Matt Mercer, Aabria Iyengar, and Brennan Lee Mulligan — all of whom have run canonical actual plays in the world of Exandria — sat down together for a roundtable discussion of their GMing techniques.

There’s a lot of GMing talent in that room and a lot of great GMing advice in the video. I wanted to kind of dig that advice out and make it accessible, so I rewatched the video and took some notes. Then I thought it might be valuable to polish up those notes and share them here. In practice, that’s turned into a little bit of a ramble as I try to both capture what they were saying, while also sharing my own thoughts on what it means.

Where necessary I’ve used [square brackets] to indicate my original thoughts.

GROKKING A SETTING

I’ve done my own video on coming to grips with a published setting, so I found these thoughts interesting.

Matt: As I learned to GM, I would just create new settings because I was too scared to dive into established settings like Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk. So I understand there can be a reticence or anxiety about not wanting to “ruin” the setting or run it incorrectly.

Brennan then talked about how their experience running Exandria was fundamentally different from a GM running it at home, because anything that they say during the actual play becomes official canon.

Aabria: Try it when the guy who made the world is at your table.

Matt: The good news is that for the majority of you, it will not be livestreamed to the internet. So you can fuck it up as much as you want.

Aabria: Nobody 100%’s the lore. (…) Give yourself a little bit of grace.

There are a couple practical tips here:

• Take a break and go look stuff up when you need to.
• Set your campaign in a corner of the setting where you can’t “break” anything.

But the really big idea is:

Matt: Establish in Session 0 that this is your version of the setting. If you really want to be hardcore into the canon you can, but the intent with writing the [setting books] is to make information that you can use. That’s meant to be helpful. That you can take and use as much as you want to the letter, or break it apart and remake it however you want.

If you give yourself permission to own the setting and make your own version of it, the problem (and anxiety) kind of just goes away: Once it’s yours, any “mistakes” you make are actually just the truth of your setting.

Mercer explicitly rejects the auteur theory of creation, particularly in the context of roleplaying games: Exandria was “born from accident” and developed collectively. Even in his own group, it’s not something that belongs exclusively to him.

[Establishing this attitude in Session 0 also frees the players from this burden. It’s okay to shoot Darth Vader. You won’t have broken anything. You’ll have created something new.]

SESSION 0 & CHARACTER PLANNING

“I have a class. And spells. And magical gear. And literally no desires and no attachments.” Buddy, that’s enlightenment. I don’t know what to tell you. You’re actually done. You beat the game.

Brennan Lee Mulligan

Session 0 fulfills several functions:

• It establishes safety tools (lines & veils).
• It’s an amuse-bouche that clears the palette from your previous campaign.
• It sets tone for the campaign.

For an actual play, having an off-camera Session 0 is important because it gives the players space to explore ideas without feeling committed to them.

But the core discussion revolves around character creation. For a long-term campaign, you’re going to be spending dozens, hundreds, or thousands of hours with the characters. So you want to spend the time to get the characters right.

• But also don’t be afraid to sunset characters who aren’t working. Allow players to retool their characters or even retire them and bring in a new character.

Session 0 character creation can be even more important for short campaigns, though, because you won’t have the time to explore and gradually develop the characters (and their relationships) through play.

AT THE TABLE: Do character creation at the table. This allows players to bounce ideas off each other and create pre-existing relationships between their characters. The result is an overt history shared by the group. [You can see an example of this in practice in Dragon Heist: Creating the Characters.]

SUB-GROUPS: You can enhance this by having one-on-one or small group sessions with subsets of the full group. (This can also be done virtually or by e-mail between sessions.) This allows for the creation of secret histories known only to

[This is desirable because (a) enigma drives interest and (b) dramatic revelations are fun. If you’re wondering what’s really going with someone else’s PC, the interest generated will immerse you into that relationship. And it’s fun to be the center of attention for a dramatic reveal; that’s an experience that doesn’t have to be limited to the GM.

This notably, for me, illustrates a central truth: An RPG is an act of narrative creation, and I don’t (necessarily) mean that in the sense of storytelling. I mean that the game is simultaneously the creation of an event AND the spoken narration/description of that event. Furthermore, players in an RPG are simultaneously creators and audience; they are both participants in the creation of the game’s narrative and also the audience for that narrative. (The rise of televised actual play obviously begins to shift this dynamic, but it obviously remains largely true.)

Furthermore, there is a tension between the mantle of Creator and the mantle of Audience. We’ll come back to this.]

KEY ELEMENTS: [I’m creating some jargon from the discussion here.]

• Momentum are attachments. Friends, enemies, debts, etc.
• Trajectory are the character’s initial goals.
• Motivation is the character’s “why.” What is it that they want?

So if you have a player who isn’t providing back story, you need to ask them: Where’s your momentum coming from? What is driving you? What do you want to achieve? [Because the question goes both ways: These things come from back story, but figuring these out will also inform your back story.] Where you are from informs where you’re going.

It’s not about the amount of character backstory. “You don’t need a forty page back story to do this.” You just need enough backstory for these key elements to be in place and for the character to “click” into place.

Nothing wrong with forty pages of back story if that’s what the player wants or needs! Aabria Iyengar has a tip, though: Five minutes before the session, ask everyone, “What’s your back story?” Because no matter the length, in that moment the player will focus in on what’s most essential for them.

Tip: Backstory also tells you where the players’ focus is. As Brennan puts it (paraphrasing), “No clerics? Guess I won’t bother developing the gods, then.”

GAME MASTER AS GREEK CHORUS

Matt Mercer also notes that, “Back story is an invitation to the GM; not an expectation.”

