DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 48D: Alchestrin’s Mural

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 studied it in detail.

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 not a visual artist.

My sketches are crude and even my mini-painting is rudimentary at best.

But the world, of course, is filled with art. I want that reflected in my campaign worlds. Art is a tangible expression of both culture and individual personality. It’s a powerful tool for setting the scene and creating a palpable sense of place. You can use it to reinforce themes. The cracked cup with the finger-painting of a swan can tell the story of a character and a tapestry can capture the tale of an entire nation.

Nor is it limited to the halls of the rich. I’m reminded of the painting from the dilapidated Spouter-Inn in Moby-Dick:

On one side hung a very large oil painting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced, that in the unequal crosslights by which you viewed it, it was only by diligent study and a series of systematic visits to it, and careful inquiry of the neighbors, that you could any way arrive at an understanding of its purpose. Such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, that at first you almost thought some ambitious young artist, in the time of the New England hags, had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched. But by dint of much and earnest contemplation, and oft repeated ponderings, and especially by throwing open the little window towards the back of the entry, you at last come to the conclusion that such an idea, however wild, might not be altogether unwarranted.

But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you through.—It’s the Black Sea in a midnight gale.—It’s the unnatural combat of the four primal elements.—It’s a blasted heath.—It’s a Hyperborean winter scene.—It’s the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time. But at last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in the picture’s midst. That once found out, and all the rest were plain. But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? even the great leviathan himself?

In fact, the artist’s design seemed this: a final theory of my own, partly based upon the aggregated opinions of many aged persons with whom I conversed upon the subject. The picture represents a Cape-Horner in a great hurricane; the half-foundered ship weltering there with its three dismantled masts alone visible; and an exasperated whale, purposing to spring clean over the craft, is in the enormous act of impaling himself upon the three mast-heads.

That’s more florid than a description I would attempt at the gaming table. Yet the intention and effect is the same.

But art is more than just set dressing. It encodes exposition into the environment, rewarding exploration, study, and attention to detail. It can peel back the layers of history in a moldering ruin. (Sometimes literally as ancient murals peek through cracking plaster.) And it can also conceal DaVinci Code-style secret lore.

Again, though, I’m not an artist. So how can I incorporate this kind of stuff into my campaign?

One option is to coopt existing graphical resources: RPG sourcebooks, stock art, and online image searches can all give you stuff to work from.

(If you’ve created a fictional piece of art, of course, it can be difficult to find an existing piece that matches it. But if you reverse the creative process — look for cool art and use it to inspire the other aspects of the adventure — it can be a lot easier.)

As you can see in the current session, however, I’ll also evoke art through text by preparing art handouts. In practice, these are very similar to lore books.

Obviously this is not appropriate for every piece of art, but I find them particularly effective for murals, tapestries, triptychs and the like. If you’re embedding clues in the art, the handout gives the players a physical reminder and reference. You can reward skill checks by giving the player the handout to share with the group, empowering them to roleplay the voice of expertise discussing the artwork.

Another tip is to include evocative visual snippets in the handout. This is great when you find an image that feels right, but can’t encompass the whole. I often do this with collections, for example: I have one image of a statue in the right style and with the appropriate subject, but there are twenty statues in the collection. I can include the image to evoke the look of the statues, while describing the full collection in the handout.

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

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

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 48B: The Fall of Tepal

The biggest story of the morning hours had been a mysterious fire in the Guildsmans’ District – an apartment building on Storm Street had burned to the ground in flames that witnesses reported to be a bright, phosphorescent blue (leading authorities to suspect magical arsonry).

But that news was being rapidly forgotten by the larger story sweeping across the city: An army had marched out of the Southern Desert, taken the city-state of Tepal by surprise, and sacked it.

Nasira was taken aback by the news. Learning that the news had arrived in Ptolus on three refugee ships she headed towards the docks. Speaking with passengers from the ships, however, she could discover little in the way of detail: The ships had sailed free just as the city was falling, and they could tell her nothing about the fate of her temple or the city itself once it had been taken.

At the beginning of this session, the PCs were visited by Talia and Marcus Hunter, delvers interested in exploring a section of Ghul’s Labyrinth which the PCs had previously discovered earlier in the campaign.

The Hunters are from Dark Tidings, an adventure by Monte Cook that was published back in 2009. In the original module, the PCs are hired by friends of the Hunters who want the PCs to save the Hunter expedition, which has gone missing in the Dungeons beneath Ptolus. If the PCs take the job, they’re given a full briefing on the back story, a map of the Dungeon area where the Hunters disappeared, and a list of the members of the Hunter expedition.

It’s a fun adventure and I wanted to incorporate it into the In the Shadow of the Spire campaign. One option, obviously, would be to run the scenario hook as written: The Hunter’s friends show up out of the blue and want to hire the PCs.

Instead, what I’m doing in this session is laying groundwork for the future adventure.

First, I’ve performed a campaign stitch: The Hunters aren’t going to disappear in some random section of the Dungeon. Instead, their explorations will be directly connected to the actions of the PCs. This means that I can also use Dark Tidings to answer the lingering question of what lies beyond one of the bluesteel doors in the Laboratory of the Beast. Plus, it lets me develop the Delver’s Guild and its inner workings a bit (with the delving contract), while also packaging up a unique, flavorful reward for the PCs (in the form of earning a percentage of the Hunter’s delving haul). All of which is also, conveniently, a great way to get the players invested in the fate of the Hunter party.

Second, of course, I’m setting up a reason for the PCs to be hired to save the Hunters when they go missing later in the campaign: It’s a section of Ghul’s Labyrinth they’re already familiar with, making them uniquely qualified for the job. There’s nothing wrong with random patrons popping up out of the blue to offer the PCs jobs on the basis of nothing but their reputation, but I’ve generally found it more effective when you can make things a little more personal. Not only does this make the campaign feel cohesive, it also means that the player’s choices have weight. (We tried to save the missing child at Greyson House, which led us to explore Ghul’s Labyrinth. We cleverly discovered a password which allowed us to discover the Laboratory of the Beast. We tried to sell the rare treasures we discovered there, which led to the deaths of the researchers from House Erthuo and, much later, the Hunters approaching us.)

Sometimes this sort of stuff will just organically happen during play. Sometimes, though, you need to look ahead and set things up. This doesn’t necessarily mean you need to have everything prepped ahead of time: You just need a general idea of what an upcoming scenario might look like. In this case, I’m setting up a published scenario, but we could just as easily imagine an original scenario where the only thing I really know is that (a) an adventuring party will approach the PCs and (b) will later go missing in order motivate further exploration of Ghul’s Labyrinth.

Published adventures, unfortunately, often overlook this type of groundwork. Since the author doesn’t know the particular details of your campaign, it’s easiest to have everything about the scenario arise from a tabula rasa. I think this is a mistake, though, and in my own work, as well as my work as an RPG Producer at Modiphius and Atlas Games, I emphasized the importance of including Groundwork tools that GMs could use to set up published scenarios in their own campaigns. (See Design Notes: Scenario Tools for more details on this.)

Regardless of what published adventures may do, however, as GMs I think we should always be looking fore these opportunities in our own campaigns.

In the case of the Hunters, the payoff for this groundwork would come eight sessions later., and the PCs wouldn’t actually go after the Hunters until Session 62, a full year and a half later in real time.

Sometimes you need to plant those seeds deep.

In fact, this sessions also features groundwork for a completely different adventure, with the Fall of Tepal being connected to multiple future scenarios.

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