IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

SESSION 15A: THE LABYRINTH’S MACHINES

January 12th, 2008
The 5th Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

Taking another turn down a hallway led them to a complex of three large chambers. In the center chamber, a massive apparatus of machinery had been built up in the middle of the room. Nearly ten feet across, it extended from the floor to the ceiling.

The far wall of this chamber was inset with a large, ten-foot wide sheet of smoky, opaque glass flanked by two doors.

To the left and the right, the other two chambers of the complex lay down short halls. In each of these rooms, short flights of stairs led up to large, coffin-like boxes of metal lying on the floor. To either side of these boxes were thick, metallic rods thrusting up from the floor with large, bulbous ends.

For now, Tee skirted around the machinery and checked out the doors. They were unlocked, leading to a small side chamber from which one could look through the smoky glass and observe the outer chamber. The northern all of the side chamber was covered in a morass of machinery – wires, glass tubes partially filled with liquid, convoluted gearworks, and the like.

Ranthir was fascinated. He had never seen anything like it before. It quickly became apparent that both the equipment in the side chamber and the main chamber was actually sunk into the floor, and probably connected to each other.

Tee moved to the coffin-like metal boxes. She discovered that their lids could be rotated to one side, revealing an interior surface coated with twisting tubes of glass. These formed coccoon-like depressions – one apparently shaped for a humanoid; the other for a large dog or wolf. Both were outfitted with manacles.

Ranthir, meanwhile, believed he had puzzled out the strange activation method used by the equipment: Several metallic spheres would need to be “spun up” by hand and then, while those were still in motion, three levers would need be flipped, and, at last, a button pushed.

“Should we try it?” Elestra asked. (more…)

Nefarious noble scheming has long been a staple of fantasy fiction, and it quite often makes the leap to space operas and the like, too. (Herbert’s Dune, for example.) Figuring out what the local nobility is up to in your campaign, therefore, can be an endless font of drama, intrigue, and scenario hooks.

A great deal of effort can be spent trying to get it “right”, but this is often an illusory goal. If you’re running a specifically historical campaign, then there will be a “true” version of how nobility worked for your chosen place and time period. But beyond that point, the historical norms of noble titles are so utterly varied by region, country, and time period that anyone insisting that there is, for example, one “correct” relationship between Dukes is, at best, deceiving themselves.

For example, depending on where and when you’re standing in history, a marquis could be:

• A nobleman who controls an Imperial territory
• A ruler of a border area (originally because those were the ones under Imperial control; but later simply because they were border territories)
• A noble more powerful than a count and less powerful than a duke
• A noble more powerful than a count and less powerful than a duke, but specifically because in this country dukes have to be members of the royal family
• A synonym for “count” because the distinction between “count” and “marquis” has been bureaucratically blurred out over the past several centuries
• A noble subservient to the king, but whom counts consider their liege
• A courtesy title, often assumed by the cadet lines of noble familes
• Any number of completely unrelated things in Asian cultures for which the term was used in translation

Once you realize that there is not, in fact, an ultimate truth to be found here, you’re freed up to make up you own noble traditions and relationships that are peculiar to the fantasy realms you choose to create.

This can often include making up entirely new titles. For example, in my D&D campaign world, the title of Syr dates back to a pre-historical empire. In addition to being a noble title (usually of regional leadership), it’s also the faux-etymology behind a male knight being referred to as “Sir” and female knights being referred to as “Sera”.

(And if you’re thinking, “Wait… aren’t female knights referred to as Dames?” That’s right. You’re starting to get it.)

A TANGLE OF TITLES

We have a tendency, when creating fictional worlds, to create things which are altogether too tidy. In the real world, things get messy: The Gregorian calendar, for example, is a hodgepodge of historical kludges and political compromises piled one atop another.

To make your world feel real — to make it feel like a place where people actually live — you’re going to muck it up a little bit.

For noble titles, you can achieve this with a three-step process:

1. Create a system which makes perfect logical sense.

For example, there’s the King. They’ve got a bunch of powerful Dukes who have sworn allegiance to them, and each Duke has either Counts (who rule inherited lands in the interior of the country) or Marquises (who rule over inherited lands on the border of the country) who have sworn allegiance to them.

2. Create just two exceptions: One grandfathered in from some other system. Another that’s newfangled and recent.

For example, in addition to the Counts and Marquises, there are also the Atabeks, druidic lords who swear fealty directly to the king, but who rule over nomadic tribes rather than specific pieces of land. More recently, Harald IV disbanded the duchies of Baudore, Hensfelle, and Ramsey fifty years ago because their dukes were possessed by demons. The Counts and Marquises who once swore fealty to those dukes now swear their oaths directly to the king, with no intermediary.

