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Staff	Location
4 Hostesses	Area 1
2 Hostesses	Area 4
4 Guards + 2 Advanced Guards	Area 5
Vladaam Mage	Area 5 (75%)1
Slaves	Area 2 (see text)
Customers	Location
4d6 Customers 2	Area 1
2d8 Customers	Area 4 (75% -1d8)
2d8-2 Customers	Area 2 - Drug Dens
2d8-2 Customers	Area 3 - Slave Chambers

¹ Carries key for the safe in Area 5.
² One of these customers is an apprentice from Alchemical Lab 1: Bodyworks. Wears a Vladaam deot ring.

Curse Den – Guildsman District
Nethar Street – U7

AREA 1 – HALL OF THE CURSE GLOBE

Sweet-scented incense burners in the form of copper phoenixes with smoke pouring from their mouths flank the doors, filling this long, gloomy hall with a multi-colored haze.

Various divans and curved couches covered with rich, darkly-hued velvets have been pleasingly arranged in small groupings around the chamber.

In the center of the room, dominating the décor, four brass dragon claws curl up to support a large, crystalline sphere filled with murky, swirling shadows. The sphere is eerily lit from below by an arcane circle that glows with an effervescent blue light.

CUSTOMERS: Most of the users in this central chamber are snakeweed smokers, with a few shivvel smokers mixed in.

GLOBE: This is a curse globe. The “arcane circle” is entirely decorative.

AREA 2 – DRUG DENS

DOORS: The doors to these rooms seal tightly to prevent abyss dust from escaping.

INTERIOR: Some of these chambers have low couches, but others are basically “drug barracks” with two or three cots where drug users can simply collapse into their stupors.

AREA 2A: On the wall here, a drug user has scrawled a twisted, charcoal mosaic of dark, shadowy figures threatening a city represented by a warped (almost demonic) skyline.

AREA 3 – SLAVE CHAMBERS

DOORS: The doors to these rooms seal tightly.

SLAVES: Each chamber has a slave. Some are bound to the beds. Others are kept in drugged stupors. Some are chained to the walls or suspended from the ceiling. They are rented out so that people can use curse jewels on them, although additional forms of (non-lethal) torture can also be obtained if the appropriate price is paid.

The slaves are generally suffering from 2d6 Wisdom and 2d6 Intelligence damage (and are likely to have damage to other ability scores). Any slave with an effective score of 4 or less in either Wisdom or Intelligence is either too insane or too damaged to provide accurate testimony.

Other slaves can describe where they came from: Some were shipped in on the Pride of Morrain (see Part 9: Fleet of Iron Sails). Some where sold through the Ennin Slave Market (Ptolus, p. 399). Some were taken to the Vladaam’s Slave Trade Warehouse (see Part 16: Slave Trade) before being shipped here.

AREA 4 – BERTRANT GAME

A double bertrant table in the shape of an infinity symbol fills this room. Croupiers stand in the eyes of the infinity symbol and the table can support one large game or two smaller games.

AREA 5 – DRUG STORAGE

This area contains:

• 2,000 doses of abyss dust.
• 30 doses of agony.
• 5,000 doses of shivvel.
• 15,000 doses of snakeweed.
• 8 curse jewels.

SAFE: Hidden in the wall. DC 20 Wisdom (Perception) to find on a search. DC 30 Dexterity (Thieves’ Tools) to open.

• Contains 5d10 x 10 pp in gold and silver coins.

Go to Part 8B: Curse Den – Oldtown

Everybody knows how an encounter starts: The goblins (or the SWAT team or the cyborg death squad) come through the door, snarl, and attack. Roll initiative!

Or the PCs are walking through the jungle when they suddenly see, or are ambushed by, the goblins (or the special ops team or the cyborg death squad). Roll initiative!

Or the PCs kick down the door, the goblins look up, snarl, and… Well, you get the idea.

All of these, however, are bang-bang encounters: The PCs see the bad guys (bang) and combat immediately begins (bang).

