SESSION 32C: ENTER ARVETH

December 20th, 2008
The 18th Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

Tee went over to the door that the venom-shaped thrall had been guarding and found it, predictably, locked. But it was no more difficult than the last one. Swinging it open, however, she found an even more disturbing sight: Five prisoners shackled hand-and-foot to the floor.

Tor, nursing a sick suspicion, crossed to a cocoon that was enmeshed in one corner of the hall. With a single slice of his sword, he cut it open… and a vaguely humanoid form tumbled out in a gush of acidic liquid.

“Venom-shaped… Shaped by venom.” Horror and disgust were mixed evenly in his voice.

Tee moved to free the nearest prisoner. They immediately panicked. “No! Not me! Where are you taking me?”

“It’s okay. It’s okay, I’m here to help.”

As Tee worked to undo their shackles, Agnarr headed back down the hall and grabbed the unconscious spellcaster from where they’d left him in the entryway. He wanted to keep a close eye on that one.

Questioning the prisoners they quickly determined that they had been brought here only a few days ago. There had originally been eight of them, but the cultists had been taking them away one at a time. Three of them had been kidnapped from around the city (mostly straight off the streets), but the other two reported being sold through a black market slave trade of some sort running through the Teeth of Light. And one of these reported seeing a temple with a statue of a rat-shaped man in it, leading Tor and Elestra to conclude that the followers of the Rat God must be involved, as well.

ENTER ARVETH

But what were they going to do with the prisoners? Tee definitely didn’t want to be responsible for them. And she knew that the building was being watched. They eventually decided to give each of the prisoners 10 gold pieces, told them to cover their faces, run for it, and get as far away from here as they could as quickly as possible.

But as they gathered them up to lead them out the front door, Elestra and Ranthir – who were still standing in the hall – suddenly whirled towards the front door. Two people had just come in: A blond woman and a thuggish man.

The woman hissed. “Kill them.”

Then she drank a potion and disappeared.

Tee quickly shouted at the prisoners to head upstairs – there was a window with a rope: “Get out. Get out as fast as you can. Go!”

Tor rallied the prisoners and led them upstairs. Ranthir, meanwhile, dropped a thick web into the entryway – it clearly caught the thug and he hoped it had caught the invisible woman, as well.

What they couldn’t see through the thick web, however, was that both the thug and the invisible woman had ripped their way out of the web, gone back through the front door, and were circling the building.

Tor had barely reached the rope on the second floor when an axe thrown from below thunked into the windowsill next to him. He ducked back… and the former prisoners panicked, scattering through the upper level – some cowering in corners, another getting ambushed by a patch of violent slime that fell from the ceiling, a third trying to climb out of a different window only to fall with a scream into the cobbled alley below.

Meanwhile, downstairs, Tee and Ranthir were rapidly gathering up the papers and alchemical equipment from the laboratory.

Between the axe and the panicking prisoners, Tor didn’t notice the subtle shifting of the rope as the invisible woman climbed it. She appeared suddenly before him as her knife plunged into his shoulder.

Grunting heavily, Tor dragged her through the window with her dagger still buried in him and then slammed his sword into her. She crumpled in the corner.

By the time he’d yanked the dagger out, however, the axe-throwing thug had reached the window, as well. The thug took one swing with his axe – which Tor easily ducked – and then was run through the heart with the electric-arc of Tor’s return thrust.

Tor turned to Dominic. “Heal the woman, then we’ll haul her downstairs and ask some questions.”

While Dominic did that, Tor and Tee gathered up the rest of the prisoners. One of them, unfortunately, had been killed by the violet slime. The one who had fallen out of the window had broken his leg, but Elestra was able to heal that. Then they sent them on their way. “Get as far from here as you can.”

While Agnarr and Dominic kept an eye on the prisoners – making sure that they got away safely – the others quickly mopped up the various nests and cocoons left scattered throughout the complex, making sure that the cultists’ work here was completely destroyed. They left only the barricaded room with its dangerous, gelatinous tentacles, which they resolve to deal with before going down the hole.

They reconvened on the first floor. The woman (who Tee identified as Arveth, who had recruited her into the Brotherhood) and the spellcaster were traussed up in the manacles that had formerly held the prisoners.

They were in for a rude awakening.

