DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 32C: Enter Arveth

Tor had barely reached the rope on the second floor when an axe thrown from below thunked into the windowsill next to him. He ducked back… and the former prisoners panicked, scattering through the upper level – some cowering in corners, another getting ambushed by a patch of violent slime that fell from the ceiling, a third trying to climb out of a different window only to fall with a scream into the cobbled alley below.

The default goal of a dungeon in D&D is to win fights: You go into the dungeon. You encounter monsters. You kill the monsters. You take their treasure. You leave the dungeon. Hurrah!

But defaults are boring.

This particular default, though, can be pretty sneaky. You can usually spot it, though, if you keep your eye out for “clear the dungeon” scenario goals.

For example: “My scenario isn’t just some crude, kick-down-the-door dungeon crawl! The PCs need to stop an eldritch rite which threatens to sever the connection between the Material Plane the Feywild!”

Okay, sure. And how do they stop it?

“They have to find the corrupted grove and journey into the liminal realm which connects all dryad trees!”

Awesome. And how do they actually stop the ritual?

“… they have to hunt down all the cultists in the dryad-realm and kill them.”

There’s nothing wrong with a good fight, nor with a pulp scenario where you solve your problems with fists and/or swords and/or blasters. (That adventure through a corrupted dryad-grove sounds amazing.)

But as I think the current session demonstrates, having non-combat goals — whether for a full scenario or just an individual encounter — makes the combat more interesting.

The raid on this abandoned apartment building was, if I do say so myself, a thrilling scenario. Both I and the players were fully engaged, grappling with a complex, multi-level environment filled with a variety of opponents and treacherous environments.

But the instant “save the prisoners” was introduced as an additional, non-combat goal everything was ratcheted up to another level. It added layers of complexity to the tactical situation, and by virtue of inherently creating a set-up with multiple goals (the default combat goal of “take them all out” plus the new goal), it turn calculations into choices.

The example in this session also demonstrates that these non-combat goals don’t always need to come from the GM. If you create a rich environment that responds dynamically to the players’ choices and actions, they’ll merrily set their own goals and complicate their own lives.

Campaign Journal: Session 33A – Running the Campaign: Fantasy Campaigns
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

SESSION 32C: ENTER ARVETH

December 20th, 2008
The 18th Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

Tee went over to the door that the venom-shaped thrall had been guarding and found it, predictably, locked. But it was no more difficult than the last one. Swinging it open, however, she found an even more disturbing sight: Five prisoners shackled hand-and-foot to the floor.

Tor, nursing a sick suspicion, crossed to a cocoon that was enmeshed in one corner of the hall. With a single slice of his sword, he cut it open… and a vaguely humanoid form tumbled out in a gush of acidic liquid.

“Venom-shaped… Shaped by venom.” Horror and disgust were mixed evenly in his voice.

Tee moved to free the nearest prisoner. They immediately panicked. “No! Not me! Where are you taking me?”

“It’s okay. It’s okay, I’m here to help.”

As Tee worked to undo their shackles, Agnarr headed back down the hall and grabbed the unconscious spellcaster from where they’d left him in the entryway. He wanted to keep a close eye on that one.

Questioning the prisoners they quickly determined that they had been brought here only a few days ago. There had originally been eight of them, but the cultists had been taking them away one at a time. Three of them had been kidnapped from around the city (mostly straight off the streets), but the other two reported being sold through a black market slave trade of some sort running through the Teeth of Light. And one of these reported seeing a temple with a statue of a rat-shaped man in it, leading Tor and Elestra to conclude that the followers of the Rat God must be involved, as well.

ENTER ARVETH

But what were they going to do with the prisoners? Tee definitely didn’t want to be responsible for them. And she knew that the building was being watched. They eventually decided to give each of the prisoners 10 gold pieces, told them to cover their faces, run for it, and get as far away from here as they could as quickly as possible.

But as they gathered them up to lead them out the front door, Elestra and Ranthir – who were still standing in the hall – suddenly whirled towards the front door. Two people had just come in: A blond woman and a thuggish man.

The woman hissed. “Kill them.”

Then she drank a potion and disappeared.

Tee quickly shouted at the prisoners to head upstairs – there was a window with a rope: “Get out. Get out as fast as you can. Go!”

Tor rallied the prisoners and led them upstairs. Ranthir, meanwhile, dropped a thick web into the entryway – it clearly caught the thug and he hoped it had caught the invisible woman, as well.

What they couldn’t see through the thick web, however, was that both the thug and the invisible woman had ripped their way out of the web, gone back through the front door, and were circling the building.

