IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Session 6A: Blood in the Depths

In which a hole in the wall leads to an unexpected labyrinth, and one pest problem quickly leads to another…

This section of the campaign is notable because the dungeon complex they begin to explore at the end of it was directly adapted into the The Complex of Zombies, a mini-module which you can purchase on Drivethru (among other places).

Adapting material from your personal campaign into a published form can be very rewarding, but there are a number of pitfalls you need to avoid.

The first thing you have to do is purge the material of any material inherited from other creators. Personal campaigns are, I fervently believe, strengthened beyond measure by becoming a beautiful mélange of influences and inputs. Copyright law, on the other hand, has other opinions.

In the case of The Complex of Zombies, fortunately, I’ve already “translated” Monte Cook’s Ptolus into my own campaign world (which I’ve been running and developing since 2000), which often has the effect of preemptively scrubbing off many of the serial numbers. But some work still needed to be done.

This process is less simple than it may first appear because you can’t just go through and delete everything. That would leave the material feeling hollow and incomplete. Nor, in my opinion, can you just replace other people’s creative content with generic versions of the same: “Generic” isn’t good. Generic lacks identity. Generic lacks interest.

So you have to go in, take this one really cool thing that has a bunch of specific context and content that you can’t use, and you have to replace it with something really cool and creative and detailed in its own right. And that usually has a cascade effect, as one change affects another. A well-designed scenario, after all, isn’t a bunch of unrelated stuff: So once you start changing some elements, the rest of the scenario can and should change, too.

(This process is often beneficial, though: Re-contextualizing material from one context into another often lends richer and unexpected depths to the new context which you might not otherwise have considered or created.)

For The Complex of Zombies, the most notable example of this was swapping out the deep background of Ghul’s Labyrinth (beneath Monte Cook’s Ptolus) for the research complex of the Sons of Jade. If I recall correctly, the Sons of Jade were an original creation for the adventure module, but I tied them into the mythology of the Jade Magi and the Lost City of Shandrala, which I had originally developed for the background of the gemstone golems I’d designed for the Penumbra Bestiary (although that background was stripped out of the final book) and which had also featured in a proposed mega-adventure in the pre-3.5 says of the D20 license. (A project which I occasionally play with the idea of returning to, but probably won’t all things considered.)

And although this didn’t really apply to The Complex of Zombies, the other thing you have to be wary of when going from table-to-page is trying to recapture the campaign instead of the scenario. For example, I’ve actually encountered multiple published scenarios where the author, seemingly out of the blue, suddenly starts talking about what the GM should do if one of the PCs falls in love with a seemingly random NPC.

This is almost certainly because that’s what happened in their campaign. In one case, this ended up being an extended subplot that chewed up almost half of the published scenario. Twenty or thirty pages of material. And I’m willing to bet hard currency that it was an absolutely, positively amazing experience at the table; probably one of those gaming memories that you’re still talking about fondly twenty years later.

But I’ll also guarantee you that literally no one else playing in that scenario will ever duplicate that precise experience. And you have to be cautious of those moments — at both the seemingly obvious macro-level, but also at the more insidious micro-level — when attempting to offer the material to other people. If you do your job well, then the odds are that the other GMs running your scenario will experience similarly amazing, spontaneous, and memorable acts at the gaming table. But they won’t be the same moments that you experienced. (No matter how much you try to craft a railroad to force that moment to come again. It’s like when things go sour in Groundhog Day as Bill Murray’s character tries to recreate the perfect day.)

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

SESSION 6A: BLOOD IN THE DEPTHS

April 29th, 2007
The 20th Day of Amseyl in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

The party arrived back at Greyson House and found two watchmen posted outside. They gave them the scrap of paper they had been given back at the watch house and were let inside without incident.

They found that a few things had been moved around – presumably by the watch –  but for the most part the house was undisturbed. Agnarr strode confidently into the kitchen, grabbed the rope that was still tied off to the stove… and promptly fell into the basement. Dusting himself off he looked up at the rest of the party staring down at him. “Well… We had so many problems with the rope before, I figured I would just jump down.”

Tee frowned, waved him out of the way, and then lightly slid down the rope, landing gently on the floor. She moved away quickly before Dominic could fall on her again, but the others followed carefully (and safely) as she moved south into the room where they had found poor Jasin’s body.

