AC writes:

When I first picked up Waterdeep: Dragon Heist I’d already looked at some reviews and I knew the module was a bit wonky. After giving it my own read through I knew I wanted to somehow use all the villains provided and fortunately I found the Alexandrian Remix.

After many, many, MANY hours of reading and prep I started out with our game group. Up to Chapter 1 (Ch1 of the module, so 5B of the Remix) things were going well enough. Of course that’s also only the barest start of the whole thing so that’s not saying much.

Since then it’s been an unmitigated disaster.

Things got badly bogged down trying to refurbish Trollskull Manor, this was due to my attempting to introduce the party to all the faces around the neighborhood so that they’d actually be invested in the place AND so that for the investigation yet to come they’d have some folks to actually talk to that wouldn’t just be random Joe/Jane shop-owner whose been (surprise!) next door all this time.

After slogging through that I thought we’d be able to make some headway… WRONG. I made efforts to establish some timelines, throw in a couple of faction missions, then the Cassalanters introduced themselves and their “problem”, and the parades were about to occur along with the opening of the inn.

Unfortunately I guess I miscalculated what the party would do… like I suppose heroes would, as soon as they found out about the cursed children they took off at a gallop to track down Renaer, get whatever info they could from him… and they were on the verge of taking off for Neverwinter to put the screws to his father!

At that point I shut down the game session as I had no idea how the get the damn thing back on track and I’m on the verge of just giving up on it entirely. No fault of the Remix, it’s the DM to blame here.

I’m not a first time DM, I’ve been running D&D campaigns on and off for years. The last campaign I lead was the two part Horde of the Dragon Queen / Rise of Tiamat. Maybe this time I bit off more than I could chew with the Remix, maybe I expected more from our group as I was trying to give them more of a sandbox and not so much a hack ’n slash railroad. I dunno.

What I’m wondering is if anyone else has had things go so badly wrong that they got to the point where they were seriously considering just giving up.

One side note: Trying to game with everyone locked down and remote has been a huge challenge for me. I find the loss of true interaction you get from being face to face with players in the room has killed much of my ability to improvise and is a serious impediment to building up any sort of momentum on game nights. Constantly having to repeat ourselves, pausing for long moments just in case someone else is about to say something, or just straight up technical difficulties. It’s all conspiring to suck the fun out of getting together for game nights.

First, AC, you are not alone in struggling with remote gaming. I’ve had similar difficulties. Everything takes longer. Sitting at a camera is more exhausting than sitting around a table. The channels of communication between players are limited. Body language is limited. It all translates into an experience where it becomes much harder to set tone and pace.

As a long-time GM across many different systems, I have an engrained sense of what a good session “feels like.” Remote gaming seems to be just different enough to trigger a kind of uncanny valley response; even if the session was, on its own merits, a success, it just feels as if something went wrong.

Perhaps the clearest example of this is just the amount of stuff that gets done during a session. Even if you manage to avoid having any technical glitches, the constraints of the remote experience inherently mean less gets done:

• Referencing common material can be cumbersome, particularly if you’re not using a virtual tabletop or if the material in question hasn’t been integrated into the virtual tabletop. (Think of an action as simple as finding a reference in the book and handing it to another player to look at.)
• Constraints on simple physical demonstrations and body language often mean longer descriptions and explanations.
• At a physical table you can have multiple conversations happening simultaneously. This obviously doesn’t happen constantly, but having only one effective voice channel prevents side-table discussions. In combat this means the wizard and fighter can’t coordinate their attack while you’re resolving the cleric’s turn. It also means that Sarah and Chris can’t quietly figure out what they’re planning to do next while you’re running the scene with Peter spying on Heather’s date.

And so forth.

So even the simple metric of, “Did we get a good amount of stuff done in this session?” is disrupted in remote gaming. And it’s not even that the amount of stuff that you get done is actually a problem; it just feels like a problem because it’s out of sync with what years of experience have subconsciously taught you a “good session” feels like.

