AC writes:

When I first picked up Waterdeep: Dragon Heist I’d already looked at some reviews and I knew the module was a bit wonky. After giving it my own read through I knew I wanted to somehow use all the villains provided and fortunately I found the Alexandrian Remix.

After many, many, MANY hours of reading and prep I started out with our game group. Up to Chapter 1 (Ch1 of the module, so 5B of the Remix) things were going well enough. Of course that’s also only the barest start of the whole thing so that’s not saying much.

Since then it’s been an unmitigated disaster.

Things got badly bogged down trying to refurbish Trollskull Manor, this was due to my attempting to introduce the party to all the faces around the neighborhood so that they’d actually be invested in the place AND so that for the investigation yet to come they’d have some folks to actually talk to that wouldn’t just be random Joe/Jane shop-owner whose been (surprise!) next door all this time.

After slogging through that I thought we’d be able to make some headway… WRONG. I made efforts to establish some timelines, throw in a couple of faction missions, then the Cassalanters introduced themselves and their “problem”, and the parades were about to occur along with the opening of the inn.

Unfortunately I guess I miscalculated what the party would do… like I suppose heroes would, as soon as they found out about the cursed children they took off at a gallop to track down Renaer, get whatever info they could from him… and they were on the verge of taking off for Neverwinter to put the screws to his father!

At that point I shut down the game session as I had no idea how the get the damn thing back on track and I’m on the verge of just giving up on it entirely. No fault of the Remix, it’s the DM to blame here.

I’m not a first time DM, I’ve been running D&D campaigns on and off for years. The last campaign I lead was the two part Horde of the Dragon Queen / Rise of Tiamat. Maybe this time I bit off more than I could chew with the Remix, maybe I expected more from our group as I was trying to give them more of a sandbox and not so much a hack ’n slash railroad. I dunno.

What I’m wondering is if anyone else has had things go so badly wrong that they got to the point where they were seriously considering just giving up.

One side note: Trying to game with everyone locked down and remote has been a huge challenge for me. I find the loss of true interaction you get from being face to face with players in the room has killed much of my ability to improvise and is a serious impediment to building up any sort of momentum on game nights. Constantly having to repeat ourselves, pausing for long moments just in case someone else is about to say something, or just straight up technical difficulties. It’s all conspiring to suck the fun out of getting together for game nights.

First, AC, you are not alone in struggling with remote gaming. I’ve had similar difficulties. Everything takes longer. Sitting at a camera is more exhausting than sitting around a table. The channels of communication between players are limited. Body language is limited. It all translates into an experience where it becomes much harder to set tone and pace.

As a long-time GM across many different systems, I have an engrained sense of what a good session “feels like.” Remote gaming seems to be just different enough to trigger a kind of uncanny valley response; even if the session was, on its own merits, a success, it just feels as if something went wrong.

Perhaps the clearest example of this is just the amount of stuff that gets done during a session. Even if you manage to avoid having any technical glitches, the constraints of the remote experience inherently mean less gets done:

• Referencing common material can be cumbersome, particularly if you’re not using a virtual tabletop or if the material in question hasn’t been integrated into the virtual tabletop. (Think of an action as simple as finding a reference in the book and handing it to another player to look at.)
• Constraints on simple physical demonstrations and body language often mean longer descriptions and explanations.
• At a physical table you can have multiple conversations happening simultaneously. This obviously doesn’t happen constantly, but having only one effective voice channel prevents side-table discussions. In combat this means the wizard and fighter can’t coordinate their attack while you’re resolving the cleric’s turn. It also means that Sarah and Chris can’t quietly figure out what they’re planning to do next while you’re running the scene with Peter spying on Heather’s date.

And so forth.

So even the simple metric of, “Did we get a good amount of stuff done in this session?” is disrupted in remote gaming. And it’s not even that the amount of stuff that you get done is actually a problem; it just feels like a problem because it’s out of sync with what years of experience have subconsciously taught you a “good session” feels like.

Something that may help is doing brief post mortems with your players: Literally just check in with them and find out how they felt the session went. You might find that it works well to do this immediately as the session ends (during the chatting and small talk after the action wraps for the night), or you might find it’s more effective to do it a couple days later by e-mail or text message. Either way, you’ll often find that your players actually really enjoyed sessions that you felt were a struggle, and I find that can help buoy my spirits. If they are having problems, turn the discussion towards solutions: Focus on what you all (as a group) could be doing (or doing differently) rather than simply moping over the rough edges. (If you’re having the initial discussion between sessions with each player separately, you may find it useful to open the next session by discussing the problems and collectively brainstorming solutions.)

But I digress. Let’s chat about where you are in your campaign.

MEANWHILE, IN NEVERWINTER…

I’m not there at the table with you, but while this may feel hopelessly messed up and out of control for you, I’m guessing the same is not true for your players.

First, let’s look at what went “wrong”… although I don’t think it’s actually wrong, per se. I would have waited to have the Casalanters approach the PCs until after the Dalakhar explosion. That way, the players would have known that the way to help the Cassalanters solve their problem (if that’s what they want to do) is by continuing their ongoing investigation.

