(click here for PDF)

I’ve done several of these cheat sheets now, but for those who haven’t seen them before: I frequently prep cheat sheets for the RPGs I run. These summarize all the rules for the game — from basic action resolution to advanced combat options. It’s a great way to get a grip on a new system and, of course, it also provides a valuable resource at the table for both the GMs and the players. (For more information on the procedure I follow when prepping these cheat sheets, click here.)

This set of cheat sheets is for Kenneth Hite’s Trail of Cthulhu. I’ve talked about the GUMSHOE system in past, including what I consider to be its flaws and limitations. Have I been converted? Hmm… not exactly, but I’m not going to get into it here. (Partly because I want to let those thoughts finish baking before sharing them.) So why have I prepped a system cheat sheet for the game? Well, partly because Hite’s really good at what he does: The Stability/Sanity mechanics are fantastic (particularly the metagame methods of playing out long-term madness). And the method used to present the Mythos by treating it as a catalog of mysterious possibilities instead of an encyclopedia of cemented facts is just flat-out excellent and is possibly enough to recommend purchasing the core rulebook even if you never intend to play the game at all.

But the major reason is Eternal Lies, a mega-campaign designed for the game by Will Hindmarch, Jeff Tidball, and Jeremy Keller. My great love for The Masks of Nyarlathotep and the influence it had on my node-based approach to scenario design may be well-known to readers of the Alexandrian, and Eternal Lies, while having very little directly in common with that campaign in terms of setting or plot, manages to capture perfectly almost everything that I love about its structure while, in my opinion, improving the actual content within that structure. I’ll also be talking more about Eternal Lies at some point in the near future, but the key element here is that it’s prompted me to run an entire Trail of Cthulhu campaign and that means I need a cheat sheet.

Which means that you get a cheat sheet, too.

HOW I USE THEM

I keep a copy of the system cheat sheet behind my GM screen for quick reference and also provide copies for all of the players. Of course, I also keep at least one copy of the rulebook available, too. But my goal with the cheat sheets is to summarize all of the rules for the game. This consolidation of information eliminates book look-ups: Finding something in a half dozen or so pages is a much faster process than paging through hundreds of pages in the rulebook.

The organization of information onto each page of the cheat sheet should, hopefully, be fairly intuitive. The actual sequencing of pages is mostly arbitrary.

Page 1: The core mechanics coupled to a list of the investigative and general abilities. Being able to rapidly identify pertinent investigative abilities that might be able to pull information out of a scene is pretty much the heart and soul of the GUMSHOE system, so I put these lists front-and-center for easy reference during play.

Pages 2-3: I’m not 100% satisfied with the sequencing of information on these pages. (For example, the stuff on “Explosives” should conceptually come under “Combat Options” instead of proceeding it.) But I made some compromises to make everything fit onto two pages instead of three, and in actual play this doesn’t seem to have a significant impact on ease of reference.

Pages 4-5: Similarly, my original intention was to get all the Stability and Sanity rules on one page, but they just don’t fit. So Sanity spills over onto its own page, but fortunately the remaining space is filled up nicely with the rules for Tomes and Magic.

Page 6-7: I knew the “Explosives” table was going to be part of the cheat sheet as soon as I read it in the rulebook. (Explosives may not come up frequently, but that table is too finicky for me not to want it at my fingertips whenever it comes up in play.) I wanted the references for “Credit Rating” handy because it felt important to keep that contextualized. The page on “Firearms” got added later based on the fact that I kept reaching for it during actual play.

MAKING A GM SCREEN

These cheat sheets can also be used in conjunction with a modular, landscape-oriented GM screen (like the ones you can buy here or here).

Personally, I use a four-panel screen and use reverse-duplex printing in order to create sheets that I can tape together and “flip up” to reveal additional information behind them. My Trail of Cthulhu screen currently looks like this:

• Page 1: Basic Mechanics (Credit Rating/Explosives printed on the opposite side, Firearms behind it).
• Page 2: Basic Combat (with Physical Injury/Recovery/Other Danggers behind it).
• Page 3: Stability
• Page 4: Sanity/Tomes/Magic

I hope you find them useful!

After the review I wrote, several people have asked me whether I’ll be doing a remix of Hoard of the Dragon Queen to “fix” it the same way that I did for Keep on the Shadowfell.

Short answer: Nope.

Why? Because nothing about Hoard of the Dragon Queen made me want to run it. Which means I’m not going to run it. Which means that I’m not going to put the necessary effort into revamping it.

