IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Session 21: The Saint’s Schism

Liquid light in a diamond flask was brought forth. The glowing liquid was poured across Rehobath’s brow, bathing him in its light as it coursed down over his shoulders.

A circlet of elfin gold was produced and placed upon Rehobath’s brow. As it settled into place, the liquid light flowed back up across his body, becoming concentrated in a great glowing bauble that shone forth from his forehead.

About twenty years ago now, I opened a Word document on my computer and saved it as “Fantasy Materials.” It was originally intended to be a magazine article, but it quickly became the sort of project that’s never finished because it can’t be finished. The document became a storehouse for fantastical materials: Not magic items, but rather those strange substances that can only be found where pervasive magic has changed the very substance of mortal reality.

As I wrote in the introduction to the article-that-was-not-to-be:

These are not the common materials of history or the modern world. Items of marvelous grandeur may be forged from gold and silver, but such items lack the spark of the fundamentally fantastic which even a simple blade of mithril possesses. This, then, is a catalog of things which never have been and will never be. Here there are gems which will never sparkle; trees which have never been felled; stones from quarries which will never be mined; metals which will never be forged.

They are the building blocks of a world which can live only in our imagination.

Some of the material in this article was stuff I had created out of wholecloth – like taurum, the true gold which makes common gold naught but a bauble, or wave cypress, a pale blue wood that never rots. Others, following in the grand tradition of mithril, were the result of kitchen-sinking, like Terry Pratchett’s darklight or Fritz Leiber’s snow-diamonds.

This is clearly something that Monte Cook also enjoys, as the Ptolus sourcebook includes a number of unique special materials, too. (Including the liquid light referred to above.)

The utility of this storehouse is manifold:

• It’s an easy resource to tap when you want to put magic in the set dressing.
• Any time you want to infuse an element of the game world with the fantastical, you can reach for this list and do so. For example, the ritual of the novarch’s inauguration is studded with liquid light (what it says on the tin), godwood (a pale white wood that glows in the presence of divine magic), and elfin gold (an alchemical admixture of gold and ruby dust with tremendous flexibility).
• It allows you to craft structures and vistas impossible in the mundane world. For example, the lighter-than-air stone known as heliothil which makes floating towers and flying ships possible. Or the sheets of ruby crystal which can be used to create literal gemstone rooms.
• It can be used to create fantastical challenges for high level characters. Ironwood, for example, requires adamantine axes to fell and can be used to construct incredibly sturdy doors and other structures. Or locks made of cortosis that resist magical knock spells.
• It can provide memorable and noteworthy treasures (much like Bilbo’s original mithril shirt). For example, abyssopelagic gems that are fused in the depths of the ocean and melt at the pressures of sea level unless preserved with magical stasis fields. Or the lens of phantomglass that allows you perceive invisible spirits. Or the woven shirt of ghost grass which has the protective properties of chain.

It would be a mistake, though, to constantly fill your world with novel, never-before-seen material. The reason “mithril” resonates with meaning when I say it to you is because you have been exposed to it countless times; its redolent with lore. So the new fantastical materials you introduce to your campaigns will gain meaning over time as you reincorporate them into new contexts: The PCs encounter a statue of elfin gold, the individual strands of its metallic hair impossibly blowing in the wind. They see it used as magical circlet by Rehobath. They discover small craft-ingots of it in the alchemical laboratory of a dark elf. And so forth.

It’s great when the players recognize and truly know these fantastical materials. It’s even better when they’ve internalized them and start seeking them out: “You know what would be useful for this? Some shadow-veined rock.”

SESSION 21: THE SAINT’S SCHISM

May 11th, 2008
The 9th Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

Tee turned around. “Ranthir?”

Ranthir muttered a few words of magic and then carefully examined the invisible barrier. “It’s completely impenetrable. And beyond my ability to dispel.”

“I thought we got rid of the ghost.”

“Apparently not,” Agnarr said.

“Or there’s more than one ghost haunting this place,” Tor said.

Tee grimaced. “Let’s hope that’s not the case.” She paused for a moment and thought things over. “All right. We can’t get out this way, but we can always climb down the walls. Let’s head back up to that collapsed balcony. I think that’ll be easiest.”

Tee headed back into the courtyard. A flash of lightning drew her eye upwards… and she suddenly caught sight of a large, hunched figure leaning over the edge of a walkway that stretched between two of the keep’s towers. Instinctively she whipped out her dragon pistol and fired.

The blast of energy struck the edge of the bridge. The figure jerked back and then shambled off towards one of the towers – disappearing from sight.

“What was it?” Elestra asked.

