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NEIGHBORHOODS

High District: Located on the bluff above the city, stretching away from the High Hall. Filled with tall, narrow houses festooned with balconies. There was a time when only nobles were allowed to live in the High District. This prohibition was long ago weakened and then abolished entirely, but the High District remains the demesne of Elturgard’s richest citizens.

Dock District: Below the bluff, the east side of Elturel is the Dock District. This was the oldest part of the lower city, the edge of which was once marked by the Short Loop River (which began from the spring beneath High Hall and ran down the length of the bluff before plunging over the Maiden’s Leap to an incredibly short tributary that looped around to the Chionthar). The river is now more or less gone, having been transformed into the modern canal system which radically expanded the Elturian docks.

In the 14^th century, the Dock District was “all dirt, business, and utilitarian buildings” (Forgotten Realms Adventures). The businesses are still here, but a century of empire-building has brought great wealth into the city and classed the joint up a bit. Most notably, all the streets have been cobbled with the same pale cream stone as the High District. (Despite this, the lower class in Elturel is still known as “mucksuckers,” a nickname which originally referred to their boots getting stuck in the thick mud of the Dock District streets.)

Westerly: The west side of the city began gentrifying in the late-14^th century and became home to Elturel’s burgeoning middle class. It has more two- and three-story houses than the Dock District, and it tends to eschew the “smellier” businesses (like tanneries) that remain east of the gorge. The small West Docks became slightly preferred by travelers and this was even briefly ensconced into Elturian law, resulting in a lot of inns and travelhouses sprouting up in the southern end of Westerly.

THE MAZE

The bluff on which the High Hall stands is basically a honeycomb of subterranean passages and vaults. This vast labyrinth extends under the streets of the lower city, too. Parts of this complex consist of natural caverns (the full extent of which have never been mapped and which most likely connected to the Underdark before the city was scooped into Hell), but there’s also been extensive tunneling and construction over the last few hundred years.

Stuff down here includes:

• Warehouses hewn out of the solid rock, holding food and supplies that would allow Elturel’s population to swell with refugees to more than half a million and nevertheless support them for at least three months in the case of a siege.
• Armories, some of them secret.
• The Dungeon of the Inquisitor, a subterranean maze which served as Elturgard’s prison.
• Mines, most of which were worked by prisoners from the Dungeon of the Inquisitor.
• Behemoth’s Run, a deep section of the Maze beneath the Dock District which appears to have been tunneled out by huge creatures. Some prisoners claim that you can sometimes hear the vicious roars of the behemoths echoing.
• Smugglers dens, some of which originally had tunnels running out the city (and which would now abruptly open out in mid-air about the Dock of Fallen Cities).

LOCAL COLOR

Unity Tributes, as described in Part 4B, are small sculptures of the Companion or depictions of the twin sun heraldry of the Order of the Companion. Many of these shrines are now surrounded by effigies as Elturians leave small idols depicting themselves in the hope of receiving good fortune.

Driftglobes are small, glowing ball of magical light that float through the air. They are referred to as “little companions,” although their use in Elturel actually predates the Companion by at least a century. They’re relatively expensive, but rather popular with Elturians. They also basically last forever, so Elturel has slowly accumulated a lot of them over the years. They can be found lighting homes, businesses, and so forth. PCs might find them drifting forlornly in the middle of the street or floating in the middle of burnt wreckage. Or they might pop out surprisingly intact as they’re digging through rubble.

Gallops, Canters, and Trots. Elturians often use these riding terms as synonyms for “street.” So rather than, say, Dockside Way or Market Road, there’s the Dockside Trot and Market Gallop. Most thoroughfares still use “street” (like Maidensbridge Street), but here and there you’ll see this bit of local color.

“Recall the Creed.” Even Elturians who haven’t sworn the oath to uphold the Creed Resolute will often say things like “recall the Creed” to invoke actions that are ethically or morally right (even if they’re difficult).

Taverns and Inns. By ancient statute, no inn was allowed to serve food or drink in Elturel. Nor could they share the same building as a tavern.

RANDOM ENCOUNTERS

For random encounters in Elturel (whether streetcrawling or pointcrawling), we’re going to use the encounters from Descent Into Avernus and also Encounters in Avernus (from the DMs Guild). Here’s a unified encounter table, which I’ve fleshed out with a few encounters with various factions in the city:

NECROMANTIC MIST: See DIA p. 68. In this encounter necromantic mist has filled a street and/or building, transforming the corpses within it into undead creations.

Because we’ve implemented some significant changes to the lore of Elturel (see Part 5), you’ll want to re-contextualize many of these encounters to be consistent with the new vision of the city. For example:

• In “Hellrider Uprising,” swap out the generic demons for Hell Knights fighting their former comrades.
• In “Keeper of the Keys,” make the chain devil a devil raider (who’s come to town to loot the plentiful source of new keys for his collection).
• The dead master or parent of the “Kid Warlock” could have been a victim of the Zarielite purge of Elturian wizards.
• The vrock from “Vrock Philosophy” can pontificate on the metaphysics of Elturel’s current predicament: He loves watching cities sink into the Dock of Fallen Cities. The moment when the souls are quenched en masse in the waters of the Styx is a rare wonder of ultimate beauty.

