DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 28B: On the Eve of the Banewarrens
The mansion on Nibeck Street that Jevicca had identified as the origin point for the appearance of the surge of Tavan Zith’s wild magic was very close to Pythoness House. So close, in fact, that they feared there might be a connection. Could the cultists be responsible for the breaching of the Banewarrens?
“If we check it out and there’s nothing there,” Ranthir pointed out, “then we’ve lost nothing. But if there is…”
During the last session, we talked about how I structured the second act of the campaign using two tracks — the chaos cultists and the Banewarrens. Beginning in this session, we can almost immediately see the effects of this structure in actual play.
First, the two tracks confuse the players’ understanding of the situation. Until they learn enough to disambiguate the tracks, this will obfuscate the truth of what’s happening. This makes the campaigns’ enigma(s) fiendishly Byzantine for the players, and therefore even more satisfying for them when they do unravel what’s going on (in large part by figuring out how to disambiguate the tracks).
But until they do, their own actions will often cause interactions — directly and indirectly — between the tracks. The initial effects that we see in this session are fairly minor: Their suspicion that the chaos cults might be involved with the Banewarrens causes them to double back to Pythoness House, where they have a cool roleplaying encounter with the ghost Taunell.
Paradoxically, however, the complexity of these player-forged connections between the tracks will often grow in complexity at the same time that the players are disambiguating the tracks and, therefore, simplifying their understanding of a situation becoming ever more convoluted.
And even when this doesn’t happen, the consequences of the players’ choices will nevertheless be significant. (For example, their verification that Pythoness House is, in fact, vacant in this session — something they would otherwise not have been prompted to do — will actually end up having a profound impact on how later events in the campaign play out.)
They needed to question Tavan Zith, and the only way they could think to do that was by going to Castle Shard. They also needed to know if Lord Zavere was the one responsible for opening the Banewarrens. And, if so, why.
As they rode, Dominic looked at the others. “So… do we have any idea how we’re going to do this without getting killed?”
Agnarr shrugged. “Sure. We ask him. If he didn’t do it, we don’t get killed.”
Of course, these two major tracks are not the only threads in the campaign. This is, after all, Act II. The stuff that the PCs did in Act I of the campaign continues to unspool, and that includes:
- Their relationship with Lord Zavere and Lady Rill at Castle Shard.
- Their deep suspicion of Rehobath and, by extension, the Imperial Church.
And these threads are also interacting with the major tracks and with each other.
For the players, this colors their understanding of Rehobath’s agenda and creates paranoid suspicion of what Zavere might really be up to. There are layers upon layers upon layers! (And the players are unwittingly in the act of adding even more layers themselves.)
But on my side of the DM screen, everything remains neatly sorted into discrete boxes that are easy to prep and easy to run.
Campaign Journal: Session 28C – Running the Campaign: On the Efficacy of Burning Oil
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index
