In Mothership, armor is rated in Armor Points (AP). Any damage you suffer is reduced by your current AP. However, if you suffer damage equal to or greater than the Armor’s AP, then the Armor is immediately destroyed.

I’ve been running Mothership for a while, though, and I’ve decided I don’t like this rule. The primary problem is that damage values in the system are high enough that armor is almost always immediately destroyed in the first hit. The intention is almost certainly to crank up the feeling of horror (not even your advanced battle dress can save you now!), but in practice it just feels cheap and kind of confusing. I’ve had multiple players new to the system who become completely baffled the first time they go into a fight, because it just feels as if something is wrong.

I’ve begun using the house rule below in my Mothership games, and we’ve had some pretty good success with it. It maintains the imagery of xenomorphs and nanoplagues slowly ripping their way through a PC’s armor, but it extends the experience over several rounds (which gives really great vibes at the table) without making armor feel pointless.

(And it works the other way, too, with PCs needing to apply significant force over time to cut their way through enemy AP!)

If you use these rules, let me know how it goes! I’m planning to continue tweaking these.

HOUSE RULE: ABLATIVE AP

If a character wearing armor takes damage equal to or greater than their AP value (including Cover), their armor becomes damaged and the AP of the armor is reduced by 1.

The armor is permanently destroyed if its AP is reduced to 0.

ANTI-ARMOR: An anti-armor weapon ignores AP. It automatically reduces AP by 1 on any hit and by an additional 1 point if it deals damage equal to or greater than the character’s AP value. On a critical hit, anti-armor weapons instantly destroy any armor, regardless of its AP value.

REPAIR: Damaged armor can be repaired with appropriate facilities for half the original cost of the armor.

Note: This rule does not apply to Cover. Cover is still immediately destroyed if an attack deals damage equal to or larger than the Cover’s AP rating.

The Horror Beneath spends a lot of time shooting itself in the foot.

Review Originally Published May 21st, 2001

This adventure, to put it bluntly, is a mess:

1. You’ve got a bunch of maps. Tragically, three of them are completely illegible. Actually, I don’t know if “illegible” is the right word, because they’re also completely unkeyed. Let’s just say that — between the fact that they are unkeyed and reproduced in a muddy and indistinct greyscale — it’s nearly impossible to figure out what information they’re supposed to be conveying. The fourth map is of a dungeon. This one is keyed with numbers. For reasons beyond the scope of imagination, however, these numbers are not referenced in a standard D&D format. Instead, Metcalf has decided to describe his dungeon in, basically, a stream of consciousness format – dropping the numbers into the middle of the text between a couple of parentheses whenever he feels its convenient. Simply incredible. It takes true skill to deliberately go out of your way like this to make a product as unusable as possible.

2. Metcalf seems to have persistent problems with the English language. My favorite examples are his nebulous sentence structures, which result in treats like this: “He is unarmed and has no weapon proficiencies. He doesn’t think he needs them.” Needs weapons or needs weapon proficiencies? “Steorra’s temple is the oldest and largest in Ravendale.” Oldest and largest… what? Building? Temple in general? Steorra’s temple in general? You’d assume the second, but this passage is made particularly hilarious by the sentence which appears two paragraphs later: “Temple of Saint Tollan: Ravendale’s newest temple, as well as the largest.”

3. What’s truly bizarre is that the adventure spends a bunch of time discussing Ravendale… which serves absolutely no purpose except as a place for the PCs to pick up an undefined adventure seed which is going to take them to another town: Scarborough.

4. When the PCs reach Scarborough they find the entire town deserted… except for one family, the Tendermores. They discover this when they find the Tendermore’s fourteen-year-old daughter drawing water — by herself — from the well. First off, this staggers my suspension of disbelief: Everyone in town has been dragged off by zombies except your family, and your daughter is wandering around by herself? The daughter will take them back to her house, where the PCs will meet her father Jonathon. To add insult to injury, however, Metcalf closes this description with: “…he believes that he and his “boys” can hold their own.” Who are his “boys”? I dunno. Are they literally his sons, or do the quotation marks imply something else? I dunno. Is the wife of the house still alive and around? I dunno. Are there any other daughters? I dunno.