I think these changes would be fairly easy to make on the fly, but your mileage may vary and it wouldn’t take much effort to preflight these. Either way, I recommend frequently thinking about how the encounters could potentially feature one or more of the factions active in the city. These are described at the beginning of Part 5, but a pertinent review:

• Devil Raiders: Opportunistic, independent devils raiding Elturel before its ultimate destruction could be independent operators (like the chain devil described above) or used as foreshadowing of the Avernian Warlords (see Part 7E).
• Hell Knights: These encounters can establish that the High Knights transformed into the Hell Knights; the destruction of high-level spellcasters; and/or the continued corruption of the Hellriders and Order of the Companion. (Recommendations for Hell Knight stats are given in Part 7G.)
• Zarielite Cultists: Highlight that many of these cultists came to Elturel as a sort of pilgrimage AND that the Elturian government has been riddled with Zarielites for decades. They’re mostly just reveling now, but questioning them can fill in a lot of gaps about how Elturel fell and also what’s been happening here since the city arrived in Hell.
• Ikaia’s Followers: Not all of whom need be his Sons or Daughters; there are a number of humans who have more less pledged fealty to someone who they feel can protect them in the midst of all this insanity. These encounters are most likely to happen in the east side of the city.
• Ravengard’s Peacekeepers: Should probably give the sense that they are overwhelmed, but trying hard. More likely to be encountered in the west side of the city, but if encountered in the east are likely to be overwhelmed (cut off from their comrades when Torm’s Bridges were taken).
• Liashandra’s Demons: This faction primarily exists to justify using demon stat blocks in Hell, but you do have some opportunity to establish the larger planar-political situation of the Blood War and the motives behind Zariel’s Elturian recruitment drive. There’s also a slim opportunity for some enemy-of-my-enemy action, as Liashandra’s primary mission is to sabotage the Fall of Elturel, so feel free to tack in that direction for demonic encounters.

Tip: You can use the street generator, random business table, and floor plan generator from the Streetcrawling Tools to quickly contextualize these encounters as needed. Try not to pause the action for this. Frequently you can start the encounter and then multitask, using the generators in the background.

Go to Part 5C-C: Elturel Locations

Go to Part 1

This will probably be the most controversial entry I write for the GM Don’t List, because there are a lot of players who absolutely LOVE this. And if the players love it, why wouldn’t you do it?

Well, try to bear with me because we’ll get to that.

The technique we’re talking about is description-on-demand: The GM directs an authorial question at a player, giving them narrative control to define, describe, or determine something beyond the immediate control of their character. Examples include stuff like:

• What is Lord Fauntleroy’s deepest secret?
• You open the door and see Madame DuFerber’s bedroom. What does it look like?
• Okay, so you pull him off to one side, confess your love to him, and demand to know if he feels the same way. What does he say?
• What does Rebecca [your PC] know about the Dachshund Gang? Who’s their leader?
• Robert, tell me what the name of the mountain is.
• Okay, you find some juicy blackmail on Mayor McDonald. What is it that he’s done? What evidence do you find?

If you haven’t encountered this technique before, the key thing to understand is that none of the characters being defined here are PCs: The GM isn’t asking Lord Fauntleroy’s player what their character’s deepest secret is. They’re asking the players to step out of their character and create an element of the game world external to their character (often in direct response to their character taking interest in that element of the game world).

It’s description-on-demand because the GM is demanding that a player provide description.

MANY PLAYERS DON’T LIKE IT…

Description-on-demand tends to be a fad that periodically cycles through the RPG meme-sphere. When it does so, the general perception seems to be that every player thinks this is the greatest thing since chocolate-dipped donuts.

So let’s start there: This is not true. Many players do love it. But many players DO NOT. In fact, a lot of players hate it. There are a significant number of players for whom this is antithetical to the entire reason they want to play an RPG and it will literally ruin the game for them.

I’m one of those players. I’ve quit games because of it and have zero regrets for having done so.

So, at a bare minimum, at least take this lesson away with you: Check with your players before using description-on-demand. Because it can absolutely be a poison pill which will ruin your game for them.

Okay… but why do they hate it?

A brief digression: If you’re not familiar with the distinction between roleplaying games and storytelling games, I recommend checking out Roleplaying Games vs. Storytelling Games. The short version is that roleplaying games feature associated mechanics (where the mechanical choices in the game are directly associated to the choices made by your character, and therefore the act of making mechanical choices in the game – i.e., the act of playing the game – is inherently an act of roleplaying) and storytelling games feature narrative control mechanics (where the mechanics of the game are either about determining who controls a particular chunk of the narrative or about determining the outcome of a particular narrative chunk).

When I’m playing a roleplaying game (as opposed to a storytelling game), I am primarily interested in experiencing the game world from the perspective of my character: I want to experience what they experience, make the decisions that they would make, and vicariously experience their fictional life. The reason I want this experience can be quite varied. Roleplaying can be enjoyable in a lot of different ways (catharsis, escapism, experimentation, sense of wonder, joy of exploration, problem-solving, etc.) and the particular mix for any particular game or moment within a game can vary considerably.

Description-on-demand, however, literally says, “Stop doing that and do this completely different thing instead.”

This is not only distracting and disruptive, it is quite often destructive. There are several reasons for this, but the most significant and easy to explain is that it inverts and negates the process of discovery. You can’t discover something as your character does if you were the one to authorially create it in the first place. This makes the technique particularly egregious in scenarios focused on exploration or mystery (which are at least 90% of all RPG scenarios!) where discovery is the central driving force.

Not all players who dislike description-on-demand hate it as much as I do. Some will be merely bored, annoyed, or frustrated. Others will become stressed, anxious, or confused when being put on the spot. Some will just find their enjoyment of the game lessened and not really be able to put their finger on why. But obviously none of those are good outcomes and you need to be aware that they’re a very real possibility for some or all of the players at your table before leaping into description-on-demand.

…BUT SOME PLAYERS DO

So why do some players love this technique?

And they clearly DO love it. Some enjoy it so much that they’ll just seize this narrative control for themselves without being prompted by the GM. (Which can cause its own problems with mismatched expectations, but that’s probably a discussion for another time.)

So… why?

If we keep our focus on the tension between discovery and creation, it’s fairly easy to see that these are players who don’t value discovery as much. Or, at least, for whom the joys of creation outweigh the joys of discovery.

I’m one of those players. When I’m playing a storytelling game, I love being offered (or taking) narrative control and helping to directly and collectively shape the narrative of the world.

…

… wait a minute.

How can both of these things be true? How can I both hate it and love it?

Well, notice that I shifted from talking about roleplaying games to talking about storytelling games.

Here we get to the crux of why description-on-demand is a poor GMing technique. Because while there are times I prefer to be focused on in-character discovery, there are ALSO times when I’m gung-ho for authorial creation. And when that happens, description-on-demand in a traditional RPG is still terrible.

