DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 48C: Entering the Tomb

Passing down a short flight of open stairs and through an antechamber of sorts, they entered another large chamber, this one with a wide pit in the center of it.

Carefully approaching the edge of the pit, Tee looked down to find it tightly packed with two dozen or more ancient zombies – their grey and desiccated flesh stretched cross across browned bones. When they became aware of their presence, the undead things began to claw wildly at the walls, although they found no purchase and there seemed little risk of their escape.

“Desiccated?” Agnarr said. “That sounds flammable.”

As the PCs reach what we now think of as Tier 2, you have the opportunity to start using certain monsters for effect rather than threat.

When they were 1^st level, the PCs nervously peered in every direction, ready to leap into action at even the slightest hint of movement. They really had no choice: Even a rabid house cat might prematurely end their adventuring careers with a couple of unlucky dice rolls.

As you drift into higher levels, however, some of those early foes become so trivial that they no longer pose any meaningful threat, even in great numbers. Take, for example, the pit of zombies in this session. Even if one of the PCs had been thrown headlong into this shambling horde, they’d almost certainly have been okay: If they hadn’t torched them, Nasira could’ve turned them en masse. And if she hadn’t, then Agnarr could have easily cleaved his way through them.

As a GM, it’s easy to respond to this trivialization of challenge by simply eliminating such encounters. And, of course, to some extent, that exactly what you should do.

But what this ignores is that encounters can be – and should be! – about more than just combat challenges. If you’ve been conditioned to think of D&D as simply a string of combat encounters connected with a thin patina of exposition, this may seem strange. But encounters should also be serving the needs of mood, theme, logic, and world-building.

This particular pit is helping to set tone and show the history of the Tomb (the upper levels have been abandoned for a long, long time). It also reinforces theme and just generally creeps the players out. (It could have also been significant as a bargaining chip when the PCs went down to the second level of the dungeon, but (a) as we can see here, that never happened and (b) I no longer recall if that was intentional on my part when designing the dungeon or if it was just one of those happy accidents.)

Facing encounters that would have once been daunting but have instead become trivial also communicates something about the PCs’ changing place in the world. It’s also important to remember that, even though such encounters might pose little or no risk to the PCs, they can still be deadly dangers to their PCs’ allies and other NPCs in the dungeon (and showing that to the players can also be a great way of reinforcing everything they’ve gained through their hard work).

For example, maybe the PCs can cut a swath through the goblins on the top level of the dungeon with ease, but the presence of those goblins may nevertheless explain why the lizardfolk have been trapped down on the second level of the dungeon.

Undead, in particular, can have a lot of this worldbuilding potential. They can last a long time and continue communicating a lot about a dungeon’s original purpose and its history, either through their presence, their actions, or even just their clothing. And, in terms of challenge, there’s something deeply satisfying about watching foes that once intimidated you go scurrying away in terror after the cleric turns them.

You can take a lesson from that when running non-undead foes, too: You don’t need a divine gift for a mob of goblins to go scurrying for their hidey-holes after seeing the barbarian slice-and-dice their comrades by the dozen.

It feels great for the players, but can also present a fun twist where the trivial mooks raise the alarm and bring much dangerous foes into the fray.

Campaign Journal: Session 48D – Running the Campaign: Art Handouts
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

SESSION 48C: ENTERING THE TOMB

January 9th, 2010
The 26th Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

After perhaps fifty or sixty feet, Tee emerged into a small chamber of unadorned stone. The shadows seemed even deeper here, stubbornly clinging to the corner of the room.

There was a single door of iron. As Tee took her first cautious step off the stairs towards it, Elestra – following behind her – gasped to see the shadows literally dart out from the walls. Catching Tee unaware and from behind, the first shadow clawed its incorporeal hand through her shoulder while the other plunged its own straight through her heart and chest.

Tee gasped, fumbling for a potion to fight off the cloying cold gripping at her limbs. As she stumbled away from the stairs, the supernatural shadows pursued.

Agnarr raced down the stairs. Tor, who had been watching the party’s rear, pushed his way past Ranthir and the others still on the stairs, but couldn’t get past Agnarr without exposing his own back to the shadows.

Elestra, cut off by both of the fighters, instead turned into a bird, flew through a gap in the stone balustrades of the stair, and alighted by Tee’s side. With soothing hands, she helped her shaking friend.

Nasira grasped her holy symbol and raised it high. The nearest shadow fled from her faith, passing through the iron door. This allowed Agnarr to safely back away from the base of the stairs, giving room for both Tor and Nasira to descend.

