When using a location-crawl structure (of which a dungeoncrawl is obviously the most well known example), the PCs explore an area room by room. You can see this clearly in the default action of the ‘crawl: If a PC is standing in a room and there’s nothing interesting for them to do in that room, then they should pick an exit and go to the next room.

This structure works well when designing an area that has a high density of interesting stuff in it. Not every room in a dungeon, for example, needs to be filled with interesting stuff, but probably at least half of them do, otherwise the pacing of the scenario collapses as the players robotically churn through empty rooms.

So what can you do when the scenario calls for a crawl-type exploration of a large area with only a few points of interest?

To some extent, of course, we’re talking about a fictional world and you can simply choose to design it differently: Shrink the scope of the area to sync up with the desired points of interest. (Or, alternatively, increase the number of points of interest to match the scope of the area.)

But this is not always desirable or even possible. For example, if the PCs are heading to an abandoned skyscraper in the post-apocalyptic urban wastelands, changing the skyscraper into a duplex is to fundamentally alter the nature of the scenario. And simply filling the skyscraper to the brim with various encounters would be inconsistent with the general premise that Downtown is a thinly populated desert. (It could also quite easily bloat the skyscraper exploration out of proportion to its importance in the scenario.)

Which, of course, brings us to the sector crawl. Like other crawls — location-crawls, hexcrawls, urbancrawls, etc. — it features keyed locations, geographic movement, and an exploration-based default goal. But while superficially similar to a location-crawl, the sector crawl is designed to handle low density areas. It consists of sectors, connections, and encounters.

SECTORS

You’ll start prepping your sector crawl by identifying your sectors. Basically, you’re breaking your scenario’s area into large chunks. Ideally you want these sectors to:

1. Broadly map to the characters’ understanding of the environment.
2. Generally have one point of interest per sector.

In fact, one way of designing a sector crawl is to list your points of interest — hive of mutants, cache of medical supplies, sarcophagus of the seer, etc. — and then figure out what “sector” each point of interest is in. It’s okay to have a few sectors with multiple points of interest, but if you end up with LOTS of sectors like that, you’ll probably want to think about breaking that part of your scenario down into smaller sectors. On the other hand, sectors without a point of interest should generally be very rare (or not used at all).

For example, each floor in our post-apocalyptic skyscraper might be a separate sector. Or perhaps the skyscraper is broken into three sectors – the Lower Floors (1-10), the Middle Floors (11-46), and the Upper Floors (47-69). Or maybe it’s the Ground Floor, Lower Floors, Upper Floors, and Penthouse.

The scale of these sectors, as you can see, will vary depending on the scenario, but you want them to flow naturally from the logic of the campaign world (as opposed to being arbitrary divisions) so that the players can choose how to navigate through the area. (Ideally the players won’t even know you’re running a sector crawl because their navigation decisions will flow naturally from a completely in-character point of view.)

CONNECTIONS

That brings us to the connections between sectors, which is the second thing you’ll want to prepare for your sector crawl.

By default, however, a sector crawl isn’t about the paths between sectors. You can generally access any sector from any other sector, although that navigation might be chokepointed through, for example, a central hub or elevator.

This open access might, in some cases, be only conceptual in nature. If you actually followed every step the PCs take, for example, you might discover that getting from the Lower Floors to the Penthouse is, technically speaking, only possibly by passing through the Middle and Upper Floors. But conceptually, players on the 5^th Floor can say, “Let’s take the elevator up to the Penthouse,” and they can just do that.

This open-access doesn’t mean that the PCs aren’t exploring the location. It just means that the meaningful choices will be ones of sequence and priority rather than geographical navigation.

(If this is making you uneasy, think about how node-based scenario design routinely gives PCs a slate of clues that effectively give them a menu of places to go next. An open-access sector crawl basically does the same thing.)

To support this, as you’re thinking about how your sectors are related to each other, you’ll usually want to avoid sector structures that only make sense after the characters have already explored them. Looking at a post-apocalyptic skyscraper, for example, the players can immediately intuit that it’s made up of various floor and they can go to various floors by going up or down through the skyscraper.

Conversely, if they arrive at the Great Gate of an abandoned dwarven city, they might have no idea what other sectors exist, which will make it difficult for them to make sector selections. If the PCs can’t get an immediate overview of a location when they arrive there, you may need to provide that information in some other form — maps, local guides, skill checks, divine visions, etc.

Tip: The overview might be provided as the point of interest for the Arrival sector. In other words, the PCs arrive at the Great Gate, and when they explore that sector you can tell them about the Grand Promenade, the Lower Galleries, and the seven Dwarven Minarets.

Sometimes, though, you’ll want a mysterious sector for the PCs to discover. These are sectors that are connected to (or hidden within) a specific sector, and can only be discovered or unlocked when the PCs explore that sector.

In most cases, once a mysterious sector has been revealed or accessed, it will become part of the sector crawl’s open access. (Meaning that it can be freely selected like any other sector in the future.) But it’s also possible for some sectors to act as chokepoints: In order to get from a sector on one side of the chokepoint to a sector on the other side of the chokepoint, you do, in fact, have to pass through the chokepoint sector.

Chokepoints can be used to create isolated sectors, but in other configurations you can actually think of them as the connection point between two different sector crawls.

A similar type of sector is the hub sector: If you’re in the hub, you can access any of the sectors connected to the hub. Conversely, you’ll need to pass through the hub to reach any of the sectors connected to it.

Hubs can be a useful way of conceptualizing particularly large sector crawls. Instead of needing to provide an overview of every single sector in the entire complex, you only need to provide an overview of the sectors connected to the hub and any “neighboring” hubs. It’s only when the PCs go to a new hub sector that you’ll need to overview the sectors connected to that hub.

The Great Gate of the dwarven city, for example, can serve as the hub for nearby features within the city (e.g., the Lower Galleries and the Dwarven Minarets), while also providing access to the Grand Promenade which is another hub.