Remember that this technique gives us the opportunity to experience the joy of creation, but does so only by destroying the joy of discovery. There is an inherent trade-off. But when it comes to description-on-demand, the trade-off sucks. I’m giving up the joy of discovery, but in return I’m not getting true narrative control: Instead, the GM arbitrarily deigns to occasionally ask my input on very specific topics (which may or may not even be something that I care about or feel creatively inspired by in the slightest).

Description-on-demand techniques in an RPG dissociate me from my character while offering only the illusion of control.

In an actual storytelling game, on the other hand, I have true narrative control. The structure and mechanics of the game let me decide (or have significant influence over) when and what I want narrative control over. This is meaningful because I, as a player, know which moments are most important to my joy of discovery and which ones aren’t. (This is often not even a conscious choice; the decision of when to take control and when to lean back is often an entirely subconscious ebb-and-flow.)

Note: This discussion is largely assuming storytelling games in which players strongly identify with a specific character (“their” character, which they usually create). There are many other storytelling games – like Once Upon a Time or Microscope – in which this is not the case. In my experience many of those games still feature a tension between discovery and creation, but the dynamics are very different in the absence of a viewpoint character.

Towards the end of the movie Inception, Eames looks towards the dream vault they’ve been trying to break into for basically the entire movie and says, “It’s a shame. I really wanted to know what was going to happen in there. I swear we had this one.”

Now, imagine the vault door opening. And the GM says: “Okay, Eames, tell me what you see in there!”

For one player, this is great! The importance of this vault has been relentlessly established. The entire narrative has been pushing towards this revelation and now THEY have the opportunity to create what’s inside it!

For another player, this is a disastrous, gut-wrenching disappointment. They’ve spent all this time anticipating this moment; speculating about what the vault might contain, imagining different possibilities, parsing together clues to try to figure it out. And now they’re going to find out! And, instead, the GM announces that there was never any solution to this riddle. There was no plan. No mystery to be solved. Just an empty madlibs puzzle waiting to be filled. “I really want to find out what’s in that vault,” but instead, “Nope, you don’t get what you want. In fact, you have to actively participate in disillusioning yourself.”

For a third player, they don’t really care about having narrative control, but they don’t really have any strong ideas about what should be in the vault and aren’t interested in making a creative decision about that.

And here’s the key thing: You have absolutely no way of knowing which player is which.

In fact, the answer can very easily change from one moment to the next. One player may want an in-character pay-off for the mystery of the vault, but has strong opinions on what Lord Fauntleroy’s deepest secret is and would love to define that. But another may well feel the exact opposite, while a third has no interest in either, and a fourth will be disappointed by any player defining what’s in the vault, because it’ll reveal there wasn’t a canonically true answer.

(And, yes, I have very deliberately chosen a narrative in which the characters do, in fact, have influence — albeit an indirect one — over what the vault will contain. I want you to challenge your preconceptions within the uncertainties of this liminal space. While you’re here, if you’re familiar with the movie, ask yourself whether your opinion on this interaction would be different if the GM was asking Robert Fischer’s player what was inside the vault instead of Eames’ player. Do you see how a different player of Robert Fischer might want the exact opposite answer?)

The cool thing about most narrative control mechanics is that they give you the ability to say, “This is what I care about. This is what I want to create.” And, conversely, “This is not something I care about. This is, in fact, something I DON’T want to be responsible for creating.”

CONCLUSION

Here’s my hot take.

I think description-on-demand is primarily — possibly not exclusively, but primarily – popular with players who have never played an actual storytelling game or who would desperately prefer to be playing one.

Because the thing that description-on-demand does — that little taste of narrative control that many players find incredibly exciting — is, in fact, an incredibly shitty implementation of the idea.

If you’re interested in an RPG, this is like playing Catan and having the host demand that you roleplay scenes explaining your moves in the game. (Just play an actual RPG!)

On the other hand, if you’re craving an STG, then description-on-demand in a traditional RPG is like playing co-op with an alpha quarterback who plays the entire game for you, but then occasionally says, “Justin, why don’t you choose the exact route your meeple takes to Sao Paolo?” and then pats themselves on the back for letting you “play the game.”

(This applies even if you’re playing an RPG and are just interested in adding a little taste of narrative control to it: You would be better off grafting some kind of minimal narrative control mechanic onto the game so that players can, in fact, be in control of their narrative control.)

To sum up, the reason description-on-demand makes the GM Don’t List is because:

• If that’s not what a player wants, it’s absolutely terrible.
• If it is what a player wants, it’s a terrible way of achieving it.

BUT WAIT A MINUTE…

There are several other techniques which are superficially similar to description-on-demand, but (usually) don’t have the same problems. Let’s briefly consider these.

FENG SHUI-STYLE DESCRIPTION OF SETTING. Robin D. Laws’ Feng Shui was a groundbreaking game in several ways. One of these was by encouraging players to assert narrative control over the scenery in fight scenes: If you want to grab a ladder and use it as a shield, you don’t need to ask the GM if there’s a ladder. You can just grab it and go!

Notably this is not on-demand. Instead, the group (via the game in this case) establishes a zone of unilateral narrative control before play begins. It is up to the players (not the GM) when, if, and how they choose to exercise that control. Players are not stressed by being put on the spot, nor are they forced to exert narrative control that would be antithetical to their enjoyment.

EXTENDED CHARACTER CREATION: This is when the GM asks a question like, “What’s Rebecca’s father’s name?” Although it’s happening in the middle of the session, these questions usually interrogate stuff that could have been defined in character creation.

This generally rests on the often unspoken assumption that the player has a zone of narrative control around their character’s background. Although this narrative control is most commonly exercised before play begins, it’s not unusual for it to persist into play. (Conversely, it’s similarly not unusual for players to improvise details from their character’s background.) This can even be mechanically formalized. In Trail of Cthulhu, for example, players are encouraged to put points into Languages without immediately deciding which languages they speak. (Each point can then be spent during play to simply declare, “I speak French,” or the like.)

