IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Character Background: Elestra

I have previously mentioned that the events in the campaign journal are an accurate recounting of what happened at the gaming table. There is, however, one exception to this: The character of Elestra.

In the Shadow of the Spire originally started as an online game run through ScreenMonkey and Skype. After several sessions, however, a couple of the long-distance players ended up dropping out of the game and the third long-distance player ended up being local instead. After a lengthy hiatus, we added a new player and jump-started the campaign back to life as a face-to-face game.

This left us with two orphaned characters: Agnarr and Alysta.

One of the other players ended up taking Agnarr on as a second character. And then I offered the new player the choice of either taking over the role of Alysta or creating a new character.

She decided to create a new character (which turned out to be Elestra). At this point I had two options: I could choose to simply kill off Alysta and then figure out a way to get Elestra involved with the group. Or I could retcon the campaign journal, replacing the character of Alysta with the character of Elestra.

Normally it would be a no-brainer to go with Option #1. But I had a few reasons for going with Option #2:

First, the hiatus in the campaign had already created a natural break in continuity. Part of the process in gearing back up from that hiatus was going to be reviewing the campaign journal and getting back into the flow of things. In some ways, it was an ideal time to perform a retcon.

Second, although it would have actually been quite trivial to kill off Alysta, the campaign was structured around this specific group of people waking up to find themselves locked in a common cause. I didn’t want to risk losing or watering down that essential core of the campaign.

Third, retconning would be relatively easy because Alysta had ended up being something of a cipher. Almost as soon as the campaign had started, the work schedule for Alysta’s player unexpectedly shifted and she ended up missing large chunks of the game. Playing the character during these abseences had fallen to me.

Now, on the one hand, I’m not very good as a GM when it comes to playing allies of the PCs. I usually have lots of balls in the air anyway, and I tend to just forget about the extra character who has no physical presence at the game table. In the case of Alysta this particular shortcoming was aggravated because Alysta’s player — as a result of her absences — never really defined who the character was or what her personality was like. Since I felt it was important for the player to be the one to define who the character was, I refrained from making any strong choices.

In practice this meant that Alysta would frequently go off and “do her own thing” whenever the opportunity arose. The result was something of a tabula rasa — one which easily suited itself to having the label that read “Alysta of the Order of the Holy Sword” scraped off and replaced with “Elestra of Seyrun”.

For those who might be curious, here’s the original write-up for Alysta:

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A quick primer for some of the newer readers here at the Alexandrian: When 4th Edition was announced in 2007, Dream Machine Productions went on hiatus. We were waiting to see what would happen with 4th Edition and what direction the market was headed in.

Now that those questions have been answered, DMP is slowly revving itself back up into production mode. Spells of Light and Dark: The Art of the Flame and Void proved to be the unanticipated revival product, but we’ve got several more in the pipeline.

But if you like what you read here on the site, I think there’s a pretty good chance that you’ll enjoy what DMP has to offer. This is what has come before:

The covers above link to the RPGNow purchase pages, but the books are also available from Paizo and Lulu.

And now for the question some of you may be askng: What’s happening with Legends & Labyrinths?

It’s coming. Following the problems I had during the development phase of the project, I came back to it with fresh eyes and realized there were some fairly fundamental problems with the approach I was taking to the product. This isn’t primarily a content issue — it’s a structural one. I feel very strongly that the organization of an RPG manual has a lot to do with the utility of that manual. Because of the Sidebar Reference System, reorganizing the book has meant revising a lot of content of the SRS content.

So, as I’ve said before, Legends & Labyrinths will be released when it’s ready. Which will hopefully be sooner rather than later.

A couple days ago, I talked about some of the oddities surrounding the ligth and darkness spells in the core rulebooks. The genesis of that post was a collection of light-and-darkness themed spells I was creating for an adventure. (I really like the idea of using rare knowledge — particularly spellbooks filled with non-core spells — as a type of treasure.)

As I tend to do, once I started exploring the concept of light and darkness spells I got a little carried away. When I stepped back and discovered that I had cranked out 20 pages worth of spells, I realized that what I really had on my hands here was a true mini-supplement.

So I spent a few more days laying out the book, developing artwork, creating the cover, and going through my proofreading cycles. The result is Spells of Light and Darkness: The Art of the Flame and the Void.

