Tagline: In 32 slim pages Three Days to Kill manages to not only present a really gut-wrenching, fast-paced, creative adventure, but also conjures into existence a highly entertaining, evocative, and believable slice of a fantasy world.

I’ve spent the better part of the past two weeks reading really bad fantasy modules. It is difficult to describe to you the truly excruciating pain of this experience. Instead, I shall endeavor to demonstrate by way of example:

“The characters are in Boringtown. There is a bar, a temple, and an armory.”

“The characters are in Moronsburg. There is a bar, a temple, and a general store.”

“The characters are in Clicheville. There is a bar, a temple, and a blacksmith. The mayor approaches them….”

“At the bottom of the farmer’s well there is a secret door which has not been opened in centuries. On the other side of the door is a labyrinth containing giant spiders and goblins. Kill them.”

“The abandoned mansion on the top of the hill has become home to a bunch of necromancers and a couple of ghosts. Kill them.”

“The PCs wander around the desert enjoying random encounters until they stumble across a lost pyramid. There they watch two mummies fight over conflicts which existed thousands of years ago (and about which the PCs know nothing). When the fight is over (make sure that the PCs don’t take part in any way) the PCs get to go home.”

Oy.

Between painfully artificial settings, a mind-numbing lack of originality, and stunningly awful “plots”, these so-called “adventures” have earned their designers an eternity upon the racks of the Nine Circles of Hell.

(On the plus side, I think actually playing through these scenarios counts as a form of penance. The equivalent of saying fifty Hail Mary’s or something of that nature.)

(The funny thing is that you think I’m kidding. Outside of those satiric town names, though, I’m not – these things actually exist. They’re out there and they’re waiting for you. Be afraid. Be very afraid.)

There were days when I felt like giving in to a nascent Oedipal Complex… and by that I mean stabbing my eyes out with pins to take the sight of these monstrosities away from me.

But through the good graces of providence, a copy of John Tynes’ excellent Three Days to Kill fell into my hands, and thus I was saved from a truly horrific fate.

PRODUCTION NOTES

Before we begin:

John Tynes is a roleplaying designer and writer of immense talents: He was one of the founders of Pagan Publishing. He was a co-author of Delta Green. With Greg Stolze he designed the award winning Unknown Armies for Atlas Games. Last year Hogshead Publishing’s New Style line published his amazingly evocative Puppetland and the startlingly innovative Power Kill.

With Three Days to Kill Tynes has taken advantage of WotC’s D20 Trademark License and Open Gaming License (see the Open Gaming Foundation for more details on both of these programs) to produce a module for the 3rd Edition of Dungeons & Dragons. This is the lead-off product in Atlas Games’ new Penumbra line of products. Over the next few months you can expect to see more support material for D&D3 released through this imprint.

Three Days to Kill is designed for a party of 1st to 3rd level PCs.

And now on with the show:

THE SETTING

Warning: This review will contain spoilers for Three Days to Kill. Players who may end up playing in this module are encouraged to stop reading now. Proceed at your own risk.

Three Days to Kill is set in the Deeps, a valley nestled within a mountain range. At the heart of this valley, located on the shores of Shadow Lake, is Deeptown.

And as quickly as that we have come to the first major strength of Three Days to Kill: Deeptown is a generic fantasy city. It has been specifically designed to slip seamlessly into any DM’s campaign world.

The minute you attempt something like this you’ve placed yourself in dangerous territory: If you make the town too specific, then its usefulness as a generic setting is lost. If you make the town too generic, however, you end up with the triteness of “there is a bar, a temple, and a blacksmith”.

Tynes, however, deftly avoids these pitfalls. On the one hand Deeptown is imminently generic – any DM with a mountain range can slap the town into place. On the other hand, Deeptown is also developed very specifically – it exists for a purpose, the people living there have their own character and culture, and the whole place has a dynamic quality which makes it not only a potential setting for Three Days to Kill, but many other adventures. Despite the fact that Deeptown can be placed almost anywhere in the DM’s campaign world, it has been craftily designed so that – no matter what world you place it in – it will seem as if always belonged there.

So what is Deeptown? Deeptown is a small city located on the shores of Shadow Lake, a way-point on the east-west trade routes that pass through the Deeps. The mountainous terrain of this trade route makes it easy for bandits to prey on caravans, and, in fact, any number of bandit gangs roam the hills. This helps make Deeptown particularly attractive for young adventures and other assorted muscle looking for jobs as guards (or opportunities as thieves, as the case may be).

There are six bandit lords in the area (although, as Tynes points out, “calling them ‘lords’ gives them too much credit, really — they’re just competent thugs”). The two largest groups are controlled by the bandits Modus and Lucien.

Deeptown itself is technically ruled over by the Town Council, but in truth it is the Trade Circle – the local guild of commerce – which rules the city from behind the scenes. In other words, even the law in Deeptown is governed by the corruption of the all-mighty dollar.

This leaves only one major power group left to consider: Religion. In Deeptown the two most significant religious groups are the Holy Order (dedicated to the preservation of life) and the Sect of Sixty (a group of diabolists). (Both of these groups – while having their structure and general role in Deeptown life laid out in the module – are left purposely vague in all the right places to that you can plug in whatever gods you like. For example, the Holy Order might worship Athena and the Sect of Sixty Hades. On the other hand, the Holy Order might revere Adaire, Goddess of Light and Purity; while the Sect of Sixty might practice foul sacrifices to Cthulhu. It’s all up to you.)