Because it’s unspoken, however, both the authority and boundaries of this zone can be ill-defined and expectations can be mismatched. (The problems that can result from this are probably yet another discussion for another time.)

There’s also a gray zone here which can easily cross over into description-on-demand. “What’s your father’s name?”, “Describe the village where you grew up,” and “You grew up in the same neighborhood as the Dachshund Gang, so tell me who their leader is,” are qualitatively different, but there’s not necessarily a hard-and-fast line to be drawn.

RESOLUTION OF PLAYER-INITIATED ACTION: So if saying, “You find some juicy blackmail on Mayor McDonald. What is it that you’ve caught him doing?” is description on demand, then what about when the GM says, “You deal 45 hit points of damage. He’s dead. Describe the death blow,” that must also be description-on-demand, right? I mean, the GM even said the word “describe!”

There is some commonality. Most notably, you’re still putting players on the spot and demanding specific creativity, which can stress some players out in ways they won’t enjoy. But this effect is generally not as severe, because the player has already announced their intention (“hit that guy with my sword”) and they probably already have some visualization of what successfully completing that intention looks like.

In terms of narrative control, however, there is a sharp distinction: You are not asking the player to provide a character-unknown outcome. You are not dissociating them from their character.

This is true in the example of the sword blow, but may be clearer in a less bang-bang example. Consider Mayor McDonald and the difference between these two questions:

• “You find some juicy blackmail on Mayor McDonald. What is it that you’ve caught him doing?”
• “You find some juicy blackmail on Mayor McDonald. He’s been cheating on his wife with a woman named Tracy Stanford who works in his office. How did Rebecca find this out?”

In the first example, the GM is asking the player to define an element of the game world outside of their character and their character’s actions. In the second example, the GM has defined that and is instead asking them to describe what their character did. Although it’s become cognitively non-linear (the player knows the outcome, but is describing actions their character took before they knew the outcome), it is not dissociated from the character.

The same is true of the sword blow: The mechanics say the bad guy dies; take a step back and roleplay through how that happened.

(For a longer discussion of closely related stuff, check out Rulings in Practice: Social Skills.)

WORLD DEVELOPMENT BETWEEN SESSIONS: As a form of bluebooking, players may flesh out elements of the campaign world between sessions.

Sometimes this is just a more involved version of extended character creation. (“Pete, it looks like that Order of Knighthood your character’s brother joined is going to be playing a bigger role starting next session. Could you write ‘em up? Ideology, leaders, that kind of thing?”) But it can scale all the way up to troupe-style play, where players might take total control over specific aspects of the world and even take over the role of GM when those parts of the game world come up in play.

The rich options available to this style of play deserve lengthy deliberation in their own right. For our present discussion, it suffices to say that while this is in most ways functionally identical to description-on-demand (the player is taking authorial control beyond the scope of their character), in actual practice there’s a significant difference: Players don’t feel stressed or put on the spot (because they have plenty of time to carefully consider things). And many players don’t feel that inter-session discussions are as disruptive or dissociative as stuff happening in the middle of a session (because they aren’t being yanked in and out of character).

Go to Part 12: Mail Carrier Scenario Hooks

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Now that the PCs have gotten their bearings and received the map of fallen Elturel, we’ll switch from streetcrawling (as described in Part 5B) and begin navigating the city using a pointcrawl structure.

Pointcrawls are fairly straightforward. You can see how the point-map above has a number of keyed locations (points), connected in a node-map. PCs at one of the points can travel to any connected point.

The most literal application of a pointcrawl system is to model wilderness travel along a trail system (i.e., the connections between points are literally wilderness trails running between those locations). You might find similar utility if you were running a Neverwhere-style adventure set amidst a fantastical subway system. In either case, the pointcrawl is a player-known structure. Trivially so, in fact, because the point-map has a one-to-one correspondence with the game world: The characters can see the wilderness trails or subway tunnel that they’re following.

In the city, however, the pointcrawl system is an abstraction. It attempts to capture conceptual navigation – the way we think about traveling through a city – in a way that’s useful for the GM prepping and running the material. I believe that it can best succeed at this as a player-unknown structure. In other words, the point-map above is NOT the map of Elturel seen by the players: They interact with the city naturalistically; they don’t see the points and may not even know that a pointcrawl structure is being used.

So how does that work?

When the players indicate a navigational intention, the GM basically acts as an “interpreter” who translates that intention into the pointcrawl system, uses the pointcrawl system to resolve it, and then describes the outcome to them in terms of the fiction.

This works because we naturally think of navigating a city in broad terms. “We need to head west to Lyndale Avenue and then take that south into Edina.” What was the exact route we took west to Lyndale? Did we take 36^th or 38^th or 42^nd or 46^th? We don’t really care. (And, if we did, we’d probably still be using the streetcrawl system, right?) Particularly in a pre-GPS era, navigation was even more likely to funnel into landmarks and major thoroughfares: Cross the river at such-and-such a bridge, head east to the cathedral, and then cut south through Littlehut… and so forth.

The points of the pointcrawl match the mental model we use to navigate through a city.

If you’re still struggling to grok this, you can see the effect perhaps most clearly in Elturel at Torm’s Bridges. Here the conceptual and literal geographical navigation of the city are basically unified; the funnel effect is as literal as possible: If you want to cross the gorge between the western and eastern halves of the city, you’re going to pass through the bridges.

This conceptually remains true even when the literal geographical funnel is not so precise: If the PCs decide to head south from their arrival point to the Docks, they’re going to pass through Shiarra’s Market. Yes, it’s technically possible to take a different route that avoids the market, but in the absence of intentionality the point-map represents the general “flow” of the city.

(And in the case of intentionality, check out “Shortcuts & Side Routes,” below.)