A final key thing to understand is that the more chokepoints, hubs, and mysterious sectors you add to your sector, the more specific you are making the connections between your sectors. The more you increase that specificity, the more your sector crawl will begin blurring into a pointcrawl. This will become even more true if your sectors begin shrinking towards single points of interest.

Which is not necessarily a bad thing, of course, but it’s useful to be aware of what you’re doing.

ENCOUNTERS

A sector crawl doesn’t need encounters, but they’ll usually enhance the scenario and make the area feel like a dynamic, living environment. The specific encounter methods generally resemble those in other ‘crawl structures (like hexcrawls and dungeoncrawls) — they might be random or programmed; keyed to specific sectors or the entire scenario; and so forth.

RUNNING THE SECTOR CRAWL

Running a sector crawl largely consists of going to a new sector or exploring the current sector. Each time the PCs do one of these things, trigger or check for an encounter.

Exploring the sector will turn up:

• Its “identity” (if this was not already known);
• Its point of interest (i.e., the content keyed to the sector); and
• Any secret connections to other sectors (if you’re using mysterious sectors).

If a sector has multiple things to discover, the PCs might find all of them through a single exploration action or find them one at a time (requiring more exploration actions in order to find additional stuff).

And that’s it! Running a sector crawl is actually quite straightforward.

A SECTOR OF ONE

I’ve found it occasionally useful to conceptually think of some locations as a “sector of one” when running them.

For example, in a mystery scenario there might be a house which contains exactly one clue. The players, perhaps conditioned by the ubiquitous location-crawls found in RPG scenario design, might decide to start searching the house one room at a time – essentially treating it like a dungeoncrawl.

Knowing that it’s a rather large house and they’ll spend most of their time not finding stuff that isn’t there, I might push them into a sector crawl and frame their actions appropriately: They say they’re going to search the kitchen, but I simply handle the resolution of the action as searching the whole house (i.e., the house is a single “sector” and they’re performing an exploration action there).

Note: I’m not saying this is the one-true-way of handling this situation. I can think of a half dozen different reasons why you might want to handle the house search as a location-crawl even though there’s only one clue to be found.

This can also be a good thought experiment for how you run a sector crawl, particularly if you’re finding yourself defaulting back into treating the area as a location-crawl. Unless the players are aware of the sector crawl structure (and it’s a structure that doesn’t always lend itself to that), you’ll often be figuring out how to interpret the players’ declared actions within the context of the structure.

For example, they may not explicitly say, “I’m exploring this sector.” But they might say that they’re looking for a place to sleep. Or are searching one section of the sector. Or are looking for medical supplies. All of those can be treated as exploring the sector (and trigger the sector’s discoveries and encounter).

The same thing will be true of navigation, where you’ll need to figure out if certain actions are just moving around inside their current sector or if it’s actually moving to a different sector (and, if so, which one).

UNTESTED: MEGADUNGEON SECTORS

This is something I haven’t had a chance to actually test yet: Converting sections of a megadungeon into sectors.

I’m not talking about designing a megadungeon-like scenario as a sector crawl. (Although you can easily do that, as demonstrated with the example of an abandoned dwarven city above.) What I mean is running a megadungeon as a dungeoncrawl, but when the PCs have “cleared” a particular section of the megadungeon (akin to clearing hexes in a hexcrawl) you convert that section of the megadungeon into a sector.

This would hypothetically allow the players to quickly move through cleared sections of the megadungeon. If you’ve run large dungeons or megadungeons before, you’ve probably already done something akin to this in a purely informal way. (Skipping the boring stuff and getting to the interesting bits, right?) What I find interesting about formalizing this into a sector crawl is that it would still provide a structure for triggering encounters there or even exploring to discover hidden secrets the PCs had previously missed.

It would also give a convenient structure for handling restocking the dungeon – i.e., unclearing the area as new monsters migrate in. For more details on that sort of thing, check out (Re-)Running the Megadungeon.

If you’d like to see a sector crawl in action, there’s one in the upcoming Apeworld on Fire! adventure for the Feng Shui roleplaying game. Designed by Paul Stefko, we used a small sector crawl for a section of the adventure in which the PCs are exploring an abandoned arcanowave laboratory while being hunted by a nanostock demon!

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 24C: The First Hound of Ghul

Returning to the tunnels beneath Greyson House, they proceeded carefully past the point where the pit of chaos now lay entombed. The stone above it was now visibly warping and buckling, making it clear that the effort to seal away the pool would not last for more than a few more days at most.

But, soon after, their fears regarding the unknown intruders were laid to rest: Drawing near to the former bloodwight nests, Tee could easily distinguish the distinctive sound of elvish voices. Stepping into the open, she confirmed that this was a party of workers and scholars from House Erthuo.

In this session, the PCs return to the Laboratory of the Beast. They’ve been here before. In fact, depending on how you count, this is their third or fourth foray into this section of Ghul’s Labyrinth. (It won’t be the last.)

What’s pulled them back this is the desire to wrap up some unfinished business. There are a couple particular examples of this I’d like to draw your attention to.

First, in this week’s campaign journal, Tee obtains a set of magical lockpicks which allow how to open doors which had previously thwarted their efforts to open.

Second, in the next installment of the campaign journal, you’ll see them figure out how to haul some of the larger treasures out of the labyrinth.

Some GMing advice will tell you to fear failure: Your players couldn’t open the door? Didn’t find the secret passage? Missed a clue? You’ll find plenty of people who will tell you these outcomes aren’t “fun” and shouldn’t be allowed.

But this is myopic advice.

Failure is rarely the end of the story. It is an opportunity for the players to use their ingenuity to find a different path to success. And often the stories we discover along these paths are the most memorable and enjoyable.

Partly this is due to the sense of accomplishment and progress: When you discover that you can achieve a goal that was previously impossible, that’s satisfying. And when you figure out how to find a success that overcomes failure, that’s a success which you own. The context of failure gives meaning to the eventual triumph.

