SESSION 40A: RATS OF KENNEL AND OF BRAIN

July 25th, 2009
The 22nd Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

The tunnel was long enough to take them out of the bridge, and, judging by the damp stench filling the air, they suspected they were drawing near the sewer system. A little further on the tunnel dipped steeply and Tee, who was scouting ahead of the others, found herself entering some sort of warren-like antechamber: More of the ratmens’ refuse nests pocked the corners of the room, but the filth here was thicker and viler, forming a thick and treacherous carpet of trash on the floor. There were two archways in the far walls of the room, each veiled by a ragged tapestry of blue fabric.

A closer inspection revealed that there were actually two or three ratmen sleeping here and there amid the refuse piles. With a smile, Tee notched an arrow in her bow and fired at the nearest one.

The arrow neatly pierced its jugular, ending its life silently. Tee turned her bow to the next—

Unfortunately, there was a fully awake ratling crouching in one corner that Tee hadn’t noticed. He gave a cry and fired a dragon pistol at her head. Tee narrowly dodged the blast, but the other ratlings were beginning to stir.

Agnarr and Tor came charging into the room. They converged on the ratling firing on Tee, even as he fled towards one of the veiled archways. They easily cut him down as Tee caught another ratling in mid-charge with a second arrow.

Unfortunately, the last of the ratlings managed to duck out of the other archway before they could stop him.

Tor quickly took up a watchful station in the second archway. Agnarr called out for Tee to wait, but she was hot on the heels of the escaping ratling. Passing through the arch, she found herself in another trash-filled chamber –  this one nest-less, but with deeply-rutted paths leading through more tapestried archways. One of these tapestries was still rustling and, in the absence of any wind, Tee guessed that the ratling had gone that way.

Passing through this second archway, however, Tee came face-to-face with nearly half a dozen ratlings who were being rallied in a squeaking, gibbering mass by the ratling she had been pursuing. With a little squeak of her own, Tee backpedaled into the antechamber.

Agnarr, Nasira, and Ranthir, meanwhile, had quickly gathered themselves. As Tee fell back, they came charging forward. A brief and chaotic skirmish erupted as more ratlings – attracted by the sound of the battle – came pouring into the antechamber from the other archway. But once they managed to bring their full force to bear they were able to quickly overwhelm the terrified ratlings.

With Tor and Elestra keeping an eye on the explored archway (to make sure they didn’t have any more uninvited guests), Tee performed a quick, cursory search through the nesting chambers.

She found nothing of interest. But Agnarr, who had been following her around, grunted. “Don’t you want to search more of that?”

Tee eyed the fecal-filled refuse piles. “I want to keep moving. Why don’t you search them?”

Agnarr shrugged. “You search trash better than I do.”

Tee turned towards where the others were waiting, but Agnarr was now convinced that there must be something valuable hidden somewhere under the refuse piles. He started digging through them with gusto and seemingly endless enthusiasm, sending trash flying through the air.

“What’s going on?” Nasira asked.

“Agnarr’s throwing trash around,” Tee said, watching the whole thing with a bemused look on her face. She was trying to keep a safe distance, but Agnarr was achieving some impressive distance on his flurrious cloud of trash.

But it may have been for the best that Tee was watching. A piece of crumpled paper flew past her head and something about it caught her eye. Snatching it out of the air, she unfolded it to reveal a crude map:

Tee cleared her throat and held up the map. Agnarr turned around. His face split into a huge grin. “You see? You do search trash better than me!”

Tee wasn’t sure whether she should think of that as a compliment or not. She suspected not.

RATS OF KENNEL AND OF BRAIN

The archway Tor and Elestra had been watching opened into a much larger chamber. Much larger mounds of garbage were piled high near their end of the chamber, but these petered out a little further to the south, allowing clear access to a western and a southern tunnel out of the room.

The southwestern corner of the chamber had been boxed in with an eclectic assemblage of wooden slats and this immediately attracted Tee’s interest. She stole her way across the chamber (pausing only for a moment when she noticed a green, effervescent glow at the far end of the western tunnel) and peered over the edge of the make-shift fencing.

Inside were several dire rats with leather hoods tied around their heads. She grimaced and pulled out her dragon pistol: The last thing they needed were trained attack rats being used against them.

