DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 40A: Rats of Kennel and of Brain

But it may have been for the best that Tee was watching. A piece of crumpled paper flew past her head and something about it caught her eye. Snatching it out of the air, she unfolded it to reveal a crude map.

Tee cleared her throat and held up the map. Agnarr turned around. His face split into a huge grin. “You see? You do search trash better than me!”

Tee wasn’t sure whether she should think of that as a compliment or not. She suspected not.

RPGs usually include some sort of Help action or Aid Another option, and if they don’t then you’ll probably want to figure out how you’re going to adjudicate it quickly, because it’s a pretty common situation to crop up during play.

(The two broad mechanical approaches are to either (a) have all of the helpers roll and take the best result or (b) have one of the characters “take point” as the primary check and have the helper(s) give a bonus or advantage to their roll. Check out Art of Rulings: Group Actions for a deeper dive on this topic.)

But the mechanical resolution, of course, is only half the picture, and this is where I see a lot of GMs make the same mistake: Someone declares an action, another player declares that they’re helping, the check is rolled… and then the helper disappears from the resolution. When the outcome is narrated, only the point person or highest roller is described as contributing to the success or failure of the action.

This is unfortunate.

First, it disenfranchises the helper. You have the opportunity to put multiple PCs in the spotlight simultaneously — seize it!

Second, it creates a mild dissociation between player and character. If the character’s actions are never reflected in the fiction, then the declaration of “I help!” at the game table has become a purely mechanical catechism that can rapidly degrade into a declaration gotcha.

Finally, as the GM, you’re missing out on the opportunity to draw inspiration from the characters’ collaboration to create novel interactions and descriptions. For example, when you’re describing how a character acting alone is going to “search X,” you can take some degree of inspiration from whatever X is (e.g., rummaging through a pile of garbage is different from tossing hotel room, which is different than searching a mobster’s office when you don’t want them to realize anyone was here), but as this basic action pattern is repeated dozens or hundreds of times over the course of a campaign, you’ll discover that there are only to many ways to describe it.

As soon as you add a second character, on the other hand, the potential dynamics of the check can multiply exponentially.

IN PRACTICE

To put this into practice, start by encouraging the players to work collaboratively and help each other. If your game of choice doesn’t already have an Aid action or the like, don’t just think about how you might resolve these actions, but come up with a concrete solution and let the players know that it’s an option.

Then, when a player announces that their character is going to help on a check, prime the pump for yourself by asking the player how they’re actually helping. The declaration to help is just like any other action declaration: It needs to be actionable in the fiction, and therefore you need player expertise to actually activate character expertise. You need to be able to clearly visualize what the character is doing and how they’re doing it so that you can resolve the action.

Finally, depending on the specific mechanics in your current system, you may be able to pull additional inspiration from the dice results — e.g., who had the best roll vs. who had the worst.

However, don’t fall into a default of simply determining which character “actually succeeded” while the others failed. That’s an option, but it’s only one option among a vastly larger variety of true collaborations in which multiple characters contributed to the final success.

Along these same lines, instead of imagining all the characters doing the same thing, try to think about how they could each be doing completely different things that are all contributing to success in different ways.

One way of doing this is to work backwards: Look at the result of the check (whether success or failure) and think about how that result could be split up into distinct chunks. Then simply give each chunk to a different character and explain how their actions achieved it (or caused it). Gathering information or research is an easy example of this, where you might have three or four different facts about a topic — e.g., where the target works, where they live, who they’re married to, who they’re having an affair with — and if the PCs are all doing the legwork, you just need to assign each fact to a different PC and give a brief explanation for how they found it. Creates a little extra texture for the game world and makes everyone at the table feel included.

(Note how you’ll also get more interesting failures with multifaceted consequences out of this, too!)

While doing this, try to avoid an unconscious bias about what it means to Help on a check. I, personally, find it easy to imagine the person on point in the check or rolling highest to be the one actually doing the work, while others kind of hover around them, run around as gofers, or offer helpful advice. But, depending on the interaction, it’s just as easy to imagine the experienced character mentoring, overwatching, and/or advising a team effort where it’s actually all the other characters who putting in the work under their guidance.

