SPOILERS FOR CALL OF THE NETHERDEEP
One of the central gimmicks in Call of the Netherdeep is that there’s a party of rival adventurers who will dog the PCs’ path throughout the adventure.
It’s a cool gimmick, and the Rivals themselves — Ayo Jabe, Dermot Wurder, Galsariad Ardyth, Irvan Wastewalker, and Maggie Keeneyes — are excellent characters. Not only are they varied and flavorful, they’re also presented to the DM with tight, efficient briefing packets (p. 11-13) that make them easy to grasp as roles to be played.
Unfortunately, the presentation of the rivalry in the adventure can be underwhelming. There are three reasons for this.
First, the primary tool Call of the Netherdeep gives you for managing the Rivals’ relationship with the PCs is their relationship attitude:
- Friendly
- Indifferent
- Hostile
It’s a simple gauge, but its simplicity is not the problem. The problem is that it’s the wrong tool for the job of determining what the Rivals do. Or, more accurately, it’s cripplingly incomplete.
As a gauge, Friendly/Indifferent/Hostile only tells you HOW the Rivals choose to interact with the PCs: Do they help you or kill you?
This unidimensional relationship is flat, repetitive, and ultimately dead ends the Rivals’ role in the campaign: Either literally because the PCs kill them or figuratively because they end up as loyal lapdogs who simply support whatever the PCs decide to do.
Fundamentally:
- I want to kill you.
- I don’t care about you.
- I like you.
is not the description of a Rival.
Second, the adventure frequently attempts to script predetermined interactions with the Rivals. These largely don’t work because (a) predetermined scripts like this rarely work properly and (b) although some effort is made to make these scripts flexible, they nevertheless frequently end up in conflict with the relationship being otherwise pushed by the relationship gauge.
There will be countless examples of this in actual play, but here’s one directly from the book: Early in the campaign, the Rivals — if the relationship gauge is Friendly — offer to join the PCs and work with them on the quest. The book then simply assumes that this never happened because all of the scripted interactions require the Rivals to NOT be working with the PCs.
Third, the adventure struggles with the lack of a clear, actionable agenda for much of its length.
This is a deeper problem with the structure of Call of the Netherdeep that extends beyond the Rivals, but it’s specifically problematic here because a “rival” is someone who competes with you to achieve a common objective; for superiority in a common activity.
This works to a certain extent when the PCs first meet the Rivals, because they are literally racing each other to obtain a prize item in the Emerald Grotto.
But then it stops working.
This is partly because a gauge that only outputs “I want to help you!” or “I want to kill you!” isn’t conducive to competing for a common goal. Partly it’s because the railroaded structure of the campaign breaks it. (You can’t actually race someone if they’re scripted to always show up at the next cutscene.)
Mostly it’s because the stakes of the campaign aren’t really made clear.
For example, at the beginning of Chapter 2, an NPC tells the PCs to go to the city of Bazzoxan because they’ve acquired an artifact from the Calamity and “there is no place in Xhorhas where the memory of the Calamity lingers more strongly than in Bazzoxan.”
But that’s notably not actually a reason to go to Bazzoxan. Just think about the immediate follow-up question from the players:
“And what do we do when we get there?”
If you can’t answer that question, then you don’t actually have a reason to go. Which is why, when the PCs get to Bazzoxan, the book assumes they’ll just kind of wander around aimlessly until they randomly bump into the plot. And the immediate problem here is that, “Go to Bazzoxan and then wander around until you bump into the plot” isn’t something you can have a Rival in, because there’s no actual goal to be achieved.
So if you’re running Call of the Netherdeep (or similar rival groups in other campaigns), what SHOULD you do?
STEP 1: ROLEPLAY TRUTHFULLY, PLAY ACTIVELY
In DMing the Rivals, I would not spend a lot of time trying to follow the scripted events in the book. Focus on tracking the Rivals’ relationship with the PCs and then just roleplaying them truthfully.
Broadly speaking, there are five courses of action that the Rivals are likely be pursuing at any point in the campaign:
- Working in partnership with the PCs.
- Convinced the PCs need help even if the PCs won’t let them, thus following the PCs around.
- Independently trying to figure out how to help Alyxian.
- Concluding that this isn’t any of their business and exiting the campaign to go do other things.
- Seizing the Jewel (and possibly trying to kill the PCs) and taking charge.
One of these modes of action may dominate the entire campaign, or it’s possible that the Rivals will be constantly shifting between modes. It’ll depend on how things play out at the table. Either way, you goal is to freely riff on these modes of action by continually asking, “What would the Rivals do?”
In other words, actively play the Rivals in the same way that your players are actively playing their PCs.
RIVALS IN CHARGE: It’s also possible that the Rivals can end up with the Jewel of Three Prayers, the PCs respect that, and the PCs volunteer to work for them. (This is relatively unlikely 
without rewriting some stuff early in the campaign, but it’s still a possibility.)
In my opinion, this is actually a far more challenging position to be in as a DM: If the PCs are in the driving seat, reacting to what they’re doing can be almost entirely reflexive and it’s trivial to keep the players in the spotlight. If the Rivals end up in charge, it can be much more difficult to make decisions for them without being biased by your behind-the-scenes knowledge of the campaign. And it’s much more difficult to keep the PCs in the spotlight.
Check out Calling in the Big Guns and Calling in the Little Guys: The situation here is not exactly comparable, but you may find some of the principles there useful. In particular:
- Have the Rivals ask the PCs what they think should be done. (The Rivals may or may not agree, but it’s probably a good idea to have them use the PCs’ ideas frequently.)