Also, the consequences of failure are usually fascinating and far more interesting than the consequences of success. This can be particularly true of roleplaying. As Admiral Kirk says of the Kobyashi Maru, “It’s a test of character.” How we deal with failure is far more revealing – and meaningful – than how we deal with success.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE DUNGEON

The other reason the challenges of failure often result in great stories is because they force you to re-engage with a situation.

You can see that in a pretty pure form in this session: There’s nothing inherently amazing about picking the lock on a door, but it motivates the PCs to come back to this dungeon. Which, in turn, allows them to see how the dungeon has been transformed as the result of their actions.

The Laboratory of the Beast is a fairly sterile complex, inhabited primarily by the remnants of technomantic and necromantic experiments from the distant past. But even here, the PCs encounter the researchers from House Erthuo: The things which they have done in the past are having a tangible effect on the game world.

This makes the game world feel real. It also gives meaning to the actions of the characters and the choices of the players. The first engagement with something is often scarcely removed from exposition — it establishes the basic facts, but can rarely delve deep in exploring them. It is in the re-engagement that story happens.

Of course, there are other ways that you can motivate players to, for example, revisit a dungeon. But simply allowing failure to exist in your campaign will see this behavior emerge organically from the events of play with little or no effort on your part.

LOGISTICAL CHALLENGES

Much like failure, you’ll often see GMing advice which suggests that logistical elements like encumbrance are “boring” and should just be skipped over.

There are certainly times when the logistical hurdles of a situation are clearly manageable and, therefore, the trivial details of exactly how they are managed are best skipped. And there are certainly, for example, encumbrance systems which are so burdensome that it’s better to find an alternative.

But that’s really no different than, say, an overly complicated combat system or the fact that you don’t need to bust out the initiative rolls to let 15^th level PCs intimidate and rough up some street thugs. And I think it’s a mistake to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

D&D, in particular, is a game of expeditions. When you remove the logistics from an expedition, you remove most or all of the challenge from that expedition. And I don’t just mean that in a mechanical sense. When you remove adversity from a narrative, it generally doesn’t improve the narrative!

In the current session, you can see how the logistical problem of getting bulky-yet-valuable items out of the dungeon forced the players to come up with alternative solutions. That includes bringing the House Erthuo researchers to the dungeon (“if we can’t move the orrery to sell it somewhere else, we can sell access to it where it is”). It also created a failure state which, once again, brought the players back to the dungeon.

You can see another example of this in Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, actually. Once the players have found the huge cache of coins which is the ultimate reward in that campaign, the question of how they’re going to get that gold out when there are potentially multiple factions looking to steal it out from under them is really interesting.

(With minimal spoilers, Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon is a mind-bending look at a similar conundrum.)

NEXT:
Campaign Journal: Session 24D – Running the Campaign: Magic Item Wish Lists
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

SESSION 24C: THE FIRST HOUND OF GHUL

June 21st, 2008
The 12th Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

THE NEXT MORNING

But when Tee woke up the next morning, she discovered that the Dreaming Apothecary had finally delivered the items she had purchased. They were laying, neatly displayed, on her bedside table.

There were two small, golden discs designed to be affixed to the temples. Tapping either of the discs caused a scintillating field of golden energy to cover Tee’s eye sockets. Although this effect prevented others from seeing her eyes, it enhanced her own vision.

There was an armband of black silk with Tee’s dragon sigil embroidered upon it in silver thread – thread that was not merely silver-dyed cloth, but actual woven silver.

And, at first, Tee felt there had been some mistake because there was no sign of the glamoured lockpicks she had requested. Instead, there was a large ring set with a faceted ruby. Closer inspection, however, revealed a tiny trigger near the base of the stone. Pressing the trigger revealed a set of tiny prongs, wires, and other small devices crafted from mithril. Slipping the ring on, Tee found that she could control the minute motions of these precision tools with a mere thought.

Since Tee had received her tools, it was decided that the entire group would first return to Ghul’s Labyrinth and finish their explorations there. (As a result, Ranthir’s researches into the golden key were delayed.)

Returning to the tunnels beneath Greyson House, they proceeded carefully past the point where the pit of chaos now lay entombed. The stone above it was now visibly warping and buckling, making it clear that the effort to seal away the pool would not last for more than a few more days at most.

But, soon after, their fears regarding the unknown intruders were laid to rest: Drawing near to the former bloodwight nests, Tee could easily distinguish the distinctive sound of elvish voices. Stepping into the open, she confirmed that this was a party of workers and scholars from House Erthuo.

The leader of the Erthuo expedition stepped forward and introduced himself as Faeliel. He grew quite excited when Ranthir introduced himself, shaking his hand vigorously. “Cordelia told me that you might pass this way. I’m most pleased to meet you. Would you like to see what we’ve accomplished with the orrery?”

Ranthir smiled with delighted surprise and eagerly followed Faeliel. With only a glance he could see that the orrery had already been partially restored.

“That’s right,” Faeliel said. “We’re trying to restore the orrery before moving it so that we can preserve as much of it as possible. The mechanisms are badly damaged, but we’re learning a lot by observing it in a relatively unchanged state. This damage over here seems quite extensive and recent, unfortunately.”

Ranthir explained about the bloodwight which had burst its way out of the orrery shortly after they discovered it.

“Oh!” Faeliel gasped. “Well… I’m glad we weren’t the first ones here, then!”

They both laughed, and then fell into a spirited conversation. Ranthir was able to offer several insights into the workings of the orrery before the others pulled him towards the bluesteel door.

THE FIRST HOUND OF GHUL

They were careful not to let any of the workers from House Erthuo overhear the password as they passed through the bluesteel door.

Tee had been intermittently obsessing for weeks now over the cryptic mysteries hidden behind the locked secret doors near the alchemical laboratory. Now, with her new tools, she was eagerly looking forward to trying her luck with those locks once again.

But before she did that, as they passed through the first antechamber (where the four colossal statues of Ghul looked down upon them), Tee swung open the double doors leading into the strange and tainted temple of obsidian. Through those doors she hurled every artifact of tainted chaositech she carried, feeling her very soul lightened by the loss of their burden. With a deep satisfaction, she swung the doors shut behind her and then turned aside towards the laboratories.