Nothing wrong with a good bang-bang interaction, of course, but this is just one way of initiating an encounter. If all of your encounters are bang-bang encounters, then you’re missing out on some fun options and your adventures will be unnecessarily one-dimensional. There can also be some tack-on effects in terms of game balance and scenario design that you may find surprising if you’ve only experienced bang-bang encounters.

STARTING OLD SCHOOL ENCOUNTERS

If we look back at the oldest editions of D&D, we’ll discover that they featured a procedural method for triggering encounters. The exact methods varied from one version of the game to another, but broadly speaking the procedure would look something like this:

1. Determine surprise. This could result in the monsters becoming aware of the PCs before the PCs become aware of the monsters; the PCs becoming aware of the monsters first; or both becoming aware of each other simultaneously.
2. Randomly determine the encounter distance. (For example, in a dungeon the encounter might start at 1d6 x 20 ft.) This could notably generate results farther than the current limits of the PCs’ line of sight, implying that the PCs would hear the monsters before seeing them (or vice versa).
3. Make a reaction check, which could result in monsters being, for example, Friendly, Neutral, Cautious, Threatening, Hostile, or Immediately Attacking. (The players, of course, would determine how their characters would react.)

You can see how a GM, by simply following procedures like these, would generate a huge variety in how their encounters would be initiated.

What may be less immediately obvious is the effect this has on actual gameplay:

• Spotting the goblin warg riders at a thousand feet creates a completely different combat dynamic than noticing those same warg riders when they’re only fifty feet away.
• Hearing a group of kobolds arguing on the far side of a door in the dungeon gives the PCs an opportunity to barricade the door, ambush them, sneak past them, eavesdrop for information, or any number of other options.
• Compared to an ogre who immediately attacks, a threatening ogre who says, “You don’t belong here! Get out and never come back!” offers the PCs a completely different range of potential responses, from drawing their weapons to attempting negotiations to accepting his offer and beating a hasty retreat.

And so forth.

The nifty thing to note here is that the GM doesn’t have to design all these different types of encounters. Instead, a simple, procedural variation in a handful of initial encounter conditions creates the opportunity for the players to approach each encounter in significantly different ways. Combined with different creatures, environments, and continuity, you end up with an essentially infinite variety of encounters with little or no effort.

This also has a direct impact on encounter balance.

For example, when discussing hexcrawl campaigns (or other sandbox structures where the encounters aren’t geared specifically to the PCs), I’m often asked what will happen if low-level PCs stumble into a section of the hexcrawl designed for higher-level characters or get a bad result on the random encounter tables. That’s surely just a TPK waiting to happen, right?

If you’re running exclusively bang-bang encounters, there’s a lot of truth to that, and counteracting that will require the GM to significantly limit the dynamic range of their encounter design (e.g., the world levels up with the PCs) and/or take on the responsibility of manually creating all kinds of signals warning the PCs away from dangerous areas.

But the procedural encounter methods also had the practical effects of creating ablative layers between the PCs and TPK. For example, imagine a party of 1^st-level PCs encountering a beholder. Actually getting into a lethal combat encounter with the beholder would mean:

1. Randomly generating the lethal encounter. (Which was statistically less likely.)
2. Not having the % Tracks check indicate that the PCs are encountering monster-sign instead of the monster itself. (A tracks result would, of course, procedurally warn the PCs that something big and dangerous is in the area.)
3. Failing to gain surprise. (Which would allow the PCs to silently withdraw.)
4. Generating an encounter distance close enough that the PCs couldn’t slip away.
5. The reaction check needs to generate a hostile response. (Or the PCs need to provoke a hostile response.)

As D&D stripped these various structures out of the default mode of play, however, the game gravitated towards a mode of play in which the encounter simply existing is functionally equivalent to a PC dying.

Note: The original 1974 edition of D&D also featured a fully functional mechanical structure for retreating from combat, so even when the ablative layers of the encounter system and/or the players’ commonsense failed and they found themselves in over their heads, the PCs would still have the opportunity to escape the imminent catastrophe. But that’s a topic for another time.

