Question: “How do you prep Tier 3 and Tier 4 D&D adventures? I’ve read a lot about how the game changes, but I haven’t seen a lot of guidance on what I should actually be doing. What am I missing?”

To understand how to prep high-level adventures, I think it’s important to first understand why the adventures you were prepping in Tier 1 and Tier 2 stop working as the PCs level up. What this largely boils down to is that if you have a group standing at Point A who wants to go to Point C, it becomes increasingly difficult to “force” them to visit Point B.

If you’re running a dungeon, the natural geography of the world creates pathing. Even in heavily xandered dungeons, you generally can’t just skip from Level 1 to Level 5. You have to, by one path or another, work your way through the intermediary content.

The same is true of an overland journey. You’re in Waterdeep and want to take the road to Baldur’s Gate? Then stuff can happen as you travel down the road. You’re in the Shire and want to go to Mordor? I can’t be certain what path you’ll take, but there’ll still be a sequence of procedural content from A to B to C that can form the spine of the adventure.

But as the PCs level up, they gain access to abilities like teleportation and passwall and scrying. They can nuke sites from orbit and plane shift and do all kinds of crazy stuff. Now they can go directly from Level 1 to Level 5.

Even if you’re running a railroad, you need to be able to force the players into predetermined actions and outcomes. But the abilities the PCs are gaining similarly make it more and more difficult to force them to do what you prepped.

This implies a couple of things.

First, structure is going to come from information. If the PCs know something, then they’ll probably be able to take very direct action based on that information. This is what node-based scenario design is good for, but these high-tier PCs also have access to abilities that can just proactively give them the information that they want. So you’re generally going to be better off thinking more in terms of clouds of nodes rather than specific sequences like funnels, because the PCs will sequence break.

In this sense, high-tier adventures become paradoxically smaller and shorter than low-tier ones, even as their stakes and scope are likely expanding to epic proportions. Because you can’t just, for example, stick multiple levels of a dungeon or a long overland journey between the PCs and what they want.

Second, if the opposition is going to meaningfully oppose the PCs, then they need to be similarly mobile and responsive.

You can’t just key some bad guys to a static location, have them wait for the PCs to show up, and hope it works out. You’ll want them to be set up to actively respond to what the PCs are doing, because you won’t know what it is until the PCs do it.

This means:

• Prepping proactive nodes that can be responsively or opportunistically deployed. (See Running Mysteries: Proactive Nodes.)
• Using faction turns to keep the bad guys in motion. (See p. 342 of So You Want to Be a Game Master or Blades in the Dark.)
• Thinking about what the bad guys are doing and how intelligence (i.e., things the PCs learn about) and blowback (i.e., the bad guys target the PCs for retaliation) from that can vector back to the PCs. (Check out mechanics like Heat and the Vampyramid from Night’s Black Agents to give you some interesting options here.)
• And, vice versa, figuring out what the bad guys know about the PCs and their activities, so that you can determine and actively play their responses. (You may want to create a simple system for checking counterintelligence if you don’t feel comfortable making fiat judgment calls about this. Also check out Campaign Status Module: Event Fallout.)

More than ever, in other words, this is about prepping situations that can be actively played.

Something to avoid, however, is an over-zealous and all-encompassing response, where every adventure rapidly turns into “…and then all the bad guys teleport to the PCs and A HUGE FIGHT HAPPENS!”

You can avoid that partly be playing fair, partly by creating impartial resolution mechanics where necessary (e.g., that counterintelligence check I mentioned to determine what the bad guys know), and partly by scaling up into these higher power levels so that both you and the players can figure out how to control information and protect themselves.

But it’s also, importantly, about setting goals — for both the PCs and the bad guys — that can’t be trivially solved through a giant melee. In much the same way that you should try to find more varied goals for your dungeons than simply clearing the dungeon, so here you set goals that don’t just boil down to Wipe Them Out… All of Them.

FURTHER READING
High Level Characters Are (Literally) Awesome
Soloing Smaug – The Struggle for the Soul of D&D

Go to Red Company of Magi

LETTER FROM GATTARA TO TIANT

Sweetest Tiant,

Your words tantalize me, and I shall be certain to reward you with the most delightful suffering as punishment for your impudence.

In fact, you have spurred me to a wonderful bit of inspiration: I have sent a messenger to Runshallot Street and asked them to send you the next several doses of their liquid pain as soon as it has been extracted from their apparatus. I know how much you love to indulge, and I would not ask you to restrain yourself entirely, but save some for our games later.

Bring it to the curse den on Nethar Street and we’ll get a private room.

And a private plaything.

 Gattara

GM Background: “Runshallot Street” is the Vladaam’s Slave Trade Warehouse. Gattara is also referring to the curse den in the Guildsman District.

