The Haunting of Ypsilon-14 is a pamphlet adventure for the Mothership roleplaying game. It’s just two pages long and designed to fold up as a trifold pamphlet. The goal is to make this an adventure that a GM can pick up, read in about fifteen minutes, and then immediately run. In addition to the super-fast character creation and streamlined rules of Mothership, the result is an RPG that you can pick up and play as easily as you might a board game or card game.

I think the short length of the adventure can also make it a great example of how I read and use published adventures, as described at length in How to Prep a Module. I’m going to try to give you a peek into my thought process as I read through Ypsilon-14: What I’m looking for, what I’m prepping, and how I’m solving problems before they happen at the table. Even if it’s all happening in just fifteen minutes.

Although I don’t think it’s necessary, you might want to grab a copy of the adventure to follow along.

SPOILERS AHEAD!

THE HOOK

The basic concept of Ypsilon-14 is that Dr. Ethan Giovanni, while studying a mysterious “yellow goo” discovered by asteroid miners, has woken up an alien at the mining colony and now it’s killing people.

The published scenario hook for the adventure is that the PCs have come to a mining asteroid (the titular Ypsilon-14) to pick up some cargo.

This is not a bad hook. It gets the PCs where the scenario is so that they can start interacting with it. What I notice, though, is that it could very easily require some heavy-lifting in actual play to get the players invested in the action and have a clear vector for taking action. (For example, it would be pretty easy for the PCs to just stay at the docking bay and wait, forcing the GM to figure out how to bring the action to them.) The scenario hook is relying on open-ended player curiosity, which can be fine, but isn’t particularly strong.

If I was planning to run this as part of an ongoing campaign, I would look to make the hook specific to the PCs and their goals: Not generic cargo, for example, but a specific thing that the PCs need. Or maybe the PCs learn that Dr. Giovanni has information that they need, and now they’ve tracked him to Ypsilon-14.

In my case, I’m planning to run Ypsilon-14 as an open table one-shot, so the hook will need to be more generic. (Although I might look for opportunities to feed specific hooks or connections to the adventure to various PCs: For example, if someone creates a former asteroid miner, I might suggest Ypsilon-14 as a place they previously worked.)

What I will do, though, is make the generic cargo pick-up more specific: The PCs have been hired to pick up a scientific sample from Dr. Giovanni.

I do this knowing that:

• The sample they’re picking up is the extremely dangerous yellow goo, which will encourage them to interact with it.
• Giovanni, having been infected by the yellow goo, is locked up inside his ship.
• His workstation, where he accidentally woke up the alien and also where I think I’ll place the sample container the PCs are supposed to pick up, is located down in the mining tunnels.

What I’m looking at here are the vectors of the hook: Where is the hook pointing the PCs?

The vector of the original hook terminated at the Docking Bay. As you can see, though, just a slight change to the hook creates vectors that point much deeper into the adventure.

With the PCs, therefore, motivated to follow those vectors, it will be much easier for the players to get invested in the scenario. Their actions in pursuing the vector will also give me more opportunities to bring the other elements of the adventures (e.g., people going missing and alien attacks) into play as part of the natural flow of the action.

CATCHING BOOBY TRAPS

Published adventures often have booby traps: Information that’s either missing or hidden that can unexpectedly sabotage you at the table.

Sometimes these are deliberately included by designers who want the GM to read the adventure as if it were a novel: They want you to be flat-footed by their surprise ending! And, for some reason, you’ll often read mystery scenarios where you have to first solve the mystery yourself before you can run it.

More often, they’re just mistakes and oversights.

For example, in Dr. Giovanni’s workstation in the mines:

A small WORKSTATION of scientific equipment has been set up nearby. A SCANNER relays readings from the pod to the Heracles [his ship] and a SCRAP OF PAPER sits on the desk that reads “0389.”

There are two booby traps here. The milder of the two is that I don’t know what “0389” means unless I cross-reference it to a different section of the adventure.

The more significant one is the scanner relaying readings to the Heracles: First, what do the readings say? I could improvise that, but it feels pretty core to the adventure so I’d probably throw some prep on that. More significantly, these readings aren’t mentioned in the write-up for the Heracles, so if the PCs go to the Heracles first, I could very easily not realize that PCs checking the Heracles’ computers should notice the scanner reading being relayed.

