Go to Part 1

You’ve just finished describing in your Feng Shui game how the evil cyborg clone of Jet Li has leapt through the warehouse window, sending a cascade of glass glittering across the oil-soaked floor and landing in a perfect three-point stance. You pause, but the players don’t immediately respond. So you keep talking: Cyborg Jet Li somersaults forward and raises his arm. The flesh peels back, revealing a machine gun… Oh, god. Still no response. Okay, so the machine gun fires, spraying the room with bullets. Then the cyborg dashes behind a forklift for cover. Then he shouts out, “Your deaths are all part of the program!” Then he summons a couple of his attack drones, which come flying in through the window. And then… and then… and then…

This is something I call fearing the silence. The GM finishes describing something and pauses… but there’s not an immediate response from the players. The silence, however fleeting, is like a vacuum, and the GM feels compelled to fill it. So they start talking again. And what can they possibly talk about? Well, whatever would happen next, right?

Gotta keep talking, gotta keep talking, gotta keep talking.

From the GM’s perspective — either consciously or subconsciously — the players aren’t engaged with the game. If they were, then they’d be declaring an action. But they aren’t. Which means the GM has done something wrong. So the GM has to do something — they have to say something — that will get the players engaged again.

(Oh god. It’s all going horribly wrong. What can I do? Gotta do something. Do something. Do something. Just keep doing things.)

But what’s actually happening is that the players are being boxed out. They can’t make declarations about what they’re doing, so it stops feeling like they’re interacting with the world and starts feeling like they’re just watching it.

This often becomes a cascading problem: Because the players lose “momentum” in interacting with the world, it can take a moment to sort of reconnect and get rolling again… except the moment they need is a moment of silence, and the GM is nervously filling it before they can get going.

WHAT DO YOU DO?

When I find myself fearing the silence and feeling a need to fill it, what I find effective is to consciously choose to fill it by saying, “What do you do?” or “What are you doing?”

In other words, very deliberately and very explicitly pass the ball to the players. Now the silence is their problem!

Or, more accurately, their opportunity.

You may also find it useful to think explicitly in terms of turn-taking, particularly if NPCs are involved in the scene. If all of your NPCs have had a chance to say something or do something, then it’s definitely time to make sure the PCs have a chance to say something or do something. (It’s a challenge to roleplay multiple NPCs talking to each other, but if you get into a rhythm with it, it can be surprisingly easy for the NPCs to just chat amongst themselves endlessly without the players being able to get a word in edgewise.)

It’s perhaps unsurprising that I’ve often seen this sort of problem in the first session of a campaign or the first half of a one-shot, only for things to improve as the game goes on: A lot of this is being driven by nervousness. As the GM settles down and the group finds its groove, the problem goes away. Of course, there’s only one chance to make a first impression, so it won’t hurt to consciously work towards avoiding the initial misstep.

GM DON’T LIST #14.1: BOTTOMLESS LORE

A similar problem occurs with bottomless lore. I commonly find myself falling into this trap when I’m improvising some cool new element of the world. Maybe the players have gone to a location I didn’t anticipate and so I’m creating it on the spot. As I describe the location, I keep getting cool new ideas.

So I Just. Keep. Talking.

There’s this… and this… and you see somebody doing this… and somebody else doing this… and there’s also this other thing… and also… and then the first guy does this other thing… but then…

There’s always more stuff to share about the infinite world! You’re once again stuck in a loop and the players are, once again, boxed out.

This is actually quite similar to the freeze-frame boxed text we discussed in GM Don’t List #13: Boxed Text Pitfalls, where the PCs get stuck while the GM narrates their way through a cutscene. The only difference is that in this case it’s happening spontaneously at the table.

THE REACTION POINT

The solution, however, is quite similar. You need to consciously identify the reaction point — the point at which something happens that the PCs will want to react to — and then you need to stop talking.

Another useful tip here is to set a mental description limit: What’s the maximum number of things you can describe before you need to stop talking. This isn’t hard or fast, but I recommend three to five, and almost never more than seven. (You, of course, don’t need to describe that many things. If you describe three things and that’s everything you need to set the scene, that’s great.)

This limit can feel constraining, but there are a few things to keep in mind that will help:

First, at the beginning of a scene — a new location, etc. — start broad, then specific. You’ve given yourself a “budget” for your description, and you’ll want to make sure the players know that they’re in a forest before you start describing individual trees.

Second, identify the reaction point before you start the description. Ideally, aim your description at the reaction point. At a bare minimum, when you’ve spent all of your “budget” except for the reaction point, arbitrarily stop describing anything else and cut to the reaction point. (“Okay, I’ve said four things about the hotel room. Now I need to mention the ogre with the gun and see what happens.”)

If you identify multiple reaction points in the scene, what you’ll usually want to do is prioritize them. Present the first, let the PCs react to it, and then present the second. Upon occasion there might be two reaction points that are truly happening simultaneously — e.g., the ogre pulls a gun at the very moment that kobold ninjas leap in through the window. That’s fine. It’ll just chew up more of your “budget,” since you’ll need to describe both reaction points.