But it’s a potent invitation because the easiest way to prep is to ask, “What do you think you’re going to be doing [as a character]?” And then prep that. (As opposed to saying, “This is what you’re going to do,” and then trying to figure out how to motivate the PCs to do that.)

Brennan characterizes back story as “plot hooks you’ll bite every time.” He contrasts the mysterious necromancer in the corner who the players can freely ignore as opposed to, “Your uncle, who you swore to kill, is here.”

This really sets up the idea of the GM as the chorus of a Greek play: The chorus does not drive the plot forward. It exists to establish the scene, reflect and comment upon the actions of the characters, and also to provoke and inspire their action. In just this way, an RPG campaign is driven by the players and their characters, while the GM creates opportunity and context for them to do so.

Matt: Part of the preparation (…) is getting to know enough about the world and the kind of story that you’re going to tell, so that when you start, you can kinda let all that preparation go and just ride with the player’s actions; their agency. And have that bag at the ready. At that point a lot of your preparation should be modular. You should know which things are important to tell the story, what bits of information you feel would be the most impactful for the players to discover, to uncover, to take to heart and use to drive them towards a goal, to fulfill that heroic fantasy, or that horror narrative, whatever it is that you’re using to tell.

[This is what I refer to as active play. You create these modular bits so that you can play freely with them at the table.]

RAILS vs. OBSTACLES

What I’m looking for when I’m a player is full immersion. I don’t want the experience of being a storyteller when I’m a PC. And that’s a little bit of a different thing. A lot of indie games want a flat hierarchy at the table where everybody is a storyteller. I don’t want that as a player. When I’m a player, I want to be living in a story, immersed into a character that is not, to their knowledge, living in a story. As Evan Kelmp says, “I am not a character.” I don’t want to play a character that’s thinking about their fucking narrative arc. I want to play a character who wants to save the world as quickly and efficiently as possible. But I, as the player, want the arc. So me and my character exist at odds.

Brennan Lee Mulligan

[Here we return to the tension between player as Creator and player as Audience. This tension is not a bad thing. It drives the central creative act of a roleplaying game in a way almost entirely unique to it as a medium, and when you get the balance right it creates a feedback loop of excitement.

And this type of tension is not, it should be noted, a strictly dramatist concern, although Brennan puts it in these terms. If you think in gamist terms: You, as a player, have a desire for victory. But you simultaneously don’t want that victory to be trivial.]

It’s the GM’s role at the table to resolve this tension; to unify the player’s desire and the character’s desire.

Brennan: So what does it mean if I want to provide that experience to the player? [Characters] are like water. They are going down the hill as fast as they can, seeking the path of least resistance. But the player wants anything other than a straight line. So my job as the “rails” is irrigating a path down that slope that lets the water always have taken the fastest route towards its goal, but at the end of it, the shape is the most convoluted and pleasing. You achieved the shape of a story while you were trying your hardest to avoid it.

The “rails” that Brennan is describing here are not railroading. They are obstacles. It’s the GM’s role to put obstacles between the PCs and what they want. The obstacles that Brennan is talking about are primarily derived from dramatic sensibility, but — as we’ve already discussed — the same equally applies to gamism or simulationism: The level-appropriate opponents who create challenge are placed between the PCs and their goal so that the PCs have to overcome them. Goals are not trivially achievable because the world would not feel real if they were.

Brennan also inverts this metaphor: The “rails” are ultimately designed by the players. They emerge from the character’s backstory. They are the hooks you’ll bite at every time; the uncle you swore to kill showing up to cause problems.

RANDOM TIPS AND INSIGHTS

OTHELLO TOKENS: Use the plastic discs from an Othello game set as generic monster tokens. You can use wet-erase markers on the white side of the token to identify the monster or indicate current hit point totals. [You can also flip the token to the black side to clearly indicate a corpse. It feels like corpses should be difficult terrain, but we so often lose track of them narratively.]

WHERE DO THE RELICS COME FROM? There are specific tropes in D&D. When you’re doing world-building for D&D, you want to identify those tropes and back specific explanations for them into the world, so that those tropes flow organically from the world and are a natural part of it.

[This can apply broadly to almost any setting creation. For example, let’s say you wanted to create a planet-hopping space opera. The essential trope here is that you need to be able to get from one planet to another very quickly: Cheap FTL is going to give you one setting. A solar system with dozens of terraformed planets is going to give you another. Stargates give another. Cross-planar journeys through what our ancestors called the elf-lands gives another.]

NO TIME FOR SESSION 0? If you’re running a one-shot, for example. You can replace some of that work by giving the PCs private moments at the beginning of the scenario. [And also framing scenes with smaller sub-groupings before bringing everyone together.]

Sometimes you can also use e-mail or text messages to ask questions before the session starts.

ACCEPTING OFFERS: The triad here talks about how, “Aabria is a great GM from the player’s chair,” by which they mean that she can see the storytelling beats a GM is setting up and will line herself up to hit the incoming pitch. These players recognize that you’re singing a note because you want to harmonize; and, vice versa, they sing a note because they’re hoping you’ll harmonize.

BATTLEMAPS AS IMPROV SEED. Highly detailed battlemaps can lock players into a particular visualization of the battlefield, but this can be useful if it encourages them to interact with the battlefield in creative ways. The example is given of a player seeing chains on the map and then grabbing them in-character.

…BUT YOU DON’T HAVE A BATTLEMAP: When playing theater of the mind, make it a conscious habit to establish three details of the battlefield. You don’t have to have a plan for how they’re going to be used; just make sure there’s scenery there and you’ll find that circumstance and creativity will make use of it.

And, Feng Shui-style, it can be useful to explicitly give players explicit permission to infer and/or ask about the presence of detail.

AABRIA’S SIGNATURE MOVE: “And here’s what you don’t see.” A cinematic technique in which the GM describes a scene that none of the PCs are present to witness. This can be very powerful.