Things you’re likely to say while running an urban pointcrawl:

• “Crossing Waterloo Bridge, you head south past the London Eye to Lambeth Palace.” (The PCs are leaving a vampire den somewhere near Covent Garden. Waterloo Bridge, the London Eye, and Lambeth Palace are all points on the point-map.)
• “You leave Delver’s Square and head up towards Oldtown. You pass Emerald Hill on your right, and you see the dawn hawks circling above it. Then you climb the ramp up into Oldtown and head down to the Administration Building.” (Delver’s Square, Emerald Hill, the Oldtown ramp, and the Administration building are all points. Oldtown is a neighborhood that contains many points.)
• “You leave Trollskull Alley, head south through the City of the Dead, and enter the Trade Ward. You take Nephranter’s Street through the Court of the White Bull and then south to the Caravan Court.” (The PCs are very familiar with the city here, so the GM summarizes by neighborhood – City of the Dead, Trade District – until they’re close to the target. The Court of the White Bull and Caravan Court are the nodes here; Nephranter Street is simply a way of contextualizing the journey. The GM could just as easily say, “…and enter the Trade Ward near the Court of the White Bull, taking Salabar Street down to the Caravan Court.” or “…and enter the Trade Ward, passing through the Court of the White Bull and crossing through the bustling crowds of River Street before reaching Caravan Court.”)

In all of these examples we’re assuming that the PCs already have some familiarity (or perhaps a great deal of familiarity) with the city. When they’re exploring a city for the first time – particularly a hazardous city filled with dangers like hell-bound Elturel – you’ll want to devote more attention to (and most likely have the PCs meaningfully interact with) each point as they encounter it for the first time.

BASIC POINTCRAWL PROCEDURES

The basic procedures for a pointcrawl are very simple.

STEP 1 – MOVE TO POINT: Assume moving to another point takes 10-15 minutes.

Design Note: Obviously you’d want to vary this for pointcrawls at different scales. You can also have connections of different lengths, indicating the travel time along a particular route by writing a small number next to the route, but this is probably overkill for Elturel.

STEP 2 – RANDOM ENCOUNTER: Check for a random encounter (see below).

Design Note: I recommend using a fairly high probability, much like the encounter checks for a streetcrawl described in Part 5B. Descent Into Avernus recommends a 1 in 2 chance of an encounter and that’s probably pretty solid.

If you were using a pointcrawl system in a less adventuresome city and/or one that the PCs have become more familiar with, you can step down either the frequency or intensity of encounters. (Encounters in a typical city can often just be a bit of local street color; they don’t always have to be meaty interactions. In this post I discuss how I would handle encounters in Waterdeep, triggering an encounter for whatever neighborhood the PCs were going to.)

STEP 3 – ARRIVAL: The PCs arrive at the next node.

If the PCs are in a point on the point-map, you can simply follow this procedure. If for some reason they’ve slipped “off” the point-map, simply funnel them logically into the point-map and continue from there. (You might be able to just assume they’re “at” the nearest point on the map; e.g., they may not be at the cathedral, but they’re close enough that they’re basically coming “from the cathedral” as far as other points are concerned. Alternatively, if you want to get all formal with it, you can think of their current location as a “temporary node” and think about how it would attach to the point-map.)

ADVANCED POINTCRAWL PROCEDURES

Here are a couple of advanced pointcrawl techniques that you may find useful in Elturel. (You can probably also ignore them entirely.) Their use may be more immediately obvious in player-known pointcrawls (where players can directly invoke them), but they can also be useful tools for GMs looking to interpret PC actions into a player-unknown pointcrawl.

SHORTCUTS & SIDE ROUTES: The PCs want to move from one point to another without moving through the points between.  (For example, they want to go south to the Docks without passing through Shiarra’s Market.) What happens?

In some pointcrawls this might not be possible; in the wilderness it probably requires trailblazing. In a city, though, it usually just means getting off the major thoroughfares and circling around on side streets. In a safe city where time isn’t a factor, this probably just happens. Otherwise, use these guidelines:

Simple Side Routes:

• Determine an appropriate base time. (If they’re trying to go the long way around to bypass something, you can probably set this to whatever the travel time would have been going the normal way. If they’re trying to save time by using an unorthodox shortcut, eyeball the best case scenario.)
• Make a random encounter check.
• Make an appropriate skill check (probably Wisdom, possibly Wisdom (Stealth) if their goal is to avoid attention). Each check they make adds an extra chunk of time (probably 5 minutes in Elturel).
• If the check is a success, they arrive at their intended node.
• If the check is a failure, then they’re lost and will need to make another check. If they were trying to avoid trouble, the trouble finds them. Either way, they’ll need to repeat the random encounter check and the skill check until they succeed.

Detailed Side Routes: Alternatively, you can run this process using the streetcrawling rules. Their goal is charting out the alternate route, and this is probably a distant goal (requiring them to crawl through multiple chunks of the map).

This is probably overkill, and in a player-unknown pointcrawl like Elturel it may be difficult to smoothly transition between the streetcrawl and pointcrawl structures. But this approach may prove useful in certain circumstances.

HIDDEN ROUTES: A hidden route in a pointcrawl is simply a connection between two points that is not immediately obvious; i.e., the PCs have to find the route before they can use it. In a wilderness it might be the illusory druid paths. In a city it might be linked teleportation circles or perhaps the sewers.

Hidden routes are often discovered as part of a scenario or while exploring a particular point (i.e., you’re poking around the crypts beneath the cathedral and discover a tunnel heading to the harbor). In some cases it might be as easy as making an Intelligence (Investigation) or Wisdom (Perception) check to find the route.

If the PCs go looking for hidden routes in Elturel, I recommend pointing them in the direction of the Maze — the subterranean tunnels and storehouses that lie beneath the streets. Although it’s possible to include hidden routes on a point-map (I recommend a dotted line), in this case you can probably just improvise if it comes up in play.

Go to Part 5C-B: A Very Brief Gazette of Elturel

The Ultraviolet Grasslands (UVG) is a caravan-crawl campaign designed by Lukas Rejec. If you’re not already familiar with UVG, this whole post will probably make more sense if you read my review of the setting first.