For example, you might imagine that Agnarr’s player was the one making the check in this scene, since it was Agnarr who was actually digging through the pile. But it was actually Tee’s player who made the check, receiving the +2 bonus for Aid Another from Agnarr. In this case, if I recall correctly, it was actually Tee’s player who proposed that she’d just keep an eye on the garbage Agnarr was throwing around, making my job as the DM describing the outcome incredible easy.

Campaign Journal: Session 40B – Running the Campaign: One Scenario or Two?
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

SESSION 40A: RATS OF KENNEL AND OF BRAIN

July 25th, 2009
The 22nd Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

The tunnel was long enough to take them out of the bridge, and, judging by the damp stench filling the air, they suspected they were drawing near the sewer system. A little further on the tunnel dipped steeply and Tee, who was scouting ahead of the others, found herself entering some sort of warren-like antechamber: More of the ratmens’ refuse nests pocked the corners of the room, but the filth here was thicker and viler, forming a thick and treacherous carpet of trash on the floor. There were two archways in the far walls of the room, each veiled by a ragged tapestry of blue fabric.

A closer inspection revealed that there were actually two or three ratmen sleeping here and there amid the refuse piles. With a smile, Tee notched an arrow in her bow and fired at the nearest one.

The arrow neatly pierced its jugular, ending its life silently. Tee turned her bow to the next—

Unfortunately, there was a fully awake ratling crouching in one corner that Tee hadn’t noticed. He gave a cry and fired a dragon pistol at her head. Tee narrowly dodged the blast, but the other ratlings were beginning to stir.

Agnarr and Tor came charging into the room. They converged on the ratling firing on Tee, even as he fled towards one of the veiled archways. They easily cut him down as Tee caught another ratling in mid-charge with a second arrow.

Unfortunately, the last of the ratlings managed to duck out of the other archway before they could stop him.

Tor quickly took up a watchful station in the second archway. Agnarr called out for Tee to wait, but she was hot on the heels of the escaping ratling. Passing through the arch, she found herself in another trash-filled chamber –  this one nest-less, but with deeply-rutted paths leading through more tapestried archways. One of these tapestries was still rustling and, in the absence of any wind, Tee guessed that the ratling had gone that way.

Passing through this second archway, however, Tee came face-to-face with nearly half a dozen ratlings who were being rallied in a squeaking, gibbering mass by the ratling she had been pursuing. With a little squeak of her own, Tee backpedaled into the antechamber.

Agnarr, Nasira, and Ranthir, meanwhile, had quickly gathered themselves. As Tee fell back, they came charging forward. A brief and chaotic skirmish erupted as more ratlings – attracted by the sound of the battle – came pouring into the antechamber from the other archway. But once they managed to bring their full force to bear they were able to quickly overwhelm the terrified ratlings.

With Tor and Elestra keeping an eye on the explored archway (to make sure they didn’t have any more uninvited guests), Tee performed a quick, cursory search through the nesting chambers.

She found nothing of interest. But Agnarr, who had been following her around, grunted. “Don’t you want to search more of that?”

Tee eyed the fecal-filled refuse piles. “I want to keep moving. Why don’t you search them?”

Agnarr shrugged. “You search trash better than I do.”

Tee turned towards where the others were waiting, but Agnarr was now convinced that there must be something valuable hidden somewhere under the refuse piles. He started digging through them with gusto and seemingly endless enthusiasm, sending trash flying through the air.

“What’s going on?” Nasira asked.

“Agnarr’s throwing trash around,” Tee said, watching the whole thing with a bemused look on her face. She was trying to keep a safe distance, but Agnarr was achieving some impressive distance on his flurrious cloud of trash.

But it may have been for the best that Tee was watching. A piece of crumpled paper flew past her head and something about it caught her eye. Snatching it out of the air, she unfolded it to reveal a crude map:

Tee cleared her throat and held up the map. Agnarr turned around. His face split into a huge grin. “You see? You do search trash better than me!”