Basically the setting information in Three Days to Kill can be summed up like this: A solid, interesting foundation. For a 32 page module a surprising amount of detail is included, giving the setting a life and reality of its own through the expert application of a handful of deft brush strokes – all the while maintaining an openness and flexibility which will make its use simplicity itself.

THE PLOT

Modus and Lucien, the two premiere Bandit Lords, have long hoped to turn “legitimate” (within a broad enough definition of that word). They hope to use their strength in order to convince the Trade Circle to ally with them – essentially moving into the protection rackets (expensive Trade Circle permits would be sold, and caravans which purchased them would be spared from the attention of Modus and Lucien). In the interest of seeing this day come to pass, Modus and Lucien agreed to a pact – stating that neither would enter into a deal with the Trade Circle without the other.

Lucien, however, is no longer willing to wait. He has made a secret alliance with the Sect of Sixty. Lucien wants to use the Sect to use their supernatural powers to help him crush Modus, while the Sect wants to use Lucien to help them gain a foothold over the taxation of trade routes (when his day of power comes).

Modus, although hazy on the exact details of the alliance Lucien is planning, knows that his would-be ally is up to something. Of course, he’d prefer it if Lucien was not allowed to be up to anything…

…and that’s where the PCs come in.

One way or another the PCs are attending the Festival of Plenty (a night of debauchery and infamy which is thrown annually in Deeptown by the Sect of Sixty). Several ways of getting them to Deeptown and into the Festival are given, as are a number of ways of having them prove their worth during the course of the festival. One way or another, however, they come to the attention of Modus’ men – at which point they are approached for The Job.

The Job is this: Modus knows that Lucien is meeting with his mysterious allies at a villa north of Deeptown known as Trail’s End. He wants the PCs to crash the party, screw up the meeting, and make Lucien look foolish and unreliable to his would-be supporters. The PCs, of course, will be well paid for their troubles.

So the PCs head north. On the way to Trail’s End they discover signs of orc activity in the region (which is connected to a coming of age rite), but it isn’t until they reach Trail’s End that the adventure really kicks into overdrive: You see, the villa is packed full of Sect cultists and bandits.

And if the PCs rush the front door of the villa, they’re going to be annihilated.

Three Days to Kill is, in fact, a rather ingenious scenario for bringing the gameplay of computer games like Tenchu and Thief: The Dark Project — which emphasize stealth and cunning over brute strength – into the traditional roleplaying realm of D&D. (Tynes actually uses the analogy Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six – but that requires a larger genre shift in my opinion.) The PCs are given weapons, magical items, and a situation which allows them to scout their enemy, plan a strategy, and then carry out a covert operation.

Done right this can be a lot of fun. Done wrong this is going to be nothing more than a hackfest. Either way you should get a good dose of fun before it’s all said and done. Basically its going to play out something like this:

The PCs are going to take out the bandits and the Sect henchman. As they do so, the Sect acolytes are going to fall back to a secluded room inside the villa. In this room is the Bone Mirror – a mystic artifact of great evil which allows them to start gating low-level minions of Hell into the villa.

As the minions of Hell swarm over the villa – and the PCs fight valiantly to reach and shut off the source of the Hellspawn – the remaining bandits will flee… as they do so the orcs (remember them form the trek north?) will come over the top of the hill and charge the villa as well.

Hellspawn on one side. Orcs on the other. Bandits and PCs trapped in the middle. What’s a hero to do?

Smash the Bone Mirror and fight for their lives, of course!

But we’re not done yet!

When the shattered pieces of the Bone Mirror come to rest they begin to bleed. “The blood wells up from the mirror and oozes out of the bones.” At first it merely trickles, but “then the blood comes faster, coating the floor around the shards, and begins to expand rapidly. Tendrils shoot out across the floor and begin running up the walls. As the blood spreads, it transforms the surfaces of the room. The floor bulges, and bones, flesh, and faces to begin to form. The effect spreads rapidly, accompanied by the screams of the damned.” As the process begins to effect the acolytes and orcs who still remain alive, these poor creatures begin to cry out: “He Who Walks is coming! The coming is at hand!”

The shards of the Bone Mirror transform the Trail’s End villa into the Bone Church – an outpost of Hell; a “pulsing, living, screaming conglomeration of bodies”. The PCs and the remnants of their opponents are forced to flee before the birth of this diabolic power.

And thus Three Days to Kill comes to an end: The PCs have, indeed, succeeded at their primary mission (breaking up the alliance between Lucien and the Sect of Sixty) – at least for now – but only by unleashing the seeds of future adventure: The mystery and threat of the Bone Church, the future of the Bandit Lords of the Deeps, the PCs relationship with Lucien and Modus, the evolving politics of Deeptown. Whether you decide to carry these seeds through to new adventures, or merely choose to have the PCs join the next caravan out of the Deeps, is entirely up to you. Three Days to Kill works equally well as a stand-alone adventure or as the germination point of an entire campaign.

CONCLUSION

Three Days to Kill is one of the best damn modules I’ve ever plunked down my cold, hard cash for. It’s one of those great gaming products that makes you instantly eager to call up your gaming group, roll up some characters, and get down to some serious roleplaying.

In 32 slim pages it manages to not only present a really gut-wrenching, fast-paced, creative adventure, but also conjures into existence a highly entertaining, evocative, and believable slice of a fantasy world.

Three Days to Kill is an exciting product.

And recommendations don’t come much higher than that.

