DISCUSSING:
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 23E: With Nought But Their Lives

“First, there is the Dreamsight. The Dreaming is the wellspring from which all reality is born and the grave to which all living memory returns. As such, those who can see the Dreaming with unclouded eyes can perceive deep truths of the world around them.

“Second, there are the Dream Pacts. The Lords of the Dreaming are powerful and fey. Those skilled enough in the dreaming arts can turn their souls into conduits through which the Spirit Lords can be made manifest in the world around us. But following such a path requires supreme self-control, for the Lords of the Dreaming are capable of reshaping your very soul.

“Finally, there is the art of Dreamspeaking. Those practiced in the dreaming arts can reshape the Dreaming around them. Those who are masters of the Dreaming, however, can reshape the world around them by reshaping the dreams from which the world is born. These arts have been perfected into the dreaming tongue – a primal language which not only describes the most fundamental aspects of reality, but can be used to transform it.”

If you want to check out the mechanics for the Dreaming Arts that Tithenmamiwen is preparing to study, you can find them here on the Alexandrian. (Well, Dreamsight and Dream Pacts, anyway. Tee hasn’t chosen to study Dreamspeaking yet, so I haven’t finished putting flesh on those bones.)

Specialized sub-systems and mechanical options are, of course, quite common in roleplaying games, whether you’re homebrewing them or grabbing some cool new sourcebook. And when you’re playing a popular, crunchy game with lots supplements (like D&D or Shsdowrun or Ars Magica), you have to consider how you want to handle adding this type of material to your game: Do you use all of them? None of them? Some of them? Which ones?

Figuring that out could probably be a whole discussion itself. (And a fairly idiosyncratic one.) For the moment, though, let’s assume that:

1. You and your players have learned the “core” rules of them (however you choose to define that); and
2. You now have a new chunk of mechanics that you want to make part of your game.

How do you actually go about doing that?

Well, it turns out that this is ALSO a pretty big topic that can depend a lot on the dynamics and interests of your group. For example, you might have player(s) at your table who are not particularly interested in all the mechanical gewgaws of the game – they just want to be told what dice to roll. How you approach new mechanics for them is going to differ from how you’ll handle it if one of your players is really interested in exploring mechanical options and is actually the one advocating for a new sub-system to become part of your game. (And what if you have both types of players at the same table?)

There’s also the differences between player-facing, GM-facing, and dual-facing mechanics. Also, mechanics that are going to be used for one scenario vs. those that are going to be permanent additions. We could also look at the difference between modular components being bolted onto sub-systems already in play (like new maneuvers for a combat system) vs. completely new sub-systems (“We’re piloting mecha now!”).

These discussions, however, almost always deal with the metagame dynamic between you and your players. Which makes sense, of course, because the mechanics of a roleplaying game are inherently abstracted and metagamed – they are a thing you and your players interact with, not your characters.

But what I want to point out in today’s session of In the Shadow of the Spire is that you CAN introduce mechanics diegetically – as part of the game world and from an in-character perspective. This also makes sense because, even though they’re abstracted and metagamed, roleplaying mechanics are also inherently associated with the game world: They’re connected to what’s happening in that world and the choices your characters are making.

This connection can flow both ways: By adding mechanics we often add elements to the campaign for our PCs to experience, but by attempting new activities or acquiring new resources, the PCs can also create the need for new mechanics to handle those new aspects of their lives.

If you, as the GM, want to add some new mechanical element to your game – realms management, rigging, mercantile trading, pacts with Lords of the Dreaming – it can similarly be more effective to diegetically offer (or even require) those mechanics than it would be to simply, for example, drop a new sourcebook on the table and then wonder why nobody is using it.

To some extent, this is about how mechanics without a game/scenario structure to serve tend to wither and die, but it’s more than that. If you approach new mechanics diegetically, it gives you a whole bunch of new tools for pitching those mechanics to your group and getting them excited about it.

For example, you can offer the mechanics as a reward. Players love rewards. (Who doesn’t?) “Here’s your new ship!” you say, opening the door to those mercantile and crew management sub-systems you’ve been interested in exploring.

You can also nest new mechanics inside meaningful choices. You can see this with Tee’s dreaming lesson in the current session: The player is empowered to choose which sub-system she wants to introduce into play, which immediately invests her in that choice and makes her eager to read through twenty or thirty pages of custom house rules.

In this way, diegetic mechanics can also be connected to the themes of the campaign and/or the objectives of the PCs. (This also applies to Tee, obviously, who has been obsessed with learning the Dreaming Arts since the campaign began.) The mechanics aren’t just a generically cool new thing that you hope the players will be interested in; in a very real way they are the thing that the players already care about, just manifested in a different way.

NEXT:
Campaign Journal: Session 23F – Running the Campaign: Detritus of the Dungeon
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

SESSION 23E: WITH NOUGHT BUT THEIR LIVES

June 7th, 2008
The 11th Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

BATTLE OF THE MINOTAURS

Tee gathered up the items, put them into her bag of holding, and then headed back towards the underwater tunnel.

