DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 32C: Enter Arveth

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.

The default goal of a dungeon in D&D is to win fights: You go into the dungeon. You encounter monsters. You kill the monsters. You take their treasure. You leave the dungeon. Hurrah!

But defaults are boring.

This particular default, though, can be pretty sneaky. You can usually spot it, though, if you keep your eye out for “clear the dungeon” scenario goals.

For example: “My scenario isn’t just some crude, kick-down-the-door dungeon crawl! The PCs need to stop an eldritch rite which threatens to sever the connection between the Material Plane the Feywild!”

Okay, sure. And how do they stop it?

“They have to find the corrupted grove and journey into the liminal realm which connects all dryad trees!”

Awesome. And how do they actually stop the ritual?

“… they have to hunt down all the cultists in the dryad-realm and kill them.”

There’s nothing wrong with a good fight, nor with a pulp scenario where you solve your problems with fists and/or swords and/or blasters. (That adventure through a corrupted dryad-grove sounds amazing.)

But as I think the current session demonstrates, having non-combat goals — whether for a full scenario or just an individual encounter — makes the combat more interesting.

The raid on this abandoned apartment building was, if I do say so myself, a thrilling scenario. Both I and the players were fully engaged, grappling with a complex, multi-level environment filled with a variety of opponents and treacherous environments.

But the instant “save the prisoners” was introduced as an additional, non-combat goal everything was ratcheted up to another level. It added layers of complexity to the tactical situation, and by virtue of inherently creating a set-up with multiple goals (the default combat goal of “take them all out” plus the new goal), it turn calculations into choices.

The example in this session also demonstrates that these non-combat goals don’t always need to come from the GM. If you create a rich environment that responds dynamically to the players’ choices and actions, they’ll merrily set their own goals and complicate their own lives.

Campaign Journal: Session 33A – Running the Campaign: Fantasy Campaigns
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

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

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 32A: Enthralled in Oldtown

But as Agnarr cut through the room at the center of the complex, the floor suddenly buckled beneath him – plunging him down to the first floor in a loud, splintering crash of broken wood.

Looking around, Agnarr saw the problem: Several support walls had been completely destroyed and there were several broken floor beams. He tried climbing back up to the second floor, but the acid-eaten floorboards broke beneath his weight a second time and dropped him back down again.

“I’m just going to stay down here,” Agnarr said, heading towards the far door of the room he’d fallen into.

The PCs should not be in control.

Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they should not be given control. If they exert control, that’s completely different. In fact, exerting control is likely to be their goal. But a good scenario – particularly a good dungeon scenario – will continually challenge that control and force them to fight to maintain it.

The problem with a lot of modern dungeon design is that it allows the players to trivially control the expedition: The monsters politely wait in their rooms. The PCs are free to engage and disengage with them in whatever way and whatever pace they choose.

The problem is that when the PCs have that level of control, the game breaks in multiple ways: Resource management becomes irrelevant. Weird exploits become reliable. The experience flattens. The challenge vanishes.

When you challenge their control, on the other hand, the players will be forced to respond dynamically, shepherding their resources against unknown threats and thinking outside of the box when faced with situations that are neither ideal nor anticipated.

One way to achieve this is with dynamic opponents (through the use of random encounters, adversary rosters, etc.) that challenge the players’ ability to control the pace and composition of encounters.

But you can also challenge the players’ control over navigation.

This can be done through confusion or deception (e.g., a maze-like dungeon where the PCs literally get lost, illusory walls, undetectable slopes, etc.). It can also be done through metamorphosis (e.g., tunnels collapse or walls move).

But an old school classic is the trap that moves you. The teleportation trap is perhaps the Platonic ideal here: You’re in one place and then, against your will, you are in a completely different place. You are no longer in control of your expedition and you’re going to have to work (and apply your expertise and knowledge) to regain that control (by figuring out where you are and how to get back). As the current session demonstrates, of course, there are other options, including entirely naturalistic ones. In this case, Agnarr has broken through the unstable floor and dropped down to a lower level: That was not a choice the PCs made and now, instead of being able to proceed in an orderly fashion through the dungeon (clearing rooms before methodically descending to the next level), they’ve been thrust into a completely different tactical situation.

The fact that I was using adversary rosters, location timelines, and other active opposition techniques only served to enhance the trap. Intriguingly, in this case, it worked both ways: It wasn’t just the PCs who were thrust into a new tactical situation and needed to figure out how to handle it, the NPCs were also surprised!

And being challenged like that is fun for me, too!

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