Look, the robbers are living right next door to the man-eating ghouls! The Crypt of St. Bethesda is a textbook example of how not to write an adventure.

Review Originally Published May 21st, 2001

Let me just cut to the chase on this one: The Crypt of St. Bethesda strains credulity beyond the boundaries of sanity.

You’ve got a band of robbers living right next door to man-eating ghouls. Man-eating ghouls who wander through the lair of a giant spider. Giant rats which compete with a carrion crawler over the food provided by an inn’s garbage dump. And all of them live within shouting distance of a pseudo-undead on a killing spree to replace its decaying host.

And all of them live in the basement of an abandoned church!

Ummmm….

(Actually, now that I think about it, it sounds like a bad premise for a sitcom.)

Add in the dash of an illogical adventure hook (which the author knows is illogical because he spends nearly two pages discussing exactly how to force your players to swallow this ridiculous pill – and only succeeds in making it more ridiculous), and you’ve got a truly… ummm… memorable experience.

This one’s a very big dud, folks. Pass it by.

Style: 3
Substance: 1

Title: The Crypt of St. Bethesda
Author: James Macduff
Publisher: Alderac Entertainment Group
Line: Adventure Keep
Price: $2.49
Product Code: 8307
Pages: 16

Because these adventures are so short, the reviews are also short. When I started reviewing them, I actually grouped multiple reviews together to give them a little more bulk. But it turned out that messed with people’s ability to find them through RPGNet’s search function, so as I continued my reviews of the series I started doing them one at a time. Even if they were brief.

Next AEG Booster Review: Out of Body, Out of Mind

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 45A: By Commissar’s Decree

“I’m glad you could come here today,” Carrina said. “The Commissar appreciates all of the work and sacrifices you have made for this city.”

“Happy to oblige,” Tor said.

“As your recent actions in the Temple District suggest, you’re already familiar with the recent surge in cultist activities within the city,” Carrina continued.

“Intimately so,” Tee said.

“Just so,” Carrina smiled thinly. “That’s why the Commissar has chosen to deputize you to investigate the cultist activity.”

“We’re already doing that,” Elestra blurted.

“Then it should be no great hardship to do it in the Commissar’s name,” Carrina said. “You will each be paid 75 gold pieces a month, with additional bonuses to be paid at my discretion for tangible results.”

One of my favorite things to do as a GM is having powerful and important people – the people in charge – recognize and acknowledge what the PCs have been doing in the campaign. Sometimes this is a good thing. Sometimes it isn’t. Often it’s a little bit of both. But either way, this is almost always guaranteed to excite the players.

Focusing on just the good stuff for the moment, recognition in my games have resulted in the PCs being:

• Recruited to exclusive organizations
• Featured in news reports
• Invited to exclusive social events
• Deputized to solve a problem
• Given a spaceship
• Granted lucrative contracts
• Knighted
• Given noble titles

Sometimes this acts as a kind of reverse patronage: Instead of having someone rich and powerful offer them payment up front, they instead materialize after the fact and give the PCs a monetary or material reward for something they did for completely different reasons.

An earlier example of recognition as reward in this campaign was the Harvesttime party at Castle Shard. In that case, the social event reward also served as a way to advance several threads of the campaign, introduce new NPCs, and drop a number of clues.

Similarly, in this session, the PCs are getting deputized, giving them official recognition and a small stipend for doing the thing they’re already doing (investigating the chaos cults). Deputization is also an example of the techniques I talk about in Random GM Tips: Calling in the Little Guys, where the official response to the PCs calling the cops (or the local equivalent) is to say, “Wow! Yeah! That’s definitely a problem! Can’t wait to see how you resolve it!” So, in this case, I’m kind of preemptively taking “let’s go to the authorities!” off the table: Yes, the Commissar would definitely be interested in stopping the chaos cults. Rather than letting that potentially sideline the PCs, let’s instead seize the opportunity to put them in the spotlight!

In other words, delivering recognition as reward can often serve multiple purposes at the same time.

As such, no matter how positive the immediate recognition, it’s also almost always a double-edged sword: Being recognized as important also means painting a target on yourself. You’re an important superhero? Then supervillains may want to preemptively take you off the board. You’re known to have the ear of the crown prince? That makes you a target for grifters, conmen, and others who see the PCs as a means to their ends. (This is also what happened when Rehobath schismed the Imperial Church.)

