DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Chaos Lorebook: Lore of the Demon Court

Its face was like the mirror nothingness. Its gaze a river of fire that touched thought but not earth.

Above all Those Who Slumber was the power of the One Who Was Born of Destruction, the Song Render, the Ender of Souls, the Dweller in Darkness. And among those who would speak his name, his name was Shallamoth Kindred – the act of desolation given life and mutilation given flesh.

And he did move with the quickness of a razor.

In the palace of the Kindred of Shallamoth, the eyes of the Galchutt are shut.

In the Temple of the Ebon Hand, the PCs discovered a cache of lore books.

These are specifically part of what I refer to as the chaos lorebooks, a collection of roughly fifty different lore books in the campaign dealing with:

• chaos cults
• chaositech
• the demon court
• servitors of the Galchutt
• the elder brood
• Wuntad’s plans for the Night of Dissolution

The root of this collection is the Book of Faceless Hate, which looks like this in my version of the lore book:

THE BOOK OF FACELESS HATE

No title marks the tattered, dark brown cover of this book. Its contents are written in a nearly illegible scrawl that could only have been born of hopeless madness. The first several pages of the book are covered in repetitions and variations of a single phrase: FACELESS HATE. (They wait in faceless hate. We shall burn in their faceless hate. The faceless hate has consumed me. And so forth…)

CHAOS: True chaos, or “deep chaos”, is a religion based on the fundamental aspects of hate, destruction, death, and dissolution. The philosophy of chaos is one of constant and endless change. It teaches that the current world is a creation of order and structure, but that it was flawed from the dawn of time due to the lack of foresight into what living sentience truly wants and need. The gods of creation – the gods of order – are untouchable and unknowable. They are aloof and uncaring, says the teaching of true chaos.

THE LORDS OF CHAOS: According to the book, the Lords of Chaos – or “Galchutt” – are gods of unimaginable power. But they are “mere servants of the true gods of change, the Demon Princes”. It is written that the Galchutt came to serve the Princes during the “War of Demons”, but while the Princes have “left this world behind”, the Galchutt still “whisper the words of chaos”.

VESTED OF THE GALCHUTT: Although they sleep, the Galchutt still exert some influence upon the world. This influence can be felt by the faithful through the “touch of chaos” and the “mark of madness”, but it can also be made manifest in one of the “Vested of the Galchutt” – powerful avatars of their dark demi-gods’ strength.

CHAOS CULTS: The book goes on to describe (but only in the vaguest of terms) many historical and/or fanciful “cults of chaos” which have risen up in veneration of either the Galchutt, the Vested of the Galchutt, or both. These cults seem to share nothing in common except, perhaps, the search for the “true path for the awakening of chaos”. The book would leave one with the impression that the history of the world has been spotted with the continual and never-ending presence of these cults – always operating in the shadows, save when bloody massacres and destruction bring them into the open.

As originally presented in Monte Cook’s Night of Dissolution (p. 93), the Book of Faceless Hate was a much more comprehensive player briefing of the entire cosmology of chaos in the Ptolus setting. I knew that I would need to create my own version of the book because I had moved Ptolus to my campaign world, and was therefore adapting this cosmology and melding it to my cosmology.

But I also knew that I wanted to make the Book of Faceless Hate more enigmatic, creating a much larger conspiracy and mystery that the PCs would need to unravel: How many cults were working with Wuntad? What were their true intentions? What was the true nature and secret history of the “gods” they worshipped?

My motivation was partly aesthetic: I just thought the chaos cults would be a lot cooler if they were drenched in mystery.

But it was also practical. Doing a big data dump to orient the players in the opening scenario of the published Night of Dissolution makes sense, because it was a mini-campaign with five scenarios, but I was planning a much larger exploration of the chaos cults that would involve a couple dozen scenarios. If I gave the players a comprehensive overview of who the cults were and everything they were doing, then the rest of the campaign would just become a rote checklist. It would be difficult to maintain a sense of narrative interest and momentum, and things would likely decay into “been there, done that.”

I also knew that if the players were forced to piece together disparate lore, slowly collecting different pieces of evidence to eagerly weave together while collecting the leads they need to continue pursuing their investigation and pasting all of it onto a literal or figurative conspiracy board, that it would get them deeply invested in the chaos cults. It would make them care.

