DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 29C: Skirmish in the Cauldron

“Friends of that meddlesome paladin!” The minotaur turned back towards the northern passage. “Stop hiding like cowards! Attack!”

The minotaur dashed forward, quaffing a potion that caused him to suddenly blur with speed. Bunching his powerful leg muscles he leapt up onto the thick rim of the immense iron cauldron.

“They’re drinking our wealth away!” Tee cried, firing at the minotaur.

I’m a big fan of consumable magic items: Drink a potion, it’s gone. Use up the charges in a wand, it’s done. 5^th Edition D&D turning a bunch of consumable items into permanent items via recharging charges is somewhat inexplicable to me.

See, the great thing about a consumable item is that you can give it to the PCs with an almost completely clear conscience: If you give them a permanent item and it screws up game balance, then you’ve got a permanent problem. Miscalculate and give them a consumable item that’s more powerful than you thought it would be? It’s a self-correcting problem.

In fact, you can do this deliberately: Here’s an incredibly powerful item far beyond anything you’d normally be able to get your hands on. It can literally change the course of the entire campaign… but it’s only got one charge. Use it wisely.

(You’ll see some of these uber-powerful consumables show up in future sessions.)

Monte Cook’s Numenera is a game that leans in hard on consumables: A billion years in the future, cyphers are the enigmatic remnants of the mega-civilizations which lie between our own time and the neo-Renaissance of that far-flung epoch. All cyphers are consumables and the vast majority of them are one-use items. Furthermore, due to strange interactions between cyphers it’s very dangerous to carry more than a few of them, so you’re heavily motivated to use the stuff you’ve got so that you can pick up more.

It’s a fantastic mixture of lore and mechanic: The cyphers are constantly injecting a wild mixture of new abilities, keeping the game fresh and exciting.

Even when treasure hordes get larded with consumables, though, I too often see GMs ignore them during encounters. As you can see here, that’s not my philosophy: My bad guys will use their personal stockpile of consumables to best effect, which has the dual effect of (a) injecting them with unexpected abilities and (b) enraging players who are being blasted at the expense of their own reward!

But it’s a good rage: It motivates players to think strategically and strike hard to preserve “their” loot. It’s a very diegetic way of rewarding better performance with bigger rewards.

When I’ve set up an encounter, I actually enjoy rolling on some random magic item tables to generate one or two or a grab bag of consumables. It’s a great way to shake up an encounter and make it a unique experience: An elite squad of goblin commandos who suck down potions of giant strength are very different from the ones with potions of gaseous form or invisibility.

TANGENT: THEATER OF OPERATION

In Running the Campaign: Dungeon as Theater of Operations I talked about how you should stop thinking of an encounter as “belonging” to a specific room and instead start thinking of the dungeon as a holistic environment.

I mentioned that when you, as the GM, think about the dungeon this way and run encounters this way, that the players will also learn to think that way. And you can really see that in this session:

• The lamia flees from Area 11 to Area 10.
• NPC reinforcements arrive from Area 1.
• Agnarr is forced to flee down towards Area 17.
• Ranthir blocks the hallway between Area 10 and Area 17 to cut off the reinforcements.
• Later, Ranthir races up through Area 6 and into Area 3 to try to cut off the goblins’ escape.
• Missing some of them, he chases them through Area 1 and down the long hallway, while Tee also fetches up in Area 3 and takes out some of the other goblins.

This is an encounter that could have stayed locked to Area 11. Instead, it ranged across almost the entire dungeon level.

Campaign Journal: Session 30A – Running the Campaign: Cut on the Cliffhanger
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

Go to Part 1

I’ve already provided a detailed breakdown of how you can prep and run the Betrayers’ Rise dungeon to best effect in Call of the Netherdeep: Running Betrayers’ Rise. You can just check out that article to provide the spine for this section of the campaign.

But here are a few extra things to think about.