Short version: There’s a network of nodes. Each node (or destination) is a potential market where PCs can buy or sell trade goods. One form of play in the caravan-crawl is discovering profitable trade routes between destinations (where you can buy a trade good at a low price in one destination and then sell it at a high price in another destination).

The PCs can use market research to determine the prices for trade goods. UVG has two different systems for market research: One described in the free PDF Ultraviolet Grasslands: Introduction and another in the full-fledged Ultraviolet Grasslands and the Black City.

UVG INTRODUCTION – MARKET RESEARCH

In the Introduction system, PCs can spend 1 day learning the price of a trade good in an adjacent location or 1 week to figure out the price of trade goods in up to three chained locations. For each location, they make a market check sing an appropriate skill and the result determines the price factor for that location (e.g., a result of 8 gives a price factor of 1 for the location; a result of 17 gives a price factor of 1.5). You multiply the base cost of the trade good by the price factor to determine how much it sells for in that location.

There are two things I like about this system:

• It’s simple and straightforward. Almost effortless.
• It requires zero prep. In fact, it’s specifically designed to be used during play, generating only those results which are relevant to the PCs.

The problem with the system is that the prices are dependent on the PCs’ skill check. At the most trivial level, this means that as the PCs increase their skill bonuses, prices will inflate across the grasslands. You’ll also get some weird plateauing effects where certain chart results drop below the minimum possible result.

UVG & THE BLACK CITY – MARKET RESEARCH

At first glance the system in Ultraviolet Grasslands and the Black City appears fairly identical to that from the Introduction. In practice, however, the system has received several tweaks which, speaking frankly, are almost entirely to its detriment.

First, a cash cost has been added to the time cost of market research. This is just fine and the intention is to probably discourage PCs from simply camping out in a “safe” destination and just grinding out market research.

Second, although the system still allows the PCs to focus their market research on a specific destination (or destinations), it can now produce results like, “Three stops away a place pays x4.” This seems fine, but in practice it muddies things up considerably by creating non-specific results. In addition, since there’s no way to directly generate these x4, x5, and x6 results for a location directly (only at a distance), the system inadvertently incentivizes the PCs to NOT explore the caravan routes and instead grind market research in the locations closest to Violet City (their origin point) in the hope of generating high reward locations as close as possible.

Third, key results are now seeded onto the results table, which makes the plateauing problem a lot worse. For example, a result of 7 determines that the location produces the trade good in question. That means anyone with a +7 skill check modifier will no longer generate locations that produce trade goods, completely warping the trade map. (How soon could that happen? Theoretically, a 2^nd level character.)

Fourth, they accidentally broke the system. The Introduction system could indicate that the trade good could not be sold in a particular destination (generally due to the market being saturated with local products), but indicated that the price factor in these locations was still 1 (meaning that the PCs could buy the trade goods there at their base price).

In the Black City system, these scenarios are instead modeled with a price factor 0. But remember that you multiply the price by the price factor, so a price factor of 0 means that the price will also be 0. So, for example, you can get a result of, “But they produce it here. New source, cool.” paired to a price of 0. (And it’s unclear whether that means you can’t buy it even though it’s a new source, or if they’re just giving it away for free. But either is broken.)

Note: Now that I’ve spent a considerable amount of time ripping apart one small sub-system of UVG, I do want to take a moment to say that this is no way representative of the overwhelming quality of the book as a whole. (Seriously. Go read my review.) I would not be spending so much time working on such a relatively tiny element if it wasn’t part of a well-oiled machine.

REVISED MARKET RESEARCH

The core problem with the existing market research system is that the PC’s skill check is determining the local market price. Instead, we need to generate the demand separately from the skill check to learn the demand.

• Spend 1 day and make an Easy (7) skill check to determine the market price for a specific trade good in your current location. If you succeed at a Very Hard (18) skill check, you gain advantage on your haggling check (see UVG, p. 176; you’ve found lead that may be more lucrative than the base local price).
• Spend 1 week and make an Easy (7) skill check to determine the market price for a specific trade good in one adjacent location. For every 4 points of margin of success on the check, determine the market price in an additional adjacent location. (These adjacent locations can be built out in one or more chains, with the second being adjacent to the first, and so forth.)

Design Note: I’m using difficulty numbers calculated for UVG. If you’re using 5E, you can translate these to DCs based on the descriptive values (Easy = DC 10, for example).

VARIANT – RESEARCH COST: As noted above, Ultraviolet Grasslands and the Black City added a cost to these actions. You can do the same here: Local research (1 day) costs cash = local expenses. Regional research (1 week) costs cast = 5 x local expenses.

Alternatively, or in addition to this, you could give bonuses to the check if the PCs are spreading cash around. I proposed a similar system for bribing here, and you could basically use the same structure while swapping out “bribe value” for “local expenses” in UVG.

DETERMINING LOCAL PRICE – SIMPLE VERSION

To determine the local price for a trade good, simply roll on this table:

VARIANT – MARKET FLUCTUATIONS: Once per month (every 4 weeks) or between each session, check all locations with known market prices. There is a 1 in 10 chance that 1d4 prices in that location have changed. Reroll on the table.

Design Note: You may need to play with the frequency of these tests and/or the rate of change to get a satisfactory result.

DETERMINING LOCAL PRICE – COMPLEX VERSION

… but not ultra-complex.

This system determines prices by establishing the original source(s) for a trade good and then calculating local prices based on the market’s proximity to the source. It is more time-consuming, but I don’t think significantly so.

GENERATE SOURCES: Each trade good has 1d4-1 sources in the Ultraviolet Grasslands. (If there are zero sources in the grasslands, then the Violet City is treated as the source, although most likely because it is being shipped from somewhere in civilization.)

For each source, roll 1d30+1 to generate a random destination (this excludes the Violet City and the Black City).

The price factor of a trade good at its source is 1. Haggling checks to sell are made at disadvantage and haggling checks to buy are made at advantage.

CALCULATE PRICE – EASY VERSION: When the PCs do market research in a location, determine the number of weeks of travel between the location and the closest source of the trade good. The price factor increases by +1 for every two weeks of travel, to maximum of 6.

