SESSION 33A: DOWN THE SEWER HOLE

December 28th, 2008
The 18th Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

With the two cultists securely manacled, they went upstairs to deal with the tentacular horror of translucent protoplasm.

Tor and Agnarr removed the barricade of furniture from in front of the door. Then Tor kicked open the door and stepped through.

Its abode disturbed, the creature surged out of the broken cocoon and lurched its way across the room. As it came, it spat a viscous glob of acid spittle towards Tor’s face. Tor narrowly dodged the spittle and then sinuously whipped back the other way as a pseudopod lashed out towards him.

Having kept his balance despite his acrobatic dodging, Tor lunged forward with his own blade. But the creature burst apart – opening a gap through which Tor’s sword passed harmlessly.

As the creature reformed its mass, however, Agnarr slipped into the room as well, and cut down at it. The barbarian’s blade ripped into it, leaving an acrid stench as it burned its way into the heart of the creature.

This sent the creature into a frenzied rage. It spat venom randomly in all directions, catching Dominic in the eyes, and then lashed out at Agnarr with a half dozen tentacles. Agnarr managed to weave his way past a few of them, but the sheer mass of the attack overwhelmed him – four of the pseudopods struck him and latched on. These clung to his flesh and then, using them like anchors, the creature hauled itself towards him. Before anyone could react, the creature had engulfed him.

Tee tumbled into the room and stabbed at it, hoping to lure it off of Agnarr. It spat venom in response. She was struck in the face and cried out in pain, trying to wipe the blinding, burning goo out of her eyes.

Ranthir, seeing Agnarr’s plight, hurled the familiar spell of enlargement at him. At its touch, Agnarr literally grew his way out of the engulfing creature. It ripped painfully free from his body, leaving trails of blood to pour down onto the floor.

The creature retreated from the now enormous Agnarr, spitting venom into his eyes as it went. Crying out from the literally blinding pain, Agnarr swung his greatsword—

–and struck Tee! The blow cut her down where she stood.

But the wide swing also had the effect of forcing the creature back into the corner of the room, from which – with no place to flee – it propelled itself forward again, latching two of its large pseudopods onto Agnarr’s chest. As the others stared in horror, it began sucking the blood from Agnarr’s body – sending misty trails of crimson fluid pulsing through its amoeba-like body.

The barbarian, still fighting blind, raised his sword back and struck mightily at the floor directly beneath the creature. The unsupported floorboards splintered beneath the strength of the blow, and the creature fell through the hole. It tried to drag Agnarr down after it, but Agnarr’s prodigious strength held and the tentacles ripped free.

Dominic, still blind, cried out in fright: “I think the floor is collapsing! We need to get out of here now!”

Agnarr’s vision, however, was clearing now, and he could see the creature still writhing on the lower level. With a grunt he leapt up and plunged down through the hole, driving all of his enlarged weight (more than two tons) onto the creature.

With a squalmous squelch, the creature burst – spattering eddies of protoplasmic grotesquerie through the room.

Agnarr straightened up, poking his head back up onto the second floor. He saw Tee lying in a pool of her own blood. “What happened to Tee?”

His wounds were still bleeding badly, but Elestra was able to tend to that.

Dominic was regaining his own vision. “Ah!” he cried. “You weren’t that big the last time I saw you… What happened to Tee?”

Dominic was able to heal Tee’s wounds easily enough. With a grimace of pain she sat up.

“What happened to me?”

DOWN THE SEWER HOLE

They were satisfied that they had done everything they could to cleanse the apartment complex of the horrific experiments that had been conducted there (albeit while wreaking massive property damage).

“Well, at least we didn’t burn the place down.”

“We did not burn down that house!” Tee insisted.

“What should we do now?” Tor asked.

“We should hurry,” Tee said. “It’s been at least ten minutes since the fight broke out on the street.”

“Right,” Elestra said. “The guard will be coming.”

“Or more cultists,” Tee said.

“Yes. That would be worse,” Dominic said.

They collected their two cultist prisoners (replacing the manacles with knotted ropes firmly tied by Tor) and dragged them over to the hole in the back corner of the first floor. Climbing down the rope ladder they found themselves, as they had predicted, in the sewers. Tee came last, dragging a rug over the hole behind her to help conceal its presence, cutting the rope ladder, and then floating down using her boots of levitation.