Another booby trap can be found with the crew listings. The adventure includes a great reference for the CHARACTERS in the adventure, listing everyone on the station. This write-up includes:

DANA. Head Driller. Stoich, professional, sullen.

KANTARO. Leader. Muscular, quiet, hasn’t bathed in a few days.

That’s all well and good. But in the adventure key for the crew quarters, we can also read:

KANTARO’S BUNK. Dana’s clothes mixed in with Kantaro’s laundry.

And you can probably immediately see the problem: Kantaro is in a relationship with Dana (or he’s a huge creep. But because that essential information isn’t included in the character write-ups, you could very easily end up roleplaying Dana and/or Kantaro earlier in the adventure without realizing they’re in a relationship and end up creating a continuity issue that booby traps you later.

This kind of “essential information missing from a section of the adventure that presents itself as a comprehensive reference” is a surprisingly common booby trap. Obviously, though, it can be cleared up if you just keep an eye open for booby traps while reading the adventure and make a quick note in, for example, their character write-ups.

INFORMATION FLOW

I also like to identify the essential information in a scenario, make sure I understand how the players will get that information, and improve this process where I can.

In the case of Ypsilon-14, there seems to be three key pieces of information that should be established at the beginning of the scenario:

• A miner named Mike is missing.
• Ethan Giovanni is a scientist who’s doing research onsite.
• The cast of characters — nine miners + a cat named Prince.

There doesn’t need to be a single, definitive vector for any of this information, and just having the mental list of what’s essential will go a long way towards setting you up for success at the table. But I’m not above giving myself a little clearer structure to work with.

First, you’ll note that I’ve already sorted Dr. Ethan Giovanni by connecting him to the scenario hook. So that’s done.

Second, in the adventure as written, Mike has been missing since last night and everybody knows it. So presumably, at some point, I can just have one of the NPCs give that information to the PCs. But what if we show instead of tell?

As written, when the PCs’ ship docks, Sonya, the team leader on Ypsilon-14, unlocks the docking bay door for them. What if, instead, Mike was supposed to be on monitoring duty? So the PCs dock, signal the mining station, and… nothing. They get no reply. You can give the players a little rope to figure out how they want to respond to that, but eventually Sonya will show up, open the door, and apologize on behalf of Mike’s dumb ass. Or, if the PCs have already hacked their way through the docking bay door by the time Sonya arrives, maybe that conversation goes a different way. Either way, “Mike was supposed to be here, where the fuck is he?” gets established through action that directly affects the PCs.

CAST OF CHARACTERS

Third, we have the cast of characters. This is essential information because (a) “Oh no! Jerome is missing now, too!” is probably more effective if the players know who Jerome is; (b) until the PCs figure out an alien is involved, this is your list of suspects; and (c) once things shift fully into survival horror mode, these are the people who need to be kept alive.

When an adventure has a large cast of characters like this, it’s vital that you don’t just introduce them all at once. It’s literally impossible for the players to process an info dump like that: They’ll never be able to remember their names, differentiate them as individuals, or form any meaningful relationship with them. The NPCs will just be an anonymous mob to them.

So when I see a big list of characters like this in an adventure, I’m immediately thinking about how I can split them up and sequence their introduction. In this case, my rough thoughts are:

• They meet Sonya first, as described above.
• One or two more people can come into this opening scene, probably prompting an additional discussion about the missing Mike. (Sonya: “Have you seen Mike?” “Not since last night after he broke the fucking shower.”) Maybe the cat could be in this scene and Morgan comes in looking for her?
• Throw together a quick adversary roster for everybody else.

The function of the “adversary” roster here is to just split everybody up into smaller groups and scatter them around the base. Specific groupings and locations probably won’t stick as the situation evolves, but it’ll still give me a good starting point for spreading out the introductions.

Looking at the cast list:

• It looks pretty easy to split them into On Duty and Off Duty.
• I can split the On Duty crew between those near the entrance to the mine in the Mine Tunnel and those working in the Depths.
• Off Duty crew can be split between Crew Quarters, Mess, and the Showers.

