A great post over at the Reef: The Surest Way to Become a Better Game Master.

Spoilers:

STFU AND LISTEN TO THE PLAYERS

She approaches the issue with a slew of anecdotes about games gone wrong (and also games gone right). I’ll back it up with a bit of theorycraft that I’ve mentioned here before: Your players have a pretty good idea of what they’ll find interesting and entertaining. Let them pursue the goals and plans they want to pursue and you’re far more likely to meet with success than if you try to second guess what they “really” want.

You don’t need to take on total responsibility for the game. In fact, you shouldn’t.

Also of value are the follow-ups she and her husband wrote:

How to Do This (in Practical Terms)
Why It’s Generally a Bad Idea to Say No
Answering Other Objections

As I mentioned recently in The Principles of RPG Villainy, it’s amazing how often saying “don’t railroad your players” results in people agreeing that it’s a bad idea while simultaneously trying to justify why they do it all the time.

Go to Part 1

So what we’re going to do here is take a map of Monte Cook’s Ptolus and drape a hex map over it. Then we’re going to pull existing location keys from Cook’s description of the city and we’re going to use them to key the hexes.

I’m choosing Ptolus for this exercise because the city is densely packed with existing material that’s both utilitarian (apothecaries, marketplaces, and the like) and also studded with adventuring potential. The goal is to see if simply creating an urban-themed hexcrawl will provide any insight into an urbancrawling structure.

As I’m writing this, I have absolutely no idea if this is going to work. (And perhaps a secret little hope that it will miraculously turn into a fully functional urbancrawl and solve all my problems.)

THE MAP

(click for larger image)

THE KEY

As you’re looking through this key, remember that the urbancrawl key doesn’t represent all the information that you might prep about the city. For example, you might also prep a list of shop where potions are sold. Or make a note of where the popular (and unpopular) taverns are. (These would all obviously be things that would reside within the boundaries of the hexes, but they wouldn’t be interacted with through the urbancrawl structure.)

It should also be noted that this isn’t a complete key. For example, some of these locations would need full maps along with map keys. I’m not going to bother doing that right now, though, because the primary goal of this exercise is to look at what you’re keying.

A1. ZELLATH KORY’S HOUSE: A small house serving as the homebase for a Sorn cell. (The Sorns are a decentralized assassins’ and mages’ guild.) Zellath Kory is the cell leader.

A2. CASTLE SHARD: A huge castle made from purple stone, housing a massive crystal with strange magical properties. It is ruled by Lord Zavere and Lady Rill.

A3. KADAVER’S: A secret bar for criminals hidden beneath a dilapidated manse.

A4. VLADAAM ESTATE: The noble estate of the Vladaam family. The Vladaams rule over a vast criminal network. The grounds are defended by a pack of warhounds.

B2. PYTHONESS HOUSE: A haunted castle. (Standard dungeon crawl described in the Night of Dissolution adventure.)

B3. CLOCK TOWER: A major landmark in Oldtown, the Clock Tower no longer works. A cellar below the Clock Tower leads to a very old family crypt that once lay under the manor that was built on this previous built on this spot. The crypt provides access to an underground complex known as the Buried City.

B4. SKULK ALLEY: An innocuous looking dead-end alleyway between a pair of buildings. Scrawled on the wall is the skulk symbol. Those who wait in the alley for at least half an hour are approached by Shim, a skulk willing to serve as an information broker and private detective.

B5. THE BOILING POT: A large and well-established slophouse run by a jovial fellow named Dellam Koll.

C1. WELL OF THE SHADOW EYES: A dry and disused well in a dead-end Rivergate alley. At the bottom of the well there’s a secret door leading to the underground Ravenstroke complex, a magical lair created by the wizard Aelian Fardream. It is now controlled by the Shadow Eyes, a magical clone of Fardream.

C2. CHAPEL OF ST. THESSINA: One of the many temples of Lothian found throughout the city. The chapel has been secretly taken over by the Pactlords of the Quaan (who have replaced the priests with doppelgangers and are using the upper levels for a variety of purposes).

C3. GALLOWS SQUARE: A public square where the city’s executions are held.

C4. ROGUE MOON TRADING COMPANY: A three-story building serving as the base of operations for the largest merchant company in Ptolus. (Some people call it the Star of the South Market.) Tamora Riagin runs the office here.

