SESSION 48D: ALCHESTRIN’S MURAL

January 9th, 2010
The 26th Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

Through the last arch leading out of the hall they headed down a narrowed hallway. At its end – perhaps a hundred feet or so further on – they could see a huge bas relief depicting a wolf’s skull that took up the entire wall. But before they reached the bas relief, they came to a pair of facing doorways.

Passing through one of these they found themselves in a semi-circular chamber. The far, curved wall of the place was covered in an immense, detailed mural. Although the paint was faded and chipped here and there, it was still impressive in its scope and artisanship. Ranthir, in particular, was fascinated by it. And while the others kept a nervous guard in the hall, he spent the next twenty minutes studying it in detail.

ALCHESTRIN’S MURAL

This mural appears to depict – in juxtaposition – a series of events of either historical or mythological character.

FIRST SEQUENCE: Two magi are shown casting a powerful ritual creating a vortex of energy.

SECOND SEQUENCE: The magi are shown bowing down before a huge, purple crystal that juts up out of the ground.

THIRD SEQUENCE: A great castle has been built around the crystal and a great city has risen up around the castle.

THE GREAT SPIRE OF PTOLUS

FOURTH SEQUENCE: Divided from the third sequence by a depiction of the Spire. The crystal, castle, and city remain – but now the tableau is littered with corpses. A single figure is shown with her hand raised to the crystal, a lance of purple energy connecting the two.

FIFTH SEQUENCE: The castle and crystal have disappeared. The city is in ruins and fallen into darkness.

THE CRYSTAL AMONG STARS

SIXTH SEQUENCE: Divided from the fifth sequence by a depiction of the purple crystal set against a backdrop of faded stars. A skull-faced figure is shown standing before the Spire, leading a great army of malformity.

SEVENTH SEQUENCE: A smaller number of malformities, led by a black serpent which walks like a man, stands upon the plain before the Spire. They surround a huge machine of twisted metal.

EIGHTH SEQUENCE: The castle seen before, enshrouded by coruscating beams of black energy emanating from the machinery, is seen before the Spire.

THE CRYSTAL AMONG ENEMIES

NINTH SEQUENCE: Separated from the eighth sequence by another depiction of the crystal, this one sending out lancing beams of energy which strike the malformities from the seventh sequence. The ninth sequence shows a young boy laying his hand upon the side of the quiescent crystal.

TENTH SEQUENCE: The boy, bathed in the soothing light of the crystal, is shown coming of age in a series of sequential images arrayed around the crystal. This culminates, at the top of the sequence, with a figure of the boy-turned-man – his arms outstretched to the heavens – above the crystal itself.

ELEVENTH SEQUENCE: The man is shown locked in arcane battle with the skull-faced figure.

THE MAN AND THE SPIRE

TWELFTH SEQUENCE: Separated from the eleventh sequence by a depiction of the Spire with the man – seemingly grown to the same gargantuan proportions as the Spire – laying his hands upon it as if he would rip it from the earth. The man is shown still locked in arcane battle with the skull-faced figure, but now the crystal has appeared behind him and sends a beam of energy lancing into his back – the man writhes in pain.

THIRTEENTH SEQUENCE: The man, shown bleeding and clutching at his side, is shown retreating into a great hole in the earth at the foot of the Spire.

The final image of the mural is a depiction of Alchestrin’s seal, as shown on the iron plug above, along with the same inscription.

ALCHESTRIN’S SEAL

The full perusal of its contents made them suspicious of Lord Zavere again. If the man depicted in the mural had fought against Ghul the Skull-King, why had the crystal of Castle Shard attacked him?

“I’m going to be pissed if it turns out we’ve been feeding information to Ghul’s heir or the Banelord reincarnate for the past month.”

But Ranthir pointed out that, if Castle Shard were villainous, then Lord Zavere wasn’t likely to send them to the place where they would discover his villainy. “Didn’t he say something about Alchestrin leaving Castle Shard under a cloud of suspicion?”

“That’s true,” Tee said. “It’s not like the mural in the evil tomb isn’t going to be biased.”

“Then why would he send us here?” Elestra asked.

Tee shrugged. If Zavere was 900 years old, trying to sense his motives was a waste of time.

But something else about the mural had captured Tor’s attention. “Has anyone gone to the top of the Spire? What’s up there?”