Tee wasn’t sure whether she should think of that as a compliment or not. She suspected not.

RATS OF KENNEL AND OF BRAIN

The archway Tor and Elestra had been watching opened into a much larger chamber. Much larger mounds of garbage were piled high near their end of the chamber, but these petered out a little further to the south, allowing clear access to a western and a southern tunnel out of the room.

The southwestern corner of the chamber had been boxed in with an eclectic assemblage of wooden slats and this immediately attracted Tee’s interest. She stole her way across the chamber (pausing only for a moment when she noticed a green, effervescent glow at the far end of the western tunnel) and peered over the edge of the make-shift fencing.

Inside were several dire rats with leather hoods tied around their heads. She grimaced and pulled out her dragon pistol: The last thing they needed were trained attack rats being used against them.

But then a sudden realization made her stop.

Elestra, who had carelessly followed her across the chamber, looked over her shoulder. “Why don’t you shoot them?”

“I think they’re the kennel rats,” Tee said. “They can take us to Malleck.”

They resolved to come back later and use one of the kennel rats to reach the Temple of the Ebon Hand, but first they wanted to finish routing out this nest. “We don’t want to give them time to reinforce,” Ranthir said.

Tee nodded. “They aren’t expecting us right now. That gives us an edge. Next time they’ll be waiting for us.”

Tee didn’t trust effervescent green lights, so they decided to explore the western tunnel next. The roof and walls of the tunnel were slick and wet, and a thick, turgid liquid was slowly dripping down onto the floor below to form deep puddles. Tee, not wanting to risk an untimely splash, used her boots of levitation to pull herself along.

She stopped at the far end tunnel, looking into a long cavern. Toxic sewage seeped down into a long crevasse that ran the length of the chamber, and it was from this that the sickly green light emanated. Every surface glistened with moisture, and sopping wet refuse had been gathered into mounds here and there.

Situated around the cesspool crevasse were five massive ratbrutes sitting in what appeared to be meditative trances: Their eyes were open, but milky white and seemingly sightless. Crawling over these ratbrutes were swarms of large, over-sized rats – the tops of their skulls translucent, revealing swollen, enlarged brains which glowed with an unearthly blue aura.

“That’s disgusting,” Tee murmured. “Disgusting and disturbing.”

She returned to the others and they decided to try mounting an assault.

They made their way back down the dripping tunnel as quietly as they could, but the rats were waiting for them. As the twisting swarm of bulbous-brained rats rippled towards them, blasts of distorted air struck at them. Agnarr’s senses were immediately dulled at their touch, sending him into a kind of dazed stupor.

“They’re mind blasts!” Ranthir cried.

“Wait,” Tor said. “Mind blasts? Why is Agnarr affected?”

The transparent skulls of the rats revealed brains seething with bursting pulses of pure energy.

Ranthir was the next to feel their stupor-inducing telepathic assault overwhelm his mind, and then the swarms began sending out blasts of magical blue energy – their collective mental might serving as some sort of living focal point.

The cranium rats swarmed under Tee’s floating feet and climbed up like furry fountains around Tor and the quiescent Agnarr – their filthy claws and yellowed teeth tearing at any bit of exposed flesh, while others burrowed into their armor.

“Should we attack the ratbrutes?” Tee asked, trying to dodge the blasts of blue energy.

“I don’t want to risk waking them up!” Tor said, staggering in a desperate effort to keep the rats from reaching Nasira and Elestra.

“I don’t think they’re sleeping! I think they’re controlling these brain rats!”

Tor could give no answer: The mind blasts of the rats had overwhelmed him.

Elestra rallied briefly – in the process managing to blast the swarming rats away from the stupefied fighters – but in that instant Tee saw the blind ratbrutes stagger to their feet.

“We’ll leave!” she shouted. “Call off your rats and we’ll leave!”

Everything suddenly fell perfectly still. The moment stretched for a tense eternity, and then the cranium rats swarmed into the middle of the slippery tunnel and stared deliberately up at where Tee clung to the ceiling.