Tor had barely reached the rope on the second floor when an axe thrown from below thunked into the windowsill next to him. He ducked back… and the former prisoners panicked, scattering through the upper level – some cowering in corners, another getting ambushed by a patch of violent slime that fell from the ceiling, a third trying to climb out of a different window only to fall with a scream into the cobbled alley below.

Meanwhile, downstairs, Tee and Ranthir were rapidly gathering up the papers and alchemical equipment from the laboratory.

Between the axe and the panicking prisoners, Tor didn’t notice the subtle shifting of the rope as the invisible woman climbed it. She appeared suddenly before him as her knife plunged into his shoulder.

Grunting heavily, Tor dragged her through the window with her dagger still buried in him and then slammed his sword into her. She crumpled in the corner.

By the time he’d yanked the dagger out, however, the axe-throwing thug had reached the window, as well. The thug took one swing with his axe – which Tor easily ducked – and then was run through the heart with the electric-arc of Tor’s return thrust.

Tor turned to Dominic. “Heal the woman, then we’ll haul her downstairs and ask some questions.”

While Dominic did that, Tor and Tee gathered up the rest of the prisoners. One of them, unfortunately, had been killed by the violet slime. The one who had fallen out of the window had broken his leg, but Elestra was able to heal that. Then they sent them on their way. “Get as far from here as you can.”

While Agnarr and Dominic kept an eye on the prisoners – making sure that they got away safely – the others quickly mopped up the various nests and cocoons left scattered throughout the complex, making sure that the cultists’ work here was completely destroyed. They left only the barricaded room with its dangerous, gelatinous tentacles, which they resolve to deal with before going down the hole.

They reconvened on the first floor. The woman (who Tee identified as Arveth, who had recruited her into the Brotherhood) and the spellcaster were traussed up in the manacles that had formerly held the prisoners.

They were in for a rude awakening.

Running the Campaign: Non-Combat Goals – Campaign Journal: Session 33A
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

Enemies in Feng Shui — the action movie RPG of fast and furious combat inspired by the classic Hong Kong films of Jackie Chan, John Woo, Tsui Hark, Michelle Yeoh, and Jet Li — are split into four types: Mooks, Featured Foes, Bosses, and Uber-Bosses.

Mooks, in particular, are treated a little differently by the system. First, they’re significantly worse than any other foe in terms of statistics. And, second, they instantly get knocked out of the fight if they get hit. Don’t even bother rolling for damage.

(If you’re thinking, “Hey! That sounds like minions from D&D 4^th Edition!” you’re not wrong. They got the idea from Feng Shui.)

The goal is that you can — and should! — stuff your fight scenes full of disposable mooks to create frenetic action and allow the PCs to show off their badassitude. (Even in a baseline fight, you’ll have 3 mooks per PC, and the number only goes up from there. In fact, when you want to make an easier fight, you actually increase the number of mooks, albeit while decreasing the number of featured foes.)

Feng Shui also uses a 1d6 – 1d6 core mechanic, so for every check you’re rolling two d6’s. That means that the GM is going to be rolling a lot of dice to resolve all of their attacks. Despite all that dice rolling, though, it’s quite likely that literally none of those attacks will hit. (They are just mooks, after all.)

If you roll all of those attacks one at a time, this can be a huge drag on gameplay.

One option to avoid this is to roll fistfuls of dice! There’s an article here on the Alexandrian that dives in to a lot of different techniques you can use to make this work.

Another option is to use a mook sheet: A big sheet full of pre-rolled mook attack roles. They look like this:

The idea is that, rather than rolling dice, you can just use the values on the sheet, crossing them off for each mook attack.

Atlas Games actually provides an online tool that will let you generate new copies of these sheets.

A problem you can run into with either technique, though, is that — if the mooks all just make straight-up attacks — they can whiff a little too often. This is, of course, what lets you have so many of them in a scene, but if the players no longer feel as if the mooks are a relevant threat it can render the mooks moot.

Fortunately, the solution is a simple technique: combat boosts.

In Feng Shui, characters can perform a combat boost as a 3-shot action to help out another character. A boost can:

• Grant +1 to the recipient’s next attack.
• Grant +3 to the recipient’s Defense against the next attack (and all others in the same shot).

Instead of having the dozen mooks in your fight scene all flail ineffectually, what you should be doing is having each of them perform a combat boost.

You might have the mooks form up into small gangs: Five mooks working together can boost the attack value for one of their number to be roughly equal to a featured foe. A dozen can swarm over a hero, with eleven performing an attack boost and the twelfth packing a boss-size punch.