(For more on reaction points, and why you should almost always put the reaction point at the end of your description, check out Random GM Tips: Reaction Points.)

Third, remember that description can persist through the scene. You don’t need to describe every single detail of the hotel room before the PCs react to the ogre pulling her gun. You may not have had time to describe the lamp, but as Antoine rushes forward to knock the gun out of the ogre’s hand, you can describe how the sickly light flickering out through the cigarette-stained lampshade throws his shadow against the far wall. Maybe you haven’t described what can be seen outside the window, but the kobold ninjas bursting through it gives you a chance to mention the “billboard declaring Mayor Thomas’ re-election campaign” behind them.

And so forth.

This is particularly useful if you find yourself bubbling over with bottomless lore: You don’t need to discard all those cool ideas that are sparking in your imagination; you just have to hit the pause button on them, drop the reaction point, and then look for the opportunity to weave them into the action.

GM DON’T #14.2: SAVING THROW MERRY-GO-ROUND

GM: The Lich-King waves his hand and a cloud of black miasma begins oozing up through the floor. Give me a Fortitude saving throw!

Player: 24.

GM: You quickly gulp in a breath of untainted air. But huge gouts of flame erupt from the ceiling! Give me a Dexterity saving throw!

Player: 15.

GM: You’re scorched by flame! As you grimace in pain, the Lich-King points a finger in your direction. There’s a lance of sickly green energy. Give me a Dodge roll!

Player: 9.

GM: It strikes you for 36 points of damage! The Lich-King pulls a lever on the wall, and a trap door opens in the floor beneath you! You’ll really want to make your Dexterity saving throw!

Presented like this, it’s pretty easy to notice that “the player gets a turn” doesn’t appear in this list of events. But this can often be harder to see at the actual gaming table: There are multiple players reporting results. The GM is weaving evocative descriptions of what’s happening in the scene as a result of the various reactive checks or saving throws. And it can certainly feel as if the PCs are doing a lot of stuff: They’re gulping in air! Heroically diving out of the way! Rolling dice!

And, of course, there’s a similar impulse that we’ve seen in fearing the silence and bottomless lore: You want the game to be exciting and engaging. That means you need to keep talking! And if you’re going to keep talking, then stuff needs to happen for you to describe. And you can make that stuff happen by using the playing pieces you control — e.g., the NPCs.

This is also why this problem most often crops up in action scenes: moments that seem to demand a breakneck pace, and so the GM feels pressured to keep things moving.

The solution to this is largely just Don’t Do It™. Which, of course, is not terribly helpful. Couple things that may help if you find yourself doing this:

First, if appropriate, get into an initiative order sooner rather than later. This doesn’t necessarily require combat or even the presence of NPCs. You can just call for initiative checks and use them to structure the scene.

Second, you don’t have to go for the ultra-formality of an initiative order to think in terms of turn-taking. The Lich-King created the black miasma. Has Sasha had a chance to go since then? If not, ask Sasha what she’s doing before the Lich-King takes another action. If you just make a point of thinking about this, you can probably keep track of it in your head. If not, make a list on the notepad in front of you and use tally marks when people take actions.

(This will also help individual players from dominating an encounter and boxing out their fellow players.)

CONCLUSION: CARE ABOUT THE REACTION

In the broader scope, the big solution to all of these problems is simply caring about what your players are doing.

Minimize the mindset of the Story you’re trying to tell or the World you’re trying to immerse them in. Your NPCs should be awesome, but they are ultimately not the stars of the campaign.

The mindset you want to emphasize, in my opinion, is: I want to see what the PCs do.

I’m having the ogre draw her gun because I want to see how the players react to that. (And I want to see how I react to what they do!) I can have a lot of fun playing around with all the cool lair actions the Lich-King can take, but ultimately the point of the Lich-King encounter is for the PCs to confront him.

It can be a subtle shift in thought, but when your primary focus becomes, “Oooo… I wonder what this will make them do?!” you’ll never forget to give them the opportunity to do it.

Go to Part 15: The Railroader’s Fallacy

In “My First Book,” Robert Louis Stevenson tells the origin story of Treasure Island, a book which I’ve just had the pleasure of reading this afternoon. It begins when Stevenson was a lodger at the Late Miss McGregor’s Cottage. One of his roommates was an artist who would spend afternoons at the easel, and Stevenson would periodically join him. On one such occasion, Stevenson:

…made a map of an island. It was elaborately and (I thought) beautifully coloured; the shape of it took my fancy beyond expression; it contained harbours that pleased me like sonnets; and with the unconsciousness of the predestined, I ticketed my performance ‘Treasure Island.’

I am told there are people who do not care for maps, and find it hard to believe. The names, the shapes of the woodlands, the courses of the roads and rivers, the prehistoric footsteps of man still distinctly traceable up hill and down dale, the mills and the ruins, the ponds and the ferries, perhaps the Standing Stone or the Druidic Circle on the heath; here is an inexhaustible fund of interest for any man with eyes to see or twopence worth of imagination to understand with!