(And when the players started holding lore book meetings and discussing the chaos cults even when we weren’t playing the game, I knew I’d pulled it off.)

DISTRIBUTING THE BOOKS

So I broke up The Book of Faceless Hate into a bunch of pieces, adapted the content to my campaign world, and reframed everything using lore book techniques so that the players would feel like they were “really” reading these strange tomes and oddly moist pages. Then I started adding even more lore books to flesh things out more, ending up with, as I mentioned, roughly fifty different books.

Okay, but what did I actually do with all of these lore books?

The short answer is that I seeded them into all the adventures in the campaign, spreading them around so that the PCs would collect them book by book.

I had about twenty chaos-related adventures where these books could be found, so this meant that many of them would be stocked with multiple lore books. Sometimes they were clustered together in a secret library; other times they would be scattered throughout the adventure.

In practice, I had even more options (and was adding even more chaos lorebooks) because most of these books weren’t unique volumes. They were books and religious scriptures. Secretive, yes, but still meant to be copied and disseminated. Thus, for example, the PCs could find a copy of The Touch of the Ebon Hand in Pythoness House in Session 22, but also, unsurprisingly, later find a bunch of them in the Temple of the Ebon Hand.

Note: And because I wasn’t worried about duplicating them, the PCs went off into an unexpected direction and I ended up adding new scenarios, I could easily reach into my stock of chaos lorebooks, grab a few, and sprinkle them around.

I was also able to add them to other scenarios, unrelated to the chaos cults, to make the entire campaign world feel like a unified whole and create the impression that the chaos cults were a pervasive, ever-present influence.

Along these same lines, I realized it was generally ideal if a cult’s primary lorebook could be found OUTSIDE the cult’s headquarters. In other words, if it was possible for the PCs to learn about a cult (setup) and then later discover where they were operating (payoff).

Consider, also, this diagram, also found in Pythoness  House in Session 22:

It depicts the symbols for a variety of chaos cults working with Wuntad, giving a default structure of:

• Who does this symbol belong to?
• It belongs to X!
• We found where X is / what X is doing!

You can see the simple progression of setups and payoffs that lead to a satisfying conclusion, and in this case we’ve complicated things through the simple expedient of having seven iterations of this progression happening simultaneously and overlapping with each other.

In actual practice, though, I muddied things up a bit more by

• including a couple symbols on the diagram that the PCs would never actually encounter in the campaign (where are they?!); and
• writing up lorebooks describing several additional chaos cults that weren’t part of Wuntad’s scheme at all (how many of them are there?!).

But I digress. Let’s get back to how the lorebooks were distributed.

What I quickly realized was that I needed a plan. You need to remember that I wasn’t prepping the entire campaign ahead of time: I had created an adventure track that indicated what the individual adventures were and how they were linked to each other, but I was prepping the keys for those adventures as they became relevant. Although I started off by simply adding whatever chaos lorebooks made sense in a particular adventure, it became clear that

• there was a bias towards some of the lorebook topics, causing them to be over-represented; and
• with so many lorebooks in play, there was a real risk that I would lose track and fail to place some of the lorebooks.

I started by putting together a simple checklist (i.e,. Have I placed this lorebook yet?), but realized I could still end up writing myself into a corner. (Where the PCs would get to the end of Act II and I would realize I still had way too many lorebooks to place and not enough adventure to place them in!) So I swapped to a spreadsheet with a list of all the lorebooks and a list of all the adventure cross-referenced.

This let me see and shape the totality of the chaos lorebooks: Where were they concentrated? Which books still needed to be placed and where could they go for best effect? Was it possible to find the book outside of the cult’s own lair?

Note: On this worksheet, I also made a point of distinguishing between which lorebooks had actually been placed – i.e., I’d keyed the adventure and they were in the adventure key—as opposed to which lorebook locations were only planned and had not yet been executed.

While doing this work, I also realized that there was a principle similar to the Three Clue Rule: Most of these lorebooks weren’t structurally essential, but they were — if I do say so myself — really cool, and I’d also put a lot of prep work into them. So for most of the books, I made a point of including them in at least three different adventures. (And if, for some reason, it wouldn’t make sense for a lorebook to be so widely disseminated, I would try to include multiple copies in the adventures where it could logically be found.)