RIVALS

Where are the Rivals and what are they doing? If they aren’t working with the PCs, you might consider having them enter the dungeon after the PCs and begin exploring. (Maybe they’re there to help; maybe hinder. Maybe working with another researcher. Having the Rivals and PCs end up in a proxy fight for the researchers they’ve been independently hired by is certainly a viable option here.)

LORE OF ALYXIAN

The prayer site and even the iconography around that site are a great opportunity for injecting more Lore of Alyxian into the campaign. Take a peek through your revelation lists and see what clues you can lay down here.

TOROG’S COMMANDMENTS

As a bonus, here’s a hyper-specific tip. In Area R13, there’s a puzzle. The designers include a hint which can be accessed with a relevant check:

Hints. A character who makes a successful DC 14 Intelligence (Religion) check recalls one of Torog’s commandments: “Seek and exalt places where no light touches.” If they aren’t sure what that means, a character can guess that the darkened passages of the labyrinth are related to this commandment by making a successful DC 10 Wisdom (Insight) check.

This is okay as far as it goes, but in my experience it’s more effective to have information like this in a different room. And it turns out that there’s a statue of Torog over in Area R12:

A beam of light from above illuminates a statue in the middle of the room. The statue, made of pale marble, is shaped like a man on his knees, arms pinioned behind his back, trussed up in chains that cut into his skin. Hooks line the corners of the figure’s mouth, pulling his lips away from his teeth, and smaller barbs encircle his eyes, holding the eyelids open.

So what you can do is either (a) have the players make the DC 14 Intelligence (Religion) check in Area R12 to recall Torog’s commandment, or (b) actually just inscribe the commandment onto the statue.

The point is that it now requires the PCs to actually put information from two different areas to solve the puzzle. That’s a more satisfying experience than, “Oh, you’re struggling? Make a check and I’ll give you a hint.” And connecting information in a dungeon like this makes the dungeon more dynamic and interesting. Even having stuff just a couple rooms away makes the place feel like a total environment, rather than a sequence of isolated rooms. As a result, it also encourages exploration and strategic thinking.

Go to Part 7: Cael Morrow

Go to Part 1

As the PCs arrive in Bazzoxan, we come to what I consider the core structure of Call of the Netherdeep. It works like this:

• In Ank’harel there are three factions — the Allegiance of Allsight, the Consortium of Vermilion Dreams, and the Library of the Cobalt Soul.
• Each faction has a specific ruidium agenda regarding ruidium. (The Allegiance wants to use it to become arms dealers; the Consortium wants to monopolize it for arcane research; the Library wants it destroyed.)
• Each faction has sent a researcher to Bazzoxan — Prolix Yusaf (Allegiance), Aloysia Telfin Consortium), and Question (Library).
• The PCs should arrive in Bazzoxan and befriend a researcher (or more than one).
• The PCs will follow the researcher(s) back to Ank’harel and join a faction (or more than one, although that probably won’t remain tenable given the factions’ mutually contradictory goals).
• The PCs will then perform faction missions, which lead them to Cael Morrow and then the Netherdeep.

Conceptually, this is a very elegant structure: You can see how the PCs are allowed to make one-on-one connections with NPCs which are then used to (a) draw them across the world to another continent and (b) pull them into more complicated alliances and politics which nevertheless remain meaningful to them because of the personal connections they’ve made. And at every step of the way — researchers, factions, missions — the tripartite structure gives ample opportunity to inject the Rivals and have them challenge the PCs (both ideologically and otherwise).

In practical terms, unfortunately, someone decided to cripple this structure right out of the gate in Bazzoxan by larding it with railroads and badly preprogrammed cutscenes. There are a number of smaller head-scratchers, but there are two major culprits.

First, all three researchers are hidden behind weird cutscene-triggers. To meet Prolix, for example, the PCs need to:

• Randomly decide to check out the crematorium.
• Talk to the crematorium workers.
• Agree to help them load corpses into the furnace.

Shortly thereafter, Prolix will come rushing up.