No child but must remember laying his head in the grass, staring into the infinitesimal forest and seeing it grow populous with fairy armies. Somewhat in this way, as I paused upon my map of ‘Treasure Island,’ the future characters of the book began to appear visibly there among imaginary woods; and their brown faces and bright weapons peeped out upon me from unexpected quarters, as they passed to and fro, fighting and hunting treasure, on these few square inches of a flat projection.

The map that appears above is, sadly, not the map that Stevenson drew that day. Much later, when he had completed his first novel, he submitted the map along with the manuscript to the publisher. Unfortunately, the map became lost in the post (or, perhaps, the publisher misplaced it). In either case, the horrified Stevenson had to recreate the map from memory, with great difficulty because he also had to comb through his own text to make sure all of the continuity was correct with the new version of the map.

In this, Stevenson was in some way reversing the process by which the novel had actually been written.

I had written it up to the map. The map was the chief part of my plot. For instance, I had called an islet ‘Skeleton Island,’ not knowing what I meant, seeking only for the immediate picturesque, and it was to justify this name that I broke into the gallery of Mr. Poe and stole Flint’s pointer. And in the same way, it was because I made two harbours that the Hispaniola was sent on her wanderings with Israel Hands.

I suspect that many a game master will recognize themself in Stevenson’s tale — whether it was the dim recesses of a dungeon, the vasty wilds of a hexmap, or the starlit expanse of a Traveller sector map.

Oft have I found myself peering at a published map and found my eyes drawn down into its enigma: If I stepped onto that street, what would I see? What strange mysteries lie beneath those mounds?

But even more often have I walked in Stevenson’s footsteps, beginning an adventure not with an outline or a scene list, but by seizing graph paper and letting my creativity flow through the geography.

This is not, of course, the only way to begin an adventure. (I am equally likely to start with, say, a revelation list.) But take a dungeon, for example. An interesting arrangement of chambers invites the imagination to fill them, and I find the encounters “peeping out,” as Stevenson suggests, from between the gridlines. The same is true of a wilderness map: My hand will chart the Silverwood before I ever learn what might lie beneath its boughs.

“The map is not the territory.” When dealing with the representation of reality, Alfred Korzybski’s saying means that we cannot capture all the complexities of reality in our representation of it; there is a vast wealth of detail that cannot be captured. But when it comes to imaginary creation, the meaning is almost inverted: the representation of the map is all that exists because the details have not yet been created; but that howling void will, like any vacuum, suck you down into it, providing a lattice on which all the detail of a world can spill out.

I’ll let Mr. Stevenson have the final word here:

I have said the map was most of the plot. I might almost say it was the whole… It is, perhaps, not often that a map figures so largely in a tale, yet it is always important… It is my contention — my superstition, if you like — that who is faithful to his map, and consults it, and draws from it inspiration, daily and hourly, gains positive support, and not mere negative immunity from accident. The tale has a root there; it grows in that soil; it has a spine of its own behind the words. Better if the country by real, and he has walked every foot of it and knows every milestone. But even with imaginary places, he will do well in the beginning to provide a map; as he studies it, relations will appear that he had not thought upon; he will discover obvious, though unsuspected, shortcuts and footprints for his messengers; and even when the map is not all the plot, as it was in Treasure Island, it will be found to be a mine of suggestion.

Go to Part 1

As we’ve previously discussed, the core structure of this section of the campaign are the faction missions. Although each faction has a different set of missions, they all follow the same formula:

• Three faction missions in Ank’Harel, followed by three missions in Cael Morrow.
• During the second faction mission, the PCs’ loyalty to their faction will be tested. If they fail, they’ll be booted from the faction and “need” to find another faction to join and do faction missions for.
• The sixth mission is “enter the Netherdeep.”

Unfortunately, these faction missions are, by far, the weakest part of the campaign. They’re plagued by a cluster of problems.

First, there’s the scale mismatch between the design of the faction missions and the design of Cael Morrow. (We’ve already solved this with our pointcrawl remix of the sunken city.)

Second, although the missions are structured to potentially prompt a faction-swap, there’s no clear way for the PCs to hook up with the other factions, because the only mechanism for that is “come to Ank’Harel with a researcher, “ which obviously doesn’t work after you’re already in Ank’Harel.

We’ve made a fair degree of progress on this by making the faction-based play more explicit in Bazzoxan. You can further capitalize on this by perpetuating their relationships with all three researchers: Question, Prolix, and Aloysia shouldn’t just vanish when the action moves to Ank’Harel. Even if the PCs ended up killing one of the researchers in Bazzoxan, how do the researcher’s friends and faction feel about that?

You can also leverage the Rivals here, particularly if they’ve joined one of the other factions. Whether the PCs split from their faction or not, the Rivals may approach and try to convert them to the choice they’ve made. (If the Rivals have been more closely allied to the PCs’ and their faction, then perhaps they fail a loyalty test or are successfully suborned by another faction.)

More than anything, simply establishing the factions and their agendas clearly before the PCs ever get to Ank’Harel will do a lot here. It will empower the PCs to proactively figure out how to contact other factions if the need arises.

