DISCUSSING:
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 23B: Binding Foul and Fair

“Well, the book should tell us more,” Ranthir said, and picked it up. He flipped it open… and the pages seemed to blur before his eyes, forming a black maw that seemed to open inside his very mind… threatening to overwhelm him… to swallow his very mind…

Ranthir jerked the book away, slamming it shut and throwing it onto the table.

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

Ranthir rubbed his forehead. His thoughts seemed blurred. The edge of his intellect dulled. “The book… the book betrayed me!”

I often talk about how one of the unique strengths of the dungeoncrawl structure is the way in which it firewalls individual rooms: If you’re a GM – particularly a new GM – you don’t have to keep an entire adventure scenario in your head. You only have to think about the room the PCs are currently standing in. All the information you need right now almost certainly fits on a single piece of paper, and you don’t have to worry about anything else until the PCs choose an exit and go to the next room.

It’s the equivalent of juggling one ball.

This also extends to creating the dungeon scenario in the first place: In its most inchoate form, the dungeon is made up of entirely independent rooms. The new GM can fill a dungeon room with fun stuff and then move on to filling up the next room without any concern for what they put in the first room.

Once you’re no longer a beginning GM, though, you’re going to start using techniques that break down this firewall. You’re not going to completely eschew the advantages of the clearly defined room key (no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater), but you will slowly stop thinking about the dungeon only one room at a time and start adding extra dimensions and complexity to your dungeon scenarios.

You’re going to start juggling multiple balls at the same time.

One such technique is the adversary roster: Instead of keying encounters to specific rooms, adversary rosters make it relatively easy for the GM think about and actively play the inhabitants of a dungeon as they move around the location, living their lives and responding to the incursions of the PCs.

Another technique are dungeon clues. To generalize, a dungeon clue is information in one room of a dungeon which influences or determines the PCs’ actions in a different room.

Some of these clues will likely be quite straightforward: For example, the key in Room 11 that opens the door in Area 41.

Other clues, however, will be complicated, perhaps requiring a series of revelations gleaned from clues in multiple locations throughout the dungeon before the final solution can be found. You can see an example of this here in Session 23, as the PCs piece together the clues that will let them locate the broken halves of the spiral contrivance.

“If the key is in the square tower and it requires a ladder to reach the secret entrance, maybe that entrance isn’t on the wall of the tower – maybe it’s under the tower.”

They returned down to the large, empty room on the fifth floor of the tower. “We should be directly beneath the tower here,” Ranthir said.

Tee floated up to the ceiling and quickly found a bit of false plaster. Scraping that aside with one of her dragon-hilted daggers, she revealed a small keyhole. She took out the key she had found in the nook below the ruined garden and found that it was a perfect fit.

A particularly effective technique is to design your dungeon clues so that the PCs are forced to crisscross the dungeon — gaining information in Area A that takes them to Area B, before sending them back to Area A to complete the sequence. These types of interactions help to transform the dungeon from a linear experience to a multi-dimensional one, in which expertise and knowledge gained from one traversal of the dungeon become rewarding when the players revisit those areas a second time.

In sufficiently complex dungeon scenarios, you can have multiple enigmas featuring overlapping patterns of dungeon clues in play at the same time. This creates navigational interest in the dungeon as the players now have to figure out their own priorities and the routes that proceed from those priorities.

The last thing to note is that dungeon clues frequently aren’t necessary to successfully complete a scenario. For example, the PCs could have found the pieces of the spiral contrivance without necessarily obtaining or figuring out all the clues. If the revelation indicated by your dungeon clues is necessary for the scenario, though, you’ll want to remember the Three Clue Rule.

THE DYNAMIC CYCLE

For the GM, dungeon clues usually aren’t something they need to think about too much while running the game (although for sufficiently complicated scenarios it might involve tracking a revelation list), but that’s obviously because the clues are getting baked in during prep. Players, on the other hand, will be actively engaged with these clues — collecting them, thinking about them, trying to figure them out — during play.

In fact, all of these techniques — adversary rosters, dungeon clues, etc. — don’t just break down the GM’s firewall. They also force the players to stop thinking about things one room at a time and instead start thinking about the dungeon as a whole. In other words, the players will stop thinking only tactically about their immediate circumstances and start thinking strategically about the broader scenario.