Style: 4
Substance: 5

Author: John Tynes
Company/Publisher: Atlas Games (Penumbra)
Cost: $8.95
Page Count: 32
ISBN: 0-887801-94-4

Originally Posted: 2000/10/29

This represents a major turning point in my life. At this point, as I’d indicated in my review of Tomb of Horrors, I hadn’t played D&D in nearly a decade. 3rd Edition had perked my interest, but I wasn’t really planning to do much of anything with it. Until I picked up Three Days to Kill at GenCon. And, as I said in the review, Three Days to Kill was exciting. It was one of those products that just kind of screams, “Play me!”

So I ended up taking over as GM for what was my regular gaming group at the time. And from that point forward, 3rd Edition would dominate my reviews, my personal gaming, and my freelance writing.

Three Days to Kill generated a lot of buzz when it first came out because it was one of two third party modules available at GenCon when the Player’s Handbook launched. These days it seems to have become something of an unsung classic, though, with fewer people being aware of its existence. I heartily recommend snagging a copy for yourself and running it ASAP.

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

Go to Eternal Lies: The Alexandrian Remix

Campaign Notes – Props Packet

The Obelisk of Axum is the second of the original scenarios that I’ve incorporated into Eternal Lies. Like the Severn Valley, it was developed as an organic response to the choices made by my original players. And there are two distinct roots that underlie its origins:

First, in the original campaign there is an oblique reference to the Obelisk of Axum is used to justify why the archaeologist Bartolo Acuna has returned to Africa thirteen years after the failed expedition he led which the PCs are investigating just in time for the PCs to question him directly. (It’s also one of the key indications that the campaign was not originally designed to begin in 1937, since by March 1937 the Obelisk was already back in Rome. With the travel times involved, you’d have to start your campaign on January 1st and hope the PCs bee-line for Ethiopia.)

As I’ve discussed previously, part of my work on the remix involved beefing up the mythological references to Gol-Goroth, the God of the Black Stone. The Black Stone itself is frequently described as an obelisk, and I thought it would be effective to have the Obelisk of Axum related to it (and, by extension, to Gol-Goroth). So I beefed up Acuna’s discussion of the Obelisk, using it as an opportunity to begin establishing Gol-Goroth in the minds of the players.

I hadn’t anticipated that the players would hear Acuna’s interest in the Obelisk and conclude that they should also be interested in it, prompting them to mount an expedition to Axum.

The second point of orign for this scenario is the odd route that my players had taken to get to this point: They followed the anticipated trajectory of New York to Savannah to Los Angeles. But then, after turning up enough information to learn of the cult’s expedition to Ethiopia in 1924, they decided that the cult’s drug-running activities in Los Angeles were too dangerous for them to tackle directly. As a result, they booked a flight to Ethiopia and skipped town without procuring any of the other leads.

This was something of a problem because Ethiopia is the only locale in the campaign which is structurally a dead-end. (Which makes sense because the cult was active there 10 years ago, but isn’t now. So there are no fresh leads to follow up.) While it was certainly possible for the PCs to investigate Ethiopia and then, without any further leads, simply return to Los Angeles, I knew that had the potential to be frustrating for them.

However, I’d already decided that Savitree Sirikhan had been mounting a series of expeditions. I decided that I would have her “anti-Investigators” (which I would shortly redub the Emporium of Bangkok Antiquities) active in Ethiopia. Once they crossed paths with the PCs, they would drop leads that would point back towards Bangkok, which had already been turned into a secondary hub that would put their investigation back on track (so to speak). I was playing around with the idea of having the Emporium also investigating Ayers’ decade-old expedition, but when the PCs decided to pursue the Obelisk of Axum I realized that it was the Obelisk itself which had brought the Emporium there.

USING THE SCENARIO

Fortunately, if you’re using the remix, you won’t need to have your players follow that precise sequence of events. I’ve incorporated clues pointing to the Obelisk of Axum into both the Ethiopia and Bangkok material. You can also strengthen these ties by increasing the activity of the Emporium of Bangkok Antiquities during the Ethiopia locale and having them attract the PCs’ attention. A few options might include:

• They kidnap or murder Acuna, interrogating him for information about the Obelisk. (If this happens shortly after the PCs question him, they might become suspects.)
• They decide to investigate the Dallol dig site. (Which they may have learned of from Acuna.)
• If the PCs are already well-known to the cult and it’s possible for Sirikhan to know they’ve gone to Ethiopia, she might telegram instructions to the Emporium members to put them under surveillance or have them killed.

More detailed notes on how to integrate the Emporium’s active investigations into the campaign can be found in my description of the Severn Valley.

PROP NOTES

The Obelisk of Axum shares the poster map used for Ethiopia. The various photos of the Northern Obelisk Field and so forth are designed so that they can be added to the Ethiopian diorama as the PCs explore Axum.

USING THE OBELISK OF AXUM AS AN INDEPENDENT SCENARIO

Unlike the Severn Valley, it can’t be trivially broken out of the campaign and  run independently. (As designed, it really lacks any sort of conclusion: The PCs come to Axum, poke around, learn some stuff (that’s mostly meaningful in terms of the larger events of the campaign).

If you wanted to run it as an independent scenario, you’d probably want to have a stronger conclusion focused on the Obelisk itself in some way. Did Frumentius remove something from the Obelisk during its destruction? If so, the PCs might need to race the Emporium of Bangkok Antiquities to retrieve it.

Or the EBA might already have it, in which case the scenario becomes about them triggering something horrible with the Obelisk itself. Maybe one of them enters the Obelisk and is horribly transformed by it. (You could pull some of the lore books form the Los Angeles cult concerning Gol-Goroth and his obelisks to help establish some of this conceptually.)

