DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 40B: Temple of the Ebon Hand

Once set on its course, the kennel rat seemed quite certain in its path and seemed to have no desire to escape.

“For a rat it’s well-trained,” Agnarr said.

“You can’t keep it,” Tee said.

After winding through the sewers for the better part of an hour, however, the kennel rat began to wander aimlessly.

Not far away she discovered that a ten-foot-wide section of the wall was, in fact, nothing more than an illusion: She could put her hand through it as easily as insubstantial air. With a shrug of her shoulder she struck her head through: The illusion was not particularly thick and she found herself looking up an empty, ramping hall of well-constructed stone…

When I talk about designing node-based campaigns, which is primarily how Act II of In the Shadow of the Spire is designed, I’m sometimes asked how I know where one scenario “ends” and another scenario “begins.”

To quickly bring you up to speed if you’re not familiar with node-based scenario design, in a node-based campaign:

• You have a number scenarios, each of which can be thought of as a “node.”
• These scenarios are linked to each other by clues.
• You use the Inverted Three Clue Rule — the players should have access to at least three unused clues at any time — to make sure the connections between the scenarios between the scenarios are robust.

But what actually constitutes a “scenario”?

Sometimes this is obvious, but often it’s not, particularly because individual scenarios can also be node-based, with scenes and locations linked together by clues internal to the scenario.

You can see a good example of how this can get fuzzy in this session. You’ve got:

• the Temple of the Rat God
• the Ratmen Nest beneath the Temple of the Rat God
• a nearby sub-level connected by a medium-length tunnel
• the shivvel dens in the Warrens controlled by the Temple of the Rat God and reached via the sewer tunnels and guide rats
• the Temple of the Ebon God, also “connected” to the Temple of the Rat God via the sewer tunnels and guide rats

Should these be five different scenarios? Or should all the stuff related to the Temple of the Rat God be one scenario and the Temple of the Ebon Hand be another scenario? Or is all this stuff actually part of a larger “Chaos Cults” scenario?

In my case, none of the above. I decided the scenario breakdown would be by location, so I ended up with:

• CC01 Temple of the Rat God
• CC01A Warren Shivvel Dens
• CC02 Temple of the Ebon Hand

(Note that I’ve grouped the alphanumeric codes for CC01 and CC01A together because they’re run by the Cult of the Rat God. Although I consider them separate scenarios, this keeps related material grouped together in my notes.)

Okay, but why did I decide this was the scenario breakdown to use?

It really boils down to what’s useful. Or, to put it another way: When you’re running this material, what are you going to be actively thinking about? What information are you going to want to cross-reference and have at your fingertips? When you’re creating or prepping the material, what’s the stuff that should be built together?

Sometimes this is about immediate logistics. Sometimes it’s more about the conceptual organization that makes the most sense in your own head. Sometimes it’ll be about how people in the game world think about and organize things.

(What you largely won’t be concerned about is how the players will be thinking about this material. These notes – and the way they’re organized – is for you. It’s the experience created at the table that’s for the players, and, honestly, the less they’re seeing how your notes work, the more immersive that experience will be for them.)

In this case, for example, even though the Temple of the Rat God also controls the shivvel dens in the Warrens, it’s unlikely that anything in the shivvel dens will directly affect the situation in and around the temple on the Street of a Million Gods. (The ratlings probably aren’t going to send reinforcements, for example.) So it makes a lot more sense to completely segregate that material so that it’s not any kind of distraction at the table.

Conversely all the rat warrens beneath the Street of a Million Gods are very likely to be relevant if, for example, the PCs mount an assault on the temple. (Or, vice versa, the temple will be relevant if they enter the complex through the sewers and work their way up.) So I naturally grouped those together.

But, like I say, this is all about practicality, and the truth of that will really strike home as a campaign develops over time.

SPOILERS AHEAD!

For example, in the upcoming section of the campaign covered by Ptolus Remix: The Mrathrach Agenda, my original adventure notes were organized like this:

• NOD5 Mrathrach Machine
• NOD5A Aggah-Shan’s Catacombs
• NOD5B White House
• NOD5C Mrathrach Table Raids

All of these clearly are related to each other (the Mrathrach Machine is reached from the White House via Aggah-Shan’s Catacombs; the Mrathrach Table Raids were focused around the Mrathrach game), which is why they all have the NOD5 tag, but nothing else about this breakdown really makes sense from an objective point of view.

What you’re looking at is just a strange agglutination that emerged piece by piece from actual play: The Mrathrach Machine scenario was taken from Night of Dissolution and was one of the original cornerstones of Act II, so when it looked like the PCs were going to approach the Mrathrach Machine from “below,” it made sense to get my prep notes for the adventure done, and if they made it through that adventure and exited out the “top” of the Machine into Aggah-Shan’s catacombs, then I could get that prepped as needed.

But then the PCs didn’t’ actually go to the Mrathrach Machine, and they actually got involved in the White House via a completely different vector. (So originally those notes were part of a completely different set of adventures notes in my background events!) As part of that, it looked like the PCs were going to find the secret entrance to the catacombs and check them out, so I prepped those adventure note as NOD5A (since they were clearly linked to NOD5 Mrathrach Machine)… but then the PCs didn’t actually explore that passage, either!

Even later in the campaign they came back around to investigating Aggah-Shan, so I pulled together all my notes for the White House (which were now lying around all over the place, including my campaign status document archive), updated them for current events, and collected them in NOD5B White House.

But then the PCs, in a series of events described here, created their own special ops mission targeting Mrathrach tables across the entire city! So I prepped that as a new scenario, and assigned it code NOD5C.

Which all makes sense to me because it reflects how we played through this material, but, as I said, obviously isn’t how you’d organize this stuff if you had a master plan!

Campaign Journal: The Demon Court – Running the Campaign: Distributing Chaos Lorebooks
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

Ptolus: Running the Campaign – Deciphering Scripts Ptolus: Running the Campaign – From Table to Page Ptolus: Running the Campaign – Rolling for NPCs