Design Note: The advantage of this method is that it be done as quickly as you can count spaces on the map. However, it will create a very uniform (i.e., boring) experience. Like a dungeon featuring perfect symmetry, there will be considerably less interest in exploration and market research will be generally devalued.

CALCULATE PRICE – STEPPED VERSION: When the PCs do market research in a location, determine the shortest path between the location and the closest source of the trade good. For each week of travel along this path, modify the price factor by 1d4-2. This cannot reduce the price factor below 1, nor above 5.

SPECIAL MARKETS: 1 in 6 markets will have a special relationship with the trade good. Roll 1d8 on the table:

Design Note: Rolling again twice on this table may create strange combinations. (For example, Taboo + High Demand. Or Illegal + Taxed.) Seize the opportunity to creatively explain the discrepancy. For example, if the goods are illegal, who’s charging the tax? A local crime syndicate? A strange goddess who haunts the village?

At the edge of the Rainbowlands stands the Violet City, the last bastion of civilization upon the edge of the ultraviolet grasslands. Even the civilized lands of this world are strange and alien to our eyes — teeming with a multihued humanity (of greenlanders, bluelanders, etc.), porcelain princes (who simultaneously live in multiple bodies psychically linked), body-hopping ultras, and cat lords — and here, where it comes to an end, the setting teems with a fever dream of the fantastic.

The premise of Luka Rejec’s Ultraviolet Grasslands is that the PCs will form a caravan which journeys out into these strange lands and then returns.

The group will start by selecting their reason for journeying into the grasslands. In addition to obviously motivating the expedition, this also determines how the group earns XP. Twelve default options are provided. For example:

• To make money. Provide the party with a financier that loans them the money for their first caravan (and creates a debt), then consider awarding 1d6 x 100 XP for every new profitable trade route discovered, and for every profitable trade completed.
• To learn the ancient secrets. A reason that should appeal to wizards. Give each destination a 20% chance of having lore and remains that lead to the discovery of an ancient secret. Once five pieces are recovered, a wizard can spend a week to research the lore and figure out the Teleportation of Innocents or perhaps the secret of Liquid Stone Lamps. Consider awarding 1d6 x 200 XP for every such secret learned.

The grasslands themselves are not trackless wastes. There are established routes and the players will have a map of 32 branching locations leading from the edge of the grasslands to the strange ruins of the Black City on the edge of an oily sea. Here’s one slice of what this map looks like:

The destinations indicated on the map are vast distances apart (the numbers on the trails between them indicate weeks of travel to reach them). You can think of each destination as a distinct point of light; or as the hub of a wheel, with different discoveries (i.e., adventure locations) available as spokes off of them. A simple structure is given for the PCs to make discoveries from the destination they’re currently in, and the intention is that they will add these discoveries to the map. (You can imagine it slowly expanding in detail as the campaign continues.)

Caravan travel itself is given an elegant, streamlined system consisting of:

• Time (simplified to weeks of travel, with each week given a specific resolution sequence you can easily walk through while making meaningful decisions)
• Inventory (with a simple system of “sacks” that make it easy to manage a caravan without getting bogged down in bookkeeping)
• Supplies & Survival (again, simplified to make it easy to manage an entire caravan of hirelings and pack animals)

The beauty of this is its robust simplicity. What I’m going to call Rejec’s caravan-crawl deserves to be ensconced alongside dungeoncrawls and hexcrawls as a pillar of the RPG artform. It’s an elegant and compelling scenario structure: Rejec provides a clean framework which GMs can fill with content, coupled to a clean set of default actions linked directly to a plethora of potential default goals.

The key insight, in my opinion, is the expectation that the PCs will travel these caravan routes again and again and again. If the goal of the structure was to simply travel from one end of the caravan route to the other (e.g., from the Violet City to the Black City), then you’d be looking at Choose Your Own Adventure prep, and it would be difficult to justify prepping all this branching content when most of it would never be experienced. But because the PCs will constantly be engaging and re-engaging the Ultraviolet Grasslands, all of that material become relevant.

In theory, this is obvious: Both megadungeons and hexcrawls follow similar principles, justifying expansive prep with the expectation that the material will be constantly re-engaged. In practice, though, this is non-trivial to achieve. Although you could simply mandate that the PCs mount multiple expeditions, this can easily decay into a monotonous grind. (You can see a similar problem crop up when people try to run megadungeons as if they were traditional dungeons and expect the PCs to “clear the dungeon.”)

Rejec structures and incentivizes re-engagement with the grasslands in three ways:

First, the Supply & Survival system forces the PCs to return to civilization to resupply (or to explore the trade routes in order to find places where they can re-supply along the way). Even if their ultimate goal were to simply “reach the Black City,” they would still need to repeatedly engage the grasslands in order to achieve that goal.

Second, by making each point on the branching routes an exploration hub surrounded by a cluster of discoveries (which could be theoretically expanded infinitely), Rejec ensures that the PCs don’t exhaust the routes. Like (Re-)Running the Megadungeon, re-engaging the material is always fresh and interesting; not simply a rote repetition.

Third, as a final fillip, Rejec adds a simple Trade & Goods structure. Using this structure, GMs can procedurally generate demand & supply, while the PCs can use market research to figure out the best places to sell their stuff. I have a few minor quibbles about this system (see below), but it creates a systemic pull that encourages players to explore the totality of the trade network.

Then, on top of that, Rejec provides a system for Milk Runs! “If the heroes figure out a milk run, where they can just travel the same journey over and over for profit… let them, but this is boring. Abstract this into a route a henchperson can handle, and roll for cash and complications every year.” So if the system designed to encourage the PCs to explore ever produces an error state where it starts encouraging them to do stuff that’s boring, Rejec provides a solution! This is brilliant!

Oh! Also! Starter caravans! Rejec provides a selection of pre-built caravans custom-tailored for specific purposes (scout, small trader, dungeon exploration expedition, etc.), so that you can just pick one and immediately start playing.