CREATING YOUR PHASES

Again, the point here isn’t that bang-bang encounters are bad. The point is that variety is good, and bang-bang encounters are just one option among many.

The point also isn’t that the procedural encounter-framing of old school D&D is the One True Way™ of gaming. That point is that encounters are, in fact, framed, just like any other scene in your game.

This means all the advice about scene-framing from The Art of Rulings applies to combat encounters, too:

• What is the agenda of the scene? (There are other options than “fight to the death,” even if you’re using the combat system.)
• What is the bang? (Bang-bang is, as we already know, only one option.)
• What are the elements of the scene? (These include both characters and location.)
• How does the scene end? (Are victory and defeat the only options? And, if not, what options have you been overlooking?)

What I will say is that playing around with old-school-style encounter framing procedures is, in my experience, a good way to experiment, push yourself out of ingrained habits, and begin exploring new alternatives. But these are, of course, random in nature and, ultimately, simulationist/gamist in nature. Which means that there are, once again, a lot of alternatives here. For example, you can frame dramatically or make deliberate creative choices in your encounter framing. And there are also completely different procedural methods you could explore.

Looking at the lessons that can be learned from old-school procedures, however, one that I find particularly useful is that the beginning of an encounter is inherently phased. (Even the choice to do a bang-bang encounter is, ultimately, a choice — conscious or otherwise — to collapse all of those phases into a single moment.) These phases include:

• Seeing monster-sign (they’re close!)
• Line of sight
• Encounter distance
• Surprise (aka, who’s aware of who? and when? and how?)
• NPC reaction/mood/morale

Think about how (and why) certain phases are skipped or become irrelevant in some encounters, but not others.

Do these phases need to occur in a specific sequence? What happens if you change the sequencing?

During what phases (or after which phases) are the PCs able to take action? Do their choices affect the sequence or phases or which phases occur? What about the NPC choices?

Are there other phases we haven’t identified here?

Rolling for initiative (or, more generally, moving into combat timing) is usually a key pivot point in a combat encounter. It’s a big, definitive bang. But it can be very empowering to remember that there are many encounters that could become combat encounters but don’t necessarily need to end up that way. (Monster reaction checks remind us of that procedurally.)

Similarly, even after initiative has been rolled, remember that scenes can have more than one bang! That might be:

• reinforcements (whether more bad guys or allies or neutral parties who could go either way)
• environmental changes (the lava is getting closer! the ceiling starts descending! poison gas fills the room!)
• retreat
• surrender
• negotiation and/or hostage-taking
• momentous death

The fact that most RPGs feature a highly structured system for resolving combat can be a very useful and powerful tool, but don’t let it become a trap. Remember that you control the framing of the scene and empower your players to shape the outcome of the scene in ways that transcend the combat mechanics.

The Zalozhniy Quartet is a mini-campaign for Night’s Black Agents, the thriller RPG where retired special ops agents discover that vampires are real and then vow to destroy the undead conspiracy once and for all.

Or, at least, that’s what I’m choosing to call it.

The Quartet bills itself as a “thriller story arc of four missions,” in which “each of the missions can be played individually, or linked into a campaign in any order.” But this doesn’t seem to hold up to close inspection.

We’ll come back to that.

SPOILER WARNING!

This review is absolutely going to ruin the twists and surprises of The Zalozhniy Quartet for you. So if you have any intention of playing in this mini-campaign at some point in the future, you should leap through the nearest window and make a daring escape. (Figuratively speaking.)

The major opposition of the Quartet is the Lisky Bratva, a Russian mafia that has figured out how to create the zalozhniy: Vampiric entities whose moment of death has been undone, transforming them into killing machines that can only be stopped if you recreate the lethal wound which has been “edited” out of their personal timeline. For an extra creep factor, this temporal meddling causes all kinds of weird, non-linear events whenever a zalozhniy is near.