At this point, you’re done for now. Put your noble titles aside and either continue worldbuilding or get back to playing.

The goal here is to introduce a few cracks into your perfect system. Marring the perfection from the beginning is important because you’ll tend to want to preserve something that’s unbroken and “makes sense”. Once you’ve broken it a little bit, though, you’ll find yourself more open to the next step…

3. Whenever the current system doesn’t quite work right for your current adventure… add an exception.

For example, maybe you discover that the Free Cities were founded by Atabek-led tribes who settled into an urban life, resulting in some Atabeks functionally being mayors. (Because the PCs went to a Free City and you needed to figure out how their government fit into the existing system.) Or you discover that some counts are actually religious men who act as liaisons between religious land-holdings and the royal government, and that these noblemen are given the title of Vicomte. (Because you thought the imagery of an evil religious nobleman who rules out of a gothic cathedral was cool.) Or maybe it turns out that the marquises weren’t always inherited titles and, technically, the king can still create non-hereditary marquises, and will do so sometimes as a way of elevating knights who have proven worthy of greater reward. (Because you wanted a foppish city-born noble to act as a foil for the PCs… and then later realized that a title of Marquis would be a cool reward for the PCs to receive after saving the kingdom.)

In other words, don’t try to lay down all the messy complexities of life in one fell swoop. Layer it in as necessity requires.

That’s the way it happened in the real world, after all.

The Infinity universe is a glorious science fiction kitchen sink. A panoply of unique cultures and cool technology is all smashed together, and opportunities for adventure and excitement explode out of every interaction.

I’ve found that the incredible richness of this setting, however, can pose a unique challenge: When you’ve got Chinese and Korean and Arabic and Germanic and Scottish and Russian and Malaysian cultures all splayed out across a dozen alien worlds, it can create a real strain on even the most well-developed cultural literacy. And the leading edge of this challenge, at least for me, are the names: When the PCs seek contact with a new NPC and I’m put on the spot to create a name on the fly, that’s when the rubber hits the road. Years of practice with improvisation have given me a lot of confidence when it comes to Western European and/or flat-out fantasy names, but when a scenario calls on the distinction between Chinese, Japanese, and Korean cultures in the riven enclaves of Shentang, I just don’t have enough depth.

There’s only so many times the players run into Jing Li before it becomes a problem.

So I put a little elbow grease into it and created a tool that I think you might find helpful, too: A grand list of NPC names for Infinity.

GENERAL NOTES

Basic Use: Pick a name.

For Variety: Mix-and-match first and last names. (For example, take “Shing Bao” and “Tong Jun”. You can name a character “Shing Jun” instead.)

Disclaimer: Anywhere I’ve butchered local naming conventions, you can assume that it was a totally deliberate decision representing cultural drift over the next two hundred years. (Innocent whistling.)

ARIADNA NAMES

These have been split into four separate lists, one for each of the major cultures/political units on Dawn. All names are pulled from the appropriate cultural background.

• Rodina Gendered Surnames: The Western-style last names shown in the name list are gendered. Remove the –a suffix when using female last names for male characters (and vice versa).

NOMAD NAMES

Nomads are a chaotic mish-mash of disparate people. The list here includes Italian, German, Romanian, and Lithuanian names, mostly as a selection of names not found on other lists.

Nomad characters will also commonly pull from the USAriadna and Rodina (i.e., Russian) lists. Yu Jing and PanOceanian names are also not unusual. Mixing first and last names across multiple lists is encouraged.

PANOCEANIA NAMES

The PanOceanian name list is drawn from Brazil, Chile, the Philippines, Malaysia, and India.

Each name is culturally distinct (insofar as that distinction exists in the real world), but mixing-and-matching is consistent with PanOceania’s neo-melting pot (so don’t worry about crossing the streams).

PanOceanian characters could also use the Caledonian and USAriadnan lists (usually representing an Australian background).

YU JING NAMES

Mandarin, Korean, and Japanese names are Last-First. (Keep this in mind for characters who are related.)

Vietnamese names are Last-Middle-First. First and middle names can be freely interchanged when mixing and matching, however, so you’ve got a lot more options here than it might look like at first.

HAQQISLAM NAMES

Even in the real world, Islamic names are a pan-cultural mixture of local tradition, bureaucratic decree, and linguistic exchange. Haqqislam is an even more thoroughly mixed Islamic melting pot plus all the disruption entailed in a planetary exodus and colonization. In addition, the following notes are simplistic in the extreme. Basically: Feel free to mix-and-match with these names as much as any other.

Al Medinat Caliphate names are Arabic.

