Player: So in Dweredell the Guild is like a local trade organization, right?

GM: That’s right. It’s ruled by a large number of powerful merchant families and its official function is to maintain commercial standards and regulate all matters of craft or trade. But in practice it’s more like a protection racket.

Player: Great! Can you tell me every single member of the Guild and also their immediate heirs?

GM: Uh…

As a GM, it’s actually kind of surprising how often you’ll run into questions like this. In the real world this is the sort of encyclopedic data that you could pull up with a five-second search on the internet. But the game world, of course, does not actually exist, and there’s no quicker way to strip back the veneer and reveal that harsh reality than saying something like, “Tell me the names of everyone who lives on Albert Street!”

On the one hand, it’s a lovely vote of confidence: The players are so impressed by the verisimilitude and depth of your game, that they just naturally assume that the answers to these sorts of questions actually exist!

But however flattering that may be, it doesn’t really change the fact that it leaves you staring out into the vast void of the unknown that they’ve invoked, wondering how it could possibly be filled.

Other examples I’ve encountered include stuff like:

• Can you name every Imperial church and chapel in the city?
• Can we get a list of every front page headline from the Gazette for the month of March 1929?
• Before we question [fictional author], can I get a list of every single book she’s written?
• I’m going to go through the warehouse and check the label on every crate. What do they say?

Of course, sometimes you actually will have a list of every Imperial church and chapel in the city. Those moments — as you reach out, grab the information the players are asking for, and present it with a flourish — are, of course, delightful.

But it’s far more typical, of course, for you to have NOT prepped a label for every crate in the warehouse.

And staring into that void, it’s easy to become trapped in it: Maybe you try to improvise your way through it. Maybe you burble some inanities and then stammer to a halt. Maybe you bring the session to a slamming stop as you spend five or ten minutes brainstorming a bibliography for the fictional author.

Sometimes you’ll want to slam the door shut on the void, even if it doesn’t make any sense: “The identities of the Guild families are a secret!” you’ll cry. Or perhaps, “The crates are all labeled in an unbreakable code!”

Stalling for time is another option, particularly if Google, Bing, and their equivalents don’t exist in your campaign setting: “How are you going to find that information?” (The only drawback here is that the stalling tactic is often limited in its effectiveness and frequently rather boring to actually play through.)

What I usually find effective in resolving this kind of research fishing expedition, however, is a much simpler technique:

“What are you looking for?”

The players have made a very large ask and you’ve become fixated on the impossible scope of it. In actual practice, though, the players are actually interested in some very specific thing related to an unspoken plan they haven’t shared with you yet. (For example, they want to know some details about the author’s work so that they can pose as fans when they talk to her. Or they’re searching the Gazette specifically for any reports of odd occurrences in the Ravenswood neighborhood.)

If you can get them to tell you what they’re really looking for and/or what they’re hoping to do with it, then getting the information they want it or creating it or giving them an alternative option or whatever else makes the most sense is often A LOT easier than improvising entire history textbooks or Yellow Pages listings for a fictional setting.

In many ways, this is another invocation of a general principle we first explored in Random GM Tips: Are You Sure You Want To Do That?:

If you don’t understand what the players are trying to achieve with a given action, find out before adjudicating the action.

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 36B: The Madness of Mahdoth

But this time their conversation returned to the strange, obsidian box that Ranthir had found in his rooms upon awaking for the first time at the Ghostly Minstrel.

“I really want to know what’s in there,” Tee said.

“Maybe it’s a magic box. Maybe our memories are trapped inside,” Ranthir said, only half-joking. “We just open the box and we get our memories back.”

But wishing the box open wouldn’t make it happen…

… unless they’d been over-looking the solution.

“What about the key from Pythoness House?” Tor asked. “The one that can open any lock?”

In Night of Dissolution, the published adventure mini-campaign by Monte Cook that I’m using for part of In the Shadow of the Spire, everything kicks off when the PCs fight a couple ogres and end up with a treasure chest they can’t open. Due to some strong warding, they’re meant to conclude that the only way to open the chest is by obtaining Neveran’s all-key, a powerful magical device that (a) can open any door and (b) was last seen in Pythoness House.