Brennan: And my head popped off my body, spun around in a circle, and said, “You can do that?!” And then settled back onto my shoulders… Talk about inviting the audience in.

Brennan’s quote here is particularly interesting in light of his earlier discussion regarding the fact that he wants to remain in character. How can this be if he’s so completely blown away by a technique feeding him information that his character has no access to?

Because, once again, the player is both Creator and Audience.

CONCLUSION

If you have time, make sure to check out the full video! There’s a lot of fun stuff — anecdotes, random observations, etc. — that aren’t captured in these notes.

Go to Part 1

STEALING THE JEWEL?

As written, if the PCs have the Jewel of Three Prayers and the Rivals are Unfriendly towards them, then the Rivals will attempt to steal the Jewel. This is also listed above as one of the general courses of action that the Rivals might pursue.

I would be extremely cautious about having the Rivals choose this course of action. I’ve been DMing for awhile and, in my experience, there are two Unforgivable Sins that an NPC can commit:

1. They can kill a PC’s pet.
2. They can steal the PC’s shit.

Anything else is probably negotiable, but these are almost always points of no return.

So if the Rivals steal the Jewel? Particularly early in the campaign before the PCs have established a relationship with them?

The Rivals are dead meat.

I’m not saying you should never do this. If it makes sense, then roleplay truthfully.

I’m just saying that you should be prepared for the consequences, which could very easily see the Rival’s role in the campaign come to an abrupt (and messy) end.

THE GMPC PROBLEM

If the Rivals are friendly with the PCs, it can quite logically end up with them joining the PCs so that they can all work together. As I mentioned above, Call of the Netherdeep actually scripts exactly this moment at the very beginning of the adventure:

If the characters are on friendly terms with the rivals, the rivals meet up with them soon after the characters’ breakfast with Elder Ushru.

Ayo Jabe doesn’t mince words; she wants to know what they found in the grotto. If she gets the sense that the characters have stumbled onto something big, her eyes grow wide. She decides that she and her group want a piece of the action and proposes that they travel with the characters, saying that there’s safety in numbers. A character who makes a successful DC 13 Wisdom (Insight) check realizes that she isn’t hiding anything and wants nothing more than to be a part of a grand adventure.

Call of the Netherdeep quietly assumes that the PCs will turn this offer down, but it seems far more likely that the PCs will agree with Ayo Jabe’s logic…

… and now the GM has to deal with five GMPCs.

Honestly, this feels like a huge headache to me.

GMPCs are not the same thing as NPCs. A GMPC is a GM-controlled character who is functionally the same as a PC in the adventure: they’re an equal member of the party and you could basically imagine an invisible player at the table controlling them as such.

It is possible to have success with such characters, but it’s far more common for them to fall into one of two pitfalls:

First, the GMPC can hog the spotlight and/or be used to railroad the players. This may be because the GM wants to do this (bad GM, no cookie), but it’s often not intentional. The core problem here is that the GM has privileged information (i.e., everything in their notes). During prep, they can predict exactly what the GMPC will do, and this can become a seductive crutch for them to fall back on. During play, their knowledge of the scenario inherently biases their decision-making. And even if the GM erects an impeccable firewall around the GMPC, the other players know that the GMPC has this privileged information and it will affect their relationship with the GMPC and the GMPC’s opinions.

(Imagine that you had a player at the table who had read the entire adventure and that the other players knew had read the adventure.)

Second, the GMPC can become a weird kind of half-character who awkwardly doesn’t participate in group decisions and/or frequently “vanishes” from the game world because everyone forgets that they’re there. (This can even happen because the GM is trying to avoid the first problem: Knowing that the players will privilege the GMPC’s opinions, for example, they just never have the GMPC offer an opinion.)

So even running one NPC companion effectively can be a big challenge. Five GMPCs at the same time? That probably doesn’t just quintuple the difficulty; it’s almost certainly exponential increase in difficulty. Even laying aside the inherent difficulties, juggling those five characters and making sure they are consistently a living part of the campaign world is going to chew up a lot of your mental bandwidth. There’s also combat to consider: all those GMPC turns are going to slow combat down.

Speaking of combat: All those extra GMPCs are going to have a big impact on the balance of combat encounters. And, importantly, the adventure isn’t designed for this. Running 5^th Edition for a group of 10 PCs is infamously difficult, but Call of the Netherdeep seems to just blithely assume that it will make absolutely no difference at all.

If you’re comfortable trying to run five GMPCs, go for it.

For everyone else, I’m not saying you should never allow the PCs and Rivals to team up. But I could certainly take efforts to make sure that this is only a momentary state of affairs.

Redirect the Rivals into supporting action off-screen. In other words, the PCs do X while the Rivals take care of Y. This is a little difficult in Call of the Netherdeep because of the linear design of the campaign, but it can be managed. For example, they might go to research the Jewel of Three Prayers somewhere else and then join the PCs in Bazzoxan. In Ank’Harel, they might volunteer to infiltrate an enemy faction. And so forth.

Encourage splitting the party, with each smaller group having a mix of Rivals and PCs. (For these scenes, you might consider letting the players whose PCs are not present take on the roles of the Rivals, particularly for combat.)

Remember to debate the agenda. Our methodology for running the Rivals (i.e., they should frequently believe that the group should be pursuing a different goal or, if they share a goal, that there is a better way to achieve it) will naturally lend itself to either splitting the party or breaking the alliance between Rivals and PCs entirely. Don’t be afraid to lean into this, as the aftermath will heighten the tension between the groups to delightful heights.

