“Most of the campaigns I’ve really enjoyed have been in systems I didn’t like.”

“A great GM can take any RPG and run a good game.”

“I just want a system that gets out of the way when I’m playing.”

What I think these players are discovering is that most RPG systems don’t actually carry a lot of weight, and are largely indistinguishable from each other in terms of the type of weight they carry.

In theory, as we’ve discussed, there’s really nothing an RPG system can do for you that you can’t do without it. There’s no reason that we can’t all sit around a table, talk about what our characters do, and, without any mechanics at all, produce the sort of improvised radio drama which any RPG basically boils down to.

The function of any RPG, therefore, is to provide mechanical structures that will support and enhance specific types of play. (Support takes the form of neutral resolution, efficiency, replicability, consistency, etc.) If you look at the earliest RPGs this can be really clear, because those games were more modular. Since the early ’80s, however, RPGs pretty much all feature some form of universal resolution mechanic, which gives the illusion that all activities are mechanically supported. But in reality, that “support” only provides the most basic function of neutral resolution, while leaving all the meaningful heavy lifting to the GM and the players.

To understand what I mean by that, consider a game which says: “Here are a half dozen fighting-related skills (Melee Weapons, Brawling, Shooting, Dodging, Parrying, Armor Use) and here are some rules for making skill checks.”

If you got into a fight in that game, how would you resolve it?

We’ve all been conditioned to expect a combat system in our RPGs. But what if your RPG didn’t have a combat system? It would be up to the GM and the players to figure out how to use those skills to resolve the fight. They’d be left with the heavy lifting.

And when it comes to the vast majority of RPGs, that’s largely what you have: Skill resolution and a combat system. (Science fiction games tend to pick up a couple of additional systems for hacking, starship combat, and the like. Horror games often have some form of Sanity/Terror mechanic derived from Call of Cthulhu.)

So when it comes to anything other than combat — heists, mercantile trading, exploration, investigation, con artistry, etc. — most RPGs leave you to do the heavy lifting again: Here are some skills. Figure it out.

Furthermore, from a utilitarian point of view, these resolution+combat systems are all largely interchangeable in terms of the gameplay they’re supporting. They’re all carrying the same weight, and they’re leaving the same things (everything else) on your shoulders. Which is not to say that there aren’t meaningful differences, it’s just that they’re the equivalent of changing the decor in your house, not rearranging the floorplan: What dice do you like using? What skill list do you prefer for a particular type of game? How much detail do you like in your skill resolution and/or combat? And so forth.

SYSTEM MATTERS

What I’m saying is that system matters. But when it comes to mainstream RPGs, this truth is obfuscated because their systems all matter in exactly the same way. And this is problematic because it has created a blindspot; and that blindspot is resulting in bad game design. It’s making RPGs less accessible to new players and more difficult for existing players.

I’ve asked you to ponder the hypothetical scenario of taking your favorite RPG and removing the combat system from it. Now let’s consider the example of a structure which actually HAS been ripped out of game… although you may not have noticed that it happened.

From page 8 to page 12 of The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures, Arneson & Gygax spelled out a very specific procedure for running dungeons in the original edition of Dungeons & Dragons. It boils down to:

1. You can move a distance based on your speed and encumbrance per turn.

2. Non-movement activities also take up a turn or some fraction of a turn. For example:

• ESPing takes 1/4 turn.
• Searching a 10′ section of wall takes 1 turn. (Secret passages found 2 in 6 by men, dwarves, or hobbits; 4 in 6 by elves.

3. 1 turn in 6 must be spent resting. If a flight/pursuit has taken place, you must rest for 2 turns.

4. Wandering Monsters: 1 in 6 chance each turn. (Tables provided.)

5. Monsters: When encountered, roll 2d6 to determine reaction (2-5 negative, 6-8 uncertain, 9-12 positive).

• Sighted: 2d4 x 10 feet.
• Surprise: 2 in 6 chance. 25% chance that character drops a held item. Sighted at 1d3 x 10 feet instead.
• Avoiding: If lead of 90 feet established, monster will stop pursuing. If PCs turn a corner, 2 in 6 chance they keep pursuing. If PCs go through secret door, 1 in 6 chance they keep pursuing. Burning oil deters many monsters from pursuing. Dropping edible items has a chance of distracting intelligent (10%), semi-intelligent (50%), or non-intelligent (90%) monsters so they stop pursuing. Dropping treasure also has a chance of distracting intelligent pursuers (90%), semi-intelligent (50%), or non-intelligent (10%) monsters.