The sequences for meeting Question and Aloysia are no less convoluted (with the trigger for the latter actually being hidden inside Question’s scene like a Matryoshka doll).

Note: All of this actually makes perfect sense if you imagine Call of the Netherdeep as a video game in which the players are expected to click on every NPC to receive their preprogrammed dialogue. Unfortunately, this is both (a) undesirable and (b) doesn’t actually work in a tabletop roleplaying game. (You can’t actually click on every single patron in the tavern until you randomly click on Question.)

Second, at the end of the Betrayers’ Rise dungeon, there’s a railroaded cutscene in which Aloysia shows up with the Rivals, attacks the PCs, and tries to steal the Jewel of Three Prayers.

This sequence is broken in so many ways that it’s actually difficult to enumerate all of them — it assumes the Rivals aren’t working with the PCs; it assumes the PCs didn’t agree to work with Aloysia when she proposed doing that earlier in the adventure; it assumes the PCs have the Jewel; etc. — but the biggest problem is that it completely breaks the core structure of the campaign.

By force-framing a scene in which Aloysia becomes a maniacal, monologuing villain, the adventure collapses the PCs’ choices: The Consortium of Vermilion Dreams has just attacked them and (possibly) robbed them. Even if they had the opportunity to join the Consortium they almost certainly wouldn’t, and it’s rather unlikely they will have the opportunity, because Aloysia is their only contact with the Consortium and she’s either their enemy or she’s dead.

(Bizarrely, the book nevertheless acts as if joining the Consortium is just as likely in Ank’harel as joining the other two factions.)

In any case, we’re going to take all of this stuff, scrunch it up in a ball, and throw it away.

PREPPING THE RESEARCHERS

Our goal, basically, is to switch everything from preprogrammed railroads and cutscenes to active play. We could honestly just wing it, but we’ll probably get better results if we create some clean prep that’s designed for flexible play at the table.

The first thing we’ll want to do is prep our three researchers — Prolix, Question, and Aloysia — using universal NPC roleplaying templates. It’ll make them a lot easier to pick up and play, while simultaneously giving us an opportunity to clearly wash away all of the nonsense and other detritus.

When designing the Key Info for each researcher consider:

• How do they point the PCs towards the Cyst of Avandra? This might be directly or through another researcher (see below), but their most immediate function is to point the PCs towards the right location in Betrayers’ Rise.
• Make sure to include their faction’s ruidium agenda. (Even if they don’t just spell everything out, you’ll want to start hinting at these dynamics… which will also get the players thinking about it and forming opinions.)
• What unique Lore of Alyxian do they have to offer? Each researcher makes an excellent vector for this (based on both what they learned in Ank’harel and what they’ve learned since coming to Betrayers’ Rise).
• What offer will they make to invite friendly/allied PCs back to Ank’harel after they’ve completed their business in Bazzoxan?

CROSS-INTERACTIONS

Next, we want to start lightly tugging the PCs into the faction politics and maybe even prompt them to start thinking about their allegiances. To do this, we’ll want to give each researcher an agenda vis-à-vis the others:

• Aloysia will attempt to eavesdrop on conversations between the PCs and other scholars. (And can be caught doing so by attentive PCs.) She might also ask the PCs to distract Prolix so that she can slip away and so something without his prying eyes.
• Prolix may tell the PCs that he’s been sent primarily to spy on Aloysia. And we can strengthen this by having Prolix ask them to break into Aloysia’s room and steal her notes.
• Question suspects that one of the other Ank’harel researchers has stolen one of his sketchbooks. She’d like the PCs to recover it.

Other options you might consider could include hiring the PCs to:

• Accompany them on an expedition into Betrayers’ Rise.
• Retrieve ruidium samples for them.
• Assassinate another researcher. (My gut says it’s probably better to limit things to light intrigue at this point, but if it feels right to ramp up the stakes and/or escalate someone into being a villain in the players’ eyes, go for it.)

Any offers that the PCs don’t take up, of course, it’s fully possible that the Rivals might do instead.