What’s happened here is that you’ve given the players a clear screnario hook (“help the Cassalanters save their kids!”) before you’ve given them a clear way of pursuing that scenario hook. They’ve responded by creating their own way of pursuing that hook and aggressively going for it.

This is not a problem!

Okay, what’s the first thing you can do?

Go with it.

They want to put the screws on Lord Dagult. Following the principles of active play, pick up that toy (Lord Dagult) and ask yourself what the logical outcome of that would be. What would Lord Dagult’s response be?

(I mean, they’re pretty obviously not going to be able to “put the screws to him.” But when they try, what happens?)

Well, if these random blokes from Waterdeep know about the gold, then it’s more at risk than he thought! (That’s particularly true if the PCs let slip that their knowledge comes from the Cassalanters.)

But these folks also saved his son. So he might think of them as useful cat’s paws in the Grand Game? He might even warn them about the Cassalanters (“you’ve been tricked by devil worshipers!”) before offering them a heap of gold to act as HIS agents. Heck, he might even offer them ALL the gold; then the big revelation would be that Dagult doesn’t seem to think that the gold is the most important thing at stake here: It’s the Stone of Golorr itself that he prizes above all else!

“Bring me the Stone of Golorr with all its Eyes and I’ll tell you where the gold is!” he says. “Then you can give it to the Cassalanters or buy a pirate franchise in Luskan or spend it on the richest gigolos on the Sword Coast. Just bring me the damn Stone!”

If the PCs agree, then he’ll tell them to head back to Waterdeep. He’ll be sending one of his local agents to contact them. (That’s Dalakhar, of course. So, then… ka-boom.)

Alternatively, he might let some information inadvertently slip while trying to figure out what the PCs know. (“Does Manshoon know? What about the rest of the Zhentarim?”)

Or maybe it’s a total dead end and all the PCs have done is add another faction to the Grand Game as Lord Dagult floods Waterdeep with his agents.

The point is to just look at what Lord Dagult knows — not just historically, but about the state of the Grand Game right now and the PCs specifically (if anything) — and then just… let things play out. See what happens.

MEANWHILE, IN WATERDEEP…

On the other hand, an epic segue to Neverwinter may be far enough outside the intended scope of the campaign that you would prefer to avoid all that. That’s OK. Even sandboxes have borders, and Dragon Heist isn’t even a sandbox.

What you need to do here is take a step back, identify the thing the PCs need to be pointed at, and then figure out how to deflect their current vector (“Let’s go question Lord Dagult!”) towards the thing they need.

In some cases it may not be possible to do this without railroading them, in which case I think you should find a different way. But if you’re running a robust, dynamic scenario (which I would argue the Alexandrian Remix of Dragon Heist qualifies as), you’ll often find that the PCs’ vector will end up naturally interacting with that scenario.

That’s the case here: If they’re still talking to Renaer, he can just say, “My father has a number of agents still active in Waterdeep. I know how to contact one of them. Why don’t I set up a meeting? They might be able to tell us what he’s up to.”

Renaer, of course, will then set up a meeting with Dalakhar for them. And then … ka-boom.

You’ll note that many of my solutions here are looking for ways to point the PCs back at Dalakhar so that the explosion can happen. But the other key thing to keep in mind here is that Dalakhar’s death and the fireball are only “essential” to the Remix insofar as they’re designed to be the primary hook into the Grand Game for the PCs. But in your campaign, the PCs are already hooked. So Dalakhar and the explosion are relatively non-essential.

Since the PCs are already in the Grand Game, it’s a good opportunity to review Part 7: How the Remix Works. There’s a simple checklist there for the GM to follow when running the campaign:

(1) Are the PCs looking for a lead to one of the Eyes? If yes, pick a Faction Outpost and point them at it.

(2) Did the PCs just piss off one of the Factions? If yes, pick a Faction Response Team and have them target the PCs.

(3) Are the PCs floundering and don’t know what to do next? If yes, pick a Faction Response Team and have them target the PCs. (If you’re not sure how they might target the PCs, just have them show up and try to kill them.)

Repeat until the campaign is done.

This list is really just a default algorithm for actively playing the core elements of the campaign.

If you can’t redirect to the Dalakhar assassination in some way, you’ll have to do a little extra lifting to direct the PCs to the stone itself (since their investigation of the fireball won’t lead them to the Gralhunds). But keep in mind, as described in Part 2 of the Remix, that this chain of events already has a default outcome if the PCs get involved which ends with Jarlaxle in possession of the Stone (i.e., one of the Factions that the default algorithm consistently prompts you to pick up and play with).

To come full circle: I don’t think your campaign is as “out of control” as it feels to you right now. In fact, I think your campaign is in a great place. You’ve got a group of players who are clearly heavily invested in what’s happening AND self-motivated enough to create their own plans and aggressively push for the outcomes they want. That’s FANTASTIC.

Follow their lead.

This is an experimental new series for the site. It might end up just being one-and-done. Let me know what you think of it in the comments. If you have any questions you’d like to have considered for future columns, throw those in, too. The goal here is to address specific situations from actual play; the general gist being, “If I were the GM in this situation, what would I do?” (As opposed to more abstract questions about general methodology or theorycraft.)