Of course, you’ll also need to figure out some sort of independent hook for getting the PCs involved. Maybe they’ve been hired by the Italian government to prep the Obelisk for looting and, when they arrive onsite, they find the EBA already ensconced?

Go to 2.3 Malta

Don’t prep plots, prep situations.

That’s a maxim I first started preaching on the Alexandrian back in 2009. And one of the key things I talked about in Don’t Prep Plots is that you want to focus your prep on developing toolboxes instead of contingencies. Prepping contingencies catches you in the Choose Your Own Adventure trap, where you waste a lot of time trying to second-guess your players and developing mutually contradictory material for every possible choice they might make.

I’ve seen a lot of GMs, both before and after I wrote Don’t Prep Plots, discover the virtues of this lesson. And what frequently happens is that they begin applying the lesson at the macro-level of their scenario design, but continue making the same old mistakes at the micro-level. This is ironic, because it’s actually the micro-level stuff that is frequently the biggest and most useless time sink.

I’ve been spending a lot of time with Eternal Lies lately, so I’m going to use it as an example of what I’m talking about.

SPOILERS FOR ETERNAL LIES

In Malta, the PCs find a hospital where two boys are being held by cultists and fed a “treatment” regime which is actually making them sicker. The published adventure anticipates that the PCs might try to rescue the boys and this happens:

Leaving the Hospital Superbissima is not especially difficult if the PCs are just visitors or patients. An Investigator may use Medicine or Disguise (Difficulty 5) to pose as another Investigator’s doctor and authorize the transport of the character to another hospital. (This probably requires the authorizing Investigator to sign a few forms.) A bit of Reassurance convinces hospital clerks that a patient feels fine and is ready to depart. A Reassurance spend convinces a clerk to the point that he or she doesn’t even write a suspicious note in anyone’s file or form much of a memory of the character — good for anonymity, if they need it.

The real challenge to escaping from the hospital appears under two other circumstances: when Donovan’s guards are there, watching who comes and goes, and when the Investigators have patients with them that are under Dr. Solazzio’s “special care.”

(Note that Investigators in the hospital as patients can get dosed with Nectar or put under Dr. Solazzio’s care for two broad reasons: either the cult recognizes them as enemies and decides to make use of the PCs’ vulnerability, perhaps to draw out their comrades, or you as Keeper decide that Dr. Solazzio’s attentions fall on them for purely dramatic reasons such as for pacing or exposition.)

If the Investigators attempt to slip out in pursuit of Donovan or while his guards are in the hospital, see the scene Malta 4,”Pursuing Donovan,” p. 232, for stats on those guards. They take immediate note of strange behavior in their vicinity.

If the Investigators try to get Alexi or Monte (or both) out of the hospital, they have to get around some nurses and orderlies and go through the security staff. (They may even have to get through Donovan’s own guards, if they time their escape poorly.) This is not all that hard to do, really; it’s just hard to do anonymously. Waving guns around or making a total of a 2-point Intimidation spend is brutish enough to clear a gap through the hospital staff. Getting Alexi and/or Monte out of the hospital likely leads to a citywide manhunt for the boys and their “kidnappers,” with both crooked and legit police on the search for the Investigators.

Thus the Investigators may want to wear surgical masks or Disguises, since even a simple disguise (Difficulty 4 or 5) at least renders a character unidentifiable to witnesses who might be called upon, in this era without security cameras, to assert that “yes, that’s the one who carried that boy out of the hospital.” A surgical mask gives any character a dedicated pool point of Disguise within the hospital. A doctor’s white coast grants an additional pool point of Disguise. Either or both gives you a good reason for some NPCs to make lazy assumptions (“Just another surgeon, I guess”) or obstructive assumptions (“Excuse me, doctor, can you help me?”) about the character, depending on the success of the attempt. NPCs might challenge a disguise if the Investigators draw attention to themselves or interact with an NPC. Not all interactions call for the Difficulty 7 test befitting proper impersonation. In this context, it’s easier (Difficulty 5 or 6) to impersonate “a doctor” than it is to impersonate a particular Doctor (Difficulty 7). A Medicine spend might count as a point toward a Disguise roll if, for example, an Investigator wants to portray a visiting specialist (“Didn’t you get my telegram?”).

All disguises are temporary affairs, anyway, buying just enough time to take action, stymie the opposition, or delay consequences for recklessness or failure.

Once the Investigators get out onto the street, they must have somewhere to take the rescued boys (though see “The Knight”). Thus the situation gets more complicated. You may want to call for a Stealth or Shadowing test (Difficulty 5 close to the hospital, Difficulty 4 after that) to describe the Investigators’ attempted escape from the scene of their rescue. Alternately, they may try simply Fleeing the scene until they can make a single Stealth test to hide.

If the Investigators have devised a whole scheme for rescuing the boys and getting them free of the cult (perhaps involving fake papers and a ship out of Malta), let them explore it. If it proves to be too much of a distraction from the job at hand, gloss over details or assume that the characters succeed rather than testing for every damn task. Securing papers for the boys might just require a Law or Streetwise spend among the right contacts, for example, and getting the boys to safety might simply involve flying them out in the Winston-Rogers plane to Sicily and then sorting out the rest of it between Locales. If the logistics of a complicated rescue seem to be spoiling the players’ good feeling for doing the right thing, make things easier on the players (even if things stay complicated for the characters between scenes).