LOCATION TRIGGERS

Instead of hard-coded cutscenes, you’ll want to look for opportunities to introduce the researchers flexibly as the PCs explore Bazzoxan. You might find it useful to prep a short list of options for each researcher (but, again, avoid actually doing half-page scripts or anything like that).

Prolix might be at the crematorium. But he’s also at the inn. Or studying a sacrifice engine.

Question is at the inn. Or leaving an offering at the Wall of the Unforgotten (she’s made, and lost, friends here). Or studying carvings at Betrayers’ Rise.

Aloysia is at the inn. Or demanding soldiers from Verin to escort her into Betrayers’ Rise. Or getting a puncture wound treated at the infirmary (she was helping in the fight against the gibbering mouthers, CotN, p. 50).

Rather than keying these to the researchers, I would still jot these down as 1-2 sentence notes in each location key. When the PCs go to a particular location, you’ll have those options right at your fingertips.

CHECK OUR WORK

With everything we’ve done, we should be covered here, but treat each researcher as a revelation and make sure you’re satisfying the Three Clue Rule.

If, as we’ve previously discussed, you’ve got “look for local researchers” set up as the default action for the PCs to take when the arrive in Bazzoxan, this should largely take care of itself, as the PCs can simply ask around town and almost anyone can point them in the direction of one, two, or all three researchers. (“I actually just Question over at the Wall of the Unforgotten.”)

Of course, the researchers are also their own proactive nodes: When in doubt, or if you’ve got a researcher who has been MIA so far for some reason, just have one of them show up. You can easily justify that happening almost anywhere.

MAKE AN ENEMY

I mentioned above that befriending a researcher is an essential element in the core structure of Call of the Netherdeep. Although it’s not essential, you may find that it’s highly effective to focus on the opposite — to pay attention to which researcher(s) the PCs have made their enemy.

(And to do the same — both friends and enemies — for the Rivals.)

In fact, if you have the PCs interacting with the researchers and the researchers all have active objectives in conflict with each other, this will likely happen quite naturally. You just need to make sure that you lean into it: If the choices the PCs are making are big, meaningful choices, then the blowback from those choices should also be big and meaningful (and it should be quite difficult to walk the tightrope of somehow keeping everyone happy… or at least duped).

The beauty of it, of course, is that ANY of the researchers might end up being this enemy. Because you’re not predetermining it or forcing it, it’s the players who are responsible for the consequences.

To seal the deal, having some sort of big finale in Bazzoxan featuring a confrontation with this enemy is probably desirable. You can concoct a custom scheme for each researcher or play it by ear to see what makes the most sense, but it’s probably just fine if we draw inspiration from the book here: The enemy researcher tries to steal the Jewel from the PCs.

A few things to think about:

• Where do they do it? (This will depend, at least in part, on what the NPC knows about the PCs’ location and intentions.)
• How do they do it? (Broadly speaking you’re probably choosing between an open assault or a stealthy heist. If the latter, make sure you slather plenty of evidence around so that the PCs know exactly who did it.)
• What allies can they call upon? (The Rivals may or may not be available, but there are a lot of other NPCs in Bazzoxan. Some of the researchers have access to teleportation and might even return to Ank’harel and bring back a strike team from their faction.)
• How does the guilty party flee to Ank’harel ASAP? (Assuming they survive the attempt.)

You may discover, depending on how things play out, that it’s more natural to let the PCs travel to Ank’harel and then run this confrontation as one of their first experiences there. Nothing wrong with that. The point is, after all, to be actively playing in response to what the PCs are doing.

Go to Part 6: Betrayers’ Rise

Go to Part 1

At this point in Call of the Netherdeep, the PCs are supposed to (a) be aware of the Jewel of Three Prayers and (b) have received a vision of an unidentified prisoner who begs them for help (either directly or as a kind of psychic static if the Rivals were the ones who touched the Jewel first). Structurally, the PCs are now supposed to leave Jigow and head to Bazzoxan.