Once the players have been nudged in this direction, you’ll discover that their strategic consideration of the dungeon will actually feed back into the scenario itself, creating dynamic interactions which were never explicitly part of your prep: The deliberately placed dungeon clues will get them thinking about how Room 11 and Room 33 relate to each other, for example. But now that they’re thinking like that, they’ll also think about:

• Using a passwall spell to move from Room 14 to Room 22.
• Tricking the goblins in Rooms 9 thru 12 into attacking the ogre in Room 41.
• Scavenging alchemist’s fire from the traps in the lower hallways to destroy the cursed tapestries in Room 42.

This dynamic play on the part of the players will, in turn, give you the opportunity of rising to the challenge and finding more ways to actively play the scenario in order to respond to them.

NEXT:
Campaign Journal: Session 23C – Running the Campaign: Dungeon Cycles
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

SESSION 23B: BINDING FOUL AND FAIR

June 7th, 2008
The 10th Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

CLEARING THE KEEP

They headed across the bridge and into the Cobbledman’s tower. Climbing down, Tee found herself in a chamber littered from broken bones and filth. On a dirty pallet of grey straw, the Cobbledman lay sleeping.

Tee approached him and gently shook him by the shoulder. He stirred, and then the eyes on his second head – the one that hadn’t spoken before – shot open. His hand shot out and grasped Tee by the throat, choking the life out of her. The second head let out a low growl of rage.

Tee panicked for a moment, but then thought quickly. She slapped the other head soundly across the cheek. It woke up, bleary-eyed. It took in Tee. It took in the other head. “No! Don’t!”

The Cobbledman’s other arm darted out and punched the Cobbledman’s second head.

The hand on Tee’s throat dropped away and she fell to the floor (realizing only then that she had been lifted up into the air).

“Are you all right?” the Cobbledman asked. The second head was glaring and sulking.

“I think so,” Tee said, rubbing her throbbing throat. “I’m sorry I woke you up. But you said we might be able to borrow the spiral key that Maquent gave you. Do you think we could do that?”

The Cobbledman grasped at his shirt front. “…I don’t know.”

“We have the other piece,” Tee said., holding it up. “We’d only need it for a little while. And once we were done, you could have both parts.”

“Really?” the Cobbledman’s right face split into a wide grin. “All right.” From under his shirt he pulled out the other half of the spiraled disc.

With a sharp tug, he broke the leather strap it was hanging from and handed it over to Tee. She smiled, thanked him, and gave him some more food. Then she climbed back up to where the others were waiting.

“Got it.”

“What do we do with it?” Elestra asked.

“I don’t know,” Tee said.

“Could this be the key you were looking for?” Tor asked.

“No, I don’t think so,” Tee said. “I think the key we’re looking for is below the statue. I think this is something the cultists made.”

“How will we get the two pieces back together again?”

Tee shrugged and pressed the two pieces together. There was a bright flash of light, and the pieces were seamlessly joined.

“I thought that might work.”

Even with the key in hand, they still wanted to make sure that the rest of the keep had been cleared out before doing anything else. Leaving enemies at their back while they journeyed down into whatever waited beneath the house didn’t seem like a good idea.

Fortunately, they had already explored most of the keep. They started by climbing the stairs that led from the roof of the house up to the central tower. There they found a chamber filled with a weblike nest of bits of old cloth and other rubbish, held together with a hardened, glistening excretion of some kind.

“Disgusting,” Tee said, and then stepped aside to let Agnarr chop his way through it. She could see that there was a ladder on the far side leading up to the tower’s parapet. But a few moments later she was holding up her hand: “Stop!”

Agnarr stepped back and Tee stepped forward: She had been right. There were two more of the red robes which had apparently belonged to the Crimson Coil cult stuck in the nest. “These might come in useful,” she said, carefully prying them out. One of them was in fairly shabby condition (“I can fix that!” Elestra said.), but the other was in good condition (albeit filthy).

Agnarr went back to work, and within a few minutes Tee was pushing open the trapdoor leading to the parapet. Poking her head through, her gaze was immediately arrested by a crown sitting in the center of the parapet.

With a closer look, she quickly realized that the crown itself was nothing but cheap wood painted gold. But her interest was piqued by the eight large blue garnets: To her trained eyes, these appeared real… and, if they were, they would easily be worth 200 gold crowns each.

BINDING FOUL AND FAIR

That left only one nook left to explore: The lower levels of the Cobbledman’s tower. These couldn’t be accessed from above, however, so they circled back down through the keep and then climbed back up.

