DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 45B: On a Hill of Corpse Flowers
Several stone sarsens jutted up from the ground, forming a rough and imperfect circle. Each of the sarsens bore the sigil of Alchestrin and were worn with age and crept-over with moss. The grass had grown tall around them, and here and there even taller plants had sprung up with broad, shiny leaves and brightly-colored flowers. More disturbingly, they could see the corpses of small animals scattered here and there around the sarsens.
A faint whiff of pungent decay wafted down the hill towards them, but they decided to brazenly ignore the animal carcasses and head straight up the hill towards the sarsens. As they drew near the circle, they could see in its center a large iron plug etched with bronze and set into the earth….
In my experience, it’s difficult to take a simple environmental hazard and turn it into compelling gameplay at the table. Not impossible. The same principles that make for compelling traps can also apply to natural hazards. I just find, without the element of human ingenuity behind the construction of a deliberate trap, that it’s harder to justify those principles.
With that being said, this session demonstrates a fundamental design principle that I find incredibly useful: If you have an environmental hazard, you can add almost literally any creature to the encounter and you’ll instantly make both the hazard and the creature more interesting.
If I had just added corpse flowers around the entrance to Alchestrin’s Tomb, it would have taken, at best, a trivial effort by the PCs to burn them away. Similarly, if they had found nothing except a coldsnake curled up on top of the iron plug, the result would have been a pretty perfunctory combat encounter. Either way, it would have been a pretty forgettable experience.
But put the two together and… Presto! You’ve got a unique experience.
This principle works, in part, because it can:
- Force target selection. Which problem are the PCs going to deal with first? (If they only have one target — or their targets are indistinguishable — then there’s no meaningful choice. As soon as you have multiple options, however, there’s an opportunity for tactical choice.)
- Create weird and unexpected interactions and/or synergies, potentially giving a fresh spin to even familiar abilities.
- Offer tactical opportunities that can be taken advantage of by either the bad guys, the PCs, or both.
You get similar results from combining multiple monsters of different types into the same encounter.
Fortunately, Tee – trying to suppress a cough that seemed as if it would rip out her lungs – spotted one of the tall, brightly-colored flowers turning towards them with an almost sadistic purpose. Making an intuitive leap she realized that the flowers – not the serpent – were the true source of the noisome plague. She shouted out a warning to the others while lurching towards the nearest flower, but her weakly-swung sword failed to produce any effect on its thick, armored stalk as she collapsed.
In this case, I hadn’t actually planned for the PCs not to realize the source of the poisonous malaise afflicting them, but it’s exactly the sort of thing that can just spontaneously emerge from encounters like this.
LOOTING BESTIARIES, REDUX
I’ve previously discussed how I’ll systematically loot bestiaries as part of the development cycle for a campaign. In this case, as I prepared Alchestrin’s Tomb, I went on a mid-campaign survey looking for stuff that would be cool to plug into the adventure:
- Corpse Flowers are from Creatures of Freeport.
- Coldsnakes are, unfortunately, from a disreputable publisher I won’t direct you towards because they scammed me.
- The iron plug and its riddling inscription is taken from the brief description of Alchestrin’s Tomb in the Ptolus)
I love RPGs with lots of high quality adventures, because those can be plugged directly into a campaign structure. But even better is an RPG with tons of modular material that can be plugged directly into scenario structures and scene structures (i.e., encounters). It’s just so much fun to go browsing through these toys, grabbing the coolest ones that catch your eye, and then seeing how they can be combined into cool stuff.
Campaign Journal: Session 45C – Running the Campaign: Agenda Pressure
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index
I assume natural hazards will pop up naturally (sic) often enough over the course of a campaign that trying to force every natural hazard to include an encounter is awkward and unreasonable?
To make sure I’ve got it correctly: Natural hazards are anything that in some way affects the PCs and that may require a cost of time or resources to deal with (other than difficult terrain)?
I’d define a hazard as anything non-sentient and probably non-animate, that can harm a PC; bad weather, steep slopes, crumbling surfaces, toxic atmospheres, soul-crushing noises, etc. Traps are a particular type of hazard.
“Forcing” encounters to have any particular structure, I think, is the wrong way to think about it. Better: “this ongoing blizzard should be an important part of the story, but it lacks a point of focus to dramatize it or make it interesting. Let’s have monsters attack during the white-out conditions.” Or, “this bunch of bugbears looks like kind of a boring fight. Let’s make them more interesting by having them attack while the party is crossing the rickety bridge.” It can go either way: add monsters to dramatize hazard, or add hazard to spice up monsters.