- Have the Rivals assign the PCs an important objective to achieve while the Rivals are doing something else. (And try to arrange things so that, at least some of the time, whatever the PCs are doing turns out to actually be the crucial thing.)
STEP 2: DEBATE THE AGENDA
The creative goal, of course, is for the Rivals to actually BE the rivals of the PCs.
The key to achieving this is the Principle of Opposition: Whatever the PCs think is the right course of action? The Rivals have the opposite opinion.
To understand the power of this, let’s consider the end of the campaign. The adventure finally puts its cards on the table and the PCs are given a fairly clear choice: Free the Apotheon, Help the Apotheon, or Kill the Apotheon. (And there are strong arguments for each.)
As for the Rivals?
DEALING WITH THE RIVALS
Rivals who follow the characters into the Heart of Despair behave in one of two ways, depending on their attitude toward the characters:
Friendly or Indifferent Rivals. The rivals allow the characters to deal with Alyxian in whatever manner they see fit, fighting alongside them if need be.
Hostile Rivals. The rivals attack the characters.
They’re stuck on the broken relationship gauge: Loyal lapdogs or furious murders.
But what happens if you instead use the Principle of Opposition:
PC: We have to free him.
Ayo Jabe: We can’t do that! He’s mad! You’ll doom the world!
Or:
PC: We have to help him.
Galsariad: He’s beyond help. Corrupted with power. There’s no option except to exterminate him.
Or:
PC: We have to kill him.
Maggie: But he’s in pain! You can’t just murder him! He deserves to be free!
The relationship gauge tells you HOW the Rivals oppose the PCs’ agenda:
- Hostile? They’re going to go with aggressive negotiations.
- Friendly? It’ll be a debate.
- Indifferent? Heated argument that could go either way.
In practice, the PCs probably won’t be a united front, which will give you the freedom to split up the Rivals’ opinions, too, so that the debate can boil out into a multifaceted argument. In fact, maybe the whole thing fractures apart, with PCs and Rivals both forming new alliances and turning on each other.
The key thing here is that the opposition of the Rivals will force the players/PCs to think about what they believe. It will force them to have an active agenda and an opinion about how best to achieve that agenda. And then they’ll need to DEFEND both.
That process — thinking, forming opinions, defending those opinions — will make the players invest deeply in the campaign.
Of course, the Rivals don’t need to be completely intransigent pains-in-the-butt at every single moment. Sometimes they’ll align with the PCs (because they’re friends or as grudging enemies towards a common goal). And sometimes the PCs should be able to change their minds.
(You may be surprised when the Rivals also start changing the players’ minds. Play fair in the battlefield of ideas and your players will engage with those ideas. And with those characters.)
Because of how the upcoming schedule for the Alexandrian is working, the two supplementary posts for this series won’t be available until May 9th and May 16th.
Patrons of the Alexandrian currently have access to the full series in PDF. Click here.
This line: But that’s notably not actually a reason to go to Bazzoxan. Just think about the immediate follow-up question from the players: “And what do we do when we get there?”
I feel like I’m seeing something like this in every review for a 5E adventure. This has to be a deliberate choice on WOTC’s part, but why? What does the adventure gain from not providing a good motivation?
Reminds me of the finales of Shadowrun Returns – both Dragonfall and particularly Hong Kong. They’re still pretty limited in what outcomes can happen – it _is_ a video game – but the characters are “awake” enough to argue with you about whether the final boss fight is worth fighting (and in Dragonfall, you can try to talk them down). They do a good job of selling the characters as real people with traits and opinions.
@Ed: My charitable interpretation is that it’s a systemic failure in how WotC parts out the writing.
I have no actual knowledge of how they do this in practice, but it’s not hard to imagine one author getting a spec sheet for Jigow and another author getting a spec sheet for Bazzoxan. The Jigow author is basically told “send the PCs to Bazzoxan to investigate the Jewel,” but they don’t have any way of knowing what’s in Bazzoxan or to add material to Bazzoxan in order to contextualize the hook.
But this doesn’t really explain it, because somewhere in the process of bringing the drafts together “making the hooks work” should be on the to do list. And there were also instances of this in Candlekeep Mysteries, which doesn’t have the same dynamic.
It’s not like “there’s an image of the Jewel of Three Prayers in Bazzoxan” is the only possible explanation here.
– Alyxian’s vision could tell you to seek the prayer site.
– The Elder could say, “I once studied in Ank’Harel with someone who knew a lot about stuff like this. His name was Prolix, and I happen to know he’s recently traveled to Bazzoxan to study ruins of the Calamity.”
And so forth. These are not complicated. They don’t require huge new structures or lots of new content to implement. It would take less than 10 minutes to do the necessary revisions to the text.
So I kinda come back to my cargo cult explanation from the Descent Into Avernus review.
There might be a little bit of generic video game writing in there, too: “Look, the NPC with the question mark over their head told you to go Bazzoxan, “Go to Bazzoxan” is in your Quest Log, and now Bazzoxan has a glowing blue dot on your map. What more do you want from me? Get over there and click on every single NPC until one of them gives you another blue dot.”
Or, even more minimalistically, the “Get Quest” button from Puzzle Quest 😉
Really enjoying this series of posts! One thought that I had while first skimming the book was that I would have loved to see some guidelines for running a session zero where you and your players could create your own rivals, or possibly even your own Apotheon. So much of the campaign sinks or swims based on how invested your players are in these NPCs, and giving them input would be one way to increase that sense of campaign ownership. Obviously finding the right balance/kind of player input would be tricky, but it’s something I’d want to look into if I were running this campaign for my group.