IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

CHARACTER BACKGROUND: AGNARR

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IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Character Background: Agnarr

Today I’m posting the first entry in the campaign journal for Ptolus: In the Shadow of the Spire. It takes the form of the background for a character named Agnarr (created by David Blackmer).

The common view of character creation is often that of a solo affair: The player creates their character and then brings it to the game. But I’ve always viewed the creation of a player character as a collaborative process.

STEP 0: THE CAMPAIGN CONCEPT

Before any character is created there’s the campaign concept. This can be roughly broken down as the answer to three questions: Who are the characters? What do they do? Where do they do it?

One of the traditional advantages D&D has enjoyed over many other roleplaying games is that it comes with a flexible but clear-cut concept: 99 out of 100 D&D campaigns are about a group of adventurers exploring dungeons and slaying dragons in a Tolkienesque fantasy setting. If someone says, “Hey, you want to play D&D?” You’ve already got a pretty good idea what that campaign is going to look like.

On the other hand, if someone says, “Hey, you want to play Heavy Gear?” The only question that answers is, “Where do they do it?” (The planet Terra Nova in the seventh millennium.) It leaves completely unanswered the questions of who the characters are and what they do: They could be members of a Saragossan terrorist cell; they could be soldiers in a military strike team; they could be mercenaries in the Badlands; they could be arena gladiators; and so forth.

And, of course, if someone says, “Hey, do you want to play GURPS?” They haven’t told you anything about the campaign concept. You could be playing anything from anthropomorphic cavemen to transhuman cyber hackers.

The creation of a campaign concept can, in itself, be a collaborative process. The question, “What do you guys want to play next?” is basically the most simplistic form of that. But in addition to answering the three basic questions (Who? What? Where?), the GM can also create a discussion about specific themes and even events that the players would like to explore.

Even with D&D, it’s still a good idea to communicate a more specific campaign concept. There is a difference, for example, between the characters who will be effective in urban, rural, and subterranean environments. (And, of course, even larger differences are also possible.) You shouldn’t bring a knife to a gunfight, and your players will have more fun if they don’t bring a woodland druid loaded up with Knowledge (nature) and Survival skills to an all-urban campaign with nary a tree in sight.

In the case of In the Shadow of the Spire, the central structure of the campaign is based around a major mystery. That mystery is literally launched in the very first moment of the campaign, and I didn’t want to spoil that initial moment of surprise. This made it difficult to discuss the deeper campaign concept with the players, but I was still able to tell them the big picture:

The entire campaign will take place within the city of Ptolus — a major city-state that serves as Arathia’s only port on the Southern Sea. It’s a cosmopolitan city. There are elven enclaves from the Teeth of Light; a large dwarven population descended from the refugees of the Kingdoms of the East; a rare population of centaurs; and even that strange and enigmatic litorians. In recent years, vast subterranean complexes, laden with treasure, have been discovered beneath the streets of the city. A gold rush of sorts has erupted around the exploration and looting of these complexes.

From a more abstract point of view: In the Shadow of the Spire will be a combination of urban adventures and dungeoneering. There will be a good mix of standard dungeon-crawling, diplomatic intrigue, and complex investigation.

Now, with this campaign concept in hand, it’s time to start working on the actual characters.

Continued…

Starting tomorrow I’ll be posting campaign journals from my ongoing campaign — Ptolus: In the Shadow of the Spire. These journals are actually quite long, so I won’t be clogging up the main page with them. (EDIT: On the new website, I’ll be using “Read More” tags.)

What I will be posting to the main page, however, are original essays relating to the journal entries. Some of these will be sort of “Behind the Scenes” commentary, which may only be of interest if you enjoy reading the journals themseles. (Which I hope you will.) But others will spin-off from the journal material to talk about my DMing techniques and adventure design. (Although, let’s be honest, whether those will be any more interesting or insightful is proably open to debate.)

This particular post will probably end up being a little bit of both, as I talk a little about the origins of the campaign.

STEP 1: THE SEED OF AN IDEA

I started my first full-fledged 3rd Edition campaign in the summer of 2001. The impetus for that campaign was the desire to run John Tynes’ Three Days to Kill. I spent a couple of weeks sketching out the map of a campaign world, roughing in the history and mythology of the setting, and then developing the broad outlines of a five act campaign (starting with the events of Three Days to Kill).

That was the origin of a setting I refer to as the Western Lands. Since that time, the Western Lands have served as the setting for most of my D&D games.

My desire to run a Ptolus campaign actually dates all the way back to 2002. That was the year that Monte Cook released The Banewarrens mega-adventure. I knew as soon as I read The Banewarrens that this was a campaign I wanted to run — it combined an evocative mythology; a unique setting; and a flexible, open-ended design. I actually started laying down the groundwork immediately: The PCs in that first Western Lands campaign traveled through Ptolus, allowing me to establish both the city and the distinctive Spire.