As Nasira came, she called aloud the name of her goddess – “SAYL!” – and in a burst of holy light the remaining shadow was blasted back into the floor of the chamber. There it remained for a long moment – like a shadow imprinted without an owner – before it faded away into nothingness. The palling darkness of the chamber seemed to lift at its passing.

HAUNTED HALLS

Beyond the iron door was a long hall of dark grey stone that seemed to serve as a crossroads of sorts between four narrow arches. Web-encrusted skeletons lay slouched in a dozen shallow niches that lined the walls of the hall. Tee was taking no chances and stabbed the nearest of the skeletons through its exposed sternum. As she did so, the skeleton in the next niche lurched suddenly to its feet… and then stumbled and collapsed into a broken heap.

Tor and Agnarr did a quick sweep around the circumference of the hall, bashing each skeleton in turn (although they evoked no response from any of the others). Ranthir, inspecting the remnants of their bone-bashing, noted that the skeletons had been covered in small, detailed runes – arcane in nature, but drawn in an archaic style. Some of the runes appeared necromantic, but not all of them, and Ranthir was puzzled as to what their purpose had been.

Passing through one of the arches leading out of the hall, Tee found herself in a huge chamber. Dozens of chains dangled from the ceiling, each tipped with a vicious, serrated hook. On two or three of the hooks she could see skeletal remains hanging limply.

… and many of the chains were drifting slowly in the breeze of a room in which the air was perfectly still.

The effect was unnerving, and after quickly confirming that the room was otherwise empty they went through the arch on the opposite side of the hall. Passing down a short flight of open stairs and through an antechamber of sorts, they entered another large chamber, this one with a wide pit in the center of it.

Carefully approaching the edge of the pit, Tee looked down to find it tightly packed with two dozen or more ancient zombies – their grey and desiccated flesh stretched cross across browned bones. When they became aware of their presence, the undead things began to claw wildly at the walls, although they found no purchase and there seemed little risk of their escape.

“Desiccated?” Agnarr said. “That sounds flammable.”

Tee sprayed some oil into the pit and lit ‘em up. The party backed out of the chamber as it started to fill with thick, black smoke carrying the stench of burning flesh.

Running the Campaign: Undead for Effect – Campaign Journal: Session 48D
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

Go to Part 1

TURN BACK THE CLOCK

Turn Back the Clock by Kyle Tam is a thinly disguised roman a clef of Arthur C. Clarke’s and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. The PCs receive a distress call sent from a ship thought lost for centuries: Mankind’s first expedition to Jupiter. It’s been knocked loose in time by the presence of the Star Child Flux Child. The original crew is experiencing Annihilation-like transformations, and if the PCs aren’t careful, they’ll similarly become lost in space and time.

Conceptually this seems really interesting. Unfortunately, it’s the execution that kills this one.

First, imagine adapting 2001: A Space Odyssey, but you aren’t really sure how to do that, so the structure of your adventure is just punching the Flux Child in the head until it’s “felled,” freeing you from the ship. But, also, that’s basically impossible because the Flux Child does 5d100 damage, has 20 maximum Wounds, and you forgot to include a Health score.

Second, I frequently found the text confusing. For example, “the crew is not technically in danger,” but they were currently fusing with the furniture and/or have pieces of their bodies falling off, plus they will shortly cease to be sentient. Hmm. I feel like I have a radically definition of “danger” than the author here.

Finally, there are more fundamental design problems here. For example, a core structure of the adventure is, “The longer you spend onboard the Charon, the more of yourself you lose. Each day, make a Sanity save or else roll on the [Distortion Table].” But the adventure is keyed as a pointcrawl with three briefly described areas.

This is a problem I frequently see in published adventures. I’ve discussed a similar problem in Running Background Adventures: There’s simply not enough narrative material to fill the time necessary to trigger this structure.

“Clarke’s Star Child does body horror” is a cool concept. But, sadly, there’s nothing on the page in Turn Back the Clock that I would actually use in bringing that concept to the table. This is a disappointing miss for me.

GRADE: F

The PCs are hired to pick up a secretive shipment from an automated shuttle. The only problem? An experimental combat drone – the Synthetic Predator 1^st Design, 3^rd Revision (or SP-1D3R) – has stowed away on the shuttle to escape the facility where it was being tested. Desperate for energy, it begins draining the power systems on the PCs’ ship.

This is another good concept with shaky execution.

Designer Nikolaj Gedionsen describes the adventure as “a claustrophobic game of cat-and-mouse aboard a failing ship where an intelligent machine predator turns the crew’s familiar home against them.” Which sounds great, but immediately runs face-first into a ship map that’s entirely linear. It’s hard to play cat-and-mouse on a balance beam.