C5. CHON: A clothier/tailor.

D2. RED STALLION PUB: The largest, most popular alehouse in the North Market. Co-owned by Yallis Kether and Utha Aryen. At night, the Red Stallion holds contests for drinking, singing, and throwing darts. (The winners get free drinks the following night.) A former delver named Jurgen Yath can also be found there, willing to sell information about the Dungeon beneath the city.

D3. SADIE’S REST: A memorial park dedicated to Sadie of the Moors. Bron Higger is the caretaker.

D4. RAMORO’S BAKERY: Ramoro Udelis and his wife Carlatia run this South Market bakery. The house itself is old and ill-kept, but the baked goods are excellent. Ramoro’s brother, Pauthan, is a pickpocket who “works” among the bakery’s customers.

D5. THE MYSTERY PUB: A tavern known for elaborate, bizarre, and magical games and entertainments.

E1. KILLRAVEN’S TOWER: An old stone tower that leans precariously to one side and appears to be abandoned. Word on the street is that it’s actually the secret entrance to Kellris Killraven’s underground stronghold. (Killraven is attempting to establish a new crime family in Ptolus.) In reality, however, it has nothing to do with Killraven.

E2. TEMPLE OBSERVATORY OF THE WATCHER OF THE SKIES: The most distinctive portion of this temple is the cylindrical observatory with its giant telescope, used to observe significant events and omens in the skies, particularly the night sky. The temple is run by Helmut Itlestein, also known for being the head of the controversial Republican movement.

E3. GHOSTLY MINSTREL: An inn, pub, and restaurant all in one. It’s become the meeting place of choice for delvers and adventurers. The Minstrel is haunted by an actual undead bard.

E4. BLACKSTOCK PRINTING: Blackstock is one of the few businesses in the city with a functioning, large-scale movable type printing press. (Many of the city’s newssheets are printed here.) What is not widely known is that the press is controlled by six of Aelian Fardream’s clones (who were awakened from temporal stasis due to a strange magical surge several years ago).

E5. COCK PIT: An underground cockfighting arena which has grown into one of the largest illegal gambling dens in Ptolus.

F2. CATTY’S HOUSE: A small house serving as the homebase for a Sorn cell. (The Sorns are a decentralized assassins’ and mages’ guild.) Katrin “Catty” Salla is the cell leader.

F3. TEMPLE OF THE FROG: An abandoned ruin. The vile cultists who once ran this temple were driven out by adventurers six years ago.

F4. KERRIK’S: The proprietor of this bar, Kerrik Tanner, is also a contact point for the Vai assassins.

F5. WOODWORKER’S GUILDHALL: Run by Guildmaster Falen Jenn.

G1. NALL HALL: A cultural center for people from the northern wasteland of Nall or those who have descended from Nallish folk. They hold dances, feasts, and festivals to preserve their traditions – but all are welcome. (At the festival, PCs will be approached by a young woman named Sanne who is trying to find someone to look for her husband, Sebastin. Sebastin disappeared on a delving mission in the Dungeon below the city while using a map that he purchased from someone at the Red Stallion Pub.)

G2. SMOKE SHOP: The Shuul mechanists’ guild sells cutting-edge technological items here – spectacles, watches, spyglasses, magnifying lenses, goggles, precision tools, pills of various kinds, and (their newest creation) the aelectrical lantern. They also sell all manner of firearms and technological weaponry. Crimson Coil cultists have been stealing gunpowder from the shop in order to construct a huge bomb.

G3. TERREK NAL’S HOUSE: Terrek Nal was apprenticed to the mage Golathan Naddershrike. Naddershrike proved a cruel master cursed him with a monstrous appearance, Nal murdered him in rage. After the murder, Nal returned to his family home and remains there in seclusion: The right half of his body is a glaring red and pink, slick with pus and strange excretions. He emits a foul stench too powerful to cover with perfumes. The greatest, change, however, is not physical: Nal now gains sustenance from fear instead of food and drink. When driven to desperation, he ventures out of his house and terrorizes people – he doesn’t harm them, merely frightens them in order to survive. A wealthy businessman who was assaulted three days ago has put a bounty of 500 gp on the monster’s head, describing his assailant as “a twisted man-thing with melted flesh”.