As seen in the current session, this obviously resulted in the PCs often finding copies of chaos lorebooks that they already had. You might think this to be repetitive, pointless, or even disappointing, like a someone saying, “Aw, man… I already have this one!” when opening a pack of baseball cards. In practice, though, that really wasn’t the case.

First, the primary effect was fare more along the lines of, “Oh no… The cult has been here, too.”

Second, because it did, in fact, make diegetic sense for multiple copies of these books to exist, the presence of multiples made the world feel like a real place. It made the books “real,” rather than being a collectibles achievement in a video game.

Finally, because the campaign was being played out over months and even years of real time, the second or third encounter with a chaos lorebook would simply remind the players of what they have, often prompting them to pull out their copy of the handout and review it. Thus, the lore of the campaign was being constantly and organically reinforced until the players knew it in their bones.

Which was, of course, the point of the chaos lorebooks in the first place.

Campaign Journal: The Bloated Lords – Running the Campaign: All Your Zaug Belong to Us
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

LORE OF THE DEMON COURT
(Chaos Lorebook)

And in the darkness of his prison, the Nameless One spun the first strands of the Web of Demons. And the web was laid between and beside the world, building upon the corruption that he had laid. And so he became the Weaver.

And in the world which he had lost, there were those who felt the touch of his web. And they were like unto gods. And chief among them were the Four Princes of the Demon Court: The Nightwalker, the Blood Goddess, the Scarlet Lord, and the Bane of Fire.

THE ORDERS OF THE DEMON COURT

And in the first rank of the Demon Court there were the Princes of Chaos.

And in the second rank of the Demon Court there were the Dukes of Chaos. And their chief was Shallamoth Kindred. And among them were Bhor Kei and Dhar Rhyth and Jubilex and Kihomenethoth and Ravvan the Beast.

And in the third rank of the Demon Court, there were the servitors of the Dukes – rhodintor and zaug, carach and shaddom, vreeth and the teeming hordes of the Elder Brood.

And in the passing of the Demon Court, there were left the Vested and the Cults – the seeds of chaos.

THE SHADOW THAT NEVER SLEEPS
(Chaos Lorebook)

Above all Those Who Slumber was the power of the One Who Was Born of Destruction, the Song Render, the Ender of Souls, the Dweller in Darkness. And among those who would speak his name, his name was Shallamoth Kindred – the act of desolation given life and mutilation given flesh.

This volume is a collection of lore regarding the Galchutt known as Shallamoth Kindred. It is a mixture of texts: Some poetical, some religious, some scholastic, some bombastic.

RANK WITHIN THE HOST: The Galchutt are not given to any order or hierarchy, and yet Shallamoth Kindred is often seen as their leader. No other Galchutt has ever been known to disobey it, and one of the ancient texts cited tells that “the Dweller in Darkness shall lead the Natharl’nacna host into the heart of creation, there to deliver all unto oblivion”.

THE FORM OF MAN: Shallamoth Kindred is described as being of two forms. The first of these – the form of man – takes the shape of a tall, lithe humanoid with indistinct features. This entire form is black like the deepest part of a bottomless pit, with the exception of its dagger-shaped eyes, colored the yellow-brown of diseased teeth.

THE FORM OF SOUL: The second form – the form of soul – is that of a squirming mass of ropy tendrils surrounding a bulbous, obese, pox-covered, decaying body with a vaguely humanoid shape. In some of the grotesque illustrations contained within this volume, vestigial bat-like wings hang limply around this form.

THE SUDDENNESS OF DESTRUCTION: “And he did move with the quickness of a razor.” “And in that moment he both came and was gone, leaving a wake of black madness in his tread.” These and similar quotations attest to Shallamoth Kindred’s ability to move with blinding speed and agility. It is literally capable of being there one moment and then gone in the next.

THE FACELESS FACE: “Its face was like the mirror nothingness. Its gaze a river of fire that touched thought but not earth.” Shallamoth Kindred never displays emotion. It never grows angry and it never shows fear. It does not gloat. It does not rejoice. It is impossible to manipulate or even to reason with.