But then a sudden realization made her stop.

Elestra, who had carelessly followed her across the chamber, looked over her shoulder. “Why don’t you shoot them?”

“I think they’re the kennel rats,” Tee said. “They can take us to Malleck.”

They resolved to come back later and use one of the kennel rats to reach the Temple of the Ebon Hand, but first they wanted to finish routing out this nest. “We don’t want to give them time to reinforce,” Ranthir said.

Tee nodded. “They aren’t expecting us right now. That gives us an edge. Next time they’ll be waiting for us.”

Tee didn’t trust effervescent green lights, so they decided to explore the western tunnel next. The roof and walls of the tunnel were slick and wet, and a thick, turgid liquid was slowly dripping down onto the floor below to form deep puddles. Tee, not wanting to risk an untimely splash, used her boots of levitation to pull herself along.

She stopped at the far end tunnel, looking into a long cavern. Toxic sewage seeped down into a long crevasse that ran the length of the chamber, and it was from this that the sickly green light emanated. Every surface glistened with moisture, and sopping wet refuse had been gathered into mounds here and there.

Situated around the cesspool crevasse were five massive ratbrutes sitting in what appeared to be meditative trances: Their eyes were open, but milky white and seemingly sightless. Crawling over these ratbrutes were swarms of large, over-sized rats – the tops of their skulls translucent, revealing swollen, enlarged brains which glowed with an unearthly blue aura.

“That’s disgusting,” Tee murmured. “Disgusting and disturbing.”

She returned to the others and they decided to try mounting an assault.

They made their way back down the dripping tunnel as quietly as they could, but the rats were waiting for them. As the twisting swarm of bulbous-brained rats rippled towards them, blasts of distorted air struck at them. Agnarr’s senses were immediately dulled at their touch, sending him into a kind of dazed stupor.

“They’re mind blasts!” Ranthir cried.

“Wait,” Tor said. “Mind blasts? Why is Agnarr affected?”

The transparent skulls of the rats revealed brains seething with bursting pulses of pure energy.

Ranthir was the next to feel their stupor-inducing telepathic assault overwhelm his mind, and then the swarms began sending out blasts of magical blue energy – their collective mental might serving as some sort of living focal point.

The cranium rats swarmed under Tee’s floating feet and climbed up like furry fountains around Tor and the quiescent Agnarr – their filthy claws and yellowed teeth tearing at any bit of exposed flesh, while others burrowed into their armor.

“Should we attack the ratbrutes?” Tee asked, trying to dodge the blasts of blue energy.

“I don’t want to risk waking them up!” Tor said, staggering in a desperate effort to keep the rats from reaching Nasira and Elestra.

“I don’t think they’re sleeping! I think they’re controlling these brain rats!”

Tor could give no answer: The mind blasts of the rats had overwhelmed him.

Elestra rallied briefly – in the process managing to blast the swarming rats away from the stupefied fighters – but in that instant Tee saw the blind ratbrutes stagger to their feet.

“We’ll leave!” she shouted. “Call off your rats and we’ll leave!”

Everything suddenly fell perfectly still. The moment stretched for a tense eternity, and then the cranium rats swarmed into the middle of the slippery tunnel and stared deliberately up at where Tee clung to the ceiling.

Keeping her eyes focused on them, Tee carefully levitated over them and picked her way back down the tunnel. The cranium rats followed her with their eyes, but held their place. Tee lowered herself to the floor and directed Nasira and Elestra in gathering up Agnarr, Tor, and Ranthir. Together they led them out of the complex and back the way they had come.

Running the Campaign: Show the Help – Campaign Journal: Session 40B
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

M. asks:

I want to run a post-apocalyptic campaign with the PCs stuck in the middle of a war between multiple factions, but I’m struggling to set it up. I want a lot of inter-factional politics and for the struggle just to survive to be a big part of things. The PCs should start as grunts, but I’d like them to get more involved in the decision-making later on. I’ve read So You Want to Be a Game Master, but what do I actually prep? Should I write up the whole military campaign as a hexcrawl?

To get started, let’s keep it simple.

Your campaign is going to start with an EPISODIC STRUCTURE with mission-based scenarios: The PCs are grunts. Maybe for a specific military. Maybe as part of a small band of scavengers trying to survive w while the larger war rages around them. Or maybe they’re mercs getting orders from different factions each week.