CONCLUSION

Ultimately, this all boils down to a simple formula:

1. Roleplay truthfully. (Actively play the Rivals and track the relationship gauge.)
2. Debate the agenda. (And force the players to think about and defend their choices and opinions.)

But this formula will manifest itself with an infinite variety at the gaming table, as the Rivals and PCs collide spectacularly in myriad ways. The unpredictable nature of these conflicts itself will bring the drama — and the characters — to vivid life. As you choose to actively play with them, the players will feel the fundamental reality — the ineffable uniqueness — of the events happening at your gaming table, and they will rise to the occasion.

FURTHER READING
Call of the Netherdeep: Running Betrayers’ Rise

Go to Part 1

The last piece of the puzzle here is that, in order for the Rivals and PCs to disagree about the current agenda, there has to BE a clear agenda for them to disagree about. As noted, this is something that Call of the Netherdeep struggles with.

Even if the Rivals weren’t a factor here, this is still something you’d want to fix. In fact, the Rivals can be a good diagnostic tool: If you hit a section of the campaign where you can’t figure out how the Rivals could have a competing agenda, that’s probably a good indication that you’ve failed to give the players enough information to have an opinion and a choice of their own.

Fortunately, I think addressing this problem doesn’t have to be particularly complicated. You just need to focus on two things. First, backfilling the lore surrounding Alyxian the Apotheon. Second, making sure there’s a clear goal (or choice of goals) at each stage of the campaign.

LORE OF ALYXIAN

When the PCs reach the Netherdeep, they are confronted by an extraplanar extrusion of a demigod’s traumatized mind. In exploring the physical space of the Netherdeep, they are simultaneously delving into the mystery of Alyxian’s past (and the trauma he has suffered).

This is a really cool dungeon, but in its current form the Netherdeep is doing most of the heavy lifting for both establishing a mystery (What is Alyxian’s story?) and then also solving that mystery. If you want to elevate this material, then you need to pull some of this amassed lore backwards so that it appears meaningfully earlier in the campaign. (All the way back, in fact. From the Emerald Grotto if not earlier.) What you want is for this enigma (Who is the Apotheon?) to be much more front-and-center throughout the campaign, so that by the time the PCs get to Netherdeep the players are fully engaged with the mystery and trying to figure it out. The Netherdeep should just be the focused resolution, as they fill in the gaps and realize some deep and terrible emotional truths.

The result will be much more satisfying, and feel more like the culmination of an entire campaign, instead of just another procedural step.

To understand what I mean here, let’s consider one small, concrete example: In Area 24 of the Netherdeep, the PCs encounter Perigee the Deva. This celestial actually fought with Alyxian during the Calamity centuries ago and remains, ruidium-corrupted, by his side even now.

This could be a really incredible moment: The PCs get to meet this legendary figure out of myth!

… but it really only works if you know who Perigee is before you walk into that room. And in Call of the Netherdeep, you don’t.

Imagine that you went on an adventure in the dungeon beneath the hill where King Arthur is buried, fated to rise in Britain’s hour of greatest need. As you journey through the dungeon you encounter some of his knights: Galahad, perhaps. Percival. Guinevere.

Those are cool moments because you recognize those names: “Holy crap! It’s Guinevere!”

But you don’t get that moment with Perigee because… well, who the heck is Perigee? No one at the table cares.

But if you establish Perigee earlier in the campaign — she appears in a mural in Betrayers’ Rise; she’s mentioned in a scrap of poetry; she has a statue in Cael Morrow or the Emerald Grotto — then you CAN have the moment of, “Holy crap! It’s Perigee!”

You just have to put the work in.

Check out Getting the Players to Care for various techniques you can use for doing this. There are already numerous opportunities throughout the campaign for including this lore, you just have to take advantage of them:

• Establishing the Calamity during the Festival of Merit.
• Murals in the Emerald Grotto prayer site.
• The first vision.
• What the Elders of Jigow know.
• What basic research in Jigow can uncover.
• Lore in Betrayers’ Rise.
• Lore held by the Bazzoxan researchers.
• What advanced research in the libraries and lore-stocks of Ank’Harel can uncover.
• More material seeded in Cael Morrow.

Use the Three Clue Rule and build your revelation lists. And this will require some care and thought: Don’t reveal enough? The players aren’t engaged with trying to figure it out. Reveal too much? You’ll undermine the revelations in the final act.

You’ll know you have the balance right if:

• The players already have strong opinions about Alyxian before ever reaching Ank’Harel (and, ideally, those opinions are varied and shifting); and
• The players have big questions about the Apotheon that they talk about and clearly want answers to.

This will allow the Rivals to challenge those opinions and to join in the discussion hypothesizing what the answers might be. But, even more importantly, the desire to answer those questions will motivate the agenda of the campaign.

CAMPAIGN AGENDAS

Call of the Netherdeep is a linear campaign (Jigow → Emerald Grotto → Bazzoxan → Ank’Harel → Cael Morrow → Netherdeep), which means that the structure of the campaign can be largely summarized as a series of agendas — i.e., the sequence of goals that move the PCs through the campaign.

In the adventure as written, these goals are generally underdeveloped, vague, and merely procedural. We’ve already seen, for example, how the PCs go to Bazzoxan because “an NPC told you to,” rather than having any true, actionable reason for going there.

As we discussed in the article on Running Betrayers’ Rise, we can strengthen the agenda which brings the PCs to Bazzoxan by seeding a specific piece of lore: The Jewel of Three Prayers is depicted somewhere in Betrayers’ Rise and the Jigow Elder knows this.

Tip: I also recommend that all of the characters in the Emerald Grotto — not just the group who claimed the Jewel — receive Alyxian’s vision. (And he remains connected to all of them.) Similarly, the Elder should seek out both groups the next morning. They share a destiny.