They were standing at the intersection of four major sewer passages. Narrow walkways of beslimed stone ran along a wide, slowly flowing channel of raw sewage. Agnarr examined the ground and determined that the walkways to the north and west had recently seen a great deal of traffic. They suspected that was the direction the cultists would come from, so they decided to take the prisoners a little way down the southern passage instead.

Quickly searching them, they found several carefully folded and oiled silk, each of which contained some sort of alchemical substance (which Tee guessed was poison). They also turned up a thick sheath of research notes in a hidden pocket of the spellcaster’s robes. They took the time to study these and the other papers that they had recovered from the alchemical laboratory upstairs.

THE BOOK OF VENOM’S TRUTH

This small, gray-covered volume is a paean to all manners of vile activities – drug abuse, sexual perversions, acts of cruelty and violence – treated with the reverence of holy ritual.

In totality, the book appears to be a cult manual for the “Brotherhood of Venom”. They worship chaos, speaking of the “slow swarm of the Elder Brood” – by which they appear to mean the slow, methodical, and (above all) secret sowing of chaos and dissolution. They perceive ordered society as a curse and seek to undermine it through a slow and steady erosion of disintegration.

Entire passages are given over to describing the basic dynamics of power and how to subvert them – serving as a generic manual n how to infiltrate the highest levels of a society through its most important individuals.

The cult prefers the clandestine. They are patient and careful, never wanting the authorities or other potential opponents to know they exist.

A name is scrawled on the inside back cover: BROTHERHOOD OF PTOLUS

THE MASKS OF DEATH

This folder of blood-red leather contains a collection of associated parchments which appear to serve as something of a cult manual for a group calling itself the “Brotherhood of the Deathmantle”, the Death’s Grimace, or the Tears of Blood.

The cult serves chaos through the worship of murder and slaughter. The more chaos and fear each murder creates, the greater the veneration. Mass murder – the slaying of a whole town, a whole city, or a whole nation – is their ultimate goal.

Each cultist wears a death’s head mask, usually of copper or bronze but occasionally of iron painted skull-white. The cult frequently associates with the undead, and there is even the suggestion that the most faithful among them are undead themselves. They venerate graveyards as holy places and speak of the end of days as “the grave of all worlds”.

Much of the book is given over to the painstaking detailing of the instruments of death: The making of poisons, the care of weapons, and so forth.

Some of the manual is given over to what they would consider the ultimate religious ecstasy: The death of a god.

ALCHEMICAL NOTES ON ASKARA

These notes detail the creation of a magical poison referred to as askara. The notes appear to have been frequently altered, apparently in an effort to perfect the process. The effects of the poison are not described.

The notes appear to combine alchemical and mystical knowledge credited to both the Ebon Hand cultists and the Brothers of Venom.

OBSERVATIONAL NOTES
ON VENOM-SHAPED THRALLS

These are detailed notes on the effects of a poison referred to as askara. The poison is designed to mutate its victim in a prolonged misery that lasts for weeks or even months before the victim dies. During this time, however, the victim’s mind becomes pliable – effectively becoming a slave of those administering the poison.

When victims are injected with askara, they weaken until they collapse. Within twelve hours, their bodies secrete a dark, syrupy substance that covers them and then hardens, forming a black, spherical cocoon. Within another twenty-four hours, the victim emerges from the cocoon, mutated into a hideous amalgam of an insect-like creature and their former selves.

A large section of these notes detail the perfection of a solution that must be applied to the cocoons during the gestation period. Without that solution, the resulting creature “lacks cohesive physical form”. This solution appears to have been difficult to perfect, and was reached only after “Wuntad assured us access to the teachings of the Deathmantles”.

Other notes refer to “unexpected activity in the post-emergent cocoons” including a reference to “violet slime” and “secondary spontaneous cellular generation”, but these are not particularly detailed.

Running the Campaign: Fantasy Sewers – Campaign Journal: Session 33B
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

Tomas: Okay, I’m going to search the room.

GM: Give me a Search check.

Tomas: (rolls dice) Aw, shoot. I rolled a 4, which only gives me an 8 on the check.

