obelisks” appendix at the back of the book are just a rewritten version of the “Secret of the Obelisks” sidebar that appeared in Rime of the Frostmaiden back in 2020.

And, ultimately, this is really unsurprising. Because the Cylons Wizards’ designers don’t have a plan. They never had a plan. “Weird obelisk” is a common genre trope, so they just coincidentally showed up as flavor text in a bunch of different adventures. Then fans noticed the “pattern” and created a Grand Conspiracy out of it. In the context of The Shattered Obelisk as a book, this doesn’t even count as a flub: The book doesn’t need or even seem to want a grand “truth about the Obelisks,” so it doesn’t matter that one isn’t included.

But Wizards needs to stop selling their books by lying about them.

And if you were planning to buy The Shattered Obelisk because you were looking forward to learning the truth about the Obelisks… well, you deserve to know that it was a lie and you won’t get it.

Go to Part 2: Obelisk Hunting