With that being said, while discussing the campaign over the past few days I have had a few thoughts about the approach I would take to remixing the campaign if I were going to do it.

NODE-BASED DESIGN

As I mentioned in my original review, the basic back story of Hoard of the Dragon Queen kinda screams out for a node-based design: Multiple factions of a cult simultaneously pursuing multiple artifacts should lend itself pretty much instantly to the PCs being able to choose which threats they want to prioritize.

One thing to consider, however,  is that D&D characters increase in power level over time, so you can’t just have a wide open playing field without risking either crippling difficulty at the beginning of the campaign and/or push-overs at the end of the campaign. With that being said, my understanding of 5E is that the “bounded accuracy” design is specifically meant to increase the range of tolerance for this sort of thing and pre-4E had at least a 3-4 level range of tolerance.

So what you need to do is design around funnels that refocus the investigation. (Or, alternatively, layer cakes while accepting that occasionally the PCs will backtrack and roll over some easier material.)

Having a bulkier initiating node that the PCs can gain a couple of levels during also makes sense (to take the edge of fragility off their characters). So it makes sense to keep the general idea of “siege on Greenest, followed by investigations at the cult camp.” In the camp you’d want to seed clues to three different nodes:

• Leads to wherever they’re transporting the stuff.
• An envoy from another faction of the cult.
• Reports from agents who are currently spying on a third faction of the cult (that somehow threatens this faction’s interests).

This 1st Funnel is primarily focused on figuring out what the cult’s true agenda is. The second prong of clues within the scenarios of this funnel, therefore, would show their fascination with Tiamat, hint that they’re looking for Tiamat-themed artifacts, and also reveal the “five-headed” structure of the cult. The first prong is the structural branch in which clues point them to the conclusion of the 1st Funnel: An “all-faction” meeting of the cult. At this meeting, the PCs would discover (or verify) that the cult is specifically interested in the five dragon masks. Furthermore, they would get clues pointing them towards 2-4 more dragon masks. These might include:

• Ongoing expeditions being run by the cult.
• Expeditions that are about to begin. (Do the PCs sabotage the mission? Race to meet them to the site?)
• Fortresses where the cult is keeping masks they have already obtained.

And so forth. This 2nd Funnel would lead them to Tiamat’s Prison where the final ritual is being performed (or whatever). If I was invested in the idea of the cult getting all five masks and raising Tiamat, I’d probably arrange things so that the masks have already been shipping to the final site before the PCs ever arrive at the various expedition locations. Given my predilections, however, what I’d probably do is design the ritual in a way that the PCs holding a single mask won’t completely disrupt it. Maybe something like:

• Each mask allows the cult to summon one Aspect of Tiamat (i.e., a deity-infused dragon of matching color). Or maybe the ritual just involves an appropriate dragon wearing the mask and, thus, channeling a shard of Tiamat’s soul. Either way, the point is that if the PCs manage to hold onto one or more of the masks… great! They have substantially reduced (but not eliminated) the effectiveness of the plans and Tiamat’s manifestation on this plane.
• Also designing 2-3 proactive nodes of assassins or thieves or the like that the cult would send after the PCs in order to retrieve the masks they’ve “stolen”.

USING THE RAW MATERIAL

If I’m looking to preserve as much of Hoard of the Dragon Queen as possible, I’d probably look at something like this:

Node 1: This consists of Episodes 1-3 from the book.

1st Funnel:

• For tracking the looted goods, I’d use a possibly abbreviated version of Episodes 4-5 but have it conclude at the Roadhouse. (With records there pointing to the conclusion.)
• The envoy would be from the Hunting Lodge (Episode 7, with the same relationship to the Castle in the Clouds for the conclusion).
• The agents would be spying upon Castle Naerytar. (Preparations are being made to send their delegation to the conclusion.)

The conclusion of the 1st Funnel would be a meeting at the Castle in the Clouds (Episode 8).

Remember to include cross-node clues: So, for example, the Hunting Lodge is also shipping goods to the Roadhouse (providing a place where you might be able to use additional material from Episodes 4-5) and has a spy from Castle Naerytar. And so forth.

The 2nd Funnel would be a hypothetical remix of the material from Rise of Tiamat (if it proves to have anything usable upon release).

THE FIRST EPISODE

 The other thing you have to do if you’re going to run Hoard of the Dragon Queen is fix the opening scenario.

First, the hook of “you have some vague reason to be in Greenest, but when you get there you find that the town is being attacked by a dragon” is far too fragile. One option would be to drastically ramp up the importance of whatever they need to accomplish in Greenest, while also making it massively time-sensitive and also being of a nature that a dragon besieging the town doesn’t render it moot.