This hooks the PCs and send them to Pythoness House, where they eventually obtain the all-key and open the chest (which contains some miscellaneous magic items).

For a published scenario, this is a pretty good scenario hook. But published scenarios, of course, are extremely limited in the types of scenario hooks they can use: The writer doesn’t know who your PCs are and they don’t know what’s going on in your campaign, so they can obviously only present broad, generic hooks.

(I talk about this more in my video on Better Scenario Hooks.)

In the case of this specific hook, it means that:

• The ogres are basically just a random encounter.
• The hook to the all-key is a little weak. (The PCs are just supposed to make a Knowledge check to remember that the all-key exists and that it might help them.)
• The stuff inside the chest are just generic magic items.

The all-key itself is, notably, also just a McGuffin: Its function is to get the PCs to Pythoness House, where they’ll start getting wrapped up in the lore and machinations of the chaos cults that will drive the rest of Night of Dissolution, but it remains largely irrelevant to any of those events (except insofar as the PCs might make use of it, of course).

A generic hook like this in a published adventure isn’t really a flaw. (It’s not as if Monte Cook can magically divine what will be happening in your campaign.) But, as a GM, you should definitely view them as an opportunity.

And what makes the hook from Night of Dissolution pretty good, as I mentioned, is that Cook has seeded it with a bunch of juicy elements that you can easily leverage.

• The ogres carrying the chest: Where did they get it? Who are they delivering it to? Where do the PCs encounter them, exactly?
• Of course, the ogres aren’t required: A chest that cannot be opened. You could find that almost anywhere.
• And what’s in the chest? You can swap out the generic magic items for almost anything that the PCs might want or need.

Think about whatever campaign you’re running right now (whether it’s a D&D campaign or not): What could you put into a box the PCs can’t open that would be vitally important to them? Or, alternatively, who could the box belong to that would make finding it feel likely a completely natural and organic part of your game?

In my case, I knew that I was going to use Night of Dissolution as part of Act II in my campaign even before the campaign began. (We’ve previously discussed how the triggers for Act II were set up.) This meant that I could not only weave the box and all-key into the ongoing events of the campaign, I could also weave it into the PCs’ backgrounds during character creation.

In this case, this just meant that the PCs started the campaign with the box they couldn’t open, presenting an immediate enigma that was tied into the larger mystery of their amnesia.

The contents of the box were, of course, further keyed to that mystery and are, in fact, laying the groundwork for triggers much later in the campaign, too. (No spoilers here! You’ll just have to wait and find out like my players!)

The other thing I wanted to work on was the link from “box you can’t open” to the all-key: A simple skill check felt unsatisfying, and hoping that a player would spontaneously think, “Hey! Let’s do some research into magic items that could help us open this box!” wasn’t exactly reliable.

But I could make it reliable by just scripting it into their amnesia: During their period of lost time, they had done exactly that research, found the answer, and then hired Shim to locate the all-key, setting in motion the chain of events that would have Shim unexpectedly arrive and deliver the information to them.

(It was also possible, of course, that they actually could think to do research and ironically retrace the steps I had scripted for their former selves: That might have led to Pythoness House by a completely different path. Or it might have led them straight back to Shim again. Either way… mission accomplished!)

And that’s all it really took to take a generic McGuffin and integrate deeply into the fabric of the campaign.

Campaign Journal: Session 36C – Running the Campaign: Group Chemistry
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

SESSION 36B: THE MADNESS OF MAHDOTH

January 24th, 2009
The 19th Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

Leaving Castle Shard, they headed down into South Market. There they found Mahdoth’s Asylum – a small, rather nondescript building on Childseye Street.

They were greeted in the small, rather dingy offices of the asylum by a plain-faced, brown-haired man who introduced himself as Danneth Sonnell.

“Ah… I believe you sent me a letter, sir,” Ranthir said with a slight smile.