If the PCs have the Jewel, the transition works like this:

• Elder Ushru tells them he also had a vision of the same mysterious figure.
• He identifies the Jewel of Three Prayers as a Vestige of Divergence, i.e. “an enchanted relic from the time of the Calamity.”
• He tells them that they should go to Bazzoxan because “there is no place in Xhorhas where the memory of the Calamity lingers more strongly than in Bazzoxan.”

If the Rivals have the Jewel, the transition works like this:

• The PCs overhear someone saying that (a) the Jewel is worth at least 1,000 gp and (b) the Rivals have left town and are heading to Rosohna.
• ???

The idea seems to be that this will prompt the PCs to hunt down the Rivals and rob them. Although even if they do that, the campaign doesn’t really include any mechanism to then point the PCs towards Bazzoxan. So the connection here is either broken outright or outrageously fragile.

But even the first version of this hook is pretty problematic. The core problem is that the PCs are not actually given a reason to go to Bazzoxan. Yes, the “memory of the Calamity” lingers there, but that’s not actually a reason. To understand the distinction, consider the immediate follow-up question from the PCs: “And what do we do when we get there?”

If you can’t answer that question, then you don’t actually have a reason to go. This is why, when the PCs get to Bazzoxan, the book assumes they’ll just kind of wander around until they bump into the plot.

(There is, of course, a metagame reason for the players to have their characters go to Bazzoxan — the DM has mentioned a place name and is waggling their eyebrows suggestively. But (a) that’s a bad table experience and (b) doesn’t solve the underlying structural issue here.)

The other thing to ask yourself here is, “Why are the PCs even talking to Elder Ushru?” Well, because he had the vision, right?

But why did HE have the vision?

Because, in the absence of a reason to go to Bazzoxan, the adventure needs an NPC mouthpiece through which the DM can say, “You’re supposed to go to Bazzoxan.”

My rule of thumb, though, is that if I have an NPC doing something really cool (and I count receiving enigmatic visions from proto-gods on the list of really cool things), I should double-check and make sure I couldn’t design things so that the PCs get to do the really cool thing.

So let’s clean all of this up.

UNIVERSAL VISION

When anyone touches the Jewel of Three Prayers (whether it’s the PCs or the Rivals), everyone in the Emerald Grotto receives the vision of Alyxian the Apotheon.

This means that PCs and Rivals alike have a unique connection to the Apotheon and they have ALL received the campaign’s call to adventure, regardless of who actually ends up in possession of the Jewel of Three Prayers. This connection to the Apotheon, of course, can (and will!) persist through the entire campaign, drawing both PCs and Rivals inexorably towards the Netherdeep.

It also means that the vision can be used to clearly establish the bridge from Jigow to Bazzoxan. There are a couple of ways that we can do this.

EXPLICIT VISION

In the vision as written, Alyxian says:

“I am imprisoned, please help me.” […] “My name is Alyxian. I am lost in darkness. Long ago, I prayed to the Change Bringer in the heart of a temple of evil. I beg you, take my jewel and…”

The easiest fix here is to just change the vague reference to a “temple of evil” and make the call explicit:

“You must find me! You must bring the Jewel to the Cyst of Avandra within Betrayer’s Rise beneath Bazzoxan!”

This is every bit as direct as the DM waggling their eyebrows while pointing at the flashing neon sign saying, “The book says you need to go to Bazzoxan, dummies!” But, of course, it has the advantage of being diegetic: It’s the PCs, not the players, who are being given a clear instruction.

ENIGMATIC VISION

There are, however, a number of reasons why you might want the players to work for this a bit:

• I’ve previously mentioned Getting the Players to Care. One of the techniques described there is making something a mystery: the process of unraveling a secret will invest the players in the lore, and also give them a sense of accomplishment and reward when they figure it out.
• If they need to figure out what the vision meant, it will probably also focus their attention on the Jewel. (Whereas if they’re just explicitly told where to go next, they may not spend much time thinking about the Jewel at all.)
• While the PCs are taking action to figure out the Jewel and/or vision, you can use the actions they take as a vector for feeding in other Lore of Alyxian.

