During my last Twitch stream, we were taking a peek at Keeper Tips, a pocket book of collected wisdom published by Chaosium for the 40^th Anniversary of Call of Cthulhu and featuring snippets of useful advice curated from a couple dozen creators. One of the tips we looked at was:

The pineapple on the sideboard. Only put into a scene, session, or scenario what you want your players to investigate. If you put a pineapple on a sideboard in a room they enter, they will investigate it.

The point being that almost anything noteworthy or unusual that you describe in the game world will almost certainly attract the players’ attention, and if they can’t figure out why this thing exists or what it does — often because it is, in fact, just a pineapple — it will only fuel their curiosity. Beware of trivialities metamorphosizing into voracious timesinks that can swallow a session whole!

But I noted that there was, in fact, a practical purpose to which these pineapples could be put:

What if you wanted the players to get distracted?

For example, imagine that the PCs have suddenly veered right and driven off the edge of your prep. You could, of course, call for a break or end the session early, but another option would be to put a pineapple on the nearest sideboard. As the players descend upon the pineapple, vociferously debating with each other about its true meaning and purpose, you’re suddenly free behind your screen to rapidly sketch out a new dungeon level; pull together the stat blocks for a flock of Triad mooks; google blueprints for a mansion; throw together a quick ‘n dirty social event; or whatever else the occasion might call for.

Chat immediately dubbed this technique “pineappling.”

Iconoplast: Dude. I think this GM is pineappling us!

Kevin: No way, man! This has gotta be a clue!

You could even keep a small stockpile of such enigmas in your notes, ready to be deployed whenever an unexpected scene needs to be filled. (101 Curious Items could, in fact, serve such a purpose.)

OPPORTUNISTIC PINEAPPLING

Of course, as the original tip suggests, there’ll likely be plenty of pineapples in your campaign that appear out of nowhere. You’d think you’d need to put the pineapple some place conspicuous, but you can just as easily put it in a fruit bowl or store it in a pantry, and you’ll still inevitably hear a player say something like, “A pineapple is a tropical fruit and out of season! What is it doing here?” or even, “Why would you put a pineapple in a fruit bowl?”

“Because it’s fruit…?” you’ll think to yourself, but it’s too late. The obsession has begun.

And the broader tip here is to take advantage of these moments. Whether the PCs are puzzling over pineapples or debating strategy amongst themselves, learn to identify these periods of grace and shift your attention away from what the players are doing so that you can focus on other tasks:

• Review your notes.
• Check your adversary roster.
• Clear away the stat blocks and minis from the last combat.
• Put your paperwork and rulebooks back in order.
• Pre-roll some random encounters, including non-focal encounters.
• Look at your campaign status document.

Take chaos and restore it to a state of order.

But when your work is done — or if you have no such maintenance to perform — it will be time to get the players to put the pineapple down. At this point, there’s a key question to ask:

Are the players having fun with their pineapple?

If so, then more often than not, it’s fine to just let them have their fun. If possible, default to yes and see if you can find some way to give the players some small reward for their efforts. (Even if it’s just a laugh at themselves as they realize the absurdity of dissecting a pineapple.) For example… why do the Thorndikes have a pineapple in their fruit bowl out of season? Could it have been given to them as a gift by the Tharsian merchants who are trying to buy the jade lion? Maybe!

When fun threatens to become frustration — or if you can see the eyes of the non-obsessed players at the table beginning to glaze over despite their comrade’s enthusiasm — it’s time to bring things to a close. Broadly speaking, you’re looking to either provide a distraction from or a definitive conclusion to the pineapple peering.

Distractions, for example, could include:

• The PCs hear some bad guys in the hallway outside the pantry.
• If the PCs have split up, cut to the other half of the group. When you cut back, use a leading prompt to push players away from the pineapple: “Okay, let’s go back to Iconoplast. Now that you’re done examining the pineapple, what are you doing next?”
• Ask an uninvolved player what their character is doing while the pineapple is being studied. Resolve that, and then, once again, use a leading question to push the pineapple PC into a new activity.