Tee saw that the crates stacked along the wall and hiding the small crawlspace she had seen hacked through the foundation of the house hadn’t been moved. The watchmen they had spoken to had told the truth: They hadn’t found the secret passage, or even suspected that it existed.

Tee had Agnarr move the crates out of the way. With the hole clearly exposed, she could see that crates had also been stacked on the other side of the hole. Getting down on her hands and knees she crawled through the hole and gave the crates on the other side a sharp shove to get them out of the way. Too late she heard the sharp twang as a crude tripwire snapped and two flasks of alchemist’s fire dropped and smashed across her back.

Goblins – probably warned of their approach by all the noise they had made – hooted and hollered and began running towards her from out of the shadows, but with elven speed Tee rolled back out of the crawl hole, ripped off her burning shirt, and tossed it aside. (more…)

Go to Part 1

Infallibility is not, in fact, a requirement for a game master. Indeed, the idea that the act of GMing requires some sort of savant is a pernicious one which was, sadly, robbed the world of many fabulous GMs and many tables filled with happy gamers.

With that being said, one of the GM’s responsibilities is, in fact, to provide a certain level of rules mastery. How you achieve that level of mastery is largely dependent on your own personal study habits. For me, the typical procedure is:

First, read the rulebook cover-to-cover. If you haven’t read a rule at least once, then you’ve really got no chance of getting it right.

Second, prepare a comprehensive cheat sheet for the system. The process of organizing and compiling the cheat sheet is, by itself, a great way to get a grasp on how they work and relate to each other (and also sussing out those minor mechanics you would otherwise gloss over). Once you’re done, of course, the cheat sheet becomes invaluable at the actual gaming table, artificially supplementing your own knowledge. As we’ll see, being able to quickly and accurately reference information is almost as good as knowing it off the top of your head.

(I’ve also talked before about how the hierarchy of reference can be used to progressively gain system mastery.)

Third, when I think it might be warranted (or fun!), I’ll also run “playtest” one-shots using the system. These are a great way for both the GM and the players to gain familiarity with the system and work out its kinks before diving into a long-term campaign. (For players, I’ve tangentially found that this familiarity often makes for a richer and more engaging character creation process. Knowing how a game works provides really valuable context for the mechanical decisions you make when building your character.)

BUT WHY?

Some may wonder why this rules mastery is important. I’ve even met GMs who, for nearly incomprehensible reasons, take great pride in being largely ignorant of the rules. (This seems related to the school of thought which maintains that the rules of an RPG are just kind of a pleasant fiction that the players improv vaguely around / the GM uses only when necessary to reign with an iron fist.)

First, presentation and pacing. Nothing deflates excitement or undercuts tension at the gaming table faster than, “Hang on, let me just figure out how the rules for this work.” The Art of Pacing mostly discusses macro-scale pacing, but pacing at the micro-scale is just as important: Keeping things flowing smoothly; maintaining (and escalating) the mood; sustaining player focus and attention. All of these things require the rules to flow out smoothly, cleanly, and accurately not only to minimize friction, but also because high quality rules that are effectively applied will enhance these things.

Speaking of which, quality rulings require both knowledge and comfort with the rules. Any master craftsman or artist knows the importance of being intimately familiar with your tools, and the art of the GM is no different. A good GM will make the rules sing, finding ways to combine and recombine them to achieve (and help their players achieve) delightful and unexpected things. But you have to fully understand your tools before you can start truly playing with them.

Third, consistency. In many ways, this is actually just a special case of GM Don’t List #1: Morphing Reality. If the GM doesn’t know the rules, then their application of the rules will become inconsistent and unpredictable. This inconsistency results in the game world acting in weird and unpredictable ways, which inevitably frustrates the players: They see a lock and expect that they’ll be able to use their Criminal skill to pick it because that’s what they did last time; but this time the GM decides (or realizes) that it should actually require an Infiltration check to pick a lock and the players discover that they’ve sent the wrong person to deal with the problem.

Finally, when the GM doesn’t know the rules — and isn’t using them correctly — it preemptively shuts down certain styles of play. For some players, these elements of play are very important; for others less so. But either way, their loss will generally result in a flattened and less interesting gaming experience.