THE CITADEL WITHOUT LIGHT: “And in the palace of the Kindred of Shallamoth, the eyes of the Galchutt are shut.” This phrase stands alone in the lower left hand corner of a page otherwise covered in a strangely warped mandala. Other passages refer to this place as the Citadel Without Light, and some speak of an inner sanctum: The Tourbillion. The Vortex of the World. From this Vortex, one can “step forth into the world”.

Another fragment describes the palace as being built entirely of mirrors which sometimes reflect less than can be seen, sometimes more, and sometimes something entirely alien.

Running the Campaign: Distributing Chaos Lorebooks – Next: The Bloated Lords
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 40B: Temple of the Ebon Hand

Once set on its course, the kennel rat seemed quite certain in its path and seemed to have no desire to escape.

“For a rat it’s well-trained,” Agnarr said.

“You can’t keep it,” Tee said.

After winding through the sewers for the better part of an hour, however, the kennel rat began to wander aimlessly.

Not far away she discovered that a ten-foot-wide section of the wall was, in fact, nothing more than an illusion: She could put her hand through it as easily as insubstantial air. With a shrug of her shoulder she struck her head through: The illusion was not particularly thick and she found herself looking up an empty, ramping hall of well-constructed stone…

When I talk about designing node-based campaigns, which is primarily how Act II of In the Shadow of the Spire is designed, I’m sometimes asked how I know where one scenario “ends” and another scenario “begins.”

To quickly bring you up to speed if you’re not familiar with node-based scenario design, in a node-based campaign:

• You have a number scenarios, each of which can be thought of as a “node.”
• These scenarios are linked to each other by clues.
• You use the Inverted Three Clue Rule — the players should have access to at least three unused clues at any time — to make sure the connections between the scenarios between the scenarios are robust.

But what actually constitutes a “scenario”?

Sometimes this is obvious, but often it’s not, particularly because individual scenarios can also be node-based, with scenes and locations linked together by clues internal to the scenario.

You can see a good example of how this can get fuzzy in this session. You’ve got:

• the Temple of the Rat God
• the Ratmen Nest beneath the Temple of the Rat God
• a nearby sub-level connected by a medium-length tunnel
• the shivvel dens in the Warrens controlled by the Temple of the Rat God and reached via the sewer tunnels and guide rats
• the Temple of the Ebon God, also “connected” to the Temple of the Rat God via the sewer tunnels and guide rats

Should these be five different scenarios? Or should all the stuff related to the Temple of the Rat God be one scenario and the Temple of the Ebon Hand be another scenario? Or is all this stuff actually part of a larger “Chaos Cults” scenario?

In my case, none of the above. I decided the scenario breakdown would be by location, so I ended up with:

• CC01 Temple of the Rat God
• CC01A Warren Shivvel Dens
• CC02 Temple of the Ebon Hand

(Note that I’ve grouped the alphanumeric codes for CC01 and CC01A together because they’re run by the Cult of the Rat God. Although I consider them separate scenarios, this keeps related material grouped together in my notes.)

Okay, but why did I decide this was the scenario breakdown to use?

It really boils down to what’s useful. Or, to put it another way: When you’re running this material, what are you going to be actively thinking about? What information are you going to want to cross-reference and have at your fingertips? When you’re creating or prepping the material, what’s the stuff that should be built together?

Sometimes this is about immediate logistics. Sometimes it’s more about the conceptual organization that makes the most sense in your own head. Sometimes it’ll be about how people in the game world think about and organize things.

(What you largely won’t be concerned about is how the players will be thinking about this material. These notes – and the way they’re organized – is for you. It’s the experience created at the table that’s for the players, and, honestly, the less they’re seeing how your notes work, the more immersive that experience will be for them.)

In this case, for example, even though the Temple of the Rat God also controls the shivvel dens in the Warrens, it’s unlikely that anything in the shivvel dens will directly affect the situation in and around the temple on the Street of a Million Gods. (The ratlings probably aren’t going to send reinforcements, for example.) So it makes a lot more sense to completely segregate that material so that it’s not any kind of distraction at the table.

