As I’ve discussed in the Art of Rulings and Rules vs. Rulings?, among other places, I think it’s important that a DM not allow any interaction at the table to become purely mechanical. Partly this is just an aesthetic preference on my part (it keeps things interesting), partly it’s ideological (rules are associated for a reason), and partly it’s because specificity and detail usually leads to creative gameplay.

Traps are a key example of this. If all you can do with a trap is make a skill check to Search for it, make a skill check to Disable it, and/or take damage from it, then the trap will be fairly boring. You can try to spice that up mechanically or (and this is easier) you can spice it up by being relatively specific about how the trap works. (For example, you might end up with players scavenging the tension ropes that reset a spike trap in order to tie up their kobold prisoner. Or draining the alchemist’s fire through the nozzles of a flame trap. When they disable the pit trap do they wedge it open or use spikes to let it support their weight one at a time? The difference will matter if they end up getting chased back down that hall by ogres.)

In following this doctrine, I’ve found that it can occasionally be difficult to imagine what disarming a magical trap really looks like. I mean, if it’s just magical potential hanging in the air waiting for an alarm spell to go off, what is the rogue doing, exactly, when they make their Disable Device check? And what are they actually sensing with their Search checks?

To that end, here are a few techniques I use when thinking about magical traps.

Magical Potential: Permanent and semi-permanent magical effects will leave a very subtle “impression” on the physical world. Careful characters with great sensitivity can detect the presence of a magical field. In some cases this may be the first step in identifying how to bypass or disable the magical trap; in other cases, it may turn out that the trap can’t be disabled without something like dispel magic (but at least the rogue can figure out where it’s safe to walk and where it isn’t).

Ethereal Hooks: Ethereal hooks are attached to spell potential stored on the Ethereal Plane. When the ethereal hooks are “tugged”, they yank the spell potential back from the Ethereal Plane and the energy of the planar transition triggers the spell effect. Ethereal hooks are particularly useful for warding physical objects (i.e., traps which are triggered when you pick up an item). They can also be attached to physical tripwires. In either case, the ethereal hooks require some physical substance and can be safely dislodged if sufficient care is taken.

Spellsparks: Tiny spheres or cylinders made from small amounts of mithril and taurum (true gold). Spellsparks impact areas of spell potential and complete the casting. A typical application would be a spellspark attached to the bottom of a trigger plate: Step on the plate, the spellspark depresses and triggers a fireball. But if you can remove the spellspark, the spell potential is as harmless as a block of C4 without a detonator. (A divine variant of the spellspark is to douse a small prayer wheel in holy or unholy water.)

Smudging Sigils: This is almost always the case for things like a symbol of death, but quite a few other spell effects can also be “stored” as arcane or divine sigils using the proper techniques. You generally can’t just reach out and smear the thing (that’ll usually trigger the effect; spellcasters aren’t stupid). But if you’ve got the proper training, then you can usually identify exactly where you need to smudge the sigil to negate its effects.

Counterchanting: Spell effects with verbal components still resonate with those chants even after the casting is complete. By using proper counterchanting techniques, a character can weaken those resonances and eventually dissipate the spell effect. (This isn’t like counterspelling: The counterchanting is too slow a process to use on a spell as its being cast. It only works here because the spell is being held in a stored state.)

Concealed Material Components: In some cases, spell effects built into traps still require the material components of the spell to be present in order for the spell to be triggered. These are usually concealed in the trap somewhere. (For example, a fireball trap might have a bit of sulfur tucked away.) If you can remove the concealed material component without triggering the trap, then the trap is rendered impotent.

Arcane/Divine Focuses: Other spell-storing techniques require the presence of a physical talisman or focus. In some cases, removing the focus will cause the spell energies to dissipate harmlessly. In other cases, it will just defang the spell — which means that it could be triggered again if the focus were restored.