5. As if Metcalf’s lock-lipped descriptions are not bizarre enough, we then get the sequence of events that night when the zombies come: “The Tendermores are not very effective archers, the zombies should have no trouble advancing to the front of the house.” So, in other words, they’ve had no problems holding them off this long – but as soon as the PCs show up, the Tendermores are doomed? Apparently so, because no matter what the PCs do, they will “see two of the Tendermore women taken by the zombies.”

6. Actually, they’re not zombies. They’re grub hosts – which are just like zombies, except they can’t be turned. They are also the way that the Brood Queen (who’s hiding out in that dungeon, which is supposed to be part of an abandoned dwarven citadel, but doesn’t look it) creates her young (the Brood Warriors).

Basically, The Horror Beneath had a semi-decent idea (Aliens in a fantasy setting), but then simply fumbled the ball in executing it. Actually, let me rephrase that: They didn’t fumble the ball. They deliberately tossed it on the floor, tripped over it, broke their leg, stumbled over their target audience, and plunged off a cliff.

It would have been better if the maps had been legible. It would have been better if the presentation had been smoother. Heck, it would have been better if the plot had been comprehensible.

In short: Don’t buy The Horror Beneath.

Style: 2
Substance: 1

Title: The Horror Beneath
Authors: Eric Metcalf
Company: Nightshift Games
Line: D20
Price: $8.95
ISBN: 192933228-9
Production Code: CFE4001
Pages: 32

Style 2? I was apparently feeling generous that day.

I feel bad for Eric Metcalf. He was one of the very first adopters of the OGL and D20 System Trademark License, making the superhero RPG The Foundation and The Horror Beneath two of the earliest third-party 3rd Edition supplements, before the market became glutted with competitors. Unfortunately, this just meant that the entire hobby’s eyes fell upon what were extremely neophyte efforts. Sort of like grabbing someone who just took their first singing lessons and thrusting them onto a Broadway stage. Yeah, the result is terrible. But you can still empathize.

Re-reading this review, it was also interesting seeing my early reaction to someone forgetting how to key a dungeon. Notably, back in 2001, I don’t recall anyone trying to justify this.

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

In the last month alone I’ve had three people tell me they were feeling overwhelmed trying to prep an entire campaign and ask me if I had any advice for how to push through that prep when all you really want to do is start playing!

Well, the good news is that at least nine times out of ten, you don’t need to push through that prep. You almost certainly can — and should! — start playing a lot sooner than you think.

I think the prevalence of this “I’ve gotta prep the whole campaign before the first session!” mindset is due, at least in part, to the prevalence of published campaigns, particularly for D&D 5^th Edition. Obviously if you’re publishing a book, you need to write the whole book before you send it to the printer. Looking at these printed books, however, it can be easy for a new GM to think that this must be a model of what they should prep for their own campaigns: Literally hundreds of pages of notes detailing adventures that will take months or possibly even years to play through at the table.

And, yeah, that’s a pretty daunting prospect.

In So You Want to Be a Game Master, I actually recommend almost the exact opposite approach for first-time GMs: Start with a one-shot. Prep it, run it, and only then prep the next one. I think this is particularly important if you’re a new GM, because you’re going to be learning a lot in your first few sessions of play: What works and what doesn’t. What the players loved and what blew up in your face. What you need and what you don’t.

You’re going to want to be able to immediately apply those lessons to the next session and the next adventure so that you can keep growing and learning as a GM, and it’s a lot more difficult to do that if you’ve already prepped two dozen adventures before ever sitting down at the table. If you instead lean into an episodic campaign structure, you’ll be freeing yourself to learn and explore — and you’ll also able to embrace your excitement and start playing as soon as possible!

HOW MUCH DO I PREP?

But let’s say that you want to run a larger, more interconnected campaign.

You want to run a larger, more interconnected campaign.

– Leslie Nielsen (probably)

You still don’t have to prep the whole thing ahead of time. This raises the question, of course: How much do you need to prep?

In my opinion, you’ll want to start by creating a broad, comprehensive overview or outline of the entire campaign. What this looks like, exactly, will depend on what the primary structure of your campaign is going to be, but it will generally be no more than one or two pages in length.