“And you are, sir?”

“Master Ranthir.”

“Ah, of course. Yes. I am glad that you have come.”

Danneth led them down a back stair into a basement of remarkable size. Not only its scope, but the stonework of its construction was quite out of keeping with the plain wooden construction above. (It had almost certainly been repurposed from some older structure.) They were taken through several rooms and then into a long hall lined with iron-doored cells.

Halfway down this hall a figure suddenly threw himself against the bars of the nearest door: “Please! Get them out of here! Get them out! They’re driving me mad!”

Danneth quickly crossed to the door and shut the outer shutter, but not before they had recognized the prisoner as the dwarf who had been summoning fell creatures during Tavan Zith’s escapade through Oldtown.

At the end of the hall they turned into another, similarly lined with cells. Danneth led them to one of the doors along this hall, removed a large ring of keys from his belt, and unlocked it.

“What exactly do you want us to do?” Tee asked.

“I honestly don’t know,” Danneth said. “When he is not asking for Master Ranthir he simply raves.”

“What’s his name?”

“Tabaen Farsong, an elf of House Erthuo.”

They exchanged glances and shrugs. None of them recognized the name.

Danneth opened the door. Crouched against the far side of the cell, feebly pawing at the wall and murmuring inarticulately under his breath, was a scrawny figure dressed in shabby clothes. As the inmate looked up they saw that it was another of Tavan Zith’s victims: The elf who had been driven mad during the ordeal.

Tabaen’s eyes seemed drawn to Ranthir’s, locking his gaze upon the mage. He said in a desperate, sibilant whisper: “A key. A noble key. You know the door. The key is the hand which will open the door. You have to get it. You have to get in to keep them out. A key which is a hand and a staff which is a knife. Many dangers. So many evils!”

The words poured out of his mouth, but as soon as they were done the elf’s eyes emptied of thought and he sank back against the wall.

Danneth rushed to his side and quickly examined him. “There’s no response.”

“He’s comatose?” Dominic asked.

Danneth nodded.

“I’m sorry,” Ranthir said, sincerely abashed.

Danneth shook his head. “I don’t know. This might be for the best. At least his mind is at rest.”

“They’re here master!”

The sudden cry had come from the far end of the hall. Looking that way they saw a dark-haired halfling peering around the corner.

There was a moment of puzzlement and then, floating into view from around the corner, came a beholder.

“What’s happening here?” The beholder’s voice was gruff and impatient. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

“We were summoned,” Tee said brashly. “Who are you?”

“My name is Mahdoth. This is my asylum. You are not welcome here.”

Danneth emerged from the cell.

“Master, I—“

“I told you that there were to be no visitors here.”

Danneth fell silent.

Mahdoth turned to the rest of them. “Leave. Now.”

Tee walked up to him. “You’re being very rude. We were asked to be here.”

Mahdoth glowered down at her with his large eye. “Danneth should not have brought you here.”

“That’s between you and him.”

“Zairic, show them out.”

The obsequious halfling scuttled forward and escorted them out of the complex. As they walked down the street away from Mahdoth’s, they chatted briefly about the encounter.

“Do you think he was hiding something?” Ranthir asked.

“I’m sure of it,” Tee said. “On one of his eye-stalks he was wearing a bone ring.”

THE ALL-KEY AND THE CODEX

When they returned to the mansion on Nibeck Street, they found Elestra waiting for them. they ran through the now familiar checklist of unanswered questions and tasks left uncompleted. But this time their conversation returned to the strange, obsidian box that Ranthir had found in his rooms upon awaking for the first time at the Ghostly Minstrel.

“I really want to know what’s in there,” Tee said.

“Maybe it’s a magic box. Maybe our memories are trapped inside,” Ranthir said, only half-joking. “We just open the box and we get our memories back.”

But wishing the box open wouldn’t make it happen…

… unless they’d been over-looking the solution.

“What about the key from Pythoness House?” Tor asked. “The one that can open any lock?”