“I don’t know,” Tee said, slowly holstering the pistol. “I couldn’t see it clearly.” (more…)

Go to Part 1

NODE 3: ALICIA COREY’S BOARDING HOUSE

• A wooden, hand-painted sign declares as much on the sloped front lawn. An attached lower placard reads ROOM FOR RENT.
• Ma Kelley is a woman in her mid-50s. Widowed when her husband was killed in the war. She knows what the Girls know (below), and can also provide Alicia Corey’s rental application.
• Men are generally not allowed through the door at any hour; if they have official credentials, she won’t make a fuss about it, but it will nevertheless startle the girls.

Bedrooms: One of the second floor Chambers is occupied by Ma Kelley. The other four are furnished for rental. Three are occupied (including Alicia’s); the fourth is currently available for rent.

ALICIA COREY’S RENTAL APPLICATION

• She moved into Ma Kelley’s in July.
• Lists a forwarding address: 169 Page Street West, St. Paul, MN.  (Node 5: Fatima’s Shrine)

QUESTIONING THE GIRLS

• Betty, Grace
• They probably don’t’ know that Alicia is dead (unless it’s been a couple of days, in which case the cops have followed up).
• Alicia always paid her rent promptly in cash.
• She worked as a secretary, but they realize they don’t know for what firm.
• She never had any guests that they can recall, but she did keep strange hours from time to time. (Ma Kelley doesn’t have any sort of curfew, so this wasn’t considered a problem or anything.)
• She’d once mentioned during dinner that she had been in Cairo. The girls thought this was terribly exotic, but it didn’t seem as if Alicia wanted to talk about it. (Betty is convinced this means that she has a dark and mysterious past; probably featuring a lover who tragically died.)

ALICIA COREY’S ROOM

Furnished with care and love. A handmade quilt on the bed. (Features an arabesque design indicative of it being Egyptian in origin.)

Writing Desk: Everything is meticulously clean. Any written matter has been carefully destroyed.

Loose Floor Board: Under the bed. Alicia Khouri’s Diary is hidden inside.

ALICIA COREY’S BACKGROUND

Alicia’s real name is Alicia Khouri. She is of Egyptian descent.

Rashida Khouri, Alicia’s mother, is a Hu-manifestation of Ra and a Sister of Fatima. Alicia learned the teachings of the Sisterhood from her mother, but had not yet been indoctrinated into the inner mysteries of the coven. (She didn’t know that her mother was a Hu-manifestation of Ra.)

Gladys Roy had alerted the Sisterhood that there was Tanit activity in the Twin Cities. Alicia was sent to conduct an investigation. She had tracked the cult activity to kidnappings at Harriet Tubman’s Asylum for Colored Orphans (Node 4), but gotten no further in her investigation at the time of her death.

Investigators may suspect that Corey was directly targeted in response to her investigation, but this is not the case. Her exposure to the Tophet serum whiskey was coincidental.

ALICIA COREY’S DIARY

Flipping through this thin red volume – well-worn and weather-beaten despite containing pre-printed entries only for the year 1925 – reveals that the first half is completely blank and unused. In July of this year, however, entries in a fine and elegant script begin (mostly in a blue ink, although there are some scrabbled out in pencil and others in a black ink; all appear to be of the same hand, however).

At first glance, most of the entries appear to be concerned with sightseeing around the Twin Cities. But in aggregate an odd pattern appears: The sites she is notating as if they were tourist attractions generally… aren’t. They’re common businesses or even private residences. Mixed in among these curious entries you notice a recurring mention of the name Tanith, and also one reference to “a defacement of the eye of Ra”.

Over the past month, the entries become fixated around a single location: Harriet Tubman’s Asylum for Colored Orphans, located in the Rondo neighborhood of St. Paul. The exact nature of these notes is difficult to discern as they are partly written in some form of code, but they seem to catalog the comings and goings of numerous individuals, tracking their movements in some detail.

If Lost, Please Return Me to
169 Page Street West, Saint Paul, Minnesota

Go to Node 4: Harriet Tubman’s Asylum for Colored Children

In GM Don’t List #9: Fudging I discuss why GMs should avoid fudging, and if they do end up needing to fudge, why they should view that as a failure point in their game and a learning opportunity to figure out how they can become a better GM.

The most common form of fudging is changing the outcome of a die roll (the roll was a failure, but you say it was a success, or vice versa), but it’s widely understood that there are also other ways to fudge mechanical results (increasing a creature’s hit point total, for example).

What I think is less commonly understood, however, is that not all the dice rolls you make in a roleplaying game are mechanics, and it’s not actually fudging to change or ignore those dice rolls. Specifically, procedural content generators. Such generators can actually use any number of randomization techniques (for example, here’s a method for using CCG cards to generate adventures), but since we’ve already got dice laying around the typical RPG table most procedural content generators just use those.

WHY ISN’T THAT FUDGING?