Something that may help is doing brief post mortems with your players: Literally just check in with them and find out how they felt the session went. You might find that it works well to do this immediately as the session ends (during the chatting and small talk after the action wraps for the night), or you might find it’s more effective to do it a couple days later by e-mail or text message. Either way, you’ll often find that your players actually really enjoyed sessions that you felt were a struggle, and I find that can help buoy my spirits. If they are having problems, turn the discussion towards solutions: Focus on what you all (as a group) could be doing (or doing differently) rather than simply moping over the rough edges. (If you’re having the initial discussion between sessions with each player separately, you may find it useful to open the next session by discussing the problems and collectively brainstorming solutions.)

But I digress. Let’s chat about where you are in your campaign.

MEANWHILE, IN NEVERWINTER…

I’m not there at the table with you, but while this may feel hopelessly messed up and out of control for you, I’m guessing the same is not true for your players.

First, let’s look at what went “wrong”… although I don’t think it’s actually wrong, per se. I would have waited to have the Casalanters approach the PCs until after the Dalakhar explosion. That way, the players would have known that the way to help the Cassalanters solve their problem (if that’s what they want to do) is by continuing their ongoing investigation.

What’s happened here is that you’ve given the players a clear screnario hook (“help the Cassalanters save their kids!”) before you’ve given them a clear way of pursuing that scenario hook. They’ve responded by creating their own way of pursuing that hook and aggressively going for it.

This is not a problem!

Okay, what’s the first thing you can do?

Go with it.

They want to put the screws on Lord Dagult. Following the principles of active play, pick up that toy (Lord Dagult) and ask yourself what the logical outcome of that would be. What would Lord Dagult’s response be?

(I mean, they’re pretty obviously not going to be able to “put the screws to him.” But when they try, what happens?)

Well, if these random blokes from Waterdeep know about the gold, then it’s more at risk than he thought! (That’s particularly true if the PCs let slip that their knowledge comes from the Cassalanters.)

But these folks also saved his son. So he might think of them as useful cat’s paws in the Grand Game? He might even warn them about the Cassalanters (“you’ve been tricked by devil worshipers!”) before offering them a heap of gold to act as HIS agents. Heck, he might even offer them ALL the gold; then the big revelation would be that Dagult doesn’t seem to think that the gold is the most important thing at stake here: It’s the Stone of Golorr itself that he prizes above all else!

“Bring me the Stone of Golorr with all its Eyes and I’ll tell you where the gold is!” he says. “Then you can give it to the Cassalanters or buy a pirate franchise in Luskan or spend it on the richest gigolos on the Sword Coast. Just bring me the damn Stone!”

If the PCs agree, then he’ll tell them to head back to Waterdeep. He’ll be sending one of his local agents to contact them. (That’s Dalakhar, of course. So, then… ka-boom.)

Alternatively, he might let some information inadvertently slip while trying to figure out what the PCs know. (“Does Manshoon know? What about the rest of the Zhentarim?”)

Or maybe it’s a total dead end and all the PCs have done is add another faction to the Grand Game as Lord Dagult floods Waterdeep with his agents.

The point is to just look at what Lord Dagult knows — not just historically, but about the state of the Grand Game right now and the PCs specifically (if anything) — and then just… let things play out. See what happens.

MEANWHILE, IN WATERDEEP…

On the other hand, an epic segue to Neverwinter may be far enough outside the intended scope of the campaign that you would prefer to avoid all that. That’s OK. Even sandboxes have borders, and Dragon Heist isn’t even a sandbox.

What you need to do here is take a step back, identify the thing the PCs need to be pointed at, and then figure out how to deflect their current vector (“Let’s go question Lord Dagult!”) towards the thing they need.

In some cases it may not be possible to do this without railroading them, in which case I think you should find a different way. But if you’re running a robust, dynamic scenario (which I would argue the Alexandrian Remix of Dragon Heist qualifies as), you’ll often find that the PCs’ vector will end up naturally interacting with that scenario.

That’s the case here: If they’re still talking to Renaer, he can just say, “My father has a number of agents still active in Waterdeep. I know how to contact one of them. Why don’t I set up a meeting? They might be able to tell us what he’s up to.”

Renaer, of course, will then set up a meeting with Dalakhar for them. And then … ka-boom.

You’ll note that many of my solutions here are looking for ways to point the PCs back at Dalakhar so that the explosion can happen. But the other key thing to keep in mind here is that Dalakhar’s death and the fireball are only “essential” to the Remix insofar as they’re designed to be the primary hook into the Grand Game for the PCs. But in your campaign, the PCs are already hooked. So Dalakhar and the explosion are relatively non-essential.