Bypass Passwords: Some spellcasters will intentionally build bypass passwords into their traps. If the builder was cautious, these can be quite difficult to determine. But many spellcasters will simply draw on a common lore of such phrases. In other cases, casters may not be aware of (or simply choose not to bother changing) standard bypasses built into the most common forms of certain rituals. Like Gandalf standing before the doors of Moria, characters with proper training can often run through their stock of common passwords and discover that they’ve managed to disable the trap without any real danger. (Some caution is required, however: Some trap-makers anticipate this sort of thing and will instead have the trap trigger if certain false passwords are given.)

Telepathic Completion: This is a subtle technique. The spell effect actually reaches out telepathically and sends a completion word; the power of the victim’s own thoughts will trigger the trap. (This means that characters immune to mind-affecting effects and/or telepathic communication can’t trigger the trap. This often means that undead can freely cross through the trap.) Rogues holding a proper counter-command in their thoughts while moving through the triggering zone of the trap can disrupt the delicate telepathic effect for a limited amount of time (say, 1d4 minutes), allowing others to pass through safely.

Clockwork Mechanisms: Spells can be stored inside clockwork mechanisms. Physically disabling the clockworks will disable the magical trap. Nice and simple.

Thoughts? What other techniques could we be using here?

As a final utilitarian note: I’ll only rarely include these specific details into my notes. Instead, this is just a conceptual toolkit that I can use to explain the working of any trap as it comes up during play. Similarly, I usually don’t spend time prepping the exact mechanics of how a particular pit trap works (one door or two? where are the hinges? are there hinges? what are the spikes at the bottom made out of? etc.).

Way back in Dragon #285, James Jacobs presented the Breathdrinker: A creature of evil, elemental air that could silently steal the air from your very body. This is the illustration which accompanied the article–

I was immediately struck by how delightfully creepy they were, and in my first 3E campaign two of them were sent as assassins to ambush the PCs in the night. (This was actually in retaliation for what the PCs had done In the Depths of Khunbaral.) As I wrote in my notes:

• They come in the night.
• Glowing red eyes. Silverish-gray skin, taut against bone. Translucent and insubstantial. Glide with utter silence.
• One attacks the party member farthest from the guard. The other attempts to paralyze the guard one round later.

(If you really want to recreate the experience, I cued the encounter to track 26 on the Final Fantasy IX Plus soundtrack, which you can listen to here.)

A couple years later, the breathdrinker was picked up for inclusion in Monster Manual II. And I was like, “Of course they did. That’s an awesome monster and it gave me an awesome encounter.”

Here’s the illustration which appeared in Monster Manual II:

Maybe this is an admission of shallowness on my part, but I don’t think I end up with my creeptacular encounter of eery, silvery forms if that illustration had been my introduction to breathdrinkers. (Actually, I suspect I would have skipped right over breathdrinkers and never given them a second thought.)

Part of my general dissatisfaction with Geoffrey McKinney’s Carcosa is certainly due to a difference of opinion when it comes to methodology.

First, whether we’re talking hex keys or dungeon keys, I’m extremely skeptical of key entries that consist of nothing more than a list of monsters. This is particularly true of published products, and yet a depressingly huge number of Carcosa’s key entries consist entirely of things like “17 Diseased Guardians”, “13 giant lizards”, and “5 Mummies”.

It’s bland and it’s boring. It’s also virtually useless.

Unfortunately, this generally remains true of Carcosa‘s key even when more details are proffered. For example, massive chunks of the book consist of, “[Settlement type] of # [type of human] ruled by [insert title], a [alignment] [level] [class].” (For example: “Village of 400 Green Men ruled by ‘the Peerless Will,’ a neutral 8th-level Fighter.”) And even more are dedicated to describing the particular physical characteristics of various Spawn of Shub-Niggurath, all of which were generated using the charts found at the back of the book with no additional creative thought applied whatsoever.

And that, ultimately, is probably the biggest indictment against Carcosa’s hex key: Virtually all of it could have been more usefully rendered as a half dozen random tables.