“Jevicca told us that Jabel Shammar – the citadel of the Banelord – remains intact up there,” Tee said. “That’s more than I had ever heard before. But everyone who grows up in Ptolus knows the stories of the people who have tried to fly up there.”

“What happened to them?” Tor asked.

“They don’t come back,” Elestra said.

THE GOLEM DOOR

The mural had proven informative, so they decided to check out the bas relief. But as they drew near, they were somewhat terrified to see the entire sculpture come suddenly to life.

“WHAT BUSINESS WOULD YOU HAVE HERE?”

Ranthir was fascinated. “You speak modern Arathian. That’s fascinating…”

Tee, who also spoke Arathian, addressed the wolf-skull directly. “We come for the knowledge of Alchestrin.”

“THEN YOU MAY PASS.”

And the mouth of the golem door gaped wide, revealing a broad stone stairway on the other side. After a moment of hesitation, Tee nervously agreed to go through. And, after some confused deliberation, Tor and Nasira went with her. (A meat-shield and a healer. Everything was fine.)

The stairs twisted down fifty feet or so before bottoming out before another door of iron. Unlocking this door and swinging it wide, they looked down a long, wide hall of finely-fitted stone – the work of meticulous craftsmen, although the age of the work was clearly immense. There were scorch marks, broken sword blades, and the like littering the length of the hall, which disappeared into a deep gloom beyond the reach of their lights. But at the very edge of their sight, they could see a pair of facing doors.

Tor shook his head. “This place is huge.”

Running the Campaign: Art Handouts – Campaign Journal: Session 49A
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 48C: Entering the Tomb

Passing down a short flight of open stairs and through an antechamber of sorts, they entered another large chamber, this one with a wide pit in the center of it.

Carefully approaching the edge of the pit, Tee looked down to find it tightly packed with two dozen or more ancient zombies – their grey and desiccated flesh stretched cross across browned bones. When they became aware of their presence, the undead things began to claw wildly at the walls, although they found no purchase and there seemed little risk of their escape.

“Desiccated?” Agnarr said. “That sounds flammable.”

As the PCs reach what we now think of as Tier 2, you have the opportunity to start using certain monsters for effect rather than threat.

When they were 1^st level, the PCs nervously peered in every direction, ready to leap into action at even the slightest hint of movement. They really had no choice: Even a rabid house cat might prematurely end their adventuring careers with a couple of unlucky dice rolls.

As you drift into higher levels, however, some of those early foes become so trivial that they no longer pose any meaningful threat, even in great numbers. Take, for example, the pit of zombies in this session. Even if one of the PCs had been thrown headlong into this shambling horde, they’d almost certainly have been okay: If they hadn’t torched them, Nasira could’ve turned them en masse. And if she hadn’t, then Agnarr could have easily cleaved his way through them.

As a GM, it’s easy to respond to this trivialization of challenge by simply eliminating such encounters. And, of course, to some extent, that exactly what you should do.

But what this ignores is that encounters can be – and should be! – about more than just combat challenges. If you’ve been conditioned to think of D&D as simply a string of combat encounters connected with a thin patina of exposition, this may seem strange. But encounters should also be serving the needs of mood, theme, logic, and world-building.

This particular pit is helping to set tone and show the history of the Tomb (the upper levels have been abandoned for a long, long time). It also reinforces theme and just generally creeps the players out. (It could have also been significant as a bargaining chip when the PCs went down to the second level of the dungeon, but (a) as we can see here, that never happened and (b) I no longer recall if that was intentional on my part when designing the dungeon or if it was just one of those happy accidents.)

Facing encounters that would have once been daunting but have instead become trivial also communicates something about the PCs’ changing place in the world. It’s also important to remember that, even though such encounters might pose little or no risk to the PCs, they can still be deadly dangers to their PCs’ allies and other NPCs in the dungeon (and showing that to the players can also be a great way of reinforcing everything they’ve gained through their hard work).

For example, maybe the PCs can cut a swath through the goblins on the top level of the dungeon with ease, but the presence of those goblins may nevertheless explain why the lizardfolk have been trapped down on the second level of the dungeon.

Undead, in particular, can have a lot of this worldbuilding potential. They can last a long time and continue communicating a lot about a dungeon’s original purpose and its history, either through their presence, their actions, or even just their clothing. And, in terms of challenge, there’s something deeply satisfying about watching foes that once intimidated you go scurrying away in terror after the cleric turns them.