“Wait,” Elestra said. “What about they key we came for?”

Tee looked at her quizzically. “I think it was the key from the chest.”

“The one that hurt you? But that doesn’t make any sense. And we’ve found lots of keys here. Maybe there’s another one. Why would we want a key that hurts you to use it?”

“We don’t know why we wanted the key,” Tee said. “We don’t know what it’s for.”

“We should open the door,” Elestra said. “See if there’s another key back there.”

“The door the minotaurs were afraid of?” Tee said. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Maybe they were just pretending to be afraid.”

The argument continued for several minutes, but eventually it was decided that they would at least look through the door. Tee picked the lock and edged the door open, peeking through it.

There was another icy cavern, this one larger than the rest. A multi-headed construct of frost-rimed brass and levianthan proportions lay in a heap in the center of the floor. But even as Tee’s eye fell upon it, the construct stirred – one of its heads slowly rearing up with the rasping sound of metal upon metal.

Tee slammed the door shut.

“We need to go. Now.”

WHAM!

The cavern rocked with the bone-shaking impact of the construct on the far side of the door.

“What is it?”

WHAM!

“Go! Now!”

They fled back through the underwater tunnel and up through the fleshy membrane… and found the minotaurs waiting for them.

“Segginal tells us that Wuntad sent you on a mission. Give us the weapons of chaos.”

Tee was bleary-eyed and exhausted, still suffering from the ill effects of using the key. She didn’t want to do it, but they didn’t seem to have any other choice. With a heavy sigh she reached into her bag, pulled out the spear, and handed it to the nearest minotaur.

Agnarr attacked.

“Agnarr! No!” Tee was perhaps even more surprised than the minotaurs. Her hand was still half in her bag of holding, reaching for the next item. She quickly changed her aim and withdrew the modified dragon rifle. But she was too weak to fight, and simply stumbled back towards the nearest corner.

The minotaurs roared. The claws of one smashed into Agnarr’s side, sending him spinning towards the other who caught him with a similarly devastating blow. Agnarr dropped to one knee. He swung his sword feebly towards them, but then a third blow crashed down on his head and he slumped into unconsciousness.

Tor hesitated, his sword half-drawn from its sheath, waiting to see what would happen. With Agnarr down, would Tee begin negotiating again?

Perhaps she might have, but even as Agnarr thudded heavily to the ground, Dominic extended his hand and murmured a prayer. A bolt of silvery energy emerged from his fingertips and struck one of the minotaurs. The energy flowed about the creature as if it were liquid mercury, and the motions of the minotaur slowed… and stopped. It had become frozen in time.

Tor finished drawing his sword and charged the other minotaur. He nimbly weaved his way through the flurrying claws of the creature, turning the closer blows with his shield. His sword, crackling with electricity, struck here and there – opening painful wounds in the creature’s thick hide.

As Tor kept the creature occupied, Elestra and Dominic darted forward and laid their hands on Agnarr. Their joint strength flowed into the barbarian, healing his wounds.

As Agnarr groggily regained his consciousness he quickly focused on the battle being waged almost directly above him between Tor and minotaur. He grabbed up his sword and stabbed up… straight through the minotaur’s groin. The creature gave a bellowing roar of unimaginable pain and collapsed in a pool of its own blood and viscera.

As Agnarr stood up, shaking off some of that same blood and viscera, Tee weakly stepped forward, lowered the modified dragon rifle, and immolated the surviving minotaur (who was still trapped by Dominic’s spell).

LEAVING WITH THEIR LIVES

“Wuntad is very angry with you.”

It was the voice of Segginal – the statue-bound chaos spirit.

“I don’t care, Segginal.” Tee shouted. “Open up!”

After a moment, the statue above them slid aside. They climbed up and then moved away from the statue before discussing their options.

“We could still try to escape,” Agnarr said.

Tee shook her head. “We couldn’t beat them before and now I’m less than useless in a fight.”

“They might have left.”

“I doubt it,” Tee said. “But we can check.

They climbed up to the second floor, hoping to look down through one of the tower windows. As they reached the tower, Elestra asked the question that was weighing on everyone’s mind: “Do you think the Segginal guy is telling Wuntad where we are?”

Tee looked out through the window. “Yeah… I think he is.”

Wuntad was standing on the path before the gate, staring straight up at her. He was now accompanied by more than a dozen of the cultists. Now he shouted, his voice loud enough to be heard through the lead-framed window.

“The minotaurs don’t matter to me! They were foul, primitive creatures. Unworthy servants. All I want are the weapons! Give them to me and you can still leave here with your lives!”

“Damn it.” Tee sighed heavily and turned away from the window.

“We’re not going to give them to him, are we?” Elestra asked.

Tee looked at her. “I’ll say it again: Do we have any other choice?”

“But we can’t! We don’t know what he’ll do with them if he gets them!”

“But we do know what he’ll do if he doesn’t get them.”

