Our Let’s Read of the original 1974 edition of D&D continues as we delve deeper into Volume 1: Men & Magic. Topics covered in this video include:
If you want to start watching from the beginning, you can do that here.
I sat down with the folks over on Roleplay Rescue. We chatted about open tables, my current work, future plans for the Alexandrian, and all things RPGs.
I know I said that Season 10 had come to an end after 22 episodes but when opportunity strikes it’s best to grasp it with both hands. Besides, episode 23 also has a nice, mystic ring to it. My guest today is the single biggest influence on this podcast, a huge inspiration to me as a gamer and Game Master, and just about the best source of roleplaying wisdom I have come across on the internet. When he suggested he’d be open to doing an interview, well, I was thrilled. How could I say no?
You can check out the podcast here:
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I think we need to start with a little disambiguation. This is NOT a review of Ptolus: City by the Spire, the incredible 700-page city supplement originally designed for D&D 3rd Edition, recently adapted to both D&D 5th Edition and the Cypher System, and the basis for my own In the Shadow of the Spire campaign.
This is a review of Ptolus: City of Adventure, an anthology of three adventures each sold separately as PDFs:
(Also not to be confused for Ptolus: City By the Spire, the graphic novel by Monte Cook and Caanan White. Although the odds of that error being made are probably significantly lower.)
The adventures are designed with the expectation that you’ll be using them in conjunction with the Ptolus sourcebook, but it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to adapt them to any urban D&D setting.
They are dual-statted for use with both 5th Edition and the Cypher System. I usually find dual-statted books very awkward and frequently confusing, but Monte Cook Games cleverly uses sidebars and iconography to clearly delineate the two sets of stats. The result is easy to read and easy to use.
SPOILERS FOR THE ADVENTURES!
DOCTRINE OF GHUL
In Bruce R. Cordell’s Doctrine of Ghul, an incomplete manuscript purportedly written by Ghul the Skull-King (an evil overlord from the history of Ptolus) has surfaced and is being promulgated through the city. Those who read the manuscript, however, discover that (a) they are cursed to die unless they finish reading it and (b) it’s incomplete, so they can’t do that.
Whether it’s the PCs who get cursed by the incomplete doctrine, someone they care about, or someone who’s willing to pay them for help, they’ll have to journey into Ghul’s Labyrinth — the vast dungeons beneath Ptolus which once served as the barracks for Ghul’s legions and the laboratories for his arcanists — and visit three locations where the missing passages of the Doctrine can be found.
Truth be told, the metaphysics and background of this whole framing device is a dog’s breakfast. The “Doctrine” is actually a fake, created by a wizard named Alberek who wants to bring Ghul back from the dead. Alberek believes that each time someone finishes reading the full Doctrine there’s a chance that they’ll bring Ghul back from the dead… so, naturally, rather than just sending out full copies of the Doctrine, he’s hidden chunks of the text underground so that people have to go adventuring to read the full Doctrine. (Even though this isn’t necessary and, if you copy out the passages, you can bring them back to the surface and have people read them.) Also the Doctrine isn’t completely fake, it’s based on fragments of text which may have actually been written by Ghul. Also also, each time someone finishes reading the Doctrine and doesn’t miraculously resurrect Ghul, Alberek teleports to their location and kills them. For… reasons?
Bit of nonsense really.
But here’s the thing: This whole framing device is, ultimately, just a way to get the PCs to visit three locations within Ghul’s Labyrinth.
Each of these locations is a completely independent mini-dungeon, and they’re all quite excellent. Incredibly creepy ambience, clever encounters, and cool lore make each one a delightful gem of dungeon design.
For example, in the Breeding Pits the PCs will encounter an airborne pathogen which subverts their immune systems and uses them to begin creating a grey goo. As they expectorate or vomit forth the strange substance, it becomes animate and begins joining together to form strange servitors seeking to continue the ancient work of the researchers who once labored here.
That’s the kind of idea which elevates a simple dungeon crawl into a truly memorable experience, and each of these locations are studded with stuff like this.
So here’s the bottom line for me: Jettison the wonky framing device and you’re left with three really great mini-dungeons that you can use to flesh out any journey into or through Ghul’s Labyrinth. That’s a fantastic tool for your toolkit! And makes it more than worthwhile to grab a copy of Doctrine of Ghul.