This sets up one of three key questions that should drive the campaign.

What is the Jewel of Three Prayers? Specifically, the PCs should be able to figure out that it was empowered by the gods to aid Alyxian three times; that shrines were erected in those places; and that they need to find the shrines in order to fully reactivate the Jewel.

What is ruidium and what should be done with it? It should become clear that ruidium is appearing at sites associated with the Apotheon.

Who is Alyxian the Apotheon? Piecing together the details of his story and framing the ultimate question of the campaign, which is whether he should helped, freed, or destroyed.

The PCs may not fully understand all of these questions to start with, but they should be pretty firmly in place by the time they’re wrapping up Betrayers’ Rise (even if the complete answers won’t be realized until Cael Marrow and the Netherdeep).

CORE STRUCTURE

Once the PCs get to Bazzoxan, the campaign moves into its core structure, which revolves around the scholar factions of Ank’Harel and their ruidium-based goals:

• Allegiance of Allsight (Prolix) want to use the ruidium to create weapons, armor, and other artifacts that they can sell to the highest bidder.
• Consortium of Vermilion Dreams (Aloysia) want to secure a monopoly on ruidium so that they can study its deeper mysteries and have sole access to its power.
• Library of the Cobalt Soul (Question) believe that ruidium is dangerous and it must be either destroyed or sealed away so that it cannot harm the world.

First, in Bazzoxan, the PCs make contact with one, two, or three researchers from Ank’Harel, who clearly communicate:

• The identities of their factions;
• The ruidium-based goals of their faction; and
• The existence of ruidium in both Betrayers’ Rise and Ank’Harel associated with the imagery of the Jewel of Three Prayers.

Second, these researchers refer the PCs to their factions (or come back with the PCs to Ank’Harel to make the proper introductions).

Third, the PCs join one (or more) of these factions and begin doing faction mission for them.

Structurally, this is quite straightforward. The key thing is that the factions and (most importantly) their conflicting agendas are made clear to the PCs immediately (instead of being largely obfuscated until later in the campaign).

Because the PCs now need to make some choices about what THEY think should be done with the ruidium, dynamic relationships with the researchers in Bazzoxan and the factions in Ank’Harel can emerge through actual play.

This also creates the opportunity to organically create a meaningful dispute between the PCs and the Rivals: Just give the Rivals a different opinion about what the significance of ruidium is and what should be done with it.

Design Note: I suspect it’s likely that at one point this WAS the intended structure for Call of the Netherdeep. At some point during development, however, the decision was made to (a) script a scene with Aloysia as a monologuing villain and (b) have all the researchers in Bazzoxan play coy with what they know in order to create Startling Revelations™ in Ank’Harel.

If so, these decisions really broke the back of the adventure as written: The PCs are forced to blindly “choose” a faction without understanding the significance of that choice, and Aloysia’s faction has been railroaded off the table as a viable ally (even though the rest of the adventure acts as if the PCs are just as likely to join it). Much like the Rivals, the factions get reduced to a simply “Me Help” / “Me Fight” dichotomy.

Go to Part 3: Situational Advice

SPOILERS FOR CALL OF THE NETHERDEEP

One of the central gimmicks in Call of the Netherdeep is that there’s a party of rival adventurers who will dog the PCs’ path throughout the adventure.

It’s a cool gimmick, and the Rivals themselves — Ayo Jabe, Dermot Wurder, Galsariad Ardyth, Irvan Wastewalker, and Maggie Keeneyes — are excellent characters. Not only are they varied and flavorful, they’re also presented to the DM with tight, efficient briefing packets (p. 11-13) that make them easy to grasp as roles to be played.

Unfortunately, the presentation of the rivalry in the adventure can be underwhelming. There are three reasons for this.

First, the primary tool Call of the Netherdeep gives you for managing the Rivals’ relationship with the PCs is their relationship attitude:

• Friendly
• Indifferent
• Hostile

It’s a simple gauge, but its simplicity is not the problem. The problem is that it’s the wrong tool for the job of determining what the Rivals do. Or, more accurately, it’s cripplingly incomplete.

As a gauge, Friendly/Indifferent/Hostile only tells you HOW the Rivals choose to interact with the PCs: Do they help you or kill you?

This unidimensional relationship is flat, repetitive, and ultimately dead ends the Rivals’ role in the campaign: Either literally because the PCs kill them or figuratively because they end up as loyal lapdogs who simply support whatever the PCs decide to do.

Fundamentally:

• I want to kill you.
• I don’t care about you.
• I like you.

is not the description of a Rival.

Second, the adventure frequently attempts to script predetermined interactions with the Rivals. These largely don’t work because (a) predetermined scripts like this rarely work properly and (b) although some effort is made to make these scripts flexible, they nevertheless frequently end up in conflict with the relationship being otherwise pushed by the relationship gauge.

There will be countless examples of this in actual play, but here’s one directly from the book: Early in the campaign, the Rivals — if the relationship gauge is Friendly — offer to join the PCs and work with them on the quest. The book then simply assumes that this never happened because all of the scripted interactions require the Rivals to NOT be working with the PCs.

Third, the adventure struggles with the lack of a clear, actionable agenda for much of its length.

This is a deeper problem with the structure of Call of the Netherdeep that extends beyond the Rivals, but it’s specifically problematic here because a “rival” is someone who competes with you to achieve a common objective; for superiority in a common activity.

This works to a certain extent when the PCs first meet the Rivals, because they are literally racing each other to obtain a prize item in the Emerald Grotto.

But then it stops working.

This is partly because a gauge that only outputs “I want to help you!” or “I want to kill you!” isn’t conducive to competing for a common goal. Partly it’s because the railroaded structure of the campaign breaks it. (You can’t actually race someone if they’re scripted to always show up at the next cutscene.)