The Plea also frequently relies on overriding or ignoring the core rules of Mothership. In my experience, this sort of thing doesn’t work because the players get frustrated at the bullshit “threat” that’s being arbitrarily thrust upon them.

The adventure includes its own mechanical superstructure in the form of a Power Drain system (modeling and tracking the SP-1D3R taking over and depleting the ship’s systems), but I have a difficult time believing it was ever playtested. The core of the system boils down to:

1. Start with 12 Power.
2. -1 Power when the drone connects to a system.
3. If the PCs power down a section, it can’t be Power Drained and also save 1 Power per turn.

The math just fundamentally doesn’t math here. Nonetheless, I’ve done several dry runs of the system using various interpretations of what it might have meant (did you mean -1 Power per turn? can the drone be attached to multiple systems simultaneously?) and it just doesn’t work.

All of these issues, I think, explains why a significant chunk of this adventure is a section called “The Vibe.” Ultimately, that’s a pretty good summary of The Plea: It’s a concept running almost entirely on vibes.

GRADE: D

TESSERACT

Pyry Qvick’s Tesseract initially threw me for a loop because (a) it’s called Tesseract (a cube extended into fourth-dimensional space in the same that a square is extended to become a cube in three-dimensional space) and (b) it features a bunch of non-Euclidean cube-shaped rooms. So my brain kept trying to make the adventure work as an actual tesseract… but it isn’t.

Which is OK. I mention this only in the hope it might help you avoid the same pitfall and get straight to appreciating just how cool this adventure is.

Things kick off in Tesseract like this:

Your ship passes a massive metallic cube. After a moment, your ship passes by a massive metallic cube. Again and again. Your navigation shows no progress made.

On the cube’s surface, a hatch opens.

Crawling inside the cube, you discover a dozen of the aforementioned cube-shaped rooms, all arranged on a map that makes it easy for you to run as the GM, but devilishly complex for the players to unravel. (If they ever do.)

The rooms themselves are consistently themed, but each one is varied and intriguing. In addition to the navigational puzzle of the non-Euclidean map, exploring the cube is also deeply satisfying because the rooms present an interconnected mystery that allows the players to slowly piece together what’s happening here (and, hopefully, undo it). This is very much the adventure that Turn Black the Clock wanted to be, but dropped the ball on.

Season to taste with the creepy cube-droids which infest the place.

The net result is a creepy, well-designed adventure I am sure will leave your players disoriented, paranoid, and thrilled.

GRADE: B-

Rather than the trifold modules we’ve been reviewing, Dead Weight by Norgad is a twelve-page micro-adventure.

The PCs are crewing a cargo ship when an alien artifact in one of the ship’s holds activates, causing all dead bodies in the area to rapidly accelerate towards. It starts with all the meat in the ship’s galley, which rips through the crew currently eating dinner. The dead bodies of the crew, of course, are added to the mass of meat and bone, which rip through the hull of the ship, causing lockdown and atmospheric pressure doors to trigger throughout the ship.

As the investigation and emergency repairs begin, a crew member mortally injured in the initial incident dies, inflicting more damage… and that’s when corpses start arriving from outside the ship. Can the PCs figure out what’s going on and jettison the artifact before the asteroid the artifact was taken from arrives and annihilates the ship?

The concept of Dead Weight is elegant in its horrific simplicity. The execution is simply beautiful.

Just look at this map:

(click for larger image)

Each of the vectors here show the trajectory of damage from the scripted meat projectiles, and you can see how simple it would be to draw your own vectors and immediately understand the resulting damage as events play out at the table. This map is simply fantastic as both a reference and a structure of play, and Norgad has also included player handouts (without the GM-only info) that you can print out for the players.

The ship key itself is equally polished: Nested descriptions make it easy to master the adventure, while creating satisfying layers of investigation for the PCs. Clearly delineated post-incident shifts in the room descriptions make it a breeze to keep the potentially complicated continuity and dynamic environments of the adventure crystal clear in play.

I have only one quibble with the whole package: It’s not immediately apparent why the adventure track ends with the asteroid 98-Gobstopper crashing into the ships. Careful reading suggests that the asteroid – composed of “banded layers of oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, calcium, and phosphorus, with some other trace elements” – is actually the compacted remains of the countless dead attracted by the artifact at the asteroid’s core. But it would have been friendlier to the GM to just spell that out.

This quibble, of course, scarcely detracts from the whole package. Dead Weight went straight into my open table rotation. I adore it.