One of the secret doors lay in the chamber with four alchemical pits, where the fetid fungus had threatened to overwhelm them in a living, undulating wave. While Agnarr and Tor moved cautiously towards the pits to ensure that no new dangers were breeding in their depths, Tee moved toward the section of the wall where she had discovered the concealed keyhole. Removing the ruby on her new ring, she slid the delicate mechanisms into the keyhole.

With a satisfying click, a section of the wall popped open with a burst of stale air. Sliding the wall panel to one side, Tee revealed the hidden chamber. To one side, a small wooden desk was half-rotten through. To the other, what appeared to have once been large crates had been stacked in the corner, but many of these had collapsed under the weight of many years.

And the sound of deep, laborious breathing echoed through the chamber…

Tee motioned for the others to keep silent and then moved quietly into the room.

She discovered the source of the breathing behind the desk: A large, gracile creature with chocolate-brown fur lay sleeping. Its neck and hind legs were curiously elongated, but it was clearly a hound.

Tee backed her way out of the room and told the others what she had seen. Then she moved back into the room, searching it while being careful not to disturb the dog. Agnarr followed her in to keep an eye on the creature and watch her back.

But as soon as Agnarr laid his eyes on the creature, a huge smile spread across his face. It was his dog! He had spent so much time looking for a faithful hound to rear and train, and now he had found it in the most unexpected of places!

Most of the room’s contents had decayed to dust and ruin, but among the shattered boxes Tee found three spears of solid steel and high craftsmanship that she felt might fetch a fair price in the city above. But her persistence paid off particularly when she found a secret compartment hidden inside the ruined remnants of the desk… and, inside the compartment, a half-rotted purse containing several dozen blood-red rubies.

As Tee stood up, slipping the gem purse into her bag of holding, Agnarr gestured towards the dog. “Try to wake it up.”

Tee gave the barbarian a skeptical look, her thoughts returning to the vicious, yapping, porcelain puppy that Agnarr had last fixated on in his quixotic search for a faithful companion. But she could tell that he wasn’t going to be easily dissuaded, so she gave the slumbering dog a half-hearted prod. It didn’t stir.

Tee shrugged. “No such luck! Let’s go.”

She headed towards the door, but Agnarr didn’t follow. Instead he sheathed his sword and gave the dog a more powerful prodding with his foot. There was still no response.

With a thoughtful look on his face, Agnarr reached into his own bag of holding and pulled out a raw steak. (Tee: “Why do you have raw steak in your bag?” Agnarr: “For the goblins.” Tee: “Well… that explains absolutely nothing.”) Agnarr waved the steak under the dog’s nose.

The dog didn’t stir.

But Agnarr was not to be easily dissuaded: Laying the steak down, he grabbed the dog with both his hands and gave it a mighty shake.

The dogs eyes popped open! It lunged at Agnarr’s face!  Tee, cursing, whipped our her rapier—

… and the dog began ecstatically licking Agnarr’s cheek.

NEXT:
Running the Campaign: TBD – Campaign Journal: Session 24D
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

Go to Table of Contents

THE DREAM MACHINE

The dream machine allows multiple subjects to be strapped into it and share the dreams of the primary subject. Lulu is the primary subject here, and the dream machine should allow her to dive into and recover memories that she has lost. Mad Maggie will encourage as many PCs as possible to join Lulu in the machine so that they can help her in recovering her lost memories.

Once everyone is attached to the machine, Mad Maggie will activate it (and will continue monitoring its activity from outside the shared dreamscape) while promising to pull them out if things get too rough.

SNIPPET – TUNING INTO LULU’S DREAMS: There’s a strange rushing sensation and/or sound (it’s difficult to differentiate one sense from another for a moment) and then all of the PCs open their eyes to find themselves with Lulu in an infinite, featureless white void.

• A moment of double vision: The PCs realize that they are looking out of each other’s eyes. (So PC 1 is looking out of PC 2’s eyes and is seeing themselves, for example.)
• They hear Mad Maggie’s voice cackling out of the white void all around them: “That’s odd! One moment!”
• There’s a high-pitched squeal, everyone’s vision blurs, and then they’re all looking out of the correct sets of eyes.
• Mad Maggie says: “That’s better! Now, give me just a moment to synchronize your soul-streams with the heartstone. [PC’s name] seems a little choleric.”
• As Mad Maggie adjusts the machinery, the white void slowly morphs or shifts or phases in and out of a sickeningly pink and fluffy landscape that slowly comes more and more into focus until it finally solidifies around the PCs… this is the inside of Lulu’s mind.
• Mad Maggie: “You should all be on the same beam now. This may hurt a little. I’m going to adjust the machine to harmonize with her Styx-tainted memories.”
• The fluffy pink landscape begins to undulate precipitously. It seems to accelerate unevenly in semi-random directions, rushing past the PCs and Lulu in a dizzying display. Then pieces of the pink fluff seem to either desiccate or decay; turning into faded brown patches or, in some cases, a dripping black sludge.
• The effect accelerates — more and more of the pink fluff turning into a sickening morass that swirls about the PCs in a whirl of multi-shaded black. PCs need to make a DC 13 Dexterity or Wisdom check to avoid having this black muck cling and stick to them. On a failure, they will suffer disadvantage on their first check in the vision.

VISION – THIRD VISIT TO IDYLLGLEN: The black sludge sloughs away to reveal a field of battle. It’s chaotic. The battle lines of Zarielite crusaders have met a ravening mass of gnolls and the front lines are a frantic melee. [PC’s name] is just dragging their sword free from the dead body of a gnoll.

• Lulu is nearby and Zariel is mounted atop her. But even in that moment of respite, Zariel cries out, “Lulu! Help hold the line here! I’m going to get a lay of the land!”
• As Zariel shoots straight up into the air, another clot of gnolls comes rushing down the hill.

Encounter: Zariel can be seen circling above. You might describe her occasionally diving down towards some distant part of the battlefield, only to reappear above on the next round.