Mostly it’s because the stakes of the campaign aren’t really made clear.

For example, at the beginning of Chapter 2, an NPC tells the PCs to go to the city of Bazzoxan because they’ve acquired an artifact from the Calamity and “there is no place in Xhorhas where the memory of the Calamity lingers more strongly than in Bazzoxan.”

But that’s notably not actually a reason to go to Bazzoxan. Just think about the immediate follow-up question from the players:

“And what do we do when we get there?”

If you can’t answer that question, then you don’t actually have a reason to go. Which is why, when the PCs get to Bazzoxan, the book assumes they’ll just kind of wander around aimlessly until they randomly bump into the plot. And the immediate problem here is that, “Go to Bazzoxan and then wander around until you bump into the plot” isn’t something you can have a Rival in, because there’s no actual goal to be achieved.

So if you’re running Call of the Netherdeep (or similar rival groups in other campaigns), what SHOULD you do?

STEP 1: ROLEPLAY TRUTHFULLY, PLAY ACTIVELY

In DMing the Rivals, I would not spend a lot of time trying to follow the scripted events in the book. Focus on tracking the Rivals’ relationship with the PCs and then just roleplaying them truthfully.

Broadly speaking, there are five courses of action that the Rivals are likely be pursuing at any point in the campaign:

• Working in partnership with the PCs.
• Convinced the PCs need help even if the PCs won’t let them, thus following the PCs around.
• Independently trying to figure out how to help Alyxian.
• Concluding that this isn’t any of their business and exiting the campaign to go do other things.
• Seizing the Jewel (and possibly trying to kill the PCs) and taking charge.

One of these modes of action may dominate the entire campaign, or it’s possible that the Rivals will be constantly shifting between modes. It’ll depend on how things play out at the table. Either way, you goal is to freely riff on these modes of action by continually asking, “What would the Rivals do?”

In other words, actively play the Rivals in the same way that your players are actively playing their PCs.

RIVALS IN CHARGE: It’s also possible that the Rivals can end up with the Jewel of Three Prayers, the PCs respect that, and the PCs volunteer to work for them. (This is relatively unlikely without rewriting some stuff early in the campaign, but it’s still a possibility.)

In my opinion, this is actually a far more challenging position to be in as a DM: If the PCs are in the driving seat, reacting to what they’re doing can be almost entirely reflexive and it’s trivial to keep the players in the spotlight. If the Rivals end up in charge, it can be much more difficult to make decisions for them without being biased by your behind-the-scenes knowledge of the campaign. And it’s much more difficult to keep the PCs in the spotlight.

Check out Calling in the Big Guns and Calling in the Little Guys: The situation here is not exactly comparable, but you may find some of the principles there useful. In particular:

• Have the Rivals ask the PCs what they think should be done. (The Rivals may or may not agree, but it’s probably a good idea to have them use the PCs’ ideas frequently.)
• Have the Rivals assign the PCs an important objective to achieve while the Rivals are doing something else. (And try to arrange things so that, at least some of the time, whatever the PCs are doing turns out to actually be the crucial thing.)

STEP 2: DEBATE THE AGENDA

The creative goal, of course, is for the Rivals to actually BE the rivals of the PCs.

The key to achieving this is the Principle of Opposition: Whatever the PCs think is the right course of action? The Rivals have the opposite opinion.

To understand the power of this, let’s consider the end of the campaign. The adventure finally puts its cards on the table and the PCs are given a fairly clear choice: Free the Apotheon, Help the Apotheon, or Kill the Apotheon. (And there are strong arguments for each.)

As for the Rivals?

DEALING WITH THE RIVALS

Rivals who follow the characters into the Heart of Despair behave in one of two ways, depending on their attitude toward the characters:

Friendly or Indifferent Rivals. The rivals allow the characters to deal with Alyxian in whatever manner they see fit, fighting alongside them if need be.

Hostile Rivals. The rivals attack the characters.

They’re stuck on the broken relationship gauge: Loyal lapdogs or furious murders.

But what happens if you instead use the Principle of Opposition:

PC: We have to free him.

Ayo Jabe: We can’t do that! He’s mad! You’ll doom the world!

Or:

PC: We have to help him.

Galsariad: He’s beyond help. Corrupted with power. There’s no option except to exterminate him.

Or:

PC: We have to kill him.

Maggie: But he’s in pain! You can’t just murder him! He deserves to be free!

The relationship gauge tells you HOW the Rivals oppose the PCs’ agenda:

• Hostile? They’re going to go with aggressive negotiations.
• Friendly? It’ll be a debate.
• Indifferent? Heated argument that could go either way.

In practice, the PCs probably won’t be a united front, which will give you the freedom to split up the Rivals’ opinions, too, so that the debate can boil out into a multifaceted argument. In fact, maybe the whole thing fractures apart, with PCs and Rivals both forming new alliances and turning on each other.

The key thing here is that the opposition of the Rivals will force the players/PCs to think about what they believe. It will force them to have an active agenda and an opinion about how best to achieve that agenda. And then they’ll need to DEFEND both.

That process — thinking, forming opinions, defending those opinions — will make the players invest deeply in the campaign.

Of course, the Rivals don’t need to be completely intransigent pains-in-the-butt at every single moment. Sometimes they’ll align with the PCs (because they’re friends or as grudging enemies towards a common goal). And sometimes the PCs should be able to change their minds.

(You may be surprised when the Rivals also start changing the players’ minds. Play fair in the battlefield of ideas and your players will engage with those ideas. And with those characters.)

