DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 43B: Kalerecent’s Cry

Porphyry House stood on one end of an open plaza in the Guildsman’s District near the Warrens facing a large, dilapidated open-air rotunda which stood along the Old Sea Road near East Street. It was an elegant, two-story structure constructed of dark purple and mauve porphyry. Minarets rose from each of the buildings’ four corners, and a central dome served as the roof. Its façade was decorated with several statues, bas-reliefs, and other carvings of handsome men and beautiful women (many of them striking a variety of lewdly suggestive poses).

Here’s a fun fact: For a very long time I thought porphyry was some kind of incense or spice. Perhaps something similar to frankincense or ambergris. (Although ambergris was also something that I misapprehended, assuming it be far more akin to amber than its etymology would, in my opinion, suggest.) The trick was that I had only encountered “porphyry” in print, usually as part of a pulp story where it would be tucked into a list of treasures or opulent extravagances.

(Along similar lines, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that many “serpentine statues” became significantly more orphidic in my mind’s eye than an author had intended.)

In reality, of course, porphyry is actually a beautiful, purple-red stone.

“The Porphyry House of Horrors” is an adventure by James Jacobs which first appeared in Dungeon Magazine #95. When I first read the title and even the opening pitch, I was still belaboring under my false understanding of porphyry’s nature.

“Ah yes,” I thought. “A high-class whorehouse of porphyry. The luxurious chambers must be redolent with the rich scents of porphyry.”

Sigh.

In any case, Jacobs’ adventure quickly cured me of my misapprehension and running the adventure locked the true beauty of porphyry into my imaginative lexicon.

This is just one minor example of how D&D, and roleplaying games in general, can be so potently educational. As a text-based medium, of course, they carry all the benefits of vocabulary and knowledge that any reading does. But, as a creative medium, they also encourage research into a vast array of topics.

Even more so than that, playing RPG adventures creates “living memories” that are, in my experience, far more powerful than stuff you just read in a book. It’s not the same thing as real life, obviously, but it’s still “stickier.” Sometimes, of course, this means that you know more about Ptolus than you do western European geography, but there’s also all kinds of “real” stuff you can pick up along the way. (Like what porphyry is.)

For example, while putting together the Malta chapter of the Alexandrian Remix of Eternal Lies, I did A LOT of research into the island and its history. Running the sessions built on top of that research really locked it in.

Similarly, a bunch of the Zalozhniy Quartet campaign for Night’s Black Agents takes place in western Europe. Doing research for that and running the PCs through transnational chases through the region means I’m not nearly as shaky on western European geography as I was five years ago.

The great thing is that there’s always new stuff to learn. And RPGs are a really fun – and effective! – way of doing it.

Campaign Journal: Session 43C – Running the Campaign: Running Darkness
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

The D&D 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide introduced a new Bastion system, giving PCs the opportunity to create personal strongholds. To briefly sum up the Bastion system:

1. Your bastion is made up of facilities which can (a) be ordered to provide a special benefit and (b) include a number of hirelings. (Some facilities will also let you recruit defenders.)
2. A bastion turn is 7 days. On each turn, you can issue orders to any/all of your facilities.
3. If you DON’T issue any orders to your bastion, then a bastion event is rolled.

Each PC automatically gets a bastion at 5^th level. All or any of the PCs in a group can choose to combine their bastions into a single physical location. PCs gain additional facilities at 9^th, 13^th, and 17^th level.

You can’t spend money to make new facilities, but some facilities can be enlarged by spending 2,000 gp and you can swap one facility for a different facility each time you level up.

If your bastion is attacked (as part of a bastion event, for example), then:

1. You automatically defeat your enemy.
2. Lose 6d6 defenders.
3. If you end up with 0 defenders, then one of your facilities has been damaged and can’t be used for one bastion turn.

The bastion facilities mostly avoid dissociated crap, but there are a handful of hilarious exceptions, such as:

• Performing a play to gain +d6 to any later d20 roll of your choice.
• Expert skill trainers who can make you proficient in skills, but only for 7 days.
• Warrior lieutenants who won’t defend your bastion if it’s attacked, but CAN raise armies for you. (The armies also won’t defend your bastion.)