“We could always try going out the back way,” Dominic suggested.

“With Segginal telling him everything we’re doing?” Tee said.

“If we do give them to him,” Tor said. “I don’t want to go out there. I’m sure he’ll betray us.”

“Maybe we could get the Cobbledman to give him the items? I don’t think he can actually come into the keep. Otherwise he would have just killed us and gotten the weapons himself. Or done it years ago.”

A shadow fell across them. Wuntad had flown up to the window and was looking in at them. “This is your last chance.”

“Will you agree to free the Cobbledman?” Tee asked.

Wuntad’s eyes narrowed. “He lives?”

“He does. And he misses you.”

Wuntad seemed to mull it over for a moment. “Very well. If you give me the weapons, I will free the Cobbledman.”

“Fine,” Tee said. “We’ll have him bring the items to you.”

They found the Cobbledman, once again, sleeping in his tower. Tee carefully woke him.

“Cobbledman? Wuntad is here.”

“Wuntad’s here?”

“He is. He’d like to see you. He wants to free you. But I need to ask you a favor.” Tee quickly explained what they needed the Cobbledman to do.

They went down to the courtyard. Wuntad and the cultists were waiting just outside the gate. Tee loaded the Cobbledman’s arms full with the various weapons… but she deliberately held back three items: The journal, the ironwood box inscribed with Lithuin runes (and the crystals it held), and the golden key. She hoped that Wuntad might not notice the missing items, and if he did then—

“Where is the box of ironwood?” There was great anger in Wuntad’s voice.

“It’s right here,” Tee said, pulling it from her bag. “But his arms were full. Send him back and he can bring it out to you.”

And, as she had hoped, Wuntad had noticed the missing item most precious to him… but not the key. Nor did he open the ironwood box and notice that the journal was missing.

“Cobbledman,” Wuntad said. “You are free to leave Pythoness House.”

Wuntad then turned to them. “I am glad that you saw… reason. But pray that our paths do not cross again.”

The cultists turned and left. The Cobbledman came back towards them, a wide grin on his kind face. “Did you hear?”

“We did,” Tee smiled. “I’m very happy for you.”

“Do you have any more food?”

Ranthir laughed and handed him another bar of rations. The Cobbledman, munching contentedly, headed back towards his tower.

“We should do something for him,” Tor said. “He shouldn’t have to stay here.”

“What about those people that Urlenius was talking about?” Tee suggested.

“The Brotherhood of Redemption?” Dominic said.

“Right. They might be willing to help him.” She looked around. The cultists were gone. “Well, shall we go?”

“Not yet,” Agnarr said. “There’s one more thing I want to do.”

Agnarr returned to the statue of Segginal… and smashed it to pieces. As the last of his destructive work was done, a mournful wind howled through the keep and, with a malevolent laugh, Segginal’s voice echoed through the halls: “You will bear my curse forever.”

Agnarr grunted. “Nice guy.”

A PEACEFUL AFTERNOON

As they emerged from Pythoness House, the aeroship of House Shever passed above them – heading out towards the Southern Sea. They followed in its wake, heading down into Midtown and returning to the Ghostly Minstrel.

Tee had an appointment to keep, so she only stopped in long enough to drop off her bag of holding (with its tainted items and, most importantly, the soul draining key) and then left again.

Tor, too, only went to his room long enough to pick up a fresh set of clothes before heading over to the bathhouse on Tavern Row. (Where he sat quietly in a corner, speaking to no one.)

Agnarr headed to the common room and ordered a meal of feast-like proportions.

Elestra and Dominic, meanwhile, talked things over and decided to spend the afternoon trying to find help for the Cobbledman. Elestra knew that the Brotherhood of Redemption maintained a small chapterhouse in the Guildsman District (although there were rumors that they also maintained a large underground fortress somewhere beneath the city).

As Elestra and Dominic headed back out through the front hall, however, a cry came from the common room. “Mistress Elestra! Mistress Elestra!”

Before she even turned to look, Elestra knew that it was Iltumar. She suppressed a groan.

Iltumar was sitting at a table with an elven woman with dark brown hair. The glint of mithril chain could be seen under the woman’s clothes.

“Elestra, this is Lavis,” Iltumar said. “I’ve solved Tee’s riddle! The answer is ‘t’! T for Tee!”

“Very good, Iltumar!” Elestra smiled, exchanging a look with Dominic.

“I’ve got a new one for you, too: ‘My house is not quiet, but I am not loud. I am the swifter, at times the stronger. My house more enduring, longer to last. At times I will rest, but my house rushes on. Within it I lodge as long as I live. Should we two be severed, my death becomes sure.’”

Elestra leaned over towards Dominic. “Do you think it’s a snail? I think it might be a snail.”

Dominic shrugged.

“Do you want to join us for a drink?” Iltumar asked eagerly.

Elestra turned back to him. “I’m sorry, Iltumar. But Dominic and I have something we need to do. In fact, we were just heading out.”