Conversely all the rat warrens beneath the Street of a Million Gods are very likely to be relevant if, for example, the PCs mount an assault on the temple. (Or, vice versa, the temple will be relevant if they enter the complex through the sewers and work their way up.) So I naturally grouped those together.

But, like I say, this is all about practicality, and the truth of that will really strike home as a campaign develops over time.

SPOILERS AHEAD!

For example, in the upcoming section of the campaign covered by Ptolus Remix: The Mrathrach Agenda, my original adventure notes were organized like this:

• NOD5 Mrathrach Machine
• NOD5A Aggah-Shan’s Catacombs
• NOD5B White House
• NOD5C Mrathrach Table Raids

All of these clearly are related to each other (the Mrathrach Machine is reached from the White House via Aggah-Shan’s Catacombs; the Mrathrach Table Raids were focused around the Mrathrach game), which is why they all have the NOD5 tag, but nothing else about this breakdown really makes sense from an objective point of view.

What you’re looking at is just a strange agglutination that emerged piece by piece from actual play: The Mrathrach Machine scenario was taken from Night of Dissolution and was one of the original cornerstones of Act II, so when it looked like the PCs were going to approach the Mrathrach Machine from “below,” it made sense to get my prep notes for the adventure done, and if they made it through that adventure and exited out the “top” of the Machine into Aggah-Shan’s catacombs, then I could get that prepped as needed.

But then the PCs didn’t’ actually go to the Mrathrach Machine, and they actually got involved in the White House via a completely different vector. (So originally those notes were part of a completely different set of adventures notes in my background events!) As part of that, it looked like the PCs were going to find the secret entrance to the catacombs and check them out, so I prepped those adventure note as NOD5A (since they were clearly linked to NOD5 Mrathrach Machine)… but then the PCs didn’t actually explore that passage, either!

Even later in the campaign they came back around to investigating Aggah-Shan, so I pulled together all my notes for the White House (which were now lying around all over the place, including my campaign status document archive), updated them for current events, and collected them in NOD5B White House.

But then the PCs, in a series of events described here, created their own special ops mission targeting Mrathrach tables across the entire city! So I prepped that as a new scenario, and assigned it code NOD5C.

Which all makes sense to me because it reflects how we played through this material, but, as I said, obviously isn’t how you’d organize this stuff if you had a master plan!

Campaign Journal: The Demon Court – Running the Campaign: Distributing Chaos Lorebooks
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

SESSION 40B: TO THE TEMPLE OF THE EBON HAND

July 25th, 2009
The 22nd Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

After she was satisfied that the cranium rats had left, Tee snuck back to the kennel rat corral. Several collars hung from hooks in the wall. Taking one of them, she led one of the kennel rats back to where the others waited and then they passed on to the northern sewer tunnel.

Trusting Agnarr’s experience with trained animals, Tee turned the kennel rat into his care. It took a little experimentation, but Agnarr eventually determined that there were two paths that the kennel rat would follow from the northern sewer entrance: One heading towards the west and the other heading roughly eastward.

Thinking that the western one was most likely to lead to the Temple of the Ebon Hand, Agnarr turned the kennel rat loose in that direction, keeping its leash tightly in hand.

Fortunately, once set on its course, the kennel rat seemed quite certain in its path and seemed to have no desire to escape.

“For a rat it’s well-trained,” Agnarr said.

“You can’t keep it,” Tee said.

After winding through the sewers for the better part of an hour, however, the kennel rat began to wander aimlessly. Not far away, Tee spotted a half dozen hooks hanging on the wall nearby. Tee pointed them out to the others and Agnarr started playing with them, convinced that one of them must operate a secret door. After he managed to tear one of them off the wall completely, Tee pushed him out of the way and hung up the kennel rat’s leash.

“Oh!” Agnarr’s mouth widened. “They’re for the leashes!”

Tee shook her head in exasperation and started a more proper probing of the tunnel wall.

Not far away she discovered that a ten-foot-wide section of the wall was, in fact, nothing more than an illusion: She could put her hand through it as easily as insubstantial air. With a shrug of her shoulder she struck her head through: The illusion was not particularly thick and she found herself looking up an empty, ramping hall of well-constructed stone. The walls were of simple gray granite, but the floor was of a pale, whitish marble. Thirty or forty feet up, the passage ended in a T-intersection.