You can immediately see that there is a ton of verbiage being dedicated to specific plans that the PCs may or may not actually come up with. What I’m suggesting is that the prep for this should look something more like this:

ESCAPING THE HOSPITAL

There are two exits from the Hospital Superbissima: The front door and a side entrance used by employees. There are tall windows in the patient wards, but many of these are not designed to be opened.

NURSES: Collectively, the nurses of the Hospital Superbissima benefit from Awareness +2 to notice investigators snooping around areas they don’t have permission to be in or any other suspicious activity happening in the hospital.

HOSPITAL SECURITY: Security around the hospital is surprisingly tight. In addition to two guards in the lobby, a guard is also found at the nurse’s desk on each floor of the building.

[Insert a stat block for the hospital security guards here.]

DONOVAN’S GUARDS: If Donovan is on the premises, his guards are stationed at the entrance to the third-floor Intensive Care Ward and will respond immediately to anything they view as strange or suspicious.

[Repeat the stat block for Donovan’s guards here for easy reference.]

GETTING THE BOYS OUT: Getting Alexi and/or Monte out of the hospital, this likely leads to a citywide manhunt for the boys and their “kidnappers,” with both the crooked and legit police on the search for the investigators. Securing a place of refuge where people can’t spot the boys and report them may be difficult. Getting them out of the country may require securing (or falsifying) legal papers.

SIDEBAR: Remember that the Knight may already be watching the investigators at this point. If they get into trouble in the hospital, he’s likely to step in and help them out. Or at least offer them a place of refuge.

ON THE USE OF TOOLS

And that’s pretty much it. What’s the distinction here, beyond a greatly reduced word count (and, thus, work load)?

As the GM, note that if your players were to propose any of the escape plans proposed in the original text, you should be able to look at the tools provided in the second description and figure out what the result or response will be. More importantly, if the players propose some completely different plan (calling in a bomb threat, rappelling through the windows at night, taking hostages, casting a spell to escape with the kids to another dimension, etc.) you should also be able to pick up the tools (the layout of the hospital, the nurses, the security guards) and figure out what will happen.

While prepping the adventure, you don’t need to think to yourself, “What will happen if my players decide to disguise themselves as doctors? Well, I guess they’d make a Disguise check. I better write that down!” Not only because it’s self-evident, but because there are at least a half dozen other possibilities for what they might do. Whatever work you’re putting into trying to figure out the myriad tactics the PCs might employ in a particular tactical situation, you’d be far better off making your toolbox larger and more interesting.

PREPPING YOUR TOOLBOX

But what constitutes the difference between a tool and a contingency? For example, isn’t prepping this information about the hospital dependent on the PCs going to hospital? Doesn’t that make the whole thing a contingency? And even if we lay that concern aside, how do we actually identify what the useful tools are? I mean, the bad guy might have a collection of early Picasso paintings. How do I know whether to prep the Picasso collection or the alarm system on his windows?

I find this generally boils down to two questions.

First: What will the PCs be interested in? Not what they’re going to do, but what they’ll be interested in. Where their focus will be. (In a mystery scenario this is relatively easy to predict because it usually equates to wherever the clues are pointing them.) It’s possible to get pedantic and argue that “being interested” constitutes an action, but I think the distinction being sought here is generally pretty clear.

Second: What are the NPCs’ plans? These can be specific to the events of the scenario (“they want to blow up Woodheim”) and possibly even specific to the PCs (but not specific to the actions of the PCs) if their current plan is aimed at the PCs (like Lex Luthor obtaining kryptonite to deal with Superman). But most of the plans you’ll be looking at will actually be a lot more general and long-standing than that.

The hospital scenario is an example of this: The cult doesn’t want the boys to escape. What precautions are they taking to prevent that from happening?

Similarly, if you were designing a mansion for a mob boss you’d ask questions like: What type of security system does he have? What does he enjoy doing at home? What does his daily schedule look like?

If the mob boss is currently planning to assassinate the head of the local Triads, then you’d start asking yourself questions like: Who does he hire to do that? If things go bad, what resources does he have to protect himself?

All of these questions will guide you towards creating either the long-standing status quo or the current trajectory of action that the PCs are going to be thrusting themselves into. And what you want to focus on is that situation which exists without the PCs and let your players worry about the thrust.

Which, I suppose, ultimately brings us full circle:

Don’t prep plots, prep situations.

FURTHER READING
Empower Your Prep: The Rachov Principle
The Railroading Manifesto
Node-Based Scenario Design
Gamemastery 101

Go to Eternal Lies: The Alexandrian Remix

Campaign Notes – Diorama – Props Packet

Ethiopia receives very few changes for the remix. There are a few minor changes, mostly aimed at either (a) incorporating the Obelisk of Axum into the campaign or (b) creating a clearer path by which the PCs could reach Ayers. (I knew that there was literally 0% chance that my players would choose to just blindly ride into the desert in a vaguely western direction on the off-chance they might run into him, so I created the mythology of the Dream-Scourged Halls of Oloth-Waaq to give a little flavorful direction.)

One thing I did change, however, was the custom Heat Track the campaign uses for desert travel. I posted these previously on the Alexandrian when I first developed them, but I’ll share them here, too, for easy reference.

The effect of prolonged exposure to extreme temperatures in Trail of Cthulhu is very straight-forward: Investigators are considered to be hurt, resulting in them suffering a +1 difficulty on all tests.

The designers of Eternal Lies had a desire to make exposure to extreme heat more mechanically interesting and they introduced a rudimentary heat track. I found their treatment interesting, but wanted something a little more robust (particularly when it came to treatment and recovery). These mechanics are specifically designed for desert travel.