With your outline in hand, you’re then going to prep just enough material for the first session. But what does that mean? Once again, it depends on the campaign structure.

For example, if you’re planning a megadungeon campaign, then your campaign overview is going to be a list of all the different levels in the dungeon. This might include short, one- or two-sentence descriptions of each level, and you might even put together a side view showing how the various levels connect to each other. This initial list might expand and the connections might shift over time, but this gives you a place to start.

Arneson and Gygax, way back in the 1974 edition of D&D, recommended having three levels of your megadungeon prepped before running your first session, and that’s still pretty solid advice: Most groups, during their first session, will likely never leave the first level of the dungeon, but there’s a chance that they might find a staircase down to the second level and decide to check it out. So you want to be prepared for that. You might even have a situation where, through pure dumb luck, that group makes a direct beeline to another staircase and ends up down on the third level. No reason not to have your bases covered.

In addition to not wanting the players to go charging off the edges of your prepared content, prepping a little bit ahead like this also lets you backfill and foreshadow, knitting the dungeon together into a more coherent environment. (For example, once you’ve prepped the dragonborn cultists on the second level of the dungeon, you might seed the goblin treasure on the first level with Tiamat artifacts they’ve captured from the cultists.)

If the level connections of your megadungeon are heavily xandered, I recommend modifying this advice: Prep the entrance level of the dungeon and any level directly connected to the entrance level. (For example, if Level 1 connects to Levels 2, 4, and 1A, you should prep all four of those levels, because you have no way of knowing which way the players might decide to go.)

After the first session of the campaign, make a list of which levels the PCs have visited. You should now prep all the levels which are connected to those levels. The great thing is that you’ll often discover you’ve already prepped some or all of those levels, which means your prep load will generally decrease over time. (For example, they might gone down to Level 2, which connects to Levels 3 and 4. You’ve already prepped Level 4, so all you need to do now is fill in Level 3.)

Repeat this after every session, and your megadungeon will expand, filling out the details of your original campaign overview at a nice, sustainable pace.

You’ll find that these same basic principles — prepping roughly one scenario ahead of wherever the PCs currently are — can be applied to a lot of different campaign structures. For example, if you’re using a node-based campaign structure, then your campaign overview will be a revelation list of all the adventures plus the clues that link those adventures together. You can include any number of scenarios on this list and, once again, you’ll be free to expand and rearrange the scenarios as you flesh them out into fully playable notes.

For your first session, you’ll obviously start by prepping the initial adventure. When you’re done, look at all the clues in that adventure which point to other adventures, then prep those additional adventures. (Because it’s fully possible that the PCs might discover one of those clues during the first session and choose to immediately follow it, possibly never realizing that it leads to a “separate” scenario in your notes.)

For example, consider the classic introductory node-based structure:

Here the initiating adventure has clues pointing to scenarios A, B, and C, so those are the four adventure you’d ideally want to have ready to go when the campaign begins.

After the first session, as with the megadungeon example, simply look at which scenarios the PCs have broken the seal on (either because they’ve already followed a clue into the scenario or because they’ve told you they’re planning to do so at the beginning of the next session), identify the clues in those scenarios, and make sure you prep all the scenarios those clues point to.

Once again, you’ll find that you’ve often already prepped these scenarios: For example, if the PCs head to scenario A, they’ll have access to clues pointing to scenarios B, C, and D. But you’ll have already prepped scenarios B and C, so all you need to prep is Scenario D. If they wrap-up scenario A in the next session and head to scenario C, you’ll discover that all your prep is already done.

These same basic principles can be applied to mixed campaign structures or even larger adventures. For example, imagine a node-based campaign in which several of the linked adventures are large dungeons. If the PCs have access to clues pointing to one of these dungeons, you don’t necessarily need to prep the whole thing: You could just prep the first couple levels and wait to fill in the rest of the dungeon until the PCs show up and actually start exploring it.

PREP-INTENSIVE CAMPAIGN STRUCTURES

Both of our examples have featured campaigns with a single point of entry — the first level of the dungeon; the initial scenario. But what if we wanted multiple potential points of entry? For example, what if the megadungeon has multiple entrances leading to multiple levels? What if we want to start the campaign with a job board or by giving each PC a set of rumors that they can choose to follow up on?