Since the PCs are already in the Grand Game, it’s a good opportunity to review Part 7: How the Remix Works. There’s a simple checklist there for the GM to follow when running the campaign:

(1) Are the PCs looking for a lead to one of the Eyes? If yes, pick a Faction Outpost and point them at it.

(2) Did the PCs just piss off one of the Factions? If yes, pick a Faction Response Team and have them target the PCs.

(3) Are the PCs floundering and don’t know what to do next? If yes, pick a Faction Response Team and have them target the PCs. (If you’re not sure how they might target the PCs, just have them show up and try to kill them.)

Repeat until the campaign is done.

This list is really just a default algorithm for actively playing the core elements of the campaign.

If you can’t redirect to the Dalakhar assassination in some way, you’ll have to do a little extra lifting to direct the PCs to the stone itself (since their investigation of the fireball won’t lead them to the Gralhunds). But keep in mind, as described in Part 2 of the Remix, that this chain of events already has a default outcome if the PCs get involved which ends with Jarlaxle in possession of the Stone (i.e., one of the Factions that the default algorithm consistently prompts you to pick up and play with).

To come full circle: I don’t think your campaign is as “out of control” as it feels to you right now. In fact, I think your campaign is in a great place. You’ve got a group of players who are clearly heavily invested in what’s happening AND self-motivated enough to create their own plans and aggressively push for the outcomes they want. That’s FANTASTIC.

Follow their lead.

This is an experimental new series for the site. It might end up just being one-and-done. Let me know what you think of it in the comments. If you have any questions you’d like to have considered for future columns, throw those in, too. The goal here is to address specific situations from actual play; the general gist being, “If I were the GM in this situation, what would I do?” (As opposed to more abstract questions about general methodology or theorycraft.)

Go to Ask the Alexandrian #2

Places to Go, People to Be, a French RPG ‘zine, has finished posting all 16 parts of Structures de jeu, which is the translation of my series on Game Structures. (The original essay can be found here.)

You can check out previous PTGPTB translations of Alexandrian content here and here.

Adversary Roster from Infinity: Quantronic Heat

Adversary rosters are one of the essential tools in my GM’s kit. In 2016, I wrote that I considered them my greatest “secret weapon”:

They allow me to run dynamic scenarios of considerable complexity on battlefields that can easily sprawl across a dozen areas with a relative simplicity which still leaves me with enough brainpower to manage varied stat blocks and clever tactics […] permanently disrupting the staid rhythms of “kick in the door” dungeoncrawling in your campaign. Adversary rosters are also a great way for running stealth missions, heists, and covert ops.

Of course, I have no interest in actually keeping them secret. Since writing that essay in 2016, I’ve introduced them to an even larger audience through my remixes of Dragon Heist and Descent Into Avernus; taught them as an essential tool in the Infinity Roleplaying Game core rulebook; and used them prominently in Over the Edge: Welcome to the Island.

I’d first mentioned the concept of the adversary roster here on the Alexandrian all the way back in 2011, referring to them as a “monster roster” and using G1 Against the Giants as an example of how they could be used. But by that point I’d already been using them for years.

While discussing this history with Robb Minneman on Patreon, I ended up delving into my old game notes in an effort to figure out when I’d first used an adversary roster: I knew that Against the Giants had actually been one of the earliest rosters I’d developed (which is one of the reasons I’d used it as the example in my 2011 post). And I also remembered using them in Forge of Fury around the same time.

As I sifted through my notes, though, I discovered (or, I guess, re-discovered) a far more nuanced development process. Adversary rosters are, in many ways, such a simple concept that one might think they would have sprung full-blown from the brow of Zeus. That was even more-or-less how I remembered it happening, but it wasn’t true.

So I thought it might be interesting to take a detailed look at the actual development process to see how this concept evolved.

