Meh.

When Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen was announced, I was really excited about it. So excited, in fact, that I ended up spending most of the summer and beyond doing a deep dive into the Dragonlance Saga. I was excited about the campaign returning to the War of the Lance, the time period of the original Saga (and accompanying Chronicles trilogy). I was excited about Stephen Baker (designer of great mainstream wargames) and Rob Daviau (father of the legacy board game genre) joining forces to design Warriors of Krynn, a companion wargame that was designed to be played in conjunction with the campaign.

What an amazing opportunity to reinvent the bond between wargaming and roleplaying that has been part of D&D’s legacy from the very beginning! And, more than that, an opportunity to triumphantly realize the unfulfilled promises of the original Saga!

Plus it was coming out within mere days of my birthday! What a fun little birthday treat! I didn’t hesitate at all in preordering the Deluxe Edition that bundled the D&D campaign and board game together into one package.

So when the book showed up at the beginning of December I didn’t hesitate for a moment in ripping open the box— (Literally. The Deluxe Edition box is incredibly fragile and basically impossible to open without destroying it. Bizarrely, it’s apparently deliberately designed to be disposable.) —and flipping open the book.

Of course, I was still excited! Just completely engaged with the book. There’s some nifty little player handouts in the first chapter that are designed as missives from various NPCs to the PCs as an introduction to the setting, and I recorded some dramatic readings of those, thinking they’d be cool to send to my players as little teasers.

But then I found myself reading the book less and less. At first I thought it was just the holidays keeping me distracted, but by the end of the month it was clear that Shadow of the Dragon Queen had become a slog for me. It was frustrating and, even worse, it was boring.

And then the OGL crisis hit, with Wizards of the Coast flipping off the entire hobby and promising to detonate a devastating nuclear bomb in the middle of the industry. As I dealt with the professional and personal fallout from that, I wasn’t really in the mood to read any D&D books (and it wouldn’t really have been fair to the book), so I laid it aside. Fortunately, the OGL crisis eventually resolved itself in perhaps the best way anyone could have reasonable hoped for, and so, in February, I eventually picked up Shadow of the Dragon Queen again.

… and it was a still a miserable slog.

To a large extent, the simple fact that I have only just now, at the end of April, managed to drag my carcass to the final page of the book, is a pretty accurate summary of my entire review.

IS THIS BOOK FOR YOU?

The original Dragonlance adventures, published in the 1980’s, sought to bring the power of a true fantasy epic to Dungeons & Dragons. It plunged the players into the world-spanning epic of the War of the Lance, in which the evil draconians of Takhisis, the Dragon Queen, formed the Dragon Armies and invaded the realms of Ansalon, positioning the PCs to change the course of history.

Shadow of the Dragon Queen is set during the earliest days of the war, ostensibly serving as a prequel or sidequel of sorts to the Dragonlance Saga. Part of the appeal of a ‘quel narrative like this, of course, is seeing how the continuity meshes with the existing work. When done well, as in the early issues of Kurt Busiek’s Untold Tales of Spider-Man or Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, you get an exciting bit of frisson whenever you see a character walk off stage left, knowing that they are simultaneously walking on stage right in a different story. Like a great heist movie, there is a kind of puzzle-solving delight in seeing the pieces come together, plus a real opportunity for depth and meaning that resonates beyond the immediate boundaries of what you’re creating.

The problem, though, is that Shadow of the Dragon Queen cares so little for the established continuity of Dragonlance or the War of the Lance that it’s a complete turn-off for any Dragonlance fans who would be interested in that sort of thing.

For example, the fact that several hundred years ago the True Gods abandoned the world of Ansalon during the Cataclysm and have not been heard from since is a really big deal. It’s a central tenet of the Dragonlance setting, a crucial element of the War of the Lance, and something which, in my opinion, is part of what makes the original Dragonlance Saga something special and unique in the annals of D&D. The quest to find the True Gods and restore the divine magic of clerics is, in fact, a really big part of the Saga.

So when it became clear to me that Shadow of the Dragon Queen was set in a time period before the True Gods returned to Ansalon, I was really curious: How were the designers going to deal with the fact that clerics canonically (pun intended) don’t have their spells?

And the designers’ provided a truly epic answer:

“Eh… fuck it.”

The book provides a short dream sequence. If a player creates a cleric, the DM basically says, “A god appears to you in your sleep! So I guess all that stuff that happens over in the Saga was completely pointless! Woo-hoo!”