GM: You spend a couple minutes tossing the room, but you don’t find anything.

Maria: Oh! I want to check, too!

Steve: Me, too!

Samantha: I got a 17!

This is dogpiling the check. It’s not always a bad thing, but when it crops up during play it often just feels… wrong somehow. Are the players pulling a fast one? I mean, it just makes sense that Maria and Steve and Samantha could help search the room. So why can it be so frustrating when this happens?

There are actually three different problems here, and it’s probably useful to split them apart and look at each one separately.

First, there’s a metagaming issue. If Tomas rolled a 30 on their Search check and the GM says “you didn’t find anything,” Maria (and Steve and Samantha) don’t pipe up to say, “I’ll try, too!” It’s only when the thief muffs his roll and fails to find something that the rest of the party uses that metagame knowledge to have someone else make the check.

If this is your concern, you can address it by simply making these types of checks secretly: Since the players don’t know the check result, they can’t metagame it.

This won’t necessarily stop the dogpiling, though. The uncertainty about how well Tomas did can actually motivate the players to always dogpile the check. Other types of action checks may also make it more immediately obvious if Tomas failed or succeeded (e.g., he either picked the lock and can open the door or he didn’t) and have the other PCs queuing up to try, which isn’t metagaming but still dogpiling.

Which leads us to the second problem, which is a pacing issue. Is it really interesting to have everyone sit there sequentially rolling the check? What a huge drag! Let’s wrap it up and move it along! (This is particularly true if there really isn’t anything for them to find in the room and Tomas’ check result is irrelevant.)

You can often bypass this issue by calling for all of the PCs to make a check at the same time.

GM: You’re ushered into a grand ballroom. On the wall hangs a huge, heraldic banner of a red stag rearing on a checkered field of blue and white.

Samantha: Do I recognize the heraldry?

GM: Everyone give me an Intelligence (History) check.

In fact, you should often be anticipating this type of check: All of the characters can see the heraldic banner and they either recognize it or they don’t; it’s not something requiring active study, so you should be immediately asking everyone to make the check. (We call these reactive checks.)

Even if it’s a non-reactive check (like searching a room) and the player is the one proposing the action, you can still try to get ahead of the dogpile: “Is anyone helping Tomas search the room?”

But the third problem is a balance issue.

Let’s say that a particular check has a 70% chance of success for the first character, but a 50% chance of success for the other four PCs. This probably falls into the range of checks that’s both interesting and relevant to resolve. But if the check is dogpiled (with all of the PCs rolling and only one needing to succeed), that 70% chance of success suddenly becomes a 96% chance of success, at which point you have to ask yourself why you’re even rolling the check in the first place.

Compound probability adds up quick, and this is particularly true in systems where the range of the die roll is larger than the skill bonuses: The shift in the average die result over multiple rolls rapidly makes skill almost completely irrelevant. (For example, a DC 15 check where most skill bonuses are +1 to +5 and you’re rolling a d20. The successful check is more likely to come from whichever player rolls the highest number on the d20 than it is to come from the PC with the highest skill rating.)

DOGPILING vs. GROUP ACTIONS

Dogpiling a failed check isn’t the same thing as a group action (where multiple characters are working together). Many games already include effective mechanics for resolving group actions. In D&D 5th Edition, for example, you have group checks (everyone rolls and the group succeeds if at least half the checks are successful) and the Help action (the character with the best check modifier makes the check with advantage if there are other characters helping them).

For more on resolving group actions in any system, check out Part 14 of The Art of Rulings.

FAILURE MUST BE MEANINGFUL

Somewhat ironically, the solution to dogpiling largely goes back to the first principles for framing a check: If you’re rolling the dice, then failure should be interesting, meaningful, or both.

So whenever a PC makes a check, there should be a penalty or consequence for failure.

But yet another reason that dogpiling can feel frustrating is that it can trivially bypass what initially seemed like a meaningful consequence. For example, failing to pick a lock on a door is meaningful because it means the PCs need to find another way to get through the door.

Of course, this also reveals that dogpiling is, in many ways, indistinguishable from one PC repeatedly rerolling the same check.