Iltumar’s smile fell away.

“But I’ll let Tee know about your new riddle. I know she’ll be excited to hear it.”

“It’s okay,” Iltumar said. “I know you probably have much more important people to see.”

Elestra awkwardly tried to figure out how to make her farewells. Lavis exchanged a sympathetic look with her. But, at that moment, Ranthir was passing by on his way to fetch his customary bowl of soup for the evening. Overhearing her distress, he tapped Iltumar on the shoulder.

“Iltumar, I have some studies to attend to this evening. Would you, perchance, be interested in assisting me?”

Iltumar’s smile returned, even larger than before. “Really?”

“Yes,” Ranthir smiled. “I have to fetch some food, but then we could begin immediately… if you like.”

FOURTH LESSON OF THE DREAMING

Tee – weakened by the draining effects of the golden key and distracted by the myriad thoughts racing through her mind – had difficulty focusing upon her training. She had difficulty even achieving the dreaming trance, and could do little of consequence.

When the frustrating trance work was completed, Tee began gathering up her things to leave. But Doraedian stopped her.

“The dreaming trance requires a difficult art of balance. It shall never be without effort, although you will find that it becomes easier in time. However, there is another matter that we must discuss today. There are many paths through the arts of the Dreaming, and from this day forward your training will be of your choosing.”

“Choosing?” Tee said.

“Yes, while your lessons with me will continue, you will also be trained in one of three specialties.

“First, there is the Dreamsight. The Dreaming is the wellspring from which all reality is born and the grave to which all living memory returns. As such, those who can see the Dreaming with unclouded eyes can perceive deep truths of the world around them.

“Second, there are the Dream Pacts. The Lords of the Dreaming are powerful and fey. Those skilled enough in the dreaming arts can turn their souls into conduits through which the Spirit Lords can be made manifest in the world around us. But following such a path requires supreme self-control, for the Lords of the Dreaming are capable of reshaping your very soul.

“Finally, there is the art of Dreamspeaking. Those practiced in the dreaming arts can reshape the Dreaming around them. Those who are masters of the Dreaming, however, can reshape the world around them by reshaping the dreams from which the world is born. These arts have been perfected into the dreaming tongue – a primal language which not only describes the most fundamental aspects of reality, but can be used to transform it.”

“I’m not sure what I want to do.”

“It is not a decision to be rushed. Take your time. Explore your thoughts. Write me by letter before your next lesson on the 18^th and let me know your choice.”

NEXT:
Running the Campaign: Diegetic Mechanics – Campaign Journal: Session 23F
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

On Friday I looked at how, with a minimal application of system mastery by the DM, a completely new player who had never even played a roleplaying game before could create a character in just five sentences.

Magical Kitties Save the Day is the newest RPG from Atlas Games: You are a magical kitty. You have a human. Your human has a Problem. You need you use your magical powers to solve their Problems and save the day! The trick is that the Hometown where you live also has Problems, and when those Problems – witches, aliens, hyperintelligent raccoons – are aimed at your human’s Problems, they make those Problems so much worse!

Created by Matthew J. Hanson, the first edition was a PDF-only rulebook designed to be enjoyed by all ages. At Atlas, we believed we could take this hidden gem and bring it to the masses: After an extremely successful Kickstarter last year, we’ve created a boxed set that is chock full of material not only to make the game the perfect introduction for young new players – making it ideal for parents wanting to roleplay with their kids, for example – but also to teach new GMs of any age how to master the game.

That’s why, for example, the first thing you’ll find in the game is Magical Kitties & the Big Adventure: A choose-your-path graphic novel adventure, so that new players can get a taste of how the game is played within seconds of opening the box.

It’s also why, as I looked to develop and expand the 2^nd Edition of the game, that I focused very carefully on character creation with an eye on the principles of fast, accessible character creation I had learned from years of experimenting with open tables. Not because Magical Kitties Save the Day is necessarily designed for open table play (although it can very easily be adapted for it), but because those same principles apply to any game that you want to be friendly for brand new players:

• You want them to be able to start playing quickly, particularly if they’re young players who may have a shorter attention span.
• You want the decisions to be comprehensible without any system mastery, because not only will these players not have mastery of the specific mechanics of Magical Kitties; they may not even have an understanding of how any roleplaying game is played.

(As an unexpected benefit, simple and clear choices also allowed me to repackage character creation into the graphic novel experience, when it otherwise would have proven difficult.)

The first edition of Magical Kitties was already really good at this. So my design focus was on targeting the handful of steps in character creation that still had any lingering friction and figuring out how to ruthlessly restructure them or supplement them in order to eliminate that friction.

The result was the seven sentences of Magical Kitties character creation:

1. You have two Kitty Treats and an Owie Limit of 2.
2. Roll 1d6 to determine your Cute, Cunning, and Fierce attributes. (Table on p. 10.)
3. Roll 2d6 and read them as a two-digit number to generate your Talent (p. 13).
4. Roll 2d6 to generate your Flaw (p. 14).
5. Roll 2d6 to generate your Magical Power (p. 15).
6. What does your kitty look like and what is their name?
7. Determine your human’s Problem by rolling a Problem Source and an Emotion associated with that problem (p. 12), then name and describe your human.