In addition to the criminal machinations of the Lisky Bratva, the Quartet also features the Philby Plot, in which the historical figures of Henry St. John Philby and his son Kim Philby, both spies whom infamously betrayed the British government during the 20^th century, are revealed to have been part of an alchemical plot in which the entire Saudi royal bloodline was given a vampiric contamination. Anyone who can track down the tri-partite alchemical reagents known as the Albedo, Nigredo, and Rubedo will be able to complete St. John’s final ritual, transform the entire Saudi royal family into their vampiric thralls, and take de facto control of one of the richest nations on the planet.

… guess what the Lisky Bratva want?

Together, the zalozhniy and the Philby Plot form two fantastic pillars for The Zalozhniy Quartet to build around. The myriad individual ops are also great – varied, dynamic, and well-tuned to show off the strengths of the Night’s Black Agents system.

The basic bottom line here is that the core of the Quartet is very good. Personally, I find the concepts compelling and the raw material useful. It’s the type of adventure that you read and think, “I can’t wait to see what my players do with this!” And, as a testament to that, I’m currently halfway through running a Zalozhniy Quartet campaign.

So, obviously, I’m going to recommend The Zalozhniy Quartet. If you have any interest in Night’s Black Agents, this gives you a lot of awesome stuff to play with and great bang-for-your-buck.

But I do have some reservations.

THE FLY IN RENFIELD’S OINTMENT

Robin D. Laws often says that published adventures are valuable because they teach you what and how to prep for the game.

And that’s the problem with The Zalozhniy Quartet: This is not how you’re supposed to prep a Night’s Black Agents campaign.

A Night’s Black Agents campaign is organized around the Conspyramid, a selection of nodes — sources of blood, funding, and protection; cults, institutions, infrastructure, front companies, etc. — arranged into a pyramidal form and connected to each other, creating a model of the vampiric conspiracy which the agents will navigate.

This is not, however, what The Zalozhniy Quartet does.

Now, to be fair, the intention of the Quartet is that it can be plugged into your existing Conspyramid. For example, if you have a Russian mafia node on your Conspyramid, you can just use the Lisky Bratva! This is why the book says the adventures can be played in any order, because the idea seems to be that each adventure can be plugged in as a separate node on your Conspyramid (and the agents should be free to navigate the Conspyramid without being locked into a sequence).

This is good in theory, but the actual execution is flawed.

For example, the adventures can’t actually be played in any order. At least, not as written. There are too many continuity errors, including one instance where, if the PCs aren’t playing them in the right sequence, there’s supposed to be a phone call that basically says, “The stuff that happens in the other adventure is already over-and-done. You missed it.” Another of the missions — “The Zalozhniy Sanction” — is clearly designed to be played first.

I suspect this is because the series was originally designed to be played in sequence, and then at some point in development it was decided that they should become modular. The retrofit, however, was slapdash, and it wreaked havoc on the book.

For example, if the adventures can be played in any sequence, then logically each adventure should include clues pointing to all the other adventures. And this is true. Except the clues aren’t integrated into the adventures. Instead, they’re listed as separate Exit Vectors and Entry Vectors for each scenario, which also don’t match each other. (So, for example, the entry vectors for “Out of the Ashes” say that PCs in “The Boxmen” will be able to trace the owner of a safe deposit box or some business correspondence to get to “Out of the Ashes.” But if you check the Exit Vectors for “The Boxmen” these clues do not appear!)

It’s difficult to really express how intensely unfriendly this presentation is to the GM.

Similarly, the book also provides an adversary roster for the Lisky Bratva:

At first glance, this seems useful. Except:

1. There are significant continuity errors between the structure shown on the map and the structure described in the text of the book; and
2. The structure shown in the diagram doesn’t match the structure of play.

See, the function of an adversary roster in Night’s Black Agents is to guide the players’ investigation: They follow the connections from one adventure to the next.