Not infrequently when I’m discussing these issues, these styles of play will be dismissed by the narrow minded as just “goofing around with mechanical widgets”. But it’s not that simple. Yes, there are those who play roleplaying games, in part, to have the satisfaction of overcoming (or outsmarting) specifically mechanical challenges. But mechanics permeate every aspect of an RPG, and their effect can be felt in many different styles of play. For example, there is satisfaction and enjoyment to be had in building a character who is very good at something and then doing that job well (just like the satisfaction of any job done well). When the rules suddenly shift and the mastery that you should have had suddenly ceases to exist, that can be an incredibly frustrating experience for players.

(And, in this sense, you may realize that GM Don’t List #4: Thou Shalt Not Hack is, in fact, a special case of this general rule.)

GM DON’T #5.1: IGNORING THE RULES

As a corollary, it’s also important that GMs don’t habitually ignore the rules.

As I can already sense hackles rising across the internet, let me make it clear what I’m NOT talking about:

• House rules. You’re not ignoring the rules when you decide to explicitly change them in order to better your game.
• Variant stat blocks. If you decide to give an orc a +1 sword or bump up a troll’s Strength score, that’s not ignoring the rules either. (For some reason there are people who think so, or who categorize this as “cheating”. These people are, frankly, insane.)

Now that I’ve hopefully soothed some hackles and raised a different set of them, let’s delve into this a little bit.

The main thing to notice is that when you ignore the rules you are actually stumbling directly into almost all of the exact same problems that occur when you’re simply ignorant of them: Consistency necessarily deteriorates, which subsequently tanks the quality of your rulings and also creates the same frustrations from players depending on consistency in order to understand both the game world and their characters.

If you consistently find yourself ignoring (or wanting to ignore) a particular set of rules, that’s an indication that those rules are fundamentally broken (at least for the experience you want to create) and you should be looking to fix them (or replace them entirely), not simply ignore them.

A common example of this are grappling rules. (Across most systems, really, but infamously so when it comes to virtually all editions of D&D.) And the solution is, in fact, to apply house rules which make grappling appealing instead of a chore.

One particularly pernicious example of this which certain GMs endemically suffer from is, “I’m bored with combat let’s skip it.” (Or, really, any other aspect of game play. It’s just that combat seems most common here.) This usually takes the form of resolving 1-3 rounds of combat normally and then saying, “Eh. Fuck it. Let’s just sum up what happens and move on.”

The GM’s intention here is good: They sense that the game is getting boring and they want to fix it. But in doing so they systemically create a number of other problems:

• Characters built to enjoy their spotlight time during combat are being punished.
• Strategically clever and creative players often spend the first few rounds of combat setting up an advantageous situation that will give them a big, satisfying pay-off as the combat continues. By cutting combat off just as they finish their set up, the GM is perpetually blue-balling them.
• Because they’re never certain exactly when (or if) a particular combat is going to be summarily dismissed, players become uncertain in their use of limited supplies. Burning a one-use potion or once-per-day ability only to have its use become irrelevant when the GM decides combat has become too “boring” to continue is incredibly frustrating.

All of these problems only get worse when the GM defines “boring” as “the PCs are winning”, while remaining fully engaged and excited as long as his bad guys have the upper hand.

BUT RULE ZERO!

“But it’s the GM’s god given right to change or ignore the rules at their whim!”

Sure. But insofar as we agree that this is a power which a GM has, I would argue that its use should be considered, deliberate, and, above all, limited. More generally on this topic, I would tend to make three final observations:

Calvinball is a really funny joke, but it is, in fact, a joke. There’s a reason why games have rules, and RPGs are no exception. System matters.

In my experience, the motivations GMs have for unilaterally ignoring the rules tend to be shitty ones. Virtually all of them, in fact, rhyme with “tailroad”.

But let’s assume that the GM has accurately identified a truly singular instance in which the rules should be ignored (instead of permanently changed) without letting their players know (instead of explaining the ruling they’re making and why it varies from the norm) in order to truly increase the table’s enjoyment of the game. Here’s my question:

What gifts the GM with the unique capacity to recognize when the application of a rule would be a bad idea for the game?

If you’d be equally happy with the other players at the table unilaterally deciding to fudge a dice roll or pretend that their skill rating is higher than it is or act as if their character has an ability that isn’t on their character sheet, then more power to you. But what I see at the table (and usually observe in these hypothetical discussions online) are hypocrites who simply feel that their opinion is infallible, but the judgment of everyone else at the table can’t be trusted.