Go to Ask the Alexandrian #2

Places to Go, People to Be, a French RPG ‘zine, has finished posting all 16 parts of Structures de jeu, which is the translation of my series on Game Structures. (The original essay can be found here.)

You can check out previous PTGPTB translations of Alexandrian content here and here.

Adversary Roster from Infinity: Quantronic Heat

Adversary rosters are one of the essential tools in my GM’s kit. In 2016, I wrote that I considered them my greatest “secret weapon”:

They allow me to run dynamic scenarios of considerable complexity on battlefields that can easily sprawl across a dozen areas with a relative simplicity which still leaves me with enough brainpower to manage varied stat blocks and clever tactics […] permanently disrupting the staid rhythms of “kick in the door” dungeoncrawling in your campaign. Adversary rosters are also a great way for running stealth missions, heists, and covert ops.

Of course, I have no interest in actually keeping them secret. Since writing that essay in 2016, I’ve introduced them to an even larger audience through my remixes of Dragon Heist and Descent Into Avernus; taught them as an essential tool in the Infinity Roleplaying Game core rulebook; and used them prominently in Over the Edge: Welcome to the Island.

I’d first mentioned the concept of the adversary roster here on the Alexandrian all the way back in 2011, referring to them as a “monster roster” and using G1 Against the Giants as an example of how they could be used. But by that point I’d already been using them for years.

While discussing this history with Robb Minneman on Patreon, I ended up delving into my old game notes in an effort to figure out when I’d first used an adversary roster: I knew that Against the Giants had actually been one of the earliest rosters I’d developed (which is one of the reasons I’d used it as the example in my 2011 post). And I also remembered using them in Forge of Fury around the same time.

As I sifted through my notes, though, I discovered (or, I guess, re-discovered) a far more nuanced development process. Adversary rosters are, in many ways, such a simple concept that one might think they would have sprung full-blown from the brow of Zeus. That was even more-or-less how I remembered it happening, but it wasn’t true.

So I thought it might be interesting to take a detailed look at the actual development process to see how this concept evolved.

THREE DAYS TO KILL

Around 2000-02 I was running (or attempting to run) three D&D 3^rd Edition campaigns:

• The Quest of the Seals was a fetch-quest campaign using a mixture of original and published adventures. I launched the campaign with John Tynes’ Three Days to Kill (Atlas Games).
• Freeport was a heavily modified version of Chris Pramas’ Freeport Trilogy (Green Ronin), placed at the northern tip of the Teeth of Light (a chain of islands in my home campaign setting) and studded with some island-hopping adventures.
• The War of the Giants, was a campaign I wanted to run that would start with G1 Against the Giants, but rather than transitioning to drow-related shenanigans, it would have instead escalated into a full-scale humans vs. giants war on the northern frontiers. (This never really got off the ground and didn’t progress beyond Against the Giants).

If you’re familiar with the history of D&D, then you’ll know that Three Days to Kill and Death in Freeport were the first two third-party adventures published for 3^rd Edition, both being released on the exact same day the Player’s Handbook was released. It’s not really a coincidence that my first two full-fledged 3^rd Edition campaigns launched with those scenarios: I’d scooped them up at Gen Con 2000.

In terms of how adversary rosters developed, The Quest of the Seals was the most important of these campaigns.

I’ve talked previously about how John Tynes, in Three Days to Kill, boils down the essential elements of a raid-type scenario. As noted in that discussion, part of a raid-type scenario is that “the defensive forces should be designed to respond as an active opposition force.” This is what that looked like in Three Days to Kill:

Now, this is not an adversary roster. But what it does do is separate the bad guys from the room key and, once again, emphasize that they’re going to be actively moving around the place.

When I prepped the adventure, I created a cheat sheet for the villa:

You can see that this is also not an adversary roster: It’s just a brief summary of the information from the module. When I ran the adventure, though, I really liked this: I liked the dynamic foes. And I liked having this information all on a cheat sheet that I could easily reference.

THE SUNLESS CITADEL

Three Days to Kill ends with someone (probably the PCs) accidentally opening a portal to Hell. For the purposes of my campaign, I basically upped the ante on this. As I noted in the campaign journal:

Behind you, the Blood Temple crouches upon the side of the mountain, pulsing and screaming into the night. A fiendish red light floods the heavens, obscuring the pale stars which shine down upon your retreating forms. The maw of Hell has been opened, and if there is a power which can shut it… you do not know what it might be.

The Quest of the Seals was, in fact, a quest for the three seals required to shut the portal to Hell: I placed one in The Sunless Citadel, another in the Forge of Fury, and the third in a homebrew module called the Monastery of Light. I then positioned these locations at opposite ends of my campaign world, so that the PCs would have to criss-cross the map on their epic journey.

But I digress. The important bit is that the next adventure on the docket was The Sunless Citadel.

And in my prep notes for The Sunless Citadel there’s this page:

Now, this looks a lot like an adversary roster. But this is only partly true. Do you see the entries for “Total Kobolds” and “Total Goblins”? That’s because this was actually a worksheet for tracking casualties.