But there’s no way to do that in The Zalozhniy Quartet as written, because, in addition to the damage wrought by the retrofit, the original structure of the scenario was clearly a linear railroad and that structure hasn’t actually been removed!

You can see this very clearly, for example, in the first adventure in the book, “The Zalozhniy Sanction.” The PCs are hired to investigate a Lisky Bratva smuggling operation, but the job is scripted to fail and the GM needs to force them to go on the run. (Oof.)

And not just on the run in general (despite the extended chase rules in Night’s Black Agents being specifically designed to empower the players to choose how and where they run to). The GM needs to force the PCs to specifically make a run to their handler’s safe house in Vienna. (Oof again.)

With the PCs forced onto this path, an effort is then made to actually invoke the extended chase rules… except that just won’t do, because on their way to Vienna, the PCs need to be dragged through a whole sequence of ops:

• Sabotaging a football team
• Infiltrating a vampire monastery
• Rescuing an investigative reporter
• Breaking up a human trafficking ring
• Disrupting a mafia meeting

So the extended chase rules are invoked in name-only, but don’t actually do anything. (Oof a third time.)

(This “just ignore the chase rules” thing happens quite a bit in the adventure. For example, there’s a thriller chase elsewhere in the adventure where if the PCs lose the chase, the target they’re chasing goes boom; but if they win the chase, then the target goes boom and so does a PC. Which is backassed adventure design.)

Plus, this whole thing doesn’t really make any sense because the Lisky Bratva’s reaction to the PCs is insanely out of proportion. For example, they stage a major terrorist incident killing hundreds of people in an effort to silence some people who… tried but failed to steal some intel?

Then, on top of all this, the Quartet’s best intentions end up biting it in the ass: It wants to be something that any Night’s Black Agents GM can plug into their campaign, which is admirable. But Night’s Black Agents notably includes a system for creating custom vampires, which means in any given campaign they could be anything from Nosferatu to psychic statues to alien space vapor.

So as you draw towards the finale of The Zalozhniy Quartet and, in particular, the Philby Plot comes into focus, the writers have a problem:

• What, exactly, did Philby do?
• What, exactly, are the albedo, rubedo, and nigredo?
• What, exactly, does the final ritual entail?

And so forth.

In a quest for genericness, the writers literally can’t answer these questions. They do, to their credit, offer you a bunch of options, but they are, perforce, vague options. They can’t actually nail anything down, which means they also can’t design concrete, playable scenarios. The inevitable result is that, as the campaign reaches its grand conclusion, it just kind of dissolves into a mushy non-entity.

CONCLUSION

That seems like a lot of problems. And it is.

But I also said that The Zalozhniy Quartet is very good and that I heartily recommend it.

So… what gives?

Well, remember those ops I mentioned above? They’re all pretty great. So are the other ops in the book:

• Extracting an enemy intelligence agent
• Performing a heist on a private Swiss bank
• Raiding a museum in Baghdad
• Tracking down the Thing Which Was Once St. John

So, yes. There are some large scale structural problems. But the actual adventure content ranges from pretty good to really good, and the core pillars of the campaign — the zalozhniy and the Philby Plot — are conceptually fantastic (even if you need to fill in a few holes).

Plus, here’s the great thing: Night’s Black Agents already has an incredibly flexible and robust campaign structure. Remember the Conspyramid? All you need to do is pull the ops out of the book, plug them into a fully functional Conspyramid, and you’re good to go. As remixes go, Night’s Black Agents makes this one really simple.

Don’t get me wrong. If The Zalozhniy Quartet wasn’t so messy, it would receive a significantly higher grade from me. It doesn’t take much imagination, in fact, to see that it might have been one of the best RPG campaigns ever written. Unfortunately, that’s not the case, and what we’re left with is a flawed masterpiece.

But even a flawed masterpiece is going to create some pretty cool experiences at your table.

Good hunting!