A definitive conclusion, on the other hand, can be achieved by:

• Opportunistically identifying a skill check and then framing the outcome of the check to clearly declare that there’s nothing to be done with the pineapple. (e.g., “After several minutes of intense scrutiny, you conclude that this is, in fact, an ordinary pineapple and nothing more. What do you want to do now?”)
• Asserting a cost and seeing if they’re willing to pay it. “You’ve spent several minutes talking about this pineapple. How long are you planning to continue examining it?” If they’ve become sufficiently obsessed to pay the cost, that’s fine, just make sure you actually apply the cost. (For example, start making random monster checks. Make sure the dice are ominously loud as you roll them.)
• As mentioned before, opportunistically give them some small reward (“This is clearly a Tharsian pineapple; it couldn’t have come from any of the local farms”) and then immediately prompt them for a new action. “Okay, now what are you going to do?”

Each of these, you’ll note, features a strong pivot and prompt asking the players for what they do next. Stubborn players may nevertheless stick with the pineapple, but most will take the hint — often subconsciously doing so without ever realizing the hint was given (“What do you want to do now?” is, after all, a question they hear all the time at the table) — and move on.

When it comes to that stubborn player, however, the ultimate solution is to break the fourth wall and simply declare out of character — as the game master speaking directly to the players — that they have found everything there is to find and there is nothing more to be achieved here.

You can soften the blow by giving them some final bit of information for their efforts (again, that opportunistic reward) while saying, “And that’s all, folks!” Alternatively, you can often achieve a similar effect by asking them, after definitively establishing that they’ve learned everything they can/need to, if there’s anything else they want to do before the scene ends. (This is a little bit of psychological judo, since it puts them in the driver’s seat.)

What you want to make sure you avoid, however, is having the pineapple turn into a grenade. (Pun intended.) The most important thing here is to make sure that you’re not judging them or mocking them for their interest in the pineapple.

After all, pineapples are fun!

Go to Table of Contents

Storm King’s Thunder begins with the shattering of the Ordning by Annam. The giants, freed from their bonds by the destruction of their society and driven by a desire to claim lordship in the Ordning-yet-to-come, are suddenly more active — and more violent — than they’ve been in generations. Giant attacks run rampant across the Sword Coast and Savage Frontier.

The PCs get sucked into this morass and the question of the hour is: How can we stop it?

Logically, therefore, Storm King’s Thunder should conclude with the PCs resolving the crisis. Their actions should stop the giant attacks and restore the peace.

Oddly, however, as we discussed in Part 2B, this is not how Storm King’s Thunder ends. The book instead wraps up with the PCs rescuing Hekaton (he didn’t disappear until after the Ordning was broken) and then helping him slay the wyrm Iymrith (whose schemes also didn’t begin until after the Ordning was broken).

To complete our remix of Storm King’s Thunder, therefore, we need to conjure forth the missing ending.

THE ORDNING

In the real world, the divine right of kings was the belief that a king’s right to rule was granted by God. In practice, it was fairly circular logic: Everything in the world is the way it is due to God’s plan. Therefore, the fact that I’m in charge means that it’s God’s plan that I should be in charge. And because it’s God’s plan that I should be in charge, no one has a right to question my authority.

I’m in charge because I’m in charge. QED.

(“Hey! What about free will?” “I said no questions!”)

But what if you lived in a world where the gods were real? And you could just call them up and ask, “Who do you think should be in charge?” In fact, maybe your god is more than happy to tell you who’s in charge.

That’s the Ordning.

Annam, the god whom almost all giants worship, has decreed a divine hierarchy for giant society for more than 30,000 years. This hierarchy applied not only between the giant races (so that the cloud giants, for example, had dominion over the hill giants, but were subservient to the storm giants), but also to each individual giant.

The giants sometimes speak of this as skarra, the light of Annam:

• The light of Annam is upon him.
• Her skarra is brighter than mine.
• May the light of Annam shine on you.
• She burns with fiery skarra.

Annam’s light was a guide, a spotlight, a purpose, a blessing, and so much more.

And then the lights went out.

The result was the sort of total societal collapse you often find in failed states. Touchstones from the real world might include the dissolution of the USSR, the rise of ISIS, Rome after the assassination of Caesar, or the Communist Revolution in China.

The giants are a society now riven with strife. Paramilitary organizations struggle for power and/or survival, while the common folk desperately seek protection after aeons of having it assured. In fact, it’s not one conflict, but many different conflicts, all spilling out and affecting the other races and nations of Faerun.

Go to Part 5B: Solutions

A patron asked me to explain what I mean when I say “nonsense railroad.” (Which is something I occasionally do in reviews and online discussions.)

Let’s start by laying some groundwork.