• Nasab: Arabic names often feature a sequence of patronymic names tracing an individual’s lineage; ibn meaning “son of” and bint meaning “daughter of”. (For example, Laila bint Miraj ibn Iqbal.) In the Human Sphere, it’s become more common to see matronymic bints rather than defaulting to the male line. (For example, Kinnia bint Jandira bint Adriana.)
• Surnames: Arabic surnames follow a dizzying array of cultural traditions. Historically, it wasn’t unusual for Arabs not to have any surname. (A practice which hiraeth culture brought back into fashion.) Honorific laqab are also possible, but beyond the scope of this cheat sheet. Nisbah surnames indicate where the individual comes from (or is associated with), and in some cases end up being an inherited surname instead. For this cheat sheet, roughly half of the Arabic surnames are nisbah for Bouraki locations. (You can kludge your own by looking at the map of Bourak and, generally, just adding “Al-“ at the beginning and an “i” at the end.)

Funduq Sultanate names are Turkish.

• Surnames: Used In a purely Western style (although often have an Arabic derivation, so stealing from the Arabic list can work well).

Gabqar Khanate names are Afghani and Kyrgyz. (Each listed name is culturally distinct.)

• In Gabqar, naming traditions have blurred, so you can freely mix-and-match the Afghani and Kyrgyz naming practices described below.
• Subordinate Names: Afghani MALE names often have two parts, with one usually a subordinate name. These subordinate names can appear first or second, but the other half is always the character’s “proper name” regardless of position. (You can create these by using the sample list of subordinate names or by mixing-and-matching from the list).
• Sample Subordinate Names: Mohammed, Abdul, Gholam, Ali, Khan, Jan, Shah, Din, or attaching the suffix –ullah to the other name (e.g., Kanatullah).
• Gendered Surnames: The Western-style last names shown in the name list are gendered. Remove the –a suffix when using female last names for male characters (and vice versa).
• Patronymic Surnames: Kyrgyz alternatively uses a more traditional patronymic surname. These are –kyzy (son of) and –uulu (daughter of) and can be constructed by combining them with any first name (e.g. “Ensar” becomes “Ensarkyzy”).

Iran Zhat al Amat Shahnate names are Persian/Iranian.

• Surnames: Although originally constructed similarly to Arabic nisbah, Persian names are inherited in a Western style.

(click for PDF)

Go to Part 1

As I mentioned way back in GM Don’t List #1, I am generally anonymizing the examples I give in these essays. I’m not looking to shame specific Game Masters, and I’m not interested in punching down. My goal is not to initiate some sort of witch hunt; it’s to educate and discuss.

This essay, however, is an exception. The problems I had this time ultimately originated with a published product, and a published product is fair game.

The book in question is Strange Revelations, an adventure supplement for The Strange. When I reviewed Strange Revelations, I mentioned that I would be using at least 8-9 of the ten scenarios in the book at my gaming table.

The tenth scenario was “Venom Rising”.

SPOILERS AHEAD FOR VENOM RISING

“Venom Rising” is a hot mess of a scenario.

The premise is that an NPC has been framed for blowing up several industrial facilities and the PCs need to clear her name. So why is everyone convinced she did it? What’s the evidence that she’s guilty?

There isn’t any.

So right there you have a broken premise, right? It’s the equivalent of a D&D adventure where you’re supposed to kill the ogre that’s been harassing the village and, when you ask where he is, the mayor says, “That’s his corpse in the corner there.”

Which brings us to the scenario itself, which consists of the PCs visiting the suspect’s living quarters and each of the industrial sites that were blown up. These scenes play out in one of two ways:

• The PCs show up, fight 4-5 bad guys, search the location, and find no clues.
• The PCs show up, search the location, find no clues, and then fight 4-5 bad guys.

And here’s how the scenario premise is supposed to resolve itself:

• The PCs see a picture of the suspect and realize that she has a third arm.
• They do the equivalent of an internet search, find the publicly broadcast video feed from one of the attacks, and note that the masked terrorist who blew up the facility doesn’t have three arms.

So when I said that there wasn’t any evidence incriminating the suspect, that was inaccurate: It’s not just that there’s no evidence incriminating her; it’s that the evidence which is publicly available before the PCs begin their investigation indicates that someone else did the crime.

Except it’s even worse than that because the suspect’s robotic third arm is pictured as detachable. Which means that the evidence which is supposed to be “exculpatory” isn’t actually exculpatory.

Ultimately, the module tells the GM to resolve the situation by having the person actually responsible for the bombings simply show up and do something egregiously guilty-looking directly in front of the PCs for no particular reason.

Simply reading through the scenario it was obvious how it would play out at the table: The PCs would go from one location to the next. They would never be able to accomplish anything (because there was nothing to accomplish), and would thus grow slowly more and more aggravated with their frustrated investigations. Then the bad guy would arbitrarily show up and the scenario would end with a final, relieved whimper.