As I’m quickly spreading these characters around, I’m likely already getting ideas for how some of these scenes could be framed up. (For example, if I put Ashraf and Kantaro in the Mess, what might they be arguing about? Or is it Dana and Kantaro in there and they’re flirting with each other? Or is Dana supposed to be in her quarters, but she’s missing if you go looking for her because she’s actually shacked up with Kantaro in his quarters? If Rie is sleeping, how do they react if they get woken up? And so forth.)

If a particularly brilliant idea occurs to me here, I’ll jot it down for posterity. But I’ll usually just let these wash over me. It’s a sign that the scenario is beginning to take life in my imagination, but I’ll trust myself to find the rights answers while improvising at the table.

WRAPPING UP

On that note, the intention of a minimalist adventure like The Haunting of Ypsilon-14 is to give the GM raw material and trust them to improvise.

This is, of course, good praxis: Don’t prep stuff that you can improvise at the table.

With that being said, if you see a place where the adventure is expecting you to improvise and either (a) you’re not comfortable improvising that or (b) you see a big value add from prep, then you should finish up by prepping that stuff.

For example, Sonya has a collection of cassette tapes in her quarters and she’ll blast music from her boombox. Improvising a bunch of titles for her cassettes is the type of thing that I, personally, can get hung up on in a session, so maybe that’s something I’d want to do ahead of time. (In this specific case, that’s being balanced against my desire to keep my prep for these open table one-shots somewhere between “extremely minimal” and “none at all,” so I’ll probably end up skipping it.)

As another example, with the large cast of characters it might be useful to grab pictures for each of them that you can show to the players to help keep them all straight. Along these same lines, if you’re not feeling confident in improvising these characters from the minimalist descriptions, then maybe it’s worthwhile to spin up a universal roleplaying template for each of them.

It’s important to remember that there’s no “right” answer here: It’s about what you feel confident improvising at the table and what added material, if any, seems valuable to you.

In this case, jotting down the prep described above took about fifteen minutes. That feels about right for how I’m choosing to use this module, and I think I’ve set myself up for success at the gaming table. What and how you choose to prep will different from the choices I made, but ultimately we have the same goal!

If you’re reading this, then you’re probably more dedicated to the RPG hobby than most.

You’ve probably read the rulebook.

You’ve probably made cheat sheets to help you master the game (and to help you fake it ‘til you make it).

So you’ll likely find yourself in a position where you know more about the game’s rules than the other people you’re playing with. You might even know more than your GM!

How can you share that mastery with the table?

First, obviously, you can answer any questions that come up during play that you know the answer to. (Even just knowing where in the rulebook the answer might be found can be very useful!)

Second, let the other people at the table with you – particularly new players – know that you have experience with the game and you’d be happy to answer any questions they have.

Third, if you’ve made a rules cheat sheet for the game, share it with the rest of the group!

As you’re helping other players, remember that your goal is to help them make the choice that THEY want to make. Don’t just tell them what to do. We call that quarterbacking. If you do that, then they’re not really getting to play the game, and that’s not fun.

One way to avoid quarterbacking is to focus on helping newbies do what they want to do, but better. (For example, if they say they want to skewer an orc on their rapier, you might remind them that their Dexterous Riposte bennie lets them double their Agiltiy bonus to damage.)

Along similar lines, make sure you’re explaining the rule to them, not just telling them what to do. Your goal should be for them to learn the game so that you don’t need to keep helping them!

When the occasion does arrive for specific advice – for example, if they ask, “What do you think I should do?” – you can still avoid quarterbacking by giving them two or three options instead of just one. That way they still get to decide what their character actually does. (And sometimes, seeing those options will actually spur them to a new and creative idea that’s all their own!)

This works even better if you can also explain the positives and negatives for each choice, helping them to understand how to think about similar choices in the future. (For example, you might say, “Well, you could rush into melee and attack with your monocord. That’ll do more damage, but put you at risk for a counterattack. Or you could hang back and shoot your pistol from a distance. You’ll be safer back there, but you’ll be shooting into melee and have disadvantage on your attack roll.”)

HELPING THE GAME MASTER

Helping your GM with the rules can be a surprisingly touchy subject.

The really good GMs are going to recognize your expertise and will actively seek it out. They’ll be the ones saying things like, “Hey, Nina, do you remember how the grappling rules work?” or, “Asem, could you look up the range of a bullseye lantern?”