Grade: B-

Author: Gareth Hanrahan
Story Design: Kenneth Hite

Publisher: Pelgrane Press
Cost: $26.95
Page Count: 148

FURTHER READING
Review: Night’s Black Agents

Go to Table of Contents

The Vladaams covertly operate three curse dens in Ptolus. These dens of iniquity feature a rich drug culture mixed with strange curse magicks and gambling.

OPERATIONS

Each curse den is run by a Vladaam Mage assisted by a small team of Vladaam Guards and Advanced Guards. In general, security is light because everyone knows that the Vladaams will respond violently to anyone disrupting their operations: The Balacazars and Killravens might fight each other, but they don’t fuck with the Vladaams.

Hostesses working at the curse dens are commoners (MM p. 345) unless noted otherwise.

The curse dens are overseen by Den Master Marcus Corellius. He’s based out of the Rivergate curse den and is also responsible for crafting curse jewels as required. Notably, he’s officially the holder of the deeds on all three curse dens and also the Slave Trade Warehouse (see Part 16: Slave Trade), with the Vladaams using him to distance themselves from the properties in case anything goes wrong.

Vladaam Guards: Use guard stats, MM p. 347, with AC 17. (Equipment: breastplate, shield, longsword, longbow, arrows x20, potion of healing, Vladaam deot ring.)

Advanced Vladaam Guards: Use knight stats, MM p. 347.

Vladaam Mage: Use mage stats, MM p. 347. See Part 13: Red Company of Magi.

PRICE LIST

CURSES
Curse Globe Rental	1,000 gp
Curse Jewel Rental	100 gp
Slave Rental	100 to 1,000 gp
Psychic Poison	280 gp (cast by Den Master Corellius)
DRUGS
Abyss Dust	1 gp
Agony (Liquid Pain)	200 gp
Shivvel	2 sp
Snakeweed	2 sp

See Part 18: Vladaam Drug Running for descriptions.

CURSES

CURSE GLOBE
Wondrous Item, legendary

A large, crystalline sphere filled with murky, swirling shadows. When provided with a possession, garment, body part, lock of hair, or similar item, a curse globe can be used to remotely curse a chosen individual. The target gets two Wisdom saving throws (DC 18): One to negate the scry-like effect through which the curse is cast and once against the curse itself. If both saving throws are failed, the target is affected as per bestow curse.

A curse globe can be used twice per day, once at dawn and once at dusk.

The original Vladaam curse dens were build primarily around offering the curse globe service and expanded their services from there. They charge 1,000 gp for the use of the curse globe. Due to the limit on their usage, there may be a waiting period before a globe becomes available.

CURSE JEWEL
Wondrous Item, very rare

A flat-cut ruby about three inches across set into an elaborate setting of gold carved with twisted arcane runes. When placed against the bare skin of a victim, the curse jewel can inflict a curse upon them as per a bestow curse spell (DC 15 Wisdom saving throw negates). The process is deliberately painful to the victim and simultaneously creates a pleasurable reversal in the person using the curse jewel.

This reversal acts as an extremely addictive drug (Constitution DC 12, buzz 1d2 days, initial special effect, second effect darkvision 60 ft., Addiction DC 16, threshold 1 dose, Withdrawal DC 16 (exhaustion), recovery threshold 3, Compulsion DC 8). During a buzz, the drug creates a sense of intense euphoria and also reverses the effect of the curse that was afflicted. (For example, if the curse inflicted disadvantage on Strength checks, then the user of the curse jewel would gain a temporary advantage to Strength checks). The eyes of characters who gain darkvision as a secondary effect of using the curse jewel glow a dark, seething red.

Curse jewels are evil items and due to their frequent use in painful, decadent torture, 50% of them have become lightly tainted.

GAMES

The curse dens are not full-blown gambling establishments, but they feature various games of chance and skill as part of their darkly bohemian atmosphere.

BERTRANT: This exceedingly simple dice game involve the roll of three dice. The players always attempt to get higher than everyone else in the game, with special combinations on pairs and triples. Bertrant is mostly enjoyed by those who expect to be drinking heavily while playing and hence do not really need to keep their wits about them.