(Just make sure you read the whole thing.)
Grade: B-
THE RUNEBLOOD BLESSING
The Runeblood Blessing by Sean K. Reynolds is a brilliant example of how to prep and run urban adventures.
The concept is that a sorcerer named Vlenn has perfected a magical ritual that will grant people a blood-red rune that gives them a magical power (like blur or invisibility or feather fall). She offers the ritual for an extremely affordable price, and empowered runeblooders begin showing up throughout the city. It’s the democratization of magic and it upsets the existing structures of power in myriad ways.
There’s just one little problem: Some of the runeblooders are dropping dead.
So many published adventures would take this incredibly cool concept and immediately fail to realize its expansive, transformative potential by locking it into some form of linear structure. Reynolds’ skips right past this potential pitfall by instead providing an adventure toybox for the GM to actively play with.
The presentation of these toys can be a little sloppy in places, but it boils down to:
The important thing to recognize is that these are all independent (yet overlapping) adventure elements. What makes The Runeblood Blessing so cool is that there’s not some specific moment at which The Adventure™ begins. There’s not one specific point where somebody shows up and says, “You should go on this adventure now.”
Instead, there is this vast, ongoing event that’s happening throughout the entire city. It’s not happening specifically to the PCs. It’s happening to the city. To everyone. And it’s up to the players to decide if, how, and when they’re going to choose to interact with these events: Do they buy a runeblood blessing? Blackmail Vlenn? Investigate the criminals?
The result will add a deeply rewarding layer to your Ptolus campaign, bringing the city to life and making it feel huge to your players. That scope and vibrancy, in turn, will make the PCs feel incredibly important once they get involved.
Highly recommended not only as an adventure in its own right, but also as a nearly perfect exemplar of how to create your own urban adventures.
Grade: A-
RETURN OF THE EBON HAND
The final adventure in the book — Return of the Ebon Hand by Monte Cook and Sean K. Reynolds — is another phenomenal example of how you can/should design adventures for your Ptolus campaign.
There are two things I love here.
First, Return of the Ebon Hand is a sequel. The adventure assumes that the PCs have already routed the Ebon Hand from their temple, which is presented as an adventure location in the core Ptolus sourcebook. Although it can’t be entirely sure how those events might have played out in your campaign, it offers several options and some guidance on how you can adapt the adventure to make it fit.
This is such a great example of how events in your campaign can/should spark additional adventures as events develop over time. (I might have a soft spot here because, in my own campaign, the PCs routed the Ebon Hand and then also had to deal with the legacy of their actions in a subsequent adventure.)
Note: I’ll also note that you don’t have to run this adventure as a sequel. The published adventure notes the possibility of assuming that NPC heroes or the City Watch had cleaned out the Temple of the Ebon Hand, and that perhaps those events could be used as background events in your campaign. But it would also be fairly easy to tweak things so that both the Temple of the Ebon Hand and the New Temple of the Ebon Hand are active at the same time. You could even put Fulton’s Journal, as described below, in the Temple of the Ebon Hand where the PCs can discover it.
The second thing I love about Return of the Ebon Hand is how it showcases using multiple scenario hooks that all point to the same scenario.
The background of the adventure sees the vestiges of the Ebon Hand flee from the destruction of their temple and eventually reorganize into a new temple built around a Pit of Insanity within Ghul’s Labyrinth. Harnessing this powerful artifact of chaos, the Ebon Hand once again begins experimenting with the human mutations which are the heart of their faith and through which they believe they will achieve transcendence.
Their use of the Pit kicks its chaotic power into high gear, and it begins manifesting strange effects in the city above and the dungeon nearby. This includes resurrecting various dead criminals in the crypts of the Prison.
As with The Runeblood Blessing, several background events are presented to integrate this background into your campaign. Then Cook and Reynolds present three scenario hooks:
The cool thing is that you can deploy all three of these scenario hooks simultaneously. (The PCs might pursue one of them or they might want to pursue all three of them.) The even cooler thing is that it’s not immediately obvious that all three clues point to the same dungeon crawl!