This brought them to a small, poorly furnished room. In the center of the room there was a rickety wooden table. On the top of the table a pentagram had been inscribed in charcoal. Three objects stood within the pentagram, positioned at points of power within the diagram: A jar of yellowish liquid; a short, fat candle half-expended; and, on a copper plate, a book.

Tor, looking at the jar, grimaced. “We’ve found somebody’s chamberpot.”

Tee turned back to the ladder. “Ranthir! Get up here!”

Ranthir was quickly able to identify the ritual as an exploitation of sympathetic magic. “It’s a binding ritual,” he explained. “The jar is either formed of diamond crystal or a polymorphed diamond – I can’t tell which. But you can see that the purity of the crystal has been corrupted. The pattern of the pentagram also suggests that it was, in fact, a dual-binding ritual: One spirit was bound here, to this jar. But this minor ritual was used, through the laws of sympathetic magic, to trigger a much larger binding somewhere else. And the spirits would have been opposed – one evil or chaotic; the other lawful or good. The burning of the candle would have triggered the sympathetic connections of the ritual and… Yes, here on the candle we can see inscribed the name Segginal in arcane runes.”

“Who’s Segginal?” Tor asked.

“I don’t know,” Ranthir said.

“The Cobbledman,” Tee suggested. “One bad head; one good head. A spirit bound to each.”

“Perhaps,” Ranthir said. “But the nature of the ritual suggests that one of the spirits is still bound here, in the jar. Or rather to the jar.”

“Then which one was bound in the jar? The good one or the bad one?”

“It could be the spirit that haunts the castle,” Tor said. “The ritual could have been what bound it here.”

“Well, the book should tell us more,” Ranthir said, and picked it up. He flipped it open… and the pages seemed to blur before his eyes, forming a black maw that seemed to open inside his very mind… threatening to overwhelm him… to swallow his very mind…

Ranthir jerked the book away, slamming it shut and throwing it onto the table.

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

Ranthir rubbed his forehead. His thoughts seemed blurred. The edge of his intellect dulled. “The book… the book betrayed me!”

Ranthir remained in a rather foul mood as they discussed their options. He’d heard of the foul corruptions which could turn a book into an inversion of itself – a consumer of knowledge instead of a giver of knowledge – but he still felt personally violated by the experience. It was a betrayal that struck at the heart of everything he held dear.

After weighing their options, Tee decided that they should break the jar. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

“Death,” Tor said.

Agnarr, hearing this as they came back down the ladder, grinned. “Sounds like my kind of plan.”

They went down to the courtyard.

“Are we sure we want to do this?” Dominic asked.

Tee shrugged and threw the jar against the stone wall. It shattered into shards and, where the shards fell, a whirlwind sprang up. It grew suddenly in strength, whipping their hair and causing some to fall back a step. Elestra cursed. Tor tightened his grip on his sword.

And then the whirlwind gave way and disappeared. In its place, a tall figure with pale blue skin and white-feathered wings hovered in the air. He looked down at them with eyes of pure light.

“My name is Edlari. I thank you for freeing me from my foul imprisonment. I owe you a debt that cannot easily be repaid.” He turned his gaze to the sky and frowned. “What year is it?”

“790.”

“Has it been so long?” He shook his head sadly. “I can sense a great evil in this place, but it lies beneath us where I cannot reach it. Will you accept my aid, meager though it may be?”

“Of course,” Tee said.

He flew to each of them in turn, his heavy wings beating softly at the air, and laid his hand upon their brows. They felt their wounds and aches fade from their bones and blood. Ranthir could feel the fog left by the evil tome fade from his thoughts. Tee, with great joy, could feel the rigors of the taint fading from her soul… although, in the same moment, she felt the weight of the dark items which lay in the bag at her side.

“And now,” Edlari said, “I must return to the Pale Tower. Seek for me there if you would speak with me again.”

With that, he was gone – his wings carrying him up and over the walls of the keep.

NEXT:
Running the Campaign: Dungeon Clues – Campaign Journal: Session 23C
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING:
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 23A: Let Slip the Dogs of Hell

“WHO DARES TO VIOLATE THIS SANCTUARY OF CHAOS?”

They whirled around and looked up. Above, on a balcony in the tower directly above them, a demon with a goat-like head was floating several feet off the ground. It carried a vicious looking axe with a blade that gleamed in the sun.