Alternatively, you can have the mooks group up with a featured foe or boss, either boosting their attacks to devastating levels and/or creating an almost impenetrable defense with their defensive boosts.

You’ll want to make sure to weave these boosts into your narration of the fight: Describe the mooks grabbing PCs by the arms and allowing their boss to land a crushing blow or throwing themselves in front of their boss to take a shot. You could even describe misses as the PCs being unable to get close to the big bad guy through the swirling swarm of mooks!

You want to make it clear to the players that the mooks are the problem, and that they’re going to continue to struggle against the featured foes until they clear out the riff-raff.

Fortunately, it’ll still be quite easy to do that.

They’re just mooks after all.

Go to Campaign Status Documents

If we’re talking about information that can be encoded in the campaign status document, then with trackers we’re getting pretty primal with it.

Literally any aspect of the campaign that you need to keep track of over the course of several sessions?

Put it on the campaign status document.

For example, I have a tendency to default to warm, sunny days in my description of the campaign world. To counteract that, I’ll use a random weather generator, pregenerate the results for several days, and then put them on my campaign status document:

WEATHER

10/20/790: Cloudy, high 43°F, low 31°F, light wind

10/21/790: Windy, high 50°F, low 40°F, moderate wind

10/22/790: Overcast, high 48°F, low 34°F, light wind

10/23/790: Fog, high 58°F, low 41°F, moderate wind

10/24/790: Clear, high 42°F, low 31°F, light wind

10/25/790: Windy, high 41°F, low 24°F, moderate wind

At the beginning of each session, I’ll take the current day’s weather, write it on a Post-it note, and put it on my GM screen to remind me.

For the In the Shadow of the Spire campaign, I used a simple reputation system. That actually goes on the first page of my campaign status document, since it may be referenced during almost any social interaction:

REPUTATION

FAME: 8

INFAMY: 0.5

FAME:  Rescued Phon. Recovered Jasin’s body. Castle Shard party. Shilukar’s bounty. Association with Dominic. Tavan Zith riot. Killing of the Columned Row Killer. Freeing slaves and children from Temple of the Rat God. Paid repatriation costs for slaves from Porphyry House raid. Arrest ordered by Carrina.

Even more common than these permanent installations, for me, are bespoke trackers that get created as the result of the PCs’ actions.

For example, the PCs took one of their bags of holding and dedicated it corpses they want to talk to, either until they get speak with dead prepped or, after casting the spell the first time, until the one week time limit runs out and they can cast it again. (They call it their dead-icated bag.) Rather than scrambling through campaign journals and other notes trying to figure out the last time that they talked to, for example, Arveth, I simply added a tracker to my campaign status document indicating the last time they talked to one of their corpses:

SPEAK WITH DEAD ROSTER

Arveth: 10/19/790

Medusa: 10/18/790

Wulvera: 10/26/790

These bespoke trackers can also be more complicated. The same PCs looted twenty living paintings — paintings that are magically animated — while looting a dungeon. They ended up approaching the Winsome Gallery in the Nobles District to see if they would buy the paintings. I decided that the Winsome would buy some of them, but didn’t have enough cash on hand to buy all of them. Instead, they would put them on display and seek out buyers on the PCs behalf.

The PCs agreed to this.

Many sessions later, the PCs ended up looting Lithuin vases from a different adventure and the PCs once again decided to approach the Winsome Gallery. The result is this section of my campaign status document:

LIVING PAINTINGS / LITHUIN VASES

20 paintings total / 5 bought by Winsome Gallery

25% chance per day of selling 1d3 paintings

675gp per painting – 5400 gp on hand + 1000 gp from bidding war

Updated: 10/20/790

Winsome Owns: #13, #16, #17, #19, #20

On Display at Winsome: #19 – A figure pierced through by a great hook of iron, depending from the ceiling on a chain. Swaying gently back and forth.

Remaining Paintings: #7, #8, #9, #10, #11, #14, #18

10/2/790: sold #6,

10/3/790: Vladaams purchase #5

10/10/790: sold #3, #15 – House Dallimothan, bidding war with House Cath on #3 following Interlude 2

10/11/790: sold #1

10/14/790: sold #4, #12 – House Sadar

10/18/790: sold #2

WINSOME GALLERY

• Wylsaen Faechild, owner and expert (male elf, Expert 1)
• Nerr, a friendly art dealer (original arrangement for living portraits)

CHECKING IN

• Wylsaen has noticed that the eyes of painting #20 (depicting Alchestin) opened “about a week” after they purchased the painting. They had to take it off display because the eyes would follow those in the room unnervingly.
• Paintings proved quite notable after House Vladaam purchased one on the 5^th: House Dallimothan, who purchased two of the paintings, was curious about their provenance and left a standing inquiry that the gallery is now passing along.

