DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 24B: The Meeting of All Things

As they discussed it, they realized that they had a wider need to take stock of what they had accomplished, analyze what remained to be done, and make some hard decisions – as a group – regarding what their immediate and long-term goals should be.

As the others returned to the inn, therefore, they gathered them together in Elestra’s room.

Tee asked the most important question: What are our immediate goals?

This week’s campaign journal is attempting to accomplish two goals.

First, it’s trying to capture the actual experience of the session, in which the players spent a significant amount of time poring over their notes, discussing their actions, and setting an agenda for the session to come.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, it is seeking to preserve the essence of that debate, its conclusions, and, for lack of a better term, its findings of fact so that they can be easily referenced by the players in the future. In other words, it’s more or less serving as the detailed minutes of the meeting.

Something to be aware of if you’re a GM writing a campaign journal like this, is that this actually takes a fair degree of delicacy. The difficulty is that they were attempting to figure out mysteries to which I already know the answers: In summarizing their thoughts and conclusions, therefore, it can be quite easy for me to subconsciously focus on the correct solutions.

For example, over the course of the conversation the group might make five different hypotheses about why Character X did Y. One of the five hypotheses is actually what’s happening. In summarizing that conversation for the journal (a process which, by its nature, streamlines the discussion), I could thoughtlessly trim away the superfluous hypotheses and only include the correct guess. (Because, after all, that’s the only important one, right?) In fact, without careful consideration and note-keeping, it can quite difficult to even remember what the other hypotheses were.

THE COLLATION

The meeting itself is of a type which I have found to be pretty much inevitable in any campaign featuring extensive lore books (the creation and use of which I discussed a couple months ago). Or, more accurately, any campaign in which extensive clues and lore have been encoded into handouts. At some point the density of this information reaches a point at which the players feel the need to organize it, collate it, and figure it out.

(Such meetings will sometimes trigger in other campaigns, but this is usually due to extensive recordkeeping by one or more of the players: Those notes become the hardcoded data store that needs to be sorted through and sorted out. For example, in my Castle Blackmoor open table, there was a session where all of the various PCs who had been mapping the megadungeon specifically scheduled a session where they could all get together, compare their maps, and figure out how to connect them into a larger, more definitive map.)

These sessions are, in my experience and without exception, fantastic. They can be particularly spectacular when the players all commit to carrying out the discussion in character, turning the whole thing into a tour de force of focused roleplaying that almost invariably deepens the players’ instinctual grasp of their characters while simultaneously immersing them deep into the lore of the campaign.

Oddly, I can rarely predict when one of these lore book meetings (as I’ve come to think of them) will break out. They often come when the players have run out of obvious threads to pull on, but can also happen when the players feel overwhelmed by the number of loose threads they have in hand. They almost always happen when the characters themselves are in a moment of quiescence, and are often triggered by just one or two players who decide that it’s time to “figure all this stuff out.”

I know some GMs who get antsy in sessions like this. I think it’s because they aren’t doing anything and it doesn’t seem as if the players are doing anything. I think this sensation is heightened because the GM knows all the solutions: Watching someone solve a puzzle you already know the solution isn’t exactly exciting, even though the person bending all of their brainpower upon the problem is, in fact, intensely engaged with it.

There may be times, however, when the group has truly run aground and you need to gently prod them back into motion. This, too, requires a light touch because, once again, you know the answers: It’s just not your place to push them in a particular direction. I know you’re excited for them to discover the incredibly cool thing you made, but your hints are almost certainly defeating the purpose of making it an engaging mystery in the first place!

Honestly, your job in these sessions is almost always to just sit back and enjoy the show, while perhaps occasionally helping players track down a particular prop or answer questions which their characters would know the answer to.

With that being said, though: Listen carefully! The players are going to drop a lot of clues for you in figuring out where the PCs are going next and what you should be prepping.

NEXT:
Campaign Journal: Session 24C – Running the Campaign: Back, Back to the Dungeon
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

Ptolus: Running the Campaign – Custom Game Structures Ptolus: Running the Campaign – Using Prophecy Ptolus: Running the Campaign – An Interstice of Factions