Note: When you run your own session of Dead Weight, I recommend taking the time to frame up and play through more of the back story that sets up the First Projectile incident. These events are well detailed in the text of the module, but I think it will work better if the players actually experience those events for themselves and then see the payoff.

GRADE: B+

Go to Part 5: Airlock Series

An excellent overland adventure, organized to make the GM’s task simple and the player’s experience memorable.

Original Review Posted May 21st, 2001

Before WotC’s OGL and D20 trademark license came along and allowed them to release products like A Lion in the Ropes and The Malady of Kings, Troll Lord Games was producing generic fantasy adventures. As with many products of their kind, the production values on these generic modules were weak. But in the case of Troll Lord, the modules were cheap enough to match those production values ($5), and the content itself was highly memorable (if sometimes in need of some fix-up work). These modules are now being updated to D20 (check out their website), and are – I think – worthy of your attention.

PLOT

Warning: This review will contain spoilers for The Mortality of Green. Players who may find themselves playing in this adventure should not read beyond this point.

One of these modules was (and is) The Mortality of Green by Stephen Chenault. Set within the Darkenfold Forest, The Mortality of Green focuses upon the Druidic Council’s efforts to recover the forest from the evil which has long possessed it. Although the task will be long and arduous, the Council is attempting to offer the denizens of Darkenfold hope by having Cornelius the White carry a sapling of the Great Tree to the woodsmen of Rangers Knot, who will plant it in a secret grove whose ground shall be sanctified. In turn, the grove (and sapling) will begin to heal the Darkenfold.

Unfortunately, deep within the forest lives a sentient tree named Gristlebones. Gristlebones is twisted, old, and corrupt. He sends one of his allies – Quagmire the Troll – to intercept Cornelius and steal the sapling. Which Quagmire does.

Enter the PCs, who stumble across the dying Cornelius – who attempts to extract an oath to recover the sapling and fulfill his failed mission. The PCs’ attempt to fulfill this oath will lead them throughout the Darkenfold as they seek to catch Quagmire before he can deliver the sapling to Gristlebones, who will corrupt its powerful magic for his own purposes.

STRENGTHS

When I was first being exposed to the adventures being produced by Troll Lord Games, I was immediately struck by the extremely memorable environments in which they were being set. All of them take place within the After Winter Dark campaign setting (which I have reviewed elsewhere on RPGNet). Despite this, however, their unique – and compelling – elements are still presented in a fashion which allows them to be inserted seamlessly into any sufficiently generic campaign world.

The Mortality of the Green, of course, is no exception to this. Stephen Chenault is very careful to present the Darkenfold in such a way that it is not simply rendered into the meaningless background noise of the stereotypical “evil forest”. The Darkenfold is given a specific character, history, and geography – playing upon familiar fantasy themes, but establishing itself as something memorable unto itself.

With his setting established, Chenault then proceeds to develop upon it an excellent overland adventure. As a general rule, I find that overland adventures generally have problems. Unlike a standard dungeon, the players are not tightly confined to a set of stone rooms – and, as a result, it’s all too easy for the PCs to simply start missing things. On the other hand, unlike scene-act structure, the overland adventure has a certain assumption of self-direction. The Mortality of the Green is also a chase adventure – in which the PCs are expected to track someone down. This provided yet another opportunity for the adventure to fall flat, because its all too easy to fall into the trap of designing such an adventure so that the entire thing will derail in the DM’s hands if a single tracking die roll (for example) is missed.

Fortunately, Chenault avoids the pitfalls – and the result renders the DM’s task simple, and the player’s experience memorable: The necessary possibilities are covered, the adventure responds with changing dynamics to the actions of the PCs, and the entirety is kept simple enough to be easily played.

Style: 3
Substance: 4

Author: Stephen Chenault
Publisher: Troll Lord Games
Line: D20
Price: $5.00
ISBN: 0-9702397-1-8
Product Code: TLG1101
Pages: 22

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.

In the past few days I’ve been asked several times why I still play Dungeons & Dragons.

After all, I’ve criticized the rules, the adventures, the design, and even the company. So why am I still running and playing this game?

There are a bunch of answers to this question. In fact, part of the answer to the question is that there ARE so many answers to the question.

The most basic answer is the Arneson & Gygax designed one hell of a game,  and with the exception of the most mangled edition of the game, D&D has never drifted so far that its core gameplay has become unrecognizable. There was a time, back in the ’90s, when, so frustrated that my house rules for AD&D had become longer than the core rulebooks themselves, I did give up on D&D for a while, wandering off in pursuit of the One True Way of Gaming. I’ve since learned that there is no One True Way of Gaming, which makes it easier to appreciate D&D for what it is instead of dwelling on everything it isn’t.