This character creation is lightning fast. I can actually run 20-30 minute micro-scenarios of Magical Kitties (as convention demos, for younger kids, or as quick pick-up games) in which new players can learn the rules, create their characters, and complete the adventure.

…AND NOW FOR THE BUILD

In looking at our seven sentences for Magical Kitties, you might notice how many of those involving dice to randomly generate the character. This, of course, is intentional: In our discussion of OD&D, you may recall, I mentioned how players new RPGs associate “rolling dice” with “playing the game,” and that having them roll dice during character creation makes them feel as if they’re already playing the game (instead of still waiting for it to start). It headlines the fun, and this is even more true for young players.

(Everyone loves rolling dice. Kids just love rolling dice more.)

But you may also recall that random generation is a trade-off: You’re trading speed for the appeal of a carefully crafted character that you can fine tune to be exactly what you imagined playing.

Magical Kitties Save the Day, though, is also designed to be a game that can grow and mature with new players over time. Which is why every single one of those steps in which we use random generation – attributes, talents, flaws, magical powers, your human’s Problem – is designed so that an experienced player can swap it out: They can skip the random generation and instead have complete control over the creation of their character.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been doing a lot of experimentation-by-necessity with the party-planning scenario structure I shared here on the Alexandrian back in 2015. It seems like almost every other time I sit down to design or develop a scenario these days, I find the party-planning scenario structure staring back at me:

• In Welcome to the Island for Over the Edge, I used it to fairly pure effect with Jonathan Tweet to design “Seversen’s Mysterious Estate,” which I describe in more detail over here.
• In Quantronic Heat for the Infinity RPG, Nick Bate and I used it to model a full season in an illegal remote racing circuit. This took the basic structure and spread it across multiple days.
• For “Battle of the Bands,” also in Welcome to the Island, I worked with Jeremy Tuohy to adapt the structure for modeling a road trip studded with micro-adventures.

Basically, the more designers who pitch me awesome, expansive concepts for adventure scenarios, the more I find myself coming back to the party-planning scenario structure as the foundation we can easily adapt to make those concepts work in practical terms.

This has been really interesting and exciting work. I had largely thought of the party-planning structure as being fairly narrow and specific (but very useful!) in its utility, but the more my designers and I have been using it, the more powerful and flexible it has proven to be.

I haven’t been sharing these new insights here on the Alexandrian largely because, for a long time, I thought of these scenarios as just being specific applications of the party-planning structure. (Any time you use a scenario structure, after all, you’re adapting it to the needs of the specific scenario.) But while this is true for some of the scenarios I’ve been designing, I’ve recently come to the conclusion that several of these structures have developed enough that it’s not just a matter of them being adapted to a specific scenario; they’ve been adapted to support whole new classes of scenarios, making them distinct scenario structures in their own right.

Today we’re going to look at the scenario structure for festivals which I developed for Jonathan Killstring to use in his upcoming Burning Dragon scenario for the Feng Shui roleplaying game.

THE FESTIVAL

Burning Dragon is an outdoor art and music festival in the Gobi Desert that gathers each summer to “forge the dragon.” Lasting more than a week, it culminates in a huge wicker effigy of a dragon being literally lit aflame to complete the symbolic purging of the festival.

This structure, however, can be used for any large gathering that the PCs will be exploring in detail: a large convention, a long weekend at RenFest, a visiting carnival, a theatrical fringe festival, the Fortnight of the Blood Moon, the Conclave of the Goblin Princes, the solar migration of the star-whales… whatever.

DISTRICTS

Break the festival location into separate districts. These should generally be diegetic (i.e., the PCs should be able to understand the divisons; they’re not arbitrary game concepts) and are likely to reflect the organization of the festival itself. If the people running the festival were to publish a flyer for participants, what would the map look like if you flipped it open?

Another rule of thumb you might find useful is that if the PCs are in one district they should generally not be aware of what’s happening in any other districts unless it’s an event of cataclysmic proportions. (The idea is that if you want to know what’s happening in another district, you’ll need to go there and find out.)

You don’t need a lot of different districts, but if you’re having difficulty breaking your festival into separate districts then it’s very possible that it would be more appropriate to handle your event using the party-planning structure (even if it’s a party on a very large scale).

DISTRICT CHARACTERS

For each district, create the NPCs the PCs are likely to meet there. Again, you don’t need a lot. Just two or three can be enough. These can include characters who are particularly important to the district (like an event organizer or guest of honor), but also think about characters who can be representative of the average festival attendee in that district.

For ease of use, I recommend that ANY character you want attending the festival be associated with a specific district. (Everybody at the festival has to be somewhere after all.) But although they’re associated with a particular district, don’t be afraid to have the PCs run into these characters in other districts. To that end, I also recommend prepping a master list of festival NPCs (and the districts they’re keyed to) for easy reference.