6. Other activities:

• Doors must be forced open (2 in 6 chance; 1 in 6 for lighter characters). Up to three characters can force a door simultaneously, but forcing a door means you can’t immediately react to what’s on the other side. Doors automatically shut. You can wedge doors open with spikes, but there’s a 2 in 6 chance the wedge will slip while you’re gone.
• Traps are sprung 2 in 6.
• Listening at doors gives you a 1 in 6 (humans) or 2 in 6 (elves, dwarves, hobbits) of detecting sound. Undead do not make sound.

I’ve said this before, but if you’ve never actually run a classic megadungeon using this procedure — and I mean strictly observing this procedure — then I strongly encourage you to do so for a couple of sessions. I’m not saying you’ll necessarily love it (everyone has different tastes), but it’s a mind-opening experience that will teach you a lot about the importance of game structures and why system matters.

The other interesting thing here is that Arneson & Gygax pair this very specific procedure with very specific guidance on exactly what the DM is supposed to prep when creating a dungeon on pages 3 thru 8 of the same pamphlet. (These two things are conjoined: They can tell you exactly what to prep because they’re also telling you exactly how to use it.) Take these two things plus a combat system for dealing with hostile monster and, if you’re a first time GM, you can follow these instructions and run a successful game. It’s a simple, step-by-step guide.

“Now wait a minute,” you might be saying. “You said this procedure had been ripped out of D&D. What are you talking about? There’s still dungeon crawling in D&D!”

… but is there?

THE SLOW LOSS OF STRUCTURE

Many of the rules I describe above have passed down from one edition to the next and can still be found, in one form or another, in the game as it exists today. But if you actually sit down and look at the progression of Dungeon Master’s Guides, you’ll discover that starting with 2nd Edition the actual procedure began to wither away and eventually vanished entirely with 4th Edition.

The guidance on how to prep a dungeon has proven to have a little more endurance, but it, too, has atrophied. The 5th Edition core rulebooks, for just one example, don’t actually tell you how to key a dungeon map. (And although they have several example maps, none of them actually feature a key.)

One of the nifty things about a strong, robust scenario structure like dungeon crawling is that with a fairly mild amount of fiddling you can move it from one system to another. This is partly because most RPGs are built on the model of D&D, but it’s also because scenario structures in RPGs tend to be closely rooted to the fictional state of the game world.

This is, in fact, why you probably didn’t notice that 5th Edition D&D doesn’t actually have dungeon crawling in it any more: You’re familiar with the structure of dungeon crawling, and you unconsciously transferred it to the new edition the same way that you’ve most likely transferred it to other games lacking a dungeon crawling structure in the past. In fact, I’m willing to guess that removing dungeon crawling from 5th Edition was not, in fact, a conscious decision on the part of the designers: They learned how to run a dungeoncrawl decades ago and, like you, have been unconsciously transferring that structure from one game to another ever since.

Where this becomes a problem, however, are all the new players who don’t know how to run a dungeoncrawl.

Most people enter the hobby through D&D. And D&D used to reliably teach every new DM two very important procedures:

1. How to run a dungeon crawl

2. How to run combat

And using just those two procedures (easily genericizing the dungeon crawling procedure to handle any form of location-crawl), a GM can get a lot of mileage. In fact, I would argue that most of the RPG industry is built on just these two structures, and that most GMs really only know how to use these two structures plus railroading.

So what happens when D&D stops teaching new DMs how to run a dungeoncrawl?

It means that GMs are now reliant entirely on railroading and combat.

And that’s not good for the hobby.

THE BLINDSPOT

If you need another example of what this looks like in practice, check out The Lost Mine of Phandelver, the scenario that comes with the D&D 5th Edition Starter Set.  It’s a fascinating look at how this really is a blindspot for the 5th Edition designers, because The Lost Mine of Phandelver includes a lot of GM advice. They tell you that the GM needs to:

• Referee
• Narrate
• Play the monsters

They give lots of solid, basic advice like:

• When in doubt, make it up
• It’s not a competition
• It’s a shared story
• Be consistent
• Make sure everyone is involved
• Be fair
• Pay attention

There’s a detailed guide on how to make rulings. They tell you how to set up an adventure hook.