Each hook not only points to a different problem/opportunity (chaos manifestations, resurrected criminals, an enigmatic journal), it also points to a completely different entrance to this section of Ghul’s Labyrinth. So, for example, the PCs might explore the prison crypts, follow the tunnels back to the lair of the resurrected criminals, and then realize, “Hey! I think these tunnels match those in Fulton’s journal!” And then they might explore a bit more and discover the Ebon Hand cultists that have been making headlines in the newssheets for the past several weeks!
In short, it’s a rich, multi-dimensional adventure environment that I think you’ll find really rewarding in actual play.
There are, unfortunately, a couple of flaws here that should be noted.
First, I found the cartography a little underwhelming. There’s some very nice xandering here (including, but not limited to the multiple entrances), but there’s a lot of “square rooms joined by long hallways.” I would have liked a few more geographically distinctive set pieces and perhaps a greater sense of the purpose for which these corridors were originally made. (This should not be interpreted as a knock on the key, which is studded with lots of interesting rooms.)
Second, Fulton’s journal is a really scenario hook and could be a really cool prop. But the adventure chooses to chop the journal up and print each entry directly next to the room which it’s describing. Expect to do some extra work stitching these together, and then even more work filling in the significant lacuna that you’ll immediately discover. (If you don’t do this, your players will find it virtually impossible to get any meaningful utility out of the journal.)
But these quibbles should be understood as exactly that: Quibbles.
Return of the Ebon Hand is a very, very good adventure that’s also a perfect bookend to The Doctrine of Ghul, nicely showcasing a different facet of Ghul’s Labyrinth.
Grade: B+
Style: 5
Substance: 4
Authors: Bruce R. Cordell, Sean K. Williams, Monte Cook
Publisher: Monte Cook Games
Cost: $29.95 (Physical) / $14.97 (PDF)
Page Count: 96
Goodman Games is proud to present Original Adventures Reincarnated #7: Dark Tower, updated and expanded from the 1979 classic for both 5E and DCC rule sets! Ranked as one of the Top 30 adventure modules of all time by Dungeon Magazine, Dark Tower is considered by many to be the first published mega-dungeon. It was one of the first modules to utilize the newly released (at that time) Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks, which author Jennell Jaquays incorporated into the original design.
Two editions will be published: one using 5E rules, and one using the DCC RPG rules. Packaged in a handsome slipcase, each edition will be published as three hardcover books. Volume one is a reprint of the classic adventure, with introductory essays by gaming luminaries, including John Rateliff, Eric Mona, Justin Alexander, James Maliszewski, Jon “Taco” Hershberger, Stephen Newton, and others.. Volume two is a conversion of Dark Tower to new rules. Volume three is The Chosen Suns of Set, an all-new adventure and sourcebook expanding on concepts presented in the original 1979 adventure.
Goodman Games says that I’m a gaming luminary!
If you’d like to see a revamped version of Xandering the Dungeon which has been specially adapted for this deluxe release of the classic Dark Tower adventure… well, you’ll need to buy this deluxe release of the classic Dark Tower adventure!
You can read more about the Dark Tower on the Alexandrian over here.
STEALING THE JEWEL?
As written, if the PCs have the Jewel of Three Prayers and the Rivals are Unfriendly towards them, then the Rivals will attempt to steal the Jewel. This is also listed above as one of the general courses of action that the Rivals might pursue.
I would be extremely cautious about having the Rivals choose this course of action. I’ve been DMing for awhile and, in my experience, there are two Unforgivable Sins that an NPC can commit:
Anything else is probably negotiable, but these are almost always points of no return.
So if the Rivals steal the Jewel? Particularly early in the campaign before the PCs have established a relationship with them?
The Rivals are dead meat.
I’m not saying you should never do this. If it makes sense, then roleplay truthfully.
I’m just saying that you should be prepared for the consequences, which could very easily see the Rival’s role in the campaign come to an abrupt (and messy) end.
THE GMPC PROBLEM
If the Rivals are friendly with the PCs, it can quite logically end up with them joining the PCs so that they can all work together. As I mentioned above, Call of the Netherdeep actually scripts exactly this moment at the very beginning of the adventure:
If the characters are on friendly terms with the rivals, the rivals meet up with them soon after the characters’ breakfast with Elder Ushru.