Running the Campaign: Non-Combat Goals – Campaign Journal: Session 33A
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 32B: Shaped by Venom

A beam of scintillating energy shot out from a second door – only slightly cracked – and struck the barbarian in the chest, paralyzing him completely. Agnarr was completely defenseless as one of the thralls thrust its lance-like claw through his chin and up into his skull, killing him instantly.

Oh no! Agnarr! I can’t believe this! How will his death reshape the campaign? What will be the emotional fallout? What new character will his player create?

With the entryway cleared, Dominic came around the corner, looked at Agnarr’s grievous wound, and sighed heavily.

(…)

As Tee came back inside, she saw that Agnarr was shaking his head gingerly – Dominic had resealed the bond between his soul and body.

Oh. Never mind.

For the In the Shadow of the Spire campaign, and other 3^rd Edition games, I used a set of house rules for death and dying designed to narratively smooth out the “you’re dead, you’re back, you’re dead, you’re back, you’re dead” up-and-down cycle that can emerge in D&D, but it’s nevertheless true that once you start hitting the upper range of what we’d now call Tier 2 the PCs’ relationship to death shifts.

Raise dead really is a game changer.

This used to be less true. In AD&D, for example, a character could only be returned to life with raise dead or resurrection effects a number of times equal to their Constitution score. (This could eventually be surpassed with a wish spell, but obviously only at a much later point in the campaign.)

(At least in theory. The fact that 3^rd Edition began eliminating such consequences because they weren’t fun is largely because a wide swath of people were already ignoring them because they weren’t fun. But I digress.)

Regardless, most D&D protagonists will reach a point where their relationship is largely unique in storytelling. Superheroes often experience a revolving door of death, but it’s rarely seen that way by the character except for comical asides or fourth-wall breaks. Video games will have stuff like phoenix down that will “revive” companions who are “dead,” but this is usually ludonarrative dissonance with these games nevertheless featuring actual death in their cutscenes.

The same sort of ludonarrative dissonance — a disconnect between the story of the game and the mechanics of the game — is something that will often crop up in D&D campaigns: You instinctively want death to have the same meaning that it does in stories or real life, but the reality is that it doesn’t. Dominic’s reaction to seeing Agnarr’s impaled corpse may be distress, but it really shouldn’t be the same emotional reaction that someone in the real world seeing their companion’s corpse would have. Because the reality Dominic and Agnarr are living in is just fundamentally not the same.

And, in my opinion, that’s OK. It’s fascinating, even.

I think there’s kind of two ways to deal with this.

First, you can try to treat death in a mid- or high-level D&D game as if it were emotionally and factually the same as death in the real world. If you take this approach, though, I think you’ll be best served if you actually house rule the game to match the vision of what you want (and sustain ludonarrative harmony). That would mean getting rid of spells like raise dead, and if you do that, you’ll probably also want to modify the mechanics around dying, your scenario design, or both.

Second, lean into it. Death doesn’t have the same meaning. So what meaning DOES it have, both emotionally and factually? And what are the unique stories that you can tell with that meaning?

A sentiment I often see in a variety of places (discussions of prequel movies, for example) is that if a character can’t die, then there’s nothing at stake. This can be a particularly alluring belief when it comes to a D&D because, other than the outcomes of specific die rolls, death IS the only mechanically defined thing at stake in the game.

But it’s not really true, of course, because the experience of playing D&D is much more than just the sum of its mechanics. And, particularly in fiction, life-or-death is often the least interesting thing at stake.

Campaign Journal: Session 32C – Running the Campaign: Non-Combat Goals
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

SESSION 32B: SHAPED BY VENOM

December 20th, 2008
The 18th Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

ENTER THE CULTIST

Tee, who had taken up a position at the top of the staircase to serve as a look-out, heard a door open below. She snuck down the stairs and looked down the central hall on the first level… just in time to see someone disappear around the far corner of the hall into the front entryway.

Signaling silently to the others above to follow her, Tee made her own way down the hall. Agnarr, oblivious to all of this, continued poking around through the largely deserted complex of rooms he’d dropped into.

Tee peeked around the corner into the entryway: One of the doors on the northern side of the room was slightly ajar. She took a few moments to consider her options while the others crept down the hall behind.

But before she could reach a decision, Agnarr finished exploring the rooms he was in and emerged – loudly – into the entryway through a different door.