But you may discover that other GMs won’t be thrilled with you talking about the rules, and some can be downright hostile about it.

For some GMs this is an aesthetic preference. They want the players interacting with and thinking about the game world as if they were their characters. They don’t want them thinking about the rules.

It can also be because GMs, rightly, believe that part of their responsibility is to be an expert in the rules and to use that expertise to the benefit of the players and the game. When a player tries to correct a mistake or simply provide their own expertise, therefore, some GMs will feel like the player is implying that they’re somehow failing or even abusing their position.

A few GMs will take this even further, believing that they have ultimate authority at the table and, like a tinpot dictator, can’t have anyone questioning that authority or implying that they’re less than omniscient. (Ugh. Kind of a red flag, in my opinion.)

It’s kind of like a student correcting a teacher’s mistake. The good teachers will politely take the correction and the best teachers will actually get excited about it. But, of course, some teachers – sometimes even otherwise pretty good teachers! – just can’t handle it.

Complicating this simple picture are rules lawyers. These players have expertise in the rules, but instead of using their knowledge to help improve the game, they’ll instead selectively use the rules and even deliberately misinterpret them in order to gain personal advantages.

When it’s not outright cheating, rules lawyering skirts right up against it, and it can be particularly pernicious because rules lawyers will frequently turn every rules question into a lengthy debate that distracts and detracts from the game.

Many GMs will have had bad experiences with rules lawyers in the past, and their hostility towards players offering an opinion on the rules will often be a reaction to those bad experiences.

To avoid being a rules lawyer, when you think the GM is overlooking a rule or getting it wrong, politely offer the information you have as briefly and completely as you can. Then let the GM, with your information in hand, make their ruling and figure out what happens in the game. Whatever the outcome is, let the game roll on. If you still have a problem with how things played out, then approach the GM after the session to talk it out and make sure you can both be on the same page in future sessions.

This same advice holds in general: If you feel like the way you’re sharing your rules mastery at the table is creating friction – whether with the GM or with the other players – just have a chat with them about it between session. Explain where you’re coming from and why it’s important to you to be a positive resource, and see if you can all reach an agreement that can benefit the game and make everyone happy.

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Chaos Lorebook: Lore of the Demon Court

Its face was like the mirror nothingness. Its gaze a river of fire that touched thought but not earth.

Above all Those Who Slumber was the power of the One Who Was Born of Destruction, the Song Render, the Ender of Souls, the Dweller in Darkness. And among those who would speak his name, his name was Shallamoth Kindred – the act of desolation given life and mutilation given flesh.

And he did move with the quickness of a razor.

In the palace of the Kindred of Shallamoth, the eyes of the Galchutt are shut.

In the Temple of the Ebon Hand, the PCs discovered a cache of lore books.

These are specifically part of what I refer to as the chaos lorebooks, a collection of roughly fifty different lore books in the campaign dealing with:

• chaos cults
• chaositech
• the demon court
• servitors of the Galchutt
• the elder brood
• Wuntad’s plans for the Night of Dissolution

The root of this collection is the Book of Faceless Hate, which looks like this in my version of the lore book:

THE BOOK OF FACELESS HATE

No title marks the tattered, dark brown cover of this book. Its contents are written in a nearly illegible scrawl that could only have been born of hopeless madness. The first several pages of the book are covered in repetitions and variations of a single phrase: FACELESS HATE. (They wait in faceless hate. We shall burn in their faceless hate. The faceless hate has consumed me. And so forth…)

CHAOS: True chaos, or “deep chaos”, is a religion based on the fundamental aspects of hate, destruction, death, and dissolution. The philosophy of chaos is one of constant and endless change. It teaches that the current world is a creation of order and structure, but that it was flawed from the dawn of time due to the lack of foresight into what living sentience truly wants and need. The gods of creation – the gods of order – are untouchable and unknowable. They are aloof and uncaring, says the teaching of true chaos.

THE LORDS OF CHAOS: According to the book, the Lords of Chaos – or “Galchutt” – are gods of unimaginable power. But they are “mere servants of the true gods of change, the Demon Princes”. It is written that the Galchutt came to serve the Princes during the “War of Demons”, but while the Princes have “left this world behind”, the Galchutt still “whisper the words of chaos”.