Regardless, your basic scenario hook is simple: They get orders to DO A THING from their commanding officer or scavenge elder or whatever.

And, from that, the basic rhythm of play will flow pretty naturally: They go and do the thing (or fail to do the thing). Then they go back to their commanding officer and they get their next mission.

Each MISSION is a scenario. You told me you have So You Want to Be a Game Master, and that book is primarily designed around scenario structures — how to design and run different types of scenarios.

DUNGEON SCENARIOS

• The enemy has dug a tunnel network; we need you to go and clear it out.
• We’ve discovered an old Fallout-style Vault. We need you to explore it and verify there’s no enemy presence.

RAID SCENARIOS

• We need you to take out the enemy’s mobile transmission tower.
• We’ve found a secret tunnel going into Base Frozen Alpha. Use the tunnel to infiltrate the base, then lower the shields.

And so forth.

As a general rule, though, giving the PCs a specific objective, but leaving the players free to figure out HOW they want to achieve that goal will result in more interesting and engaging scenarios.

After running a couple of these missions, you might want to get a little fancy by experimenting with surprising scenario hooks. (For example, the PCs are sent to clear out a tunnel network suspected to be infested with enemies, but when they arrive they instead find it full of refugees. What do they do?)

But mostly you can keep it straightforward. Expect to run at least a half dozen of these scenarios to kick things off. During this time you’ll be learning a lot about the game, scenario design, your group, etc. Design each new mission based on (a) what the PCs are doing, (b) how their actions are affecting the world, and (c) what the PCs’ goals are/become.

• Look at things they care about, put them at risk, and say: “How do you save them?”
• Plague them with hardship (an enemy has infested their food supply with a bio-weapon), listen to the solutions they propose (“let’s raid their food depots!”), and then design the next scenario so that they can go and do that.

Along these same lines, have the mission outcomes be big and meaningful:

• If they find a large cache of rations, make a point of how the lives of their scavenge band have improved. Little Timmy, who was all skin-and-bones, is actually looking healthy!
• If they fail to take out an enemy communication tower, their unit gets ambushed. Now they’re on the run, pushed back by the enemy (and we need to scout out Death Rock Canyon to make sure there aren’t any muties laying an ambush before we can escape through it!) and their friends are crippled or dead.

Honestly, you could run the whole campaign like this and accomplish a lot of what you want to accomplish, but after running a bunch of episodic scenarios, you may be in a place where you want to reposition the PCs from “somebody tells you what to do” to “you need to figure out what to do.” This means putting the players in the driver’s seat so that you can directly engage them with the type of deep conflicts and meaningful choices you want to happen in this campaign.

This is the point where you’ll need to transition to a different campaign structure.

The first thing you’ll need to do, though, is look at how this shift happens diegetically: The PCs have been taking orders, now they’re not. Why?

• Maybe the leaders of their scavenger band get assassinated when they go to a meeting. Or blown up by a radiation bomb. However it happens, the PCs are now in charge of the scavenger band.
• If they’re military grunts, maybe they get assigned as an advanced scout team to explore a new region (where they’ll largely be autonomous in their operations).

You might plan ahead for this, but the nature of the diegetic shift may also develop organically through play.

The second thing, in my opinion, if you’re going to have the players making big, strategic choices that will affect the course of the war, then you need to give them some sort concrete structure to base those choices on.

This doesn’t have to be super robust. You don’t need to design a fully functional 4X strategy game. But you want something that will guide your own rulings and, by extension, let them make meaningful choices instead of just trying to influence your whim.

The most basic structure here is:

• A list of resources (food, ammunition, etc.) and where they’re produced/storehoused.
• A list of infrastructure (population/settlements, military units, etc.) and the cost in resources to maintain it per month, season, year, or whatever other time period makes sense.
• An understanding that a resource shortfall will result in either severe consequences for a piece of infrastructure or cause that infrastructure to collapse entirely.

The exact lists you use here will depend a lot on what you’ve discovered about the world, game, players, and characters while running the episodic portion of the campaign. (And you can actually start laying the groundwork for this stuff and experimenting a bit before the PCs are in a decision-making position.)