Although this is not well-represented in the campaign journal, I actually ended Session 22 in a cliffhanger: The demon showed up, shouted, “Who dares?!”, and that’s where I wrapped up the night.

Cliffhangers are great. There are all kinds of cliffhangers, but two significant ones for RPGs are unresolved peril and the escalating bang.

Unresolved peril is fairly self-explanatory: The PCs — or people/things they care about — are in a state of jeopardy and we “leave them hanging,” uncertain of the outcome. The anticipation of the cliffhanger is based on desperately wanting to know the fate of the things we care about.

I discuss escalating bangs in The Art of Pacing. This is the point in a scene where the stakes are either precipitously raised to a whole new level and/or when the stakes you thought the scene were about abruptly change into something completely different. If you cut more or less on the exact moment that the escalating bang is revealed, the anticipation of the cliffhanger is based on being uncertain about where the scene is going and also the eagerness of wanting to take action in the new reality presented by the bang.

This particular cliffhanger is basically a combination of both types: The escalating bang of the demon’s arrival has both changed the nature of the scene and put the PCs in jeopardy.

(As I point out in Part 5 of The Art of Pacing, cliffhangers also don’t always have to come at the end of a session: If the group has split up, you can create numerous cliffhangers by cutting from one group to another.)

“Anticipation” is a key word here. What makes the cliffhanger desirable as a dramatic technique is that the players immediately want to keep playing, while simultaneously denying that to them. It’s a great way of ending a session, because it makes the players eager for the next session.

ENDING THE SESSION

Cliffhangers are not the only effective way to end a session. At the end of Session 21, for example, we closed on the resolution of some pretty heavy stakes for the character of Dominic. Those significant character beats — particularly if the characters themselves are thinking deeply about how things turned out — are a good place for a session break because it lets the players live long in that moment.

In other cases, like the end of Session 19, you might want to break at the point where a scenario has reached a definitive conclusion. This helps to solidify a sense of accomplishment — the idea that a new milestone in the campaign has been reached. When you look back at a campaign, these milestones will chart out the course you’ve all taken together. (From a practical standpoint, this can also be a good place to wrap up for the night so that everyone — including you! — can have some time to think about what they want to do next.)

If you want to study different types of effective session endings, think about how other serialized forms of entertainment — television shows and comic books, for example — wrap up their installments. You’ll find a lot of different types of endings, and also a lot of variations within those types.

The real trick with an RPG, though, is finding that ending. Unlike a scriptwriter, you only have a limited amount of control over where the game session will take you and how fast it will take you there. That’s actually why I use the word “finding”: Whereas the scriptwriter can sculpt the ending they want, as a GM you need to instead be aware of when the ending happens and then actually end the session.

If you miss a potential ending, there probably won’t be another coming along for awhile. That’s when you’ll end up just kind of awkwardly cutting at some arbitrary point because you’ve run out of time.

THE ENDING WINDOW

To find an effective ending, you’ll first need to be aware when you’re in what I call the “ending window.” That’s the window of time at the end of the session in which it’s acceptable to say, “That’s all folks!” It doesn’t matter how perfect an ending a particular moment would be if it comes two hours into a four hour session. (Although that might be a good place to take a break.)

For me, in a four hour session, the ending window is generally from about 15 minutes before our scheduled end time to about 10 minutes after. (If I’m running for a group where the end time is hard-and-fast, it’s more like twenty to twenty-five minutes before the scheduled end of the session.) If I’m in that window or approaching that window, I know that I’m looking for an ending and can start framing and pacing the action accordingly.

I have a simple trick for staying aware of where I am in the session: A kitchen timer. Before the session starts, I simply set the timer to go off at our scheduled end time and put it discretely behind my screen. (It’s usually surrounded by a pool of dice.) I can then tell in a glance where we’re at: Three hours left. Two hours left. One hour left. Half an hour left. In the ending window.

Why not just use the timer on your phone? The timer on my phone generally needs to be checked – i.e., I have to turn on the screen. It also opens up the potential for other distractions in the form of notifications and the like. The kitchen timer, by contrast, just sits there in my peripheral vision. Not only can I check it with a flick of my eye, but I’ll periodically notice it throughout the session without having to actively think about checking the time. It keeps me tuned in.