VESTED OF THE GALCHUTT: Although they sleep, the Galchutt still exert some influence upon the world. This influence can be felt by the faithful through the “touch of chaos” and the “mark of madness”, but it can also be made manifest in one of the “Vested of the Galchutt” – powerful avatars of their dark demi-gods’ strength.

CHAOS CULTS: The book goes on to describe (but only in the vaguest of terms) many historical and/or fanciful “cults of chaos” which have risen up in veneration of either the Galchutt, the Vested of the Galchutt, or both. These cults seem to share nothing in common except, perhaps, the search for the “true path for the awakening of chaos”. The book would leave one with the impression that the history of the world has been spotted with the continual and never-ending presence of these cults – always operating in the shadows, save when bloody massacres and destruction bring them into the open.

As originally presented in Monte Cook’s Night of Dissolution (p. 93), the Book of Faceless Hate was a much more comprehensive player briefing of the entire cosmology of chaos in the Ptolus setting. I knew that I would need to create my own version of the book because I had moved Ptolus to my campaign world, and was therefore adapting this cosmology and melding it to my cosmology.

But I also knew that I wanted to make the Book of Faceless Hate more enigmatic, creating a much larger conspiracy and mystery that the PCs would need to unravel: How many cults were working with Wuntad? What were their true intentions? What was the true nature and secret history of the “gods” they worshipped?

My motivation was partly aesthetic: I just thought the chaos cults would be a lot cooler if they were drenched in mystery.

But it was also practical. Doing a big data dump to orient the players in the opening scenario of the published Night of Dissolution makes sense, because it was a mini-campaign with five scenarios, but I was planning a much larger exploration of the chaos cults that would involve a couple dozen scenarios. If I gave the players a comprehensive overview of who the cults were and everything they were doing, then the rest of the campaign would just become a rote checklist. It would be difficult to maintain a sense of narrative interest and momentum, and things would likely decay into “been there, done that.”

I also knew that if the players were forced to piece together disparate lore, slowly collecting different pieces of evidence to eagerly weave together while collecting the leads they need to continue pursuing their investigation and pasting all of it onto a literal or figurative conspiracy board, that it would get them deeply invested in the chaos cults. It would make them care.

(And when the players started holding lore book meetings and discussing the chaos cults even when we weren’t playing the game, I knew I’d pulled it off.)

DISTRIBUTING THE BOOKS

So I broke up The Book of Faceless Hate into a bunch of pieces, adapted the content to my campaign world, and reframed everything using lore book techniques so that the players would feel like they were “really” reading these strange tomes and oddly moist pages. Then I started adding even more lore books to flesh things out more, ending up with, as I mentioned, roughly fifty different books.

Okay, but what did I actually do with all of these lore books?

The short answer is that I seeded them into all the adventures in the campaign, spreading them around so that the PCs would collect them book by book.

I had about twenty chaos-related adventures where these books could be found, so this meant that many of them would be stocked with multiple lore books. Sometimes they were clustered together in a secret library; other times they would be scattered throughout the adventure.

In practice, I had even more options (and was adding even more chaos lorebooks) because most of these books weren’t unique volumes. They were books and religious scriptures. Secretive, yes, but still meant to be copied and disseminated. Thus, for example, the PCs could find a copy of The Touch of the Ebon Hand in Pythoness House in Session 22, but also, unsurprisingly, later find a bunch of them in the Temple of the Ebon Hand.

Note: And because I wasn’t worried about duplicating them, the PCs went off into an unexpected direction and I ended up adding new scenarios, I could easily reach into my stock of chaos lorebooks, grab a few, and sprinkle them around.

I was also able to add them to other scenarios, unrelated to the chaos cults, to make the entire campaign world feel like a unified whole and create the impression that the chaos cults were a pervasive, ever-present influence.

Along these same lines, I realized it was generally ideal if a cult’s primary lorebook could be found OUTSIDE the cult’s headquarters. In other words, if it was possible for the PCs to learn about a cult (setup) and then later discover where they were operating (payoff).

Consider, also, this diagram, also found in Pythoness  House in Session 22:

It depicts the symbols for a variety of chaos cults working with Wuntad, giving a default structure of:

• Who does this symbol belong to?
• It belongs to X!
• We found where X is / what X is doing!