Then the adventure starts and they tell you:

• This is boxed text, you should read it.
• Here is a list of specific things you should do; including getting a marching order so that you know where they’re positioned when the goblins ambush them.
• When the goblins ambush them, they give the DM a step-by-step guide for how combat should start and what they should be doing while running the combat.
• They lay out several specific ways that the PCs can track the goblins back to their lair, and walk the DM through resolving each of them.

And then you get to the goblins’ lair and…  nothing.

I mean, they do an absolutely fantastic job presenting the dungeon:

• General Features
• What the Goblins Know (always love this)
• Keyed map
• And, of course, the key entries themselves describing each room

But the step-by-step instructions for how you’re actually supposed to use this material? It simply… stops. The designers clearly expect, almost certainly without actually consciously thinking about it, that how you run a dungeon is so obvious that even people who need to be explicitly told that they should read the boxed text out loud don’t need to be told how to run a dungeon.

And because they believe it’s obvious, they don’t include it in the game.  And because they don’t include it in the game, new DMs don’t learn it. And, as a result, it stops being obvious.

(To be perfectly clear here: I’m not saying that you need the exact structure for dungeon crawling found in OD&D. That would be silly. But the core, fundamental structure of a location-crawl is not only an essential component for D&D; it’s really fundamental to virtually ALL roleplaying games.)

THE BLINDSPOT PARADOX

Paradoxically, this blindspot not only strips structure from RPGs by removing those structures; it also strips structure from RPGs by blindly forcing structures.

It is very common for a table of RPG players to have a sort of preconceived concept of what functions an RPG is supposed to be fulfilling, and when they encounter a new system they frequently just default back to the sort of “meta-RPG” they never really stop playing. This is encouraged by the fact that the RPG hobby is permeated by the same meme that rules are disposable, with statements like:

• “You should just fudge the results!”
• “Ignore the rules if you need to!”

A widespread culture of kitbashing, of course, is not inherently problematic. It’s a rich and important tradition in the RPG hobby. But it does get a little weird when people start radically houseruling a system before they’ve even played it… often to make it look just like every other RPG they’ve played. (For example, I had a discussion with a guy who said he didn’t enjoy playing Numenera: Before play he’d decided he didn’t like the point spend mechanic for resolving skill checks; didn’t like XP spends for effect; and didn’t like GM intrusions so he didn’t use any of those mechanics. He also radically revamped how the central Effort mechanic works in the game. Nothing inherently wrong with doing any of that, but he never actually played Numenera.)

As a game designer, I actually find it incredibly difficult to get meaningful playtest feedback from RPG players because, by and large, none of them are actually playing the game.

And these memes get even weirder when you encounter them in game designers themselves: People who are ostensibly designing robust rules for other people to use, but in whom the response to “just fudge around it” has become so ingrained that they do it while playtesting their own games instead of recognizing mechanical failures and structural shortcomings and figuring out how to fix them.

EXCEPTIONS TO THE BLINDSPOT

To circle all the way back around here: System Matters. But due to the longstanding blindspot when it comes to game structures and scenario structures in RPGs, we’ve stunted the growth of RPGs. Most of our RPGs are basically the same game, and they shouldn’t be. The RPG medium should be as rich and varied in the games it supports as, for example, the board game industry is. Instead, we have the equivalent of an industry where every board game plays just like Settlers of Catan.

Now there are exceptions to this blindspot when it comes to scenario structures. Partly influenced by storytelling games (which often feature very rigid scenario structures), we’ve been seeing an increasing number of RPGs beginning to incorporate at least partial scenario structures.

Blades in the Dark, for example, has a crew system that supports developing a criminal gang over time. Ars Magica does something similar for a covenant of wizards. Reign provides a generic cap system for managing player-run organizations in competition with other organizations.

Technoir features a plot-mapping scenario structure that’s tied into character creation and noir-driven mechanics.

For Infinity I designed the Psywar system to provide support for complex social challenges (con artistry, social investigation, etc.).

You can also, of course, visit some of the game structures I’ve explored here on the Alexandrian: Party Planning, Tactical Hacking, Urbancrawls. The ongoing Scenario Structure Challenge series will continue to explore these ideas.