G4. POTIONS AND ELIXIRS: A well-stoked alchemical supply and potion store. The sole proprietor is a half-elf sorcerer named Buele Nox.

G5. MIDDEN HEAPS: A huge trash dump backed up against the southern city wall. The merchants in charge of the heaps charge a small fee for the dumping of trash (and for a little extra won’t bother inspecting it too closely). They’ll also sell scrap and broken items for 5cp per pound. Ratmen, goblins, and even otyughs are known to make their homes amidst the towering piles.

H3. DAYKEEPER’S CHAPEL: The Daykeeper’s Chapel is charged with beginning the ringing of the dawn bells each day (the other chapels take their cue from its beginning). Sister Arsagra Callinthan also oversees a variety of charitable outreach programs into the warrens. At the moment, Sister Arsagra has offered sanctuary to a man named Kobal who is being hunted by the Pale Dogs. (Kobal has discovered that Jirraith is a doppelganger.)

H4. JIRRAITH’S LAIR: The Pale Dogs are the most prominent of the gangs in the Warrens. They’re led by a mysterious man named Jirraith who keeps his “headquarters” in the top floor of an average-looking tenement. He has no bodyguards there, but he has a trained gibbering mouther. Even his lieutenants don’t know that Jirraith is actually a doppelganger.

H5. PORPHYRY HOUSE: A vile whorehouse secretly run by naga mistresses. The whores are actually polymorphed hydra hatchlings.

I2. DOCKMASTER’S TOWER: A strangely-shaped tower that looks out across the Docks. The Dockmaster who lives within maintains all the crew and cargo manifests, inspection reports, and shipping information that pertains to any craft that enters or leaves Ptolus. In fact, an officer from each ship must check in with the Dockmaster immediately upon arrival and immediately before departure. The Dockmaster, however, is grotesquely obese and never leaves the upper level of the tower: He transfers paperwork and messages via a basket on a string outside one window. For anything more, he has a small girl named Secki (age 8) who works for him.

I3. ENNIN HEADQUARTERS: The headquarters of the Ennin slavers (who work with the Pactlords of the Quaan).

Go to Part 5: Using the Ptolus Hexmap

The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft are available in a handsomely compiled e-book from the Arkham Archivist, so there’s never been a better time to read Lovecraft’s original stories if you’ve been depriving yourself until now.

If you’re feeling ambitious and want to read all of Lovecraft, then simply reading the stories in the order that they were written is definitely the way to go: You’ll see the evolution and transition of his ideas in “real time” (so to speak) as the mythology of the Mythos grows up around you. I, personally, find this experience fascinating because, at the beginning of his career, Lovecraft was extremely racist, virulently xenophobic, and cynically terrified of the future. At the end of his career he would certainly not be considered liberal by today’s standards, but his views on all of these subjects had radically shifted and softened. I find Lovecraft’s racism appalling, but I find the totality of his career to be hopeful and uplifting: People can learn. People can get better. People can expand their horizons.

But tackling the complete corpus of Lovecraft is definitely a major undertaking, so it’s understandable if you’d rather just sample his work. For that approach, this is the list I recommend for getting a good overview:

• The Dunwich Horror
• The Call of Cthulhu
• Shadow Over Innsmouth
• The Colour Out of Space
• Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
• At the Mountains of Madness

The order in which you read these six stories doesn’t matter much (although I’d save At the Mountains of Madness until last). But if you read all six you’ll have a pretty good sense of Lovecraft’s breadth, you’ll have experienced most of the “big ideas” that people talk about when they talk about Lovecraft, and you’ll have read a good selection of Lovecraft’s best work.

A case could be made for adding “The Shadow Out of Time” and “The Statement of Randolph Carter” to this list (the latter of which should be read before “Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” if you read both). But I, personally, don’t think they’re as good as the six stories listed above.

Go to Part 1

One of the things I talked about in the Game Structures series was the vertical integration of game structures. For example:

The hexcrawling structure delivers you to a hex keyed with a dungeon. Entering the dungeon transitions you to the dungeoncrawling structure, which delivers you to a room keyed with a hostile monster. Fighting the monster transitions you to the combat structure, which cycles until you’ve defeated the monster and returns you to the dungeoncrawling structure.