Second, even when the hex key shows greater creativity, it usually takes the form of material which is non-actionable during an actual game session. For example, hex 2004 is keyed:

A Brown Man, dressed in immaculate white robes fringed with golden embroidery, rests quietly by the side of the path. He acknowledges with a barely perceptible nod. It would be wise to return this show of respect with a dignified bow or curtsy.

… or what? He’ll attack? He’ll shed his skin and reveal himself to be a Spawn of Shub-Niggurath? He’ll curse them? He’ll turn out to be a demi-god? He’ll betray them to their worst enemies?

The argument can, of course, be made that the purpose of the key is merely to serve as a creative seed for the GM. But, if so, why is McKinney so delightfully enamored with the words “cannot” and “never”? Let’s proffer hex 2105 as an example:

Drums, the clash of war cymbals, and the deep clangor of a mighty gong can be heard coming from the desert. The sounds taper and crescendo with the bluster of the wind, but their source can never be found.

Even if this wasn’t the umpteenth time I’d read some variation of “there are mysterious sounds and you can never figure out what they are“, you can’t try to defend half the hex entries by saying “just ideas to develop” while the other half of your hexes are trying to stifle the development of those ideas.

I recognize that many of these elements are historic qualities of classic hex-based supplements like the Wilderlands. But Carcosa is a particularly bland and repetitive instantiation of the form, and I also think 1976 was a long time ago. Similarly, while I may find Palace of the Vampire Queen a fascinating historical oddity and revolutionary for its time, anybody trying to sell me a dungeon designed like that today is not going to win my applause.

TO THE GOOD

One point of particular interest in Carcosa are the sorcerous rituals. These have received a good deal of attention because many of them require specific vile acts in order to perform them (murder, rape, and so forth), but that’s largely a tempest in a teapot. (Although the critics would lead you to believe that they’re graphic snuff pornography, the reality is that the vile acts — while specific — are not detailed or described in any sort of lurid detail. If rape or violence against children are trigger words for you, you should probably avoid this book. Otherwise, you’ll find more graphic stuff in a Clive Barker, Jacqueline Carey, or Stephen King novel.) What I actually find interesting about the sorcerous rituals is that they provide an innovative method for motivating and directing the exploration of the hex map.

For example, the Approach of the Farthest Rim, “can be performed only in the lost fane in hex 2401”. Whether the PCs are trying to stop a sorcerer performing this ritual or playing villains attempting to complete the ritual for themselves, this kind of specificity will drive them out into the wilderness of Carcosa: They have to find that fane. In fact, even if the ritual is not being performed (by the bad guys or the PCs), learning the details of the ritual inherently provides a hook: What else might be inside the fane?

That’s a clever structure for delivering scenario hooks and I’ll almost certainly be lifting it in the future.

In a similar vein of derived utility, the random charts for Spawn of Shub-Niggurath, Space Alien Armament, Random Robots, and Mutations are all fairly well done.

All of this, unfortunately, is fairly brief in character and scarcely justifies the purchase price for Carcosa. Which regrettably brings us…

TO THE FURTHER BAD

Overwhelmingly, my disappointment with Carcosa stems from the lack of anything truly weird or creative in the setting. The book bills itself as a “Weird Science-Fantasy Horror Setting” and I was expecting a creative burst of the unique, the bizarre, and the alien. What I got instead was “9 Tyrannosaurus Rexes”. (And, no, occasionally adding the words “mutant”, “radioactive”, or “fungoid growth” to the tyrannosaur doesn’t actually make it notably more interesting.)

Adding to the supplement’s weakness is the extremely questionable quality of McKinney’s house rules. Basically, the book starts by detailing a lengthy system in which you use a d20 roll to randomly determine what type of dice you roll before rolling them (d4, d6, d8, d10, or d12). If you squint hard enough, you can almost have this make sense for Hit Dice (which McKinney has you re-roll at the beginning of every combat), but when he goes on to do the same thing with weapon damage (so that every time you make an attack you roll one of every die type and then use the d20 to determine which of the other dice count) all you can do is start backing away slowly.