You can accomplish this by basically just stripping information out of the vision to dial in the desired level of enigma. For example:

“You must find me! You must bring the Jewel to the Cyst of Avandra within Betrayer’s Rise!”

… okay, but where’s Betrayer’s Rise? This is fairly easy to figure out (ask almost anybody or just look at a map of Xhorhas).

Or you can strip out even more information:

“You must find me! You must bring the Jewel to the Cyst of Avandra!”

Well, Avandra the Change Bringer is obviously well-known. But what and where is her “cyst”? The PCs now have two vectors they could pursue: The Cyst or the Jewel.

Note: I’m enigmatically referring to the Prayer Site of Avandra within Betrayer’s Rise (CotN, p. 72) as a “cyst” of good within the evil of that place.

And, of course, you can go one step further:

“You must find me! Bring my Jewel to me!”

Which would obviously leave the PCs with the Jewel as their only vector.

Regardless, your structural goal is to point the PCs in the direction of Bazzoxan. So, depending on the vectors you’ve provided, this ultimately boils down to:

• Identifying that the Cyst of Avandra lies within Betrayer’s Rise (e.g., it is said that during the time of the Calamity, Avandra blessed a site within Bazzoxan; it is described in some demonic texts as a “cyst” which blighted that temple of the Betrayers Gods).
• Discovering that the Jewel of Three Prayers is depicted on the walls of Betrayer’s Rise. (We previously looked at how this research might work when we were discussing campaign agendas; e.g., Elder Ushru tells them he saw a drawing of “this very Jewel” there when he was younger.)

Once the PCs start digging into this enigma, you may find them pursuing other lines of inquiry unrelated to the Apotheon’s vision. If so, remember once again that your goal is to point them to Bazzoxan.

For example, they might become curious about the ruidium outcroppings in the Emerald Grotto. (Identifying and researching the red crystals reveals that there are similar outcroppings in Bazzoxan.) Or they might try to do historical research into the history of the Emerald Grotto/Jigow to figure out where the hidden temple came from. (This would be an opportunity to drop some Lore of Alyxian, including perhaps a reference suggesting a connection with the “Cyst of Avandra,” which would lead them back into the research trail for the cyst.)

As you begin pointing your final vectors into Bazzoxan, it’s worth noting that the ideal hook — for reasons described in the next section — should also imply an action of “talk to the local scholars” when they get there. If the PCs had to do research themselves to get there (while still having lingering questions they want answers to), this probably follows quite naturally. But, of course, you can also make it more explicit.

WHAT ABOUT THE RIVALS?

As noted, the Rivals received the same vision the PCs did and will likely have a lot of the same questions.

If they’re working together, this might be a good opportunity to “split the party” by having the Rivals pursue one set of leads while the PCs pursue another. (This might eventually include the PCs heading to Bazzoxan while the Rivals pursue “other leads” and only join them later.) If the PCs fail to identify Bazzoxan as their goal (for whatever reason), then you can use allied Rivals to deliver the lead. Alternatively, maybe it’s the Rivals who fail to identify Bazzoxan, but still uncover some ancillary information of interest.

If they’re not, then think about how the Rivals might pursue their own research: Perhaps they journey to Rosohna to peruse the libraries of the dark elves or seek out a major temple of Avandra in Asarius in order to identify the Cyst. (If you’ve followed the Three Clue Rule and prepped multiple vectors that the PCs might follow to Bazzoxan, then you can just choose a research path they didn’t pursue and give it to the Rivals.) You might consider giving one of the Rivals a research journal summarizing their conclusions that the PCs might discover later.

In either case, it’s probably most interesting — even if the PCs and Rivals both successfully identify Bazzoxan as their next goal — for each team to collect related, non-overlapping lore in their investigations.

Go to Part 5: The Scholars of Ank’Harel