See, The Sunless Citadel is occupied by a clan of kobolds and a clan of goblins at war with each other. As written, this conflict is kind of a cold war (with the kobolds occupying one set of rooms and the goblins occupying a different set of rooms). But I wanted to make this an ACTIVE conflict, with the goblins and kobolds actively feuding, raiding, and fighting. The casualty sheet was designed so that I could track this in real time.

This becomes even clearer with some stuff I designed for the group’s second session in the Citadel. The PCs had allied with the kobolds and fallen asleep in a side chamber. I decided to launch the second session with them being awakened by a major goblin raid on the kobolds.

I actually prepped the outcome of the entire fight if the PCs didn’t get involved. This was sort of like prepping a scenario timeline, but mostly misguided because it continued far past the point where the PCs were likely to intervene and change everything. (On the other hand, it was really four separate timelines — one for each room which had been assaulted — so this was mitigated somewhat: If the PCs intervened in Area 15, for example, I could use the timeline to easily keep track of what was happening in other rooms. Looking back with 20+ years of experience with 3^rd Edition, though, it would have made a lot more sense to reduce the number of rounds involved here by at least a third.)

In concert with this timeline, I also had a more specific casualty tracker:

In practice, that cheat sheet listing the locations of every goblin and kobold in the place did result in me beginning to haltingly use it like a proto-adversary roster (moving goblins and kobolds around to reinforce various areas), but the concept hadn’t fully gelled yet.

THE DEPTHS OF RAGE

As the PCs left The Sunless Citadel and headed west towards The Forge of Fury, one of the adventures they had along the road was “Depths of Rage,” a scenario from Dungeon Magazine #83 by J.D. Wiker that I combined with some material from Carl Sargent’s Night Below campaign.

Wiker’s “Depths of Rage” is a really cool scenario where the PCs delve into a goblin lair and then, when they’re at the deepest point of the dungeon, an earthquake hits and causes large parts of the dungeon to collapse. Now, with the dungeon completely transformed, the PCs need to crawl back out!

So this is a really cool, dynamic dungeon where the key entries and monster locations shift pre- and post-quake.

Night Below, on the other hand, includes notes in its key about how the monsters will dynamically react to the PCs’ presence and attempt to alert monsters in other locations (and also how the current location will be different if they have been previously alerted). For example

5. Thief Guards

[…]

If the wyvern watch at area 4 goes off, alerting them to the presence of intruders, Tinsley slips away towards area 10 to alert the fighter guards in the lower caverns (area 12), while Caswell hides behind one of the many columnar rocks.

I kind of combined these two ideas in an effort to make the dungeon even more dynamic and reactive. What I ended up with was an adversary cheat sheet that looked like this:

Which was… interesting.

No, not really. I mean, it worked. The adventure was great. But trying to program my prep notes like a computer game was a terrible idea — pure contingency prep instead of tool prep.

The last thing I prepped as part of this adventure, though, was a tracking sheet. Basically just a list of every area in the scenario so that I could actively track which goblins were where as a result of the various Alerts being triggered:

When I’d filled out this tracking sheet, what I had, of course, was something that looked a lot like the proto-adversary roster from The Sunless Citadel (i.e., Area 16 – 4 goblins), with the key difference being that this had been specifically developed to move the goblins around.

You’ll also notice that I had chunked the dungeon into sections: the Western Caves and the Eastern Caves. This was a natural division in Wiker’s design of the caverns, and breaking the goblin forces into these two separate chunks I kept each chunk to a manageable level of complexity.

THE FORGE OF FURY

Which brings us, finally, to my prep notes for a radically expanded Forge of Fury. It’s here that all of these ideas gel into the adversary roster. It looked like this:

Following in the footsteps of the goblins & kobolds of The Sunless Citadel and the east & west caves of “Depths of Rage,” you can see that I’ve chunked Forge of Fury into factions. This, obviously, is the adrak faction.

You can see that I’m still including a separate list of everyone in the faction. I did this for the purpose of tracking casualties, just as I had done in the previous two adventures. (Shortly thereafter I realized I could just track casualties directly on the area roster so that I wasn’t trying to do double-entry bookkeeping in the middle of a session.)

You might also note that I was indexing by AREA instead of by ACTION GROUP. (Compare to the roster from Quantronic Heat at the beginning of this article.) This is really a legacy of how the adversary roster evolved out of a traditional dungeon key (i.e., I’m literally going through the module and listing all the monsters in Area 15, then all the monsters in Area 16, etc.) and it persisted in my notes for many years even when I wasn’t adapting published adventures.

Reviewing my other campaign notes, it looks like I made the swap around 2009, probably as part of the In the Shadow of the Spire campaign.

(Why is the swap important? Conceptually it puts the focus on the adversaries you’re actively playing rather than the area they’re currently in. More importantly it makes it A LOT easier to use advanced techniques like variable areas, patrols, and the like. It also makes doing roster updates easier. See Art of the Key – Part 4: Adversary Rosters.)