To resolve a Bertant bout:

1. Advantage Check: Make an opposed Intelligence (gaming set) check between all players. The winner gains advantage.
2. Elimination: When a player with advantage wins advantage again, the player (or players) with the lowest score are eliminated. All players with advantage except the winner lose advantage, all players without advantage gain disadvantage, and play continues.
3. Victory: The last player wins all of the table stakes for the bout.

To resolve an evening of play, roll 1d20:

1d20	Result
1-15	Lose entire stake
16	Lose half stake
17	Break even (keep stake)
18	Win stake +10%
19	Win stake +25%
20	Win stake +50%
21	Win stake x 2
22	Win stake x 5
23-24	Win stake x 10
25-26	Win stake x 20

A character proficient with gaming sets can add their base proficiency bonus to this roll.

DRAGONSCALES: See Ptolus, p. 333 and Addendum: Dragonscales.

SKULLRATTLE: The game of skullrattle features a specially modified dragon skull. A ball of red jade (referred to as the “fire”) is dropped into one of the hollowed-out horns of the skull and falls through a specially constructed pachinko-like mechanism which causes it to shoot out of one of the openings in the skull itself. The final revelation is preceded by a “deathrattle” which emanates from the skull (and is caused by the pneumatic device which propels the fire out of the randomized orifice).

Bets are placed before the fire is dropped into the horn. They are paid off according to the table below (which also shows how the result can be randomized with percentile dice). “Bottoming out” happens when the fire drops entirely through the skull without emerging through any of the orifices.

d100	Orifice	Payout
1-24	Left Eye	4:1
25-48	Right Eye	4:1
49-60	Left Fenestra	8:1
61-72	Right Fenestra	8:1
73-78	Left Nostril	16:1
79-84	Right Nostril	16:1
85-88	Left Mandible	24:1
89-92	Right Mandible	24:1
93-94	Left Fang	48:1
95-96	Right Fang	48:1
97-00	Bottoming Out	No Winners

Other Bets:

• Eye — 1:1 (left or right)
• Fenestra — 4:1 (left or right)
• Maw — 8:1 (any mandible or fang)

Since the game is entirely random, you can use the “Evening of Play” rules for Bertrant, but you do not gain any bonus to the roll from proficiency with gaming sets.

STAFF

Vladaam Guards: Use guard stats, MM p. 347, with AC 17. (Equipment: breastplate, shield, longsword, longbow, arrows x20, potion of healing, Vladaam deot ring.)

Advanced Vladaam Guards: Use knight stats, MM p. 347.

Vladaam Mage: Use mage stats, MM p. 347. See Part 13: Red Company of Magi.

Hostesses/Customers: Use commoner stats, MM p. 345.

DEN MASTER CORELLIUS

Den Master Marcus Corellius: Use mage stats, MM p. 347. AC 13 (16 with mage armor). Proficient with alchemist’s tools.

• Circlet of Persuasion: Advantage on Charisma-based checks.
• ring of protection

Cantrips (at will): mage hand, mending, shocking grasp
1^st level (4 slots): charm person, mage armor, magic missile, unseen servant
2^nd level (3 slots): false life, invisibility
3^rd level (3 slots): sending, summon lesser demons (Xanathar’s),
4^th level: (3 slots): arcane eye, dimension door
5^th level (1 slot): seeming

Go to Part 8A: Curse Den – Guildsman District

 

Andrew Stanton is the superstar creator of WALL-E, John Carter, Finding Nemo, A Bug’s Life, Toy Story, and many more. In 2012 he gave the above TED talk collecting all the lessons he’s learned about storytelling.

A good story, says Stanton, makes a promise. That promise might be as simple as, “Once upon a time…,” but the crucial thing is that the audience believes that this will be a story worth hearing. The promise, therefore, invites the audience to engage with the story. It’s like a foot in the door. It’s incredibly important because, without that initial engagement (and the trust that comes with it), the storyteller has nothing to build on or with.