As he did so, the slightly ajar door burst open and two venom-shaped thralls charged through. Agnarr took half a step back and drew his sword to defend himself—

But at that moment, a beam of scintillating energy shot out from a second door – only slightly cracked – and struck the barbarian in the chest, paralyzing him completely. Agnarr was completely defenseless as one of the thralls thrust its lance-like claw through his chin and up into his skull, killing him instantly.

Ranthir – seeing Agnarr fall – threw a fireball into the entryway. It exploded spectacularly. Tee seized the opportunity to tumble past the two large thralls. Bursting through the door from which the beam of energy had come, she saw the spellcasting cultist backing away. With a single bounding leap she was on him, viciously cutting him across the chest.

The cultist fumbled a potion of healing to his lips and raised his other hand to cast a spell – but then his eyes grew suddenly large as a cocoon behind Tee suddenly belched forth a swarm of chaos beetles.

Tee ducked back out of the room and slammed the door shut. The last thing she saw were the beetles sweeping over the cultist, biting and stinging at him repeatedly.

Tor, meanwhile, had led the charge against the two venom-shaped thralls. They had been badly injured by Ranthir’s fire ball, and Tor was making short work of them.

With the entryway cleared, Dominic came around the corner, looked at Agnarr’s grievous wound, and sighed heavily.

EXIT THE CULTIST

As the last thrall dropped and Dominic knelt by Agnarr’s side, however, the sound of breaking glass came from the room Tee had left the spellcaster in.

“He’s jumped out the window!”

Tor and Ranthir rushed outside into the street. A moment later, the cultist came stumbling out of the alley, a vicious cut on his arm sending blood streaming down his arm. Seeing them he spat. “Chaos shall eat your hearts!”

The cultist raised his hands to cast a spell… and Ranthir undid the casting before it had even begun.

Tee came through the door, dropped her sword, and drew her bow.

The cultist yelped and turned to run, but Tor chased him down and tackled him to the cobblestones. Getting his arms wrapped around the cultist’s neck, he began to choke the life out of him.

Tee, glancing at the stares they were receiving from the others in the street, quickly trotted back inside – collecting her weapons as she went: They were going to have to hurry.

“The Brotherhood… will…. never…” The cultist slipped into unconsciousness. Tor grabbed him by the collar and dragged him back inside.

SHAPED BY VENOM

As Tee came back inside, she saw that Agnarr was shaking his head gingerly – Dominic had resealed the bond between his soul and body. She moved past them, performing a quick sweep of the rest of the apartment’s building’s lower level.

There were a few more nests and cocoons, along with some patches of the dangerous violet slime, but there were only two points of true interest: First, a small room near the back of the building where the floorboards had been broken from below. A ladder leaned against the side of this hole and the smell of raw sewage drafted up from below.

Second, a locked door.

By this time, Tor had dragged the unconscious cultist back into the entryway.

“The watch will be here soon,” Elestra said.

“Yes,” Tee said, coming back from her sweep. “We should move quickly.”

“Where are we going?” Dominic asked.

“Down the hole.”

But first they wanted to find out what was behind the locked door.

With Agnarr backing her up, Tee easily picked the cheap lock on the apartment door. Swinging it open revealed a room cluttered with various papers and alchemical equipment. Near the middle of the room there was a large, wooden table that had been outfitted with crude shackles. Strange stains dotted and pitted the surface of the table.

Of more immediate concern, of course, was the venom-shaped thrall crouched low before the door on the opposite side of the room. With his demesne disturbed, the thrall attacked.

Agnarr shoved Tee out of the way and faced off against it. Under the brunt of the creature’s assault, he was pushed back against the far wall of the hall, but then the vicious thrust of his counter-attack skewered it.

Running the Campaign: Death at Tier 2  – Campaign Journal: Session 32C
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

One is always tempted to write something like, “This is the perfect D&D movie.”

But such a statement almost immediately raises the question: What would the perfect D&D movie look like? Would it be a Temple of Elemental Evil dungeon crawler? The gothic horror of Castle Ravenloft? The epic fantasy of the Dragonlance Saga? An isekai like the animated series? A remake of Cube in the Tomb of Horrors?

So let us instead say that this is a perfect D&D movie.