In prepping the characters, use the Universal NPC Roleplaying Template to make it easy to keep all the characters straight and quickly pick them up during play. Print out on NPC per sheet and keep them loose so that you can quickly pull out the sheets for each NPC participating in a particular conversation.

DISTRICT LOCATIONS

Define your district physically by describing major sites or landmarks there. These points of interest may be places the PCs are going to (and, therefore, potentially serve as motivations that bring them into the district) or the PCs might discover them as they explore a district for the first time.

Once again, a little can go a long way here. In fact, if you find yourself listing a whole bunch of locations in a district, you might want to take that as a cue to split the district into several different districts.

DISTRICT EVENTS

District events are things that happen in the district. Some events will naturally be keyed to specific locations and/or characters, but don’t lock them down too tight unless you need to. (It’s more useful to keep things flexible for when you’re actually running the scenario.)

Every district should have at least one event keyed to it. There’s no limit to the number of events you can choose to include in a district, but an over-abundance of events are likely to be wasted prep. Generally speaking, PCs will tend to go to a district once, do the things they need to do there, and then move on. This generally means that keying more than two or three events to a district will make it necessary to really cram stuff into that single visit. There are situations where that can work, but they’re probably the exception rather than the rule.

(Another exception is if your scenario is structured in such a way that the PCs are motivated or required to repeatedly crisscross the festival, visiting districts over and over again. Additional events can be useful then.)

TOPICS OF CONVERSATION

The last tool you’ll prep, as with other social events, are the topics of conversation.  These might be momentous recent events, fraught political debates, or just utter trifles (like an argument about which ska band is the best). For example, in Burning Dragon the topics of conversation include:

• Ganbaatar is the odds-on favorite in the traditional wrestling competition this year. He bench-pressed a pickup truck over in the Badlands earlier. For real, though!
• There’s a big-shot director (S. Khünbish) shooting a film here at the festival.
• Did you know the festival grounds are actually the site of an ancient Mongolian fortress? I heard that the place was ruled by four Wu sorcerers, but it was burned down by four evil shaman-kings who came to steal the secrets of the Wu.
• A young woman was apparently assaulted or kidnapped during the opening ceremony this year.
• How many wheels are too many/not enough on a vehicle. (Later, the topic shifts to how many spikes are too many/not enough on a vehicle.)
• How far along has construction gotten on the dragon effigy.
• There’s a big turtle over in Dust Town. Like, a really big turtle. Nobody seems to know how it got there, but everybody’s trying to get a selfie with it.

I recommend mixing in a few “irrelevant” topics of conversation to camouflage (or, at least, contrast) the “important” stuff. During play, these topics of conversation should also pick up stuff that’s been happening in play (either keyed district events or just whatever mischief the PCs have been getting up to).

RUNNING THE FESTIVAL

Start with your Opening Shot: What happens when the PCs arrive at the festival? What do they immediately see? What’s immediately happening that they can either choose to interact with or be provoked to interact with?

Ideally, this opening shot will also orient the PCs. By the end of it, the players should clearly understand how the festival is organized — i.e., which districts exist and how they relate to each other.

Now that the PCs are at the festival, follow their lead as they attempt to accomplish whatever goal brough them here in the first place. This will usually involve them going to one of the districts. (If they don’t choose a district and instead just want to do something “at the festival” in a general sense — look for information, look for a GMC, etc. — that’s fine. You can either arbitrarily choose a district in which they find the thing they’re looking for or are interrupted by something interesting happening.)

When the PCs are in a district, you’ll mostly be picking up the various tools you’ve prepped for that district, putting them together in different ways, and figuring out how to have fun with them. Broadly speaking, in each district there are three “slots” that you can drop elements into:

• Arriving in the district.
• While doing something in the district (i.e., the reason the PCs came to the district in the first place).
• Leaving the district.

Pay particular attention to how different elements can be combined. For example, if the PCs want to talk to a NPC, could that conversation be happening in one of the specific locations within the district? Are there other NPCs who could join the conversation? Could the district event start happening in the middle of the conversation?

Similarly, if the PCs are in a location, what NPCs might be hanging out there? If there’s an event, how might it affect one of the locations? And so forth.

Although some things may happen to the PCs and force them to react – for example, an NPC might com up and start talking to them – mix things up by also including characters, locations, and events that the PCs can observe and then choose to react to (or ignore). If they don’t react to Old Bill stealing horses from the inn’s stables, that’s fine! They’ll probably see them again.

Similarly, if the PCs are wrapping up a scene, don’t feel like you need to immediately push them into a new one: Ask the players what they want to do next and then use their answer to frame up the next set of tools.

If the PCs are heading into a particular district and you find yourself looking at all the tools in the district uncertain of what should happen, just trigger the district event when the players arrive and see where things go from there.