“Would that work?” Tee asked. “There were no moving parts in the lock.”

Ranthir shrugged. “I don’t know. It might.”

And so, quite unexpectedly, they turned towards the Hammersong Vaults. There Tee removed the golden key from her lockbox (immediately feeling the heavy weight of its soul-wearying effect) and Ranthir retrieved the obsidian box from his. They returned with both of them to the Banewarrens and rendezvoused with Elestra. They quickly explained their plan to her.

“That might be why we were looking for they key in the first place!” Elestra exclaimed.

“Here goes nothing,” Tee said. She slipped the key into the feature-less lock of the obsidian box.

It turned effortlessly.

Tee felt the strength of her soul pulled through the key and into the lock. In the same instant, a thin sliver of light spread along the box’s impenetrable seam. A moment later the lid popped open with a burst of stale air.

FLASHBACKS

In that moment, Tee found her vision turned inward: There was an echoing, thundering crash… and she found herself stepping through a wall of broken stone and shattered shards of adamantine. Beyond it, in a small vault of sorts, there stood only two columns of stone. And atop each column was a solid block of obsidian, gleaming with a faint iridescence. And a voice spoke: “At last! The secrets of the Stonemages!”

Ranthir found himself sitting in an inn’s common room, hunched over a table. A fire roared a few feet away. He was speaking to an older man, with white hair and a well-trimmed beard. “I’ve found it. It’s being carried by a northern barbarian and an elven girl.”

Dominic and Elestra once again found themselves standing before the door of shadows upon the cliff-wall of the Northern Pass.

And, Agnarr, too found his thoughts cast back to the interior of a black coach. Tee was sitting there, fingering her necklace thoughtfully while gazing out over the landscape of green hills rolling past the carriage window.

WITHIN THE BROKEN BOX

The visions – as vivid as they were – lasted for only a moment and then they found themselves once more huddled around the box.

Lying within the box there was a small codex with pages of thick vellum and covers of banded, blackened adamantine.

With an air of exhaustion, Tee pulled the key out of the box. Ranthir eagerly scooped up the book. As he flipped through the book (discovering it to be written entirely in dwarven), Agnarr was playing with the lid of the box – opening and closing it, only to find that it could not be resealed.

None among them were familiar with dwarven characters, but Ranthir was hardly going to let that stand in their way now: With a wave of his hand he began to translate the text…

CODEX OF THE SHARD

(written in Dwarven)

A study of the Great Crystal, recovered from the ruins of Ibbok Turren in the 943^rd Year of the Great Thane.

These are the first words in a small codex with pages of thick vellum and covers of banded, blackened adamantine. The rest of the book is dedicated to a meticulous study of a small crystalline jewel. It is written in several distinct hands.

The jewel registers with an overwhelming magical aura, thwarting more mundane efforts at identifying its properties… while simultaneously deepening the evident curiosity of the writers.

• Various efforts aimed at creating “elemental sympathies”, “energetic repercussions”, and “lesser effect echoes” meet with failure. But dozens of pages are dedicated to each experiment.
• The experimenters then turn their attentions to divination magicks. These meet with unexpected reactions. Weaker divination spells seem more powerful in the presence of the crystal, but reveal nothing of the crystal itself – the term “reflection” is often used to describe the failure, although even the writer seems hazy on what exactly that means.
• When more powerful divination spells are attempted, the casters are apparently driven mad. Despite this, the effort is attempted three times.
• The third caster is referred to by name: Sulaemesh. Like the others Sulaemesh is driven mad, but apparently his madness takes the form of scrawling or screaming the same phrases over and over again: “The Tower of the Dragon. The Lake of Silt and Ash. The City Fractured. The Stone Broken. The Net of Black Iron. The End of All Dreams.”
• At this point, it appears that the writers stop studying the crystal directly and focus their attention on trying to decipher the Vision of Sulaemesh. Many elaborate theories are concocted, but it is clear that they are mostly leading to frustration.