Over time, you’ll find that your knowledge of where you are in a session will bring other benefits besides pacing for effective endings. Some of this is practical (like knowing when you should take a break). Others can be a little more ephemeral — you’ll start to develop a gut instinct for pacing; when you have time to let things play out and when you need to get the players moving with harder framing and higher stakes.

NEXT:
Campaign Journal: Session 23B – Running the Campaign: Dungeon Clues
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

SESSION 23A: LET SLIP THE DOGS OF HELL

June 7th, 2008
The 10th Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

“WHO DARES TO VIOLATE THIS SANCTUARY OF CHAOS?”

They whirled around and looked up. Above, on a balcony in the tower directly above them, a demon with a goat-like head was floating several feet off the ground. It carried a vicious looking axe with a blade that gleamed in the sun.

Its powerful legs pushed off the wall behind it, propelling it above their heads. It then dropped to the balcony, floating a few inches above the floor as it swung the axe towards Tee’s head.

Tee tumbled backwards, rolling to her feet in a low crouch. Tor and Agnarr pushed past Ranthir, raised their swords – which they had held uneasily by their sides during the conversation with the Cobbledman – and attacked.

The demon caught Tor’s blade with the broad side of his axe, but Agnarr’s sword cut deeply into its arm. It felt as if he was chopping into a block of solid wood, but the magic blade cleanly cut through the thick skin and found the blood and bone below.

The demon threw back its head and howled in pain. It swept the axe violently back and forth – first smashing the broad side of it against Tor’s head (sending him staggering) and then reversing the blow to smash into the Agnarr’s ribs.

Agnarr gasped as the axe cut through his armor and deep into his side, sending a gush of blood pouring from the wound. The demon’s horns jutted forward, smashing into Agnarr’s forehead.

Elestra reached out, feeling the Spirit of the City and using her own force of will to energize the strength of it around her.

Ranthir, meanwhile, was thinking quickly: He hit the demon with a powerful disenchantment, causing its levitation charm to vanish. The demon fell, landing awkwardly and stumbling forward.

Agnarr, grimacing through the pain, took advantage of the momentary distraction and swung his sword again.

The demon whirled away from the blade, but it still cut deeply into his side. Then it ducked under Tor’s blade and leapt over the parapet, murmuring demonic syllables. Arcane powers caught it up in the air and it levitated out over the central courtyard.

As it turned back to them, Elestra finished gathering her strength and focused a sizzling arc of lightning which tore through the demon where it flew. But the demon seemed entirely unfazed as the electricity leapt from its horns and arced through its body, instead crying aloud: “You will rue the day that you crossed the path of True Chaos!”

Tee, who had retreated back into the keep itself, suddenly heard heavy footsteps thudding across the stone ceiling above her – which would mean that something was on the roof! “Look out!”

But she was too late to warn any of them. Two hounds of hell leapt from the upper level, landing on the balcony near Tor and Agnarr. Their skin had the appearance of cooled lava; their eyes were smoldering pits; and their nostrils breathed gouts of flame. As they skidded across the balcony, they turned and gaped their mouths: Twin cones of flame washed across Agnarr and Tor.

But Tor had raised his shield at the last possible moment, and Agnarr had eased in behind it: Although they still felt a little broiled in their armor, they were mostly angered by the fell beasts.

Although that might have been more true for Tor than it was for Agnarr, because a huge grin was growing across the barbarian’s face: “Dogs! They’re dogs!”

Tee called out from behind him: “You are not allowed to keep one!”

The smile fell from Agnarr’s face, and he dutifully moved forward with Tor. Their blades worked in quick unison and – although the hounds were covered in skin like liquid stone – their magical blades made quick work of them.

Meanwhile, the demon had fled – abandoning his hounds, reaching the far wall of the keep, and dropping down out of sight.

THE SQUARE TOWER

With the demon gone and the demonic hounds reduced to a pile of burning slag, Elestra released the powers of lightning she had called and the smell of ozone faded from the air. Turning to the others she said, “So where to now?”

“I still want to try to get to the square tower,” Tee said. “If Maquent’s journal is still accurate, then the other half of the spiral contrivance or key or whatever it is must be hidden in there.”

There had been a trapdoor in the ceiling of the room filled with arcane symbols and the remnants of old rites, so they climbed up through that to reach the roof. From there they were able to cross over to the square tower.

But they found that the square tower had no doors or windows. Tee donned her boots of levitation to reach the top of tower, but there was no entrance there, either. She then spent the better part of half an hour scouring every inch of the tower’s 24-foot high walls, convinced that there must be some hidden entrance.