You can take a lesson from that when running non-undead foes, too: You don’t need a divine gift for a mob of goblins to go scurrying for their hidey-holes after seeing the barbarian slice-and-dice their comrades by the dozen.

It feels great for the players, but can also present a fun twist where the trivial mooks raise the alarm and bring much dangerous foes into the fray.

Campaign Journal: Session 48D – Running the Campaign: Art Handouts
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

SESSION 48C: ENTERING THE TOMB

January 9th, 2010
The 26th Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

After perhaps fifty or sixty feet, Tee emerged into a small chamber of unadorned stone. The shadows seemed even deeper here, stubbornly clinging to the corner of the room.

There was a single door of iron. As Tee took her first cautious step off the stairs towards it, Elestra – following behind her – gasped to see the shadows literally dart out from the walls. Catching Tee unaware and from behind, the first shadow clawed its incorporeal hand through her shoulder while the other plunged its own straight through her heart and chest.

Tee gasped, fumbling for a potion to fight off the cloying cold gripping at her limbs. As she stumbled away from the stairs, the supernatural shadows pursued.

Agnarr raced down the stairs. Tor, who had been watching the party’s rear, pushed his way past Ranthir and the others still on the stairs, but couldn’t get past Agnarr without exposing his own back to the shadows.

Elestra, cut off by both of the fighters, instead turned into a bird, flew through a gap in the stone balustrades of the stair, and alighted by Tee’s side. With soothing hands, she helped her shaking friend.

Nasira grasped her holy symbol and raised it high. The nearest shadow fled from her faith, passing through the iron door. This allowed Agnarr to safely back away from the base of the stairs, giving room for both Tor and Nasira to descend.

As Nasira came, she called aloud the name of her goddess – “SAYL!” – and in a burst of holy light the remaining shadow was blasted back into the floor of the chamber. There it remained for a long moment – like a shadow imprinted without an owner – before it faded away into nothingness. The palling darkness of the chamber seemed to lift at its passing.

HAUNTED HALLS

Beyond the iron door was a long hall of dark grey stone that seemed to serve as a crossroads of sorts between four narrow arches. Web-encrusted skeletons lay slouched in a dozen shallow niches that lined the walls of the hall. Tee was taking no chances and stabbed the nearest of the skeletons through its exposed sternum. As she did so, the skeleton in the next niche lurched suddenly to its feet… and then stumbled and collapsed into a broken heap.

Tor and Agnarr did a quick sweep around the circumference of the hall, bashing each skeleton in turn (although they evoked no response from any of the others). Ranthir, inspecting the remnants of their bone-bashing, noted that the skeletons had been covered in small, detailed runes – arcane in nature, but drawn in an archaic style. Some of the runes appeared necromantic, but not all of them, and Ranthir was puzzled as to what their purpose had been.

Passing through one of the arches leading out of the hall, Tee found herself in a huge chamber. Dozens of chains dangled from the ceiling, each tipped with a vicious, serrated hook. On two or three of the hooks she could see skeletal remains hanging limply.

… and many of the chains were drifting slowly in the breeze of a room in which the air was perfectly still.

The effect was unnerving, and after quickly confirming that the room was otherwise empty they went through the arch on the opposite side of the hall. Passing down a short flight of open stairs and through an antechamber of sorts, they entered another large chamber, this one with a wide pit in the center of it.

Carefully approaching the edge of the pit, Tee looked down to find it tightly packed with two dozen or more ancient zombies – their grey and desiccated flesh stretched cross across browned bones. When they became aware of their presence, the undead things began to claw wildly at the walls, although they found no purchase and there seemed little risk of their escape.

“Desiccated?” Agnarr said. “That sounds flammable.”

Tee sprayed some oil into the pit and lit ‘em up. The party backed out of the chamber as it started to fill with thick, black smoke carrying the stench of burning flesh.

Running the Campaign: Undead for Effect – Campaign Journal: Session 48D
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

An excellent overland adventure, organized to make the GM’s task simple and the player’s experience memorable.