• 4 gnoll fangs of Yeenoghu (MM, p. 163)
• 7 gnoll pack lords (MM, p. 163)
• 16 gnolls (MM, p. 162)

Second Round: A “gnoll” archmage strides to the top of the hill about 250 feet away. There’s only a 50% chance per round that it focuses its spellcasting on the PCs’ section of the battle. (You can describe other spells zipping off to blast away NPCs fighting to either side.)

• Use stats for archmage (MM, p. 343), with following changes.
• Damage Resistance cold, fire, lightning; bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing from nonmagical weapons.
• Damage Immunities poison
• Condition Immunities poison
• Senses truesight 120 ft., passive Perception 12

Wrap Up: At a time of your choosing (probably when the PCs are finishing off the gnolls in their immediate vicinity and/or when they’ve credibly threatened the archmage), there is a terrible trumpeting sound that echoes across the field of battle.

• It’s followed by a monstrous voice echoing through a bullhorn. It speaks Abyssal: “Cast off! Cast off! Demons of the Abyss, to arms! To arms! We ride for the flag of Yael! At Yael we strike!”
• On its next action, the skin of the “gnoll” archmage sloughs off, revealing a chitinous, winged, demonic form that takes to the air and flies towards the bullhorn’s command.
• “To Yael! To Yael we ride!”

SNIPPET – SECOND VISIT TO IDYLLGLEN: Just as the demon’s gnoll-skin sloughed away, the fields of Idyllglen begin to decay once more into that thick, black sludge.

• The PCs can hear the sound of something metallic being struck repeatedly; like a cheap gong.
• Mad Maggie’s voice from a distance: “Worthless junk! Worthless! Align you thrice-cursed pile of barlgura dung! Align, damn you!”
• The black sludge churns for a moment longer and then grows still. Just a black void that seems to press in on the PCs from all sides.
• Out of the darkness: “You’re no ogres! Identify yourselves!”
• There’s a blazing golden light: Lulu! Lit up as if golden flames danced through her fur! Zariel is astride her. The sudden light also reveals a small band of irregularly outfitted soldiers, led by a woman with long black hair. [Yael]
• Zariel says, “Know ye that I am Zariel! By the compact of old and in heed of your call, I return to you in your hour of need!”
• The woman smiles, walking forward: “I am Yael of Idyllglen. And we are sore pressed, milady.”
• Zariel dismounts and extends her hand, clasping Yael’s: “I am glad to you meet you, Yael of Idyllglen.”

Montage of Lost Conversations. There’s a horrible screech and the vision flies apart in tatters.

• Mad Maggie: “Hold on in there! One of the bile ducts has gotten wedged open!”

What follows are just fragments of conversation (the PCs may not even see all the speakers, who are indicated in brackets for the DM’s elucidation):

• “Yeenoghu has returned! He razes the settlements of the Winding Water!” [a messenger to Zariel and the Three Generals, precipitating the Third Visit to Idyllglen]
• Zariel: “Chazaqiel has betrayed all we believe in. You must see that! To Hell with her if that is what she wants, but we would break our oath to follow her!” [Zariel rallying those loyal to Heaven before her Long March during the Averniad]
• “Which of us do you think sees more clearly?” [Asmodeus, tempting Zariel to her fall]
• Zariel: “The demon lord flees before our wrath! And he has taken one our own! To rescue and salvation! Charge!” [Zariel unwittingly leading the Three Armies through the portal to Avernus]
• “My friend, you will find the aid of the Emporium to be all that you will ever wish.” [Mahadi, shortly before he splashes Lulu with water from the Styx]
• Zariel: “It may be madness. But will you join me?” Yael: “Aye. Let’s dream a little bigger.” [Yael and Zariel forming the Zarielite Crusade]

VISION – LAST STAND ON THE STYX: They hear Yael’s voice continuing to speak, but now it’s some sort of eldritch chant. It seems to pulling at them. Their vision begins to clear. They find themselves surrounded by a gentle undulation. Like the surface of a scrying pool, it shows them:

• Yael and Lulu onboard an infernal ferry sailing down a river [the Styx].
• The ferry has been hulled and is slewed to one side; it’s slowly sinking.
• They’re surrounded by demons. Lulu has just gored two of them with her tusks and, with a shake of her head, hurls them overboard.
• Yael is casting a spell. Her chanting voice is literally drawing the PCs towards it. They can resist this effect with a DC 14 Wisdom save if they choose to (in which case they remain in the undulating space for what follows, but can choose to leap through at any time).

Yael is casting a summon celestial spell (see Tasha’s Cauldron, p. 110). PCs who are drawn through the undulating surface of the vision actually become the Celestial Spirits she summoned that day. Yael says, “Well… it seems the gods can still hear us, even here.”

• Let the players choose whether they wish to be Avengers or Defenders (Tasha’s Cauldron, p. 110).
• Although they have the stat block of a Celestial Spirit, they use their own normal attack bonuses and have their own physical appearance, but with golden, glowing skin and hair that seems to be made from pure light.
• If Lulu is a PC, she’ll assume the role of her former self.

Shortly after the Celestial Spirits arrive, Yael calls out to Lulu: They’re losing the ship! They need to flee back into Avernus to escape the demons tracking them from the Abyss! Yael flies off on Lulu’s back, leaving the Celestial Spirits to cover their retreat.

Encounter. This is not an encounter designed for the PCs to win. (If they do, great. End it there.)

• 2 shadow demons (MM, p. 64) + 4 barlgura (MM, p. 56) on the ferry
• 8 barlgura on the shore; 1d4 leap onto the boat each round
• 4 glabrezu (MM, p. 58) on the shore, shouting orders to the barlgura (they’ll come across at an opportune time)
• A flock of 8 vrock (MM, p. 64) on the shore next to the glabrezu, some of whom take off and pursue Lulu and Yael (send all of them if Lulu is player-controlled) while the rest continue assaulting the boat

Wrapping Up. This vision ends when the Celestial Spirits have been overwhelmed or, against all odds, destroyed the demonic war party.