REPORT FROM THE RESEARCHERS ON CROSSING STREET

Guildmaster Arzan,

I hope you find these tissue samples as fascinating as we have. You have several days before the preservations spells would need to be renewed. I have also included chrysalid samples.

I think you can assume that we’ll be continuing our work at Crossing Street for the foreseeable future. Not only are there still many questions to be answered before we untangle the riddle of what was being done here, but Mistress Navanna has been delivering new artifacts for our study. Due to the demands, Master Aliastar has had us establish an additional laboratory.

The work is hard, but fascinating. I don’t know that we could sustain the long hours without the assistance of Master Grui’s arts.

                                                                                                Sathara

GM Background: Sathara is a Vladaam Researcher working at the Oldtown Apartments. The tissue samples come from a pain devil, while the chrysalid samples were taken from the nests of the venom-shaped thralls. Master Grui is a Vladaam alchemist who has been supplying draughts of Morpheus to help the researchers work long hours.

A GUIDANCE FROM RENN SADAR TO THE ARCHMAGE CRETAI

Cretai,

I am, of course, disappointed to learn that there’s no chance the Box of Shadows might have been placed within the Banewarrens before they were sealed, although I suppose it’s good not to have wasted the effort on a fruitless enterprise.

I’m also sorry to report that I’ve been unsuccessful in obtaining any of the crystalline research from the Eslathagos project for you. The oversight triad is being unusually secretive, one might almost suggest panicky. If you can think of anything that might influence Unirthorm, Rinirgen, or Kaeran Altarstone to loosen their lips, I do hope you’ll let me know. I can confirm, however, that the crystal lenses are a crucial lynchpin in the operation of whatever the technomantic devices seal the Spire.

Fortunately, this missive is not wholly dedicated to disappointments. In the immediate aftermath of Rehobath’s power play, the Inverted Pyramid suffered a paroxysm of panic and certain old archives were unlocked. Among these were journals of Peruun pertaining to the Divine Blight. The project was only briefly pursued before those fearing it might trigger the very return to the Days of Blood that others sought to guard against prevailed. During this time, however, I was able to secure copies of Peruun’s notes, which I have attached here. I wish you luck in unlocking the secrets of the Blight and look forward to reaping the rewards with you when that day comes.

Don’t forget that you owe me a cup of ale next time you see me at Danbury’s,

                                                                                                Lord Renn Sadar

The attached research notes pertain to an arcane energy, referred to as Divine Blight, which temporarily severs the connection of a priest to the Nine Gods.

The efficacy of the energy cannot be questioned, but mastering the Blight for practical applications — a targeted spell or an enchantment upon a weapon, for example — appears to be an unmet challenge.

GM Background: The box of shadows is described in Ptolus, p. 636. “Eslathagos” refers to Eslathagos Malkith, the Banelord (Ptolus, p. 79) and the “Eslathagos project” assumes that the Inverted Pyramid is involved with the exploration of the Banewarrens (as described in the Banewarrens adventure). Peruun is a founding member of the Inverted Pyramid, who in his latter years became fascinated by chaositech. He wrote a number of journals, some known and many lost, which were encoded with an arcane cipher designed to confound comprehend languages and similar spells.

Go to Part 14: Surveyor’s Guild

So You Want to Be a Game Master has been released in a hardcover Polish edition from Black Monk Games!

I was in Poland last week to celebrate the release of the book at Pyrkon, and you can now order it from Black Monk Games directly or find it at your favorite local gaming store in Poland!

It’s an absolutely beautiful edition of the book. It was truly thrilling to be able to hold a copy in my hands for the first time!

BUY NOW!

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 46A: Among Madmen

At the last possible moment, Zairic twisted aside so that the arrow lodged in his shoulder instead of his heart. Letting his book drop to the floor, Zairic vaulted over the high arm of his chair and jumped for cover. In mid-leap, he released a fireball through the window. Tee ducked down as the fiery inciting pellet passed over her head and avoided the brunt of it almost completely, but Elestra (standing in the open further down the alley) was caught by the edge of it.

Most of the others – clumped together across the street and still debating how they could (or would or should) use Elestra’s homunculi – missed the flash of the fireball. Fortunately, Ranthir – who was providing the daisy-chained camouflage near the mouth of the alley – recognized it for what it was. “Fireball!” he shouted, hurrying into the alley.

The fiction-mechanics cycle is arguably the heart of the roleplaying game experience: The ways in which we use mechanics to create fictional outcomes; declare fictional actions that are resolved mechanically; and use the outcome of either to feed back into the other form an intricate and interwoven dance at the gaming table.

A key component of this dance is how mechanical outcomes are explained in the fiction. For simple, straightforward intentions with unambiguous results, this is often so obvious that one can easily miss that something is actually happening: The player said they wanted to jump over the chasm; the dice said they succeeded; therefore, they land on the other side of the chasm.

