The revised 2024 edition of the D&D 5E Player’s Handbook includes a Rules Glossary at the back of the book. This glossary is integral to the organization of the rulebook, as described in a sidebar on page 7:

RULES GLOSSARY

If you read a rules term in this book and want to know its definition, consult the rules glossary, which is appendix C. This chapter provides an overview of how to play D&D and focuses on the big picture. Many places in this chapter reference that glossary.

So, for example, the rules will mention that a spell can have a Cone area of effect, but what this means will never be explained in the text: It will only be defined in the “Cone [Area of Effect]” section of the Rules Glossary.

There is also, of course, an Index where you can look up various topics. This is, thankfully, MUCH improved over the 2014 version of the Index, which suffered from a multitude of sins. (The most frustrating, in my experience, was that you’d look something up in the Index and it would tell you to go look at a different Index entry. And sometimes when you looked up that entry, it would tell you to go look at another entry. And then, when you finally followed the daisy chain to its end, there would only be a single page reference which could have just as easily been included at every single entry along the daisy chain! This is completely absent from the 2024 Index.)

Splitting the rules for a game into an explanatory text and a “definitive” rules glossary isn’t a new technique. It’s a format that’s been used by a number of board games over the last couple decades. (For example, Fantasy Flight Games was a big fan of this for a while, and even D&D 3^rd Edition published a separate Rules Compendium that used a similar approach in an effort to “simplify” and “clarify” the rules with a “definitive” reference.)

And, to be blunt, my experience with these glossary-based rulebooks, as I’ll call them, has pretty consistently sucked. They have a pretty easy fail-state in which the rules glossary ISN’T actually authoritative, so you end up with rules split up across multiple locations, which means that

• you’re forced to flip back and forth between different pages trying to piece together the full set of rules you actually need; and
• even when the glossary IS authoritative, there’s no way that you can be sure that’s true, so you end up flipping back and forth anyway.

This fail-state is generally made worse because you need to play Guess What We Named This Entry, which can be capricious at best. Furthermore, these failures seem to be endemic because, in my experience, game rules are inherently procedural (if A, then B, then C), whereas a glossary is organized by topic.

Note: None of this applies to a rulebook which simply includes a Glossary. A normal glossary can be a useful resource for quickly understanding key terminology, and can be even more useful if it includes page references pointing you to the full and primary discussion of the topic. You could remove such a glossary and the game would still be complete.

A glossary-based rulebook, on the other hand, has rules which are ONLY found in the Rules Glossary. This glossary is not merely a reference tool; it’s integral to the presentation of the game. Removing this glossary would change the game.

With all that being said, I tried to go into the 2024 Player’s Handbook with an open mind. At first glance, in fact, it seemed that the Rules Glossary would be a useful reference tool (although it was immediately obvious that its utility would be greatly enhanced if it had page references).

After using it for a little bit, unfortunately, I’m forced to conclude that…

IT SUCKS

To demonstrate, let’s consider a spell’s Range and Target.

“Range” is not, as far as I can tell, covered in the Rules Glossary. (I can’t be 100% sure of this because sometimes you have to guess how the term is being alphabetized — i.e., “Range” vs. “Spell Range”. But the Index doesn’t have a Rules Glossary page reference for it, so I’m fairly confident.) This means that all of the rules for a spell’s Range are located on page 236 in Chapter 7: Spells.

That’s simple enough.

What about a spell’s Target?

Well, that does have a Rules Glossary entry, on page 376, which is:

TARGET

A target is the creature or object targeted by an attack roll, forced to make a saving throw by an effect, or selected to receive the effects of a spell or another phenomenon.

Great! At first glance, we’ve found the rules for Targets!

… except, of course, I have a certain degree of system mastery, and I know this cannot, in fact, be the totality of the Target rules.

Okay, so let’s hit up the Index:

target, 376

Huh. Only one page reference and it’s pointing to the Rules Glossary entry. Maybe the 2024 revision massively streamlined the Target rules and those are the only rules for targets.

Let’s double-check by looking up “spells” and “spell target” in the Index and see if there’s anything there.

Nope.

The reality is that the Index, although much improved, has actually failed here. The rules for a spell’s Target are located on page 237-8. These rules are fairly bulky and, at first glance, seem complete.

But wait, there’s more!