One thing led to another, however, I ended up running several other campaigns before my attention returned once more to The Banewarrens. And then I hit one more delay because I heard that Monte Cook was developing the most ambitious city supplement ever published, describing the city of Ptolus in exuberant detail.

STEP 2: THE BACKBONE

By 2007, Monte Cook had published over 1000 pages of material for Ptolus (including the deluxe 660 page sourcebook). Improperly done, that much material could have acted as a straitjacket — choking any life or spontaneity from the setting. But, impressively, Cook designed the material to maximize its usefulness at the game table. The richness of the setting really excited me.

The other thing that excited me was the adventure material. In addition to The Banewarrens, I also had the sample adventures from the Ptolus sourcebook and the Night of Dissolution mega-adventure.

This material, with a fair degree of restructuring, became the backbone for the first two acts of a five-act campaign structure focused around a fusion of Ptolus mythology and the mythology of the Western Lands.

STEP 3: PUBLISHED ADVENTURES

Opinions on using published adventures tend to vary quite a bit: Some people are for them as time-savers; others criticize them for lacking creativity.

I tend to fall somewhere in the middle of this debate. For me, a well-designed adventure module is like a well-written play. Part of the entertainment value is in taking someone else’s creative material and interpreting it. There’s also something I really relish in the concept of a common experience shared disparately among many different gamers.

We tend to think of creativity as something that begins with a blank canvas and disparage anything that “rips off” something else. But the reality is that lots of valuable creative work doesn’t start with a blank canvas, and this type of creative interpretation is widely recognized in many artforms: Thousands of actors interpret the words of Shakespeare every year. T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, and elements of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman have all drawn from mythology. John Howe and Alan Lee interpret the works of J.R.R. Tolkien in their paintings.

On the flip-side, while I will strategically use published adventures in my campaigns, they seldom define my campaigns. For example, in the case of In the Shadow of the Spire, Monte Cook’s material forms the backbone of the first three acts of the campaign… but only about 25% of the adventure material I’m using is pre-published (and only some of the material is Cook’s).

(Although working in Ptolus has been interesting because so much of the original material I’m generating is still, quite naturally, being heavily influenced by the unique mythology and history of the city.)

Perhaps one of the reasons I have success with published modules is because my use is governed by desire instead of need. For example, I didn’t decide to run The Banewarrens because I was looking for a mini-campaign that would take the PCs from 6th to 10th level. I decided to run The Banewarrens because I thought it was a pretty awesome adventure.

And that’s pretty typical of how I use published adventures in general. On my shelf I’ve got a couple dozen or so published adventures for a variety of RPGs that I think are pretty nifty (for one reason or another). A few of those will serve as the impetus for an entire campaign that will grow up around them, like an oak growing out of an acorn. But most of them will see use for the opposite reason: I’ll be designing a campaign and I’ll see a place where I can slot them in.

For example, Act II of In the Spire of the Shadow revolves in part around pursuing a network of cults. It just makes sense to go out and grab a couple of the cult-oriented adventures I’ve got hanging around and seeing if I can make them work within the larger structure of this section of the campaign.

STEP 4: THE PLAYERS

In the Shadow of the Spire actually started as an online game. My primary motivation for this was David Blackmer. David had been one of my players in the original Western Lands campaign, and that campaign had actually come to an end when he moved to Indiana. David is an amazing roleplayer, and I had missed playing with him ever since he left.

So I put together a suite of tools including ScreenMonkey and Skype so that David and I could play together. When all was said and done, I’d also picked up players in Arizona and Iowa. Adding a couple of locals to the mix gave me a group with five players.

STEP 5: GETTING STARTED

Which is where we’ll pick up tomorrow…

Atop the peak of Mt. Auroch, the fabled griffon riders make their home in the city of Aerie…

I was recently going through my original notes for City Supplement 2: Aerie and discovered a rather nifty idea that had gotten misplaced and left out of the final product. So I thought I’d showcase it here for anyone who might be interested…

THE SPRING THAW

The city of Aerie is carved into the very mountain itself. The tier of the Lower City is dwarfed upon the western side by the Griffon Wall and upon the other by the Upper City, which rises 300 feet. And above the Upper city, seeming to stand sentinel over the city below, is the Fort on the Mount, home to the fabled Griffon Knights.

And towering above it all is the snowy peak of Mt. Auroch.

Each spring, the mountain snow above the city begins to thaw, creating a considerable amount of run-off. The city would be regularly flooded if it were not for the extensive drainage system which carries water from along the eastern wall, under the Uppe rCity, and down to the river in the Lower City. This run-off does raise the level of the river considerably, and the River Road is often flooded during this time of the year — but it was designed specifically to handle the overflow.