We could start by reviewing the three techniques described in Failure for the Beginning GM:

No Retries. This obviously solves the dogpiling problem by definition. Whoever made the initial check represented the group’s best effort, and no subsequent checks will change that outcome — e.g., we have established that this door cannot pick and you’ll have to find a different way of getting in.

If your group is used to using narrative resolution, this may be all that you need. But frequently it will just leave people scratching their heads, “Why can’t Samantha search the room after Tomas or at the same time as Tomas?”

A technique I’ve been experimenting with in D&D to “soften” the concept of No Retries is a gradated group check. Basically, it interprets the dogpile as a retroactive group check. The group check requires half of the people attempting the check to succeed, so the second character to make the check has a chance to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. But if the second character also fails the check, now they’ve dug a hole and it would take two more successful checks for the group to work their way back to success.

The effective application of this technique can be a little limited, but I’ve found it can be a great mental model for social scenes: Tomas has clearly screwed up the negotiations with the vizier. Can Samantha step in and smooth things over? If not, then it will be quite difficult to salvage the situation.

Failing Forward. This preempts the problem because the first character to attempt the check can’t fail, they can only suffer a consequence — Tomas finds the hidden jewel, but triggers a trap; he picks the lock, but his lockpicks break; etc. Since the initial attempt didn’t fail, there’s never a reason for the other PCs to dogpile.

Progress Clock. When all else fails, start or tap a failure clock. The flexibility of this option is great, making it easy to default to when all else fails.

To sum up: Once the dogpile starts, you’ve just got to start looking for additional consequences. Not in a punitive way, just in a, “Okay, you’re spending a lot of time on this lock… what does that mean in the context of the wider world?” way.

DO YOU DARE TO DOGPILE?

With that being said, you also don’t want to discourage the second-best skill rating in the group from flaunting their stuff occasionally. So you may also want to think about how each additional success on a check could provide a benefit:

• A gather information check where each successful check gives a different piece of information, but a failure results in the bad guys becoming aware that the PCs are asking questions.
• A check to craft a magic item where each successful check adds a unique feature to the item, but each failure results in a curse.

This may require a more complicated framing of the check, but it carries the benefits of extra successes needing to be weighed against the increased risk of failure for each additional participant and forcing the group to make a strategic decision.

Why were the PCs always getting lost in Castle Ravenloft?
The dead ends.

Did you hear that Strahd has started writing poems dedicated to Tatyana?
He went from bat to verse.

What’s Strahd’s favorite artifact?
The neck of Vecna.

What should the PCs never say when answering Strahd’s invitation?
Bite me!

Why does Count Strahd have Wizard levels?
He’s a neck-romancer.

Why are there no mosquitoes in Barovia?
Strahd eliminated the competition.

Why did Strahd join the Creative Commons?
He likes his artists open range.

What happened when the PCs ran from Strahd and he gave chase?
They finished neck and neck!

Why doesn’t Strahd go on adventures?
He sucks the life out of the party.

Why didn’t the players enjoy the Castle Ravenloft campaign?
Strahd was a real pain in the neck!

Why was everyone upset about the 10 Greatest D&D Villains list released by Wizards of the Coast?
They forgot to count Strahd!

How do you beat Strahd at poker?
Raise the stakes!

Did you know that Strahd and Auril had a love child? Unfortunately, the baby suffered from a serious congenital condition…
A severe case of frostbite.

Why doesn’t Strahd incorporate Ravenloft?
He’s not a big fan of stakeholders.

Why doesn’t Count Strahd ever go to therapy?
He’s bad at self-reflection.

After you’ve killed Count Strahd, where do you go to loot his gold?
The blood bank.

Why did Strahd need a cure disease spell?
He couldn’t stop coffin.

What should the bard play while you’re fighting Count Strahd?
Another One Bites the Dust.

Did you hear about Strahd and Tatyana?
He loved in vein.

Why does Strahd always fail his Dexterity (Stealth) check?
He can’t stop coffin.

Why did Strahd want to kill the PCs?
They drove him batty.

Why did Count Strahd have to move out of Castle Ravenloft for a month?
It was getting re-vamp-ed!

What spell does Count Strahd use to control the drawbridge on Castle Ravenloft?
Re-moat control.

Why can Strahd never take a joke?
He’s pun-dead.

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