This can be crudely characterized as: “You explore the hexcrawl so that you can find dungeons. You explore dungeons so that you can find things to kill. You kill things so that you can get their treasure.” This is, obviously, a vast over-simplification. But it effectively drills down to a core structure that exemplifies the basic elements that make these scenario structures tick.

So, in a naturalistic sense, we can ask a wandering hero standing at the gates of a city, “What are you looking for?” But we could look at the same question through a structural lens and ask, “How can we vertically integrate the urbancrawl with other scenario structures?” (And what can that tell us about how we need to structure the urbancrawl itself?)

The structure “above” the urbancrawl is pretty easy to figure out: A hexcrawl brings us to the city, delivers us to the gate, and brings us right back to the question, “What are you looking for?”

Which turns our attention to the structure under the urbancrawl. And for that, let’s start by considering existing structures that we could stick in there.

URBANCRAWL TO DUNGEON

What if we treated an urbancrawl just like a hexcrawl? It delivers you to location-based adventures using a dungeoncrawl structure.

This sort of structure could work well for a Ptolus-style or Waterdeep-style “dungeon under the city” scenario, where the goal of your urbancrawling is to find new and potentially lucrative entrances to the city’s literal underworld.

But while this hypothetical structure could serve as an intriguing patina for a megadungeon campaign, it seems to be primarily interested in providing an alternative exit from the urban environment. What I’m interested in, on the other hand, is finding a structure for actual urban adventuring.

Of course, we wouldn’t necessarily need to do literal dungeons: We could deliver up vampire dens or mob houses or whatever. The mental stumbling block I run into, though, is how to reliably trigger these from simple geographic movement in an urban environment. (But it’s definitely something to keep in mind.)

URBANCRAWL TO COMBAT

What if we treated the urbancrawl just like a dungeon? You crawl into a neighborhood and it triggers a combat encounter just like entering a dungeon room.

The problem I see here is contextualizing this string of violence into something interesting. In a dungeon there is an immediate, physical contiguity which can be used to bind multiple encounters together: The goblins in area 4 are working with the other goblins that can be found in areas 5-10.

By contrast, an urbancrawl is distinct from a dungeoncrawl in that it is presenting selected elements of interest from a much larger pool of information. (As opposed to the dungeoncrawl, which generally presents everything inside the dungeon complex.)

Which isn’t to say, of course, that you couldn’t figure out a way to contextualize urbancrawl combat encounters. For example, if we key a vampire in Lowtown and a vampire in Empire Villa it wouldn’t take much imagination to assume they’re both based out of the same blood den. But since that connection is non-geographical, we would need to figure out a way to “escalate” from the ‘crawl-triggered vampire encounters to the blood den.

(This becomes necessary because movement in a city is, generally speaking, not limited.)

It strikes me that this urbancrawl-to-combat structure would probably work really well for a Dirty Harry-style cop campaign: The ‘crawl becomes your patrol, with the various encounters triggered by the ‘crawl serving as potential hooks into larger investigations.

 URBANCRAWL TO MYSTERY

Which brings us to urbancrawls triggering mystery scenarios.

A natural image to pull up here is the cop out on patrol: They walk the streets, spot something suspicious, and the investigation of a crime is triggered. For similar reasons, this might be an interesting structure to explore for a superhero campaign: The classic “Master Planner” story from Amazing Spider-Man #31-33 was triggered by Spider-Man simply spotting some burglars trying to steal atomic equipment and then following a string of clues that eventually led him to an underwater base hidden in New York’s harbor.

This sort of “walking the streets and having something mysterious bump into you” is also quite popular in classic sword and sorcery literature, however. Robert E. Howard uses it in a number of Conan stories, for example, including “Shadows in Zamboula” which opens with a quivering voice declaiming that, “Peril hides in the house of Aram Baksh!” as the titular barbarian is walking down a street.

As I mentioned earlier, however, true mystery scenarios don’t play well with a true ‘crawl structure because they’re not holographic in their goals: You can’t solve the second half of the mystery unless you’ve collected the clues from the first half. So let’s lay mysteries aside for a moment and back up a moment.

URBANCRAWL TO LOCATION

“Peril hides in the house of Aram Baskh!”