THREE DAYS TO KILL

Around 2000-02 I was running (or attempting to run) three D&D 3^rd Edition campaigns:

• The Quest of the Seals was a fetch-quest campaign using a mixture of original and published adventures. I launched the campaign with John Tynes’ Three Days to Kill (Atlas Games).
• Freeport was a heavily modified version of Chris Pramas’ Freeport Trilogy (Green Ronin), placed at the northern tip of the Teeth of Light (a chain of islands in my home campaign setting) and studded with some island-hopping adventures.
• The War of the Giants, was a campaign I wanted to run that would start with G1 Against the Giants, but rather than transitioning to drow-related shenanigans, it would have instead escalated into a full-scale humans vs. giants war on the northern frontiers. (This never really got off the ground and didn’t progress beyond Against the Giants).

If you’re familiar with the history of D&D, then you’ll know that Three Days to Kill and Death in Freeport were the first two third-party adventures published for 3^rd Edition, both being released on the exact same day the Player’s Handbook was released. It’s not really a coincidence that my first two full-fledged 3^rd Edition campaigns launched with those scenarios: I’d scooped them up at Gen Con 2000.

In terms of how adversary rosters developed, The Quest of the Seals was the most important of these campaigns.

I’ve talked previously about how John Tynes, in Three Days to Kill, boils down the essential elements of a raid-type scenario. As noted in that discussion, part of a raid-type scenario is that “the defensive forces should be designed to respond as an active opposition force.” This is what that looked like in Three Days to Kill:

Now, this is not an adversary roster. But what it does do is separate the bad guys from the room key and, once again, emphasize that they’re going to be actively moving around the place.

When I prepped the adventure, I created a cheat sheet for the villa:

You can see that this is also not an adversary roster: It’s just a brief summary of the information from the module. When I ran the adventure, though, I really liked this: I liked the dynamic foes. And I liked having this information all on a cheat sheet that I could easily reference.

THE SUNLESS CITADEL

Three Days to Kill ends with someone (probably the PCs) accidentally opening a portal to Hell. For the purposes of my campaign, I basically upped the ante on this. As I noted in the campaign journal:

Behind you, the Blood Temple crouches upon the side of the mountain, pulsing and screaming into the night. A fiendish red light floods the heavens, obscuring the pale stars which shine down upon your retreating forms. The maw of Hell has been opened, and if there is a power which can shut it… you do not know what it might be.

The Quest of the Seals was, in fact, a quest for the three seals required to shut the portal to Hell: I placed one in The Sunless Citadel, another in the Forge of Fury, and the third in a homebrew module called the Monastery of Light. I then positioned these locations at opposite ends of my campaign world, so that the PCs would have to criss-cross the map on their epic journey.

But I digress. The important bit is that the next adventure on the docket was The Sunless Citadel.

And in my prep notes for The Sunless Citadel there’s this page:

Now, this looks a lot like an adversary roster. But this is only partly true. Do you see the entries for “Total Kobolds” and “Total Goblins”? That’s because this was actually a worksheet for tracking casualties.

See, The Sunless Citadel is occupied by a clan of kobolds and a clan of goblins at war with each other. As written, this conflict is kind of a cold war (with the kobolds occupying one set of rooms and the goblins occupying a different set of rooms). But I wanted to make this an ACTIVE conflict, with the goblins and kobolds actively feuding, raiding, and fighting. The casualty sheet was designed so that I could track this in real time.

This becomes even clearer with some stuff I designed for the group’s second session in the Citadel. The PCs had allied with the kobolds and fallen asleep in a side chamber. I decided to launch the second session with them being awakened by a major goblin raid on the kobolds.

I actually prepped the outcome of the entire fight if the PCs didn’t get involved. This was sort of like prepping a scenario timeline, but mostly misguided because it continued far past the point where the PCs were likely to intervene and change everything. (On the other hand, it was really four separate timelines — one for each room which had been assaulted — so this was mitigated somewhat: If the PCs intervened in Area 15, for example, I could use the timeline to easily keep track of what was happening in other rooms. Looking back with 20+ years of experience with 3^rd Edition, though, it would have made a lot more sense to reduce the number of rounds involved here by at least a third.)

In concert with this timeline, I also had a more specific casualty tracker:

In practice, that cheat sheet listing the locations of every goblin and kobold in the place did result in me beginning to haltingly use it like a proto-adversary roster (moving goblins and kobolds around to reinforce various areas), but the concept hadn’t fully gelled yet.