At this point, you have a few options.

First, you can modify things to collapse the campaign back down to a single point of entry. For example, the dungeon might have multiple entrances, but only one of those might be known or accessible to the PCs at the start of the campaign.

Second, you can give the players access to all of their options (e.g., telling them about all of the entrances or giving them all of their rumors) during Session 0 and have them make a decision about which one they’re going to choose when the campaign begins. You won’t want to completely forget about the other options, but this will still let you focus your initial prep.

Third, you can look at each point of entry separately and prep each of them using the principles described above. For example, if the megadungeon has entrances to Level and Level 4, then you’ll need to prep both of those levels and all of the levels either of them are connected to. This will obviously be a lot more prep, but that’s okay as on as (a) you feel the benefits justify the costs and (b) you have the time and are willing to do that much prep.

As you can see, the same general principle applies: What scenarios could the PCs choose to engage in the next session? Prep those and, ideally, one step more.

This means, though, that some campaign structures are inherently prep-intensive. Hexcrawls, for example, are extremely prep-intensive, since the PCs could hypothetically head in any direction from their starting point and can easily travel multiple hexes in a single session. With no idea where, exactly, they could end up at in their wanderings, a typical hexcrawl requires you to key dozens of hexes before play begins, many of which could and probably will contain full location-based adventures.

If you can put in the effort, however, prep-intensive campaigns can be very rewarding. Partly because they give the players a lot of freedom in exploring the world or situation, but mostly because, as the campaign continues, all that prep will already be done! That will free you up to focus on other stuff during your inter-session prep. (Or, alternatively, just lean back and take it easy.)

REDUCING PREP

If you’re looking to cut down the amount of prep you need to do, there are a few techniques you can use.

First, if you’re comfortable with improvisation, then you get away with reducing your safety net. Broadly speaking, you can usually get away with just prepping the scenario for the next session. Most of the time, the PCs won’t skip ahead to the next dungeon level or jet off for the next scenario. If you’re comfortable  just improvising when this does happen, then you don’t need to account for those possibilities in your prep.

Zero-prep games like Technoir and various procedural content generators can, of course, help you with improvising various types of content.

Something else to consider is downtime spacing between scenarios. This may be as simple as travel time: If the current scenario is in Geneva and the PCs find clues pointing to a different scenario in Dallas, then they’re much less likely to pop out in the middle of the Geneva scenario to check out what’s happening in Dallas than they would be if the other scenario was also located in Geneva. This can be generalized into anything that imposes a cost (in time, resources, etc.) for bailing on a scenario early or swapping between scenarios.

The other alternative is a downtime activity that consumes actual time at the table: If the players unexpectredly jag towards a scenario you don’t have prepped yet, you simply trigger the transitional content and use it to fill the rest of the session.

In some games, for example, you might just tell the players to level up. Then, while they’re spending twenty or thirty minutes advancing their characters, you can be throwing together the notes you need for the next adventure.

Blades in the Dark, on the other hand, has a structured downtime period between every job in which time in the game world passes, various events are played out, and crew development happens. This kind of downtime content requires more of your attention as the GM, but you don’t actually need to get an adventure prepped at the table: You just need the downtime spacing to chew up enough the session that you can wrap things up and come back next week with the scenario prepped.

(For more tips on handling the endings of sessions, check out Cliffhangers & Conclusions.)

Ultimately, Deep Horizon lacks the space it needs to tell the story it wants to tell.

Review Originally Published June 27th, 2002

Designed for 13th-level characters, Deep Horizon is WotC’s sixth Adventure Path module. Skip Williams, the author, takes us into the Underdark with this one, revealing a developing struggle between beholders, salamanders, and the long-forgotten civilization of the desmodus (a race of bat-like humanoids).

CONTENT

Warning: This review will contain spoilers for Deep Horizon. Players who may find themselves playing in this adventure should not read beyond this point.

One consistent weakness in the Adventure Path modules have been the character hooks, and this remains true with Deep Horizons: They’re tepid at best. You’ll be best off, in my opinion, using them as a way of foreshadowing the adventure.