A period of several years appears to pass with little or no activity in the Codex. Then there is a new entry in a fresh hand, beginning with:

The crystal matches, in all respects, the properties of the dreaming shard.

The next several pages are a collation of research apparently drawn from several different sources. The dreaming shard is one small sliver of a much larger artifact known as the Dreaming Stone. The Dreaming Stone is described as “the source of all dreams” and “the resonance of the Dreaming”, among other descriptive titles.

The tone of the next several entries is one of excited discovery. But then things take a darker turn: There is a reference to “an area of great concern” and then several pages have been ripped out of the Codex. Other pages have been completely blotted out, leaving only vague references to a “Great Crypt” and “—if the shard were to awaken—“

The last few pages of the Codex are intact. They describe the design of an impenetrable box, which the writers hope will “seal both the shard and its dangerous knowledge from the waiting world”. Two boxes are created – one for the shard and one for the Codex.

Running the Campaign: Secrets of the All-Key – Campaign Journal: Session 36C
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

Go to Table of Contents

We’ve now reached the final chunk of Storm King’s Thunder as published, with the PCs investigating Lord Hekaton’s disappearance.

Before we dive in too deep here, though, I think we all need to acknowledge the giant squid monster in the room: This section of the adventure doesn’t make any sense.

• The PCs are given a gambling chip that was found near where Queen Neri’s body was found.
• From this chip, they’re supposed to conclude that the owner of the casino must be directly involved in Neri’s death and Hekaton’s disappearance. (This, of course, is a nonsensical conclusion.)
• Lord Drylund, the owner of the casino, is involved and knows where Hekaton is being held. But… involved how, exactly? Drylund is a krakenar agent operating out of the inland city of Yartar who’s attempting to take over the local government. How does he or his team get involved in murdering Queen Neri in the Sea of Swords?

It’s not just that the evidentiary trail is flimsy and fragile. (Although it is.) The more fundamental problem is that Storm King’s Thunder never actually explains what happened to Queen Neri or Lord Hekaton. We know very broad generalities (Queen Neri was “ambushed” and Lord Hekaton was “tricked” while investigating her death), but no specifics. And even these generalities are actually contradictory. (In one section, Lord Hekaton is said to have been kidnapped while going to a location where he had been falsely told the assassins were. In another, he was attending a meeting with fake representatives of the Lords’ Alliance and believes he was “betrayed” by them.)

This lack of specificity is one of the reasons why this mystery is dysfunctional: It’s all well and good for the detectives to be in the dark about what happened, but if the writer’s understanding of the murder is limited to “somebody killed them in one of the rooms in this mansion with some kind of weapon,” then it’s going to be pretty tough for them to lay down any meaningful clues.

WHAT REALLY HAPPENED

Mirran, Nym, and Serissa are the daughters of King Hekaton and Queen Neri, who rule from the storm court in Maelstrom. King Hekaton was a strict and conservative ruler, seeking always to live within the light of Annam and to adhere to the Ordning. Queen Neri, on the other hand, sought to temper her husband’s wraths and was also something of a reformist; she believed that the giants could not only make peace with the “small folk” — the humans and elves and dwarves and halflings — but that such an alliance could mean prosperity for small- and giant-folk alike.

Five years ago, Serissa ascended above her elder sisters in the Ordning. King Hekaton responded by officially recognizing her as the heir apparent.

Mirran and Nym did not like this, but there was nothing they could do: The Ordning is the Ordning.

Nevertheless, their bitterness and resentment grew, and they began to leave Maelstrom on sojourns together. These journeys eventually took them north to the Spine of the World, where they searched for the lost Eye of the All-Father in the hopes that they would be able to commune with Annam, discover why he had chosen Serissa over them, and perhaps even right the great wrong which had been done to them.

What they found instead was the wyrm Iymrith. Long ago, her daughter Chezzaran (SKT, p. 73) had been scarred by a storm giant raiding party and she had never forgiven the storm giants. She approached Mirran and Nym in disguise as a storm giant, intending to lull them into a sense of false confidence and then murder them. When she learned who they were, however, and heard their tale, she conceived an even greater revenge. She befriended the sisters and used them to infiltrate the Storm King’s court.