The fact that the designers really couldn’t give a fig about this is really underlined by the fact that the FIRST TRUE CLERIC TO BE SEEN IN CENTURIES is just… kind of irrelevant? There’s one oblique reference to an NPC being impressed if the PCs have healing magic and that’s it.

Okay, so existing Dragonlance fans aren’t the target audience here. None of that continuity crap matters because this campaign is being written for new fans! Shadow of the Dragon Queen is their introduction to the wonderful world of Dragonlance, and it’s fine if stuff doesn’t match up perfectly up with the old stuff.

… except Shadow of the Dragon Queen kinda sucks as an introduction to Dragonlance.

The setting “gazetteer” (if you’re willing to call it that) is just fifteen pages long, and six of those are dedicated to short descriptions of every god. There’s an absolutely stunning poster map of Ansalon by Francesca Baerald, but most of the locations listed on it are not given even the briefest of descriptions.

From a player’s perspective it’s probably a slightly better experience, but I honestly don’t know how any DM would be expected to run the setting with confidence based on the information (or, more accurately, the lack of information) given here.

So if the book shows a careless disregard for the old fans and is completely inadequate for the new fans… who is it for, exactly?

Go to Part 2: All Aboard

Go to Part 1

There are literally thousands of RPGs. I, personally, own hundreds of them. So, obviously, I’m not going to attempt to catalogue every single stat block that has ever existed, but I think it might be useful to take a step back from D&D’s paradigm and look at how other games have approached this problem.

Sufficiently simple games, of course, can largely sidestep it entirely. It’s not unusual to find an RPG where NPCs are entirely defined by just two or three numbers. In some player-facing systems, many NPCs may not have any stats at all!

Although it can be somewhat obfuscated, the 1974 edition of D&D more or less fell into this paradigm. Most combat stats were derived from Hit Dice, and so for most monsters the only relevant stats were:

• Armor Class
• Move
• Hit Dice

Even in Monsters & Treasure (the 1974 version of the Monster Manual), this allowed monsters to be presented in purely tabular format:

In practice, special abilities and exceptions in each monster’s description complicate the placid simplicity projected by this table for many creatures, but this is an approach which has been more coherently synthesized in recent games.

In Over the Edge 3rd Edition, for example, Jonathan Tweet, another co-designer of D&D 3^rd Edition, created a system in which NPCs can be given a complete stat block with a single number:

• Sub-Par (0)
• Competent (1)
• Expert (2)
• Elite (3)
• World Class (4)
• Superhuman (5)

Important NPCs, however, can be given additional specialties and abilities that operate at a higher tier:

MADELINE VORE

Business Leader, Elite (3^rd): Madeline has an easy and firm grasp on how to create and leverage brand for maximum profit and how to run the enterprise that does so.

Energy Vampirism, Expert (2^nd): With a touch, Madeline can drain the life energy of a human and save it for herself, extending her life and restoring vigor.

DEFAULT, COMPETENT (1^st)

Monte Cook’s Numenera is another game that takes this approach, with stat blocks like this:

Warlord: level 4

Reugar Darkglow: level 3, tasks related to metalworking as level 5

Nieten: level 4, attacks with stronglass sword as level 5; health 20; Armor 1

Dread Rider: level 4, Might defense as level 6; health 15; damage 6 (4 blade, 2 electricity); Armor 3
Lightning Storm: Immune to electricity and +2 electricity damage. Others in immediate range suffer 1 damage per round.
Recall: Teleport to nearest dread destroyer.
Summon: Summon dread destroyer (arrives within a few hours).
Death Trigger: If slain, dread destroyer is summoned.

I refer to these as fractal NPCs: A simple default, but with the ability to add as much complexity, specificity, and crunch as desired when the occasion calls for it.

At the other end of the spectrum, of course, we have crunchier systems where NPCs have a ton of detail baked in by default. There are a lot of reasons why a system might want (and benefit from) this crunch, but a very common are systems where NPCs and PCs are built using the same rules. (And, therefore, all the complexity of creating a PC is inherited by the NPC stats.)

Like D&D, it’s not unusual for these crunchier systems to simply give up on the idea of a concise stat block. In The Succubus Club, for example, Vampire: The Masquerade just threw its hands up and printed the NPCs using full-blown PC character sheets:

It’s more typical, however, for crunchier systems to still try to achieve some degree of compactness, as seen in this stat block from GURPS Fantasy Adventures:

This relative compactness is often achieved by relying on some degree of system mastery: The spells, advantages, and disadvantages are all simple lists, requiring the GM to look up the rules for each individual feature. This is incredibly effective if the GM is familiar enough with the rules to know what, for example, Magery 2 means without looking it up, but brutally punishing to a new GM who has to look up a dozen or more abilities just to figure out what the NPC’s options are.