I recommend also adding FACTION DOWNTIME to this. A system for this is included in So You Want to be a Game Master, p. 342, and you should be able to adapt it pretty easily. The basic idea is that various factions will have agendas and they’ll be able to pursue those agendas as the campaign clock ticks forward. It’ll be up to the PCs to figure out which agendas they want to support, which they oppose, and which they ignore.

Since this is a military campaign, it’s also likely that you’ll want some sort of structure/system for resolving MASS BATTLES. What exactly this will look like will likely depend a lot on which RPG system you’re using and how large the conflict really is, but it’s once again something that doesn’t have to be super complicated in order to be effective.

Finally, make sure that (a) these three structures are linked to each other (e.g. specific faction projects should require specific resources; claiming those resources — or denying them to another faction — will likely require military action) and (b) the PCs can still take meaningful individual actions (i.e., go on adventures) to influence and/or participate in each structure (e.g., instead of a military action, they can go on an adventure to get the necessary resources; they can participate in the battles; they can provide security for the scientists researching the lunar lycanthrope raygun).

Along these lines, at this stage of the campaign (or perhaps even earlier), you may it useful to start experimenting with troupe-style play, in which each player controls a stable of characters and chooses which character they’ll play in each scenario depending on what the focus of the scenario is.

Go to Ask the Alexandrian #14

The revised 2024 edition of the D&D 5E Player’s Handbook includes a Rules Glossary at the back of the book. This glossary is integral to the organization of the rulebook, as described in a sidebar on page 7:

RULES GLOSSARY

If you read a rules term in this book and want to know its definition, consult the rules glossary, which is appendix C. This chapter provides an overview of how to play D&D and focuses on the big picture. Many places in this chapter reference that glossary.

So, for example, the rules will mention that a spell can have a Cone area of effect, but what this means will never be explained in the text: It will only be defined in the “Cone [Area of Effect]” section of the Rules Glossary.

There is also, of course, an Index where you can look up various topics. This is, thankfully, MUCH improved over the 2014 version of the Index, which suffered from a multitude of sins. (The most frustrating, in my experience, was that you’d look something up in the Index and it would tell you to go look at a different Index entry. And sometimes when you looked up that entry, it would tell you to go look at another entry. And then, when you finally followed the daisy chain to its end, there would only be a single page reference which could have just as easily been included at every single entry along the daisy chain! This is completely absent from the 2024 Index.)

Splitting the rules for a game into an explanatory text and a “definitive” rules glossary isn’t a new technique. It’s a format that’s been used by a number of board games over the last couple decades. (For example, Fantasy Flight Games was a big fan of this for a while, and even D&D 3^rd Edition published a separate Rules Compendium that used a similar approach in an effort to “simplify” and “clarify” the rules with a “definitive” reference.)

And, to be blunt, my experience with these glossary-based rulebooks, as I’ll call them, has pretty consistently sucked. They have a pretty easy fail-state in which the rules glossary ISN’T actually authoritative, so you end up with rules split up across multiple locations, which means that

• you’re forced to flip back and forth between different pages trying to piece together the full set of rules you actually need; and
• even when the glossary IS authoritative, there’s no way that you can be sure that’s true, so you end up flipping back and forth anyway.

This fail-state is generally made worse because you need to play Guess What We Named This Entry, which can be capricious at best. Furthermore, these failures seem to be endemic because, in my experience, game rules are inherently procedural (if A, then B, then C), whereas a glossary is organized by topic.

Note: None of this applies to a rulebook which simply includes a Glossary. A normal glossary can be a useful resource for quickly understanding key terminology, and can be even more useful if it includes page references pointing you to the full and primary discussion of the topic. You could remove such a glossary and the game would still be complete.

A glossary-based rulebook, on the other hand, has rules which are ONLY found in the Rules Glossary. This glossary is not merely a reference tool; it’s integral to the presentation of the game. Removing this glossary would change the game.

With all that being said, I tried to go into the 2024 Player’s Handbook with an open mind. At first glance, in fact, it seemed that the Rules Glossary would be a useful reference tool (although it was immediately obvious that its utility would be greatly enhanced if it had page references).

After using it for a little bit, unfortunately, I’m forced to conclude that…

IT SUCKS

To demonstrate, let’s consider a spell’s Range and Target.