Original Review Posted May 21st, 2001

Before WotC’s OGL and D20 trademark license came along and allowed them to release products like A Lion in the Ropes and The Malady of Kings, Troll Lord Games was producing generic fantasy adventures. As with many products of their kind, the production values on these generic modules were weak. But in the case of Troll Lord, the modules were cheap enough to match those production values ($5), and the content itself was highly memorable (if sometimes in need of some fix-up work). These modules are now being updated to D20 (check out their website), and are – I think – worthy of your attention.

PLOT

Warning: This review will contain spoilers for The Mortality of Green. Players who may find themselves playing in this adventure should not read beyond this point.

One of these modules was (and is) The Mortality of Green by Stephen Chenault. Set within the Darkenfold Forest, The Mortality of Green focuses upon the Druidic Council’s efforts to recover the forest from the evil which has long possessed it. Although the task will be long and arduous, the Council is attempting to offer the denizens of Darkenfold hope by having Cornelius the White carry a sapling of the Great Tree to the woodsmen of Rangers Knot, who will plant it in a secret grove whose ground shall be sanctified. In turn, the grove (and sapling) will begin to heal the Darkenfold.

Unfortunately, deep within the forest lives a sentient tree named Gristlebones. Gristlebones is twisted, old, and corrupt. He sends one of his allies – Quagmire the Troll – to intercept Cornelius and steal the sapling. Which Quagmire does.

Enter the PCs, who stumble across the dying Cornelius – who attempts to extract an oath to recover the sapling and fulfill his failed mission. The PCs’ attempt to fulfill this oath will lead them throughout the Darkenfold as they seek to catch Quagmire before he can deliver the sapling to Gristlebones, who will corrupt its powerful magic for his own purposes.

STRENGTHS

When I was first being exposed to the adventures being produced by Troll Lord Games, I was immediately struck by the extremely memorable environments in which they were being set. All of them take place within the After Winter Dark campaign setting (which I have reviewed elsewhere on RPGNet). Despite this, however, their unique – and compelling – elements are still presented in a fashion which allows them to be inserted seamlessly into any sufficiently generic campaign world.

The Mortality of the Green, of course, is no exception to this. Stephen Chenault is very careful to present the Darkenfold in such a way that it is not simply rendered into the meaningless background noise of the stereotypical “evil forest”. The Darkenfold is given a specific character, history, and geography – playing upon familiar fantasy themes, but establishing itself as something memorable unto itself.

With his setting established, Chenault then proceeds to develop upon it an excellent overland adventure. As a general rule, I find that overland adventures generally have problems. Unlike a standard dungeon, the players are not tightly confined to a set of stone rooms – and, as a result, it’s all too easy for the PCs to simply start missing things. On the other hand, unlike scene-act structure, the overland adventure has a certain assumption of self-direction. The Mortality of the Green is also a chase adventure – in which the PCs are expected to track someone down. This provided yet another opportunity for the adventure to fall flat, because its all too easy to fall into the trap of designing such an adventure so that the entire thing will derail in the DM’s hands if a single tracking die roll (for example) is missed.

Fortunately, Chenault avoids the pitfalls – and the result renders the DM’s task simple, and the player’s experience memorable: The necessary possibilities are covered, the adventure responds with changing dynamics to the actions of the PCs, and the entirety is kept simple enough to be easily played.

Style: 3
Substance: 4

Author: Stephen Chenault
Publisher: Troll Lord Games
Line: D20
Price: $5.00
ISBN: 0-9702397-1-8
Product Code: TLG1101
Pages: 22

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.

In the past few days I’ve been asked several times why I still play Dungeons & Dragons.

After all, I’ve criticized the rules, the adventures, the design, and even the company. So why am I still running and playing this game?

There are a bunch of answers to this question. In fact, part of the answer to the question is that there ARE so many answers to the question.

The most basic answer is the Arneson & Gygax designed one hell of a game,  and with the exception of the most mangled edition of the game, D&D has never drifted so far that its core gameplay has become unrecognizable. There was a time, back in the ’90s, when, so frustrated that my house rules for AD&D had become longer than the core rulebooks themselves, I did give up on D&D for a while, wandering off in pursuit of the One True Way of Gaming. I’ve since learned that there is no One True Way of Gaming, which makes it easier to appreciate D&D for what it is instead of dwelling on everything it isn’t.