THE DEPTHS OF RAGE

As the PCs left The Sunless Citadel and headed west towards The Forge of Fury, one of the adventures they had along the road was “Depths of Rage,” a scenario from Dungeon Magazine #83 by J.D. Wiker that I combined with some material from Carl Sargent’s Night Below campaign.

Wiker’s “Depths of Rage” is a really cool scenario where the PCs delve into a goblin lair and then, when they’re at the deepest point of the dungeon, an earthquake hits and causes large parts of the dungeon to collapse. Now, with the dungeon completely transformed, the PCs need to crawl back out!

So this is a really cool, dynamic dungeon where the key entries and monster locations shift pre- and post-quake.

Night Below, on the other hand, includes notes in its key about how the monsters will dynamically react to the PCs’ presence and attempt to alert monsters in other locations (and also how the current location will be different if they have been previously alerted). For example

5. Thief Guards

[…]

If the wyvern watch at area 4 goes off, alerting them to the presence of intruders, Tinsley slips away towards area 10 to alert the fighter guards in the lower caverns (area 12), while Caswell hides behind one of the many columnar rocks.

I kind of combined these two ideas in an effort to make the dungeon even more dynamic and reactive. What I ended up with was an adversary cheat sheet that looked like this:

Which was… interesting.

No, not really. I mean, it worked. The adventure was great. But trying to program my prep notes like a computer game was a terrible idea — pure contingency prep instead of tool prep.

The last thing I prepped as part of this adventure, though, was a tracking sheet. Basically just a list of every area in the scenario so that I could actively track which goblins were where as a result of the various Alerts being triggered:

When I’d filled out this tracking sheet, what I had, of course, was something that looked a lot like the proto-adversary roster from The Sunless Citadel (i.e., Area 16 – 4 goblins), with the key difference being that this had been specifically developed to move the goblins around.

You’ll also notice that I had chunked the dungeon into sections: the Western Caves and the Eastern Caves. This was a natural division in Wiker’s design of the caverns, and breaking the goblin forces into these two separate chunks I kept each chunk to a manageable level of complexity.

THE FORGE OF FURY

Which brings us, finally, to my prep notes for a radically expanded Forge of Fury. It’s here that all of these ideas gel into the adversary roster. It looked like this:

Following in the footsteps of the goblins & kobolds of The Sunless Citadel and the east & west caves of “Depths of Rage,” you can see that I’ve chunked Forge of Fury into factions. This, obviously, is the adrak faction.

You can see that I’m still including a separate list of everyone in the faction. I did this for the purpose of tracking casualties, just as I had done in the previous two adventures. (Shortly thereafter I realized I could just track casualties directly on the area roster so that I wasn’t trying to do double-entry bookkeeping in the middle of a session.)

You might also note that I was indexing by AREA instead of by ACTION GROUP. (Compare to the roster from Quantronic Heat at the beginning of this article.) This is really a legacy of how the adversary roster evolved out of a traditional dungeon key (i.e., I’m literally going through the module and listing all the monsters in Area 15, then all the monsters in Area 16, etc.) and it persisted in my notes for many years even when I wasn’t adapting published adventures.

Reviewing my other campaign notes, it looks like I made the swap around 2009, probably as part of the In the Shadow of the Spire campaign.

(Why is the swap important? Conceptually it puts the focus on the adversaries you’re actively playing rather than the area they’re currently in. More importantly it makes it A LOT easier to use advanced techniques like variable areas, patrols, and the like. It also makes doing roster updates easier. See Art of the Key – Part 4: Adversary Rosters.)

In any case, the pay-off for these adversary rosters in Forge of Fury was immediate and spectacular at the table: Things kicked off with a truly epic siege as the PCs sought to break through the goblin defenses at the Mountain Door. After getting through the door itself, the PCs were able to strategically test the goblin defenses, while the goblins were able to move their reinforcements around.

Later, the PCs became trapped in the depths of the dungeon, cut off by the movement of enemy troops on the levels above them. You can read the conclusion of those adventures in Tales from the Table: In the Depths of Khunbaral.

The whole thing remains one of the coolest and most memorable dungeon adventures I’ve ever run, and the experience immediately cemented the adversary roster as a technique for creating awesome games. Having run hundreds of sessions since then using adversary rosters, I have only become more convinced that this is the case.