SNIPPET – LULU CROSSING AVERNUS: As the PCs return to the undulating place, they see Lulu and Yael flying low across the Avernian wastelands.

There’s a kind of “glitch” and then it’s just Lulu flying by herself. The glitch repeats, and Lulu the War Mammoth is replaced by Lulu the Cute Little Elephant. Another glitch and now it’s Yael walking alongside the Cute Little Elephant.

DM Note: Lulu’s many, fractured memories of wandering Avernus are getting mixed up.

VISION – LULU & ZARIEL IN MERCURIA: There’s a final glitch as they see Lulu the Cute Elephant again, flying across the red sands of Avernus. The hue of the sands slowly shifts to a silverish color as the skies above darken and fill with a cascade of diamond-like stars shining bright.

The vision of Lulu fades away and they find themselves on a beach, the wine-dark waves gently lapping a beach of gleaming silver sand.

Arranged on the beach are eight pairs of frozen figures: Each pair is the same two figures in different positions and poses. Lulu (in her “fuzzy war mammoth” form) and Zariel, talking to each other.

Vignettes. The pairs of figures remain frozen until one of them is touched. Touching a frozen vignette causes it to come to life, playing out a brief snippet of the long-ago conversation between the two friends.

DM Tip: If Lulu is a player character, you could give her the script for each vignette to play out her historical part with Zariel.

Vignette #1 – Planning to Return: Zariel is standing, staring up at the stars. Lulu is curled around her feet.

• Zariel: I look out across the vast gulfs of the multiverse, and I am the sick for the need of change.
• Lulu: If change is what you’re looking for, then you’ll need to look somewhere new to find it.
• Zariel: It’s these mortals. Speaking with them – feeling the heat and fleeting speed of their passion – has aroused in me the truth. We may be eternal, but they are not. And if we fail them, our eternity makes the failure even greater.
• Lulu: Could mortals truly make such a difference in your heart?

Vignette #2 – The Disaffected Angels: Zariel wading through the waves.

• Lulu: And when the infinite forces of the Abyss sweep down upon us?
• Zariel: Then we will fight! [she laughs] But, no. Once a beachhead exists, others will flock to our cause. I am not the only disaffected angel! Give them but a chance, and they will seize it!

Vignette #3 – Dream a Little Bigger: Lulu and Zariel standing side by side, looking up at the stars.

• Lulu: From the Powers of Heaven? You’re certainly following her advice! Your dream is impossibly large!
• Zariel: Perhaps. But we’ll dream it together?
• Lulu: Forever.

Vignette #4 – What Army? Zariel and Lulu sitting on the beach facing each other.

• Lulu: You already have an army!
• Zariel: [after a moment’s confusion] You mean Yael?
• Lulu: And her militia. Yes!
• Zariel: That’s a force for bandit ogres, not demonwars!
• Lulu: But it could be!

Vignette #5 – Secrets from Heaven: Lulu and Zariel sitting on a log side by side.

• Zariel: They will not appreciate having their hand forced.
• Lulu: Then we must keep it a secret.
• Zariel: For as long as we are able.

Vignette #6 – Mortal Army: Zariel petting the top of Lulu’s head.

• Lulu: Then it will be a crusade.
• Zariel: A crusade of the valiant, whose courage shall never be broken!

Vignette #7 – Giving the Mortals a Chance: Zariel hovering a few feet off the ground, her wings spread wide. Laughing. Lulu looking up at her.

• Zariel: They have! They have made all the difference! … And perhaps that is the key. From eternity nothing can change, but if the mortals are given a chance…
• Lulu: What sort of chance?
• Zariel: To fight! To take up swords and say that their destiny is their own! That they’re no longer children! That they will no longer stand idly by while gods and godlings waste eternity!

Vignette #8 – The Second Front: Zariel is sketching something in the silver sand with her finger; Lulu is hovering in the air, looking down over her shoulder.

• Lulu: But to what end?
• Zariel: To disrupt the balance! Demons vs. devils. Heaven vs. Hell. The Great Wheel is a trap. It turns, but never ends. We will break the wheel.
• Lulu: How? Where?
• Zariel: The Blood War. The Powers of Heaven refuse to intervene – to break an eternal cycle endlessly consuming mortal souls. But if we created a second front – if we broke the balance – that might be all it would take.

SNIPPET – JANDER’S BETRAYAL: Zariel is astride Lulu and General Yael is beside them on her black charger. The battle flags of Yael’s crusaders are nearby. They stand atop a small rise on the Avernian plains surrounded by a vast array of soldiers.

Zariel: The demon army is buckling under Olanthius’ assault. I think Haruman may be able to catch them in a pincer and end Yeenoghu’s terror for all time.

Yael: I agree. As long as my army holds strong, we can keep the devil army engaged until their bloody work is done.

At that moment, a desperate trumpet sounds out across the battlefield. Zariel, Yael, and Lulu jerk their heads around.

Yael: I gave no order!

Lulu: What’s happening?

Yael grabs ahold of Lulu’s fur and shouts, “Fly! We need to see!”

Lulu launches into the sky, carrying both Yael and Zariel into a formation of pegasus-riding Crusaders.

Yael: Report!

Pegasus Rider: Sunstar’s platoon has sounded a retreat!

Yael: What?

Pegasus Rider: The call is spreading!

Looking down, they can see that a huge section of Yael’s army is peeling away towards the large portal through which Yeenoghu led the Crusaders to Avernus. Small units from other sections of the army – including some from Haruman’s and Olanthius’ armies – are following.

Zariel: What has he done?

Insight (DC 12): Zariel is in despair. She’s lost. Uncertain. Doesn’t know what to do. Her hope is breaking.

Another Pegasus Rider: What should we do?

Insight (DC 12): Yael sees Zariel’s despair and for a moment it washes over her. She, too, is losing hope. And then a steely strength seems to enter her eyes; her back straightens.