In the Target section, for example, there are rules for areas of effect:

Areas of Effect. Some spells, such as Thunderwave, cover an area called an area of effect, which is defined in the rules glossary. The area determines what the spell targets. The description of a spell specifies whether it has an area of effect, which is typically one of these shapes: Cone, Cube, Cylinder, Emanation, Line, or Sphere.

Okay, so then we go to the Area of Effect entry in the Rules Glossary. This includes essential rules about the area’s point of origin, how to determine if certain parts of the area of effect are blocked, etc. and then it cross-references Rules Glossary entries for each individual shape. (So you might then flip to Cube to figure out the specific rules for how a Cube area of effect works.)

But what if you were coming to this from a different direction? For example, let’s say you were looking at the Thunderwave spell, where it says:

Each creature in a 15-foot Cube originating from you makes a Constitution saving throw.

You don’t know what that means, but “Cube” is capitalized, which indicates a term that’s located in the Rules Glossary. Here you get the specific rules about Cubes which, at first glance, seem complete… but don’t actually include the stuff about how certain parts of the area might be blocked. This is probably okay-ish, though, because even though “area of effect” isn’t capitalized, the entry is titled “Cube [Area of Effect]” and the square brackets indicate that there’s another glossary entry. Yes, you now have multiple pages open and are cross-referencing them to figure out how the rules work, but at least you were able to find everything by following the breadcrumb trail!

But let’s go back to the rules for Targets on page 238 and look at this section of the rules:

A Clear Path to the Target. To target something with a spell, a caster must have a clear path to it, so it can’t be behind Total Cover.

Well, that seems complete and, unlike the “Areas of Effect” section of the same rules, there’s no reference to an entry in the Rules Glossary, so we must be good to go!

… except I know that in the 2014 version of the rulebook, this section reads:

A CLEAR PATH TO THE TARGET

To target something, you must have a clear path to it, so it can’t be behind total cover.

If you place an area of effect at a point you can’t see and an obstruction, such as a wall, is between you and that point, the point of origin comes into being on the near side of that obstruction.

Hmm. What happened to that whole second paragraph?

Well, once again, maybe they removed it from the rules. It did, after all, give rise to the endless debates about whether or not you could target someone standing behind a window. (And, if so, what would happen.)

But by this point I’ve gotten suspicious, and so I go digging a bit and discover that this part of the rule can, in fact, be found hidden in the Rules Glossary! (Although, obviously, not in the entry about Targets!)

Finally, all of this is made much, much worse because Wizards of the Coast is allergic to page references, and so even when they do tell you where you can find more rules, this takes the form of, “See also chapter 1,” and you’re left flipping through a thirty-page chapter trying to figure out what where you’re supposed to look.

CONCLUSION

On the one hand, you can argue that all of the rules are, in fact, in the rulebook, and can eventually be found if you just look in the right place. So what’s the problem?

On the other hand, I want you to think about how many times during this relatively simple rules look up:

• You could falsely conclude that you had all the relevant rules and, therefore, never go looking for the rules hidden away in a different part of the book.
• You needed to have multiple pages open at the same time in order to have all the relevant rules for a single topic. (Then add to this, for example, the spell listing that prompted you to go looking for these rules in the first place.)
• You’re re-reading the same text in multiple places because each entry is partially redundant.

But, also, once you’ve lost trust that either the Rules Glossary or the main text can be trusted to give you a full set of rules, how much time do you waste fruitlessly double-checking to make sure you’re not missing something that’s been hidden from you? (Remember how in one case the partial rules were in the Rules Glossary and the full rules were in the main text, but in the other case the opposite was true?)

Think about the impact all of that has in the middle of a session.

Ignore the broken Index entry and assume we successfully navigated our way through the blind turns: We nevertheless went to page 376, then page 237, then page 364, and then page 361. (And then probably back and forth between them.)

Meanwhile in the 2014 Player’s Handbook, all of these rules were located in a single place on page 204. Look it up and you’re done.

As I mentioned, the 2014 Player’s Handbook is not without its own flaws and shortcomings. My point here isn’t that perfection hasn’t been achieved. My point is that glossary-based rulebooks are systemically flawed, and the 2024 Player’s Handbook is just one example of a fundamental problem, which means that the impact on you and your game will also be systemic and pervasive, affecting it in every part.

Monte Cook’s Banewarrens is one of the best dungeon-based campaigns of all time.