Unfortunately, you won’t be quick enough to avoid the next page where he lays out the statistical analysis which demonstrates that, on average, all of this extra complexity and dice rolling has virtually no effect whatsoever.

And then there’s a whole related mechanic where you have to keep track of multiple hit point totals for each character… But I digress.

Finally, although other options are proffered, the supplement largely bills itself as a place to run full campaigns. (The book even includes an introductory adventure.) But there’s no place on Carcosa that’s accessible to new characters. Virtually every keyed encounter in the book is aimed at mid-to-high level play. (And most of those seem to be heavily inspired by the Tomb of Horrors “save or die… actually, screw it, just skip the save: you’re dead” school of design.)

For example, the starter adventure is set in hex 2005. Despite being specifically and explicitly aimed at 1st level characters, this module includes random encounters with 10 HD monsters. (And the hexes immediately surrounding hex 2005 are no better: Hex 2004, for example, contains five aggressive 10 HD monsters. If you follow the standard hexcrawling practice of automatically triggering the keyed encounter when the group enters a hex, anybody who strays too far north during the intro adventure is going to get TPK’ed.)

IN SUMMARY

There’s really no question that Carcosa is a truly gorgeous volume. Lamentations of the Flame Princess have lavished the volume with fantastic illustrations by Rich Longmore; the paper is thick and luxurious; the binding is superb; the layout and cross-referencing are excellent. (The PDF is somewhat flawed by the decision to de-synch the page numbers and make it unreadable on e-readers and tablets, but this is somewhat compensated by the encyclopedic cross-linking.) It even comes with a cloth map, which — as an old fanatic of the Ultima computer games — is a decision I absolutely adore.

But, ultimately, all of this glitzy extravagance surrounds a hollow core. Most of the book is nothing more than rote mediocrity, large chunks of the rest are unusable in any form, and, when all is said and done, you will come away with nothing more than a dozen or so decent ideas that might be useful if you polish them up a bit. That’s a good showing for a blog post, but for a $40+ supplement? It’s a disappointment.

Style: 5
Substance: 2

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

SESSION 2B: A WOMAN ASSAULTED

March 18th, 2007
The 16th Day of Amseyl in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

(more…)

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Session 2B: A Woman Assaulted

In which assaults both inexplicable and inexcusable are committed against the innocent and guilty respectively, and a holy man asks a favor with long-lasting consequences…

The shivvel addict in the first part of Session 2 is what I sometimes think of as a “foreshadowing encounter”.

In the Shadow of the Spire is primarily designed as a node-based campaign (with a few wrinkles that I’ll discuss at greater length at a later date). This means that I do have some general sense of what will be included in the campaign, if not necessarily what will happen in the campaign.

(Although only a general sense: There are quite a few “foreshadowing encounters” scattered throughout these journals which foreshadow… absolutely nothing. The PCs went a different way. I like to pretend that I always meant for those to be “local color encounters”.)

In this particular case, I knew that the PCs were probably going to get wrapped up in a tight little knot of criminal conspiracy involving the shivvel trade. The pay-off starts coming in Session 7, but by laying the groundwork for shivvel here I’ve established some necessary exposition which will make the later stuff easier to present when it comes up. I’ve also established shivvel as part of the wider reality of Ptolus; so when I later say “the shivvel trade is important”, the players don’t have to just take my word for it: They know it.

A subtler example in this same session is Brother Fabitor. I knew that in Act II (which turned out to be several dozen sessions later) I would need someone from the Imperial Church to contact the PCs; thus the introduction of Brother Fabitor here.

I thought there was actually decent odds that Brother Fabitor would become a more significant NPC. And he might have if the paladin Alysta had remained part of the campaign. Instead the PCs ended up becoming more closely associated with Mand Scheben (who you haven’t met yet) and ended up engaging the Imperial Church in completely unanticipated fashion.

… but those are tales for the future.

FURTHER READING
Random GM Tip – Foreshadowing in RPGs