The third problem is that the faction missions are extremely simplistic. Their barebones design is often very reminiscent of the similarly minimalist faction missions in Dragon Heist, but whereas the faction missions in Dragon Heist are B-plots that serve as contrapuntal beats to the main action, the Netherdeep faction missions are meant to be the backbone driving the campaign to its ultimate conclusion. It’s really not where you want threadbare, desultory material.

And the final problem with the faction missions is that most of them are just plain bad.

FIXING THE FACTION MISSIONS

To explain what I mean, consider “Hunt for the Truth” (p. 100), where the PCs are trying to identify a double agent in the Allegiance of All-Sight who they believe planted a stolen ring on their friend. They find two pieces of evidence:

1. An Insight check reveals that someone has a “guarded expression.”
2. This same person, a researcher in the ruidium-infested ruins of Cael Morrow, has a ruidium infection.

The adventure is then over, as the characters can “present their findings to Headmaster Gryz Alakritos.” But… what findings, exactly?

In the next faction mission, “The Double Agent,” the PCs need to track down a double agent and the PCs find two pieces of evidence:

1. An Insight check reveals the agent’s “true intentions and affiliation.”
2. This same person, a researcher in the ruidium-infested ruins of Cael Morrow, has a ruidium infection.

And if you feel as if the Matrix just glitched, I’m sorry to report that this is not the case: It’s the exact same set up, and the conclusion both times is, “Proof?! Sir, I made an INSIGHT check!”

There are eighteen faction missions in Call of the Netherdeep and I’m not going to break them all down. But you should definitely take a long, hard look at them. I don’t think there are any of the faction missions I would run as-is, and this whole section of the campaign probably needs to be torn down to the foundation, sifted for parts, and then rebuilt from the ground up.

DYNAMIC FACTION MISSIONS

My first instinct with the faction missions is to make them far more dynamic: Rather than a preprogrammed, linear series of fetch quests against a static backdrop, it would be far more interesting if the players’ actions were drastically shifting the balance of power in a back-and-forth struggle with the other factions.

A few things to think about:

Proactive Faction Encounters. Prep some strike teams and/or other proactive elements for the factions. These can become very versatile tools, which you can drop in at any time to complicate the PCs’ lives and create a sense that all of the factions are in constant motion.

Rival Activity. Invoke the Rivals. If you’re following the Principle of Opposition, then even if the Rivals have been working with the PCs up until this point, Ank’Harel will be the point where their disagreement with the PCs about what their goals should be (regarding Alyxian, the ruidium, or both) should really escalate. If it hasn’t happened already, this probably means that the Rivals will end up joining a different faction, becoming one of your proactive faction encounters and almost certainly the NPCs most likely to thwart the PCs’ faction goals.

You can add even more complexity to this idea if friendly Rivals reluctantly join the same faction as the PCs to begin with, but later heel turn as they realize they can’t support the faction’s goals. Alternatively, maybe the Rivals themselves are divided and will end up splitting up across multiple factions. (Maybe the PCs will, too!)

Tip: If you find your game riven with deep philosophical differences about what the “right” thing to do in this section of the campaign is… that’s fantastic! If the divisions between PCs become so great that it feels as if they’re only sticking together because it’s expected, you might explore the possibility of similarly splitting the Rivals and letting players whose characters leave a faction take on the roles of Rivals who stay in the faction. (At your discretion, you can do the inverse with the grouping of PCs + Rivals who join a different faction, following both groups while allowing everyone to continue playing.)

The Other Faction Face. If the PCs are in one faction and the Rivals are in another, it’s possible the third faction will just become a minor player in the campaign. Alternatively, you can give that faction a notable NPC who frequently interacts with the PCs and becomes the “face” of that faction. The appropriate Bazzoxan researcher is probably an easy choice here if they’re available.

Competing for Goals. In framing your faction missions, don’t think only in terms of “what are the PCs trying to do.” Instead, think in terms of something that multiple factions are trying to simultaneously achieve. Once you’ve done that, you can put the opposition in the field and actively play them in competition with the PCs.

Progress clocks may be a good mechanism for tracking how each faction (including the PCs) are doing in the pursuit of their goals. Countdown timers can be used to similar effect (e.g., the PCs need to recover a ruidium artifact before the thieves use it). You may also want to take a peek at scenario structures like Race to the Prize or McGuffin Keep-Away.

You can also increase the dynamic quality of the missions by putting multiple goals into play at the same time. This immediately adds interest by forcing the PCs to choose what goals they’re going to prioritize.

Tip: As you’re looking to strip-mine the faction missions from the book, make sure to look at the faction missions being pursued by the other factions and ask questions like, “What would it look like if the PCs were trying to STOP this from happening?” Also think about how these might flow into the background events of the campaign and how the PCs might become aware of them, creating the sense (and reality!) that stuff is happening in the campaign world even when the players aren’t there to see it.

ANK’HAREL MISSIONS: STAKES & REVELATIONS

The two-phase approach used by the book — of a set of missions taking place in Ank’Harel and then a set of missions focused on Cael Morrow — is probably a good one to retain.