Ranthir, meanwhile, was looking through Maquent’s journal. Just as Tee, in frustration, was giving up on her search, Ranthir reread the entry from Noctural 14^th, 787 YD. Then he read it out loud to the others: “I have somewhat befriended the Cobbledman. He grows more mad with each day, however. I hid my half of the spiral contrivance in his tower with him. I shall not even tell Radanna. Of course, she will not tell me where she keeps her half, either, but there’s only one place it could be. Certainly no one could sneak a ladder up to that secret door without her knowing about it.”

“If the key is in the square tower and it requires a ladder to reach the secret entrance, maybe that entrance isn’t on the wall of the tower – maybe it’s under the tower.”

They returned down to the large, empty room on the fifth floor of the tower. “We should be directly beneath the tower here,” Ranthir said.

Tee floated up to the ceiling and quickly found a bit of false plaster. Scraping that aside with one of her dragon-hilted daggers, she revealed a small keyhole. She took out the key she had found in the nook below the ruined garden and found that it was a perfect fit.

When she turned it, however, the entire stone block – 6-feet to the side – came loose and fell. It slammed into her and spun her down and to one side. Agnarr, standing below, was caught squarely by the block and driven to the ground.

Dominic rushed forward to help. Agnarr pushed the rock off of his crushed legs and waited patiently for the priest’s holy energy to repair his broken bones. “I’m getting tired of falling rocks in this place.”

“I think they went with cheap mortar,” Dominic said, reaching out to lay a hand on Tee’s bleeding scalp as she settled woozily to the floor next to them.

“When we move in here it’ll have to be the first thing we fix,” Ranthir said.

“We aren’t moving into the demon-infested house,” Tee said.

Tor smiled. “It won’t be demon-infested when we’re done with it.”

“That’s right,” Elestra said. “We’ve already scared off one demon today.”

“He’ll be back,” Tee said grimly.

The stone block had revealed a hole leading through the floor into the bottom level of the square tower. Niches carved in the sides of the hole would make it easy for someone to climb up if they were at the top of a ladder, but they were superfluous for them: Tee’s head was clearing now and so she floated up through the hole.

She emerged into a small, square room. A ladder of iron rungs driven into one wall led up to a trapdoor. The other walls of the room were covered with carved niches. Most of these niches were empty, but in four of them Tee could see flasks of liquid. In another there were a half dozen sticks of black-and-gold incense. In a sixth lay a small gray idol.

Tee grimaced. “I hate idols. Idols haven’t been nice to me.” She unlaced her boots and dropped them down so that Agnarr could follow her up.

Tee climbed up the ladder to the next level of the tower. Here she found a plain room of stone with an iron chest lying off to one side. The ladder continued up to a trap door of stone secured with a thick iron bar.

The lock on the chest proved tricky, but Tee eventually managed to get it open. Inside she found bags of silver and gold coins, a thick candlestick of pure gold, and a finely-crafted headband of woven silver. Laying at the bottom chest was half of a circular disk of black obsidian with a bright red stone spiraled through it.

Tee climbed back down the ladder and found Agnarr peering quizzically at one of the niches. “Don’t touch anything. I’ve found Radanna’s half of the contrivance… key… whatever it is.”

“Now we just need to kill the Cobbledman for the other half.” Agnarr grinned.

“I don’t think we’ll need to kill him. He seemed all right with the idea of letting us borrow it.”

“I thought it was inside of him. He grabbed his chest when he was talking about it.”

“I think he was just grabbing at something under his shirt.”

“Oh.” Agnarr thought about this for a second and then jerked his head towards the niches in the wall. “Should we take this stuff?”

Tee glowered at the idol. “I guess we’d better figure out what it is. Why don’t you go back down and send Dominic up to look at it.”

Agnarr shrugged and jumped down through the hole.  He handed the boots over to Dominic, who murmured a prayer to Vehthyl and floated up just high enough for his eyes to clear the edge.

He was able to quickly identify the flasks as containing unholy water. The incense had a strong aura of magic about them.

“And the idol?” Tee asked.

“It has no enchantment upon it. I think it’s safe.”

Tee picked it up and found that it was formed of compressed ash. It was really nothing more than a trinket. She stuck it in her bag, decided against taking the unholy water, and then gingerly picked up the incense.