Pulling her head back, Tee quietly told the others what she had seen. She had also been able to hear them clearly talking behind her, so the illusion offered no sound-proofing whatsoever.

The others quieted and Tee walked through the wall. As she passed onto the white marble, the floor suddenly glowed brightly and the filth of the sewer was drawn away from her body, down through the illusionary wall, and into the sewer channel beyond.

“That’s handy.” Tee smiled, pleased that her clothes weren’t going to be ruined by the sewer after all. But she was concerned about the light, so she levitated up (with one last schlurping noise) and worked her way along the ceiling. As she neared the top of the ramp, she heard the faint sounds of laughter and raucous carrying-on from somewhere ahead. Peering around the corner she saw that the noise was coming from beyond an iron door to the right.

Deciding that it was safe enough, Tee lowered herself to the floor and padded her way to the left. The hall in that direction opened into a larger chamber with several hallways leading away from it. One side of this chamber was sunken to a depth of seven or eight feet with its open walls lined with low bookshelves. There were also a few padded chairs and a table with silver goblets and a matching serving pitcher laid out.

Tee was tempted by the silver, but decided to leave it alone for the moment. The complex in this direction seemed perfectly quiet. She returned to the others, while privately resolving not to tell Ranthir about the books so that he wouldn’t get distracted, and proposed that they tackle whatever cultists might be behind the door on the right.

Ranthir agreed. “We shouldn’t leave any enemies at our backs.”

They weren’t sure how many cultists might be behind the door, but there were certainly several of them. Since they didn’t know exactly what they would be getting themselves into when the door opened, they decided to be safe rather than sorry: Ranthir turned Tee invisible and Elestra called upon the Spirit of the City to blend the rest of them into the city’s stone (except for Ranthir, who was going to serve as the bait).

They followed Tee quietly up the ramp, their sewer filth schlorping away (Agnarr was sorry to see it go). Once they were in position, the invisible Tee threw open the door and hurled a thunderstone into the room beyond.

It landed near four cultists playing cards in the corner of a bunkroom. Each of the cultists was horribly deformed or mutated: One with huge ears; another with his left arm split into three limbs below the elbow; a third weeping acid tears; and a fourth with a patch of oozing black across his cheek and neck.

The cultists turned in confusion as the door swung open and then cried out in pain as the thunderstone went off behind them. With the echoes of the thunderstone still reverberating through the room, Tee slipped quietly to the far side of the room.

The cultist with the giant ears was howling in pain, clutching his head in both hands. The other three cultists, however, exchanged their cries of pain for those of anger and rushed the door. They saw Ranthir standing halfway down the hall and, completely oblivious to their danger, practically impaled themselves on the swords of Agnarr and Tor as they rushed forward. Tor stepped forward and finished off the third, while the fourth – still clutching his ears – lowered his hands just in time to have Tee thrust her rapier through it. (In one ear, out the other.)

CHAOS LOREBOOKS

The flurry of noise abruptly fell away. Their plan had, perhaps a little surprisingly, gone off flawlessly. Ranthir, however, had spotted the books – having backpedaled his way down the hall as the cultists came charging through the door. So while Tee searched the barracks (which proved to be of little interest), Ranthir began poking his way through the cultists’ library.

There was a copy of the Book of Lesser Chaos largely identical to the one they had found in Shilukar’s Lair and two or three copies of the Touch of the Ebon Hand which all seemed similar to the copy they had found in Pythoness House. One of the copies of the Touch of the Ebon Hand, however, had what appeared to be a prophecy scrawled on the back cover:

PROPHECY OF THE BLACK RAIN

And there shall come a night of black rain. And the arts of magic shall have no power against it. And the Gods shall be silenced. And the rain shall wash away the world that we have known and end all bonds.

 The library in general was focused on matters of black magic, ritualistic anatomy, dark alchemy, and the like, but there were several other volumes of particular, specific interest regarding the mysterious Galchutt: Lore of the Demon Court, The Shadow That Never Passes, and The Bloated Lords.

Running the Campaign: One Scenario or Two? – Next: Chaos Lorebooks
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

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