VASES OF LITHUIN (NOD5A, Area 7)

• Wylsaen unfamiliar with them, but Nerr identifies them correctly.
• Couldn’t dream of splitting the collection, but also can’t afford it for the gallery. Willing to pay 25,000 gp immediately and outright. Otherwise, they’ll try to find a buyer at the 40,000 asking price. (5% chance per day of a buyer presenting themselves)

Let’s break this down a bit.

(“Why bother with all this?” you may ask. First, the cashflow of the PCs is a significant element of the campaign at this point, having a major impact on the solutions they can pursue to various problems. Second, it results in some interesting roleplaying and opportunities for the PCs to make social connections.)

At the top of the section is the mini-system I created for randomly determining when the paintings sell. It starts with a quick summary of the initial conditions (there were 20 total paintings, 5 of which were purchased directly by the Winsome). Then, each day, I roll d% and see if any paintings sell. If they have, I roll 1d3 to see how many sold. After that, the prices the PCs agreed to with the Winsome are recorded, following by how much money the Winsome has one hand from previous sales (and will turn over to the PCs). Finally, I list the campaign date when I last checked sales (to make sure I don’t skip a day or accidentally check multiple times per day).

Following that is a roster of the paintings available for sale. For a full description of each piece, I would need to refer back to the original adventure, but I do list the full description of #19 specifically because the Winsome has it on display (and I will mention and describe it to the PCs when they come back).

Then a breakdown of which paintings sold when, this includes — as you can see — notes about particularly significant buyers (who might be of interest to the PCs or vice versa).

Following that are some Key Info entries for Wylsaen, their contact at the Winsome Gallery, that I can use while roleplaying him next time.

Finally, since the PCs have declared their intention to bring the Lithuin Vases here, I’ve put together some preliminary notes for how that interaction will go (which also includes a reference to where I can find the original description of the vases so that I can find it easily).

It turns out the PCs have been distracted by a lot of other stuff lately, so the vases have just been sitting in a bag of holding (not the dead-icated bag, that would be be gross) and these notes have been patiently waiting for several sessions.

Next: Continuity Notes

You’ve been playing D&D 5^th Edition for awhile now and you’re starting to wonder what other roleplaying games are out there. Is there something you’d like better? Maybe you have a favorite genre — space opera, horror, detective fiction — and it’s not fantasy. Or maybe you just want a break.

Or maybe not. I’ve been playing D&D for thirty years. It’s a game of infinite possibility.

But if you are thinking about trying a new RPG, here are some options I think you should check out.

5th EDITION: IT’S NOT QUITE RIGHT

“I’ve only played D&D 5^th Edition, it’s not quite right for me, and I’d like to try something different.”

1974 D&D: The original version of D&D created by Dave Arneson & Gary Gygax. This is the opposite end of the spectrum from 5^th Edition. This may not be what you’re looking for, but it will tell you a lot about whether you should be looking at other editions of D&D. I’ve done a video series taking a closer look at this edition and how it plays at the table.

Pathfinder (Jason Buhlmahn): The 1^st Edition of Pathfinder derives from the 3^rd Edition of D&D and the current 2^nd Edition heavily revises that into a more streamlined, tightly designed package. Either or both will tell you everything else you need to know about checking out other editions of D&D.

Shadow of the Demon Lord (Robert J. Schwalb): From one of the major designers during D&D 4^th Edition, Shadow of the Demon Lord is a good example of where the concepts of D&D can be taken when designers are given the freedom to reinvent them.

GURPS Dungeon Fantasy (Sean Punch): Based on the GURPS universal RPG system, Dungeon Fantasy is for the simulationists and the extreme character customizers.

The One Ring (Francesco Nepitello & Marco Maggi): Set in Tolkien’s Middle Earth, this one is for the narrativists and those interested in an earthier fantasy. Also focused on epic journeys.

Blades in the Dark (John Harper): Everybody gets to play a rogue! Also introduces org-based play as the group builds a criminal crew together.

Ars Magica (Jonathan Tweet & Mark Rein•Hagen): Everybody gets to play a wizard! Also introduces org-based play as the group builds a covenant together.

Burning Wheel (Luke Crane): Maybe you’d like a storytelling game! With Burning Wheel you’re really only dipping your toe in that end of the pool, but it’ll open the door for you.

WHAT ELSE IS OUT THERE?

“I’ve only played D&D, but I want to see what other sorts of games are out there.”

Some of the games listed below are repeated from the list above.