Normally when I review films, I try to avoid discussing anything in detail after the first fifteen minutes without a spoiler warning. But Honor Among Thieves challenges that policy because the first fifteen minutes is so packed with action, character development, and insanely clever narrative layering that it feels a bit unfair to you to lay it bare. (If you’re not completely onboard with the film by the end of the first fifteen minutes, then you’re probably going to be in for a rough ride.) So I’m just going to mention a few key points and then we’ll head into spoiler territory:

• This movie feels like playing in a truly great D&D campaign in the best possible way.
• Daley & Goldstein, along with co-writer Michael Gilio, have crammed a truly insane amount of D&D lore into this film, and not once does it feel forced or self-indulgent.
• It’s simply a joyful experience, but also one that has a legitimate emotional core. I legitimately teared up at the end, because the film had been so successful at getting me invested in its characters.

If you are any sort of D&D fan — or even if you just enjoy fun fantasy films — then you owe it to yourself to go see this movie.

SPOILER WARNING!

Honestly, I think the scene that best captures what this film is about is the speak with dead sequence: The heroes need to learn what happened on a battlefield a few hundred years ago, and so they start digging up corpses.

The scene starts with Holga, the barbarian played by Michelle Rodriguez, talking about how she always dreamed she would be buried in holy ground like this. The emotional beat lands, in large part because it flows directly out of the previous scene, and also serves to pivot us into the first speak with dead:

Simon: I read this incantation. Once the dead man is revived, we can ask him five questions, at which point he will die again, never to return.

(…)

Edgin: Here we go. Were you killed in the Battle of the Evermoors?

Corpse: Yes.

Edgin: Four more questions, right?

Corpse: Yes.

Edgin: No, that one wasn’t for you. Did that count?

Corpse: Yes.

Edgin: Dammit. Only answer when I talk to you, OK?

Corpse: Yes.

Simon: Why would you say “okay” at the end of that sentence?

Corpse: I didn’t.

(The corpse dies.)

This isn’t the best scene in the movie. (It would be hard to pick one. There are so many great scenes in this film.) But it showecases everything the film does well:

It is constantly developing characters, which is what allows it to have four fully developed character arcs plus another three or four vividly realized members of the supporting cast.

It achieves that wild blend of irreverent comedy, monstrous horror, and heartfelt epic that characterize many of the finest D&D campaigns.

It does a simply brilliant job of capturing iconic moments from the game table and putting them onscreen in a way that honors and celebrates them, while also making them completely accessible and fun and thrilling even if you’ve never played a session of D&D in your entire life.

“But she turns into an owlbear, Justin! I’ve seen the trailer! That’s clearly not allowed by the rules!”

Okay, first: Get the fuck out. You don’t deserve nice things.

And second: Yeah, that’s fucking right. The movie even has house rules. How could it be an authentic representation of D&D if it didn’t?

It even manages to somehow feature an honest-to-gods GMPC (played by Regé-Jean Page) for a dozen or so scenes.

My one and only real critique of the film is that I would’ve liked it to have been daring enough (or, at least, empowered enough) to actually shake up the status quo in the Forgotten Realms. Instead, everything needs to be more or less tucked back where it belongs at the end of the film. (On the other hand, I guess I’m also glad D&D’s lore is still being driven by the RPG and not by the feature film.)

In any case, I’ll be heading back to the theater to see it again next week, which will make it the first film I’ve seen twice in theaters since the pandemic started. I don’t think I can really give it a better recommendation than that.

GRADE: B+

A guide to grades at the Alexandrian.

Go to Part 1

ORCHIDS OF THE INVISIBLE MOUNTAIN (Terry H. Romero): I actually quite like this scenario, and I’d like you to keep that in mind while I discuss its two major problems. (Then we’ll cycle back around to the good stuff.)

First, there’s a trend I’ve seen in Wizards of the Coast adventures — particularly in their anthologies — of designing a scenario hook that offers an intriguing enigma for curious players to investigate, but then immediately having an NPC show up who barges in, orders the PCs to investigate it, and gives them a specific checklist of tasks to complete. Frequently, this NPC will also just immediately explain the enigma, robbing the adventure of any sense of discovery, but nevertheless leaving the busy work.

“Look, I’m going to be perfectly honest with you,” the DM says. “I think you’re all idiots and incapable of taking any action unless someone is literally holding you hand. Hang on a sec, let me wipe the drool off your chins.”

In the case of “Orchids of the Invisible Mountain,” it feels particularly weird because the strange enigma is literally an NPC ordering the PCs to do a thing. And then another NPC shows up so that they, too, can order the PCs to do the exact same thing.

It’s like you’re stuck in some kind of middle-management hell.