Overall, though, the Bastion system is meaty. It packs a lot of stuff into just twenty pages. I’m also a big fan of the conceit of “assume your bastion has a complex economy that usually breaks even.” It immediately knocks out a bunch of bookkeeping that can keep people from wanting to interact with systems like this. (It would probably work even better if the system was more explicit in (a) stating this conceit and (b) embracing it in the design. For example, you could have bastion events that could include stuff like “Shortfall — this month you’re in the red; what are you going to do about thast?” But I digress.)

Perhaps the most important feature, in my opinion, is that PCs automatically gain that bastion stuff when they level up. I’ve long argued that if you want strongholds to be a core part of the D&D experience, then you need to go back to the PCs getting them as an automatic perk. If the players see a cool toy on the list of stuff they get when they level up, they’ll want to go play with their toys.

Which would then, ideally, position the DM to use the group’s bastion(s) to create cool adventure hooks, complications, and evolving narratives. And, simultaneously, the players would be set up to use their bastions to cleverly solve problems, set goals for themselves, and explore new opportunities for their characters.

Unfortunately, those hooks and opportunities don’t exist. In fact, because of how the system is designed, they can’t exist.

THE BASTION BUBBLE

The problem is that bastions have been designed to exist in a bubble.

The advantage of this bubble is that you can have bastion play without changing the way you run campaigns: It’s a downtime action PCs can take without taking a break from adventuring. Bastions are a little solo game that the players run off to the side that occasionally pops out a healing potion.

The problem, though, is that the bubble also means that there’s no clear vector for integrating bastions into your campaign:

• there’s no way to level up from doing Bastion stuff; and
• there’s no way to improve your bastion without leveling up.

As written, the DM can’t say, “Go on this adventure and your Bastion will get this cool improvement!” And a player can’t say, “I want this cool improvement for my Bastion, how can I make that happen?”

Meanwhile, bastion events are all designed to be neat, tidy, and basically resolve themselves. (If they mad a mess, after all, the PCs might have to stop following the plot and go clean it up!) So the system also doesn’t generate adventure hooks.

It’s not just that the Bastion system doesn’t plug into or generate adventure content. It’s designed to actively REPEL attempts to do so: Nothing goes in. Nothing comes out. (Except the gachapon prizes.)

This is why bastion events only trigger when the PCs aren’t home (and don’t issue any orders).

It’s why defenders and hirelings don’t have stat blocks: You can’t take a hireling with you on an adventure. You can’t join your defenders in fighting to protect your bastion.

It’s even why the bastion economy is kept entirely separate from the PCs’ money. (And don’t worry your pretty little heads about any of the details.)

And even though it’s never explicitly said, it’s also why it’s strongly implied that if the PCs have retreated to their bastion, then they should be left alone.

The campaign is over here. The bastion is over there. Stay in your lane.

Okay, but can’t we just burst this bubble?

Even if the Dungeon Master’s Guide says that we can’t, that doesn’t we couldn’t, for example, reward the PCs with a new bastion facility.

Unfortunately, it’s not quite that simple. To use the example of facility rewards, consider how many facilities each PCs from leveling up: Two at 5^th level; two more at 9^th; once more at 13^th; and one more at 17^th.

Assume we have a group with five PCs who have their bastions physically united: At 5^th level, when they get their bastions, they’ll have a total of ten facilities… but there are only nine Level 5 facilities. Similarly, at 9^th level they’ll get +10 facilities, with only ten Level 9 options to “choose” between.

While you can duplicate facilities and a few of them have benefits that would make that worthwhile, you can see how, in a pretty typical group, there are no hard choices when it comes to the group’s collective bastion. Your players can just say, “One of each, please!”

As analogy, imagine that PCs automatically got magic items when leveling up. In fact, they get so many magic items from leveling up that they can have one of every single magic item in the Dungeon Master’s Guide. If that were true, it would be quite difficult to motivate the PCs with the promise of a magic item. And the same thing happens with bastion facilities.

You can work around the edges a little bit here. For example, as I mentioned, there are some bastion facility upgrades. You could expand the number of meaningful upgrades available and offer them. You could create new facilities. You could also play around with the idea of granting access to level-gated facilities.

There’s other stuff we can do, too: We could create stat blocks for our hirelings and defenders. We could replace the bastion event triggers and revise the whole system into something that the PCs can meaningfully interact with. But it turns out the bastion bubble is baked in pretty deep and, if we want to burst it, we would need to rip a lot of stuff out and rebuild it.

CONCLUSION

The bastion bubble is, ultimately, rooted in a more significant and widespread problem with the 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide: The lack of a clear vision of play.