Of course, part of the reason the hooks for these modules are weak is that, in general, WotC’s authors are not attempting to convey a plot. The Sunless Citadel, for example, is not a module about the PCs attempting to accomplish X, Y, and Z. The Sunless Citadel simply exists – and there are any number of reasons why the PCs might go there.

Similarly, Deep Horizon doesn’t convey a plot – it conveys an environment. A situation. How the PCs enter that situation, and what they do once they’re there, is entirely up to them.

Here’s the background: 300 years ago the desmodus were at war with the drow… and they were losing. In order to save themselves, the desmodus used powerful magic to reroute a magma flow – using it to seal off their city (and, simultaneously, destroy the nearest drow city). Although the desmodus survived, sealed off from the rest of the world (with the exception of small colony of salamanders, who traded with the desmodus for metal ore), every passing year of isolation brought them closer to the brink of extinction.

Three months ago, however, an earthquake reopened the desmodus’ corner of the Underdark. This has created a crisis in desmodu society, and their old ways of life have broken down: The entire race now stands on the edge of a knife, trying to find its way into the new future which has opened up before it.

Deep Horizon details three environments: The first is Chael-Rekshaar, the drow city destroyed when the desmodu redirected the magma flow 300 years ago. Today, it is inhabited by a trio of beholders (supported by a variety of slave laborers). These beholders are excavating the city with their disintegrate eye, searching for whatever treasure they can find.

The second is the Desmodu Enclave, the final refuge of what was – until just a few months ago – a slowly dying race.

The third is the Salamander Citadel, built upon the underground volcano formed by the backed up magma flow created by the desmodu 300 years ago.

Deep Horizon also details a power struggle: As their society has fragmented and redirected itself, the desmodus’ shipments of ore to the salamanders have slowed. This has angered the salamanders, who have allied themselves with the beholders – hoping to wipe out the desmodu once and for all. While the PCs are here, an assassination is attempted against the leader of the desmodu.

Also at work here is the destabilizing effect lying behind the recent earthquake: The ancient magic the desmodu used to seal themselves away is finally having consequences. If the situation isn’t completely remedied, the earthquakes will get worse. Unfortunately, undoing the magic and allowing the magma to return to its natural flow patterns will significantly cool the current habitat of the salamanders – something which is sure to raise their already heated ire.

STRENGTHS

If you want a summary of why you should pick up Deep Horizons, you don’t have to look any farther than the summary of its content: Skip Williams delivers an active, compelling scenario and invites you to bring along your PCs.

Of course, WotC consistently puts together a well-produced package, and this module is no exception: The cover, by Brom, is eye-catching. The maps are well done. The interior art delivers without detracting. The rules are impeccably handled. All the i’s are dotted and all the t’s are crossed.

WEAKNESSES

Unfortunately, Deep Horizon does have one significant problem: It just plain, flat-out lacks the space it needs to tell the story it wants to tell.

For example, the concept of the ruined drow city of Chael-Rekshaar is really cool. But, in actual execution, it’s rendered into nothing more than a single, ruined temple. (The rest of the city is left beneath the lava flow.)

Similarly, the assassination attempt which forms the module’s only substantive arc of plotted action is essentially squeezed into half a page. Its presentation is simply rushed, leaving you more with the sense of an outline than a module.

Which isn’t to say that Deep Horizon doesn’t work: It does. Everything on the page functions. It just doesn’t live up to its potential, and the primary problem here simply seems to be a lack of space. (Deep Horizon wouldn’t be the first Adventure Path module hurt due to its limited page count, either: The Speaker in Dreams was significantly gutted before its release. Ironically, WotC opted to increase the page count of its Adventure Path modules immediately after Deep Horizon — both Lord of the Iron Fortress and Bastion of Broken Souls feature 48 pages).

A less systemic problem the potential DM should keep an eye on is the introduction of the desmodu: I’ve had several DMs tell me that their PCs were initially hostile toward the desmodu, due to the fact that they fall victim to a desmodu raiding party on their way down into the Underdark. (When faced with an unknown race of humanoids in D&D, I’ve found that players tend to assume the worst of anything that attacks them first.) Since the rest of the module assumes that the PCs will be, at the very least, neutral towards the desmodu, this has the potential to cause some problems.