A secondary effect of the spring thaw, however, are the beautiful waterfalls which form along the eastern wall during the greater periods of run-off. Fifty years ago, the eastern portion of the Upper City actually suffered from an avalanche as snow plummeted off the wall and buried dozens of buildings.

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While writing my essay on “Revisiting Encounter Design”, I kept drifting towards a related topic: The fetishization of balance that appeared in 3rd Edition’s fandom.

“What’s wrong with balance?” you may ask.

Nothing. In fact, there are lots of perfectly valid reasons to seek balance. However, if you fetishize the pursuit of balance in a way that needlessly limits your flexibility, then you’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

THE IRON MAN PRINCIPLE

Let’s back up for a second: The designers of 3rd Edition wanted to provide DMs with some basic guidelines about what challenges would be appropriate for PCs of a given level. In order to do that, they first had to make some baseline assumptions about what the power levels of the PCs would be at each level. And in order to do that, they had to understand the Iron Man Principle.

The Iron Man Principle is simple. As long as:

(A) There are magic items which are useful (particularly in combat); and
(B) The PCs can have those items; and
(C) The designers care about game balance at all; then
(D) There will need to be guidelines for how many items the PCs should have.

Because there is a difference between what Tony Stark can do and what Iron Man can do.

A lot of people get frustrated by the Iron Man Principle. You’ll hear them say things like, “All the classes should be equally powerful with or without equipment!” or “I should be able to run a low-magic campaign without changing anything else!” Sorry, folks, but it just doesn’t work that way. If you take two perfectly balanced twin brothers, tell them to fight, and then stick one of them in the Iron Man suit… well, that guy’s gonna win.

A COUPLE OF BIG MYTHS

Myth #1: Older editions didn’t feature as many magic items.

Myth #2: In 3rd Edition, PCs level up much faster than in older editions.

A couple years ago, Quasqueton at ENWorld posted a detailed analysis of the classic modules from the 1st Edition era. His conclusions shocked many people: If you played through those classic adventures by-the-book, you would level up at pretty much the same pace and you would have roughly the same number of magic items.

There is a slight caveat with Myth #2, however. In older editions of the game, XP was rewarded for treasure. For every 1 gp of treasure a character got, they were also supposed to receive 1 XP. The vast majority of groups, however, considered this to be a “stupid” rule and didn’t play with it. The result was that almost everybody remembers advancement in previous editions being slower than in 3rd Edition (and those memories are quite accurate… insofar as they weren’t actually playing by the rules).

(I’m going to take a tangent for a moment here and defend the GP = XP guideline. Experience points are, fundamentally, an abstraction that exists almost entirely in the metagame. This is often misunderstood, which is why you’ll hear people saying things like “you shouldn’t get better at jumping because you killed some orcs”. But the reality is that the rewarding of XP — whether it’s for overcoming combat challenges, surviving traps, achieving story goals, or exceptional roleplaying — is ultimately a dissociated mechanic. In the case of classic D&D campaigns, treasure wasn’t just laying around. You gained treasure by exploring dangerous dungeons, surviving traps, and solving puzzles. Rewarding XP for treasure was a proxy reward: It wasn’t about rewarding someone for picking up a gold piece, it was about rewarding them for the effort it took to get that gold piece. But I digress…)

So what the designers of 3rd Edition basically did was simple: They looked at the older editions of the game, broke down the expected style of play (as represented in the classic modules), and then hard-coded those values into things like the Wealth By Level table.

Now, your personal experience with previous editions may have varied quite a bit from what 3rd Edition hard-coded into its expectations. That’s because pretty much everybody extensively house ruled the older editions in order to cater them to their personal tastes and (in some cases) just to make them playable at all.

THE FALSE FASCISM

With 3rd Edition, however, a kind of false fascism arose. It looked like this: Older editions were easier to house rule. Why? Because in the new edition if you make a change you’ll screw-up the game balance!

There is an iota of truth here: The previous versions of the game were so badly balanced that the entire concept of “game balance” was pretty much a joke. Anyone trying to convince you that dual-class characters were balanced compared to multiclass characters, for example, should be taken immediatey to a detox center.

So it wasn’t that the extensive house ruling of AD&D wasn’t changing the balance of the game… it’s just that the “balance” of the game was already so screwed up that nobody could tell the difference if you screwed it up a little more. (And it was pretty easy to make it a little better without a lot of effort.)

But the fact that the designers of 3rd Edition actually did a lot of work to improve the balance of the game doesn’t mean that house ruling had suddenly become impossible. For me, the firmer foundation of 3rd Edition made it a lot easier to tweak just the stuff I wanted to tweak to achieve whatever effect I was aiming for. But, for other people, the firm foundation became a kind of golden handcuffs — discouraging them from tweaking the game to match their personal tastes, while leaving them feeling trapped.