To square the difference, the designer can attempt to anticipate which abilities the GM is least likely to be familiar with and/or which abilities are relevant to the current encounter and provide a more detailed reference only for those abilities. For example, Literacy, Charisma +2, Compulsive Liar, and Greedy are probably all relatively self-explanatory, so maybe we can just focus on explaining what Voice and Magery 2 mean.

This is what I refer to as a hierarchy of reference. If you’re a GM doing this for yourself, it can be time-consuming but relatively straightforward (and very useful!). After all, you know exactly what information you do and don’t know. If you’re doing it for a published book, on the other hand, it’s often far trickier. You can’t even really target a specific level of system mastery, because every GM will learn different parts of the system in different ways and at different times. It can even be deceptive. (Compulsive Liar and Greedy look like roleplaying prompts, particularly if no further explanation is given. Did you remember to make the Will rolls they require?)

The other technique, of course, is to find ways to condense the presentation of the information. We saw variations of this earlier with the AD&D and BECMI D&D stat blocks. When Wizards of the Coast redesigned the D&D 3^rd Edition stat block in 2006, I thought their utility-based division was nifty, but the specific execution too large, so I revised the stat block into a short form that required a fraction of the space:

NAME (CR #) – [Gender] [Race] – [Class] [Level] – [Alignment] [Size] [Type]
DETECTION – [special], Listen +#, Spot +#; Init +#; Aura …; Languages [list], [special]
DEFENSES – AC #, touch #, flat-footed #; hp # (HD); Miss #%; DR #; Immune …; Resist …; Weakness …
ACTIONS – Spd # ft.; Melee attack +# (damage); Ranged attack +# (damage); Space # ft.; Reach # ft.; Base Atk +#; Grapple +#; Atk Options …; SA …; Combat Feats …; Combat Gear …
SQ …
STR #, DEX #, CON #, INT #, WIS #, CHA #
FORT +#, REF +#, WILL +#;
FEATS:
SKILLS:
POSSESSIONS:

Which could be combined with short references for pertinent abilities (and, when in doubt, page references for quickly looking up for the full rules when necessary).

This approach of condensation also requires a certain degree of mastery, but this time only of how the relatively dense stat block is designed to be read. (As opposed to every unique ability in the entire game.)

And, of course, these two techniques for dealing with crunchy stat blocks can also be used in combination — both compacting the information and also making decisions about which abilities need to be fully described.

IN CONCLUSION

So when it comes to stat blocks, there are broadly two approaches you can take.

First, you can choose to design your system to make the presentation of adventure stat blocks more compact, which often also has the effect of making them easier for GMs to create, particularly on-the-fly when something unexpected happens in the middle of a session.

Or you can try to figure out some way to condense the presentation of information, often relying (to at least some extent) on the GM’s system mastery to help carry the load.

Or you can just give up and tell people to look it up. If you’re feeling really apathetic, you can do that without even the common courtesy of a page reference.

This article is a revision and expansion of an older article. The original version can be found here.

When creating an NPC for a GUMSHOE game — like Esoterrorists, Trail of Cthulhu, or Night’s Black Agents — instead of giving them ability ratings (e.g., Infiltration 10, Scuffling 8, Shooting 6), instead give them an ability modifier:

• +1 (skilled)
• +2 (excellent)
• +3 uber

You could also use -1 or -2 modifier to indicate incompetence. (Any rating lower than -2 would most likely mean the NPC automatically fails on those tasks.)

Health / Stability / Sanity: These and similar pools that are depleted via some form of damage are rated and used normally.

USING ABILITY MODIFIERS

As with an Alertness Modifier or Stealth modifier, because GUMSHOE defaults to being a player-facing system whenever possible, you will primarily use ability modifiers to modify the base difficulty of a PC’s check (which is usually difficulty 4).

Ability modifiers can also be used if the NPC makes a check, in which case the relevant modifier is simply added to the NPC’s die roll.

CHERRIES

In Night’s Black Agents, an ability rating of 8+ unlocks a cherry. Although most other GUMSHOE games do not have cherries, they similarly unlock a +1 Hit Threshold for any character who has Athletics 8+.

Most cherries are only relevant to PCs, but any cherries that may be relevant to an NPC (including the +1 Hit Threshold) are unlocked at ability rating +2.

OPTION: NPC ABILITY POOL

As an optional rule, you can also grant NPCs a small pool of general points:

• 2 (mook)
• 4 (default)
• 8 (boss)

This pool can be spent to enhance any ability the NPC possesses, as appropriate, to either increase the difficulty of a PC’s check or increase their own check result.