Actually, I’m drawn back to that quote. Because what’s really happening here is that Conan is being told, “There’s something interesting in the house of Aram Baksh! You should totally check it out.” (The actual character is saying “don’t go in there, it’s dangerous, other people have died”, but from a structural standpoint the hook is saying the opposite.)

So let’s remove the trappings of the “dungeon” concept and instead just deliver up “locations”. That actually sounds familiar: It’s very similar to how hexcrawls work.

So what if we treated an urbancrawl just like a hexcrawl?

If you go exploring through an urbancrawl, what types of locations does it deliver to you? How does it deliver them? Why are you looking for them?

I have no idea. So let’s make a hex map of Ptolus.

Go to Part 4: Experimental City Hexes

As I’ve mentioned before, the manuscript for Richard II: Thomas of Woodstock has seen better days. Torn pages and missing words are damaging enough, but perhaps the most devastating loss to the play is its finale: At least one full leaf is missing at the end of the play, taking with it at least 120 lines (based on the number of lines per leaf in the rest of the manuscript). It’s unlikely that we are missing more than one or two leaves, as the play is already rather long at 2,989 lines and is clearly heading towards a conclusion.

The ending of a play, of course, contains the culmination of its plot, theme, and characters. Therefore, in order to discuss or analyze Richard II: Thomas of Woodstock, one must hypothesize the nature of its ending. (If Godot shows up, Waiting for Godot looks like a very different play.) And if one is going to perform it, of course, a conclusion of some sort must be written.

It is perhaps unsurprising to discover that the hypothetical ending of the play has become a crucible for the authorship debate: Write the ending one way, and it strengthens the play’s ties to Shakespeare’s Richard II. Write it a different way and the plays become completely incompatible.

CONCLUDING THE PLOT

Much like the authorship debate itself, there are basically two possibilities for the ending of Richard II: Thomas of Woodstock:

First, the play could be viewed as a complete conflation of Richard’s reign: The cronies of Richard’s final crisis (Bushy, Bagot, Scroop, and Green) are transplanted into Richard’s first crisis (which historically featured an entirely different set of nobles). Gloucester’s death, which in real life took place between the two crises, is dramatically shifted to the culmination of the first. But instead of being resolved in a series of primarily political maneuvers, this crisis is instead resolved on the field of battle in the fashion of the second crisis.

Theoretically one could argue that this is not a prequel to Shakespeare’s Richard II, but rather supercedes it entirely: All one needs to do is provide an ending in which Richard abdicates his throne in order to complete the play’s masterful blending of every crisis in Richard’s reign into a single, unified narrative.

This theory runs into a rather significant stumbling block, however, when one notices that Henry Bolingbroke — Richard’s replacement and the future Henry IV — is conspicuously missing from the play. While it’s impossible to completely rule out a last minute revelation of the heir apparent (akin to Henry VII in Richard III or Fortinbras in Hamlet), it’s rather difficult to imagine how the play would simultaneously remove Bolingbroke’s father (the Duke of Lancaster), who has also been left rather inconveniently alive.

Thus we are forced to turn to the second possibility, in which Richard’s first deposition is carried out: Stripped of his friends and with their tyrannies revoked, Richard is allowed to keep his throne. Much like the historical record, there is a return to a sort of status quo, allowing for a relatively seamless continuity with the beginning of Richard II.

In addition to Richard’s fate, there’s the question of how the issue of Woodstock’s murder was to be resolved. It has been hypothesized that Lapoole’s entrance as a prisoner at the top of the scene must presage an ultimate revelation of Woodstock’s fate, but this isn’t necessarily true: Lapoole may merely be rounding out the crowd of Richard’s cronies who have been captured during the battle (and destined to be sentenced during the course of the scene). If the play is connected to Richard II, it’s notable that while Gloucester’s death is known at the beginning of that play, even Lancaster and York are left to speculate on the king’s guilt in the matter.

CONCLUDING THE CHARACTERS

Tying off the loose ends of the plot in R2: Woodstock is largely a matter of shuffling historical necessity and guessing which bits the author intended to include. More difficult to guess are the particular conclusions of each character’s arc, since each character — although largely drawn from the historical record — is nevertheless the unique creation of the author’s genius.