If the Bastion system, for example, had been built with a clear vision of play in mind, then we would expect Wizards of the Coast to write their upcoming adventures/campaigns with the Bastion system in mind: Since we’re assuming that all PCs will have them, we should logically account for them in our prep and expectations.

I suspect, however, that this will not be the case, for much the same reason that — while most of the sample adventures in the Dungeon Master’s Guide feature overland travel — only one of them actually uses the Journey system that’s presented as the scenario structure for that. (And this despite the fact that, unlike the bubble of the Bastion system, the Journey system has a clear integration with play!)

This is also why the Bastion system has some weird level-gating. Some of these are inexplicable. (Why, for example, can’t you run a Pub until you’re 13^th level?) Others, however, are pretty clear-cut: Since there’s no clear vision of play — of how the Bastion system is supposed to actually work at the table — anything requiring novel or challenging storytelling — like leading an army or running a guild — is just dropkicked to a high enough level that Wizards, whose campaigns that virtually all end at 15^th level or before, can just shrug and say, “Not our problem. Figure it out yourself.”

This is why I think the Bastion system will, unfortunately, just wither on the vine. And I strongly suspect that, rather than the ideal outcome of Bastion-based adventures, we’ll instead see a worst-case scenario. Like the half-formed downtime mechanics in the 2014 Dungeon Master’s Guide, this half-functional Bastion system will only become an impediment to people trying to implement better and fully functional solutions.

You’ll see a lot of people trying to implement, say, Trollskull Manor from Dragon Heist in the system and getting stuck.

Which is too bad, because there’s something almost brilliant about the Bastion system. And I do think that, thanks to their automatic acquisition, we’ll see a lot of groups, possibly even a majority of groups, using strongholds, something which hasn’t been true since the ‘80s (which, not coincidentally, is the last time they were a core part of the D&D rules).

In truth, I hope to be proven wrong here. I think it would be marvelous for Bastions to burst out of their bubble.

For that to happen, though, someone will need to find the thing that strongholds in D&D have always struggled to find: A clearly understood structure and vision of play.

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 43A: Scouting Porphyry House

They knew that Porphyry House was engaged in illicit as well as salacious trade, and they doubted the cultists were bringing their other business brazenly through the front door. There had to be a second, surreptitious entrance somewhere.

Probably underground.

Probably in the sewers.

So what’s happening at the beginning of this session is that, after giving up on the idea of finding an entrance to Porphyry House through the sewers at the end of last session, the players almost immediately worked their way back around to the same conclusion: There must be an entrance through the sewers!

There isn’t.

Whereas the PCs’ scouting in the last session was still taking them interesting places (because they were following paths to interesting things, even if their reasons for doing so were erroneous), we’ve now reached the point where they’re really just ramming their faces into a wall. It’s like searching a dungeon room you’ve already searched three times and hoping you’ll find something new, only at a slightly larger scale.

So, as a GM, what do you do about this?

Well, I actually have an article about this: Random GM Tips — Driving Past the Dead End.

They eventually found their way to the right area beneath Porphyry House… but found nothing except a few impassable pipes which might (or might not) lead into the House.

By the time they re-emerged from the sewers, evening was settling in and they were reminded that they had an appointment with Rehobath in the not-too-distant future. They decided to leave and try again the next day, and on their way back to the Ghostly Minstrel laid out a plan to magically tunnel their way into the house from below (if they could figure out exactly where they should be digging).

What you’re seeing reflected in the campaign journal here is a very hard frame — the time spent at the table is minimal, while the time that passes in the campaign world is significant. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but it would have been along the lines of, “Okay, going down into the sewers you begin exploring. You’re right in the heart of where the older sewer systems in the Warrens meet the newer systems of the Guildsman District and it’s all a chaotic jumble. You eventually find your way to the area right under Porphyry house, but there’s nothing there except drainage pipes.”