Go to Game Structures

We’re one month away from Dave Arneson Day, a celebration of the Father of Roleplaying Games on the day of his birth, October 1st.

Last year I talked about the Arnesonian Dungeon and I described how I wanted to celebrate Dave Arneson Day by Running Castle Blackmoor: Seeking to recapture that moment, almost 50 years ago, when Dave Arneson’s players went down into his basement, discovered the Castle Blackmoor miniature sitting on his table, and ventured down the stairs into the dungeons beneath it.

It’s a powerful, iconic image. But the truth is that it’s not quite that simple.

My first exposure to the dawn of the modern roleplaying game came through Greg Svenson’s “The First Dungeon Adventure,” which has been revised several times, but which you can read in its most current form here. Greg Svenson played in Arneson’s original Blackmoor campaign, and his story of having “the unique experience of being the sole survivor of the first dungeon adventure in the history of ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ indeed in the history of roleplaying in general” is really cool. It captures the imagination. It invites you to really envision what it would have been like to sit at that table with Dave Arneson and discover something truly new and unique and amazing. To be there when it all began.

But it’s probably not true.

For those unfamiliar with this topic, there are several key cruxes in the early history of Blackmoor:

When the first session was played: Several key pieces of documentary evidence are widely considered to point to 1971 as the date of the first Blackmoor session. (These are not actually conclusive, IMO. They’re just the earliest contemporary documentary evidence that can be reliably dated.) This date has gotten particular weight after publication of Jon Peterson’s Playing at the World, an incredibly authoritative treatment of the early history of RPGs, because Peterson virulently rejected all eyewitness accounts in favor of contemporary documentary evidence.

(Peterson has good reasons for this: When Gygax attempted to claim that AD&D was a game unrelated to D&D so that Dave Arneson didn’t need to be paid royalties any more, Dave Arneson sued him. As often happens, the ensuing legal battle separated everyone involved into two distinct camps and created disparate narratives about what “really” happened which became entrenched. Once that happened, virtually all eyewitness accounts were irreparably tainted. You get the same thing in another case with Gygax, who miraculously starts claiming that he never liked Tolkien that much and his work wasn’t a significant influence on D&D at exactly the same time that TSR got sued by the Tolkien estate.)

However, in their earliest accounts virtually all of the Blackmoor players cited 1970 as the date of inception. Although several people, including Arneson, later decided that their memories must be faulty after looking at the documentary evidence (further muddying the waters), the most significant testimony is that of David Fant: He was the original Baron of Blackmoor and infamously became the first vampire. As such, he definitively played in the earliest sessions of Blackmoor, and yet he stopped playing when he got a job at KSTP at the end of 1970 and definitely was not playing with Arneson in 1971. (The fact he can definitively date the event which caused him to stop playing with Arneson lends his account substantial credibility.)

What the first session actually consisted of: The three main variations of the tale are the dungeon crawl (“we came in, there was a model of Castle Blackmoor in the middle of the table, and we started exploring the castle’s dungeons instead of playing the Napoleonics game we were supposed to”), the troll under the bridge (related in a fanzine and also attested to by players as being the first use of Chainmail), and the “rescue Dave Arneson from a plane crash in Europe, go through a cave, and emerge into the world of Blackmoor” (in which everyone was playing themselves and only later transitioned to a form of the campaign where they were playing different characters).

Who actually played in that first session: Even once you get past the question of what was in the first session, there’s a significant disagreement over who was there.

What were the original rules: Did the original Blackmoor use the Chainmail rules for combat or not? This is incredibly complicated by the later TSR vs. Arneson lawsuits where the question of whether or not Arneson’s game was derivative of Chainmail was legally significant.

To give a small sampling:

David Fant says he was at the first session, it was the “castle in the middle of the table instead of Napoleonics and we went into the dungeon” variation, and Dave asked him if he wanted to be the Baron of the castle.

Bob Meyer says he was at the first session, it was the “troll under the bridge” scenario, and it definitely used the Chainmail rules because he died in one hit as a result, declared he thought the game was terrible, and refused to play again for several years.

Greg Svenson says he was at the first session (later revised to be the “first dungeon adventure”), it was the “castle in the middle of the table instead of Napoleonics and we went into the dungeon” variation, and it involved Baron Fant being an NPC (which clearly contradicts Fant’s account).