The campaign, designed for 6^th to 10^th level characters, was originally published for D&D 3rd Edition in 2002. When I read it way back then, I was immediately enamored and knew that I wanted to run it. At the time, I was running an epic fantasy campaign where the PCs had to go searching for various artifacts, and I ended up routing them through Ptolus – the city where the Banewarrens are located – so that I could tease the strange and mysterious Spire that towers over the city, anticipating that when that campaign wrapped up, I would be running The Banewarrens for them next.

Unfortunately, that gaming group broke up. A few years later, however, I had a new group and Monte Cook was releasing Ptolus: City by the Spire, the nearly 700-page sourcebook describing that selfsame city where the Banewarrens were located. The stars were aligned, the campaign was begun, and I have never left the City by the Spire.

I’ve been singing the praises of both Ptolus and The Banewarrens for years, but I’ve never written a proper review. Recently, however, both books have been converted to D&D 5^th Edition, and so it seems like an opportune time to rectify that oversight.

BEHIND THE BANEWARRENS

Thousands of years ago, a good man believed that good and evil existed in balance in the world. Therefore, destroying evil was only a temporary victory, because the evil – released back into the world – would soon find some new way to manifest. The only way to truly triumph over evil, therefore, would be to instead imprison it; to lock it away from the world and keep it where it could do no harm.

This good man, therefore, began a grand project and daring crusade: Recruiting others to his cause, he sent them out into the world to gather banes – things of great evil, whether objects, diseases, or people – while he constructed the Banewarrens, a vast underground vault in which all of these objects could be stored.

Bringing all of this evil together in one place, unfortunately, proved to be a horrible mistake: First, the earth itself rebelled against the evil, thrusting upwards thousands of feet into a terrifying Spire. Then, as the good man’s servants labored to repair the vaults, something went wrong. The good man was corrupted by the banes he had collected. He became the Banelord, betraying his friends and using the evil artifacts they had collected to become a dark and terrible force.

Long ago, great heroes arose who defeated the Banelord. But the Banewarrens, and most of the evil banes which had been sealed within them, remained. In the millennia since, many have attempted to breach them, hoping to claim the banes within and perhaps becomes a second Banelord. But the defenses of the Banewarrens repelled all such attempts, and many believed that, despite his tragic fall, the good man had wrought well and the Banewarrens were, in fact, impregnable.

They were all wrong.

UNLEASHING THE BANEWARRENS

The Banewarrens campaign begins with a random encounter.

The PCs are passing through the streets of Ptolus when they encounter a dark elf named Tavan Zith, a nexus of wild and chaotic magic which is constantly mutating anyone who draws near him.

This is not, in fact, a scenario hook for The Banewarrens (structurally speaking). At first glance, it will likely seem to just be another example of the strange and exotic things that happen on the streets of Ptolus. This will quickly cease to be true, however, as the PCs’ reputation and their involvement in dealing with Tavan Zith brings them to the attention of two different factions.

Because it turns out that Tavan Zith is supposed to be locked up in the Banewarrens. And if he is instead wandering the streets, it can only mean that the Banewarrens have been breached.

The first faction to approach the PCs is the Church of Lothian. They believe the Banelord hid a holy relic known as the Sword of Truth in the Banewarrens and they want the PCs to retrieve it.

Next up is the Inverted Pyramid, an arcane guild which is deeply concerned about the Banewarrens being opened, but also wants to learn as much as possible before everything gets sealed up again.

At first it will seem as if the PCs can serve both their patrons, but as the campaign continues this will become increasingly difficult for them to do. Furthermoer, as they begin investigating the Banewarrens, they will discover that another faction, the Pactlords of the Quaan, is responsible for the breach. A little later, a fourth faction will likely discover what’s happening and also get involved.

This is, ultimately, what makes The Banewarrens such a special campaign. It’s a dungeon-based campaign that’s absolutely drenched in faction intrigue. The PCs will have to juggle the agendas of friendly factions, while simultaneously trying to deal with the machinations of antagonistic ones. (You might even be surprised to discover which ones end up being which in your campaign!) Cook does a fantastic job of presenting these faction intrigues in a format which is both easy for the GM to understand and also packaged into highly practical chunks that can be readily deployed on the table.