CHALLENGE RATING OCD

Let’s see if I can explain this as concisely as possible. The designers of 3rd Edition:

(1) Set certain expectations regarding the capability of an average party of level X.

(2) Used those expectations to create a rough ballpark determination of what type of challenges a party with average character level X could face.

(3) Classified encounters using a challenge rating and encounter level of X, where X equals the average character level of a typical party that would find that encounter challenging.

For me, this seems pretty clear-cut. The CR/EL system is not a cure-all. It doesn’t allow the DM to turn off their brain. But it does provide a pretty useful tool for quickly narrowing in on the particular range of encounters that would be appropriate for a given party.

But some people just don’t seem to get it.  And this is where the fetishization of balance takes hold, causing people to respond in one of two ways:

First, there are those who bash the CR/EL system because it isn’t a cure-all. They argue that because it’s possible to create a party of characters who are either less powerful or more powerful than the expected standard, the CR/EL system is useless.

Second, there are those who feel that any deviation from the expected power levels for group X is a sin. If a party of level X isn’t capable of taking on challenges of EL X, then somebody has screwed up. It’s simply not acceptable for the party not to have a meat-shield; or for the rogue to take Knowledge (nobility) instead of Disable Device; or for the arcanist to specialize in non-combat spells; or for a 15th level character not to have a cloak of resistance.

MOVING PAST THE FETISH

Here’s one way in which we can move past this fetishization of balance:

(1) Understand that the CR/EL system measures capability along an expected baseline.

(2) Understand that, if you deviate from that expected baseline, the CR/EL system will become increasingly less useful.

(3) Don’t worry about it.

Seriously. The CR/EL system has a lot of nice utility, but there’s no reason to let that utility needlessly handcuff you.

For example, I frequently hear people complain about how “difficult” it is to run a 3rd Edition campaign without giving the PCs the magical items the designers assumed they would have. This just isn’t true. If you want less magical equipment, just do it. This means that you’ll have to use less powerful monsters to challenge the party, but that’s hardly the end of the world.

As another example, there was a recent thread at the Giant in the Playground forums in which a DM was fretting because one of his players had chosen to play a plain-vanilla fighter from the core rulebooks instead of pursuing the more tweaked out options from some of the supplements. In a similar discussion a few years back, a different DM was worried because the fighter in his party was making sub-optimal feat selections (including Skill Focus).

And, once again, the solution is simple: Just do it. If the relative weakness of the meat-shield is reducing the party’s ability to handle combat encounters, use easier foes. If the concern is one of the player not being happy because their character isn’t performing well compared to the other PCs, then you can talk about letting them redesign the character. But the truth is even that problem is less likely to arise in 3rd Edition because of the niche protection afforded by the design of the game.

(Short version, which I discuss in greater length in the “Death of the Wandering Monster” essay: Fighters can perform consistently and constantly across many encounters. Wizards, on the other hand, get larger bangs than the fighter — but can’t use them as often. The fighter will only feel out-performed by the wizard if (a) the player of the fighter would prefer to be playing like a wizard or (b) the overall style of play in the group is favoring the wizard instead of the fighter. But those will become issues regardless of the overall optimization of the fighter or wizard.)

One of the great things about 3rd Edition is the broad range of power levels it’s capable of handling — from low-powered commoners at 1st level all the way to insanely high-powered demigods at 20th level. (This is something I also talk about in “D&D: Calibrating Your Expectations“.) One of the nice things about this range of power levels is that it gives you all the tools you need to easily customize your campaign based on the actual (and not expected) power of the party.

If you were somehow mandated to use only CR 5 creatures when building an encounter for 5th level characters, then the fetishization of balance might have some point to it. But if the PCs are under-powered for 5th level (because you’ve limited their magic items; because their equipment has been stolen from them; because their characters haven’t been optimized for combat; because there is a non-standard mix of classes in the group), then you can simply use less powerful foes. And if the PCs are over-powered for 5th level (because the PCs managed to loot more treasure than you expected; because they have higher than normal ability scores; because the players are just really good at the game), then you can simply use more powerful foes.

(And it should be noted that, even though I talk about monsters and foes a lot, this advice applies equally to other aspects of the system as well — skill checks, environmental hazards, traps, and so forth.)

In the final analysis, of course, there’s nothing wrong with playing straight by-the-book D&D, either. The standard party compositions, typical combat optimization, expected wealth and equipment, and the usual focus and pace of dungeon-crawling activities have made the game beloved by millions, after all.

But, on the flip-side, there’s no need to be stitching up arbitrary straitjackets for yourself when the game has plenty of flexibility to cater to your needs.