And then the Ordning was broken.

Suddenly Mirran and Nym weren’t helpless any more: If the Ordning no longer existed, then their sister no longer had divine favor elevating her above them.

Their father, however, persisted. He wanted to hold faith with Annam, even if Annam had forsaken them. He refused to reverse his decision and Serissa remained heir apparent. At this point, they likely didn’t require Iyrmith’s counsel for their resentment to blossom into rage, but it certainly helped.

Iymrith convinced them that “working with the small folk” was the reason that the Ordning had been broken: If they could break their mother’s friendship with the small folk, they might repair the Ordning… and, if so, they would almost certainly find themselves raised once more above their sister! Then their father would have no choice but to acknowledge them!

NERI’S PEACE

Queen Neri had formed friendships with the Order of the Blue Moon, a Selunite knighthood who operated out of the House of the Moon temple in Waterdeep. Each month, on the night of the full moon, the knights would gather at a secret chapterhouse hidden in the Red Rocks islands known as the Hall of Reflected Moonlight, and there Queen Neri would meet with them. She was particularly close with High Moonknight Xale, an elderly aasimar who was the leader of the order.

With the breaking of the Ordning, Neri was more convinced than ever that an alliance with the small-folk was essential. With Xale acting as a go-between, a meeting was arranged with Laeral Silverhand, another devotee of Selune who had recently become Open Lord of Waterdeep.

Queen Neri even convinced her husband to attend the meeting, bringing with them only a small force of four honor guards in “the spirit of trust and peace.” In the name of security, only their three daughters and Imperator Uthor, King Hekaton’s brother and commander of the king’s garrison, were privy to the details of Neri’s Peace, as it was known.

THE BETRAYAL

Iymrith, of course, learned of the meeting from Mirran and Nym. It was the perfect opportunity.

Iymrith formed an alliance with the Kraken Society because she needed both muscle and agents to carry out her schemes. It was an easy sell to Slarkethrel, as breaking Maelstrom’s power would remove a major impediment to the kraken’s imperial designs beneath the waves of the Sea of Swords.

• The Skum Lord, based out of Skullport beneath Waterdeep, created forged correspondence from High Moonknight Xale to Laeral Silverhand, purportedly delaying the meeting by a fortnight. The Skum Lord’s agents also intercepted Laeral Silverhand’s replies.
• Ascalian merrow warlocks provided a siren’s cage, a powerful artifact which was smuggled into the Hall of Reflected Moonlight and, when activated, dropped all the knights into a deep magical sleep.
• Lord Drylund of Yartar provided a company of mercenaries, who disguised themselves as Knights of the Blue Moon, rode to the coast to meet Lord Hekaton and Queen Neri, and then ambushed them.
• The were-shark Reefkin of Neverwinter simultaneously cut-off the storm giants’ escape to the sea.

The plan worked perfectly: Queen Neri was killed. King Hekaton was captured and loaded onto a specially prepared vessel called the Morkoth (SKT, p. 221).

Design Note: In the published campaign, Queen Neri is killed in one vague encounter and then King Hekaton is kidnapped during an even vaguer encounter. By collapsing both outcomes into a single event, we vastly simplify things for ourselves. (We also sidestep awkward questions like, “If your wife has just been killed, why would you wander off into an ambush all by yourself instead of bringing like a bajillion guards with you?”)

AFTERMATH

The siren’s cage was retrieved and, a few hours later, the Knights of the Blue Moon awoke. The unnatural slumber baffled them and Xale was confused why neither Queen Neri nor Laeral Silverhand had appeared for their meeting. He attempted to contact Neri via a sending spell, but received no response.