To be clear, I’m not saying any of these people are being deliberately deceptive. I’m saying these things happened a long time ago, and it’s also quite likely there were many people who played in what they thought was the “first session” of the game without being aware that Arneson had run stuff in the Black Moors before that, and there are also all the foibles of an inconsistently shared communal narrative PLUS the complications of the Arneson vs. Gygax feud and legal troubles.

If you’re interested in delving into this lore more deeply, check out the aforementioned Playing at the World by Jon Peterson. A documentary called Secrets of Blackmoor has also just recently been released. Although I found it to be a somewhat flawed work when I attended the world premiere, it nevertheless affords you the irreplaceable opportunity to hear these stories from the lips of the people who were actually there.

And start planning your celebration of Dave Arneson Day now!

The Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace has a display of Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings, drawn from a folio collection obtained by Charles II in the 17th century and only made publicly available in the early 20th century.

I saw the exhibit while I was in London last week.

I had not previously had my attention focused on his cartography. Seeing them close up and in real life, however, impressed upon me how beautiful and informative these 15th century examples of cartography could be.

Take his map of Imola for example (click for large version):

You could pretty much just plug this directly into a D&D campaign, and I absolutely love the aesthetic of it. Check out this video for how he made it:

You might also check out Random GM Tips: Visualizing City Block Maps.

There’s also this map of Valdichiana:

I strongly encourage you to click-through to appreciate all the detail in this map. (There’s even more when you see it in real life.)

I’m currently very tempted to use this map for the version of Loch Gloomen in my Blackmoor open table.

Colin R. asks: “What tricks or devices do you have for generating memorable NPCs? Especially for creating them on the fly when players go in unexpected directions.”

This will not attempt to be an exhaustive discussion of how to create memorable characters. You could write whole books on the subject, and people have. But perhaps a grab bag of techniques I’ve found useful as a GM will prove useful to you, too.

1. Give them a distinct mannerism. I talk about this in the Universal NPC Roleplaying Template, which is itself a good, quick structure that you can pour characters into. A simple, physical action that you can perform at the table — crossing your arms and stroking your chin, scratching your knee, tapping the side of your nose, winking, speaking with a particular accent, scratching the top of your head, a notably colorful preference for a particular swear word — will make it much easier for you to slip into and out of a given character, and make that character more memorable and distinct for the players.

2. Give the NPC a strong agenda. Make them want something. Better yet? A pair of agendas. If they’re agendas that partly conflict with each other, even better.

It actually works best if this agenda is not aimed directly at the PCs. Something that simply overlaps the PCs’ areas of interest is usually more effective. If the PCs’ actions/knowledge/connections/whatever could help (or hinder) the NPC, I’ve found it’s often more effective for the NPC to discover that during their interaction with the PCs. (Or for the PCs to discover it and then decide what to do with that knowledge themselves.)

This is not a universal rule, obviously: There’s nothing wrong with a patron showing up and wanting the PCs to do something for them.

But the less the players think “X exists because the GM wants us to do Y,” the more they will think of X as an actual person.

3. Throw out lots and lots of NPCs and then pay attention to which ones “click” with the players. Focus on those and be OK with letting NPCs that aren’t clicking move on with their lives. I talk about this a bit in Party Planning.

4. Neel Krishnaswami’s Law of the Conservation of NPCs is also useful to remember here:

In our last Nine Worlds session, I introduced Perseus, a captain of the Lunar space fleet, who was married to Nick’s PC’s wife. In the session before that, the players had been boarded by a Lunar ship which had confiscated our engineer’s robot as technological contraband. That ship had a captain, who went unnamed. So when I first mentioned Perseus, the players’ first response was “Hey, is he the same guy?” and my answer was, “Of course — the law of conservation of NPCs demands it!” The players chuckled, and we went on playing.

The principle of conservation of NPCs actually is one of my GMing strategies. Whenever I introduce a new conflict into the game, I try to see if existing NPCs can be integrated into this role before I consider introducing a new NPC. I find two big benefits from doing this.

The first is simply that the size of the cast stays under control — I’ve run plenty of games where NPCs multiplied without limit, and that meant that months of real time could pass before we saw an NPC reappear. This limits the amount of shared history the players can develop with a character, and is often a little unsatisfying as a result. So reusing NPCs helps prevent the narrative from fizzling out.