Yael: Send a messenger. Order Jander to turn back. Then rally the rest of the reserve! We’re going to charge the devil army! We have to keep them off Haruman’s back!

The doubt vanishes from Zariel’s eyes.

Zariel: The rest of you form up on me! We’ll need to intercept those flying devils! Keep them off the riders below!

Yael lets go of Lulu and plunges back towards the army waiting below.

Mad Maggie can be heard again: “What was that? One moment, the cogbox is rattling up a storm.”

Following Zariel’s orders, the pegasi begin gathering into a three-dimensional formation above the battle.

Mad Maggie: “The cogbox is resonating with something in there! A powerful memory! Hang on! I’ve got a shifter around here somewhere!”

There are rattling noises. The sound of metallic items being thrown around.

The pegasi are now in formation. Zariel’s eyes drift to the portal, where Jander Sunstar and the Hellriders are fleeing back to the mortal plane.

They aren’t turning back.

The portal snaps shut.

Zariel orders the charge.

Mad Maggie: “I’ve got it!” A screeching sound of metal on metal.

SNIPPET – THE BLOODY CYST: The memories glitch. You’re back a few moments earlier. Yael is still clinging to the side of Lulu. “We’re going to charge the devil army!!”

The memory glitches. Repeats. Yael is clinging to Lulu’s fur. “We’re going to—”

Mad Maggie: “Turn you bastard!”

The memory glitches. Repeats. She lets go and begins to fall… and fall… and fall…

Mad Maggie: “There it is!” The sound of a clutch box screeching, and then gears slamming into place.

The battlefield melts away beneath Yael. The memory reshapes itself.

Yael stands next to Lulu in the Avernian wastelands. They’re alone. Yael slumps against Lulu’s side, clutching her fur to stay on her feet. She’s looking toward the horizon: There’s a huge cloud of dust. Some massive force is approaching.

She turns and looks in the opposite direction. A cluster of black spots can be seen in the distance. They’re far away, but Lulu’s sharp eyes can see them: Demons. And they’re getting nearer.

Yael: It’s done. There’s no place left to run.

Lulu: There has to be something we can do!

Yael: There is… Do you trust me, Lulu?

Lulu: To the very end.

Yael draws the Sword of Zariel. It bursts with golden, divine light. A beacon which seems to call out a challenge to the approaching forces of evil.

Yael raises the Sword high above her head. “To all the Gods of the Seven Heavens, I plead for your aid! In the name of Zariel, Solar of Celestia. In the name of Yael of Idyllglen. In the name of the mortal souls who have died in this noble cause! I beg a boon to fulfill the final wish of a dying angel! I beg you not to forsake the greatest and most daring of your warriors!”

Lulu rears back on her hind legs, raises her trunk, and trumpets. The sound is deafening, yet simultaneously soothing. You can feel the hollyphant pouring her own celestial essence into Yael’s call, the sympathetic resonance of her trumpet echoing across the Avernian plains as she drives Yael’s plea across the planes.

And there was an answer.

Not a voice perhaps. But a presence. Riding Lulu’s trumpet back across the planar boundaries.

“Lathander…” Yael murmurs. “Thank you.” And then she plunges the sword down into the rocky surface of the Avernian wastelands. There’s a huge burst of holy light.

Lulu cries out. “Yael! No!” She can feel Yael poruing her own life force into the gift Lathander had offered.

Yael looks up at Lulu and smiles. “All that’s left now is the dream.”

The light intensifies. It’s a blinding blast that never seems to end.

But then it does. Rising from the ground – from the confluence of holy might and mortal sacrifice – is an alabaster fortress. Here the Sword will be protected. Here the Sword will be safe.

But the skein of Avernus itself rebels at this holy touch. The wastelands seethe and boil in a pustulential eruption. A cancerous, bloody cyst surges upwards, engulfing the fortress, Yael, and Lulu herself.

Note: This final vision reveals the location of the Sword of Zariel to the PCs, which is within the Bloody Cyst (Hex F4).

It is very likely that the PCs will have seen the Bloody Cyst before this: It’s positioned in Hex F4 because (a) characters crossing the bridge in Hex G5a will likely run into it and (b) this also makes it a convenient landmark for NPCs to use while giving directions. (One of my patrons also recommended that Mahadi’s Emporium could be camped out at the base of the Bloody Cyst at some point.)

So the intention here is that the players will be able to say: “Holy crap! The Cyst? We know where that is! We’ve walked past it like a dozen times!”

If not, that’s okay: Lots of people in this area of Avernus know the location of the Bloody Cyst and can point the PCs to it if they start describing it and asking for directions.

Part 6D-J: Claiming the Sword

Possibly the single most important skill for a GM is pacing: Cool challenges, awesome drama, incredible roleplaying, stunning set pieces, breathtaking props. These are all great. But they can be rendered almost irrelevant if your sessions are bloated with boredom or choked with dead air. It won’t necessarily kill your game deader than a doornail, but the constant drag from poor pacing will make everything else a little harder and a little worse.

So a very large part of being a great GM is developing the tools and techniques to keep things moving and to keep the players engaged at the table. I’ve already written a whole series about the pacing of narrative elements, but effective pacing also includes the more practical elements of managing the moment-to-moment details of the conversation at the game table.

When it comes to mechanics, this often just boils down to resolving things swiftly and efficiently: Virtually any time that you’re interacting with the mechanics, the right answer is to move through the interaction as quickly as possible.

Note: This isn’t because we inherently don’t like mechanics or mechanical choices. It’s because the actual rote execution of the mechanic is usually not the interesting bit of the game and you want to get to the next interesting bit (which can just as easily be another mechanical choice as a cool character detail or dramatic dilemma). There are also MANY exceptions that prove this rule. For example, knowing when to build the stakes up around a specific, momentous die roll so that everyone at the table is holding their breath through every jittering bounce of the polyhedron can be a very effective technique.

A large part of this efficiency, of course, is simply knowing the rules. But it can also be techniques that let you essentially fake knowing the rules – like using a cheat sheet, prepping your scenario notes using a hierarchy of reference, or identifying the rules guru at the table who you can provide that mastery by proxy.