TRIAGE AT THE TABLE

In reality, of course, nobody is perfect. Nobody is a walking encyclopedia. (Or, if they are, it’s the result of years or possibly decades of experience with a system.) Mistakes will be made. Rules will be forgotten or overlooked. That’s okay. The GM has to become comfortable with their fallibility so that they can deal with the consequences when they arise.

So what happens when you forget a rule at the table?

I’ve already mentioned cheat sheets. Permanently bookmarking frequently referenced sections of the book also helps. (Post-It Memo Flags are great for this.)

Also: Use the expertise of your players. Don’t be afraid to ask, “Does anybody remember how much damage a fireball does?” There are far too many GMs who are so terrified of the rules lawyer boogeyman that they won’t take advantage of the communal brainpower of the gaming group as a whole. (I’ve also found that some rules lawyers behave better when they can apply their rules expertise in this way. Not all, but some.)

Another very effective technique, particularly in combat, is to delegate someone else to look up a rule while you move onto and begin resolving the next action. You can then jump back to the original action when the rules reference is ready. (The multitasking keeps the game moving forward through the rules reference instead of creating a dead space.)

Finally, if a particularly obscure rule is escaping all efforts to clarify it, don’t be afraid to make an ad hoc ruling while making a note to come back and check what the actual rule is during the next break or after the session. It’s okay to trade strict accuracy to keep the pace up. (It’s also, in my experience, a good idea to openly tell your players what you’re doing. It doesn’t hurt if you give the PCs the benefit of the doubt when making these sorts of rulings, either. Default to yes, after all.)

Mistakes will be made and sometimes your current mastery will prove insufficient for the challenges of the moment. But as long as you handle these moments with openness, clarity, and goodwill, you’ll come out on top. And, of course, the cliché is true: Every mistake is a learning opportunity. Every mistake can make you a better GM… if you let it.

Go to Part 6: Choose Your Own Adventure

CRETACEOUS RESORT

Ten days ago you were visiting Cretaceous Resort, an amazing island theme park where genetic scientists have recreated dinosaurs out of the ancient past. You were on the last legs of a glorious vacation viewing the majestic glory and alien cunning of perennial favorites like T-Rex, triceratops, and the raptors, alongside other species which have become household names only because Cretaceous Resort has summoned them back among the living, like the Chilesaurus, the “Frankenstein dinosaur” which provides a missing link between Stegosaurus and the carnivorous dinosaurs.

But that’s when the sun was swallowed up and the dark miasma spread across the sky. The charter flight from the mainland never showed up and you were stuck. Things weren’t too bad here on the island. Tension hung in the air as reports trickled in over the radio, but any incipient panic was mollified with complimentary mimosas.

Until They came.

There was a period of chaos then. It’s not clear who first let the dinosaurs out of the paddocks. Maybe They did it. But now the strange, fluted cries of the unnatural creatures echo out there in the Dark.

You and a few other resort visitors  — perhaps with the help of some of the staff — have holed up in one of the tourist areas. You believe that similar enclaves also survived, although you’re not sure how many of them are still holding out.

Areas of Note: visitor’s center, resort hotel, rest area, supply shed, security bunker, boat docks, breeding labs, research lab, hatching facility, the aviary, nesting grounds, dinosaur graveyard

Goal: Get to either the security bunker or the boat docks. Survive.

Go to Part 1

A cyberpunk character concept I would dearly love to play some day is that of the uber-competent hacker: Case from Neuromancer. Batman’s Oracle. Edward from Cowboy Bebop. Boris Grishenko from GoldenEye. Luther Stickell from the Mission Impossible movies. Half the main characters from Ghost in the Shell.

In my ideal version of the character, I’m the guy who stays in the van three out of five times, providing overwatch and support for my teammates while they mount their raid.

So why haven’t I played this character?

Because what I’ve discovered is that a surprisingly vast number of GMs seem to consider the entire concept of using hacking to solve a problem to be some sort of anathema. So even when I’ve tried to play the character concept, I’ve ended up not actually being able to play the concept.