GLORIOUS GRASSLANDS

Laying aside how excited the book makes you to put a caravan together, the setting itself is absolutely enchanting. The book draws you in and conjures the grasslands before your mind’s eye in an alluring, all-captivating vision. It’s not just the art — which is gorgeous; landscapes like a young Hal Foster on an acid trip with characters designed by P. Craig Russell. The text positively vibrates from all of the rich ideas and evocative imagery Rejec has crammed between the covers. By the time I finished reading, I wanted to be out there exploring immediately.

Honestly, just a sample of the place names should be enough to stir the imagination:

• The Bone Mines of Moy Sollo
• The Death-Facing Passage
• The Cauldron of Revitalized Divinity
• The Grass Colossus
• The Porcelain Citadel
• The Cliff Villages of Ghost and Clan

There is a distinctive attitude and vision which simply leaps off the page. Groping for antecedents to compare the grasslands to, I suggest that this might be what you’d end up with if Hayao Miyazaki adapted Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun: It embodies a seemingly impossible nostalgia for something so alien it shouldn’t be able to resonate with our own sense of a lost past… and yet somehow does, capturing a serene beauty which is nevertheless filled with pulse-pounding savagery.

What impresses me most, though, is how incredibly accessible it all feels. The RPG industry is filled with any number of incredibly ornate and wonderful settings that are incredibly difficult to bring to the table because of how much effort it takes to onboard the entire group (Tékumel being the granddaddy of them all). But despite how fresh and unique and deep the Ultraviolet Grasslands are, I nevertheless feel that I could sit down and start playing this with little more effort than any other game of D&D.

Maybe there’s something alchemical about the borderlands — about the place where civilization (any civilization) falls away — that frees us to explore this strange and wonderful wonderland with eager and open eyes. Or perhaps it’s because Rejec encapsulates so much of the setting into immediately utilitarian elements (like equipment lists) that the players will engage with in play while making the discovery of the rest of the setting de rigeur the object of play itself.

But whatever the case, what Ultraviolet Grasslands overwhelmingly instills in me is a sense of not only how gameable it is, but how much I want to game it right now.

WHERE TO BEGIN?

There are a couple ways to begin exploring the Ultraviolet Grasslands. First, there is Ultraviolet Grasslands: Introduction, which is a free 80-page PDF. Second, there is the full-fledged Ultraviolet Grasslands and the Black City which is the full enchilada.

Theoretically, if you buy the full book, you should have no need for the Introduction. But I am going to STRONGLY RECOMMEND that even if you rush out and buy a copy of the Ultraviolet Grasslands and the Black City immediately upon finishing this review (and you should), that you should still start by reading the 80-page Introduction.

Why? Well… Remember that beautiful, crystal clear structure I was raving about? In the full book it gets a little… muddled.

First, the full book has opted to move all the location descriptions to the front of the book “for easier reference during campaign play.” Which makes sense from a certain point of view. But without the context of the structure for which this material was designed, it’s somewhat dizzying in its presentation.

Second, even once you get to the mechanical portion of the book, the material has lost focus on the core structure. In Whither the Dungeon? I talked about how D&D originally included a clear structure for running dungeon adventures, passed through a middle period where the rulebooks still included all the rules without the clear structure, and then eventually arrived at 5E where knowledge of the structure had so atrophied and/or become engrained in the designers that they even forgot to teach DMs how to key a map. It’s interesting watching UVG more or less jump from Stage 1 to Stage 2 of that process for caravan-crawls in roughly 18 months.

If you’re already familiar with the caravan-crawl structure (which you can easily be by reading the Introduction), then it’s easy to see where all of the mechanical gewgaws in the full book — including a lot of new mechanical options — fit into that structure. But if you aren’t, then the full book notably lacks that guidance.

Here’s one small example: Remember the Starter Caravans I mentioned above? In the full book they’re relabeled “Sample Caravans” and the explanation of their purpose (“if you want to skip planning and optimization”) is no longer found in the text. This may seem like a small and perhaps even insignificant change, but in practice I think it’s actually very significant. And even moreso when we’re talking about larger, more pervasive, and more innovative structures.

Similarly, there are a few places where I think the simpler systems of the Introduction are to be preferred. The system for market research is a notable example that I mentioned above: In both versions of the system, it’s problematic that the character’s skill check determines the demand for a trade good in a location (rather than discovering that demand). But the system in the full book really doubles down on this, completely eliminating the aspect of the system where players investigate specific markets. (Instead, they just make a check and get results like, “They need it, but three stops away a place pays x4.”) Systemically this both flattens the results and is significantly less useful to me as a GM.

The full book also includes the SEACAT system, an OSR fantasy system with a fair degree of deviation from D&D. It seems fine, but mostly leaves me cold, so that the best thing I can say about it is that it only takes up about twenty pages of the book. Your mileage may vary, however, and, in any case, it is easily ignored: Ultraviolet Grasslands is easy enough to use with any OSR game, and not particularly moreso with 5E. (With 3E you’d probably need to adjust some of the skill check DCs.)

My last quibble will be that the discoveries are under-developed, being more adventure seeds for the GM to develop than full-fledged content that’s ready to be run at the table. (But considerably less so than most hexcrawl products you may be familiar with, so take my critique with a grain of salt.)

Is any of this to say that you shouldn’t run out and buy Ultraviolet Grasslands the Black City?

Good lord, no! You absolutely should!

Take your first step with the Introduction, but then you need to LEAP into the full book, chock full of Rejec’s beautiful art and the incredible setting guide that will unlock all the glories of the grasslands.

Style: 5
Substance: 5

Author: Luka Rejec
Publisher: WizardThiefFighter Studios & Exalted Funeral Press
Cost – UVG Introduction: Free (PDF)
Cost – UVG & the Black City: $40 or $25 (PDF)
Page Count: 80 (Intro) / 200 (Black City)

UPDATE: As I was writing this review, word came out that Ultraviolet Grasslands and the Black City has been nominated for two 2020 ENnies Awards!