Intriguingly, therefore, it is often true the failure requires more of an explanation than success: Success, after all, merely assumes that the stated intention which triggered the mechanical resolution was achieved. Failure, on the other hand, almost seems to demand an explanation for why the character wasn’t able to achieve their desired outcome.

(And this is before we even start considering advanced techniques like failing forward.)

There are a number of techniques you can use in creating these explanations, and different RPG rulesets will often help you in different ways. A universal technique I find useful is explicitly thinking about different factors in the game world that could affect outcome. It’s really useful for keeping things fresh and varied.

(One key insight from this is that you can often make the description of success more interesting by lightly spicing it with the same details and factors that we use to explain failure.)

Something else to consider is the often unexamined assumption of who at the table is responsible for providing these explanations. In my experience, this almost always falls on the GM in their role as adjudicator and world-describer. Every so often, though, the infectious spirit of communal improv will unleash itself and people all around the table will start collaborating on the answer. And another key insight is that, as the GM, you can prompt the players to get involved in explaining outcomes.

(Matthew Mercer, for example, has made, “How do you want to do this?” particularly famous.)

In fact, you can go further than that and create specific expectations for action resolution in which describing the fictional implications of mechanical results defaults to the players. (Storytelling games often do this because their mechanics revolve around determining which player is in control of a narrative outcome.)

But I digress.

What I’m particularly interested in talking about right now is a very specific slice of these table interactions: The moment where a mechanical outcome prompts a conversation between characters, which I’m going to refer to as ex post facto roleplaying. Here the character dialogue is being triggered by or being described as the key factor in an action’s resolution.

In this session, for example, most of the PCs failed a Spot check to notice the flash from a fireball spell going off around a corner.

Why call for this check at all? I mean, it’s a fireball spell, right? Shouldn’t it be really obvious? Well, to some extent this depends on how much noise you think a fireball creates — is it a huge detonation or a more ephemeral flash of flame? More importantly, what I was primarily concerned about here was how quickly they would react to the fireball: Would they be able to leap into action and immediately join the fight? Or get caught flat-footed and have to wait a round before being able to rush to Tee’s aid?

In this case, the players asked the same question in a breakdown that looked something like this:

• Why wouldn’t we immediately notice the fireball?
• We must have been distracted.
• What could we have been distracted by?
• We must have all been continuing our debate about using the homunculi!

And then they briefly acted out a few lines of that dialogue, giving Ranthir’s player (who had succeeded on his Spot check) an opportunity to interrupt by them by shouting, “Fireball!”

This is a good example of these ex post facto roleplaying moments, which are often played as kind of funny throw-away moments. But they can, of course, also be more protracted and/or take on a more serious tone, particularly if you make a more conscious effort to notice, prompt, and/or define these moments.

In fact, rather than just reacting to skill checks with dialogue, you can also deliberately frame skill checks to set up roleplaying interactions. Using mechanics as a roleplaying prompt like this is described in more detail in Rulings in Practice: Social Skills.

Campaign Journal: Session 46B – Running the Campaign: Speak with Dead SFX
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

SESSION 46A: AMONG MADMEN

December 22nd, 2009
The 25th Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

It was mid-afternoon when they left the Necropolis.

“Should we head back to the Ghostly Minstrel or go straight to Mahdoth’s?” Elestra asked.

“Ghostly Minstrel,” Ranthir said. “We need to clean up. Besides, we still have several hours. And the Minstrel is on the way in any case.”

Agnarr grunted. “You need to clean up?”

Ranthir rolled his eyes. “Yes. I seem to be covered in some sort of black ooze. I wonder where it came from? Oh, right! My eyes and my mouth!”

THE BIG PLAN

Once they reached the Ghostly Minstrel they spent a few minutes cleaning up and then gathered back up for a planning session.

Their biggest concern was Mahdoth himself. They knew he was connected with both Wuntad and the Pactlords, which made him an obvious threat. And Ranthir knew enough about beholders from his studies in Isiltur to make them all worried: Eyestalks causing paralysis, searing pain, and even death, combined with a massive antimagic field emanating from its central eye that could unknit their strongest offensive weapons.

They laid out extensive contingency plans for dealing with the various eyestalks – restorative magicks, scrolls to re-enervate their flesh, various potions and enchantments to boost their natural resistances against its powers, and much more of the like. It would be expensive, but it was obviously a necessary expense.

“The ultimate problem, though,” Tor said, “Is that all of these precautions are magical. As soon as he puts the big eye on us, it all becomes useless.”

“We do have some non-magical solutions,” Ranthir said, pulling out the alchemical potions of questionable provenance they’d recovered from Ghul’s Labyrinth. “Who wants to go blind?”

“Do we know if his eyestalks will work in his own antimagic field?” Nasira asked.