Keeping her eyes focused on them, Tee carefully levitated over them and picked her way back down the tunnel. The cranium rats followed her with their eyes, but held their place. Tee lowered herself to the floor and directed Nasira and Elestra in gathering up Agnarr, Tor, and Ranthir. Together they led them out of the complex and back the way they had come.

Running the Campaign: Show the Help – Campaign Journal: Session 40B
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

The revised 2024 edition of the D&D 5E Player’s Handbook includes a Rules Glossary at the back of the book. This glossary is integral to the organization of the rulebook, as described in a sidebar on page 7:

RULES GLOSSARY

If you read a rules term in this book and want to know its definition, consult the rules glossary, which is appendix C. This chapter provides an overview of how to play D&D and focuses on the big picture. Many places in this chapter reference that glossary.

So, for example, the rules will mention that a spell can have a Cone area of effect, but what this means will never be explained in the text: It will only be defined in the “Cone [Area of Effect]” section of the Rules Glossary.

There is also, of course, an Index where you can look up various topics. This is, thankfully, MUCH improved over the 2014 version of the Index, which suffered from a multitude of sins. (The most frustrating, in my experience, was that you’d look something up in the Index and it would tell you to go look at a different Index entry. And sometimes when you looked up that entry, it would tell you to go look at another entry. And then, when you finally followed the daisy chain to its end, there would only be a single page reference which could have just as easily been included at every single entry along the daisy chain! This is completely absent from the 2024 Index.)

Splitting the rules for a game into an explanatory text and a “definitive” rules glossary isn’t a new technique. It’s a format that’s been used by a number of board games over the last couple decades. (For example, Fantasy Flight Games was a big fan of this for a while, and even D&D 3^rd Edition published a separate Rules Compendium that used a similar approach in an effort to “simplify” and “clarify” the rules with a “definitive” reference.)

And, to be blunt, my experience with these glossary-based rulebooks, as I’ll call them, has pretty consistently sucked. They have a pretty easy fail-state in which the rules glossary ISN’T actually authoritative, so you end up with rules split up across multiple locations, which means that

• you’re forced to flip back and forth between different pages trying to piece together the full set of rules you actually need; and
• even when the glossary IS authoritative, there’s no way that you can be sure that’s true, so you end up flipping back and forth anyway.

This fail-state is generally made worse because you need to play Guess What We Named This Entry, which can be capricious at best. Furthermore, these failures seem to be endemic because, in my experience, game rules are inherently procedural (if A, then B, then C), whereas a glossary is organized by topic.

Note: None of this applies to a rulebook which simply includes a Glossary. A normal glossary can be a useful resource for quickly understanding key terminology, and can be even more useful if it includes page references pointing you to the full and primary discussion of the topic. You could remove such a glossary and the game would still be complete.

A glossary-based rulebook, on the other hand, has rules which are ONLY found in the Rules Glossary. This glossary is not merely a reference tool; it’s integral to the presentation of the game. Removing this glossary would change the game.

With all that being said, I tried to go into the 2024 Player’s Handbook with an open mind. At first glance, in fact, it seemed that the Rules Glossary would be a useful reference tool (although it was immediately obvious that its utility would be greatly enhanced if it had page references).

After using it for a little bit, unfortunately, I’m forced to conclude that…

IT SUCKS

To demonstrate, let’s consider a spell’s Range and Target.

“Range” is not, as far as I can tell, covered in the Rules Glossary. (I can’t be 100% sure of this because sometimes you have to guess how the term is being alphabetized — i.e., “Range” vs. “Spell Range”. But the Index doesn’t have a Rules Glossary page reference for it, so I’m fairly confident.) This means that all of the rules for a spell’s Range are located on page 236 in Chapter 7: Spells.

That’s simple enough.

What about a spell’s Target?

Well, that does have a Rules Glossary entry, on page 376, which is:

TARGET

A target is the creature or object targeted by an attack roll, forced to make a saving throw by an effect, or selected to receive the effects of a spell or another phenomenon.

Great! At first glance, we’ve found the rules for Targets!

… except, of course, I have a certain degree of system mastery, and I know this cannot, in fact, be the totality of the Target rules.