The second problem with “Orchids of the Invisible Mountain” is what I refer to as scale mismatch.

“Orchids” wants to be an epic fantasy quest. It wants the vast scope and epoch-shattering consequences of The Lord of the Rings as the PCs journey forth on a grand expedition across many worlds, interacting with legendary characters and god-like beings.

But, on the other hand, it’s fifteen pages long.

It’s basically impossible for adventures like this to achieve their lofty goals, and so they end up feeling hollow and forced. You can’t squeeze Frodo’s journey to Mordor into a one-shot and expect it to have the same weight.

(There’s also a sad little bit where the text basically says, “If the PCs have plane shift, of course, they can just skip most of this adventure.” This feels like somebody in the development process realized there was a calibration problem between what the adventure expected and what 14^th-level characters are actually capable of, but it was too late to actually fix it. You can see a similar calibration problem near the beginning of the adventure, where the text confidently states that the PCs will have no way of stopping a barn fire.)

You can see a dramatic example of this scale problem in action with this map of “mountain” which is… what? About a hundred feet across?

Having said all that, the reason I’m rather fond of “Orchids” is that it’s actually remarkably effective at evoking the epic scale it’s grasping for. Far more so than any similar module I’ve seen. It achieves this primarily by just daring to dream vividly, conjuring forth dream-hazed visions that are startlingly memorable by virtue of being both unique and drawn in specific detail.

“Orchids” will take you:

• Through a burning sugar plantation.
• Across the thri-keen-haunted Grassroads.
• Into a giant termite mound which is also a thinning between this world and the Feywild.
• Up the jungle-tangled slopes of the Ghost Orchid Tepui.
• Into the Crystal Caves where the Sleeping Stone is guarded by an aboleth-cursed dragon.
• The husk of the Drought Elder, an alien god of the Far Realm whose consciousness echoes through its own dead skein.

Along the way they’ll meet:

• The Sugar Man, an ebullient leader of the people of Atagua.
• A thousand-year-old spirit kept alive by the whim of the Feywild.
• An iridescent thri-keen.
• The Dawn Mother, an ageless giant striding out of legend.

There’s nothing generic here. It’s all fantastical and wonderful and strikingly imaginative, hampered only by the necessity of its just-in-time-exposition: The PCs need to go to the Dawn Mother, and so now we’ll tell them about the Dawn Mother for the first time.

“Orchids of the Invisible Mountain” would be much more powerful if the seeds of its lore were planted much earlier in your campaign. (It’s just so much cooler if the players have known about the legends of the Dawn Mother for a long time, and now they get to actually meet her!) Planting those seeds would mean doing a lot of groundwork.

But “Orchids” just might be worth it.

Grade: C+

CONCLUSION

As with my review of Candlekeep Mysteries, what I’m looking for in an anthology is not necessarily a home run with every entry. I’m much more interested in how much good stuff the anthology offers me. It’s fairly easy to just ignore the stuff that doesn’t work.

Bearing that in mind, let’s take a peek at the hit rate for Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel:

Anything with an A or B grade is an adventure I would definitely run. Stuff with a C grade I’m more skeptical of, but are likely salvageable if you particularly like the concept or content.

So of the thirteen adventures we have:

• 3 that I would definitely run;
• 5 that could be salvaged with a little TLC; and
• 5 that I think are a complete miss.

It’s clear from these numbers that this is a weaker anthology than Candlekeep Mysteries (which scored 8/4/5 on this metric). But this is a pretty good showing for an anthology like this, and when you combine it with the gazetteer for the Radiant Citadel itself — which I simply adore — I can easily recommend Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel as a solid value.

Style: 4
Substance: 3

Project Lead: Ajit A. George, F. Wesley Schneider
Writing: Justice Ramin Arman, Domnique Dickey, Ajit A. George, Basheer Ghouse, Alastor Guzman, D. Fox Harrell, T.K. Johnson, Felice Tzehuei Kuan, Surena Marie, Mimi Mondal, Mario Ortegón, Miyuki Jane Pinkcard, Pam Punzalan, Erin Roberts, Terry H. Romero, Stephanie Yoon
Rules Development: Jeremy Crawford, Makenzie De Armas, Ben Petrisor, Taymoor Rehman

Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
Cost: $49.95
Page Count: 224

FURTHER READING
Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel: A List of Names
Review: Candlekeep Mysteries