To break this down, there are four key components:

• I’m shifting from Now Time to Abstract Time. (There’s no reason to, for example, play out a tunnel-by-tunnel exploration of the sewers because there’s nothing meaningful to find and no meaningful choices to be made during that exploration.)
• The PCs are still doing the thing that the players want them to do. (I’m not saying, “No, you can’t search the sewers.”)
• The passage of time is significant. (I’ve talked about handling the passage of time through a mental model of Morning, Afternoon, Evening, and Overnight. In this case, they spent their afternoon on the sewer search, thus the frame of, “By the time they re-emerged from the sewers, evening was settling in…” This is further reinforced because they have an evening appointment.)
• Their action has a concrete conclusion. (They didn’t just “not find an entrance to Porphyry House.” Their efforts resulted in them finding the point closest to Porphyry House. The distinction is subtle, but distinct: The former says “maybe you missed something, so you could look again.” The latter says, “you succeeded in your search and this is what you found, even if it isn’t what you wanted to find.”)

We have, thus, spent only a couple minutes of our valuable table time on this interaction. And while the players feel that they’ve been allowed to do the thing they wanted to do, they’re also been pushed away from the idea of “let’s just search again” because (a) the result has been framed as a definitive answer to their query and (b) we’ve also established that it will cost them a significant resource (time) to continue pursuing this.

Now, as you’ll see in the journal entries for the rest of this session, the players nevertheless did continue masticating this idea, intermittently discussing their options while pursuing other agendas. They really wanted a discreet entrance to Porphyry House. But rather than just boiling away table time fruitlessly searching the sewers, they instead turned their thoughts to more creative solutions: First by hatching the idea of drilling up into Porphyry House from the section of sewer they had identified as lying under the whorehouse, and then by refining that idea into stoneshaping through the rear wall of the building.

So, in short, I’m making a note here, “Huge success.”

Campaign Journal: Session 43B – Running the Campaign: D&D is Educational
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

SESSION 43A: SCOUTING PORPHYRY HOUSE

October 25th, 2009
The 23rd Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

Porphyry House stood on one end of an open plaza in the Guildsman’s District near the Warrens facing a large, dilapidated open-air rotunda which stood along the Old Sea Road near East Street. It was an elegant, two-story structure constructed of dark purple and mauve porphyry. Minarets rose from each of the buildings’ four corners, and a central dome served as the roof. Its façade was decorated with several statues, bas-reliefs, and other carvings of handsome men and beautiful women (many of them striking a variety of lewdly suggestive poses).

The plaza itself was sparsely populated. A small band of jugglers was performing near the rotunda, and a few others were lazing here or there. No one seemed to be approaching the brothel itself (it was, after all, still the middle of the day), but a pair of guards – one male, one female, and both quite attractive – stood before the large pair of golden doors leading into Porphyry House. These guards were dressed in purple ceremonial full plate, which was both form-fitting and revealing of more skin than would normally seem practical. Their faces were masked by helmets with white porcelain masks depicting beautiful and handsome faces. The doors themselves were fully fifteen feet tall and featured detailed carvings depicting a frenzied orgy.

The party was impressed, but not daunted. Elestra transformed into a bird and performed a discreet aerial survey: She found no secondary entrances and no windows. Even the minarets appeared to be decoratively constructed out of solid rock. The only way in or out of the building seemed to be the front doors.

They thought about simply sending Agnarr through the doors looking for all the world as if he were a customer, but rejected the plan when they considered their fair degree of fame. If he was recognized by the cultists, that could horribly wrong.

“It might not work anyway,” Ranthir said. “They may not take walk-ins.”

“How do you know something like that?” Elestra asked, eying him up and down.

“I come from a city.”

“I come from a city,” Tee said. “I don’t know stuff like that.”

“They may not take customers at all,” Tor said. “I think the whole thing is a front.”

Ranthir agreed it was a front, “But to be one it must take customers. It would be suspicious if they turned away custom.”

Tee agreed. “And it probably makes a lot of money.”

Agnarr was glad the infiltration plan had been abandoned. “Tor and I could just sneak up on those guards and stab them from the side. They’ve got poor periphery vision in those helmets. They won’t see us coming.”

“Where did you learn a word like ‘periphery’?” Elestra asked, eying him up and down.

“What about everyone else in the plaza?” Tor asked. “Won’t they see us?”

“Not if we’re subtle.”

“So… everyone will notice?”

“Where did you learn a word like ‘subtle’?” Elestra asked.

They knew that Porphyry House was engaged in illicit as well as salacious trade, and they doubted the cultists were bringing that other business brazenly through the front door. That meant there must be a secondary, surreptitious entrance somewhere. Probably underground. Probably through the sewers.