Okay, so let’s hit up the Index:

target, 376

Huh. Only one page reference and it’s pointing to the Rules Glossary entry. Maybe the 2024 revision massively streamlined the Target rules and those are the only rules for targets.

Let’s double-check by looking up “spells” and “spell target” in the Index and see if there’s anything there.

Nope.

The reality is that the Index, although much improved, has actually failed here. The rules for a spell’s Target are located on page 237-8. These rules are fairly bulky and, at first glance, seem complete.

But wait, there’s more!

In the Target section, for example, there are rules for areas of effect:

Areas of Effect. Some spells, such as Thunderwave, cover an area called an area of effect, which is defined in the rules glossary. The area determines what the spell targets. The description of a spell specifies whether it has an area of effect, which is typically one of these shapes: Cone, Cube, Cylinder, Emanation, Line, or Sphere.

Okay, so then we go to the Area of Effect entry in the Rules Glossary. This includes essential rules about the area’s point of origin, how to determine if certain parts of the area of effect are blocked, etc. and then it cross-references Rules Glossary entries for each individual shape. (So you might then flip to Cube to figure out the specific rules for how a Cube area of effect works.)

But what if you were coming to this from a different direction? For example, let’s say you were looking at the Thunderwave spell, where it says:

Each creature in a 15-foot Cube originating from you makes a Constitution saving throw.

You don’t know what that means, but “Cube” is capitalized, which indicates a term that’s located in the Rules Glossary. Here you get the specific rules about Cubes which, at first glance, seem complete… but don’t actually include the stuff about how certain parts of the area might be blocked. This is probably okay-ish, though, because even though “area of effect” isn’t capitalized, the entry is titled “Cube [Area of Effect]” and the square brackets indicate that there’s another glossary entry. Yes, you now have multiple pages open and are cross-referencing them to figure out how the rules work, but at least you were able to find everything by following the breadcrumb trail!

But let’s go back to the rules for Targets on page 238 and look at this section of the rules:

A Clear Path to the Target. To target something with a spell, a caster must have a clear path to it, so it can’t be behind Total Cover.

Well, that seems complete and, unlike the “Areas of Effect” section of the same rules, there’s no reference to an entry in the Rules Glossary, so we must be good to go!

… except I know that in the 2014 version of the rulebook, this section reads:

A CLEAR PATH TO THE TARGET

To target something, you must have a clear path to it, so it can’t be behind total cover.

If you place an area of effect at a point you can’t see and an obstruction, such as a wall, is between you and that point, the point of origin comes into being on the near side of that obstruction.

Hmm. What happened to that whole second paragraph?

Well, once again, maybe they removed it from the rules. It did, after all, give rise to the endless debates about whether or not you could target someone standing behind a window. (And, if so, what would happen.)

But by this point I’ve gotten suspicious, and so I go digging a bit and discover that this part of the rule can, in fact, be found hidden in the Rules Glossary! (Although, obviously, not in the entry about Targets!)

Finally, all of this is made much, much worse because Wizards of the Coast is allergic to page references, and so even when they do tell you where you can find more rules, this takes the form of, “See also chapter 1,” and you’re left flipping through a thirty-page chapter trying to figure out what where you’re supposed to look.

CONCLUSION

On the one hand, you can argue that all of the rules are, in fact, in the rulebook, and can eventually be found if you just look in the right place. So what’s the problem?

On the other hand, I want you to think about how many times during this relatively simple rules look up:

• You could falsely conclude that you had all the relevant rules and, therefore, never go looking for the rules hidden away in a different part of the book.
• You needed to have multiple pages open at the same time in order to have all the relevant rules for a single topic. (Then add to this, for example, the spell listing that prompted you to go looking for these rules in the first place.)
• You’re re-reading the same text in multiple places because each entry is partially redundant.

But, also, once you’ve lost trust that either the Rules Glossary or the main text can be trusted to give you a full set of rules, how much time do you waste fruitlessly double-checking to make sure you’re not missing something that’s been hidden from you? (Remember how in one case the partial rules were in the Rules Glossary and the full rules were in the main text, but in the other case the opposite was true?)