To flip this one last time, though, the reason recognition attracts negative attention like moths to flame is specifically because the PCs are burning so bright! Even without a formal position (like becoming deputies), recognition can be as empowering as any magic item. Often moreso. Having the ear of the crown prince isn’t just really cool, it also lets you do things that would otherwise be impossible.

This not only enhances your current camapign. It’s also a signal that you’re ready for a new kind of adventure.

Campaign Journal: Session 45B – Running the Campaign: Monster + Environment
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

SESSION 45A: BY COMMISSAR’S DECREE

October 31st, 2009
The 24th Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

They emerged from the incense-drenched depths of Porphyry House into the surreal, sunlit streets of Ptolus.

Still gasping for breath, they decided to return to the Ghostly Minstrel, regroup, and recoup.

But when they arrived, the watchman from the Delvers’ Guild station who had been intermittently harassing them since Ranthir’s encounter with a shivvel addict was waiting for them in the lobby. For the first time, they learned his name – Marco – and he asked them to come to the watch station with him.

It seemed like an innocent enough request, so they readily agreed. Marco escorted them to the station and then to a small room near the back of the building. Then he left them alone.

“What’s going on?” Nasira asked.

“Are we being arrested?”

“Should we try to escape?” Tor said.

“We haven’t done anything wrong!” Elestra said.

“Well… we have killed some people,” Nasira pointed out.

“And Tee has all of that illegal shivvel in her bag of holding.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t be discussing it here,” Tee said, gritting her teeth.

THE COMMISSAR’S DEPUTIES

A young woman with short-cropped red hair and wearing a signet with the Commissar’s seal stepped into the room. She introduced herself as Carrina.

“I’m glad you could come here today,” she said. “The Commissar appreciates all of the work and sacrifices you have made for this city.”

“Happy to oblige,” Tor said.

“As your recent actions in the Temple District suggest, you’re already familiar with the recent surge in cultist activities within the city,” Carinna continued.

“Intimately so,” Tee said.

“Just so,” Carrina smiled thinly. “That’s why the Commissar has chosen to deputize you to investigate the cultist activity.”

“We’re already doing that,” Elestra blurted.

“Then it should be no great hardship to do it in the Commissar’s name,” Carrina said. “You will each be paid 75 gold pieces a month, with additional bonuses to be paid at my discretion for tangible results.”

“What sort of results?” Tee said.

“I leave it to your imagination,” Carrina said. “I expect regular reports.”

“How do we contact you?”

“Through Marco here at the watch station.” Carrina pulled out an official-looking piece of parchment and handed it to them: It was an official decree by the Commissar enforcing their deputization and empowering them to act as such.

They didn’t really seem to have much choice in the matter. And although the government pay was clearly meager, it was money for doing something they were already committed to. So they started briefing her; rapidly filling her in on all of the major cult hotspots they were aware of around the city.

“Excellent,” Carrina said. “When can you start dealing with them?”

After some soul-searching, they decided to also brief her on the Banewarrens. If nothing else, they suspected that the Pactlords were another cult and, thus, under the purview of their commission.

Carrina had known nothing about the Banewarrens, but she listened carefully to their report. (Which, truth to be told, was not entirely complete. They edited carefully around the involvement of Rehobath and the Inverted Pyramid.) When they were finished, she promised to report the matter back to the Commissar. “Certainly if you think it to be a cult-related threat, you should act on it as quickly as possible.” But beyond that she saw little reason for panic: It was hardly the first vault of powerful artifacts to be found beneath the streets of Ptolus. Nor was it likely to be the last.

SOMETHING STIRS…

After the shellacking they had received in Porphyry House, they decided that they would spend the next day resting and recuperating. Their stores had been badly depleted and they had some deep bruises to heal.

They also agreed that a return to Porphyry House – particularly a Porphyry House likely to be armed and alerted – was beyond their present resources. So they decided to turn their attention back to the Banewarrens: They would pursue their leads to Alchestrin’s Tomb.

Ranthir, delighted at the down time, retreated to his room and his tomes.