This first phase of the faction missions is about:

• Learning new lore and/or reinforcing or expanding lore they’ve already had a chance to obtain. (This includes stuff like additional Alyxian lore, along with: Where is the ruidium coming from? Where is the entrance to Cael Morrow? What are the goals of the various factions?)
• Testing the PCs’ loyalty to their faction / determining what faction (and goals) they’re ultimately going to pursue.
• Gaining entrance to Cael Morrow.

You’ll want to start by setting up your revelation lists for this phase, and then you can just break the clues down into the missions opportunistically.

During play, seize opportunities to challenge the PCs’ ideology and the goals they’ve chosen. This can take the form of philosophical debates from the Rivals, and so forth, but is also about asking the big question through action: What are you willing to do to achieve your goals? When you see the costs of achieving your goals, is that a price you’re willing to pay?

In terms of gaining entrance to Cael Morrow, I see three primary approaches:

Controlling the Entrance. This is initially the Allegiance of All-Sight. If the PCs have joined the Allegiance, then they simply need to prove their loyalty/value in order to get an access badge. If the PCs are a member of a different faction, then viable entrance strategies would include (a) seizing control of the entrance and/or (b) forming an alliance with the faction who DOES control the entrance (most likely due to some sort of “enemy of my enemy” thing).

Even if the PCs aren’t challenging control of the entrance, consider having one of the other factions do it. (This can also occur during the Cael Morrow phase of the faction missions.)

Sneaking In. I suspect framing this as a straight-up heist scenario is probably the most powerful way to go. One interesting twist on the typical heist scenario here is that it would probably be beneficial for the PCs to figure out a way of accessing Cael Morrow that can be used repeatedly (where a typical heist usually only requires a single break-in).

Find an Alternative Entrance. In the book, the only known entrance to Cael Morrow is through the Maw of Cael Morrow. But it’s a giant underground cave. It’s quite possible that there are other entrances, perhaps leading to daring heist or McGuffin-chase as factions try to get their hands on a journal or map. Or maybe the PCs stumble across the entrance while investigating an anomalous surface outcropping of ruidium.

Note that you can also mix and match here: Maybe the PCs need to sneak in, because they’ve found lore indicating the location of a secret exit from the ruins (and so they need to be in the ruins to track it down and figure out where it leads to on the surface). Or they need to sneak in and install some sort of ruidium-charged teleportation circle so that their faction can teleport into the sunken city.

CAEL MORROW MISSIONS: TERRITORIAL CONTROL

Once the PCs are in Cael Morrow, their mission agendas will include stuff like:

• Epsionage (spy on enemy factions, identify moles, etc.)
• Investigate a known location
• Seek a rumored location (the shrine, the rift, the aboleth’s lair, etc.)
• Retrieve an artifact (or sample of ruidium)
• Eliminate threats (killing monsters, etc.)

By expanding Cael Morrow into a pointcrawl, we’ve probably also given ourselves the breathing room to let the PCs figure out their own goals and pursue them (instead of just completing homework assignments). Think about how you can feed them:

• Information about what the other factions are doing (clues and tracks left in Cael Morrow, captured correspondence, and other such clues).
• Cross-references between pointcrawl locations (e.g., a magical map that survived the city’s fall, notes from another research team, etc.) so that the PCs can set exploration goals.

What I think will help with a lot of this and add a lot of dynamism to this phase of the campaign is adding a layer of territorial control to your pointcrawl map. This means tracking both which locations each faction currently knows about, as well as which faction is currently in “control” of each location (if any).

Faction control should have a tangible effect on the pointcrawl:

• Add a base camp to the location.
• Add a research team that’s investigating the site.
• Add a patrol that’s regularly passing through that area.
• Give the faction access to resources (ruidium, magic items, etc.) that can be gained from the location.

And so forth.

This gives a very simple hook for framing faction missions (e.g., “we need you to eliminate the Cobalt Soul’s security patrol”) and also a clear mechanism for the PCs to have a meaningful effect on the current state of affairs in Cael Morrow (e.g., they take out a security patrol and that means the Cobalt Soul loses control of a key location).

The vibe you’re aiming for here is one part Le Carre spy drama, one part magical Hunt for Red October, one part Ten Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and one part Bone Wars (but the dinosaur bones are also military weapons tech). Things should feel claustrophobic, enigmatic, and terrifying.

Go to Part 9: Netherdeep Wrap

When running a hexcrawl, the easiest option is to use a single random encounter table that applies to the entire hexcrawl. No matter the hex or circumstance, if an encounter is indicated you simply roll on your one-and-only encounter table and you’re good to go.

But it can also be well worth your efforts to prep and use specialized encounter tables. For example, you might have different encounter tables based on:

• Terrain type (forest encounters vs. mountain encounters)
• Type of travel (road encounters vs. river encounters vs. wilderness encounters)
• Time of day (night encounters vs. day encounters)
• Regional encounters (using different tables for the Old Forest vs. the Azure Fields)

These categories can also overlap with each other (or not overlap with each other) depending on how your classify your world. For example, you might have a Road Encounters table that is used in both the Old Forest and the Azure Fields, as long as the PCs are on a road. On the other hand, you might also have both an Old Forest Encounters table and an Old Forest Road Encounters table, distinct from the Azure Fields Encounters table (or tables).