Nothing comes to mind that fits the bill, though, so I’m going to recommend an easier fix: The PCs are already in Greenest when the cult attacks.

The far more problematic aspect of the first episode, however, is the lengthy section with the World of Warcraft quest-giver standing atop his castle walls and ordering the PCs to venture forth over and over and over again. I suspect you could probably salvage this section of the adventure by having the players receive a complete tactical overview of the situation in town and then venturing forth once to accomplish their missions all at once. That would look something like this:

• Dragon Attack (the dragon assaults the wall shortly after the PCs arrive in the castle)
• Old Tunnel (after the PCs prove themselves against the dragon, Escobert immediately tells them about it)
• Sallying Forth (Save the Mill, Sanctuary, and Prisoners)
• Sally Port (as they return to the keep, the sally port buckles and they have to help drive the raiding parties back out)

They can then question the prisoner with Escobert and you can cut that interrogation short whenever it becomes boring by having the half-dragon champion issue his challenge.

BRINGING THE AWESOME

Pearce Shea summarizes the big problem with Hoard of the Dragon Queen eloquently at games with others:

What we learn about kobolds [in Hoard]: They are small and they like dragons. They comport themselves menacingly.

When Paizo released Rise of the Runelords they reimagined goblins with Wayne Reynolds, and Goblins lit themselves on fire by mistake, drowned in half-full barrels, feared and hated horses (horses are kind of like their dragons) and one eats a man’s face off (is eating it, through a hole in the wall, when you find it). They roast limbs for fun, carry molten tongs and try to shove adventurers into a furnace. There are optional feral goblin babies to kill (or to try to raise). They have a song (it is lame), and a druid that moves through their bramble walls as if the brambles were no obstacle at all, and a chief that rides a giant gecko. There will be a man encased in glass, an aasimar becoming a demon, a barghest, seduction, romance, betrayal, two patricides, a boat hunt, family squabbles, rangers giving reports about goblin activity, flirting, grave robbing, lost mega weapon-type defense systems, ancient temples and fonts of evil power, demons, a mutant goblin and an imp that imagines itself queen. That’s in 60 pages or so (the first of six chapters). Half the length of Hoard of the Dragon Queen. fuck.

So the biggest thing you’d have to do during a revamp of Hoard of the Dragon Queen is liberally inject the scenario with awesome stuff: The cult needs weird rituals. Strange Tiamat lore needs to be scrawled in living inks. Feel free to take advantage of the bassabal culture I created for kobolds in my Shadowfell remix. Yank open your fantasy spice rack and start using it liberally.

On that note: Check out the remix Hack & Slash is embarking upon.

Something I’ve noticed for years is that serialized narratives with a lot of complexity and moving parts have a tendency to bloat up: You look at the first season of a TV series or the first two dozen issues of a comic book and there’s a ton of stuff happening and a lot of progress seems to be getting made… and then a couple years later it seems like the pace of everything has slowed to a crawl and it takes three or four or five times longer for anything to happen.

Sometimes, of course, this is just because the writing has gotten sloppy: You cut some corners to make a deadline and release something that’s not as tight as you would like. You realize that nobody seems to have really cared about the sloppiness of what you released and so you give yourself permission to be a little more sloppy in the future.

But I’ve just realized that there’s something else going on here and it can be explicitly quantified.

Imagine that a given multi-episode plot thread in a TV series takes 40 minutes to resolve. Assume each episode of the series devotes 75% of its time (30 minutes) to the primary plot of the episode and 25% (10 minutes) to developing these multi-thread plots. Assume a new multi-episode plot thread gets introduced every 3 episodes and equal time is given to each one. What happens?

• EPISODE 1: Plot A +10 minutes.
• EPISODE 2: Plot A +10 minutes (20 minutes total)
• EPISODE 3: Plot A +5 minutes (25 minutes total). Plot B +5 minutes (5 minutes total).
• EPISODE 4: Plot A +5 minutes (30 minutes total). Plot B +5 minutes (10 minutes total).
• EPISODE 5: Plot A +5 minutes (35 minutes total). Plot B +5 minutes (15 minutes total).
• EPISODE 6: Plot A +5 minutes (concluded). Plot B +3 minutes (18 minutes total). Plot C +2 minutes (2 minutes total).
• EPISODE 7: Plot B +5 minutes (23 minutes total). Plot C +5 minutes (7 minutes total).
• EPISODE 8: Plot B +5 minutes (28 minutes total). Plot C +5 minutes (12 minutes total).
• EPISODE 9: Plot B +4 minutes (32 minutes total). Plot C +3 minutes (15 minutes total). Plot D +3 minutes (3 minutes total)
• EPISODE 10: Plot B +4 minutes (36 minutes total). Plot C +3 minutes (18 minutes total). Plot D +3 minutes (6 minutes total).
• EPISODE 11: Plot B +4 minutes (concluded). Plot C +3 minutes (21 minutes total). Plot D +3 minutes (9 minutes total).