“Range” is not, as far as I can tell, covered in the Rules Glossary. (I can’t be 100% sure of this because sometimes you have to guess how the term is being alphabetized — i.e., “Range” vs. “Spell Range”. But the Index doesn’t have a Rules Glossary page reference for it, so I’m fairly confident.) This means that all of the rules for a spell’s Range are located on page 236 in Chapter 7: Spells.

That’s simple enough.

What about a spell’s Target?

Well, that does have a Rules Glossary entry, on page 376, which is:

TARGET

A target is the creature or object targeted by an attack roll, forced to make a saving throw by an effect, or selected to receive the effects of a spell or another phenomenon.

Great! At first glance, we’ve found the rules for Targets!

… except, of course, I have a certain degree of system mastery, and I know this cannot, in fact, be the totality of the Target rules.

Okay, so let’s hit up the Index:

target, 376

Huh. Only one page reference and it’s pointing to the Rules Glossary entry. Maybe the 2024 revision massively streamlined the Target rules and those are the only rules for targets.

Let’s double-check by looking up “spells” and “spell target” in the Index and see if there’s anything there.

Nope.

The reality is that the Index, although much improved, has actually failed here. The rules for a spell’s Target are located on page 237-8. These rules are fairly bulky and, at first glance, seem complete.

But wait, there’s more!

In the Target section, for example, there are rules for areas of effect:

Areas of Effect. Some spells, such as Thunderwave, cover an area called an area of effect, which is defined in the rules glossary. The area determines what the spell targets. The description of a spell specifies whether it has an area of effect, which is typically one of these shapes: Cone, Cube, Cylinder, Emanation, Line, or Sphere.

Okay, so then we go to the Area of Effect entry in the Rules Glossary. This includes essential rules about the area’s point of origin, how to determine if certain parts of the area of effect are blocked, etc. and then it cross-references Rules Glossary entries for each individual shape. (So you might then flip to Cube to figure out the specific rules for how a Cube area of effect works.)

But what if you were coming to this from a different direction? For example, let’s say you were looking at the Thunderwave spell, where it says:

Each creature in a 15-foot Cube originating from you makes a Constitution saving throw.

You don’t know what that means, but “Cube” is capitalized, which indicates a term that’s located in the Rules Glossary. Here you get the specific rules about Cubes which, at first glance, seem complete… but don’t actually include the stuff about how certain parts of the area might be blocked. This is probably okay-ish, though, because even though “area of effect” isn’t capitalized, the entry is titled “Cube [Area of Effect]” and the square brackets indicate that there’s another glossary entry. Yes, you now have multiple pages open and are cross-referencing them to figure out how the rules work, but at least you were able to find everything by following the breadcrumb trail!

But let’s go back to the rules for Targets on page 238 and look at this section of the rules:

A Clear Path to the Target. To target something with a spell, a caster must have a clear path to it, so it can’t be behind Total Cover.

Well, that seems complete and, unlike the “Areas of Effect” section of the same rules, there’s no reference to an entry in the Rules Glossary, so we must be good to go!

… except I know that in the 2014 version of the rulebook, this section reads:

A CLEAR PATH TO THE TARGET

To target something, you must have a clear path to it, so it can’t be behind total cover.

If you place an area of effect at a point you can’t see and an obstruction, such as a wall, is between you and that point, the point of origin comes into being on the near side of that obstruction.

Hmm. What happened to that whole second paragraph?

Well, once again, maybe they removed it from the rules. It did, after all, give rise to the endless debates about whether or not you could target someone standing behind a window. (And, if so, what would happen.)

But by this point I’ve gotten suspicious, and so I go digging a bit and discover that this part of the rule can, in fact, be found hidden in the Rules Glossary! (Although, obviously, not in the entry about Targets!)

Finally, all of this is made much, much worse because Wizards of the Coast is allergic to page references, and so even when they do tell you where you can find more rules, this takes the form of, “See also chapter 1,” and you’re left flipping through a thirty-page chapter trying to figure out what where you’re supposed to look.

CONCLUSION

On the one hand, you can argue that all of the rules are, in fact, in the rulebook, and can eventually be found if you just look in the right place. So what’s the problem?