THE ART OF THE FLAME AND VOID…

Spells of Light and Dark: The Art of the Flame and Void contains 50+ spells themed around magical light and darkness. While many may merely dabble with the unrefracted glory of magical light and the stygian forces of magical darkness, there are great wonders and terrible powers to be harnessed by those willing to master their might…

Animate Shadow
Banefire
Blacksight
Blinding Burst
Blinding Light
Blindsight Cocoon
Control Shadows
Dark Shroud
Eclipse
Endless Daylight
Endless Night
Endless Twilight
Flare
Gloomsight
Hidden Shadow
Incandescent Burst
Midnight Shroud
Moonlight
Obfuscate the Hidden Eye
Orb of Darkness
Orb of Light
Radiant Infusion
Shadow Chains
Shadowsheen
Shadow Spy
Shroud of Brilliance
Starflame
Touch of Shadow
True Darkness
Unholy Darkness
Unholy Gloom
Utterdark Shroud
Wall of Brilliance
Wall of Shadows

… and many more!

RPGNow – Lulu PDF – Lulu Print
20 pages

There are six ability scores in D&D. And there are six spells for buffing those ability scores:

bear’s endurance – Clr 2, Drd 2, Rgr 2, Sor/Wiz 2
bull’s strength – Clr 2, Drd 2, Pal 2, Sor/Wiz 2
cat’s grace – Brd 2, Drd 2, Rgr 2, Sor/Wiz 2
eagle’s splendor – Brd 2, Clr 2, Pal 2, Sor/Wiz 2
fox’s cunning – Brd 2, Sor/Wiz 2
owl’s wisdom – Clr 2, Drd 2, Pal 2, Rgr 2, Sor/Wiz 2

Okay, I can kinda see the archetypal reasons for the bard, druid, paladin, and ranger getting access to different subsets of these spells.

But given the fact that the cleric’s key role in the party is healer and buffer, why are they missing cat’s grace and fox’s cunning?

It just doesn’t make any sense to me. Never has. In my house rules, the cleric gets access to all six buffs, just like the arcanists do.

Random thought: Given the predilection for PCs to get pumped up on stat boosters, is anyone else struck by the similarity to performance enhancement drugs? This doesn’t have much (if anything) to do with game mechanics, but it can be an interesting insight into the relationship between wandering heroes and the world around them. I think the idea that PCs are, in some sense, doped up further alienates them from the common society. Not only do they wield amazing powers, but their very bodies and minds are being constantly hyped up on mystical enhancements.

One of the things I talked about in D&D: Calibrating Your Expectations is the fact that the game covers a range from sub-normal to super-human powers. I think there’s something particularly interesting about a world where the guy sitting next to you may be able to unleash incredible destructive forces with the flick of a thought. What does it really mean for a common man to live in that kind of world? Even if there’s only one such person in a hundred thousand?

Here are the tent-pole Evocation [light] spells from the core rulebooks:

light – Brd 0, Clr 0, Drd 0, Sor/Wiz 0
darkness – Brd 2, Clr 2, Sor/Wiz 2
daylight – Brd 3, Clr 3, Drd 3, Pal 3, Sor/Wiz 3
deeper darkness – Clr 3

I feel as if one might go mad trying to understand this progression of spells. The druid’s affinity for light spells makes perfect sense, and even the fact that the paladin has access to daylight and not the lesser light spell has some logic to it (since daylight has some martial application).

But what doesn’t make much sense to me is that the arcanists get access to the more powerful daylight, but not the more powerful deeper darkness.

The other odd thing is that the 3.5 darkness and deeper darkness spells actually creates illumination and can be used to light an unlit area: “This spell causes an object to radiate shadowy illumination out to a 20-foot radius.” This is weird enough in its own right, but it gets even weirder when deeper darkness and daylight interact with each other and cancel each other out.

In other words, if you’re in a cave and you cast deeper darkness, you can see. If you’re in a cave and you cast daylight, you can see. But if you cast both deeper darkness and daylight, you can’t see.

These oddities were the result of attempting to re-balance the darkness spells. In all previous editions of the game, darkness had actually created an area of impenetrable darkness (as the name might suggest). But this was considerd too powerful for a 2nd-level spell, and so the “shadowy illumination” formulation was applied as a patch of sorts.

While I tend to agree that darkness was very powerful, the loss of any way to create true magical darkness was an unfortunate loss. Apparently, someone at WotC felt the same way. But their solution was somewhat perverse: In the Spell Compendium there is a spell named blacklight, which creates a true magical darkness which the caster can see through.

Oddly, however, this is a 3rd-level spell which is, in virtually every way, superior to deeper darkness. It can also be cast by arcanists.

I’m not sure what the best solution for the darkness/light spells would be. But I would certainly look at normalizing the level progressions, add more powerful versions of the darkness spells (with matching light spells to provide the natural antithesis of the two sub-types), and smooth out some of the discrepancies in how the various spells interact with each other. I’d probably also look at creating a more powerful version of the light spell to add back in the combat utiltiy of the spell that was stripped out in 3rd Edition.