When Hekaton and Neri failed to return to Maelstrom, Imperator Uthor journeyed to Red Rocks. There he discovered his sister-in-law’s body, surrounded by ample evidence that she had been murdered by the very small-folk she had sought to make peace with. With his elite guard, Uthor followed the trail back to the Hall of Reflected Moonlight, slew the small garrison there (most of the knights had returned to Waterdeep with the passing of the full moon), and ransacked the place looking for evidence of what they had done with Lord Hekaton. (He found nothing, of course.)

Back in Maelstrom, Mirran and Nym were shocked. This wasn’t what they had wanted… but they also weren’t exactly upset about it, either. Whatever second thoughts they might have had were quickly quashed by a more pressing realization: Their implication in regicide gave Iymrith the ultimate blackmail to use against them.

“Don’t worry, though,” Iymrith told them. “We’ll still make you the Queens of Maelstrom!”

… they just need to deal with their sister first.

Design Note: Why not cast raise dead on Queen Neri? This is a question that D&D adventure writers frequently just ignore. The go-to answer is simply that the soul of the victim isn’t willing to return, and you can just kind of handwave why Queen Neri wouldn’t want to come back.

Option #2: The merrow warlocks crafted some sort of soul-binding poison and her soul is trapped in the Abyss. Or, alternatively, a soul-binding crystal and now her soul is held captive in the sunken city of Ascarle.

Option #3: The breaking of the Ordning and the withdrawal of Annam’s light from the giants also means that giants can’t be raised from the dead at the moment. (Their souls can depart this world, but the road back from Annam’s kingdom is shut.)

Also: Why not just kill King Hekaton, too? That’s because Iymrith has a clever scheme. If Hekaton was dead, Serissa would simply ascend to the throne. With Hekaton alive-but-missing she’s only acting as regent, and the situation in Maelstrom is more unstable. (The Kraken Society thinks this is a crackin’ idea — pun intended — because this sort of destabilize-and-exploit is their modus operandi.)

Go to Part 4B: Seeking Hekaton

Go to Part 1

Our discussion of the Universal NPC Roleplaying Template has mostly focused on the effort that goes into originally prepping the NPC for the first time that you use them. For most NPCs, this is probably all you need: Most NPCs, after all, have a shelf life. They’ll be used once and then slip away into the night, vanishing along with the scenario which gave birth to them.

But some NPCs, of course, will become recurring characters, interacting with the PCs again and again, building long-term relationships — whether for weal or woe — that can endure for the entire campaign. (Or, in even rarer circumstances, persevering across multiple campaigns.)

What’s needed, as these long-term characters develop through play, is a new section for our NPC template: the activity log.

The quick version is that this is just a place for you to record the NPC’s interactions with the PCs — and possibly the wider campaign world as a whole — so that you can easily reference these events and keep the character’s continuity straight.

For example:

CARRINA – ACTIVITY LOG

• 9/24: Deputizes the PCs and gives them the Commissar’s Decree. PCs brief her on cult hot spots and tell her about the Banewarrens.
• 10/4: Carrina questions them about St. Thessina’s Chapel and tells them the chapel exploded. (They do not tell her about Yaeshla.) She’s told about bone devils escaping from Banewarrens. She orders the PCs to investigate the Blue Arsonists.
• 10/6: Carrina briefed on the upcoming Blue Arsonist attack.
• 10/6: Carrina briefed about Mrathrach. She needs more evidence.
• 10/12: Carrina told about purple wraith escape.
• 10/14: Carrina assigns Eliavra to help them with chaos cults.
• 10/17: Eliavra complains to Carrina about the screw-ups she’s been assigned to. She gets assignment to bodyguard Goldshields investigating tolling bell manifestations.
• 10/19: Mrathrach Raids. Carrina arrests them and strips them of their deputization. PCs manage to make peace with Carrina. Deputization reinstated.
• 10/20: PCs warn Carrina that there’s a rat in the city watch.
• 10/22: Carrina pays large bonus to the PCs. Refuses to intervene with Rehobath/Church Delvers.
• 10/22 (afternoon): Carrina summons them to deal with purple wraiths at St. Chausle’s Chapel.

The level of detail you want to use for your activity log is entirely up to you, and will probably vary depending on both circumstance and the character in question.