In any case, the pay-off for these adversary rosters in Forge of Fury was immediate and spectacular at the table: Things kicked off with a truly epic siege as the PCs sought to break through the goblin defenses at the Mountain Door. After getting through the door itself, the PCs were able to strategically test the goblin defenses, while the goblins were able to move their reinforcements around.

Later, the PCs became trapped in the depths of the dungeon, cut off by the movement of enemy troops on the levels above them. You can read the conclusion of those adventures in Tales from the Table: In the Depths of Khunbaral.

The whole thing remains one of the coolest and most memorable dungeon adventures I’ve ever run, and the experience immediately cemented the adversary roster as a technique for creating awesome games. Having run hundreds of sessions since then using adversary rosters, I have only become more convinced that this is the case.

ThinkDM recently wrote a blog post discussing the skill list in 5^th Edition called 5 Skill D&D. His two main points are,

First: The optional rules that allow you to roll any Skill + Ability combination should just be the way that the game works rather than an optional rule. I enthusiastically endorse this: Not only is it basically a no-brainer to take advantage of this flexibility and utility, but if you DON’T use stuff like Charisma (Investigation) checks then there are some glaring holes in the default skill list.

Second: Once you’re using these optional rules, it becomes clear that there are many skills that don’t need to exist. The most clear-cut examples of this, in my opinion, are Athletics and Acrobatics. One of these is Physical Stuff + Strength while the other is Physical Stuff + Dexterity. If you can just combine a “Physical Stuff” skill with the appropriate ability score, then you clearly don’t need two different skills for this.

Concluding that the game, therefore, has a whole bunch of superfluous skills, ThinkDM aggressively eliminates and combines skill to end up with a list of just five skills:

• Fitness (Athletics, Acrobatics, Endurance)
• Speechcraft (Persuasion, Deception, Intimidation, Performance (oration))
• Stealth (Stealth, Deception (passing a disguise))
• Awareness (Investigation, Perception, Insight, Survival)
• Knack (Sleight of Hand, Medicine, Animal Handling, Performance (instrument))

(Note: He eliminates the Knowledge skills – Arcana, History, Religion, Nature, Medicine – entirely.)

While I agree with the general principles here, I have some quibbles with the, in my opinion, overzealous implementation. So let’s take a closer look at some of these decisions.

I’M SOLD

I’m sold on Fitness, Speechcraft, and Stealth.

Stealth is fairly self-explanatory: Most of the conflation here actually happened before 5^th Edition was even published, which – as I’ve discussed in Random GM Tips: Stealthy Thoughts, among other places – is something I’m fully in favor of.

Lumping all the social skills into Speechcraft might initially seem too reductionist, but it’s another good example of how ability score pairings can be used to distinguish different uses of the skill and differentiate characters: Charisma + Speechcraft can be used for making a good first impression, seducing someone through sheer sex appeal, or swaying a crowd’s opinion through an emotional appeal. Strength + Speechcraft can be used for physically threatening someone. Intelligence + Speechcraft can be used for witty repartee. And so forth.

I’ve also found that this kind of conflation can sidestep the conceptual difficult of trying to figure out which skill is appropriate when someone tries to, for example, persuade the local garrison to join them by lying to them about the goblins’ intentions while subtly threatening to expose the garrison captain’s dark secret. (Logically the debate about whether this is Perception, Deception, or Intimidation should just shift to which ability score is the most appropriate; I’m just saying that, in my experience, this doesn’t usually happen. Don’t really know why, but people just seem more willing to let the muddy reality of most social interactions default to any appropriately invoked option when it’s ability scores. This also frequently flows in the opposite direction, with players moving away from one-note presentations of “this is my deception” or “this is me persuading her” to more nuanced portrayals within the broad rubric of a skill like Speechcraft. Your mileage may vary.)

I particularly like the name of Speechcraft. It has a nicely fantasy-esque feel to it; evocative, but not binding.

By contrast, I don’t like Fitness as the name for a skill. Fitness is not an action, but rather a state of being, and I don’t think it clearly captures the spirit of most such tests made at the table. I’d stick with Athletics.

AWARENESS

As I discuss at length in Rulings in Practice: Perception-Type Tests, I think there’s a lot of utility in clearly distinguishing between noticing things and actively investigating things. This becomes even clearer, I think, when you start combining them with different ability scores: Charisma + Investigation is canvassing information and rumor-gathering. Perception + Wisdom/Charisma, on the other hand, is reading body language and the like.

Lumping Survival in here doesn’t make any sense to me at all. The skill is a lot more than just following tracks and, in my opinion, should be important enough to most D&D campaigns to merit its own silo.

KNACK

Knack is all too clearly “here’s a bunch of skills I need to arbitrarily glom together so that I can hit an arbitrary clickbait title.” There’s little reason that the pick-pocket should also be the party’s best healer. Conversely, not everyone who is good at riding a horse should automatically be great at picking pockets.

So split those back out.

KNOWLEDGE

My personal proclivity is that not only should there be at least enough knowledge skills that everyone in the group can have a distinct expertise (which often means more knowledge skills than party members), but that there should be enough knowledge skills that it becomes quite likely that any given group will, in fact, have holes in their knowledge.