Go to Part 2: Setting the Agenda

In the world of Exandria, in the city of Bazzoxan, there lies Betrayers’ Rise. Once a “dark temple instrumental to the machinations of the Betrayer Gods during the Calamity” (Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount), the Rise is a gargantuan complex worming its way into the earth; a place of vast, unexplored depths where explorers delved too deep and woke up abyssal horrors from an elder age, placing the people of Bazzoxan on the front lines of an ancient war.

As presented in the Call of the Netherdeep campaign, however, Betrayers’ Rise is a tiny little dungeon with just sixteen rooms.

They’re good rooms. Great rooms, even.

But it doesn’t quite deliver the experience promised by the lore.

THE PROBLEM

To be fair, Call of the Netherdeep knows it has a problem. The writers kind of toss out the idea that “the characters experience a particular version” of Betrayers’ Rise, and that others experience “different configurations” of the dungeon. They also provide “Betrayers’ Rise Encounters” (p. 63) that can be used as inspiration to “expand” the Rise.

And this is not actually an unusual problem: You want to send the PCs into a legendary dungeon — Moria, Undermountain, Castle Blackmoor, Betrayers’ Rise — as part of a larger adventure. But these vast dungeons have dozens of levels and hundreds, possibly thousands, of rooms.

At that scale, in published adventures, page count becomes an issue. For another example of this, consider Ed Greenwood’s FRE3 Waterdeep module. Greenwood wanted to send the PCs through the well in the Yawning Portal and into Undermountain as part of this adventure, but obviously couldn’t include the entire dungeon (which usually requires hundreds of pages) in a 52-page adventure. (His solution was to create a previously unmentioned secret well in the Yawning Portal’s backroom that conveniently led directly to where the PCs needed to go.)

But even if page count or prep time weren’t important (which they obviously are), there’s also pacing to consider. Megadungeons are awesome. I love megadungeons. But it wouldn’t make a lot of sense to put Call of the Netherdeep on hold for 10 or 20 or 40 sessions while a largely unrelated dungeon crawl is happening.

So what’s the problem?

If I’m saying that you can’t do a megadungeon in Call of the Netherdeep and that you shouldn’t do a megadungeon in Call of the Netherdeep, don’t we just have to accept that micro-dungeon that Call of the Netherdeep presents?

No, actually.

THE SOLUTION(S)

We’ve been hearing “vast underground complex” and we’ve been defaulting to “megadungeon” as the solution. The solution is to shift our paradigm, and we can do that by rephrasing our goal.

The micro-dungeon in Call of the Netherdeep is (a) good and (b) probably has about the right narrative weight for its role in the campaign. So what is it that we want?

Ideally, we’d take the exact same micro-dungeon and present it in a way that’s consistent with Betrayers’ Rise being a gargantuan complex with vast, unexplored depths where explorers delved too deep and yada yada yada.

OPTION 1: MULTIPLE ENTRANCES

Instead of Betrayers’ Rise having a single entrance that leads to a sixteen room micro-dungeon, the Rise has multiple entrances leading to a convoluted honeycomb of many different dungeon complexes. Some of these are small; some are vast. Some are connected to each other; others are not… or, if they are, the ways are secret, blocked, or only accessible through interdimensional spaces.

One of these entrances, of course, leads to our micro-dungeon.

The key question now is, how do the PCs know to use this specific entrance?

To answer this question, we simply step back and look at the PCs’ goal in Bazzoxan: They’re here to get answers about the Jewel of Three Prayers, the enigmatic Vestige of Divergence which has come into either their possession or the possession of their Rivals.

Therefore, this entrance must have a specific connection to the Jewel of Three Prayers.

There are many ways you could create his connection, but you can keep it quite simple: There’s a giant drawing or bas relief of the Jewel depicted on the entrance or near the entrance or just inside the entrance.

The next question is: How do the PCs learn about this connection?

This revelation is essential for the adventure, so we want to use the Three Clue Rule here. In fact, there are two closely related revelations here.

REVELATION 1: WE HAVE TO GO TO BAZZOXAN.

• The Elder in Jigow who told them to go to Bazzoxan (p. 37) should tell them: “I was in Bazzoxan once, where the legacy of the Calamity lingers more strongly anywhere else in Xhorhas, and I saw this very Jewel depicted on the walls of the Betrayers’ Rise. Perhaps you will find answers there.”
• The PCs can discover references to this depiction of the Jewel at Betrayers’ Rise through their own research.
• The Rivals will conduct their own research (or perhaps seek the casting of a legend lore spell) and discover the Jewel’s depiction at Betrayers’ Rise. They’ll then inform the PCs, ask for the PCs’ help, or the PCs can pursue them there.

REVELATION 2: THE LOCATION OF THE JEWEL’S DEPICTION.

• The PCs can do their own survey of the Rise’s exterior to find the depiction.
• The Three Scholars of Ank’Harel in Bazzoxan (Question, Prolix, and Aloysia) are all here researching ruidium (which is specifically found around this entrance and in this micro-dungeon). They can be questioned and their notes also include depictions of the Jewel.

Design Note: This conveniently also addresses some other structural weaknesses in Call of the Netherdeep. For example, in the adventure as written the Elder doesn’t actually give the PCs’ a reason to go to Bazzoxan; so when they arrive, they end up just kind of wandering around hoping to bump into the plot. By having the Elder give them this specific connection to Bazzoxan, the PCs now arrive in town with a specific agenda which will drive the action forward.

You could also further develop this lore to strengthen connections between Bazzoxan and Ank’Harel. Perhaps the excavations in the sunken city of Cael Morrow have recently discovered a depiction of the Jewel of Three Prayers, and some or all of the scholarly factions have independently discovered its depiction in Bazzoxan (providing an alternative or additional motive to ruidium for coming here).