HEAT TRACK

0. Not suffering heat.

1. Can only make spends after first resting for 10 minutes (to gather their thoughts and spirits).

2. Difficulty of contests +1 (including hit thresholds).

3. Difficulty of tests at +1.

4. Can only make 1 spend per day and must make it in the morning after a good night’s sleep, before the day’s temperatures begin to rise.

5. Cannot make any spends.

6. Can only refresh 1 Health per day. If Heat Track would advance, it remains at 6 but character suffers 1 damage.

ADVANCING HEAT

Desert Travel: +1 Heat track per day. Characters who traveled during the day are considered to be under extreme heat conditions for the purposes of treating heat.

Camping: Characters who take a rest from traveling by camping for one full day are considered to be in favorable conditions for the purposes of treating heat.

Oasis: An oasis or similar place of significant respite may be considered “controlled conditions” for the purposes of treating heat.

TREATING HEAT

A given character can be treated for heat once per day.

First Aid/Medicine in favorable conditions to prevent advancement or reduce position on the heat track by 1.

First Aid/Medicine (difficulty 3 + heat track) in extreme heat conditions to prevent advancement or reduce position on the heat track.

First Aid 1 / Medicine 1 in controlled conditions to bring an investigator back to 0.

PROP NOTES

Dallol Diorama Photos: These colorful illustrations of the deadly beauty around Dallol should be added to the diorama after the PCs begin exploring the area.

Acuna’s Letter to the University: This is a nifty little prop, but I get the feeling that no one will ever see it. Lemme know if your players prove me wrong!

Reference – The Heat and Interpreters: This isn’t really a prop, per se, but it’s designed to be something that you hand to the players as a useful reference for the special rules that apply in Ethiopia. Thus, for lack of a better place to put it, you’ll find it here in the props pack.

Go to 2.2.1 Obelisk of Axum

Go to Eternal Lies: The Alexandrian Remix

Campaign Scenario – Diorama – Props Packet – Map

Now we come to one of the two completely new locales that I introduced to the campaign. The Severn Valley is 60 pages, 40+ props, and 20,000 words. It’s also robust enough that you could easily run it as an independent scenario (and I’ve included notes for doing so below).

The origin of the Severn Valley scenario was relatively straightforward: Eternal Lies incorporates a lot of elements from Ramsey Campbell’s stories of the Mythos. I was not previously familiar with Campbell’s fiction and so, as part of my preparation for the campaign, I began reading through all of his Severn Valley stories. Then, as I described over here, I decided to create a list of expeditions for Savitree Sirikhan’s exploration team. I thought it would be a nice tip of the hat for one of those locations to be the Severn Valley, and I included an oblique reference to the Severn Valley reference in the props I designed for The Obelisk of Axum.

I was not anticipating that my original group of PCs would immediately seize on that oblique reference and decide that their next stop should be the Severn Valley itself.

My initial intention with the scenario was to do something relatively simple and straightforward. I decided that visiting the meteoric lake from Campbell’s “The Inhabitant of the Lake” was a good bet: The PCs might be able to have a brief encounter with Glaaki, which would give them some visceral reference for the “Prisoner of Glaaki” references sprinkled through the rest of the campaign. The lake had no name in Campbell’s original story, so I decided to call it Deepfall Lake and started work. (Ironically, I would discover that Campbell had later named the lake Deepfall Waters in The Last Revelation of Glaaki.)

But as I worked at unraveling the enigma of Deepfall Lake, I found that what I had initially taken to be a relatively isolated location was, in fact, all tangled up with the rest of Campbell’s Mythos. And all of it began looping back through the Revelations of Glaaki. My Severn Valley scenario became one of those creative endeavors which take on a life of its own.

INTEGRATING THE NEW LOCALES

Both The Obelisk of Axum and Severn Valley were specifically designed for use in my campaign. In terms of adapting the specific material to your own campaigns, the most notable factor to take into consideration will be the dates involved with the activities of the Emporium of Bangkok Antiquities.

Integrating the locales into the general flow of your campaign requires a bit more finesse, however. These two locales are designed to provide the current expeditions being pursued by the Emporium of Bangkok Antiquities. (By providing a sense of activity on the part of the cultists, you’ll create a sense of urgency in the PCs. Like the floating scenes, it also makes the campaign world feel more alive and active, instead of entirely passive.) Because the PCs can visit the locations in almost any order (the exception being that there’s no practical way for them to go to the Severn Valley without visiting either Axum or Bangkok first), however, it can be a little difficult to manage all the moving parts.

In general, there are four possibilities:

BANGKOK FIRST: If the PCs go to Bangkok first, then I recommend having a current expedition at the Obelisk of Axum. In this scenario, include Fauche’s Axum Telegram (modifying it to have a recent date) with the notes on the Obelisk of Axum. If the PCs go to Axum next, they’ll find the EBA there. If they skip ahead to Severn Valley, I’d recommend having them discover that the EBA left Axum shortly after Fauche’s telegram and that they’ve already reached Severn Valley. (When they double back to Axum, you’ll need to make a few modifications to the material, but it will require significantly less work than modifying the Severn Valley material to a pre-EBA state.)

AXUM FIRST, THEN BANGKOK: Include Husain’s Site Report and Fauche’s Second Axum Telegram with the Obelisk of Axum notes. The PCs can visit Severn Valley at any point after Bangkok with little or no change to the material.

AXUM FIRST, THEN SEVERN VALLEY: When the PCs get to Bangkok, include all of the above props plus Soliman’s Letter from Severn and Survivors’ Telegram to Daniel Lowman.