Another answer is, in the words of Ryan Dancey, network externality: There are a lot more people who want to play D&D than there are people who want to play any other RPG you’d care to name. It’s just easier to recruit players for D&D and, if I’m looking for a group to play in, I’m statistically more likely to find a group playing D&D. This matters less to me than it used to: After years of running open tables, I’ve recruited a large network of players I can tap into regardless of what system I’m running. (For example, I’ve had little or no difficulty getting players for my new Mothership-based open table.) But you can never completely escape D&D’s gravity well: I’m currently setting up a Heroes of the Borderlands table for my daughter and some of her friends who are desperately interested in playing D&D for the first time. I could try to run something else for them, but I’m not going to tell a bunch of kids to NOT be excited about the game they’re already excited about.

My own familiarity with D&D and its milieu has its advantages. Not only do I like D&D-esque fantasy in general, but my immense experience prepping and running D&D adventures means that I have a very large “bag of stuff” (as Robert Conley puts it) that makes it a lot easier for me to create and improvise stuff while playing D&D.

(This can actually be a double-edged sword if you’re not careful: Yes, I have a finely honed sense of what D&D-eseque fantasy means to me. But that can also be a creative rut that makes it difficult to break out of those tropes. Even with conscious effort, it can be easy to fall back into that rut, specifically because of the comfort and confidence it affords.)

This, of course, would apply to any of the many D&D-adjacent RPGs that are out there. But as a professional RPG designer, it’s also frequently important for me to stay tuned into the industry leader. I’ve had people ask me, for example, why So You Want to Be a Game Master assumes that the reader is most likely interested in running D&D and only pivots to discussing other systems in earnest after the newbie has gotten their feet under them. And the answer, of course, is that this is just the reality of things. D&D remains not only the primary gateway to the RPG hobby, but can still be relied on as a universal touchstone. (To the degree that, when I discuss other RPGs or RPGs in general in my writing or my videos, I not infrequently get comments from people confused because they think D&D is the only RPG in existence.)

(This need to stay in-tune with the current edition of D&D can be another double-edged sword for me. I’d probably have enjoyed several of the D&D 5th Edition games I’ve run over the years more if I’d house rules them more aggressively.)

D&D’s dominance, particularly in the 3E/5E OGL era, also means that D&D is blessed with bountiful source material. For example, when I was working on The Vladaam Affair last week and needed stat blocks for the archmages of the Red Company of Magi, all I needed to do was hit up Volo’s Guide to Monsters. I’ve talked in the past about looting bestiaries and trawling published modules when doing adventure and campaign prep. It’s something that very few other games even come close to achieving.

(This is something that I wish more RPGs would try to provide in a targeted fashion. Not only do I think published adventures are essential for an RPG, but modular components designed to be plugged into prep are vital. For example, Eclipse Phase produced a supplement called NPC File 1 which was just a collection of supporting cast stat blocks. It was literally a game changer for running Eclipse Phase games, because it was so effective at speeding up prep and enabling improvisation when the players jagged off in an unexpected direction. But, unfortunately, they never released a sequel and have never updated the NPC File for 2nd Edition.)

To make a long story short (too late), I really don’t see a time in my future when D&D won’t be part of my life.

Recently, though, I have been giving some long, hard thought to my relationship as a consumer (and reviewer) of Wizard of the Coast’s official D&D books. During the November meeting of the Alexandrian Hangout Club, I was asked if I would be reviewing Forgotten Realms: Adventures in Faerun. This was a particularly interesting release because it included 50+ one-page adventures, which definitely sounds like my jam. The only problem? I flipped through the book at my local game store and saw that, like other recent releases, many of the dungeon maps aren’t properly keyed. And that was only the most obvious failure in basic adventure design. (For a deeper dive, take a peek at Questing Beast’s recent video.)

Although I came somewhat late to D&D 5th Edition (finally getting sucked in by the intriguing promise of Dragon Heist), a combination of reasonably paced releases, financial security, and professional interest made it the first time that I lived out my childhood dream of buying every official D&D book as it came out. But I think that time is coming to an end. I may still be playing and running D&D 2024, but I think this revised edition is also a great jumping off point for me.

Will I be back some day? Probably. Last time I jumped off official D&D as a consumer was back in 2008, and I was gone for a decade. I have high hopes I’ll be back sooner this time. There’s new leadership at Wizards of the Coast, and perhaps we’ll see them right the ship over there.

Or perhaps not.

But either way: Good gaming!