Deep Horizon also has an annoying flaw: The PCs need to travel through the ruined drow city of Chael-Rekshaar in order to reach the Desmodu Enclave. No problem. But the map of the Desmodu Enclave also shows two passages leading off deeper into the Underdark. Problem: If the magma flow sealed off the desmodu, why are there still passages leading into the Underdark? Plus, the descriptive text implies that Chael-Rekshaar was just the nearest drow city involved in the war with the desmodu: But there’s nothing between Chael-Rekshaar and the surface. And the only way to get deeper into the Underdark from Chael-Rekshaar, according to the map, is through the desmodu enclave. So, unless the drow had a habit of living on the surface three hundred years ago, the whole premise doesn’t seem to make any sense.

(This is easily fixed, however: Move the passages leading deeper into the Underdark to Chael-Rekshaar. These passages would have been sealed by the magma – and were recently reopened, along with the passage to the surface, by the earthquake.)

CONCLUSION

Deep Horizon is a good module: The PCs are dropped into a complex power struggle, and are given the opportunity to save an entire race. This module can represent a launching point for the higher levels of your campaign – as your PCs begin to have a larger and broader impact on the development of the campaign world as a whole.

But Deep Horizon isn’t a great module, and that’s unfortunate: Because the potential was definitely there. And with another twelve pages or so it probably could have been delivered on.

That shouldn’t dissuade you from picking this one up, though – particularly if you’ve followed the Adventure Path series to this point. If you’re willing to take the time to expand the material found here – or even just keep on your toes when it comes to improvising — Deep Horizon presents a highly enjoyable gaming experience.

Style: 4
Substance: 3

Author: Skip Williams
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
Line: D&D
Price: $9.95
ISBN: 0-7869-1855-1
Product Code: WTC11855
Pages: 32
Year Published: 2002

In my retrospective on my review of The Sunless Citadel, I talked about how Justin the Younger was still belaboring under the Plot is Adventure/Adventure is Plot paradigm. You can see the vestiges of this here, as I use it (incorrectly) as an explanation for why the scenario hooks for the Adventure Path modules were so poorly done. (The reality, of course, is that there’s nothing about prepping situations that requires threadbare scenario hooks. Quite the opposite.)

In reprinting these old RPGnet reviews, we’ve skipped ahead a bit with this one in order to release all the Adventure Path reviews together. This was actually one of the very last reviews I ever wrote for the site, appearing on the same day as a review of Atlas Games’ Backdrops. Two years later I would write a review of A Song of Ice and Fire, but these two RPG reviews were the true end of an era. (I never finished reviewing the Adventure Path series.) There were a number of reasons for this, the most prominent of which was that in 2002-03 I was spending a lot more time doing professional freelance work. I also lost my primary gaming group during this time as multiple members moved out of town. Shortly thereafter, I was knocked out of the industry in late 2003 by the post-D&D 3.5 collapse, during which most of the companies I had contracts with simply ceased to exist.

It was a rough time. And, at the time, it felt like I’d left RPGs for a long time. Looking back, though, I can see that in 2005 I both started the Alexandrian and took the first steps to getting a new regular gaming group. So it was just a couple years. And then, a couple years after that, I wrote the viral articles that transformed the site, launched my long-running Ptolus campaign, and started publishing RPG books again. Since then, my road has taken many unexpected turns, but I don’t feel as if the journey has ever been interrupted.

Hopefully the road ahead of us will be long and prosperous!

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

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 47C: Home Suite Home

Several hours into Ranthir’s candlelit researches, something sinister slithered under the door. Ranthir, intent on the strange intricacies of technomancy, noticed it not as it slipped across the room and attached itself to Tee.

Its first touch was so gentle that Tee didn’t even feel it. And when its voracious, lamprey-like mouths fastened onto multiple points along her spine it was too late… it had taken control of her body. As it drained her lifeblood, she twitched violently on the bed.

Ranthir, unfortunately, remained oblivious.

In The Art of Pacing, I talked about bangs, which are the big, explosive moments that launch scenes. Bangs come in a lot of different forms, and they can be prepped and discovered through play in a lot of different ways. One way that I use them is as a timeline of bangs, a list of events in my campaign status document that are going to happen in the PCs’ future. In practice, these bangs aren’t fully formed — “they’re more like bullets waiting to be fired. When the moment arrives, the actual bang will be customized to the circumstances of the PCs.”