WHY SPECIALIZED TABLES?

Specialized tables, as noted, increase the amount of work required to prep them and the complexity of using the tables at your table. So why bother?

Primarily, using multiple tables allow you to be more precise in describing your world.

• Wyverns only live in the mountains, so logically they should only be encountered there.
• A river-specific table would allow you to key boat-related encounters that would obviously be inappropriate on the King’s Highway.
• The shadow hounds only come out at night.
• Goblins infest the Old Forest, but fear to challenge the blue rocs of the Azure Fields.

And so forth.

This kind of detail and, crucially, distinction isn’t just about taking your worldbuilding to the next level. (Although it is.) It also creates a dynamic environment in which the players can make meaningful choices: Do you risk encountering shadow hounds by traveling at night? The risks of the Old Forest are different from the Azure Fields, where are you going to explore? And so forth.

Playtest Tip: The corollary here is that the PCs should be able to learn the details of your encounter tables. Not only can you use your encounter tables to seed your rumor tables (e.g., “Old Pete tells you that the shadow hounds only come out at night”), you can also tap them for background events or topics of conversation when NPCs are making chit-chat.

ADVANCED RULE: VARY ENCOUNTER CHANCE

You can vary the chance of having an encounter in the same way that you can vary the encounter tables you’re rolling on. If you choose to do this, I recommend simply writing the encounter chance at the top of each encounter table for easy reference.

Design Tip: One potential drawback of varying encounter chance is that it becomes difficult to pre-roll encounters, since you can’t always be sure exactly where the PCs will be for the next encounter check(s). On the other hand, it’s a very effective way of making some regions of your campaign world more dangerous than others.

ALTERNATIVE: CHECK ALL APPLICABLE TABLES

If you care about multiple encounter factors — e.g., both region and travel type — an alternative to prepping every possible combination of factors — e.g., having both an Old Forest Road Encounters table and an Azure Fields Road Encounters table — is to make an encounter check for each applicable table.

In other words, if you’re in the Old Forest and you’re traveling on the road, then you’d roll on both the Old Forest Encounters table and the Road Encounters table. On the other hand, if you’re in the Old Forest and you’re traveling along the river, then you’d roll on both the Old Forest Encounters table and the River Encounters table.

This can obviously increase the likelihood of an encounter, so another option is to check for an encounter and then randomly determine which applicable encounter table to roll on. (For example, roll 1d6. On 1-4 check the region encounter table; on 5-6 check the method of travel encounter table.)

On the other hand, checking multiple tables can be a great way of generating simultaneous encounters, allowing you to combine them in myriad ways (as described in Part 5: Encounters).

DESIGN NOTE: SINGLE HEX ENCOUNTER TABLES

Once you start designing region-based encounter tables into your hexcrawls, a common trap is to get a little too specific. While you certainly can drill your specialized encounter tables down to a specific hex (or perhaps a few hexes), you’ll almost never want to do this because the value-to-prep ratio isn’t great.

For example, imagine that you create six hex-specific random encounters. Well… how many times are the PCs likely to have a random encounter in that specific hex? And are those random encounters really so specific to that hex that they couldn’t be included in a larger regional table?

If the answer to that last question is, “No,” then the most likely reason is because the encounters are associated to a location within the hex (e.g., there’s a specific troll who sometimes charges a toll on this specific bridge). But an encounter that’s so tightly associated with a specific location is just a detail of the location, not a random encounter.

There can easily be exceptions to this. For example, maybe only in this specific hex will one encounter the weird abominations created by the genetic magic Alburturan, which have escaped or been set loose near his tower. It can totally make sense to have an Alburturan Abominations table that only applies in this very specific area. (And maybe you could find some other use for that table in the tower itself, thereby increasing its prep value?)

The point is that, if you’re tempted to do this, double check to make sure it’s really necessary.

Another option to consider is that special features like Alburturan’s abominations might be hex features separate from the random encounter system. (You can find another example of this in the original 1974 edition of D&D, which included a separate check to determine whether or not the owner of a stronghold will “ride forth” to meet any PCs passing through the stronghold’s hex.)

DESIGN NOTE: FOLLOW YOUR PLAYERS

To return to the beginning, the easiest way to handle random encounters in your hexcrawl is with a single encounter table.

In fact, if you’re designing your first hexcrawl, I highly recommend doing exactly that.

As you’re running your hexcrawl, though, pay attention to where the PCs go and what they’re interested in: Are they spending a lot of time in the Old Forest? Are they asking a lot of questions about the Azure Fields? Then you might consider defining those regions and creating specialized encounter tables for them.

This doesn’t mean that you also need to immediately create encounter tables for every other region on your hexmap! You can just continue using your general Random Encounters table for all those other areas. Add complexity over time and let your players and actual play guide your focus to where your efforts will be best rewarded.