On the other hand, I want you to think about how many times during this relatively simple rules look up:

• You could falsely conclude that you had all the relevant rules and, therefore, never go looking for the rules hidden away in a different part of the book.
• You needed to have multiple pages open at the same time in order to have all the relevant rules for a single topic. (Then add to this, for example, the spell listing that prompted you to go looking for these rules in the first place.)
• You’re re-reading the same text in multiple places because each entry is partially redundant.

But, also, once you’ve lost trust that either the Rules Glossary or the main text can be trusted to give you a full set of rules, how much time do you waste fruitlessly double-checking to make sure you’re not missing something that’s been hidden from you? (Remember how in one case the partial rules were in the Rules Glossary and the full rules were in the main text, but in the other case the opposite was true?)

Think about the impact all of that has in the middle of a session.

Ignore the broken Index entry and assume we successfully navigated our way through the blind turns: We nevertheless went to page 376, then page 237, then page 364, and then page 361. (And then probably back and forth between them.)

Meanwhile in the 2014 Player’s Handbook, all of these rules were located in a single place on page 204. Look it up and you’re done.

As I mentioned, the 2014 Player’s Handbook is not without its own flaws and shortcomings. My point here isn’t that perfection hasn’t been achieved. My point is that glossary-based rulebooks are systemically flawed, and the 2024 Player’s Handbook is just one example of a fundamental problem, which means that the impact on you and your game will also be systemic and pervasive, affecting it in every part.

Go to Part 1

Mythos fiction tends to be well-stocked with mysterious tomes filled with enigmatic lore. When running a good Mythos adventure, you’ll often want to drop similar tomes into the hands of the players.

Broadly speaking, there are two structural functions these tomes can fulfill.

First, they can deliver a specific clue — i.e., you read the book and discover that athathan panthers can only be harmed in moonlight.

Second, they can provide a research resource. These are books like the Necronomicon, Nameless Cults, Tobin’s Spirit Guide, or The Revelations of Glaaki that are an arcane repository for a great mass of Mythos lore. Characters can refer to them time and time again across disparate investigations, and often find useful references.

TOME AS CLUE

If you want the tome to impart a specific clue (or clues), you might simply cut to the chase and give them the clue: “After staying up late into the night poring over the strange, bloodstained book you found on the altar, you unravel a ritual for summoning athathan panthers in exchange for human sacrifices. The victims must be sleeping and the ritual must be performed in moonlight, because that’s when the athathan are weakened.”

But this is also exactly what lore book props are designed for. That link will take you to a full description of how lore books work, but the short version is that they’re a kind of executive summary of fictional books. The experience of “reading” a lore book prop is more immersive for the players, particularly because you can embed the clues you want them to find in the description of the book, so that they can actually extract them from the text for themselves.

The trick with lore books is that, by their nature, they tend to deliver a lot of information in a single package. As a result, it can be easy for them to tip over into the neatly organized summary of what’s going on that we specifically want to avoid when designing Mythos scenarios. So you want to make sure, when writing Mythos lore books, that they remain a confusing and contradictory source text: A mythological understanding of mythology as transcribed by madmen. The longer text doesn’t necessarily bring more truth; it just gives a more dizzying array of mythological angles all looking at the same truth.

Another technique I’ve found useful is to identify one specific slice of the Mythos entity in question (i.e., the clue you’re trying to deliver), focus entirely on that one slice, and then build out a micro-story around it that’s largely or entirely unrelated to the rest of the Mythos entity. (For example, to convey some information about L’rignak’s strange matter, you could create a story found only in the unredacted, original manuscript of Sir Richard Burton’s Arabian Nights that deals with some orphan boys in Persia who find the strange matter in a cave and bring it home to the ruination of all who interact with it. The name L’rignak might not even be mentioned in this text.)

This technique can be quite effective at evoking the scope of the Mythos entity: The suggestion that it is not some new manifestation, but has rather always been entwined with human destiny. A great, strange mass which has made its presence felt throughout the world and history, but whose true immensity has never been glimpsed… until now.

TOME AS RESOURCE

The basic idea behind a tome that serves as a research resource, on the other hand, is that, if the PCs can rifle through the text, then it can help them to both “know” things and also figure things out. The exact mechanical representation of this will depend on the system you’re running (and possibly the tome in question), but a fairly typical structure looks like this:

Studying. Before the tome can be utilized as a resource, the PC must spend some time familiarizing themselves with it (e.g., a day, a week, a month, or until they succeed on a skill check of some sort).