In actual practice, obviously, some of these plots would be ignored for several episodes and then given more screen time when they come back. And the actual amount of time devoted to each plot would vary. But you can see what happens: Early on there’s a limited number of focal points and they rapidly accumulate the time required to resolve them. But because you’re introducing these arc-plots at a rate slightly faster than they can be resolved, the number you’re juggling gradually increases over time (which further reduces the rate at which they’re resolved).

The key thing to understand here is that the bloat isn’t the result of the writing on a series changing: The bloat was there the entire time. It just took awhile before the symptoms of the disease became noticeable.

One TV series that seemed to largely avoid this problem while also enjoying the benefits of arc-plotting was Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The technique they used seems relatively straight-forward: They limited the number of arc-plots they introduced in each season and made sure that most or all of them were resolved by the end of the season. As a result, when they launched season 6, for example, they didn’t have any more balls in the air than they did when they were launching season 3.

A few days ago my Ptolus campaign had a 100 Session Review to reorient the group as we get ready to launch into the next hundred sessions. In reviewing our campaign journals for the first hundred sessions, however, I noticed once again how much the PCs seemed to accomplish in the first dozen or so sessions of the campaign and how everything seems to take much longer in the more recent sessions. But when I drill down and actually look at any given session, it’s not that there’s less stuff happening: It’s just that there’s more balls in the air.

I don’t know if I would necessarily change anything in the current campaign. But the example set by Buffy in controlling the pace at which new arc-plots are introduced in the campaign is something I’ll be keeping in mind for the future.

Many moons ago I was talking with a guy online who claimed that, by the year 2017, computer games would exist which would allow GMs to create off the cuff in real-time just like they can currently do at the table. And I said, “Bullshit.” (For obvious reasons.) In the process of calling bullshit, however, I ended up creating an example of off-the-cuff design that would be virtually impossible to replicate in a computer game engine even with procedural content generators vastly superior to anything we have available to us today.

It’s nothing particularly spectacular, but it’s got a few touches of the fantastical that I think are rather evocative and worth sharing.

VALLEY OF THE SAPPHIRE WAVES

The Valley of the Sapphire Waves is filled with rolling fields of vibrant blue grass. Anyone standing in the waters of the valley will perceive the sun as eclipsed because Helios mourns the loss of his first wife (the Ur-Goddess of the Rivers, see hex 1).

HEX 1: The Falls of the Ur-Goddess. The 300 foot tall waterfall at the end of the valley flows up because it is the place where the Ur-Goddess of the Rivers was slain millennia ago.

HEX 2: Obelisk of Moonstone. Raised as a holy site by the Heresy Cult of the Ur-Goddess. The moonstone will heal anyone touching it at night, but under the rays of the sun it is cursed. (Anyone touching it suffers as per a bestow curse spell.)

HEX 3: The Stirge Mires. 1 in 3 chance of encounteing 1-6 stirges.

HEX 4: Goblin Moonstone Scavengers. Small tribe of goblins scavenging the moonstones scattered in rocky crevasses here.

HEX 5: Vale of the Dryad. This forestland is protected by a dryad whose spirit is bound to a treant. All the squirrels here can talk, many spontaneously forming acting troupes performing A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

HEX 6: Graveyard of the Moonstone Cults. 1 in 3 chance per turn of encountering 1-3 wights.

HEX 7: Medusa’s Vale. A medusa makes her home in the Sinkhole of Statuary.

HEX 8: Sphinx Guardians. Once a great tribe of sphinxes guarded the entrance to the valley (they were placed there by Helios), but their numbers are depleted. 1 in 3 chance of encountering a sphinx, which 75% of the time will be an undead skeleton. Remaining sphinxes will ask sun-oriented riddles before attacking.

Valley of the Sapphire Waves – Update 2023

Meh.

The primary arc of Hoard of the Dragon Queen is disappointingly linear. Disappointing because the concept is so delightfully ripe for a non-linear approach: The Cult of the Dragon has abandoned its previous plans of turning dragons into dracoliches and has allied itself with a variety of living dragons and their half-breed offspring to free Tiamat from her infernal prison. In order to do this, feuding factions within the cult are seeking out five powerful artifacts which take the form of dragon masks (one for each of Tiamat’s chromatic heads).