AXUM FIRST, AND THE PCs KILL THE EBA: The easier option is to have Savitree hire a new team and quickly dispatch them to continue her research. (She’s increasingly desperate to figure this out, remember. She’s also well connected, so some quick telegrams to London’s archaeology community might allow her to quickly get a team on the ground.) The more complicated option is to heavily modify Severn Valley. The potentially crazy (but potentially totally awesome) option is to heavily modify Severn Valley and have Savitree try to hire them to explore it for her. (“We both want the same thing: We’re both scared of what this Great Entity can do. We both want to know how to control it. How to limit its influence. How to free ourselves from it.”)

In my campaign, the PCs went to Axum first, finished their business in Ethiopia while the EBA went to the Severn Valley, and then followed them there. The timelines in the Severn Valley scenario reflect that. If the PCs are hot on their heels, the EBA will move rapidly in the Severn Valley: They’ll get to their expedition sites faster and cut more corners while investigating. They’ll hire thugs and assassins to delay or simply murder the PCs. (One particularly good set of timing, however, would be for the PCs to catch up with them at Deepfall Lake just as Glaaki is attacking them.)

AFTER SEVERN VALLEY: After Soliman’s “death” in the Severn Valley, the Emporium members will be beached in Bangkok for a time. If the PCs haven’t gone there yet, you can have them complicate the situation in Bangkok. If the PCs have already wrecked Bangkok, it’s possible that Fauche might try to pick up the pieces. Or they might ally with other cult leaders. Or they might organize efforts to seek revenge (or simply regain any research material the PCs stole from Savitree).

Savitree’s Research Notes do include details for a future expedition to the Great Sandy Desert in 1935. This is a reference to Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Out of Time”, but my intention is that the Emporium of Bangkok Antiquities DON’T end up going on that expedition. (The negotiations fall through.) But if you wanted to run a Trials and Tribble-lations style adventure where the PCs and the EBA are running around in the background of “The Shadow Out of Time”, I say more power to you. You could use that as an opportunity to reveal the meteor-cities of the Yithians. The connection of those meteor-cities to Glaaki could be another method for pointing the PCs towards the Severn Valley if they haven’t already visited. (The meteor-cities are explained here in my notes for the Severn Valley scenario.)

THE MYTHOS OF THE SEVERN VALLEY

Most of Campbell’s Severn Valley stories are set during the ’50s, ’60s, and early ’70s (when they were written). With the campaign set in the 1930s, I seized the opportunity to create a dynamic prequel to Campbell’s stories: Not only will players familiar with Severn Valley have a chance to spot familiar sites, I’ve also structured the scenario so that the probable outcome is for the PCs to set up the circumstances which give rise to Campbell’s stories. Conversely, if your players aren’t familiar with Campbell’s stories they should get an extra thrill from reading them after the campaign is finished. If you’re interested in reading the specific stories which make up the fabric of the scenario, they are:

• “The Inhabitant of the Lake”
• “The Church in High Street”
• “The Stone on the Island”
• “Cold Print”

There are also references to “The Room in the Castle”, “The Render in Veils”, “The Plain of Sound”, and The Last Revelation of Glaaki. You can get all of the short stories in a single volume by tracking down a copy of the 1993 expanded edition of the Cold Print collection.

While I have done my best to scrupulously adhere to Campbell’s continuity, however, I have also taken the opportunity to vastly expand the Severn Valley Mythos.

THE DOUBLING OF TIME: At the core of my conception of Severn Valley is the doubling of time and place. Glaaki, riding within a meteor, arrives on Earth in 1787. His cultists perform a ritual using the reversed angles of Tagh-Clatur which rewrite history and warps space in the Vale of Berkeley. This means, first, that Glaaki’s meteor has always rested in the Vale of Berkeley, so that his influence on the world now stretches back to prehistory. And, second, the “weight” of the angles invoked actually increases the size of the local terrain: The city of Brichester now exists in the Severn Valley.

See, Campbell’s city of Brichester is fictional. And what I discovered when I tried to create a map of the region is that not only does the city not exist, there isn’t enough room for it to exist: It’s supposed to lie between the River Severn and the A38 north of Berkeley. But that span of land is only 4 miles across. It would be difficult to squeeze the metropolis of Brichester into that area all by itself, but it’s supposed to be surrounded by areas of wilderness that takes hours to walk across. So in order to create a map of the fictional Severn Valley, I would need to actually expand the size of the region.

And then I thought about how utterly terrifying it would be if that had actually happened and only a few people knew about it. (And, of course, you would consider those people insane. It would be like someone trying to claim that Chicago, IL wasn’t supposed to exist.)

Figuring out how Glaaki had managed to make this happen, I ended up linking the Isle Beyond Severnford (from “The Stone on the Island”) directly into the Glaaki mythos.

THE TRUE IDENTITY OF THE TOMB-HERD: Another conundrum I struggled with while unraveling Campbell’s Mythos was the identity of the tomb-herd. They’re referenced as either working for or allied with Glaaki in “The Inhabitant of the Lake”, but they receive a full description in “The Church on High Street” (which has also appeared under the title “The Tomb Herds”) with a mythology that doesn’t quite square with the later reference.

One possibility is that there are multiple tomb-herds, but I found a different way of squaring the circle by, first, entertwining the history of Glaaki’s cult and the Church in High Street and then postulating that the tomb-herd are, in fact, the next stage of development for the glakeen. I don’t know if Campbell would approve (although I do take some comfort from the amorphous transformations of The Last Revelation of Glaaki), but I hope you find the results compelling and terrifying.