Of course, this can only take you so far. However, once you’ve more or less maximized your efficiency in mastering the rules, you can still push things farther still by multitasking – i.e., resolving multiple mechanical interactions wholly or in part simultaneously.

There are a number of ways that you can do this, but today we’ll focus on one of the easiest: Rolling multiple dice at the same time.

ATTACK + DAMAGE

Start by rolling your attack die and your damage die at the same time.

I’m not sure this really needs more explanation: Do it just a few times and you’ll quickly realize how much time you’re saving. Teach your players to do it, too! In a typical combat with fifteen combatants, your group will be making ninety attack rolls (or more!). If you’re saving just four seconds per roll, that adds up to 5 minutes per combat. Running three or four combats per session? That’s fifteen or twenty extra minutes of play!

This, obviously, assumes that you’re playing a game like D&D that has a randomized component to damage. But it broadly applies to any mechanic that uses two-step rolling: These mechanics rarely have a decision point between the two rolls, so there’s no reason not to make both rolls at the same time.

ROLLING MULTIPLE ATTACKS

On the GM side of the screen, you’ll often be making rolls for a whole gaggle of NPCs. Stop rolling them one at a time! If you’ve got five bad guys who are all attacking, scoop up five dice and roll all those attacks at the same time!

Often these bad guys are all using the same stat block and may even be attacking the same target, so it won’t really matter which die gets assigned to which bad guy. (You can almost think of a mob of eight goblins in melee as just being one mass that makes eight simultaneous attack rolls.)

But you can also use this technique with disparate stat blocks and/or bad guys attacking different targets. You just need to figure out how to assign the dice in front of you:

Color coding. Use dice with different colors and assign those colors to the different attacks. In my experience, this tends to work best when you can make long-term color assignments. (For example, when I make iterative attacks in 3^rd Edition I use red dice for the first attack, black dice for the second attack, and blue for the third.)

On the other hand, trying to remember that the ogre was blue, the goblin was red, the other goblin was purple, and… Wait was the ogre purple and the second goblin blue? … Yeah, it tends to bog down. There are workarounds for this (or maybe your memory is just better than mine), but you may want to use a different technique for assignments that vary from one encounter to the next.

Tip: One work-around that DOES work smoothly, though, is when you’re rolling for two groups of bad guys that are numerically distinct – five goblins and three ogres, for example. Roll five blue dice for goblins and three black dice for ogres and there’s really no confusion about which color goes with which group. This might also be “the five halflings attacking Alaris and the three halflings attacking Dupre.”

Read left to right. When you roll the dice, they’re generally going to scatter across the table. I tend to roll across the table in front of me (instead of in a straight line onto the table), so my dice tend to spread out left-to-right. I can then just “read” the dice left to right – assigning them to the bad guys on my list in the same order.

(You might find a top-to-bottom reading of the dice works better for you. Whatever works.)

Geometric reading. This is a similar technique, but rather than linearly assigning the dice, I’ll equate the cluster of the dice on the table to the grouping of the bad guys in the game world. A simple version of this is to take a left-to-right reading of the dice, as above, and then, similarly, look at the bad guys on the battlemap left-to-right from my point of view. But you might also look at the battlemap (or imagine the scene in your mind’s eye) and see that the bad guys are arranged in two ranks with three of them in the front rank, so you just grab the three dice closest to you for their attacks.

You can also flip this around and group according to target. So if the PCs are standing three abreast in a dungeon corridor, for example, the dice on the left will be those that target the PC on the left, and so forth.

The most important thing with these techniques is to not over-think it: Whatever method you’re using, quickly shift the dice for clarity (if at all) and then move immediately to resolution.

Note: Sometimes when I describe this technique, people will express concern about the possibility of cheating – e.g., assigning your best rolls to the bad guy with the most powerful attacks or whatever. Basically… don’t do that. If you want to cheat (and you shouldn’t), there are ways to do it with a lot less rigamarole.

If you’re concerned, hard-coded color coding avoids the issues entirely. In practice, it’s not really a problem: When I’m assigning the dice, I’m treating them as objects. It’s only after I quickly and definitively shift them to the appropriate stat blocks that I actually starting processing the numbers on the dice.

This technique of rolling fistfuls of dice is often only use to the GM, but there are systems where it may be useful to also teach it to your players. For example, the aforementioned iterative attacks of D&D 3^rd Edition: The groups where I can get the players to simultaneously roll all their color-coded attack dice and matching-colored damage dice at the same time sees combat resolve MUCH more quickly than in the groups where I can’t make that happen.

PRE-ROLLING

A final dice trick for speeding up resolution is to pre-roll the dice. For example, while the PC wizard is counting up his fireball damage you look ahead and see that the horde of goblins is going next: You know that regardless of the fireball, they’re going to attack the paladin. So you can scoop up those d20s, roll them, and have them ready to go once you’ve finished adjudicating the fireball.

There are two keys to pre-rolling:

• You have to be nigh certain that the circumstances of the battle aren’t going to change the character’s intended action.
• You have to be able to stick with the intended action even after seeing the roll and realizing it’s not going to work. (Some people find they just can’t resist the temptation to switch things up. That’s not a sin. Just be self-aware enough to avoid the problem by not using the technique.)

What’s really great is when you get a group of players who are mature enough and trusted enough that they can ALSO use this technique without any problems. I can’t express how amazing it can be to say, “Okay, David, what you are you doing?” and for David to immediately say, “I’m attacking the ogre, hitting him for 32 damage.” (In this case, David has also used an open difficulty number to good effect.)

And when you get a whole sequence of players doing the same thing – pre-rolling attacks, pre-rolling fireball damage, etc. — it can be like you’re playing a totally different game! You can just roar through the mechanical portion of combat, which then immediately opens up all kinds of space for the group to instead focus on the strategic choices, dramatic dilemmas, and narrative description of the conflict!

So grab those dice and get rolling!