• Hack the security cameras to scope out the interior of the building you’re raiding? Can’t do it.
• Hack the security guard’s cellphone to track her movement? Impossible!
• Play R2-D2 in a Star Wars game and hack an electronic lock? No way. Pull out your lockpicks!
• Hack the rigging ports on the pursuit car to seize control of it? Obviously no one would want you to remotely seize control of a vehicle, so they would build a perfect security system that was completely unhackable, and therefore you can’t hack it.

(That last rationalization seems to crop up a lot. It’s like saying that obviously no one would want you to poke them with a sword; ergo it’s impossible to hit someone who’s wearing full plate.)

Quibble here and there with the plausibility of some of these scenarios in particular settings, but I’ve seen this behavior even in settings and games which include mechanics for handling these specific types of hacks! What I’m talking about is a systemic pattern of behavior in which the hacker basically can’t do their thing. It’s the equivalent of finding an antimagic field everywhere you go in a D&D game, except that I’ve found it to be a peculiarly ubiquitous attitude.

Of course, flat out denial isn’t the only way this manifests: Setting disproportionately high difficulty numbers or using roll to failure techniques are probably the most common versions, actually.

I’ve found this particularly pernicious in many convention scenarios: The designers of the game want to show off its breadth, so they include a hacker archetype pregen. But the volunteer GM running the scenario subscribes to the doctrine of Thou Shalt Not Hack, so the pregen is a trap and the person picking it finds themselves sidelined for four hours.

The worst case scenario is, sadly, one of my favorite games: Eclipse Phase. Wanting to show off everything that’s possible in this cool, kitchen sink transhuman setting, the designers regularly include an infomorph pregen: A character without a body who exists only as a digital construct and can only take actions through the Mesh network.

Combine that with a GM who doesn’t allow any meaningful action to take place through the Mesh network (which I’ve seen happen either first- or second-hand in no less than four convention scenarios) and you have a character who literally can’t do anything.

Many of these GMs don’t seem to be consciously aware of what they’re doing, so you’ll even find them saying things during character creation like, “Who wants to be hacker?” I used to hear that and think, “Okay! This guy is going to actually let me hack!” But, oddly, no. They recognize on a conscious level that a team of cyberpunk characters is supposed to have a hacker, but when it comes to actual play the hacker nevertheless finds themselves stymied at every turn.

EMBRACING THE HACK

I suspect part of the problem here is that a lot of GMs reflexively cling to the modes of play they learned running D&D dungeon crawls. Their expectation for how a facility raid is supposed to play out features people physically sneaking around and getting ambushed by security guards, and the hacker’s attempt to grab the security cameras disrupts that expectation. Their vision of the game world (inaccurately) doesn’t include hacking, so the hacker’s solution to any given problem comes out of left field, and the GM reflexively shuts it down.

This is, obviously, a form of railroading: A preconceived idea of not just how a specific problem is meant to be solved, but a broad preconception of how entire classes of problems are supposed to be solved.

So the solution to this problem is relatively simple: Don’t do that.

Conversely, however, hacking shouldn’t be a magic button that can trivially solve all problems. When that happens, it creates a spotlight problem where the hacker upstages every other character and flattens the challenges presented by the scenario.

To counteract this problem, there are a couple things the GM should do. First, check the potential consequences a hacker faces: They should be comparable to those faced by other types of action. (Just as the hacker should not find it impossible to hack an automated car; the hacker themselves should not benefit from a foolproof firewall.) Second, check your vectors: Make sure that “solving” the scenario requires a multi-step resolution and, importantly, make sure that hacking can’t be used to trivially solve all the vectors.

The most obvious example of this is, “I can’t hack that system until you plug in my remote router!” But it can become an easy trap to always design scenarios in which the team does a bunch of stuff and “unlocks” the hacker so that the hacker can then win the day. Look at ways in which hacks are invaluable at the beginning and in the middle of scenarios.

Also remember that you don’t always need to lock these things in: Players hot-swapping in vectors you’d never thought of to solve their problems is what makes the game fun. Generally speaking, the rest of the group will find ways to advocate for plans which feature the strengths of their own characters if you give them the chance. You can encourage that by creating scenarios which require multiple problems to be resolved simultaneously. Also experiment with using hard scene framing techniques to move the action “onsite”, which will discourage the players from lingering in remote “planning” sequences where the hacker (and only the hacker) is capable of taking direction action.

Go to Part 5: Not Knowing the Rules