Mechanical Benefit. Once the PC has studied the text, they gain a mechanical benefit when using it as part of a knowledge-type check. For example:

• They gain advantage on relevant checks.
• They gain a pool of points they can spend to enhance relevant checks. (Either once per scenario or a set pool that, when expired, suggests that the book’s usefulness has come to an end / the character has completely learned its contents.)
• The PC gains a permanent bonus to a knowledge-type skill or similar ability.

Usually a list of topics covered by the book determines which knowledge-based checks the book can be used to enhance. (For example, Tobin’s Spirit Guide might grant bonuses to checks related to the afterlife, undead, strange gods, and transdimensional travel.)

Cost. Books that reveal things man was not meant to know can be inherently dangerous, and it’s not unusual for studying a Mythos tome to inflict a cost (usually along the lines of lost Sanity or attracting the attention of powers who can sense those who know the Truth).

These tomes can also be presented as lore books, and, in fact, it’s ideal if they are. In addition to the list of topics covered by the book, you want to understand the nature of the book well enough that it can serve as a convenient vector for improvising where the knowledge came from. (Nameless Cults, for example, is primarily a study of cults by Friedrich von Junzt written in the 19^th century. So if, for example, the PCs pull information about werewolves out of it, then the GM might relate the information via a lycanthropic cult in Prussia.)

CREATING TOMES

Of course, some tomes might be both: They provide an initial clue relevant to the scenario where they’re first encountered, but can also serve as a general resource for future research. (In other words, the initial clue is built into whatever the fictional frame of the book is.)

As you’re creating your own tomes, I generally recommend not making any single tome so vast in its contents that it becomes universally useful. Unless you want one specific tome to be the pillar around which the campaign is built, it’s generally better to break information up and spread it across a multitude of sources: First, it motivates the players to continue seeking new knowledge. Second, the disparate sources given you a multitude of vectors for coloring and contextualizing information as it flows into your campaign. Third, this diversity in sources also makes it to improvise interesting angles for presenting the information. The more generic and all-encompassing a source becomes; the more it becomes a bland encyclopedia, it follows that referencing the work becomes more and more like a blank slate.

If you’d like to see copious examples of what Mythos lore books look like, the Alexandrian Remix of Eternal Lies contains literally dozens of them, including:

• Books of the Los Angeles Cult (both the UCLA Lot and Echavarria’s Library)
• Savitree’s Research
• Revelations of Glaaki (found in the Severn Valley props packet)

This vast number of tomes, however, should not be mistaken as model for how many lore books you need in your own campaign. The Alexandrian Remix is a special beast, and in practice a little can go a long way. In fact, it can be preferable for such lore dumps to be rare, making each lore book the PCs get their hands on a rare and precious prize.

On the other hand, for a truly hypertrophic of how far lore tomes can be pushed, consider the examples of The Dracula Dossier and The Armitage Files. The latter, designed for Trail of Cthulhu, is an entire campaign built around the players being given dozens of pages from “real” in-world documents and then puzzling their way through them to identify leads to pursue in their investigations. The former, designed for Night’s Black Agents, pushes the technique even further, “unredacting” the entire epistolary novel of Dracula and recharacterizing it as an ops file from British intelligence complete with marginalia and, once again, inviting the players to pore through the text to identify a multitude of leads.

I suppose, in the grand scheme of things, this is not so surprising.

After all, everyone knows that reading a Mythos tome can drive one mad.

(click for PDF)

Mothership is a sci-fi horror RPG. Think Alien, The Thing, Pitch Black, or Annihilation.

Its calling card is an old school approach wedded to red hot innovation:

• Blazing fast character creation.
• Brutal systems for Combat and Stress.
• Tons of sandbox support and tools in the Warden’s Operation Manual (the GM book).
• An overwhelming amount of adventure support, including both first party books and a deluge of third-party support.

This last point, in particular, is driving Mothership to my table as my next open campaign. Not only is there a ton of adventure support, a lot of it is designed so that you can spend 15 minutes reading through it and — presto! — you’re ready to go. My expectation is that I’ll be able to rapidly build a stable of adventures that will easily let me run the game with minimal or no prep.