You can see the simple progression of setups and payoffs that lead to a satisfying conclusion, and in this case we’ve complicated things through the simple expedient of having seven iterations of this progression happening simultaneously and overlapping with each other.

In actual practice, though, I muddied things up a bit more by

• including a couple symbols on the diagram that the PCs would never actually encounter in the campaign (where are they?!); and
• writing up lorebooks describing several additional chaos cults that weren’t part of Wuntad’s scheme at all (how many of them are there?!).

But I digress. Let’s get back to how the lorebooks were distributed.

What I quickly realized was that I needed a plan. You need to remember that I wasn’t prepping the entire campaign ahead of time: I had created an adventure track that indicated what the individual adventures were and how they were linked to each other, but I was prepping the keys for those adventures as they became relevant. Although I started off by simply adding whatever chaos lorebooks made sense in a particular adventure, it became clear that

• there was a bias towards some of the lorebook topics, causing them to be over-represented; and
• with so many lorebooks in play, there was a real risk that I would lose track and fail to place some of the lorebooks.

I started by putting together a simple checklist (i.e,. Have I placed this lorebook yet?), but realized I could still end up writing myself into a corner. (Where the PCs would get to the end of Act II and I would realize I still had way too many lorebooks to place and not enough adventure to place them in!) So I swapped to a spreadsheet with a list of all the lorebooks and a list of all the adventure cross-referenced.

This let me see and shape the totality of the chaos lorebooks: Where were they concentrated? Which books still needed to be placed and where could they go for best effect? Was it possible to find the book outside of the cult’s own lair?

Note: On this worksheet, I also made a point of distinguishing between which lorebooks had actually been placed – i.e., I’d keyed the adventure and they were in the adventure key—as opposed to which lorebook locations were only planned and had not yet been executed.

While doing this work, I also realized that there was a principle similar to the Three Clue Rule: Most of these lorebooks weren’t structurally essential, but they were — if I do say so myself — really cool, and I’d also put a lot of prep work into them. So for most of the books, I made a point of including them in at least three different adventures. (And if, for some reason, it wouldn’t make sense for a lorebook to be so widely disseminated, I would try to include multiple copies in the adventures where it could logically be found.)

As seen in the current session, this obviously resulted in the PCs often finding copies of chaos lorebooks that they already had. You might think this to be repetitive, pointless, or even disappointing, like a someone saying, “Aw, man… I already have this one!” when opening a pack of baseball cards. In practice, though, that really wasn’t the case.

First, the primary effect was fare more along the lines of, “Oh no… The cult has been here, too.”

Second, because it did, in fact, make diegetic sense for multiple copies of these books to exist, the presence of multiples made the world feel like a real place. It made the books “real,” rather than being a collectibles achievement in a video game.

Finally, because the campaign was being played out over months and even years of real time, the second or third encounter with a chaos lorebook would simply remind the players of what they have, often prompting them to pull out their copy of the handout and review it. Thus, the lore of the campaign was being constantly and organically reinforced until the players knew it in their bones.

Which was, of course, the point of the chaos lorebooks in the first place.

Campaign Journal: The Bloated Lords – Running the Campaign: All Your Zaug Belong to Us
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

LORE OF THE DEMON COURT
(Chaos Lorebook)

And in the darkness of his prison, the Nameless One spun the first strands of the Web of Demons. And the web was laid between and beside the world, building upon the corruption that he had laid. And so he became the Weaver.

And in the world which he had lost, there were those who felt the touch of his web. And they were like unto gods. And chief among them were the Four Princes of the Demon Court: The Nightwalker, the Blood Goddess, the Scarlet Lord, and the Bane of Fire.

THE ORDERS OF THE DEMON COURT

And in the first rank of the Demon Court there were the Princes of Chaos.

And in the second rank of the Demon Court there were the Dukes of Chaos. And their chief was Shallamoth Kindred. And among them were Bhor Kei and Dhar Rhyth and Jubilex and Kihomenethoth and Ravvan the Beast.

And in the third rank of the Demon Court, there were the servitors of the Dukes – rhodintor and zaug, carach and shaddom, vreeth and the teeming hordes of the Elder Brood.

And in the passing of the Demon Court, there were left the Vested and the Cults – the seeds of chaos.