TIMING OF EVENTS

Festival-type events often have a formal schedule of events: Such-and-such a convention panel happens at 1pm on Friday; so-and-so is performing on the Lilliputian Stage at 6pm on Saturday; the draconic convergence will be at high noon on Sunday.

It will therefore be tempting to prep this schedule. Inasmuch as possible, however, you actually want to try to avoid drawing up or otherwise establishing any such specific schedule.

There are a couple reasons for this. First, even a modest festival-type event will likely have dozens and dozens of events on its schedule. Few of them will be relevant to the PCs, creating a ton of wasted prep.

Second, this type of schedule tends to tie your hands too much when actually running the scenario: It would be ideal for the PCs to see Professor Clayton’s presentation on quantum fluctuations in Antarctica, but the event was scheduled for 1pm in the Lilac Room and the PCs went  to the Lilac Room at 2pm instead. (This is why the structure keys events to districts instead of specific times. The events are being mapped to the decisions and actions most likely being taken by the PCs.)

Note: If this still feels weird to you, take a look at a typical dungeon key. Frequently these keys will feature room descriptions in which some specific event is happening at precisely the moment when the PCs arrive at that location. It’s not that the game world is standing still; it’s that our prep is abstracted in order to make it possible to manage the infinite complexities of the world.

This is also why festival-type events, unlike other social events, don’t have a main event sequence: You don’t want the festival to feel like a meeting with a specific agenda. You want it to feel big and messy, with lots of things happening all the same time.

So what should you do when the players want to know when a particular event is happening? Broadly, there are two responses:

• It’s happening right now, so you’d better hurry if you want to make it.
• It’s happening a little later, giving you enough time to either make preparations or do something else first.

Now, there can be exceptions. The two most common ones are, in my experience, an Opening Ceremony (which probably doubles as your opening shot) and the Big Finale at the end of the festival (which might be the epilogue of the scenario or a huge, tangled convergence of everything and everyone the PCs have encountered, mixed together into a single, huge gathering modeled as a subset party-planning scenario.)

Other Landmark Events like this are possible depending on the exact nature of the festival you’re creating, but my recommendation remains that, unless it’s absolutely necessary, you’re better leaning away from this and just keying these events to an appropriate district.

If you’re interested in seeing this scenario structure in practice, Jonathan Killstring’s Burning Dragon will be released in June 2021. If you’d like to get early access to the PDF next month, you can join the Feng Shui Dragons subscription program, supporting the creation of new Feng Shui supplements.

In the Open Table Manifesto, one of the pillars I discuss for running a successful open table is fast character creation: When any or every session you run might have a new player sitting down for the first time, it’s essential that they can create a character and start playing as quickly as possible.

Back when open table-style games were far more common – and, arguably, the default mode of play for D&D – you can find all kinds of stories from people whose first experience with a roleplaying game was wandering past a table where people were playing and being invited to sit down and join the game already in progress.

(I don’t think it’s really a coincidence that D&D had its first – and arguably biggest – boom at precisely the time that it was designed for a style of play which was so conducive to being spread virally. But I digress.)

To a modern audience, these stories can sound almost absurd. That would basically never happen with an RPG today – including the 5^th Edition of D&D – because there’s no way you could generate a new character for the player and immediately drop them into the action.

But in OD&D, the original 1974 edition of D&D, I can get you a character in five sentences:

1. Roll 3d6, total them, and write them down in these six boxes in order.
2. Are you a human, an elf, a dwarf, or a hobbit?
3. Are you a fighting-man, magic-user, or cleric? (If they picked a dwarf or elf you can skip this step. Randomly roll hit points and the magic-user’s spell.)
4. What’s your character’s name?
5. You have a sword, chain armor, a shield, 8 rations, a small silver mirror, 2 torches, flint and steel, a bedroll, and 16 gold pieces. (Customize equipment list appropriately.)

Let’s play!

It’s an incredibly streamlined system that’s built on a powerfully modular base. (Which is why people have been adding new classes and races to D&D ever.)

Is this the One True Way™ of character creation in roleplaying games? Of course not. There can be a lot of advantages to multiplying the number, complexity, and even opacity of the choices players make during character creation. (Note how all of the decisions in OD&D’s character creation are immediately accessible and comprehensible to a new player who has zero understanding of how the game works. Compare to the mechanical knowledge you need for even something as straightforward as point-buying attributes in newer editions.)

But the speed with which OD&D goes from, “Do you wanna play?” to stabbing orcs in the face can be a huge feature in its own right. And it’s not one that I think should be so casually dismissed.

(Rolling ability scores can, in my experience, also enhance this. See, players new to D&D associate “rolling dice” with “playing the game.” So when the first thing I say to a new player is, “Okay, let’s roll your ability scores,” they feel like they’re already playing the game. It consistently engages them in a way that pure-build systems just… don’t.)

Note: Hey… what about alignment and languages? I find these non-essential for jumping into play, but you can include them and still have character creation wrapped up in just seven sentences.