(Why? Because that forces them to either work around the gap in their knowledge, do research, seek out an expert, and/or set a personal goal to become the expert they need. And those are all interesting outcomes.)

As I mentioned above, ThinkDM eliminates all knowledge-type skills. He offers a contradictory hodgepodge of reasons for this (for example, “no one knows everything” but also “the GM should always just assume the PCs know everything”) which I could discuss at more length, but honestly I’m tired of explaining why failure is narratively interesting and delayed gratification is satisfying.

What I really want is for a knowledge skill list to completely cover the fields of knowledge in a setting. This doesn’t mean getting super granular in the distinctions (quantum mechanics vs. electromagnetics vs. optics). Often the opposite, in fact. When a question of knowledge arises in the setting, what I want is for there to be a clear skill check that can answer the question.

This is why I really dislike the incomplete fields of knowledge in 5^th Edition’s current skill list and much prefer 3^rd Edition’s comprehensive list. (3^rd Edition was also designed to let people custom-design knowledge categories, although a surprising number of people never understood that.)

If we want to slice down the knowledge-type skills, I’d say start by saying that Backgrounds should grant proficiency in any related Knowledge checks.

And then my list of knowledge-type skills would be:

• Arcana
• Religion
• Lore
• Knowledge: (Specific Location)

With Lore here covering the entirety of mundane knowledge.

Thus we broadly distinguish between mystic shit, god-stuff, and everything else. This gives the opportunity to spread Knowledge around the table (instead of just one guy who’s a smarty-pants) and gives players the ability to flavor their character.

We’ve also given people a chance to say, “I know this city or forest or whatever really, really well.” It’s a skill type I often reach for as a GM (regardless of system) and I think it can be very flavorful for players looking to define their characters or give them a unique niche.

THE BIG LIST

• Animal Handling
• Arcana
• Athletics
• Investigation
• Knowledge: (Specific Location)
• Lore
• Medicine
• Perception
• Religion
• Sleight of Hand
• Speechcraft
• Stealth
• Survival

If you want an even tighter list, you can:

• Merge Investigation with Perception
• Fold Medicine into Lore
• Drop Sleight of Hand into Stealth

To give you a nice, notable number with 10 Skills.

TOOL PROFICIENCIES

In 5^th Edition, of course, skills are only half the story. You’ve also got tool proficiencies.

You don’t have to muck about with these, but I think there’s definitely some conflation here that would be valuable, although it’s a lot more fidgety. (This is somewhat inherent in the decision to use tool proficiencies in the first place.) 5^th Edition already sets precedent for this, however, with things like Vehicle (Land) and Vehicle (Water) proficiencies which cover a multitude of specific tools/vehicles.

The question I have is why other obvious candidates likes Musical Instruments and Gaming Sets weren’t similarly grouped together into a single proficiency.

At a certain point in staring at this, though, you realize it probably makes more sense to just create a list of skills that require tools to use:

• Alchemy
• Art
• Craft
• Gaming
• Music
• Thievery
• Vehicle (Air/Land/Water)

With the following notes:

• Navigator’s and Cartography Tools would be conflated into Survival.
• Forgery Kit would be conflated into Stealth or Thievery.
• Disguise Kit would be conflated into Stealth.
• Herbalism Kit is conflated into Alchemy.
• Poisoner’s Kit is conflated into Thievery (although you could make a case for a separate skill).

To make this actually work, of course, you’ll have to do additional work on how characters gain skills. May not be worth the headache, so keeping this short list in a separate silo (which can be trained) may still make the most sense.

Go to Table of Contents

There are several different ways that the PCs can complete the Avernian Quest, but the most immediate (and the one they’re most likely to be pursuing as they leave Elturel for the first time) is the Sword of Zariel. The vision they receive from Torm and the shredded remnants of Lulu’s memories point them towards a pair of kenku at Fort Knucklebones.

THE HISTORY OF FORT KNUCKLEBONES

The kenku Lulu is looking for are long dead. Lulu actually came to Fort Knucklebones hundreds of years ago, shortly after Zariel’s fall (see Part 6D).

See, there has always been a flock of kenku at Fort Knucklebones. For as long as anyone can remember. Longer, actually. The people in charge come and go, but the kenku are always there. The current boss is Mad Maggie, but before that there was:

• Lord Fauxen, a human warlock
• A flock of vrock, who secretly used the fort as a forward supply base in the Blood War
• Xartemug, a pit fiend

And so forth.

Although no one remembers Lulu here and no story of her original visit has been passed down, there is a vestige of her to be found among the local kenku: Kenku speak by mimicking words that they have heard. Flocks of kenku have small, unique collections of word “performances” that are collectively shared and passed down from one generation to the next. One such “word of the foreflock” in the Knucklebones flock is Lulu saying the word “love.” For generations, when these kenku have said that they love each other (or anyone else), they have spoken it with Lulu’s voice.

The kenku will recognize Lulu’s voice and become quite excited about this.

FORT KNUCKLEBONES

Fort Knucklebones is a trading post; a sort of Port Royal for the Avernian warlords where they come for supplies, recreation, and repairs. This also makes it a useful hub of operations for the PCs.