Think about the impact all of that has in the middle of a session.

Ignore the broken Index entry and assume we successfully navigated our way through the blind turns: We nevertheless went to page 376, then page 237, then page 364, and then page 361. (And then probably back and forth between them.)

Meanwhile in the 2014 Player’s Handbook, all of these rules were located in a single place on page 204. Look it up and you’re done.

As I mentioned, the 2014 Player’s Handbook is not without its own flaws and shortcomings. My point here isn’t that perfection hasn’t been achieved. My point is that glossary-based rulebooks are systemically flawed, and the 2024 Player’s Handbook is just one example of a fundamental problem, which means that the impact on you and your game will also be systemic and pervasive, affecting it in every part.

Monte Cook’s Banewarrens is one of the best dungeon-based campaigns of all time.

The campaign, designed for 6^th to 10^th level characters, was originally published for D&D 3rd Edition in 2002. When I read it way back then, I was immediately enamored and knew that I wanted to run it. At the time, I was running an epic fantasy campaign where the PCs had to go searching for various artifacts, and I ended up routing them through Ptolus – the city where the Banewarrens are located – so that I could tease the strange and mysterious Spire that towers over the city, anticipating that when that campaign wrapped up, I would be running The Banewarrens for them next.

Unfortunately, that gaming group broke up. A few years later, however, I had a new group and Monte Cook was releasing Ptolus: City by the Spire, the nearly 700-page sourcebook describing that selfsame city where the Banewarrens were located. The stars were aligned, the campaign was begun, and I have never left the City by the Spire.

I’ve been singing the praises of both Ptolus and The Banewarrens for years, but I’ve never written a proper review. Recently, however, both books have been converted to D&D 5^th Edition, and so it seems like an opportune time to rectify that oversight.

BEHIND THE BANEWARRENS

Thousands of years ago, a good man believed that good and evil existed in balance in the world. Therefore, destroying evil was only a temporary victory, because the evil – released back into the world – would soon find some new way to manifest. The only way to truly triumph over evil, therefore, would be to instead imprison it; to lock it away from the world and keep it where it could do no harm.

This good man, therefore, began a grand project and daring crusade: Recruiting others to his cause, he sent them out into the world to gather banes – things of great evil, whether objects, diseases, or people – while he constructed the Banewarrens, a vast underground vault in which all of these objects could be stored.

Bringing all of this evil together in one place, unfortunately, proved to be a horrible mistake: First, the earth itself rebelled against the evil, thrusting upwards thousands of feet into a terrifying Spire. Then, as the good man’s servants labored to repair the vaults, something went wrong. The good man was corrupted by the banes he had collected. He became the Banelord, betraying his friends and using the evil artifacts they had collected to become a dark and terrible force.

Long ago, great heroes arose who defeated the Banelord. But the Banewarrens, and most of the evil banes which had been sealed within them, remained. In the millennia since, many have attempted to breach them, hoping to claim the banes within and perhaps becomes a second Banelord. But the defenses of the Banewarrens repelled all such attempts, and many believed that, despite his tragic fall, the good man had wrought well and the Banewarrens were, in fact, impregnable.

They were all wrong.

UNLEASHING THE BANEWARRENS

The Banewarrens campaign begins with a random encounter.

The PCs are passing through the streets of Ptolus when they encounter a dark elf named Tavan Zith, a nexus of wild and chaotic magic which is constantly mutating anyone who draws near him.

This is not, in fact, a scenario hook for The Banewarrens (structurally speaking). At first glance, it will likely seem to just be another example of the strange and exotic things that happen on the streets of Ptolus. This will quickly cease to be true, however, as the PCs’ reputation and their involvement in dealing with Tavan Zith brings them to the attention of two different factions.

Because it turns out that Tavan Zith is supposed to be locked up in the Banewarrens. And if he is instead wandering the streets, it can only mean that the Banewarrens have been breached.

The first faction to approach the PCs is the Church of Lothian. They believe the Banelord hid a holy relic known as the Sword of Truth in the Banewarrens and they want the PCs to retrieve it.