In short, the scenario was completely unsalvageable. I metaphorically tossed it to one side, focused my attention elsewhere, and basically never thought about it again.

… which proved to be a mistake. Because when Gen Con rolled around last month, I wanted to play The Strange. Because I had literally forgotten all about “Venom Rising”, I didn’t recognize the title and, therefore, didn’t realize that Monte Cook Games was running a scenario from Strange Revelations. In fact, I was over an hour into the session before I realized what was happening.

And the scenario did, in fact, play out exactly the way I thought it would: In frustrating irrelevance with an unsatisfying whimper.

(Although to the credit of both creative play and the actual GM who was running the session, it wrapped up in a memorable fashion with the PCs ultimately sympathizing with the “bad” guy’s political manifesto and making arrangements to hook him up with freedom fighters who could help him achieve his political goals. As one of the players put it: “It was the first time in a decade of roleplaying that convincing the villain to use better PR has solved the problem!”)

TRIAGE AT THE TABLE

Such a result (usually minus the memorable moment) is, in fact, inevitable when the GM creates a mystery with no clues.

You wouldn’t expect this to be a particularly common phenomena, but I’ve encountered it with a surprising regularity over the thirty years I’ve been gaming. It usually doesn’t manifest itself with the utter purity demonstrated by “Venom Rising”, but it often crops up in less severe forms or within certain sections of a large scenario.

I suspect the problem is born from a fundamentally inverted understanding of how mystery scenarios are structured: We think of mystery stories as being defined by the lack of information (because they are stories of finding something which is unknown), which erroneously leads us to design scenarios which lack information.

The primary solution, of course, is understanding that mystery scenarios are actually structured on acquiring information and liberally applying the Three Clue Rule during scenario design. That’s a topic, of course, which is thoroughly covered in the Three Clue Rule essay, and I don’t think I need to further belabor the subject here.

What I will note, however, is that sometimes you can unintentionally find yourself in this scenario during actual play: You prepped clues, but the PCs missed them. Or you simply made a mistake and the PCs have ended up in an investigatory cul-de-sac where they’re unable to make any progress.

Triaging this situation at the table involves accurately maintaining and monitoring your Revelation List:

• Make a list of all the conclusions the PCs need to make in the course of their investigation.
• List all of the clues that exist for each of those conclusions.
• Use the list during actual play to track which clues the PCs have received and – importantly! – which clues they appear to have missed.

(In some cases they’ll double back and find clues they initially seemed to miss, but you can’t count on that happening.)

What you need to be keeping an eye out for are the revelations for which the PCs have missed all of the necessary clues. (In practice, you really want to start paying attention at the point where they’ve missed all but one of the possible clues. Don’t let yourself get completely backed into a corner before working to get yourself out.)

Some revelations may be nonessential. (Redundancy, particularly once you start working with full-fledged node-based design, is not unusual.) Regardless, a missing revelation should be like an alarm bell going off behind your screen. Or maybe a Check Engine light would be the better analogy: The scenario may not be immediately bursting into flames and crashing, but you do need to get it into the shop ASAP for some tender love and care.

One of the best tools to have in your arsenal is a proactive element in the scenario which you can use to deliver new clues. (There’s more discussion of this in the Three Clue Rule, but you can never go too far wrong having some thugs kick down the PCs’ door.)

If everything has gone completely to hell, this proactive element can – as in “Venom Rising” – simply be the bad guy showing up for his final confrontation. This technique, however, is incredibly dissatisfying for the players. You’re better off having the proactive element be at least one step removed so that the players can actually make the final conclusion for themselves (this is similar to Matryoshka search techniques).

On the other hand, you should also consider just letting the investigation fail sometimes. As GMs we’re often terribly hesitant to do so, but if player choices are going to be meaningful (and they should be), then sometimes the consequences of those choices will be failure. Clinging to that moment – forcing the PCs to wallow in the failure – can often be more frustrating and harmful than simply allowing the failure to happen: The cultists complete their ritual and Innsmouth slides in the sea. The bank robbers escape with the cash. Doctor Nefaria successfully travels back in time and takes over Yugoslavia in 1982.

The good news is that the consequences of failure usually beget even more interest than success: The disappearance of Innsmouth brings Mythos cults into the national headlines, leading to a burst in youth Cthulhu gangs and Nyarlathotep-inspired rebellion. The bank robbers use the cash to fund an arms deal with Mexican drug lords. The once two-bit villain Doctor Nefaria has suddenly become your campaigns’ Doctor Doom and the PCs have no one to blame but themselves.

Of course, they can only blame themselves (instead of blaming you) if you’ve designed the original mystery with the necessary clues.

Go to Part 9