The spineseeker which attacks in this session is an example of what these bangs look like in practice. Here’s how it appeared in the campaign status document:

2. TILAXIC ASSASSIN (9/25/790)

• The cultists summon a tilaxic, one of the Elder Brood.
• Tilaxic (Spineseeker, Book of Fiends 2, p. 58)
• Saavia (from NOD1; she has more levels and Pythoness House biocrystal breastplates)

Let’s break this down a bit.

First, this entry is #2 because it appears on a prep sheet titled “Laurea’s Doom.” This sheet contained multiple responses I planned for the cultists to take after they identified Tee as being “Laurea” (who had infiltrated their ranks and attacked the Temple of Deep Chaos, back in sessions 27 and 33, respectively).

I prepped this sheet as I was getting ready for Session 39, and then added the following entries to my master Event List:

9/22/790 (Evening): Chaos cultists identify Tee as being “Laurea.” They attack the Ghostly Minstel. (Laurea’s Doom)

9/25/790: Cultists send Tilaxic Assassin. (Laurea’s Doom)

9/28/790: Arveth uses Dais of Vengeance on Tee. (Laurea’s Doom)

These would have been interspersed with a bunch of other upcoming events.

Note the “(Laurea’s Doom)” reference, which reminds me to reference the prep sheet for these events. Not every event is supported by a full prep sheet, only those that require enough that they would clutter up the Event List. In this case, the prep sheet included a state block for Saavia.

The spineseeker is taken, as noted, from The Book of Fiends, a monster supplement published by Green Ronin. (I’ve talked previously about looting bestiaries for my campaign prep.) I’m fairly certain that I created the “tilaxic” species name.

The reference to the “Pythoness House biocrystal breastplate” because it’s one of the items taken by Wuntad and the other chaos cultists when they ambushed the PCs in Session 23. A good example how you can take a bunch of different loose threads and tie them all together to set up a new situation.

USING THE BANG

As I mentioned before, the bang is incomplete. It needs to be plugged into the specific context of the game session to turn it into an actual scene.

What I know is that:

• There is a spineseeker, which is being handled by Saavia.
• At some point on the 25^th of Kadal they’re going to try to assassinate Tee.

And that’s basically it. At the time I slotted this bang in to my campaign status document, these events are still days away. I have no idea where the PCs will be or what they’ll be doing on that date.

So when the 25^th rolls around, I’m looking at the list of current bangs on my campaign status document — of which this is only one — and I’m keeping my eyes open for any moment during play in which the bangs could be useful to

• escalate the action;
• fill a dead spot;
• logically happen;
• or basically anything else that makes me say “oh! let’s do it!’

There are limitations to this, of course. For example, the spineseeker won’t show up in the Banewarrens because the chaos cultists don’t know about the Banewarrens. So if the PCs, for example, spent the entire day of the 25^th in the Banewarrens, then this bang probably wouldn’t happen. (Although perhaps I might trigger it offscreen and the PCs might return to the Ghostly Minstrel to discover that there have been some strange deaths on the premises in their absence.)

Other bangs might be more restricted in time or place or circumstance (or they might be less so). Regardless, if the right moment arrives, I’ll use the bang (crossing it off on my campaign status document). And if it doesn’t, then that bang goes back in the bandolier (or simply gets deleted if it’s no longer relevant or useful).

In this case, getting ambushed at the Ghostly Minstrel was probably always the most likely use for the bang. But that can still leave a lot of questions that can only be answered in the moment: Who’s asleep? Who’s awake? Where are they? What time is it? And so forth.

So there’s a bunch of variables that can, literally, be in play here. But, in practice, it’s really pretty simple: You look for the moment where the bang makes sense. You combine you prep with the given circumstances of what’s happening in the campaign at that moment. You pull the trigger and frame up the scene.

The bang itself often requires very little prep, because the alchemy of the table will supply you with all the rich context you need to bring it to life.

Campaign Journal: Session 48A – Running the Campaign: TBD
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index