Ayo Jabe doesn’t mince words; she wants to know what they found in the grotto. If she gets the sense that the characters have stumbled onto something big, her eyes grow wide. She decides that she and her group want a piece of the action and proposes that they travel with the characters, saying that there’s safety in numbers. A character who makes a successful DC 13 Wisdom (Insight) check realizes that she isn’t hiding anything and wants nothing more than to be a part of a grand adventure.
Call of the Netherdeep quietly assumes that the PCs will turn this offer down, but it seems far more likely that the PCs will agree with Ayo Jabe’s logic…
… and now the GM has to deal with five GMPCs.
Honestly, this feels like a huge headache to me.
GMPCs are not the same thing as NPCs. A GMPC is a GM-controlled character who is functionally the same as a PC in the adventure: they’re an equal member of the party and you could basically imagine an invisible player at the table controlling them as such.
It is possible to have success with such characters, but it’s far more common for them to fall into one of two pitfalls:
First, the GMPC can hog the spotlight and/or be used to railroad the players. This may be because the GM wants to do this (bad GM, no cookie), but it’s often not intentional. The core problem here is that the GM has privileged information (i.e., everything in their notes). During prep, they can predict exactly what the GMPC will do, and this can become a seductive crutch for them to fall back on. During play, their knowledge of the scenario inherently biases their decision-making. And even if the GM erects an impeccable firewall around the GMPC, the other players know that the GMPC has this privileged information and it will affect their relationship with the GMPC and the GMPC’s opinions.
(Imagine that you had a player at the table who had read the entire adventure and that the other players knew had read the adventure.)
Second, the GMPC can become a weird kind of half-character who awkwardly doesn’t participate in group decisions and/or frequently “vanishes” from the game world because everyone forgets that they’re there. (This can even happen because the GM is trying to avoid the first problem: Knowing that the players will privilege the GMPC’s opinions, for example, they just never have the GMPC offer an opinion.)
So even running one NPC companion effectively can be a big challenge. Five GMPCs at the same time? That probably doesn’t just quintuple the difficulty; it’s almost certainly exponential increase in difficulty. Even laying aside the inherent difficulties, juggling those five characters and making sure they are consistently a living part of the campaign world is going to chew up a lot of your mental bandwidth. There’s also combat to consider: all those GMPC turns are going to slow combat down.
Speaking of combat: All those extra GMPCs are going to have a big impact on the balance of combat encounters. And, importantly, the adventure isn’t designed for this. Running 5th Edition for a group of 10 PCs is infamously difficult, but Call of the Netherdeep seems to just blithely assume that it will make absolutely no difference at all.
If you’re comfortable trying to run five GMPCs, go for it.
For everyone else, I’m not saying you should never allow the PCs and Rivals to team up. But I could certainly take efforts to make sure that this is only a momentary state of affairs.
Redirect the Rivals into supporting action off-screen. In other words, the PCs do X while the Rivals take care of Y. This is a little difficult in Call of the Netherdeep because of the linear design of the campaign, but it can be managed. For example, they might go to research the Jewel of Three Prayers somewhere else and then join the PCs in Bazzoxan. In Ank’Harel, they might volunteer to infiltrate an enemy faction. And so forth.
Encourage splitting the party, with each smaller group having a mix of Rivals and PCs. (For these scenes, you might consider letting the players whose PCs are not present take on the roles of the Rivals, particularly for combat.)
Remember to debate the agenda. Our methodology for running the Rivals (i.e., they should frequently believe that the group should be pursuing a different goal or, if they share a goal, that there is a better way to achieve it) will naturally lend itself to either splitting the party or breaking the alliance between Rivals and PCs entirely. Don’t be afraid to lean into this, as the aftermath will heighten the tension between the groups to delightful heights.
CONCLUSION
Ultimately, this all boils down to a simple formula:
But this formula will manifest itself with an infinite variety at the gaming table, as the Rivals and PCs collide spectacularly in myriad ways. The unpredictable nature of these conflicts itself will bring the drama — and the characters — to vivid life. As you choose to actively play with them, the players will feel the fundamental reality — the ineffable uniqueness — of the events happening at your gaming table, and they will rise to the occasion.
FURTHER READING
Call of the Netherdeep: Running Betrayers’ Rise