Secondly, re-using NPCs means they will have multiple facets relevant to the players. In our 9W game, Perseus’s family became a center of the narrative — each of the players was off doing something else, but they affected each other because their actions influenced Perseus and his family. So despite the characters being separated the players were still interacting with each other.

5. Have NPCs connected to each other and give them strong, contradictory opinions about each other. If everyone thinks Lord Bakersfield is a pompous asshole… eh, whatever. That’s fine. If some people think he’s a pompous asshole and other people think he’s the greatest man they’ve ever met (and they both have cause to think so), Lord Bakersfield is a much interesting character.

You’re also basically forcing the players (and their PCs) to make up their own minds about Lord Bakersfield. That means they’ll need to think meaningfully about him as a character, and that’s step one to memorability.

TOOLS FOR IMPROVISATION

Something that I talk about in Smart Prep is that if you’re looking to improve your improvisation, then you should prep tools that make it easier to improvise the stuff you find hard to improvise. What these things are is different for everybody: Some people find it hard to come up with cool names on the fly; other people find that trivial.

So which tools you find most useful is going to vary a lot.

NAMES: I put together a list of Fantasy Names by culling cool names I ran across in a data entry job and I’ve used that list over and over and over again in the last couple decades.

I recently prepped a name list for the Infinity RPG by doing a lot of research into real world cultures and their names, specifically to highlight the rich panoply of cultures found in the setting.

On a far more focused scale, Feng Shui 2 does something similar by distinguishing between characters from Hong Kong, characters from mainland China, and characters from Ancient China by using different methods of Romanizing Chinese names.

The globe-hopping Eternal Lies campaign very wisely includes a list of first and last names for each location the PCs go. Notably I did NOT follow the same practice in designing my Severn Valley expansion to the campaign because I felt confident in my ability to to improvise English names.

Over the Edge is another interesting example because Jonathan Tweet basically invented a set of naming conventions for the island of Al Amarja, subtly emphasizing the strangely akimbo nature of its place in our reality. I developed a cheat sheet of Al Amarjan Names to encourage GMs to lean into this. It can be found on Atlas’ official website.

MANNERISMS: Here’s a quick, one-stop shop: Maze Rats. It has a one page “Character Creation” sheet which includes random tables for appearance, physical details, costumes, personality, mannerisms, and hobbies.

You can get a lot of mileage by, say, randomly generating a part of your body and thinking about what you can do with it. If you have one of those dedicated hit location dice, here’s a really creative way you could use it.

AGENDAS: These are trickier to generate meaningful, high-quality random tables for, because they are generally going to be heavily dependent on the specific context of the game setting.

Assuming that your setting is already well-stocked with NPCs, however, one thing you can do is basically just co-opt an existing NPC’s agenda: In the real world, after all, there’s not just one guy who’s pro-Brexit or seeking to buy real estate in the Guildsman’s District or aligned with the Mafia or engaging in anti-android-apartheid activism.

So add this new NPC to one of these existing factions of interest. It works best to then give their agenda a twist so that it’s providing a different angle or insight into the agenda. The easiest twist is to simply flip the agenda and have them opposed to whatever the other NPC is trying to accomplish: So they’re anti-Brexit, trying to protect middle class property rights in the Guildsman’s District, a gangbuster, or an android-tester enforcing the apartheid.

KEEP A FILE: Something else you can do is to start keeping a file of cool NPCs you’ve seen in various adventure modules. I talk about this a bit in Strip-Mining Adventure Modules.

You don’t have to limit yourself to characters from RPG products, or even from the same setting or genre. A lot of the stuff that makes characters cool and memorable — their beliefs, their look, their mannerisms — all tend to translate well.

If these characters are a little too well known, this can be less effective. (Although, honestly, Ian McKellan’s Gandalf is basically an archetype at this point and it’s perfectly acceptable to have a wizard show up smoking a pipe, waggling their eyebrows, and speaking cryptically in dramatic whispers.)

Genre flips often solve this problem in any case: Use Gandalf’s mannerisms for a mafioso or Luke Skywalker’s characterization for a petulant halfling and your players will probably never even realize where you drew your inspiration from.

As Dominic finished, his eyes blazed with silver light. Rehobath was entranced. “It is the mark… It’s hard to believe that one of the Chosen should have come to me.”

This meeting between Dominic and Rehobath is a major turning point in the campaign.