Another answer is, in the words of Ryan Dancey, network externality: There are a lot more people who want to play D&D than there are people who want to play any other RPG you’d care to name. It’s just easier to recruit players for D&D and, if I’m looking for a group to play in, I’m statistically more likely to find a group playing D&D. This matters less to me than it used to: After years of running open tables, I’ve recruited a large network of players I can tap into regardless of what system I’m running. (For example, I’ve had little or no difficulty getting players for my new Mothership-based open table.) But you can never completely escape D&D’s gravity well: I’m currently setting up a Heroes of the Borderlands table for my daughter and some of her friends who are desperately interested in playing D&D for the first time. I could try to run something else for them, but I’m not going to tell a bunch of kids to NOT be excited about the game they’re already excited about.

My own familiarity with D&D and its milieu has its advantages. Not only do I like D&D-esque fantasy in general, but my immense experience prepping and running D&D adventures means that I have a very large “bag of stuff” (as Robert Conley puts it) that makes it a lot easier for me to create and improvise stuff while playing D&D.

(This can actually be a double-edged sword if you’re not careful: Yes, I have a finely honed sense of what D&D-eseque fantasy means to me. But that can also be a creative rut that makes it difficult to break out of those tropes. Even with conscious effort, it can be easy to fall back into that rut, specifically because of the comfort and confidence it affords.)

This, of course, would apply to any of the many D&D-adjacent RPGs that are out there. But as a professional RPG designer, it’s also frequently important for me to stay tuned into the industry leader. I’ve had people ask me, for example, why So You Want to Be a Game Master assumes that the reader is most likely interested in running D&D and only pivots to discussing other systems in earnest after the newbie has gotten their feet under them. And the answer, of course, is that this is just the reality of things. D&D remains not only the primary gateway to the RPG hobby, but can still be relied on as a universal touchstone. (To the degree that, when I discuss other RPGs or RPGs in general in my writing or my videos, I not infrequently get comments from people confused because they think D&D is the only RPG in existence.)

(This need to stay in-tune with the current edition of D&D can be another double-edged sword for me. I’d probably have enjoyed several of the D&D 5th Edition games I’ve run over the years more if I’d house rules them more aggressively.)

D&D’s dominance, particularly in the 3E/5E OGL era, also means that D&D is blessed with bountiful source material. For example, when I was working on The Vladaam Affair last week and needed stat blocks for the archmages of the Red Company of Magi, all I needed to do was hit up Volo’s Guide to Monsters. I’ve talked in the past about looting bestiaries and trawling published modules when doing adventure and campaign prep. It’s something that very few other games even come close to achieving.

(This is something that I wish more RPGs would try to provide in a targeted fashion. Not only do I think published adventures are essential for an RPG, but modular components designed to be plugged into prep are vital. For example, Eclipse Phase produced a supplement called NPC File 1 which was just a collection of supporting cast stat blocks. It was literally a game changer for running Eclipse Phase games, because it was so effective at speeding up prep and enabling improvisation when the players jagged off in an unexpected direction. But, unfortunately, they never released a sequel and have never updated the NPC File for 2nd Edition.)

To make a long story short (too late), I really don’t see a time in my future when D&D won’t be part of my life.

Recently, though, I have been giving some long, hard thought to my relationship as a consumer (and reviewer) of Wizard of the Coast’s official D&D books. During the November meeting of the Alexandrian Hangout Club, I was asked if I would be reviewing Forgotten Realms: Adventures in Faerun. This was a particularly interesting release because it included 50+ one-page adventures, which definitely sounds like my jam. The only problem? I flipped through the book at my local game store and saw that, like other recent releases, many of the dungeon maps aren’t properly keyed. And that was only the most obvious failure in basic adventure design. (For a deeper dive, take a peek at Questing Beast’s recent video.)

Although I came somewhat late to D&D 5th Edition (finally getting sucked in by the intriguing promise of Dragon Heist), a combination of reasonably paced releases, financial security, and professional interest made it the first time that I lived out my childhood dream of buying every official D&D book as it came out. But I think that time is coming to an end. I may still be playing and running D&D 2024, but I think this revised edition is also a great jumping off point for me.

Will I be back some day? Probably. Last time I jumped off official D&D as a consumer was back in 2008, and I was gone for a decade. I have high hopes I’ll be back sooner this time. There’s new leadership at Wizards of the Coast, and perhaps we’ll see them right the ship over there.

Or perhaps not.

But either way: Good gaming!