OPTION 2: THE POINTCRAWL

If you want to actually delve into the “true” Betrayers’ Rise — that vast, unexplored depth which yada yada yada — then what you need is a pointcrawl.

A pointcrawl adventure uses a point-map to represent navigation at an abstract level. One way of understanding a pointcrawl, and its original application, is modeling travel along a trail system (i.e., the connections between points are literally wilderness trails running between the locations).

In the case of a dungeon pointcrawl, like the one we would use for Betrayers’ Rise, the points represent notable locations or regions within the dungeon and the connections between them model the navigational connections between them. Because these navigation connections are being represented at a high level of abstraction, they are often not specific. (There might be several different passages you can take from the Low Halls to the High Throne, but they’d all be represented by a single line. This is similar to how there are many streets you could take while driving across town from McDonald’s to the Museum of Natural History, but they’ll all be heading in basically the same direction.)

Let’s make this less abstract. The way a dungeon pointcrawl would work here is that the vast depths of Betrayers’ Rise would be abstracted. You’d narrate large spans of the journey as a sort of travelogue through terrifying-yet-empty vaults.

The Rise is not a beehive with every inch filled by demons. It is a wasteland.

If you want a touchstone for what this would look like/sound like in actual play, consider the journey through Moria in The Lord of the Rings:

For eight dark hours, not counting two brief halts, they marched on; and they met not danger, and heard nothing, and saw nothing but the faint gleam of the wizard’s light, bobbing like a will-o’-wisp in front of them. The passage they had chosen wound steadily upwards. As far as they could judge it went in great mounting curves, and as it rose it grew loftier and wider. There were now no openings to other galleries or tunnels on either side, and the floor was level and sound, without pits or cracks. Evidently they had struck what once had been an important road; and they went forward quicker than they had done on their first march.

They had marched as far as the hobbits could endure without a rest, and all were thinking of a place where they could sleep, when suddenly the walls to right and left vanished. They seem to have passed through some arched doorway into a black and empty space. There was a great draught of warmer air behind them, and before them the darkness was cold on their faces. They halted and crowded anxiously together.

Gandalf seemed pleased. ‘I chose the right way,’ he said. ‘At last we are coming to the habitable parts, and I guess that we are not far now from the eastern side. But we are high up, a good deal higher than the Dimrill Gate, unless I am mistaken. From the feeling of the air, we must be in a wide hall. I will now risk a little real light.’

He raised his staff, and for a brief instant there was a blaze like a flash of lightning. Great shadows sprang up and fled, and for a second they saw a vast roof far above their heads upheld by many mighty pillars hewn of stone. Before them and on either side stretched a huge empty hall; its black walls, polished and smooth as glass, flashed and glittered. Three other entrances they saw, dark black arches: one straight before them eastwards, and one to either side.

Then the light went out.

The “points” of the pointcrawl would be points of particular interest/danger. They’d also represent key navigational choices. In the movie version of Moria, for example, these are:

• the Entrance;
• “I have no memory of this place”;
• Balin’s Tomb; and
• the Bridge of Khazad-dûm

In designing this for an RPG, you would need to include options for the paths Gandalf didn’t take (so that the players would have navigational choices).

PREPPING THE POINTCRAWL: Unlike Option 1, therefore, this option would require significantly more prep, because you’ll need to create other points within Betrayers’ Rise in addition to the original micro-dungeon (which I’m going to call the Cyst of Avandra).

My guess is that you’d want at least a half dozen points that are actually micro-dungeons. (You could think of each of these as a 5-Room Dungeon.) And then you’d probably want another dozen or so points that are just individual rooms or cool landmarks (a statue, a strange chasm, a subterranean bridge, etc.).

Some of these points might be better thought of as entire regions, out of which navigational choices can be made.

“You’re in the Hex Pits. You see a number of stairs winding down. Or you could perhaps try to make your way up one of the great ramps at either end of the Pits.”

OPTION 3: THE GUIDE

If we consider Gandalf an NPC instead of a PC, then we can get some of the atmosphere offered by the pointcrawl, but wrap it in a simple package (with near-zero prep) by simply requiring the PCs to have a guide.

What guide? One of the Three Scholars, of course.

And how do they know where to take the PCs? Once again, it’s the depiction of the Jewel of Three Prayers. Rather than being an entrance to Betrayers’ Rise, the painting or bas relief of the Jewel is located deep within the Rise.

The chosen scholar(s) can guide the PCs there in abstract time (a montage of moments as they delve into the dungeon; just like the hobbits’ experience in Moria), perhaps triggering a few “random” (actually scripted) encounters along the way.

When the PCs arrive at the depiction of the Jewel, you simply shift to now time as they come to the entrance of Cyst of Avandra.

Design Note: You could enrich this interaction a bit by having the Three Scholars each propose/take differing routes through the Rise. But there’s probably not a huge gain from this unless the PCs can make some sort of meaningful choice between route options.

The PCs could also avoid the need for an actual guide if, for example, they steal one of the researchers’ notes from their rooms. (Allowing them to study the notes and guide themselves.) You can prompt this as an active premise by having one of the scholars ask the PCs to steal a rival’s notes. (Prolix might do so in order to figure out what Aloysia is doing in Bazzoxan, for example.)

For the encounters studded along the route, you can use (or at least start with) the “Betrayers’ Rise Encounters” on p. 63 of Call of the Netherdeep. Try to have these encounters really reflect the vastness of the spaces through which the PCs are traveling, however: They pass through a galley looking out over a vast underground chasm or chamber, lit by the ruddy light of a lake of fire on the far end. In the center of the lake is an island upon which is a slab of stone. And upon the slab of stone there lies a sleeping balor.

Best not to rouse it.

FURTHER READING
Call of the Netherdeep: Running the Rivals