Elestra, still mourning the loss of her python viper, retreated to her own room to begin a long communion with the Spirit of the City in the hope that she might be granted a new companion through whom the city’s voice could be heard and its will made manifest.

Tee spent the afternoon hocking their loot. Nasira tagged along with her and they spent the next few hours chatting amiably. In the evening they retired to the Ghostly Minstrel and Tee offered to teach her the game of Dragonscales. (Tee’s thoughts turned for a moment to Dominic with a sad sense of loss: She missed playing the game with him.)

Midway through their series of training games, however, they abruptly realized that the tiles had spelled out the words SOMETHING STIRS. This was not entirely unusual, but as the game continued the phrase appeared again… and again…

Tee cleared the board and they began a new game… SOMETHING STIRS.

They paused and considered their options. Tee tried manipulating the other tiles in various ways to explicate the message (“What stirs?” and so forth)… but then the message stopped occurring altogether.

Running the Campaign: Recognition as Reward – Campaign Journal: Session 45B
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

Bringing the group together during Session 0 can take a lot of forms, but it ultimately boils down to figuring out why this specific group of PCs is going to stick together and go on adventures / solve mysteries / get in trouble / work with each other week after week.

Whatever the modus operandi of the campaign might be, one of the most reliable ways to make this happen is for the PCs to have existing relationships with each other: If they’re family, friends, and/or coworkers, then they’ll care about each other, routinely be in the same place together, and/or be pursuing the same goals. That makes it a lot easier to explain why they’re all at the ski lodge where the murder happened or taking a freelance contract to raid the Salem-Watts biolabs.

The nice thing is that you don’t need all of the PCs to have the same relationships with each other, nor does every PC need a direct relationship with every other PC. As long as there’s a web of relationships weaving everyone together, the events of the campaign will slowly draw everyone closer and closer to each other.

The Dresden Files Roleplaying Game had an ingenious method for setting up these relationships which was, sadly, stripped out of the current Dresden Files Accelerated version of the game. Fortunately, it can be easily adapted to almost any game and setting.

SHARED HISTORY

Once the players have created their characters and have a firm grasp on who they are, you can plug this module in by creating an Adventure for each PC.

Note: This assumes, of course, that the start of the campaign won’t be the PCs’ first rodeo: They’ll be coming to the table with some experience under their belts.  If that isn’t the case, then you may need to make some adjustments. (For example, maybe the campaign takes place on the UCLA campus. Rather than adventure, you could create a Freshmen Year event for each PC, establishing some big, dramatic event that happened to them.)

To begin creating your PC’s adventure, start by grabbing a notecard. This will be your adventure card.

STEP 1: TITLE

Write a title for your adventure at the top of your adventure card. If you’re having trouble coming up with a cool title, think about books, movies, and short stories from the same genre as the campaign and then give them a twist:

• The Bourne Identity could become The Sampson Identity.
• Gone With the Wind could, with a twist to both noun and verb, become Arrival by Sea.
• The Lord of the Rings, by similar process, becomes The Duke of Swords.
• Escape from New York just needs a location shift to become Escape from Casablanca.

Alternatively, you might use any of these simple title formulas:

• The [Adjective] [Noun] (e.g., The Black Prince or The Remarkable Mr. Smith)
• The [Noun] of the [Place] (e.g., The Anxiety of Mars or The Uncle of London)
• They [Verb] (e.g., They Dream or They Hunt)
• A [Noun] [Past-Tense Verb] (e.g., A Crow Murdered or A Funeral Bound)
• The [Adjective] and [Adjective] [Noun] (e.g., The Macabre and Tragic Vision or The Gruesome and Forgotten Murder)

You can also create your own title formulas like this by taking many existing titles and breaking them down by word type.

Like any title, your goal is to create something evocative and intriguing. You might already have a premise in mind for your adventure (as described in Step 2) and craft your title to it; but starting with a cool title and then figuring out what the adventure for it is can be equally effective.

STEP 2: ADVENTURE PREMISE

Next, write down a simple premise for your adventure. The Dresden Files Roleplaying Game suggests this template:

When [something happens], [your protagonist] [pursues a goal]. But will [your protagonist] succeed when [antagonist provides opposition]?