If using this optional rule, you may also want to give NPCs ratings of +0 in a skill (indicating that they normally don’t receive a bonus, but could choose to spend points on a check).

OPTION: THRILLER CHASES

In the thriller chase rules from Night’s Black Agents, pursuer and runner must make secret spends from their chase pool each round. Depleting the opponent’s chase pool is a key part of what makes these rules dynamic and fun, and that combines poorly with static NPC modifiers.

Option #1 – Chase Pool: For the purposes of the chase, ignore the static modifier. Instead, when the chase starts, form a chase pool equal to 3 x the NPC’s static modifier. These points can be spent in addition to the NPC ability pool (if any) during the chase.

Option #2 – Static Charge: By default, NPCs in a thriller chase always spend their static modifier. If they have a generic NPC ability pool, they can use those points to increase their spend. In addition, if they choose to spend LESS than their stat modifier, those points are added to a dedicated chase pool which can be spent on future rounds to increase their default spend.

DESIGN NOTES

Something I find frustrating while running GUMSHOE games is that it’s very difficult to use the mechanics to figure out whether an NPC can accomplish a task while taking the NPC’s skill into account. Several GUMSHOE rulebooks even go so far as to say that the GM should simply fiat all non-combat checks by the NPCs. (Which I, personally, find deeply unsatisfying and unhelpful.)

Even in combat, though, the problem persists: The PCs’ combat pools are balanced so that they can last an entire scenario and multiple combat encounters. The NPCs’ pools are given the same rating, but they can spend it all in a single encounter. The result, combined with the typical length of a combat encounter, means that you can either:

• spend no points, which means skill is irrelevant when it comes to NPC attacks; or
• spend enough points to auto-hit the PCs every single time they attack.

The latter is both devastating and deeply unsatisfying: As a GM it means I can’t just roleplay the NPCs and see how things turn out. I am instead always making a completely arbitrary decision about whether the PCs should be hit or not. (Which, ultimately, means that NPC skill is still irrelevant.)

I believe that using ability modifiers will both (a) make it easier and faster to create NPCs (by eliminating the false precision of, for example, choosing between a pool with 10 points or 12 points) and (b) allow you to actually use the mechanics of the system while having NPC skill be relevant.

In assigning ability modifiers, you’ll generally just be choosing between unskilled (no rating), skilled (+1), and excellent (+2). PCs generally have a 50% chance of succeeding on a check with the default difficulty of 4. A +1 modifier gives them a one-third chance of success. A +2 modifier means they have to roll a 6 on the d6 to succeed. A +3 modifier means the check will be impossible unless the PCs spend points — it’s not necessarily inappropriate for an NPC to have such a rating, but you’re definitely making a very strong statement about them.

FURTHER READING
NBA Opposing Forces Cheat Sheet

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 33C: Secret Doors & Sentries

But Agnarr was already scrambling back to his feet and racing down the hallways. He passed Tee easily, despite her considerable head start, and then slid down the last ten feet of the passage – right past the ratman who had scarcely finished turning to run. Before the  ratman could scamper down the hall, draw a weapon, or even turn back to face him, Agnarr had decapitated him.

The other ratman squeaked and retreated back towards a dead end. Tee rounded the corner and put an arrow through his eye.

Tee has been shooting bad guys through the eye since the first session of the campaign. Her first victim was a giant centipede, but that was quickly followed by kobolds, goblins, cultists, ratmen, demons, and all manner of beasties.

I’ve previously described this as a running gag (due to the comedic component it has for our group), but it’s also an example of an action schtick. These are themes or motifs that repeat again and again, usually in combat scenes. They may attach to specific characters in the form of a signature move (Chow Yun  Fat dual-wielding pistols, Trinity’s floating kick, etc.), but they can also have broader application. (For example, the way that John Woo used white doves as a recurring motif in his fight scenes.)

These schticks are not, it should be noted, mechanical. They might be tied to a particular ability, but even then they aren’t something that necessarily happens every single time the character uses that ability. Schticks are a little more ephemeral than that; a little more of an artistic flourish; a spice best used in moderation.

Personally, I usually let action schticks develop naturally during play. (I described Tee shooting the giant centipede through the eye, that got a big reaction, and then she kept doing it.) But you can also deliberately design them and use them for specific effect.