I’ll likely be writing up a full review of Mothership after I’ve had a chance to run it a few more times, but for now I’d like to share the system cheat sheet I’ve developed for the game.

WHAT’S NOT INCLUDED

These cheat sheets are not designed to be a quick start packet: They’re designed to be a comprehensive reference for someone who has read the rulebook and will probably prove woefully inadequate if you try to learn the game from them. (On the other hand, they can definitely assist experienced players who are teaching the game to new players.)

The Mothership cheat sheet, in particular, works very well in conjunction with the GM screen(s) for the game, which are excellent. (There’s both a standard screen and a larger deluxe screen, which each come with the respective boxed sets.)

The cheat sheets also don’t include what I refer to as “character option chunks” (for reasons discussed here). In other words, you won’t find the rules for character creation here.

HOW I USE THEM

I usually keep a copy of the cheat sheet behind my GM screen for quick reference and also provide copies for all of the players. I have two copies of the Mothership rulebook at the table, too, but my goal is to summarize all of the rules for the game. This consolidation of information eliminates book look-ups: Finding something in a dozen pages is a much faster process than paging through hundreds of pages in the rulebook.

The organization of information onto each page of the cheat sheet should, hopefully, be fairly intuitive.

PAGE 1: Basic Mechanics and Violent encounters. (Most of the core game play loops are covered here.)

PAGE 2: Survival. (Most of the miscellaneous rules in the game.)

PAGE 3: Ports & Medical Care. (Stuff to do in your downtime.)

PAGE 4: Contractors. (I debated whether to include this page, but I really want the idea of hiring Contractors to be front-and-center for new Mothership players. It’s such an excellent way of getting them more deeply invested in the campaign.)

Having run character creation for Mothership a couple of times, the sheer speed at which it happens turns the limited number of rulebooks at the table into a significant choke point. I’m going to continue experimenting with how that should be handled, and probably trying to figure out which pages from the PDF need to be printed out to help everyone zip through. (I’ll report back when I know more.)

CRUXES

The Mothership cheat sheet currently only covers the material in the Player’s Survival Guide. I’ll likely be expanding them at some point to include the rules from the Shipbreaker’s Toolkit, but for the moment I’m going to be focusing on in media res scenarios where I’m dropping the troubleshooters into abandoned military bases, butchered research labs, and drifting derelicts.

There are a few interesting mechanical cruxes I’ve had to confront when putting together the cheat sheet.

Unarmed Damage: Unlisted in the core rulebook, this was immediately an issue in my first couple sessions. I’ve pulled the value of 1d5 from Pound of Flesh, an adventure module included in the Deluxe Edition of the game.

Androids & Oxygen: The rules state that androids don’t consume oxygen when life support systems fail, but there are separate rules for vacuums and toxic atmospheres (which require rebreathers or oxygen supplies). Should androids be affected by exposure to vacuum or toxic atmospheres? My ruling is No.

Combat: The transition from an explicitly turn-based initiative system in Mothership 0e to what seems to be a more freeform(?) resolution in Mothership 1e appears to have been pretty badly muffed. The rules and examples of play contradict each other, and support material (including stat blocks and adventures included in the core game box) don’t seem to be in sync with the mechanics. I’ll likely have more to say about this in the future, but for now I’ve simply included the combat rules as written on the cheat sheet.

I’m currently using a system of:

1. The GM threatens harm. (To use a term of art from Apocalypse World.)

2. Players declare action by going around the table.

3. GM makes rulings for how actions are resolved.

4. Players all roll dice (if necessary) at the same time. (Failures likely result in the threatened harm occurring.)

But although this is strongly suggested by the examples of play, I’m not yet convinced it’s actually working very well. (The system seems to detach from the game world, or vice versa, and every opponent kinda blurs into the same mechanical mush.) As I say, I’m going to continue experimenting with this.

MAKING A GM SCREEN

These cheat sheets can also be used in conjunction with a modular, landscape-oriented GM screen (like the ones you can buy here or here).

Personally, I use a four-panel screen and use reverse-duplex printing in order to create sheets that I can tape together and “flip up” to reveal additional information behind them. (This simple sheet, however, will simply fit directly into the four-panel screen.)