THE SHADOW THAT NEVER SLEEPS
(Chaos Lorebook)

Above all Those Who Slumber was the power of the One Who Was Born of Destruction, the Song Render, the Ender of Souls, the Dweller in Darkness. And among those who would speak his name, his name was Shallamoth Kindred – the act of desolation given life and mutilation given flesh.

This volume is a collection of lore regarding the Galchutt known as Shallamoth Kindred. It is a mixture of texts: Some poetical, some religious, some scholastic, some bombastic.

RANK WITHIN THE HOST: The Galchutt are not given to any order or hierarchy, and yet Shallamoth Kindred is often seen as their leader. No other Galchutt has ever been known to disobey it, and one of the ancient texts cited tells that “the Dweller in Darkness shall lead the Natharl’nacna host into the heart of creation, there to deliver all unto oblivion”.

THE FORM OF MAN: Shallamoth Kindred is described as being of two forms. The first of these – the form of man – takes the shape of a tall, lithe humanoid with indistinct features. This entire form is black like the deepest part of a bottomless pit, with the exception of its dagger-shaped eyes, colored the yellow-brown of diseased teeth.

THE FORM OF SOUL: The second form – the form of soul – is that of a squirming mass of ropy tendrils surrounding a bulbous, obese, pox-covered, decaying body with a vaguely humanoid shape. In some of the grotesque illustrations contained within this volume, vestigial bat-like wings hang limply around this form.

THE SUDDENNESS OF DESTRUCTION: “And he did move with the quickness of a razor.” “And in that moment he both came and was gone, leaving a wake of black madness in his tread.” These and similar quotations attest to Shallamoth Kindred’s ability to move with blinding speed and agility. It is literally capable of being there one moment and then gone in the next.

THE FACELESS FACE: “Its face was like the mirror nothingness. Its gaze a river of fire that touched thought but not earth.” Shallamoth Kindred never displays emotion. It never grows angry and it never shows fear. It does not gloat. It does not rejoice. It is impossible to manipulate or even to reason with.

THE CITADEL WITHOUT LIGHT: “And in the palace of the Kindred of Shallamoth, the eyes of the Galchutt are shut.” This phrase stands alone in the lower left hand corner of a page otherwise covered in a strangely warped mandala. Other passages refer to this place as the Citadel Without Light, and some speak of an inner sanctum: The Tourbillion. The Vortex of the World. From this Vortex, one can “step forth into the world”.

Another fragment describes the palace as being built entirely of mirrors which sometimes reflect less than can be seen, sometimes more, and sometimes something entirely alien.

Running the Campaign: Distributing Chaos Lorebooks – Next: The Bloated Lords
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 40B: Temple of the Ebon Hand

Once set on its course, the kennel rat seemed quite certain in its path and seemed to have no desire to escape.

“For a rat it’s well-trained,” Agnarr said.

“You can’t keep it,” Tee said.

After winding through the sewers for the better part of an hour, however, the kennel rat began to wander aimlessly.

Not far away she discovered that a ten-foot-wide section of the wall was, in fact, nothing more than an illusion: She could put her hand through it as easily as insubstantial air. With a shrug of her shoulder she struck her head through: The illusion was not particularly thick and she found herself looking up an empty, ramping hall of well-constructed stone…

When I talk about designing node-based campaigns, which is primarily how Act II of In the Shadow of the Spire is designed, I’m sometimes asked how I know where one scenario “ends” and another scenario “begins.”

To quickly bring you up to speed if you’re not familiar with node-based scenario design, in a node-based campaign:

• You have a number scenarios, each of which can be thought of as a “node.”
• These scenarios are linked to each other by clues.
• You use the Inverted Three Clue Rule — the players should have access to at least three unused clues at any time — to make sure the connections between the scenarios between the scenarios are robust.

But what actually constitutes a “scenario”?

Sometimes this is obvious, but often it’s not, particularly because individual scenarios can also be node-based, with scenes and locations linked together by clues internal to the scenario.