Action schticks can stick around for the length of an entire campaign (like Tee’s eye-shooting schtick), but they can also be a great shortcut for creating a memorable scenario or encounter: For example, the giants for Durbolg Peak wield huge warhammers. When they miss, the hammers often crash down, smashing craters into the ground.

The fact that you can prep action schticks can also make them a great crutch to fall back on if you’re struggling with effective and evocative descriptions of combat: Schticks can, to at least some extent, be plug-and-play, so if you give yourself the gift of a few schticks to play around with, you can get a lot of mileage by just dropping one or two of them into each fight. (Although you’ll want to be careful not to burn them out from overuse.)

Campaign Journal: Session 33D – Running the Campaign: NPC Spellbooks
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

SESSION 33C: SECRET DOORS & SENTRIES

December 28th, 2008
The 18th Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

“We should kill them,” Elestra said.

“What?” Tee said. “We said we’d let them go.”

“You saw what they were doing to those people,” Elestra said. “They’re evil.”

“And we’re not,” Tee said.

But it was clear that Elestra didn’t want to let them go – Uranik because of what he was responsible for and Arveth because she could so easily identify Tee.

“She doesn’t know my real name,” Tee said.

“But she’s seen all of us,” Elestra argued. “It won’t be hard to track down six people matching our descriptions… not with Dominic being the Chosen of Vehthyl.”

“We could just cut out her tongue,” Tor suggested.

Tee was shocked. She thought of Tor as the moral center of the group, and now she was taken aback by the bloodthirstiness of them both.

Tee prevailed and they left the two cultists unconscious where they lay. (“Cutting out their tongue never works anyway,” Dominic said.) They also decided to head through the secret door.

But as soon as they headed down the sewer tunnel, Elestra tried to double back and kill the prisoners. But she wasn’t sly enough for Tee – in fact, the effort was so clumsy that none of them took it seriously. Tee called her back and kept an eye on her until they were through the door.

Finding the door was easy enough now that they knew where to look. Beyond it they could see where the original line of the sewer had run, although it had clearly been diverted into new construction long ago. The reason for the diversion, perhaps, was the large sinkhole-like collapse that lay just beyond the new construction. A ladder leaning against the side of the sinkhole led down to an older passage of some sort beneath the sewer line.

Tee climbed down this ladder and scouted ahead, coming quickly to an intersection. She peeked around the corner, careful not to make a sound.

Unfortunately, the ratmen sentries had been warned by the light of the sunrod that Elestra was carrying. They took two quick shots at Tee’s head with a pair of dragon rifles as she ducked back around the corner.

Tee paused for only a moment and then rounded the corner again, running down the hall and firing with her dragon pistol as she went. She caught one of the ratmen in the shoulder in a blast of scorched fur.

The others, hearing the shots of both ratmen and Tee, started jumping down from the top of the sinkhole. Unfortunately, the broken floor of the passage below proved treacherous. Most of them fell haphazardly in the attempt.

The two ratmen where standing in a T-intersection at the far end of the hall. They were firing back at Tee now, but as she came closer they suddenly ducked behind opposite corners. Tee cursed, certain that they were going to reach the other defenders of the temple and raise the alarm before she could stop them.

But Agnarr was already scrambling back to his feet and racing down the hallways. He passed Tee easily, despite her considerable head start, and then slid down the last ten feet of the passage – right past the ratman who had scarcely finished turning to run. Before the  ratman could scamper down the hall, draw a weapon, or even turn back to face him, Agnarr had decapitated him.

The other ratman squeaked and retreated back towards a dead end. Tee rounded the corner and put an arrow through his eye.

As the others caught up with them, Tee knelt down to search the corpses. The ratmen had been carrying little of interest, except for the dragon rifles they had been firing. These were worn and badly damaged, marked with the clear patina of age.

“They’re not chaositech, are they?” Elestra asked worriedly.

“No,” Tee said. “They’re just very old.”

They continued into the complex. Several side passages had collapsed or partially collapsed, but they eventually came to a door of thick, sturdy oak. Tee picked a lock on this and they passed into a room that seemed equal parts meditative study and bedchamber. It was mostly empty, with only a straw mat in the middle of the floor. On the walls hung various tapestries (which Ranthir identified as each depicting great wizards of the past). There was a door directly opposite the one through which they’d entered. At the far end of the room there was a small wooden bookshelf containing a dozen assorted volumes. These, of course, caught the particular attention of Ranthir, who was also delighted to discover that one of them was a thick tome of spells.

Ranthir was not able to study the spellbook completely, but the illustrations of eyes being burnt away with acid were enough to leave him concerned.

Running the Campaign: Action Schticks – Campaign Journal: Session 33D
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index