They found a nearby sewer entrance at East Street and Hogshead and went down to explore. Unfortunately, they were right in the heart of the multi-layered interstice where the older sewer systems of the Warrens met the newer systems and it was all a chaotic, jumbled mess. If their senses of direction had held true, they eventually found their way to the area right beneath Porphyry House… but found nothing except a few impassable pipes which might (or might not) lead into the House.

ON HOLY BUSINESS

By the time they re-emerged from the sewers, evening was settling in and they were reminded that they had an appointment with Rehobath in the not-too-distant future. They decided they needed to leave and try again the next day, and on their way back to the Ghostly Minstrel laid out a plan to magically tunnel their way into the house from below (if they could figure out exactly where they should be digging).

At the Ghostly Minstrel they used the paving stones they had taken from the Temple of the Ebon Hand to quickly clean themselves, but didn’t worry themselves beyond the bare necessities (they were only meeting with Rehobath, after all). On their way through Oldtown, they took a short side-trip to the alley on Yarrow Street and spoke with Shim. They suspected that once the cultists learned that both the Temple of the Rat God and the Temple of Ebon Hand had been raided, their security precautions would skyrocket. They wanted to attack Porphyry House before that could happen, and the most effective way to do that was to find the cultists’ secondary entrance as quickly as possible. If anyone could do that, they felt it would be Shim. They introduced him to Nasira and got down to business.

“So let me get this straight,” Shim said when they had finished their explanation. “You want me to find a secret entrance to a brothel?”

“As quickly as possible, yes,” Tee said.

“And quietly,” Ranthir said. “We don’t want them to know we’re coming.”

“You’re looking for a discreet rush job on a whore house?”

“It sounds unsavory when you put it like that.”

“Could you keep using adjectives?” Shim said. “I like nice, expensive adjectives.”

They hashed out some surprisingly reasonable terms. Shim promised to bring them whatever he found first thing in the morning.

Throughout the conversation, however, Tor’s thoughts had been distracted by their upcoming meeting with Rehobath. They didn’t know what he wanted, but if their connection with Sir Kabel had been discovered then there was every possibility that they were walking into a trap.

So Tor asked Shim: “Do you have any idea why Rehobath might want to meet with us?”

“Fifty gold crowns.”

Tor shrugged and paid it.

“I’d guess it probably has something to do with your friend Dominic.”

Which it did.

They arrived at the Holy Palace to find it now staffed with servants in the livery of the novarch. The entire building was filled with a greater sense of pomp and circumstance than when Tor had first visited it only a few days before. They were led down a long hall upon a carpet of red and gold, passing between the great curves of two balustraded stairways, and through a door into the minimalist grandeur of Rehobath’s throne room.

When they arrived, Rehobath was surrounded by a number of functionaries. But he sent these away and spoke with them privately, keeping only a few guards at the far end of the hall.

“You have heard, I am sure, of what your friend Dominic has done?” Rehobath said, eyeing them with either suspicion or calculation.

The news was all over the city, so there seemed little risk in admitting it.

Rehobath gave them a report from one of his “house servants” (in other words, one of his spies). It detailed Dominic’s appearance in Empress Square the day before in much greater detail than the news reports they had been able to collect themselves.

“Did you know this was going to happen?” Rehobath demanded.

“Of course not,” Tor said.

“It doesn’t even sound like something that Dominic would say,” Tee said.

(“Well, maybe that last bit,” Elestra muttered.)

Rehobath looked sharply at her. “You think he may have fallen under the control of the traitors?”

“Perhaps,” Tee said. “Or it might not be Dominic at all. It could be an impostor. Or an illusion.”

“Yes…” Rehobath said, his eyes drifting into shrewd thoughtfulness. “That will serve… It might even be true.”

With a final nod, Rehobath changed the topic to the Banewarrens. They gave him a mildly edited account of their progress (particularly neglecting to mention the details of the legend lore spell Ranthir had cast). When Rehobath learned that they were waiting for a wish spell, however, he promised to expedite the matter with Heth Neferul.

From the moment they passed into the Holy Palace, Nasira’s nervousness had grown. Who, exactly, had she agreed to work with? And why did they seem so close to this freshly-minted novarch? Were they truly allies of Rehobath? But as their conversation continued, she became more convinced that the others were playing at some deeper agenda. At the very least, their travails together had instilled her with some trust of them. She would wait to hear their explanation.

Running the Campaign: It’s Gotta Be Here! – Campaign Journal: Session 43B
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index