Mad Maggie is the current potentate of the fort. Although not a warlord herself, she is seen by them as an equal and the neutrality of the fort is (generally) respected.

The fort itself, based around an outcropping or red rock shaped like a clawed hand, is somewhat described in Descent Into Avernus, p. 80:

• There’s a rampart of rock, bones, and metal debris with a gatehouse.
• The outer court, roughly the area that lies between the rampart and the knuckle gates.
• There are four courtyards located between each of the knuckles. These courtyards are fronted by the knuckle gates, which can be shut for an additional line of defense, but are generally left open.
• There is a fastness within the outcropping, with access caves from most of the knuckle courtyards. The fastness includes various storehouses and also Maggie’s demesne.

Note: Fort Knucklebones is also likely to be the PCs’ first introduction to soul coins as a form of currency. Take the opportunity to push home the “you’re not in Kansas any more” moment. Check out Addendum: Soul Coins, for a more detailed look at how the coins can be used in Descent Into Avernus.

BETWEEN THE KNUCKLES: There are four courtyards located between the “knuckles” of the outcropping.

• The tinker’s shed, a service station for war machines run by the kenku. A large cave at the back of this courtyard serves as a garage. The kenku live in a number of smaller caves that line the fingers to either side of the courtyard. A number of these caves are quite high, and the kenku have to climb ladders carved into the rock. (According to the flock’s oral tradition, before their entire species was cursed, the kenku of Fort Knucklebones could simply fly up to these caves. That’s how long they’ve been living here.)
• The Well, a bar built up around a rare natural spring of clean water. This spring is the reason Fort Knucklebones has been so constantly occupied. The barkeep at the Well is named Natasha the Dark; she claims to be a “cloned daughter of Baba Yaga.” (This would imply that she’s the clone-sister of Iggwilv. She’s probably making it up. But who knows? Maybe she’s the real Tasha who invented Tasha’s hideous laughter and Iggwilv stole her)
• The arcade is filled with market tents. Maggie’s infernal bank, run by an imp named Sarcasia, can also be found here. (It houses her stockpile of soul coins, acts as a moneychanger, and offers loans of various sorts.)
• The hostel, located in the broad space between thumb and index finger, is more of a public campground. No fees are charged. Anyone can grab a slab of space and pitch a tent. (Maggie figures that if people are staying here, they’ll be spending money at the arcade and that’s where she gets her cut.) The imps love to play practical jokes on people staying here.

Note: “Tinker’s shed” is the generic term on Avernus for war machine repair shops or service stations. They take the name “shed” because they’re usually rather small. The kenku’s facility here at Fort Knucklebones is expansive, but still referred to as a shed.

INHABITANTS: For ease of reference, here’s a list of NPCs at Fort Knucklebones. Also arranged as a random table just in case:

If the PCs do end up making Fort Knucklebones a hub for their operations in Avernus, I’d recommend adding a few extra characters to this list and working it up with a Tavern Time™ structure. This is a good example of where smart prep means waiting to prep something until the players have started wading into it and you know you’ll need it.

KNUCKLEBONES ENCOUNTERS: Don’t use up all the encounters in the first fifteen minutes the PCs are at Fort Knucklebones. Or even their first visit. This stuff can build over time.

• Chukka & Clonk: Help repair war-machine (DIA, p. 83)
• Mickey: Limping from injury (DIA, p. 83)
• Imps: Play a practical joke (DIA, p. 84)
• Imps: Want PCs to kill Wazzik (DIA, p. 84)
• Barnabas: Find the flameskull’s missing tooth (DIA, p. 84)
• Redcaps: Offer PCs a severed finger as a friendship gift (DIA, p. 84)

If you rework Fort Knucklebones using the Tavern Time™ structure, you can pull these encounters into the NPC “topics of conversation.” (You’ll want 2-3 per NPC.)

Bonus Encounter: Natasha the Dark wants someone to cast hideous laughter on her. It reminds her of her sister.

THE 1-TO-10 SCALE: This is briefly described on DIA p. 80-81. It’s basically a mental shorthand for tracking what an NPC’s attitude is towards the PCs. You can actually track this sort of thing for all NPCs, on your campaign status document if it seems useful to you.

ARRIVING AT FORT KNUCKLEBONES

When the PCs come to Fort Knucklebones for the first time, we don’t want the kenku they’re looking for to be the first thing they see. Looking for the kenku will mean exploring the fort, pushing and pulling them into encounters with the various locations and characters here.

REDCAP WATCHPOST: There’s a watchpost in the fort’s ramparts manned by redcaps. Use the encounter described in DIA, p. 81.

OUTER COURT: As the PCs pass through the watchpost and into the outer court, describe three specific people (or groups of people) doing things around the courtyard. (One of these might be an encounter, but that’s probably not necessary right now.)

Note that you want to be specific. You don’t want to just describe a generic mélange of activity (e.g., “The courtyard is full of strange-looking creatures. There are horns and tails and a faint smell of sulfur.”). You want specific stuff they can choose to interact with.

None of these should be kenku. I recommend including a warlord gang (maybe hanging out around their war-machines outside the Well) as a way of foreshadowing or, if the PCs choose to interact with them, introducing this aspect of the campaign. (More on these gangs in Part 7E.)