Next up is the Inverted Pyramid, an arcane guild which is deeply concerned about the Banewarrens being opened, but also wants to learn as much as possible before everything gets sealed up again.

At first it will seem as if the PCs can serve both their patrons, but as the campaign continues this will become increasingly difficult for them to do. Furthermoer, as they begin investigating the Banewarrens, they will discover that another faction, the Pactlords of the Quaan, is responsible for the breach. A little later, a fourth faction will likely discover what’s happening and also get involved.

This is, ultimately, what makes The Banewarrens such a special campaign. It’s a dungeon-based campaign that’s absolutely drenched in faction intrigue. The PCs will have to juggle the agendas of friendly factions, while simultaneously trying to deal with the machinations of antagonistic ones. (You might even be surprised to discover which ones end up being which in your campaign!) Cook does a fantastic job of presenting these faction intrigues in a format which is both easy for the GM to understand and also packaged into highly practical chunks that can be readily deployed on the table.

The two primary tools for doing this are:

• Events. Listed at the beginning of each chapter, these are floating scenes that can be dropped into the PCs’ dungeon explorations.
• Time Passes. Certain dungeon rooms are flagged with additional key entries describing how the room might be changed by the actions of other factions. (These can be used when the PCs first enter a room if they’ve been dilly-dallying or busy elsewhere, but can also be saved and used when the PCs return to the room later to show that they’re not alone down here.)

In practice, these are quite possible, making it possible to create the simulacrum of real activity with great ease and giving you all the raw materials needed to actively run the factions with only a little extra effort.

What makes this work particularly well is that Cook has designed the Banewarrens to periodically pull the PCs back into the metropolis above. (For example, at one point early in the campaign they’ll figure out that they need a particular magical resource to unlock the doors within the Banewarrens and continue making progress, so they’ll need to leave the dungeon to track it down.) This ingeniously creates absences from the dungeon, allowing the Events and Time Passes elements to be seamlessly implemented. It also allows the PCs to interact with the other factions in new and different ways. Plus, these interludes also provide breaks from dungeon-based play, mixing things up and preventing the campaign from become a monotonous slog.

THE NATURE OF THE BANEWARRENS

The Banewarrens are sometimes described as a “megadungeon,” but I don’t think this is quite right. They’re a rather large and ingeniously mapped dungeon, with more than a hundred rooms, but they’re designed as a single, coherent scenario with the PCs pursuing a singular goal, and not the warren of disparate scenarios you’d see in a true campaign dungeon. (See Types of Dungeons for a deeper discussion of the differences here.)

This is not, of course, to the detriment of The Banewarrens. The singular purpose and vision allows Cook to craft a truly memorable – and terrifying! – environment for the PCs to explore. The expertly xandered maps, distinct flavoring of the different sections of the Banewarrens, and the unique sense of progression (as the PCs travel in-and-up, rather than down-and-out) provide an excellent playground, into which Cook pours a ghastly variety of horrific foes and a creepy panoply of banes.

The banes, in particular, gives the Banewarrens a very unique feel. It fundamentally inverts the typical dungeoncrawling tropes: Instead of kicking down doors and grabbing loot to haul out of the dungeon, the PCs will instead quickly learn that they need to keep the doors locked at all costs and make sure nothing gets out. The Banelord may or may not have been right about the conservation of evil in the universe, but there’s little doubt that releasing these things of great evil into the world will have horrible consequences.

(“Hey! What are the PCs going to do about treasure?!” Fortunately, the other factions and the interludes that take place outside the Banewarrens are designed to solve this problem.)

CONCLUSION

And all of that is why The Banewarrens is one of the best dungeon-based campaigns of all time.

If it hadn’t already been converted to the 5^th Edition rules, I’d still be recommending that you track down a copy of the 3^rd Edition campaign and adapt it to 5^th Edition ASAP. (Or Shadowdark or Basic Fantasy RPG or Old School Essentials or maybe even Mork Borg, whatever floats your dungeoncrawling boat.) It’s not just that it’s a fantastic campaign that you and your players will remember forever; it’s also one of those transformative campaigns capable of teaching you a whole new way to run your game.