First, in The Railroading Manifesto I defined “railroading” in an RPG as:

Railroads happen when the GM negates a player’s choice in order to enforce a preconceived outcome.

Technically, therefore, railroading can only happen at the actual game table. In practice, though, we’ll talk about “prepping a railroad” or “railroaded adventures,” by which we mean scenarios which require the PCs to make very specific choices, therefore forcing the GM to railroad the players into those choices to avoid having the scenario fall apart.

Tangentially, this is a pretty basic tip: Don’t prep what the PCs will do, because (a) that requires precognition and (b) deciding what the PCs are going to do is the players’ responsibility. Instead, prep interesting and provocative situations that create rich opportunities for the PCs to make decisions and give you, as the GM, the toys you need to actively play the world in response to those decisions.

But I digress.

Second, if you do want to design and run a railroad — (please don’t!) — then the secret to making it work even some of the time, as I describe in How a Railroad Works, is to make sure that every choice is obvious and appealing: You need the players to know what they need to do and you need them to want to do it.

A nonsense railroad is basically what you get when a railroaded adventure doesn’t do that. Instead, the actions mandated by the nonsense railroad are hidden, capricious, unlikely, and/or idiotic.

For example, imagine that the PCs are playing Triads locked in a gang war with another organized crime outfit. Then imagine an adventure in which, unprompted:

• The players have to decide that they should make peace with the rival gang at an arbitrary point in the gang war.
• The players have to propose that peace talks take place at the rival gang lord’s mansion.
• During dinner at their rivals’ mansion, one of the PCs needs to sneak away and break into the rival gang lord’s office.
• Once in the office, they need to take the time to search through all the file cabinets.
• This will not give them any information about the gang lord’s business affairs, but they will find one scrap of paper that says “something weird is happening at one of our warehouses at the docks.”
• They need to immediately leave the dinner and go down to the warehouse in order to interrupt the voodoo ritual being performed there.

And, again: All of this needs to happen unprompted. None of them are given a reason to be done, many of them are completely illogical, and quite a few are actually the opposite of motivated — they’re actively inimical to the PCs’ agenda.

This is not, bizarrely, an exaggerated example. I’ve seen much worse than this on countless occasions, including professionally published adventures. Strangely common varieties include:

• “I’ve mentioned some random object, why aren’t you stealing it?”
• “You’ve got rock solid evidence that So-and-So is guilty of the crime you’re investigating, but please don’t do anything with that evidence because the adventure will immediately break.”
• “I think we can all safely assume that the PCs will leave the pocket-sized object they’ve been sworn to protect unguarded in their hotel room while they go shopping. There’s absolutely no chance that they’ll take it with them or leave one of the PCs behind to keep an eye on it.”

And so forth.

If you’re familiar with the old computer adventure games, then you’ve likely encountered this same type of tortured logic in a different guise.

In short, a nonsense railroad is an adventure where the PCs are required to perform a predetermined sequence of specific actions, which they will certainly NOT take of their own volition because the actions make no sense, and — when they’re clumsily and overtly forced to take those actions — they will feel stupid doing so.

(Because, again, they make no sense.)

Railroads are bad and nonsense railroads are their nadir. They are overtly hostile to the players and, when published, an act of sabotage aimed at the unwitting GM.

On New Year’s Day 2023, many a brave soul embarked on an ambitious enterprise: To design one dungeon room each day, every day, for a full year!

On New Year’s Eve 2023, Dungeon Masterpiece decided to do the whole thing in ONE DAY!

Baron de Ropp invited a bunch of conspirators and collaborators to join him throughout the day, plowing through level after level of the megadungeon.

I was one of these collaborators, and you can see me join up at 4 hours and 47 minutes.

Join me on the RPGBOT.Podcast and Get Ready For Epic Sessions!

No more searching for ways to become a great Game Master! If you’ve ever wanted to unlock your potential to create unforgettable tabletop roleplaying games, then the new book So You Want to be a Game Master by ENnie Award-winning and USA Today Bestselling Author and game designer Justin Alexander is the perfect guide for you! With step-by-step tips, tricks, and strategies for running incredible sessions on any game system, this book is a must-have for aspiring Game Masters. On this episode of the RPGBOT.Podcast we talk with Justin Alexander and learn about the secrets of crafting amazing encounters, battles, and dungeons.; and find out how you can make your gaming nights even more fun and memorable!

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