FUTURE VISITS

On future visits to Fort Knucklebones I recommend having:

• 1d3 or 1d4-1 NPCs in the Outer Court and the Well.
• Having 1d2 or 1d3-1 NPCs in the other courtyards (plus whatever NPCs would logically be there, like the kenku in the garage).

If you expand the cast of characters here, you can probably bump those numbers up a notch.

Have one or two encounters on each visit. (If you haven’t gone for a full Tavern Time™ structure, in which case they’ll be keyed to the NPCs as you generate them.)

QUEST OF THE DREAM MACHINE

In the published book, Mad Maggie uses her dream machine to unlock Lulu’s memories and then Lulu’s memories guide the PCs as they journey across Avernus (through the twin railroads).

We are more or less going to invert this structure:

• The PCs come to Fort Knucklebones.
• The kenku explain that they can’t help, but maybe Mad Maggie can.
• Mad Maggie is intrigued (in large part due to her obsession with Zariel lore and Lulu’s presence in the rare tapestry she owns, see Part 6D). She has a machine that she thinks could be used to recover Lulu’s lost memories.
• Just one problem: The machine doesn’t work. It’s missing four key components. The PCs will need to find these components in order to make the machine work.

To find these components, the PCs will need to explore Avernus (as described in Part 7). Once they have the components, the dream machine can be repaired and Lulu’s memories recovered (as described in Part 6D-I).

Homework: How did Mad Maggie get the dream machine?

THE FOUR COMPONENTS:

• Nirvanan Cogbox. Used in a variety of infernal machines, these cogboxes come from Mechanus.
• Heartstone. Used by night hags to infiltrate the dreams of their victims. It’s used as a prism or beam-splitter in the dream machine.
• Phlegethosian sand. Obsidian sand pounded from the jagged, rocky plains of Phlegethos, the fourth layer of Hell.
• Astral pistons. Another component used in various pieces of infernal machinery. The pistons are actually extruded into the astral plane, maximizing their mechanical output. It’s an outdated technology and rarely used these days.

MAGGIE’S LEADS

In addition briefing the PCs on the parts she needs, Mad Maggie can provide them with some initial leads on where they may be able to find some of them. The alphanumeric hex references below are map coordinates from the hex map in Part 7B, which you can use to quickly identify where these leads can potentially take the PCs.

Astral Pistons: She’s heard that an oni named Malargan — the forgemaster of Kolasiah, a local warlord — has a set of astral pistons in his forge. (Hex A5)

Astral Pistons: Uldrak the Tinker, whose shop is based out of a titanic helmet located in the western end of the Plains of Fire, had a set of astral pistons in stock a few years back when one of Maggie’s riders (now dead) needed repairs for an antique war machine. It’s possible he might still have a supply. (Hex D5)

Heartstone: Mad Maggie and Red Ruth (Hex B4) were part of a coven along with a third night hag named Gaunt Gella. Mad Maggie believes that Red Ruth killed Gella and stole her heartstone. Maggie suspects that Red Ruth is still located somewhere in Avernus, but she doesn’t know where. However, she has heard rumors that Red Ruth has been seen at Mahadi’s Emporium from time to time, and the PCs might check there for a lead to Red Ruth’s current location.

Note: “Gella” means “the one with the golden hair.” Consider having a quiet, emotional moment for Mad Maggie where she remembers the beautiful hair of her fallen friend. It’s up to you whether or not Red Ruth was actually responsible for Gella’s death.

Alternatively, Gaunt Gella was bald, but collected the heads of blonde mortals. (Maggie can still fondly remember how beautiful the hair was.)

Nirvanan Cogbox: Nirvanan cogboxes are a modronic technomancy. Maggie has heard that a modron ship crashed on the shores of the Styx contra-Dis from Fort Knucklebones. (The ship is located in Hex H5, but it’s actually an elemental galleon from Eberron and does not have a cogbox.)

Design Note: At least three instances of each component have been seeded into the Avernian hexcrawl. (The Three Clue Rule waves hello.) In Part 7I: Avernian Rumor Tables, you will find additional rumors that can lead the PCs to these disparate sources.

Mad Maggie gives four leads, and she should give them all at once. She gives two different sources for one component, one possible source for a second component (although she doesn’t exactly know how to track that source down), and an incorrect location for the fourth component.

This spreads four experiences across these leads:

For one component, the PCs have two leads and can choose one. (Establishing the idea that they have multiple options for finding the components.)

For another, they’ll have to follow up their lead to figure out where they can actually find the component. (Establishing the idea that they’ll need to actively investigate to find these components.)

For the third component, they’ll discover a dead end and need to find a different way.

For the fourth component, they’ll have no lead at all. (Establishing the idea that this isn’t just a “do what Mad Maggie tells you” fetch quest; instead, they’ll be in the driver’s seat for figuring out how to obtain these components.)

With no additional explanation, simply receiving these four leads from Mad Maggie will teach the players a lot about the form, structure, and expectations of the Avernian hexcrawl.

Go to Part 6D: Lulu’s Memories