Five masks lost in disparate locations? Multiple cult factions simultaneously pursuing semi-compatible goals?! When I first read the background I was absolutely convinced I was about to read the D&D equivalent of Masks of Nyarlathotep and have my brain blown at the prospect of node-based scenario design being used as the introductory campaign for an entire generation of gamers.

Sadly, not to be.

Instead, the campaign is a pretty rigid “go to X, then go to Y, then go to Z” affair. Hoard of the Dragon Queen makes up for this, however, by designing most of the individual scenarios along its path in a delightfully non-linear fashion: Enemy strongholds are set up to reward frontal assaults, physical stealth, and clever infiltration. Fractious factions can be turned against each other using a variety of methods. Alliances can be forged and broken in myriad ways. Enemies surrendering and being questioned (instead of fighting bloodily to the death) is gloriously well-supported. Token guidance is even given for PCs who go wandering off the intended path on wild goose chases. And all of this goes hand-in-hand with a very utilitarian presentation which is starkly at odds with the overwritten-to-useless style which has afflicted a lot of published adventures in the last decade.

Which makes the scenarios where this liberal and refreshing approach is supplanted by a rigid railroad all the more puzzling.

This really only afflicts a couple of the scenarios, but unfortunately one of them is the first scenario and it’s laughably atrocious: There’s a lengthy sequence where the PCs are besieged in a castle (after getting railroaded into it, of course). The PCs are then supposed to go to the local duke (who basically has a yellow exclamation mark over his head) and get a quest to fight their way out of the besieged castle and accomplish some goal in the town. Then they fight their way back through the respawning kobolds on the drawbridge, return to the duke (who the adventure literally says waits for them in the same spot on the castle battlements), get their next quest, and then fight their way out again.

And if they do that two or three times, they’ll unlock a dialogue option where the duke tells them about a secret passage leading out of the castle so that they can bypass the respawning drawbridge encounter going forward.

It’s kind of astonishing that I kept reading the adventure after that.

Can I also take a moment here to point out that the campaign hook for Hoard of the Dragon Queen is absolutely ridiculous? The PCs are approaching a random town, crest a hill, and discover that it is being attacked by a dragon. Okay. That’s fine. But then the campaign assumes that the 1^st level PCs are likely, when confronted with that sight, to decide that their best course of action is to walk into the town.

(Did I mention that the dragon is also accompanied by an entire army?)

Maybe I’m just spoiled by having players who aren’t seriously brain damaged, but I literally cannot imagine a scenario in which that hook would work.

But what kills Hoard of the Dragon Queen is not its inconsistent design. Nor its occasional absurdities. Nor the plentiful continuity errors. Nor the horrific editorial shortcomings. Nor the completely inadequate maps (some of which appear to be missing entirely, some of which don’t match the text, and many of which lack keyed entries they’re supposed to have).

No. What kills Hoard of the Dragon Queen is that it’s so incredibly boring.

And I’m not talking about one of those adventures that’s just boring to read on the page. I mean that the contents of this adventure, basically from top to bottom, are generic and dull and trite and uninteresting: There is no kobold that isn’t a generic kobold. There is no bedroom that isn’t a generic bedroom. There is no swamp which isn’t a generic swamp. And there is absolutely nothing fantastical or wonderful or unique or memorable.

(The obvious rejoinder here is that a good GM could still take this material, work miracles upon it, and make it totally awesome during actual play. Of course they could. But a good GM would also know better than to use such a flat and uninspiring foundation in the first place.)

To be fair, there are a couple of exceptions to this general dullness. (Flying stolen wyverns to intercept the flying castle of a giant is the most notable one.) But for a campaign which I’m assuming will take at least 40-60 hours of table time to complete, those slim exceptions are wholly inadequate.

Which, ultimately, brings me back to the reaction I had most consistently and finally to Hoard of the Dragon Queen:

Meh.

Outside of a few truly awful sequences in the first scenario, there’s nothing here that’s really terrible. But there’s also nothing to be found between these covers to justify spending $30 on it (let alone another $30 on the essentially mandatory second volume). Most damning, however, is that Hoard of the Dragon Queen also lacks anything which will reward the countless hours of ponderous and forgettable playing time that you would languish upon it.

Grade: D

A guide to grades here at the Alexandrian.

Go to Remixing the Hoard of the Dragon Queen