“I don’t know,” Ranthir confessed.

“Then we should assume they do.” Tee grimaced.

“It doesn’t seem fair,” Elestra said.

From memory they sketched out a small map of the areas they had seen last time they had been at Mahdoth’s. But the truth was they had no idea how extensive the asylum complex was or how deep it might go beneath the streets of Ptolus.

To supplement their limited knowledge they considered using clairvoyance spells again, but they were concerned that defensive measures at the asylum might be triggered by their use.

Elestra tried to figure out how they could use her homunculi’s ability to pass seamlessly through earth and stone to scout out the complex, but since it was incapable of communicating anything of detail back to her that seemed for naught. Nasira, on the other hand, mentioned the possibility of scrying, but the limitations of the techniques available to her made it seem of little use, as well, until Ranthir combined the two plans: By affixing the scrying sensor to Elestra’s homunculi, Nasira would be able to watch the homunculi’s progress.

INFILTRATION BY FIRE

Eventually, feeling as prepared as they could perhaps hope for, they headed for Mahdoth’s around 9 pm.

On the way, however, they had time for further debate: Did they want to wait for the shipment to arrive and then ambush it? Or should they assault the compound immediately so that they wouldn’t have to fight both the asylum personnel and whoever came for the shipment at the same time?

“I think it’s six of one or half a dozen of the other,” Elestra said.

“I’ll take the six to one,” Agnarr said. “I like those odds.”

They all stared at him for a long moment.

“What?”

They settled on the immediate attack, which naturally opened the question of what their specific approach should be. They considered drilling down from street level into the staircase they knew led to the lower level (and which passed beneath the street). They also reopened the practicality of sending Elestra’s homunculi to scout (and, if so, where and when and how he should carry out the scouting).

Keeping the homunculi as an option, Elestra wrapped them in the camouflage of the city’s spirit. Keeping this camouflage-connection through physical proximity, they strung themselves out in a daisy-chain to allow Tee to get close enough to the building to scout the perimeter.

Through the simple expedient of looking through the windows, Tee confirmed that the street-level portion of the asylum (like the tip of the iceberg above its lower levels) was largely abandoned: Only Zairic – the halfling who had ratted them out to Mahdoth when they had come here at Danneth’s invitation – was to be found there, reading a book in a salon-like area towards the rear of the building.

Zairic looked like an easy target. Tee eased open a window at the opposite end of the room, carefully lowered her longbow into place, and… FIRED!

At the last possible moment, Zairic twisted aside so that the arrow lodged in his shoulder instead of his heart. Letting his book drop to the floor, Zairic vaulted over the high arm of his chair and jumped for cover. In mid-leap, he released a fireball through the window. Tee ducked down as the fiery inciting pellet passed over her head and avoided the brunt of it almost completely, but Elestra (standing in the open further down the alley) was caught by the edge of it.

Most of the others – clumped together across the street and still debating how they could (or would or should) use Elestra’s homunculi – missed the flash of the fireball. Fortunately, Ranthir – who was providing the daisy-chained camouflage near the mouth of the alley – recognized it for what it was. “Fireball!” he shouted, hurrying into the alley.

Zairic called out from behind the chair. “Who are you? Do you know who you anger tonight?!”

Tee didn’t bother to answer him. She vaulted herself through the window and skipped across the room, loosing another arrow that thumped into the high back of the chair.

Zairic wrenched her first arrow out of his shoulder, gulped down a healing potion, and made a break for the door. Elestra, cursing the burns from the fireball, threw open another window to the room and fired her dragon rifle at him. The blast missed narrowly, scorching the wall.

Zairic, in mid-stride, ripped a scroll from an inside pocket of his cloak and gestured through the window towards Elestra. The others were just arriving at her side, and they were all caught in a pounding, painful hail of dagger-like ice that plunged down from the sky.

Tee, deciding to fight ice with fire, dipped her hand into her bag of flames and hurled a fire elemental at the Halfling. Distracted by the fiery sprite, Zairic made an easy target for her as she plunged her dagger into his shoulder and re-opened the magically healed wound from her arrow.

Zairic cursed loudly. Wrenching himself free from her blade he cast another spell, sending his body into a rapid, cascading shift between reality and the Ethereal Plane. “You’ll die tonight!”

“You’re the only one dying tonight!” Tee shouted. “We’re happy to speak with the dead!” Her expert eyes were tracking his skittering, shifting, flickering form.

“I’ll speak with your corp—“

The halfling gurgled and collapsed. Tee’s arcing blade had ripped through half his neck. As his body fell forward, his head fell back upon a flap of flesh and landed upright on his back.

“That’s disgusting,” Elestra said, climbing through the window.

Running the Campaign: Ex Post Facto Roleplaying – Campaign Journal: Session 46B
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index