The two primary tools for doing this are:

• Events. Listed at the beginning of each chapter, these are floating scenes that can be dropped into the PCs’ dungeon explorations.
• Time Passes. Certain dungeon rooms are flagged with additional key entries describing how the room might be changed by the actions of other factions. (These can be used when the PCs first enter a room if they’ve been dilly-dallying or busy elsewhere, but can also be saved and used when the PCs return to the room later to show that they’re not alone down here.)

In practice, these are quite possible, making it possible to create the simulacrum of real activity with great ease and giving you all the raw materials needed to actively run the factions with only a little extra effort.

What makes this work particularly well is that Cook has designed the Banewarrens to periodically pull the PCs back into the metropolis above. (For example, at one point early in the campaign they’ll figure out that they need a particular magical resource to unlock the doors within the Banewarrens and continue making progress, so they’ll need to leave the dungeon to track it down.) This ingeniously creates absences from the dungeon, allowing the Events and Time Passes elements to be seamlessly implemented. It also allows the PCs to interact with the other factions in new and different ways. Plus, these interludes also provide breaks from dungeon-based play, mixing things up and preventing the campaign from become a monotonous slog.

THE NATURE OF THE BANEWARRENS

The Banewarrens are sometimes described as a “megadungeon,” but I don’t think this is quite right. They’re a rather large and ingeniously mapped dungeon, with more than a hundred rooms, but they’re designed as a single, coherent scenario with the PCs pursuing a singular goal, and not the warren of disparate scenarios you’d see in a true campaign dungeon. (See Types of Dungeons for a deeper discussion of the differences here.)

This is not, of course, to the detriment of The Banewarrens. The singular purpose and vision allows Cook to craft a truly memorable – and terrifying! – environment for the PCs to explore. The expertly xandered maps, distinct flavoring of the different sections of the Banewarrens, and the unique sense of progression (as the PCs travel in-and-up, rather than down-and-out) provide an excellent playground, into which Cook pours a ghastly variety of horrific foes and a creepy panoply of banes.

The banes, in particular, gives the Banewarrens a very unique feel. It fundamentally inverts the typical dungeoncrawling tropes: Instead of kicking down doors and grabbing loot to haul out of the dungeon, the PCs will instead quickly learn that they need to keep the doors locked at all costs and make sure nothing gets out. The Banelord may or may not have been right about the conservation of evil in the universe, but there’s little doubt that releasing these things of great evil into the world will have horrible consequences.

(“Hey! What are the PCs going to do about treasure?!” Fortunately, the other factions and the interludes that take place outside the Banewarrens are designed to solve this problem.)

CONCLUSION

And all of that is why The Banewarrens is one of the best dungeon-based campaigns of all time.

If it hadn’t already been converted to the 5^th Edition rules, I’d still be recommending that you track down a copy of the 3^rd Edition campaign and adapt it to 5^th Edition ASAP. (Or Shadowdark or Basic Fantasy RPG or Old School Essentials or maybe even Mork Borg, whatever floats your dungeoncrawling boat.) It’s not just that it’s a fantastic campaign that you and your players will remember forever; it’s also one of those transformative campaigns capable of teaching you a whole new way to run your game.

GRADE: A+

Author: Monte Cook
Publisher: Monte Cook Games
Cost: $12.99 (5E PDF) / $6.66 (3E PDF)
Page Count: 180

ADDITIONAL READING
Review: Ptolus – City of Adventure
Ptolus: In the Shadow of the Spire
Ptolus Remix: The Mrathrach Agenda
Ptolus Remix: The Vladaam Affair

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 39C: Liberation of the Slaves

Tor became a whirling dervish – a one-man electrical storm – at the top of the stairs, holding off the churning wall of fur. Several of the ratlings leapt down onto the stairs behind him, surrounding him utterly, but they were no match for the speed or ferocity of Tor’s electrical blade.

When the furious job was done, Tor and Elestra quickly got the prisoners up the stairs and out the front door of the temple. They sent them, with money in their pockets and food in their bellies, to the watch station in Delvers’ Square.

Particularly in campaigns where the PCs are Big Damn Heroes™, I think it can be really powerful to show how their actions have earned them a reputation.

You save the world a few times and people start taking notice, ya know?

One technique I particularly like is the Big Social Event, as we saw back in Session 12: A Party at Castle Shard. As I discussed in Game Structure: Party Planning:

I’ve … found them to be effective as a way of signaling when the PCs have changed their sphere of influence. You rescued the mayor’s daughter from a dragon? Chances are you’re going to be the belle of the ball. And you’re going to discover that powerful and important people have become very interested in making your acquaintance.