(For context, this log covers developments over roughly 80 sessions of play.)

Personally, I still run most of my games at the table from paper notes, and I’ll print my NPC briefing sheets on separate sheets of paper. My activity logs, therefore, are often somewhat informal, with the briefing sheets just accumulating handwritten notes over time as living artifacts of the campaign. (The back of the briefing sheet — which is often blank — can be a great place for note-taking!) But whether you’re running your campaign from a VTT, a wiki, or a Notions board, you should find it fairly easy to create an ACTIVITY LOG section on the character’s page and do the same.

AUDITING THE ACTIVITY LOG

If these notes become sufficiently unruly, of course, it can be valuable to recompile them, edit them, and bring them back under control. It’s important to remember that one of the primary goals of the NPC Roleplaying Template is to keep information related to the NPC succinct, well-organized, and easy-to-reference, and this remains true of the activity log, too.

It can be useful to remember that your goal is not to write a short story describing these events to some third party audience: You’re creating a quick reference for jogging your memory, making sure you don’t forget anything, and keeping the continuity straight.

Along similar lines, detailed information that was relevant a dozen sessions ago can often be reduced to a single sentence referencing those events now that time has passed.

On the other hand, in reviewing your notes, you may also discover that there’s stuff you should have written down that you didn’t. It’s usually easy enough to add the missing information to make sure you have it in the future.

I usually find a simple timeline — as in the example with Carrina, above — to be the best format for the log, but your mileage may vary. (And may also, of course, depend on the specific NPC.)

BACKGROUND – SINCE LAST WE MET

In my experience, it’s far from unusual for an NPC to disappear from the campaign for a bit and then reappear at a later date, whether because the PCs spontaneously seek them out or because they’ve become relevant to some new scenario you’re prepping. (Don’t forget Neel Krishnaswami’s Law of the Conservation of NPCs!)

Just like old friends getting together, you’ll probably want to know what the NPC has been up to in the interim. (Unless they were literally stuck in a cryo-stasis chamber for the duration.) Knowing that NPCs are “doing stuff” even when they’re not in their direct line of sight will make the game world truly feel alive for your players.

When prepping the NPC for their new appearance, therefore, you may find it useful to include a BACKGROUND – SINCE LAST WE MET subsection to their briefing sheet. You could just integrate this into a single updated Background section, but this, “What have you been up to?” material — although often not Key Info — is nevertheless something I’ll usually want to make a point of using, and therefore find useful to separate out a bit for easy reference.

(If it is Key Info, of course, you can just drop it down there, instead.)

The amount of detail you want to dive into with this will, again, vary a lot depending on the situation, but a little will go a long way here: One or two anecdotes, which can usually be no more than a sentence or two, will almost always get the job done.

Once you’ve actually used this material (e.g., they’ve told the PCs all about their adventures in the secret reptoid caverns behind Niagara Falls), you can then incorporate it into the NPC’s Activity Log. (Although this stuff technically didn’t happen while they were directly interacting with the PCs, it’s still part of the NPC’s personal, evolving continuity in the campaign.)

CAST OF CHARACTERS

A final thing I’ll mention here is that if you’re running a campaign with a big, rotating cast of recurring NPCs, you may find it very useful to maintain a cast of characters module in your campaign status document.

This is something I discuss in more detail in Campaign Status Module: Supporting Cast.

How you organize this list — whether alphabetically, by faction, by utility, or something else entirely — will obviously depend on your specific needs for the current campaign, but when you combine this with either a file folder or three-ring-binder or indexed wiki page of NPC briefing sheets, you should have everything you need to fill your world with fascinating characters who your players can form deep and meaningful relationships with.

FURTHER READING
Quick NPC Roleplaying Templates
Campaign Status Module: Supporting Cast
Random GM Tip: Memorable NPCs
Advanced Gamemastery: Universal Roleplaying Template

Thanks to Frolmaster and Olivia Bullocks on Youtube for recommending the topic for this article!