LINKING ETERNAL LIES: The other thing I wanted to do, of course, was to tie Severn Valley to the Eternal Lies campaign. I did that through the character of Tricia Piper. In “Cold Print”, Ramsey Campbell establishes that an additional volume of the Revelations of Glaaki, steeped in lore concerning Y’Golonac, was written by an inmate at the Mercy Hill Asylum. I decided that the process of writing this volume started in 1924 and it was a direct result of the ritual that was performed by Echavarria in Los Angeles.

I don’t know if you’ll share the same thrill of excitement that gives me: But the idea of players being able to link the exploits of their characters into a wider world in subtle and insidious ways just seems to invest such a unique depth of meaning above and beyond all the normal ways in which a campaign can deliver meaning.

 UNTANGLING THE REVELATIONS OF GLAAKI

There are a number of reference sheets throughout the Severn Valley scenario to help you keep track of the complicated and overlapping continuities and mythologies. There were times when it felt like I was sweating blood to pull those coherent references together, and this was never more true than with the six page reference sheet for the Revelations of Glaaki you’ll find at the end of the scenario.

This final reference sheet is less organized and condensed than the others. Its function is, instead, to contain every scrap of information I’ve dredged up about the Revelations from Campbell’s work (and others of note). As with the other aspects of the scenario, I have expanded upon the known body of lore concerning the Revelations of Glaaki for my remix, but I wanted a solid body of reference to build from. And because the Revelations are, in many ways, the central pivot on which the mythology of Eternal Lies turns, I suspect you may find it useful, too. (Or, at the very least, of interest.)

PROP NOTES

Alan Thorpe’s Notes: The front and back cover of Alan Thorpe’s Notes are designed to be printed out on cardstock (I used matte photo paper) and taped together to form a folder that you can then slide the actual Notes into.

Birch Sculptures: It doesn’t matter which picture goes with which Birch sculpture they discover. The visual references are atmospheric in nature. (These sculptures are, in fact, the work of Cris Agterberg, who is name-dropped in the scenario as supposedly taking influence from the completely fictional Birch.)

Faces of the Violet Cube: If you wanted to cut the cube out and tape it into an actual cube, I’m betting that would be pretty awesome.

Husain Soliman’s Notes: The conceit I’m shooting for here is that the notes are made in a little notebook. You could copy them out by hand if you’ve got an appropriate notebook. What I did was to print these out, cut the sheets down, and staple them together to form a little pseudo-notebook. (If you wanted to put a hole through them and stain them as if Glaaki’s spine had speared straight through the notes and into Soliman’s chest cavity, more power to you.)

Journal of Thomas Cavanaugh: These are designed to be printed as a booklet. The cover is presented in a separate file (I printed it on matte photo paper to give a nice, sturdy cover).

Photo of Grotesque Statue: You can actually buy this statue as a resin kit for $40 CAD if you want a really awesome, physical prop to drop on the table and freak your players out.

Revelation of the Herd: This is sized to be printed on a very nice piece of stationary paper that I happen to own which looks like the sort of thing you’d find in a 1930s hotel. (Which is, in fact, where it ended up being written in my campaign.) Note that the handwriting actually DOES match the handwritten Revelations of Glaaki excerpts.

USING SEVERN VALLEY AS AN INDEPENDENT SCENARIO

The core of this scenario is that the PCs are coming to the Severn Valley on the trail of a group of archaeologists from the Emporium of Bangkok Antiquities. It’s relatively easy to use the Emporium while severing its connection to Savitree Sirikhan and the Eternal Lies campaign. (Alternatively, you could actually use Severn Valley as an alternative way of kicking off an Eternal Lies campaign, although you’d want to add more clues that would allow PCs to track the Emporium back to Bangkok.)

The reason for the PCs’ pursuit of the Emporium might be professional (the Armitage Inquiry is interested in consulting the group or putting them on retainer), hostile (Project Covenant has identified the group as a potential security threat), or concerned (the PCs are also associates of the Emporium who have come to find out why their colleagues have stopped reporting back).

EXPANDING THE SEVERN VALLEY: Another option would be to expand Severn Valley to include more of Campbell’s stories. The setting practically screams for being turned into a full-throttled sandbox focused around the local Mythos forces drawn to the region by Glaaki’s presence (like the Mi-Go and the cultists of Goatswood), with telltale traces throughout the region gradually pointing the PCs towards the terrible truths of the Valley’s true history. (Basically, a big orgy of the Campbellian Mythos focused through the lens of Glaaki.)

For a sandbox campaign, there are a number of ways that the PCs could be drawn into the Valley for the first time:

• The Brichester Scholars, based out of Brichester University, would be a relatively standard “scholars vs. the Mythos” set-up.
• The Winchester Group, an SIS workgroup tasked with the unwise mission of discovering how Mythos technology could be exploited in the inevitable war against fascism, would probably result in the campaign looking a lot more like Raid on Innsmouth than Shadows Over Innsmouth.
• The Summer Holiday structure would reframe the Severn Valley as a gothic romance: School chums come to spend their holiday in the Valley, only to be drawn into its horrors.
• A special guest appearance by the Bookhounds of London (with their frame focused around the many volumes of the Revelations of Glaaki) would make a lot of sense.
• I’m also struck by the idea of a Children of the Blitz frame, featuring a Narnia-like premise with young children evacuated from London.

Go to 2.2 Ethiopia