For example:

When SpaceX engineers start turning up dead with blood streaming from their eyes, Jack Hammer is hired to discover the dark truth. But will Jack Hammer succeed when it becomes clear Elon Musk wants to shut the investigation down?

But there are a lot of different premises you could use. For example, S. John Ross’ Big List of RPG Plots is a fantastic resource, including entries like:

MANHUNT

Someone is gone: they’ve run away, gotten lost, or simply haven’t called home in a while. Somebody misses them or needs them returned. The PCs are called in to find them and bring them back.

Which can give you a premise like this:

Duchess Scarlet Madara is kidnapped from the Cannes Film Festival! Jack Hammer is at the festival attending the opening of a film written about his life. Can he solve the case even while standing in the limelight?

In writing up your premise, make sure your character’s role in the story is clear and phrase the conclusion as a question, leaving the ultimate outcome uncertain. You’ll also want to keep it short: ideally no more than two or three sentences.

STEP 3: GUEST STAR

Everyone should now read their character’s adventure premise out loud and place their notecard in the center of the table. Then, taking turns in whatever manner seems appropriate, everyone should select an adventure belonging to a different PC. (Alternatively, everyone could pass their card to the left. Or you could shuffle the cards and deal them out randomly.)

However the decision is made, you should now be holding the notecard for an adventure starring a PC other than your own. Your character will now be guest starring in this adventure!

To do this, simply add one or two sentences to the card explaining your character’s supporting role in the story. When brainstorming your contribution, it can be a good idea to talk things over with the player of the starring character and make sure you’re both on the same page and happy with the outcome. Your character should be significant — either complicating the situation or aiding the protagonist (or possibly both) — but not usurping the role of main character. (You don’t want to be a Mary Sue.)

It can be useful to think of a single dramatic situation involving your character, the protagonist, and, optionally, the antagonist(s). For inspiration, you might want to check out Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations by Georges Polti. (You can find of Polti’s original book here, but it may be easier to consult of the hundreds of summary lists scattered around the internet to glean the essential idea.)

For example, one of Polti’s dramatic situations is:

13. ENMITY OF KINSMEN

“Hatred of one who should be loved” is a powerful antithesis.

(…)

(3) Hatred Between Relatives for Reasons of Self-Interest: “La Maison d’Argile” (Fabre, 1907). Example from fiction: “Mon Frere” (Mercereau).

Which might lead you to:

Rick Cuthain, the bastard brother of Duchess Scarlet who has always resented her, is the #1 suspect of the Gendarmerie! But after convincing Jack Hammer of his innocence, Rick helps him discover Scarlet’s connections to the strange Cult of Serpents.

Once you’ve added your character to the adventure card, take a moment to jot down the title and other details in your own character’s background. This is, after all, part of their story, too! Note, for example, how Rick’s player has discovered not only a sister, but an entire family wrought with drama through their participation in Jack’s story.

STEP 4: SECOND GUEST STAR

Repeat Step 3, with each player selecting a different character’s story and casting their PC as a guest star. (It’s okay to guest star in someone else’s story if they’re also a guest star in yours, but you shouldn’t guest star in the same story twice.)

For this step, it’s okay if your contribution also wraps the story up, but it doesn’t have to.

Once you’re done with this step, everyone should (a) have an adventure starring their character and guest starring two other PCs and (b) be the guest star in two other PCs’ adventures.

(If you only have two players, skip this step.)

STEP 5: WRAPPING UP

If your second guest star’s contribution to your adventure didn’t provide a conclusion, add one now.

You can flesh your adventure out a bit if you want, but you don’t have to. The capsule descriptions should provide you with a fundamental understanding of what happened that you and the other players can riff on and develop during play. (“Remember that time we broke into the Starlink facility in Bastrom and hacked the whole network?”)

If they don’t already, make sure everyone involved in your adventure has a copy of it. (Or, at least, their part in it.) You want to make sure everyone knows the canonical version of events.

Back to Session 0 Modules

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 44B: Time to Fly

 Tor grabbed up Agnarr’s body and turned, churning his way down the hall.

The twisting vines continued to confound their orderly retreat, but several of them had broken free now and were running back across the lounge. Tee, who was still trying to assist Tor’s retreat, tossed Nasira her magical lockpicking ring: “Get out! Quick as you can!”