When these events work, they’re exciting and engaging experiences, often providing a memorable epoch for the players and spinning out contacts and consequences that will drive the next phase of the campaign.

But, more broadly, the attitude of the world towards the PCs should shift. Partly because the players get a huge thrill out of their actions being recognized. Partly because it just makes sense.

One thing I find frequently useful for this is some form of Reputation system. For In the Shadow of the Spire, I’ve been using a streamlined variant of the Reputation mechanics from the 3^rd Edition Unearthed Arcana sourcebook.

The short version is:

1. Stuff that the PCs do earn them Fame or Infamy points, which collectively create a reputation bonus.
2. When the PCs meet a new NPC for the first time, the NPC makes a DC 25 skill or Intelligence check + the PCs’ reputation bonus.
3. On a success, they recognize the PCs. Their reaction depends on their opinion of the actions the PCs’ took to earn their Fame/Infamy (and this may also inflict bonuses or penalties to subsequent social skill checks equal to the reputation bonus).

I can also flip that around and give NPCs a Reputation score so that PCs can recognize them with a successful Knowledge (Local) + reputation check.

In this case, I decided that recusing the slaves from the Temple of the Rat God would create a big enough splash that it would add a half point to their PCs’ reputation. To track this, I have a short section in my campaign status document that looks like this:

REPUTATION

FAME: 5.5

INFAMY: 0

FAME: Rescued Phon. Recovered Jasin’s body. Castle Shard party. Shilukar’s bounty. Association with Dominic. Tavan Zith riot. Freeing slaves and children from Temple of the Rat God.

The quick rep reference basically gives me a menu of stuff that I can have NPCs who recognize the PCs mention. (“Didn’t I see you at the Harvesttime party at Castle Shard?” or “Oh my god! You saved my brother during the riot in Oldtown!” or “I heard you helped us out on that Shilukar case.”)

In practice, I grade these on a pseudo-logarithmic scale: Rescuing the pregnant Phon was enough to get earn their first point of Fame (people might recognize them as “the delvers who rescued that pregnant woman!”), but after that they aren’t going to earn Fame for every single person they rescue.

In any case, I’ve found this minimalist reputation system to be pretty effective. It tends to only be meaningful once every few sessions (although as their Reputation grows, that becomes more frequent), but the maintenance cost is extremely low and the moments when it’s triggered provide nice little spontaneous pops of payoff and, in some cases, unexpected twists.

Campaign Journal: Session 40A – Running the Campaign: Show the Help
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 39B: Shivvel, Slaves, and Gold

“If they’re running a major drug operation here, this isn’t nearly enough money.”

It was clear, too, that there had once been much more of the shivvel stored here. Tee suspected that the destruction of Linech Cran’s operation was continuing to affect the ratlings’ supply.

Poking around the rest of the room she discovered that a section of the wall could be removed, revealing a detailed map of the Warrens with several locations marked with crude symbols.

When discussing node-based design, a lot of focus tends to be put on how it can be used for scenarios like the 5-node mystery. Which makes sense. It’s a very versatile scenario structure, easy to use and adaptable to a lot of different situations.

But I first came to node-based design as a campaign structure, as described in Node-Based Campaigns: Not linking together scenes in an adventure, but as a way of linking one adventure to another. In the Shadow of the Spire, a campaign I was actually running and designing when I wrote Node-Based Scenario Design, is almost entirely built using a node-based campaign structure.

You can see a pretty focused example of what that looks like in the current adventure.

I labeled each adventure with an alphanumeric code. So the PCs are currently in CC01 Temple of the Rat God. The “CC” stands for “Chaos Cults.” Act II of the campaign also includes BW and NOD adventures, for Banewarrens and Night of Dissolution, respectively. The distinction of “BW” adventures reflects that Act II of the campaign is built around two separate forks (the chaos cults and the Banewarrens), while having “NOD” and “CC” designators started as a convenient way of distinguishing “stuff from the Night of Dissolution campaign book” from the wide variety of additional chaos cult scenarios I was adding to the campaign.

But why have alphanumeric codes at all?

Mostly convenience and clarity.