You can see a good example of how this can get fuzzy in this session. You’ve got:

• the Temple of the Rat God
• the Ratmen Nest beneath the Temple of the Rat God
• a nearby sub-level connected by a medium-length tunnel
• the shivvel dens in the Warrens controlled by the Temple of the Rat God and reached via the sewer tunnels and guide rats
• the Temple of the Ebon God, also “connected” to the Temple of the Rat God via the sewer tunnels and guide rats

Should these be five different scenarios? Or should all the stuff related to the Temple of the Rat God be one scenario and the Temple of the Ebon Hand be another scenario? Or is all this stuff actually part of a larger “Chaos Cults” scenario?

In my case, none of the above. I decided the scenario breakdown would be by location, so I ended up with:

• CC01 Temple of the Rat God
• CC01A Warren Shivvel Dens
• CC02 Temple of the Ebon Hand

(Note that I’ve grouped the alphanumeric codes for CC01 and CC01A together because they’re run by the Cult of the Rat God. Although I consider them separate scenarios, this keeps related material grouped together in my notes.)

Okay, but why did I decide this was the scenario breakdown to use?

It really boils down to what’s useful. Or, to put it another way: When you’re running this material, what are you going to be actively thinking about? What information are you going to want to cross-reference and have at your fingertips? When you’re creating or prepping the material, what’s the stuff that should be built together?

Sometimes this is about immediate logistics. Sometimes it’s more about the conceptual organization that makes the most sense in your own head. Sometimes it’ll be about how people in the game world think about and organize things.

(What you largely won’t be concerned about is how the players will be thinking about this material. These notes – and the way they’re organized – is for you. It’s the experience created at the table that’s for the players, and, honestly, the less they’re seeing how your notes work, the more immersive that experience will be for them.)

In this case, for example, even though the Temple of the Rat God also controls the shivvel dens in the Warrens, it’s unlikely that anything in the shivvel dens will directly affect the situation in and around the temple on the Street of a Million Gods. (The ratlings probably aren’t going to send reinforcements, for example.) So it makes a lot more sense to completely segregate that material so that it’s not any kind of distraction at the table.

Conversely all the rat warrens beneath the Street of a Million Gods are very likely to be relevant if, for example, the PCs mount an assault on the temple. (Or, vice versa, the temple will be relevant if they enter the complex through the sewers and work their way up.) So I naturally grouped those together.

But, like I say, this is all about practicality, and the truth of that will really strike home as a campaign develops over time.

SPOILERS AHEAD!

For example, in the upcoming section of the campaign covered by Ptolus Remix: The Mrathrach Agenda, my original adventure notes were organized like this:

• NOD5 Mrathrach Machine
• NOD5A Aggah-Shan’s Catacombs
• NOD5B White House
• NOD5C Mrathrach Table Raids

All of these clearly are related to each other (the Mrathrach Machine is reached from the White House via Aggah-Shan’s Catacombs; the Mrathrach Table Raids were focused around the Mrathrach game), which is why they all have the NOD5 tag, but nothing else about this breakdown really makes sense from an objective point of view.

What you’re looking at is just a strange agglutination that emerged piece by piece from actual play: The Mrathrach Machine scenario was taken from Night of Dissolution and was one of the original cornerstones of Act II, so when it looked like the PCs were going to approach the Mrathrach Machine from “below,” it made sense to get my prep notes for the adventure done, and if they made it through that adventure and exited out the “top” of the Machine into Aggah-Shan’s catacombs, then I could get that prepped as needed.

But then the PCs didn’t’ actually go to the Mrathrach Machine, and they actually got involved in the White House via a completely different vector. (So originally those notes were part of a completely different set of adventures notes in my background events!) As part of that, it looked like the PCs were going to find the secret entrance to the catacombs and check them out, so I prepped those adventure note as NOD5A (since they were clearly linked to NOD5 Mrathrach Machine)… but then the PCs didn’t actually explore that passage, either!

Even later in the campaign they came back around to investigating Aggah-Shan, so I pulled together all my notes for the White House (which were now lying around all over the place, including my campaign status document archive), updated them for current events, and collected them in NOD5B White House.

But then the PCs, in a series of events described here, created their own special ops mission targeting Mrathrach tables across the entire city! So I prepped that as a new scenario, and assigned it code NOD5C.

Which all makes sense to me because it reflects how we played through this material, but, as I said, obviously isn’t how you’d organize this stuff if you had a master plan!

Campaign Journal: The Demon Court – Running the Campaign: Distributing Chaos Lorebooks
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index