Looking back on this moment now, it’s hard for me to imagine a version of In the Shadow of the Spire in which this doesn’t happen. But the truth is that if I ran this campaign another fifty times, the chances of this – or anything like it – happening again are basically nonexistent. Like “The Tale of Itarek,” this moment, and everything that comes from it, is the result of completely unanticipated player decisions building one atop another.

(If I actually did run this campaign again, of course, I might choose to restructure it to make including this material more likely. This is not out of the question. For example, the Severn Valley scenario I designed for Eternal Lies was similarly the unplanned result of very specific and relatively unlikely decisions made by the PCs. When I ran the campaign a second time, however, I added specific clues to make it more likely that the PCs would end up going there.)

So let’s take a moment to talk about how we got here. I think you’ll find it interesting, at least in part, because it also demonstrates how a number of different techniques I’ve discussed here at the Alexandrian can combine together in actual play.

Unlike most of these Running the Campaign essays, this one will contain SPOILERS for upcoming installments of the campaign journal. So you may want to skip it if you’d rather be surprised.

STAGE 1: ACTUAL PREP

In terms of actual prep (i.e., things I planned as the DM), there are basically two points of origin.

First, Dominic’s eyes. These were included in the campaign as one of the clues to the metaplot mystery of what had happened to them during the period of amnesia immediately preceding the beginning of the campaign. The notes describing the eyes were quite brief:

• If Dominic praises Vehthyl while wearing or holding the mithril holy symbol he woke with, his eyes become glowing silver globes with the following effects: +2 to Spot checks, detect magic, can be active for up to 15 minutes per level per day.
• A Knowledge (religion) check (DC 22) reveals that this is one of Vehthyl’s signs – it is a mark of the god’s chosen, indicating that they have taken the first step on the path to sainthood.

Second, Rehobath and his relationship with the Imperial Church. This gets a little more complicated.

Rehobath is based on Monte Cook’s Rehoboth. In the original Ptolus setting, Rehoboth Ylestos was the Emperor of the Church. When the Empire fell, Rehoboth fled to Ptolus, where his son Kirian Ylestos was the Prince of the Church, and “declared himself secular Emperor as well as the head of the Church of Lothian and set up his own Imperial court in the Holy Palace.”

Because I was transplanting Ptolus into my own campaign world, I had to figure out how to adapt that to fit with the gods, religions, and politics of the Five Empires. This went through several iterations, some of which were quite convoluted. (At one point, Rehoboth was theoretically being held in religious asylum and seclusion by his son, but the two of them were secretly working together as a nefarious conspiracy.) But at the time the campaign started it had settled into a more basic form:

• Rehobath (note the subtle name change, which I’m definitely claiming was deliberate and not a typo that iteratively asserted itself into all of my campaign notes) had once been the Gold Fatar of the Inner Cathedral of Athor. In the political wrangling around the appointment of the last Novarch (the head of the Imperial Church), he was effectively demoted to being the Silver Fatar of the Outer Cathedral of Athor in Ptolus.
• Aggrieved in his new position, Rehobath gathered power and eventually declared himself both the Novarch-in-Exile and Holy Emperor, claiming divine right of rule over both the Imperial Church and the Empire of Seyrun.
• Kirian Ylestos (who was no longer Rehobath’s son) had been sent by the Imperial Church to replace the heretic Rehobath as the rightful Silver Fatar of the Outer Church of Athor. He was successful in ousting Rehobath, who took up residence in the “Holy Palace” in the Nobles’ District.

Shortly after the campaign started, however, I realized that I’d made a mistake: It would be far more interesting to rewind the timeline and include all of that political finagling as backdrop events that would play out as current events in the Ptolus newssheets while the PCs went about their adventures.

So, at this point, Rehobath was still the Silver Fatar of the Outer Cathedral, although he was actively scheming to declare himself Novarch-in-Exile.

STAGE 2: PLAYER INTEREST

Once Dominic discovered that his eyes glowed silver whenever he praised Vehthyl, he became interested in figuring out why. Although it seems fairly obvious in retrospect, I had not anticipated that his interest would take the form of seeking out local Vehthylian religious experts.