For example, it made it easy to say that the Marked Map of the Warrens handout (as seen below) was pointing to CC01A Warren Shivel Dens.

Why “CC01A” instead of “CC02” or some other distinct number? Again, it mostly boils down to what I found most useful. I generally found it useful to group together scenarios that were more closely related to each other. For example, the adventures found in Ptolus Remix: The Mrathrach Agenda were originally NOD5 Mrathrach Machine and NOD5A The White House.

The warren shivvel dens directly operated by the ratling cultists were more closely/directly related to CC01 Temple of the Rat God than they were to, for example, CC07 Porphyry House of Horrors. In this case, I’d also “discovered” the warren shivvel dens existed while prepping CC01 Temple of the Rat God, so it just made sense to me to insert them into the numbering sequence here.

Other clues the PCs found here include:

• Sewer Routes to the Coast, a map which is an alternate clue to CC01A and also to 004A Slaver’s Enclave (an adventure from Act I).
• Questioning the slaves, which would also lead to 004A Slaver’s Enclave.
• Sewer Tunnels to Oldtown, a map leading to NOD4 Temple of Deep Chaos.
• Broken square symbols forming a trail in the sewer tunnels, which could be followed to CC02 Temple of the Ebon Hand.

And here you can directly see the dynamics of a node-based campaign in play. Having found all these clues, the PCs have to make a decision about which lead they’re going to pursue next. (And, in this case, that actually includes, “Do we keep exploring the dungeon we’re in? Or do we switch gears?”) The players are immediately drawn into this discussion (at least in part because they’re collectively puzzling out what the clues mean and how they’re connected to things they’ve learned elsewhere in the campaign), causing the group to collectively think deeply about the campaign and get drawn further into the game world.

Also, because of the redundancy of the Inverted Three Clue Rule, it would also have been fine if, for example, they didn’t question the slaves…

…which, from a structural standpoint, they didn’t.

Ranthir, meanwhile, was feeding the malnourished slaves while Tor gently questioned them. It turned out that most of them had been freshly captured off the streets of Ptolus, many from the Warrens. Several were obviously shivvel addicts and easily preyed on. There was an elven prisoner, however, who had a different tale to tell: He had lived in the village of Onsafal in the Teeth of Light. He and most (if not all) of his village were captured by slavers and then sold through the black markets of Freeport. He had arrived at the Docks, been taken to a warehouse, and then sold to the ratlings.

Ranthir heard from one of the slaves how they’d been kidnapped and taken to a warehouse in the Docks, but he never followed up by asking the elf where the warehouse was located. (A classic example of a player not realizing that a clue is actually a clue.)

In fact, as the campaign continues, you’ll discover that the PCs didn’t follow MOST of these clues.

There are a variety of reasons for this. For example, the redundancy between the Sewer Tunnels to Oldtown map and the Marked Map of the Warrens caused them to conflate the two. They chose to approach the shivvel dens above ground, and ended up ignoring the fact that Sewer Tunnels to Oldtown also included a tunnel leading to the Docks (and the warehouse the elf had mentioned).

(It’s particularly fun when something like this happens, they eventually find a different path, and then many moons later they’re reviewing their notes, discover the clue they ignored, and say, “Holy crap! We had the solution the whole time!”)

There are a few other connections to note.

The shivvel they find here is a payoff from previous foreshadowing. Way back in Session 9, the PCs had found a note indicating that Silion was getting shipments of shivvel from Linech Cran. This was an existential lead, as described in Running Mysteries: The Two Types of Leads – it told the PCs that Silion existed, but didn’t give them any way of actually finding her. That foreshadowing set up Silion as an antagonist, and here we complete the circuit.

The Deathmantle cult symbol the PCs find here is the opposite end of the same thing: The PCs learn the Deathmantle cult exists, but have no way of finding them right now.

The evidence that the cultists are having problems sourcing shivvel (which is further developed in CC01A) because the PCs took out Linech Cran’s shivvel operation is another form of payoff, this time showing the impact of the PCs’ actions on the game world.

Along similar lines, in Session 39C the PCs also find a note indicating that the Temple of the Rat God had begun investigating the Arathian Job, giving them a well-earned pat on the back for a job well done, while also making them just slightly paranoid that the cultists were on their trail.

Don’t worry: A little paranoia is good for the players.

Campaign Journal: Session 39C – Running the Campaign: Reputation
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index