GRADE: A+

Author: Monte Cook
Publisher: Monte Cook Games
Cost: $12.99 (5E PDF) / $6.66 (3E PDF)
Page Count: 180

ADDITIONAL READING
Review: Ptolus – City of Adventure
Ptolus: In the Shadow of the Spire
Ptolus Remix: The Mrathrach Agenda
Ptolus Remix: The Vladaam Affair

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 39C: Liberation of the Slaves

Tor became a whirling dervish – a one-man electrical storm – at the top of the stairs, holding off the churning wall of fur. Several of the ratlings leapt down onto the stairs behind him, surrounding him utterly, but they were no match for the speed or ferocity of Tor’s electrical blade.

When the furious job was done, Tor and Elestra quickly got the prisoners up the stairs and out the front door of the temple. They sent them, with money in their pockets and food in their bellies, to the watch station in Delvers’ Square.

Particularly in campaigns where the PCs are Big Damn Heroes™, I think it can be really powerful to show how their actions have earned them a reputation.

You save the world a few times and people start taking notice, ya know?

One technique I particularly like is the Big Social Event, as we saw back in Session 12: A Party at Castle Shard. As I discussed in Game Structure: Party Planning:

I’ve … found them to be effective as a way of signaling when the PCs have changed their sphere of influence. You rescued the mayor’s daughter from a dragon? Chances are you’re going to be the belle of the ball. And you’re going to discover that powerful and important people have become very interested in making your acquaintance.

When these events work, they’re exciting and engaging experiences, often providing a memorable epoch for the players and spinning out contacts and consequences that will drive the next phase of the campaign.

But, more broadly, the attitude of the world towards the PCs should shift. Partly because the players get a huge thrill out of their actions being recognized. Partly because it just makes sense.

One thing I find frequently useful for this is some form of Reputation system. For In the Shadow of the Spire, I’ve been using a streamlined variant of the Reputation mechanics from the 3^rd Edition Unearthed Arcana sourcebook.

The short version is:

1. Stuff that the PCs do earn them Fame or Infamy points, which collectively create a reputation bonus.
2. When the PCs meet a new NPC for the first time, the NPC makes a DC 25 skill or Intelligence check + the PCs’ reputation bonus.
3. On a success, they recognize the PCs. Their reaction depends on their opinion of the actions the PCs’ took to earn their Fame/Infamy (and this may also inflict bonuses or penalties to subsequent social skill checks equal to the reputation bonus).

I can also flip that around and give NPCs a Reputation score so that PCs can recognize them with a successful Knowledge (Local) + reputation check.

In this case, I decided that recusing the slaves from the Temple of the Rat God would create a big enough splash that it would add a half point to their PCs’ reputation. To track this, I have a short section in my campaign status document that looks like this:

REPUTATION

FAME: 5.5

INFAMY: 0

FAME: Rescued Phon. Recovered Jasin’s body. Castle Shard party. Shilukar’s bounty. Association with Dominic. Tavan Zith riot. Freeing slaves and children from Temple of the Rat God.

The quick rep reference basically gives me a menu of stuff that I can have NPCs who recognize the PCs mention. (“Didn’t I see you at the Harvesttime party at Castle Shard?” or “Oh my god! You saved my brother during the riot in Oldtown!” or “I heard you helped us out on that Shilukar case.”)

In practice, I grade these on a pseudo-logarithmic scale: Rescuing the pregnant Phon was enough to get earn their first point of Fame (people might recognize them as “the delvers who rescued that pregnant woman!”), but after that they aren’t going to earn Fame for every single person they rescue.

In any case, I’ve found this minimalist reputation system to be pretty effective. It tends to only be meaningful once every few sessions (although as their Reputation grows, that becomes more frequent), but the maintenance cost is extremely low and the moments when it’s triggered provide nice little spontaneous pops of payoff and, in some cases, unexpected twists.

Campaign Journal: Session 40A – Running the Campaign: Show the Help
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index