Numenera (Monte Cook): A science-fantasy game seting one billion years in the future. Earth has seen eight mega-civilizations rise and fall, and a neo-Renaissance now picks through the ruins, rediscovering what was lost.

Ars Magica (Jonathan Tweet & Mark Rein•Hagen): Everybody plays the wizard! Your powerful magi have banded together to found a covenant in Mythic Europe, a fantasy version the 13^th century.

Pendragon (Greg Stafford): Step into the legends of King Arthur, playing knights of Camelot in a campaign designed to span decades.

Technoir (Jeremy Keller): A cyberpunk game with a radically inventive game system in which you change the world by using verbs to push adjectives. Also features conspiracy-driven plot-mapping.

Blades in the Dark (John Harper): Everybody plays the rogue! The players craft not only their characters, but also the criminal crew they all belong to. Features mechanics specialized for carrying out heists and other scores that are tightly integrated with downtime development of the crew.

Night’s Black Agents (Kenneth Hite): A vampire spy thriller, in which retired secret agents discover that vampires are real. After creating your own unique vampire variant, very creative tools like the Conspyramid empower the GM to run a vast, global conspiracy.

Eclipse Phase (Rob Boyle & Brian Cross): A transhuman kitchen sink space opera set 10 years after the Fall of Earth. With elements ripped from the pages of cutting edge science fiction, Eclipse Phase is a multitude of games in one.

Call of Cthulhu (Sandy Petersen): Based on the horror fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, the players take on the roles of investigators seeking to unravel eldritch mysteries.

You might also enjoy these storytelling games, which are tabletop narrative games similar to roleplaying games, but distinctly different (and not all of which even have a GM):

The Quiet Year (Avery Alder): A map-based storytelling game in which the players collaboratively create a post-apocalyptic civilization using prompts generated from a deck of playing cards.

Microscope (Ben Robbins): Explore an epic history entirely of your own making, using the rules of the game to build an ever-expanding, non-linear chronology.

Shock: Social Science Fiction (Joshua A.C. Newman): A game intensely focused on the speculative in speculative fiction, in which each player takes on the role of both their Protagonist and also the Antagonist for the player sitting to their right.

Ten Candles (Stephen Dewey): Ten days ago, the sun went out. And then They came. The survivors have learned to stay in the light. You play this game by candlelight, snuffing one of the ten candles at the end of each scene… until the last candle goes out.

MY GAMES

“I’ve only played D&D, I want to try something new, and Justin’s a shill.”

These are all games I’ve created, co-created, or oversee as either the RPG Developer at Atlas Games or publisher at Dream Machine Productions.

Ars Magica (Jonathan Tweet & Mark Rein•Hagen): The only game to make all three lists!

Technoir (Jeremy Keller): A cyberpunk game with a radically inventive game system in which you change the world by using verbs to push adjectives. Also features conspiracy-driven plot-mapping.

Magical Kitties Save the Day (Matthew J. Hanson, Justin Alexander, Michelle Nephew): Every kitty has a magical power, every kitty has a human, and every human has a problem. The magical kitties have to use their powers to solve the humans’ problems! (Warning: Problems may include witches, alien invasions, and hyper-intelligent raccoons.) This game is designed for first-time roleplayers and first-time GMs, including an introductory graphic novel adventure that lets you start playing within minutes of opening the box and a plethora of guides for running your first game.

Legends & Labyrinths (Justin Alexander): A version of 3^rd Edition which strips the game down to its simplest core. Designed to be 100% compatible with 3^rd Edition, however, allowing you to not only use any adventure material designed for the game, but to also bolt on any and all advanced options you’d like to have in your game.

Infinity (Justin Alexander): A space opera kitchen sink based on the Infinity miniatures game from Corvus Belli. Notably includes a three-part conflict resolution engine with fully integrated Warfare, Psywar, and Infowar systems.

Feng Shui (Robin D. Laws): The Hong Kong action film roleplaying game! Laws has created an ingenious setting allowing him to wed historical, modern, and science fiction settings into a single experience for your PCs, while the innovative combat system allows you to capture the high-octane fights from your favorite action movies.

Over the Edge (Jonathan Tweet): The Ultimate Democratic Republic of Al Amarja welcomes you. During your stay with us please remember that Liberty is Job One, Disarmament Means Peace, It’s Polite to Speak English, and, of course, Paranormal Activity is Perfectly Legal. Thank you for your consent. (Make sure to check out my adventure in the Welcome to the Island anthology.)

Unknown Armies (Greg Stolze & John Tynes): An occult horror RPG about broken people trying to fix an equally broken world.