THE PROBLEM: BUYING EQUIPMENT

The one place where character creation in OD&D can still bog down is in purchasing equipment: The player rolls 3d6 x 10 to determine their starting gold pieces and then they need to spend that budget on individual items.

In practice, there are steps you can take to mitigate and streamline this. (For example, making sure you have enough copies of the equipment list so that everyone can buy their equipment simultaneously without needing to pass the book back and forth.) But in my experience, it still results in equipment buying taking three to five times longer than the rest of character creation put together.

This is why, in my example of fast-paced five sentence character creation, I leverage my own expertise in the system to effectively buy the equipment for them. Players can also get through this step very quickly once they’ve similarly mastered the equipment available and know what they should be buying.

What would be ideal, though, is if we could find a way to systemically mimic this mastery so that new players could buy their own equipment without bogging down here. To do that, we can split buying equipment into its own sub-process and literally package up our expertise.

STARTING EQUIPMENT PACKAGES

Note: These specific packages tacitly assume that you’re using my house rules for OD&D, which you can also find conveniently summarized in the Blackmoor Player’s Reference. But they should be broadly useful for any OD&D game regardless. The general equipment list has also be lightly amended with some items not found in the original 1974 books.

STEP #1: ROLL FOR STARTING GOLD

Roll 3d6 x 10 to determine your starting gold pieces.

STEP #2: BASE ADVENTURER KIT

Spend 15 gp to purchase the base adventurers kit.

• Large sack (2 gp)
• 1 week of standard rations (5 gp)
• Water skin (1 gp)
• 6 torches (1 gp)
• Flint and steel (1 gp)
• Suit of clothes (2 gp)
• Bedroll (3 gp)

STEP #3: ARMOR

Pick one type of armor.

• Leather Armor (15 gp)
• Chain-type Armor (30 gp)
• Plate (50 gp)

Optionally, pay for any or all of the following:

• Shield (10 gp, +1 AC)
• Helmet (10 gp, without helmet suffer -1 AC)
• Gorget (10 gp, +1 AC vs. vampires)

STEP #4: MELEE WEAPONS

Choose a melee technique:

• Sword & Board
• Dual-Wielding
• Two-Handed

(If you select sword & board, but don’t buy a shield, you’re just fighting one-handed.)

Sword & Board: 1d6 damage unless otherwise noted.

• Dagger (3 gp, 2d6 take lowest damage)
• Hand Axe (3 gp, 2d6 take lowest damage)
• Mace (5 gp)
• Sword (10 gp)
• Battle Axe (7 gp)
• Morning Star (6 gp)
• Flail (8 gp)
• Spear (1 gp, provides reach)

Dual-Wielding: Pick any two Sword & Board weapons.

Two-Handed: 2d6 take highest damage.

• Pole Arm (7 gp, provides reach)
• Halberd (7 gp, provides reach)
• Pike (5 gp, provides reach)
• Two-Handed Sword (16 gp)
• Lance (4 gp, must be riding horse)

STEP #5: MISSILE WEAPONS

You can optionally select a ranged weapon in addition to your melee technique:

• Sling (1 gp, 2d6 damage take lowest)
• Light Crossbow (15 gp, 1d6 damage, fire one-handed but requires two hands to reload)
• Heavy Crossbow (25 gp, 2d6 take highest damage, fire one-handed but requires two hands to reload)
• Short Bow (25 gp, 1d6 damage)
• Long Bow (40 gp, roll 2d6 damage take highest)

Ammunition: Sling stones can be gathered from the wilderness at no cost.

• 20 arrows (5 gp) + Quiver (5 gp)
• 30 quarrels (5 gp) + Case (5 gp)

STEP #6: ADDITIONAL EQUIPMENT PACKAGES

Optionally select one or more additional equipment packages. You can also roll 1d6 to select one randomly.

Delving Package:

• Lockpicks (30 gp)
• 20’ spool of wire (10 gp)
• 6 sticks of chalk (1 gp)
• 12 iron spikes (6 gp)
• 6 wooden stakes (1 gp)
• Mallet (2 gp)

Prepared Adventurer Package:

• 10 sheets of paper (2 gp)
• Silverpoint (5 gp)
• 50’ rope (1 gp)
• Lantern (10 gp)
• 3 flasks of oil (6 gp)
• 10’ pole (1 gp)

Wilderness Package:

• Bedroll (1 gp)
• Small tent (4 gp)
• 1 week iron rations (15 gp)
• Leather Backpack (5 gp)

Basic Mount Package

• Light Horse (40 gp)
• Saddle (25 gp)
• Saddle Bags (10 gp)

Note: A silverpoint is an historically accurate writing instrument. The scribe drags the silver stylus across the surface of the paper. Specially prepared paper can make the lines even clearer, but this “underdrawing” can also later be inked.

ADDITIONAL READING
Reactions to OD&D
Running Castle Blackmoor
On the Importance of Character Creation
Character Creation in 7 Sentences: Magical Kitties Save the Day