The nature of the promise also means that “stories are inevitable if they’re good, but they’re not predictable.” A statement which, I think, can be interpreted in many ways: That we may know where a story is going, but not the path which is taken. Or that we may know the direction of Fate, but not necessarily the specific form it will take. Or that when we look back at the story, it seems as if everything is perfectly aligned and could have gone no other way than it did, but we could not have foreseen it.

In other words, the story must faithfully keep its promise, but it should still surprise and delight the audience.

(For more on how you can achieve this effect in an RPG, check out Random GM Tip: Three Point Plotting.)

The promise also creates a window of opportunity for the storyteller, and they have to capitalize on that by making the audience care about the story.

There are many ways a storyteller can do this — character, theme, craft, etc. — but one particular lesson he talked about leapt out to me as a Game Master:

THE UNIFYING THEORY OF 2+2

The absolute best way to get the audience to care about the story is to get them involved with the story; to get them actively thinking about the story. And the best way to do that is to make them work for the story.

In other words, don’t show your audience FOUR. Show them 2 + 2 and make them do the math.

Note that 2 + 2 isn’t difficult. The point isn’t necessarily to challenge the audience. (Although it can be: There’s a reason why the mystery genre is popular. A properly placed insoluble problem can actually be even more effective, which his why everyone remembers the end of Inception.)

The point is that even the simplest act of connecting the dots engages the audience. It makes them, on a primal level, a part of the story. They are thinking about the story and they have opinions about it. Once you’re part of something, you care about it. As Stanton says, “A well-organized absence of information pulls us in.” We have a desperate need to complete an unfinished sentence.

Take Citizen Kane, for example. (Spoilers ahoy!) Imagine how much less effective would that movie be if, at the end of the movie, Orson Welles had Joseph Cotton’s character say, “Rosebud was his childhood sled. Despite the poverty and the hardship of his youth, he must have always missed the simple, uncomplicated joys of his youth and the unconditional love of his mother.” The beauty of Citizen Kane as a movie is, in fact, the immense artistry Welles employs so that, rather than spoonfeeding that moral to the audience, he has prepared the audience so that all the nuance and emotional complexity of that idea becomes as simple as 2+2 when he shows them the image of the sled.

(I’ll note that this can actually create paradoxes in storytelling, where sometimes the more effort you spend explicitly and plainly explaining something to the audience can actually result in the audience understanding it less, because the lack of engagement causes them to mentally skim past it.)

And it’s a “unifying theory” because it can apply to almost everything in a film: Characters, plot points, exposition, etc.

The trick, of course, is that the audience wants to work for their meal, but they usually don’t want to know that they’re doing that. So it’s also the storyteller’s job to hide the audience’s work from the audience.

To use our Citizen Kane example again, when you see the sled at the end of the movie, you don’t consciously think, “Oh! A tricky problem! Let me think this through!” Ideally, the storyteller has set you up so that you simply see 2+2 and reflexively think, “Four.”

(Again, there are exceptions, like the central conundrum of most mystery stories.)

IN YOUR GAME

Stanton, of course, is talking about animation and filmmaking, and we know that we can’t just take the same storytelling techniques that we see on screen and use them in our RPG games. RPGs are a different medium; one in which the players have an unprecedented freedom and for which plots should not be prepped.

But the Unifying Theory of 2+2 still works!

All you need to do is give your players the equation and then left them take the final step.

In fact, the interactivity of a roleplaying game can actually enhance the technique because the players can actively investigate. In a film, the audience has to passively receive the equation, but in an RPG, the players can go looking for the twos. Or maybe they have the twos, and they need to experiment to figure out the correct mathematical operator.

(I think I’ve broken the metaphor.)

Matryoshka techniques like matryoshka searches and matryoshka hexes are built around this idea that “completing the equation” will mean taking action as a character, and that doing so can give the player both ownership and control over the answer we find.

For other techniques you can use to help make your players care about your campaign, check out Random GM Tips: Getting Your Players to Care.