If you’re looking for an intermediary step, consider adding a “Regional Encounter” entry on your general Random Encounters table. You can then key a single appropriate encounter (or, alternatively, a smaller 1d4 or 1d6 table) to each region, which will be triggered when you roll that Regional Encounter on the general table. This can, of course, also serve as the seed for a full regional encounter table when the time comes.

Back to Hexcrawls

Go to Part 1

The next stage of Call of the Netherdeep are the faction missions: Each faction has a series of six missions which start in Ank’harel, take the PCs into the sunken city of Cael Morrow, and eventually lead them into the Netherdeep. But we’re going to skip ahead to Cael Morrow itself, because — as the setting for half of the faction missions — we really need to get it straightened out before we can meaningfully work on the missions.

(Ank’harel itself is just fine, except for the fact that locations weren’t keyed to the map for some reason. So you’ll want to do that.)

This is, unfortunately, where your remix of the campaign is going to start getting harder. The key thing here is that:

1. Cael Morrow is a vast sunken city; but
2. The mapped section of Cael Morrow designed for the PCs to actually explore is a very, very tiny archaeological site (barely a few hundred feet across).

And the elephant in the room is that all the faction missions are written as if they were set in the entire, vast city of Cael Morrow, despite the fact that, in reality, they’re only set in the tiny, tiny archaeological site.

For example, in one mission the archaeological dig leader is concerned because one of his researchers has been missing for three days and he has no idea where she might be.

Where is she?

Two hundred feet away, straight down a linear corridor.

On a broader level, all the faction missions set in Cael Morrow are framed the same way:

Seven days after the end of their last mission, the characters are invited to meet Aradrine…

Seven days after the PCs successfully complete mission 4, Aradrine invites them…

Seven days after they successfully complete mission 5, Aradrine briefs the characters on their next assignment…

All three sets of factions are set up in the same way: The PCs do a short mission, then a full week passes, and then they’re given another mission.

But this is never going to actually happen because (a) the PCs have nothing else to do between missions and (b) the entirety of Cael Morrow consists of only seventeen keyed locations, so even if they haven’t fully explored the entire site during their first mission to the sunken city (which is quite plausible), they’ll certainly have done so before they get their next mission.

So you’ve got a couple choices here.

OPTION #1: REWRITE THE FACTION MISSIONS

The problem with Cael Morrow isn’t, necessarily, that it’s set up as a tiny archaeological expedition in the midst of a vast sunken city. The problem is that everything else in the campaign — the NPCs, the faction missions, the lore — is designed as if this wasn’t the case.

So your first option is to leave Cael Morrow more or less exactly the way it is and simply redesign the faction missions from the ground up to reflect the actual reality of the sunken city. Unfortunately, this almost certainly means more or less completely throwing out the faction missions as they exist and redoing them from scratch. (On the other hand, this may not actually be a terrible idea in any case, for reasons that we’ll discuss below.)

OPTION #2: REMIX CAEL MORROW

The other option, of course, is to do the opposite: Remix Cael Morrow so that the archaeological expedition — and the PCs’ explorations — encompass the entire sunken city. You’ll still need to make at least some tweaks to the faction missions, but you can hew much closer to the original structure of the campaign.

The trick, of course, is that you probably don’t want Cael Morrow to be a megadungeon with hundreds and hundreds of areas for the PCs to explore. (You could do that, but it would be a lot of prep, a lot of playing time, and almost certainly a huge, pace-killing distraction from the primary thrust of the campaign.)

The solution is probably an underwater pointcrawl. So let’s take a closer look at that option.

THE CAEL MORROW POINTCRAWL

If you’re unfamiliar with pointcrawls, you may want to check out the Pointcrawls series. The short version is that you’ll create a node map of locations that are connected with paths. The locations are the “points” of the pointcrawl and, during play, the PCs in a location can choose one of the paths connected to that location and follow it to another location.

The scale of a pointcrawl can vary from a local neighborhood to a small kingdom to an interstellar empire. Similarly, you key to each point can vary from a single landmark (e.g., a sunken statue) to a mini-dungeon (e.g., a small building) to a large dungeon (e.g., the Netherdeep). (Or planets or entire solar systems, although that’s probably more than we’ll need at the moment.)

Our pointmap here, obviously, would encompass the entirety of Cael Morrow. That’s the entire point of the exercise, after all. (Pun intended.) Cael Morrow was a massive metropolis, and its ruins now lie “in a vast underground cistern.” Structurally, our goals are:

• To increase the amount of time the PCs need to spend exploring Cael Morrow, so that they can’t knock the whole thing off in a single afternoon.
• Make the sunken city feel large enough that plot hooks like “somebody is lost down here, rescue them” or “an enemy faction has snuck into the city, hunt them down” make sense.
• Ideally, give the PCs the opportunity to actually explore the ruins and discover things people haven’t seen in centuries.