If you’re struggling to understand why changing the outcomes of a procedural content generator isn’t the same thing as fudging a mechanical resolution, let’s take an extreme example. I’m prepping a scenario for my next session and I need a name for an NPC. So I pop open the Random Name Generator at Behind the Name, select for random surnames, click the button, and get:

Ivonne Eógan Masson

For whatever reason (maybe personal aesthetic, maybe because the Masons are already established as major power brokers in the city and I think it’s interesting this random generator has unexpectedly connected this NPC to the clan), I decide to drop the second “s” from “Masson” and name the character Ivonne Eógan Mason.

Did I just fudge?

Frankly speaking, no. Not by any reasonable/functional definition of the term.

What if instead of tweaking the outcome I actually just ignored it and rolled again by hitting the “Generate a Name!” button a second time? Still no.

What if I move this interaction from prep to actual play (I need to come up with a new NPC’s name on the fly, so I randomly generate one and then tweak it)? Still no.

What if the random name generator is published in the game’s rulebook? Still no.

This isn’t fudging not only because it would make the concept of “fudging” so broad as to be meaningless, but also because treating the outcome of a procedural content generator as a straitjacket or legally binding contract is to fundamentally misuse the procedural content generator. Using a procedural content generator is more like coating the bottom of an agar plate with a growth medium: As it’s exposed to your creative subconscious, the growth plate begins to accumulate a bunch of random creativity and odd synchronicities that begin to grow and thrive. (Ivonne Mason, for example, is a very different character than Lea Colton or Caroline Bone specifically because each of those random names provides a different creative stimulus.) Treating the outcome of the procedural content generator as if it were inviolable scripture, on the other hand, is like sterilizing the agar plate; it completely short-circuits the process.

ALL MECHANICS ARE PROCEDURAL CONTENT GENERATORS!

“Ah ha!” you say. “But aren’t all resolution mechanics actually procedural content generators, the results of which are meant to be creatively interpreted by the GM and other players? Is not the narration of outcome the same thing as taking a randomly generated group of bandits and creating the Blood Shield Bandits?”

Basically, no. There’s a similarity of process (roll dice, interpret results), but the function of resolution mechanics and procedural content generators are in many ways actually inverted: A resolution mechanic takes generally non-specific creative input and creates specificity (often literally a binary pass/fail state). A procedural content generator, on the other hand, produces non-specific creative input and expects the GM to create the specificity.

Because the processes involved are similar and because “specificity” can be a sliding scale, you can use procedural content generators as resolution mechanics (sterilizing your agar plates) and vice versa. But because the tools are designed for one thing and you’re using them for something else, the result is usually like using a screwdriver as a hammer.

GRAY AREAS

This is not, however, to say that there are no gray areas which lie along the boundary between resolution mechanics and procedural content generators.

You can see this perhaps most clearly when a game takes something which is traditionally a procedural content generator in other systems and makes it a hard-coded mechanic (or closer to being a mechanic) instead.

For example, in Apocalypse World characters are created from playbooks. For example, if you want to play a Gunlugger, you take the Gunlugger playbook and it instructs you, “To create your gunlugger, choose name, look, stats, moves, gear, and Hx.” Each of those categories then has a specific list of things. This becomes a surprising gray area: Many people, conditioned by other RPG character creation systems, looked at the provided list of names as a resource that could be used or ignored. (Many editions of D&D have similar lists of elven names, for example. Over the Edge provides a list of Al Amarjan names. And so forth.) Apocalypse World, however, specifically seeks to enforce setting through non-traditional mechanics, and so I’ve played at tables that instead interpreted this as a mechanical requirement: You must choose your name from the provided list of Gunlugger names (which are distinct from the list of, for example, Hardholder names, thus asserting setting). I’m actually still unsure what D. Vincent Baker’s intention was.

You can find another gray area in the dungeon stocking procedures of the original edition of Dungeons & Dragons. While the rules allow for some discretion on the part of the GM in the distribution of treasure and monsters, the line between advice, procedural content generator, and actual mechanic is very fuzzy and open to a lot of interpretation. This is even more true when it comes to wandering monsters in OD&D: A random encounter check is often interpreted as a procedural content generator by modern GMs, but in OD&D it’s stated as a straight-up mechanic.

The Mythic Game Master Emulator is also an interesting example: In order to emulate the role of the GM, the Mythic system basically adds a lot of binding structure onto a suite of procedural content generators. But despite the gray area this creates, the system still draws a fairly strong distinction between the output of the resolution mechanics and the output of the GM emulator (i.e., the procedural content generators). If you want to get a really clear feeling for how using resolution mechanics and using procedural content generators differ from each other, spending an afternoon playing around with Mythic as a cap-system for your favorite RPG can be very illuminating.