I’ve previously discussed the method I used to respond to his interest in “An Interstice of Factions,” so you can check that out at length. But what it boils down to is that I gave him four different options:

When Dominic headed across the bridge into the Temple District, he made gentle inquiries into the worship of Vehthyl and discovered four options: First, the Order of the Silver God. Second, the Temple of the Clockwork God. Third, the Temple of the Ebon Hand. And, finally, an itinerant minotaur priest named Shibata.

This list was largely prepped by simply going through my notes and seeing which religious organizations and individuals in Ptolus were associated with Vehthyl. Although the Order of the Silver God (part of the Imperial Church) is included in this list, you might notice that Rehobath and his politics still aren’t present.

STAGE 3: UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

At Harvesttime, Dominic chose to speak with Shibata. He got some guidance and insight into what it means to be Chosen by one of the Nine Gods and what the religious mystery of Vehthyl was, but he ultimately wasn’t satisfied with the answers he got. So after mulling things over for a bit, in Session 14 he decided to seek more guidance at the Temple of the Clockwork God.

This actually came a bit out of left field for me as a GM: After seeking out Shibata, I hadn’t realized that Dominic was still thinking about looking for more answers, so I had never given any meaningful thought to what would happen if he went to the Temple of the Clockwork God. So I stalled:

The priest shook his head. “Why this should be or what your purpose is, I cannot say. And the wisest among us are not here. We would like to wait for their return and then pray for the guidance of Vehthyl. Can you return to us? Let us say in five days time, upon the ninth of Kadal?”

Basically, the five days of in-game time would give me some time to prep content that would meaningfully reward Dominic for pursuing this avenue of investigation. I knew that the Temple of the Clockwork God and another organization known as the Shuul were loosely aligned and that both of them venerated the Iron Angels. The Iron Angels are basically ancient fantasy mecha that were somehow related to the Lithuin Titans, and various ruined Iron Angels had been recovered in archaeological digs in recent years. (This is because Cook had used the name “Iron Angel” to refer to neutral outsiders related to the Iron God, but my setting already used that name for the ancient constructs and rather than giving the Iron Angels revered by the Shuul a new name, I decided it would be more interesting to have them simply revere my existing Iron Angels.) I knew that the Shuul had been reconstructing one of these Angels, and they and the Temple of the Clockwork God were interested in figuring out how to revive it (basically bringing what they perceived as a dead god back to life). I decided that Maeda, the head priestess of the Temple of the Clockwork God, would perceive the coming of the Chosen of Vehthyl as a sign that the time for reviving the Iron God had come.

I hadn’t done much more than put together a few fragmentary notes to this effect, however, when, as I discussed in Session 19, the group’s actions unexpectedly caused them to raid the Shuul’s headquarters. Given the timeline involved, it made sense that Maeda’s communications with Savane, the head of the Shuul, would be there and the PCs discovered it:

Brother Savane—

Brother Tannock has brought me strange news. A man bearing the Mark of Vehthyl has come to our temple. He is to return to us on the 9th of Kadal, at which time I shall see for myself. But if the Chosen of Vehthyl has come to us, then the hour has arrived. Can the Iron Angel be made ready?

Maeda

When I wrote the note, however, I hadn’t anticipated that the PCs would interpret it in the worst light possible. I thought it would be kind of a cool, enigmatic reference to the “Iron Angel” and then, when Dominic met with Maeda, there’d be a payoff when Maeda revealed what the Iron Angels were. (“Make it a mystery” is a technique described in Random GM Tips: Getting Players to Care.)

Instead, the note scared them: The Temple of the Clockwork God were conspiring with the Shuul and clearly had some sort of nefarious agenda where Dominic was concerned. Dominic resolved to skip his appointment with the Temple and was left figuring out where he wanted to turn next for answers.

STAGE 4: UNANTICIPATED CHOICE

At this point you might anticipate that Dominic would choose between one of the two remaining options he had found at Harvesttime: The Order of the Silver God or the Temple of the Ebon Hand.

Instead, he did something completely unanticipated: They had been briefly introduced to Rehobath during the Harvesttime celebrations at Castle Shard, and they made the decision to reach out to him directly as the local head of the Imperial Church.

So… what happens?

Well, I look at what I know about Rehobath and his agenda. And then I think about what he would do if the Chosen of Vehthyl basically fell into his lap.

The result, of course, is that the PCs are going to be thrust directly into the middle of Rehobath declaring himself the True Novarch of the Imperial Church.

And then things get even crazier.