Nasira reached the door to the long hall of whores and swung it open. Looking both ways she sighed with relief and called back over her shoulder, “All clea—“

The door at the far end of the hall opened. Two of the armored serpents and six unarmored ones poured through. “There they are!”

As I mentioned in Prepping Porphyry House, this adventure has been enhanced with an adversary roster. And it’s a pretty great example of the kind of dynamic play that having an adversary roster can unlock for you.

In the early part of the session, you can see that the players have already internalized the consequences of dynamic dungeons: When they stealthily take out some of the guards, they know they can’t just leave the bodies lying around, because it’s very possible that they’ll be discovered by other cultists moving throughout the building.

But a little while later you can see the evidence of me actively using the adversary roster:

Tee, on the other hand, did head into the room and quickly inspected the well (finding nothing unusual about it – it was a perfectly ordinary well). She was about to move on to the equipment in the corner—

When a patrol of two fully-armored serpent-men came around the corner in the hall.

One of them immediately turned and ran back around the corner. Tor, Agnarr, and Elestra quickly converged on the remaining serpent and hacked it to pieces. But by the time they were finished with it, two more had appeared at the end of the next hall in a four-way intersection between several doors.

The PCs get spotted, some of the bad guys run to raise the alarm, and things begin to spiral out of control.

Last week, Dave Oldcorn asked, “Does this not happen an awful lot of the time with adversary rosters?” And the answer to the question is complicated.

The first thing to recognize is that the PCs made a mistake and then got unlucky with their dice rolls: The mistake was leaving most of the party standing in the hallway (a high-traffic area) while Tee was searching a room (a time-consuming activity). They might have still had the opportunity to avoid catastrophe, but they rolled poorly and didn’t hear the guard patrol coming. And then, on top of that, they lost initiative, so the guards both had the opportunity to see them and run reinforcements before they could do anything.

Mistakes and bad luck will happen, of course, so it’s not necessarily unusual for this sort of thing to happen. But you’ll also see plenty of other examples in this campaign journal where the PCs didn’t make mistakes and/or the dice were in the favor, and so kept control of the situation. In fact, it’s not difficult to imagine how just one thing going a little differently might have caused the entire Porphyry House scenario to play out in a completely different way.

Which leads us to a second important principle when it comes to adversary rosters: They shift some of the responsibility for encounter design from the GM to the players. By the point where the PCs were facing off against multiple squads of guards, an angry spellcaster, and a giant stone golem, they were clearly in over their heads. But that wasn’t an encounter that I created for them. It was, in most ways, an encounter they’d created for themselves.

This creates a really interesting dynamic where (a) the players feel ownership of their fate and (b) they can engage in truly strategic play, often controlling the difficulty and pace of the encounters they’re facing. (What happened in this session was, ultimately, a series of strategic failures followed by some strategic genius that ultimately allowed them to escape a rapidly developing catastrophe.)

In order for this to work, though, the GM needs to play fair. An important part of that is respecting the fog of war: The other reason “every monster in the place descending upon you instantly” isn’t the default outcome is because it isn’t the automatic outcome of the PCs getting spotted by a bad guy. That bad guy has to decide to run for help; the PCs have to fail to stop them from doing that; and then it takes time for them to fetch that help. And even once they have gotten help… where are the PCs? Did they just stay where they were? If not, how will the bad guys figure that out? What mistakes might be made within the fog of war? How can the PCs take advantage of that?

Above all, an adversary roster is a tool that lets you, as the GM, easily roleplay all the denizens of the dungeon. Truly embrace that opportunity by putting yourself fully in their shoes — thinking about what they know; what they would prioritize; and the decision they would, therefore, make — and playing to find out.

The final thing that pulls all of this together is the Dungeon as Theater of Operations: If the encounter in this session were glued to a single room — or if the players felt like they weren’t “allowed” to leave the borders of the battlemap — this would not have been compelling session. In fact, it would have almost certainly ended with all of the PCs dead. It’s only because the PCs were able to strategically duel with the actively played opposition of Porphyry House in an engagement ranging across fully half of the building’s first floor that (a) the PCs survived and (b) the session was a thrilling escapade from beginning to end.

Campaign Journal: Session 45A – Running the Campaign: Recognition as Reward
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index