Dominic, meanwhile, had floated back down to join the others. Agnarr threw the boots back up, Tee laced them up, and floated down. She held out the sticks of incense. “Ranthir can you identify what these are?”

Ranthir took them and raised his eyebrows. “I can, actually. These golden runes on the side are unmistakable. This is vision incense. The six sticks must be burned simultaneously, and their conjoined enchantments create a powerful connection between this world and the dreams of those nearby. Great truth can be found in the visions revealed by incense like this. There are many in Isiltur who use it.”

NEXT:
Running the Campaign: Cliffhangers – Campaign Journal: Session 23B
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

Go to Part 1

We’re continuing our series of capsule reviews of Descent Into Avernus-related material on the Dungeon Masters Guild, giving a very high overview of my thoughts/impressions of each book. Unless otherwise noted, the material has not been playtested.

You may also want to review this Guide to Grades at the Alexandrian. The short version: My general philosophy is that 90% of everything is crap, and crap gets an F. I’m primarily interested in grading the 10% of the pile that’s potentially worth your time. Anything from A+ to C- is, honestly, worth checking out if the material sounds interesting to you. If I give something a D it’s pretty shaky. F, in my opinion, should be avoided entirely.

A LIGHT IN THE DARK: A Light in the Dark bills itself as tying into the continuity of Descent Into Avernus, but it’s set in Baldur’s Gate while having a suggested level at which PCs in the campaign will have long since left Baldur’s Gate behind. Its purpose, therefore, is somewhat confusing.

The maps are nice and the concept is fine, but the adventure itself is virtually unplayable. It’s more or less written as a Choose Your Own Adventure novel, consisting of literally just pages and pages (and pages!) of horribly executed boxed text. Often this boxed text is outlining literal A or B choices. It repeatedly ends with the refrain, “What do you want to do?” literally scripted in. And it is constantly either telling the players what their characters do or simply leaving them helplessly standing by while entire scenes play out without their input.

Perhaps the most egregious example of this comes when the PCs confront the villain. While the PCs stand unable to act (because the DM is reading), the boxed text has:

• The villain order a zombie girl to go punish her parents.
• The zombie girl leave the room.
• The girl’s parents scream and beg for mercy from the neighboring room.
• The sound of thumping that turns to screams of pain.
• “The noises they make will stay with you for a long time.”

This is one of those times where I wish I had more nice things to say about an adventure. But I don’t.

• Grade: F

BALDUR’S GATE – THE STRUGGLES OF STELMANE: This is another adventure which presents itself as being something you can incorporate into a Descent Into Avernus campaign, but which is nevertheless set in Baldur’s Gate with a suggested level too high to be used in the campaign. (What gives, folks?)

The Struggles of Stelmane is a fairly simple adventure: A mind flayer is attempting to take control of Duke Stelmane. The PCs are told by the Duke’s assistant to investigate some caves. They do so and find a tunnel that leads to Stelmane’s manor. (Which – pet peeve alert! – is incorrectly referred to as a villa.) The mind flayer is in the manor. The PCs kill it.

Unfortunately, the adventure spends a great deal of time spinning its wheels. (It’s about 5 pages of content in a 20 page PDF.) And when it’s not spinning its wheels, it frequently just doesn’t make sense: The mind flayer telepathically read Stelmane’s mind and for some reason this is causing Stelmane’s physical health to deteriorate. The duke’s assistant requests a meeting with the PCs, but the only thing he asks them to do is investigate a murder that doesn’t happen until the PCs show up to meet him. The adventure frequently talks about “following a series of clues,” but there are no clues to follow. And so forth.

• Grade: D-

DANCE OF DEATHLESS FROST: Dylan Ramsey delivers a clever little expansion of Descent Into Avernus, giving the PCs an opportunity to track down the mysterious phylactery of deathless frost. With it they can either control the demon lord Kostchtchie or destroy it and turn him mortal.

My one quibble with the adventure is that it suffers a little from what I call “idea guy syndrome.” A common variant is, “Wouldn’t this encounter be cool?” This often takes the form of the bad guys sending minions to attack the PCs… but the encounter isn’t actually statted up (e.g., “She could send fiendish assassins or a simulacrum to try to steal the phylactery from the characters.”) But you also get stuff like, “It feels like the NPC’s lair should have fiendishly clever defenses… but I couldn’t figure out how to do it, so here’s a couple of vague ideas.”