TRAVEL INTERVAL: The first thing we’ll want to do, therefore, is set the standard travel interval for the Cael Morrow pointcrawl to be large enough that it would take days to explore all of our keyed locations. (And, in practice, it will take even more with the PCs backtracking, getting lost, returning to base, and so forth.) Depending on exactly what your final pointmap looks like, I’d recommend at least a 1 hour as your base interval, possibly even 2 hours.

(Remember that, as needed, you can indicate that certain routes require multiple intervals.)

KEYSTONES: In Call of the Netherdeep (p. 122), the Allegiance of All-Sight has installed magical keystones which create “thick magical barriers of shimmering, light blue force around certain areas of Cael Morrow” which “have forced the water out of those areas, leaving behind dry, air-filled chambers and hallways.”

We’ll take that concept and, rather than having all the keystones create a single air-pocket, we’ll have them installed around specific buildings or small complexes that have archaeological or logistical significance to them. Each of these air-domed buildings, of course, is a location on our pointmap; and if the PCs get briefed by the Allegiance of All-Sight (or steal their survey charts) they can get access to the routes used between these locations (i.e., a chunk of the pointmap).

PATH TYPES: Off-hand, I can think of three different path types we might find in Cael Morrow.

• Keyway. The Allegiance of All-Sight may have used keystones to create traversable “roads” through the sunken city. This seems rather expensive at long distances, but would also considerably speed up travel (so they might be used to connect a few key hubs). The existence of keyways also opens up the possibility of a faction mission to either (a) install the stones necessary for a new keyway (speeding travel to a new section of the pointmap) or (b) disable one of the keyways.
• Flared. Some paths might be more clearly marked by the Allegiance. (Or, similarly, hidden signs used by other factions?) Might be cool to use some sort of bioluminescent technique.
• Sunken Paths. These just represent “standard” travel through the cold, dark waters of Cael Morrow. Unlike flared or marked paths, these might require some form of navigation check to avoid becoming lost while following them.

Having hidden paths, particularly those leading to sites which have not been discovered/identified by the factions, also seems appropriate. As the PCs push beyond the current excavations of the Allegiance, it makes sense that they’ll have to poke around the ruins.

DEEP DECONSTRUCTION

You can get started by simply grabbing the various rooms and buildings from Chapter 5 of Call of the Netherdeep and spreading them out across the ruins. (So, for example, the Allegiance Base Camp is not directly next to the Royal Guest House.)

I suspect you’ll want to flesh out your pointmap with additional locations. This doesn’t have to be a huge undertaking. Take your cue from the locations you’ve already got: New buildings don’t need to be more than one or two or a few rooms. And you can mix in a number of locations which are just singular points of interest (e.g., a statue or mural or strange artifact lying amidst the ruins).

As you’re expanding your pointcrawl, seize the opportunity to lock in more campaign lore.

You’ll want to give particular thought to the location of the Rift to the Netherdeep. My impulse is that this should basically be as far away from the Allegiance Base Camp as possible on your pointmap. The other thing to consider is: Who knows where the Rift is? The Allegiance, certainly, but is it limited to only certain members of the Allegiance or is it a secret kept by only a few? Should you add defensive measures around the Rift? (Would the PCs be asked to assist in those?)

And what about the other factions? How much do they know when the PCs first arrive in Ank’Harel? And what actions will they take (or ask the PCs to take) to find out?

Obviously the PCs can also just explore the ruins until they find the Rift for themselves. Although there will likely be those who try to stop them from doing so.

CAEL MORROW ENCOUNTER TABLE

I would recommend creating an encounter table for your pointcrawl. There are a number of cool monsters already keyed to the ruins that you can use here, but try to push your thinking beyond combat: Think weird magical effects emanating from the Netherdeep. Encounters with the Rivals. Archaeological teams moving through the ruins. And so forth.

Cael Morrow really doesn’t need to turn into a combat slog. There are strange dangers down here, of course, but keeping the focus on the enigmas of these dark depths will probably give you bigger payoffs.

ACCESSING CAEL MORROW

A final thing to consider is how difficult it should be to access Cael Morrow in the first place. In the campaign as written, a big deal is made out of the PCs needing to get an Allegiance of All Sight badge that gives them permission to access the site, but there’s no meaningful security enforcing that. (There’s like a half dozen people down there that can theoretically summon a handful of CR 1 and CR 3 security guards that the PCs can easily curb stomp.)

My gut says that it should be tougher than that, particularly since so many of the faction missions (which we’ll talk about in just a moment) are aimed at gaining access. This might include:

• Redesigning the Allegiance Base Camp to be more supportive of heist-style hijinks.
• Giving some thought to what the Allegiance’s security response will be if they detect a breach.
• Potentially adding roving security patrols within the ruins (either immediately or in response to the security response being increased).

Alternatively, maybe you go the other way and just accept that it’s trivial to access Cael Morrow and the badges just don’t matter. Maybe get rid of the badge concept entirely. Or maybe the real security perimeter is around the Netherdeep Rift.

The right answer here will almost certainly become clear to you as you start dialing in your pointcrawl and the Ank’Harel section of the campaign in general.

Go to Part 8: Faction Missions in Ank’Harel