Of course, not every character in a drama is necessarily worthy of equal attention. Therefore, one needs to choose which characters are to be given the spotlight’s focus. In the case of R2: Woodstock, my best guess is that this focus belongs to Nimble and Tresilian (who have been the focus of the play’s B-plot), Richard (by necessity of his deposition if nothing else), and the king’s surviving uncles (partly as a continuation of Woodstock’s important legacy within he play).

As for Nimble and Tresilian, the thrust of their arc has already been initiated in Act 5, Scene 5, and is being drawn to a close when the script abruptly cuts off. It’s not difficult, therefore, to round off an ending in which the servant becomes the master (completing a cycle of class inversion found throughout the play) and Tresilian is brought to justice for his tricks in the culmination of a final trick played by Nimble.

Next we turn to Richard, who is most likely brought onstage as a captive by the Duke of York (who is conspicuously absent at the beginning of the final scene). Is he to be humbled like Tresilian? Perhaps. But if Richard is to end with his crown intact, it may make more sense to draw a contrast between his fate and that of his false judge. Let us instead suppose a Richard who, out of his need to find some strength to rely on, turns to the surety of his divine right to the throne: This harrowing experience can actually serve to strengthen and purify that belief, already found as a subtext throughout R2: Woodstock, into the central tenet of his existence (and thus setting the stage for Richard II).

Finally we come to the dukes of York and Lancaster. Throughout the play they have largely acted in concert as “headstrong uncles to the gentle king” (as Greene describes them in 1.2), but there have also been subtle divisions drawn between their characters: The “relenting Duke of York” (2.1) being contrasted against a Lancaster who is frequently “past all patience” (1.1).

Let’s suppose that in this final scene this division between brothers is brought into the open, perhaps driven by their different responses to Woodstock’s death. Lancaster, who had already sworn to “call King Richard to a strict account” (5.3) can follow their initial inclination to its extreme and depose Richard. York, on the other hand, can learn from Woodstock’s counsel and follow his example of temperance and patience, thus turning Woodstock’s death into a final sacrifice in accordance with Woodstock’s final prayer.

(And this, too, transitions the characters naturally to the beginning of Richard II.)

CONCLUDING THE THEMES

Even moreso than with plot or character, attempting to provide a thematic conclusion for the play bears the risk of stamping it with one’s own interpretation of the drama. Thus I have chosen to walk carefully, preferring to include thematic elements without necessarily seeking to summarize or pass judgment on them.

Occasionally, however, boldness is called for. In particular, I have chosen to take up key themes of Richard II. Many of these themes have already been highlighted in Richard II: Thomas of Woodstock, but others which have not previously been present in the play are established as the transformation of one theme into another.

Thus, for example, a king who has been vain turns reflective. And whereas in the aftermath of Anne a Beame’s death Richard says of himself, “My wounds are inward, inward burn my woe.” In the face of fresher losses, we find that his woe has consumed entirely, transforming him into a hollow king.

Have I overstepped scholastic certainty? Of course. But the ending of a play should never be completely predictable. So if we limit ourselves to providing an ending which does nothing that is not already contained in the play as it exists, we would confine ourselves to an artistically and dramatically unfulfilling conclusion. In seeking to push the boundaries of the play beyond the known limitation of its final, broken page, aiming towards Richard II as lodestar provides at least some guidance where we might otherwise find ourselves stumbling blindly in the dark.

THE SCRIPT ADDENDUM

The ASR scripts of the play have been updated to include the ending as it was performed during the Complete Readings of William Shakespeare. If you’re interested in reading the new ending by itself, a separate PDF link has been included below.

Permission to use this additional material in print or production is freely granted as long as the following notice is included on either (a) the title page or cover of the printed publication or (b) the cover of the production’s program, website, and any posters, postcards, or similar advertising:

New Ending Written by Justin Alexander
https://www.thealexandrian.net

Originally Produced by the
American Shakespeare Repertory
http://www.american-shakespeare.com

RICHARD II: THOMAS OF WOODSTOCK – THE NEW ENDING

RICHARD II: THOMAS OF WOODSTOCK – FULL SCRIPT

RICHARD II: THOMAS OF WOODSTOCK – CONFLATED SCRIPT

Originally posted on September 19th, 2010.