So, basically, you’re going to have to put some elbow-grease into Dance of Deathless Frost if you want to use it. Nevertheless, Ramsey delivers some cool ideas, memorable locales, and nifty ideas, so it’s probably worth the effort. (I will most likely be incorporating this scenario into the Remix.)

• Grade: C-

FORGES OF AVERNUS: The central conceit of Forges of Avernus is that each Warlord of Avernus maintains their own forge to outfit their warriors, and each of these forges is skilled in the creation of special, themed weapons. I like this a lot: One of the big shortcomings in Descent Into Avernus is that it details the warlords, but not their warbands. I wanted to supplement that lack, and Forges of Avernus does a lot of heavy lifting for me. Not only will the unique weapons make for distinct combat encounters with each warband, but the supplement also details the NPC forge masters (adding extra roleplaying opportunities).

The only drawback here is that the mechanical mastery of 5^th Edition is a little shaky. For example, there are several effects triggered “on a critical failure,” but there are no critical failures in 5^th Edition. This doesn’t appear to be a crippling problem, but when you see a weak grasp of mechanical fundamentals it erodes trust in the rest of the mechanical implementation, so you’ll probably want to double-check these elements as you add them to your campaign.

• Grade: B-

BITTER RIVALS: Bitter Rivals is a slick, professional-grade adventure designed to be seamlessly slotted into Descent Into Avernus. It adds a ton of lore to the warlord Bitter Breath and completely details their warcamp as part of a raid scenario. This is a no-brainer for any GM planning to run Descent Into Avernus, with or without the Remix.

The organization and level of detail, in particular, are fantastic. One example is the formatting of the mission briefing given in the scenario hook. Rather than using traditional boxed text, J.A. Valeur of Eventyr Games uses in-line headings to identify the major bullet points of the briefing while providing the written dialogue associated with that bullet point in plain text behind the in-line heading. I hadn’t seen this technique previously, but it’s best-of-both-worlds stuff.

There’s also a really nifty DM’s Cheat Sheet section of the adventure, which basically presents the entire adventure a second time but with only the essential elements (like encounter rosters, the bullet point version of the mission briefing, etc.). Stripped of the surrounding explanatory text, this is a great document for efficiently running the adventure without flipping back and forth through multiple pages.

• Grade: B

INFERNAL BOUNTY: Another Descent Into Avernus supplement from Eventyr Games, this short 2-page PDF is basically just a random encounter with a pair of bounty hunter devils (using some very lightly customized stat blocks) for $0.50. In addition to being a random encounter, the fiend duo can make a decent response team that can be flexibly deployed at need. But I just don’t see a lot of value in Infernal Bounty even at the fairly cheap price point.

• Grade: D

ENHANCED DEVILS: Another Eventyr supplement, Enhanced Devils looks at a dozen or so devils from the Monster Manual and soups up their stat blocks, giving them extra abilities that don’t necessarily make them more powerful, but do give them more options in combat so that multiple encounters with them stay fresh.

I haven’t playtested these yet, but they look balanced and useful. The important thing here, though, is the word “yet.” I’ve talked in the past about how 4^th Edition’s design philosophy of reducing the breadth of abilities possessed by monsters (which has carried through, albeit to a lesser extent, in 5^th Edition) on the theory that the typical monster only lasts for 3-5 rounds is fundamentally flawed (because, if nothing else, when you build an encounter with 5 of those monsters, the stat block immediately has 15-25 rounds of actions), so it’s probably not surprising to discover that I like what this supplement is doing and I like these stat blocks. I’ll be using them to help keep encounters in Avernus fresh and interesting.

• Grade: C

TEMPLE OF THE BROKEN PRINCE: Yet another adventure that sells itself as a plug-and-play side quest for Descent Into Avernus, but isn’t actually designed to work that way. This time, the adventure is set on Avernus, but the recommended level is too low.

In actual practice, the location is not really designed for Avernus. But it IS a fairly nice location-crawl that could easily be slotted into any traditional D&D setting. (If you still wanted to use Temple of the Broken Prince as part of the Remix, it might work well as the mission that sends the PCs out of Elturel just in time for the whole city to get sucked into Hell.) A demonic temple turned into a demonic sepulcher, the rooms are weird, sinister, and drenched with dread. There’s also a couple new monsters that look like creepy fun.

• Grade: C+

More DMs Guild Capsule Reviews – Go to the Avernus Remix