DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 33C: Secret Doors & Sentries

But Agnarr was already scrambling back to his feet and racing down the hallways. He passed Tee easily, despite her considerable head start, and then slid down the last ten feet of the passage – right past the ratman who had scarcely finished turning to run. Before the  ratman could scamper down the hall, draw a weapon, or even turn back to face him, Agnarr had decapitated him.

The other ratman squeaked and retreated back towards a dead end. Tee rounded the corner and put an arrow through his eye.

Tee has been shooting bad guys through the eye since the first session of the campaign. Her first victim was a giant centipede, but that was quickly followed by kobolds, goblins, cultists, ratmen, demons, and all manner of beasties.

I’ve previously described this as a running gag (due to the comedic component it has for our group), but it’s also an example of an action schtick. These are themes or motifs that repeat again and again, usually in combat scenes. They may attach to specific characters in the form of a signature move (Chow Yun  Fat dual-wielding pistols, Trinity’s floating kick, etc.), but they can also have broader application. (For example, the way that John Woo used white doves as a recurring motif in his fight scenes.)

These schticks are not, it should be noted, mechanical. They might be tied to a particular ability, but even then they aren’t something that necessarily happens every single time the character uses that ability. Schticks are a little more ephemeral than that; a little more of an artistic flourish; a spice best used in moderation.

Personally, I usually let action schticks develop naturally during play. (I described Tee shooting the giant centipede through the eye, that got a big reaction, and then she kept doing it.) But you can also deliberately design them and use them for specific effect.

Action schticks can stick around for the length of an entire campaign (like Tee’s eye-shooting schtick), but they can also be a great shortcut for creating a memorable scenario or encounter: For example, the giants for Durbolg Peak wield huge warhammers. When they miss, the hammers often crash down, smashing craters into the ground.

The fact that you can prep action schticks can also make them a great crutch to fall back on if you’re struggling with effective and evocative descriptions of combat: Schticks can, to at least some extent, be plug-and-play, so if you give yourself the gift of a few schticks to play around with, you can get a lot of mileage by just dropping one or two of them into each fight. (Although you’ll want to be careful not to burn them out from overuse.)

Campaign Journal: Session 33D – Running the Campaign: NPC Spellbooks
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

SESSION 33C: SECRET DOORS & SENTRIES

December 28th, 2008
The 18th Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

“We should kill them,” Elestra said.

“What?” Tee said. “We said we’d let them go.”

“You saw what they were doing to those people,” Elestra said. “They’re evil.”

“And we’re not,” Tee said.

But it was clear that Elestra didn’t want to let them go – Uranik because of what he was responsible for and Arveth because she could so easily identify Tee.

“She doesn’t know my real name,” Tee said.

“But she’s seen all of us,” Elestra argued. “It won’t be hard to track down six people matching our descriptions… not with Dominic being the Chosen of Vehthyl.”

“We could just cut out her tongue,” Tor suggested.

Tee was shocked. She thought of Tor as the moral center of the group, and now she was taken aback by the bloodthirstiness of them both.

Tee prevailed and they left the two cultists unconscious where they lay. (“Cutting out their tongue never works anyway,” Dominic said.) They also decided to head through the secret door.

But as soon as they headed down the sewer tunnel, Elestra tried to double back and kill the prisoners. But she wasn’t sly enough for Tee – in fact, the effort was so clumsy that none of them took it seriously. Tee called her back and kept an eye on her until they were through the door.

Finding the door was easy enough now that they knew where to look. Beyond it they could see where the original line of the sewer had run, although it had clearly been diverted into new construction long ago. The reason for the diversion, perhaps, was the large sinkhole-like collapse that lay just beyond the new construction. A ladder leaning against the side of the sinkhole led down to an older passage of some sort beneath the sewer line.

Tee climbed down this ladder and scouted ahead, coming quickly to an intersection. She peeked around the corner, careful not to make a sound.

Unfortunately, the ratmen sentries had been warned by the light of the sunrod that Elestra was carrying. They took two quick shots at Tee’s head with a pair of dragon rifles as she ducked back around the corner.

Tee paused for only a moment and then rounded the corner again, running down the hall and firing with her dragon pistol as she went. She caught one of the ratmen in the shoulder in a blast of scorched fur.

The others, hearing the shots of both ratmen and Tee, started jumping down from the top of the sinkhole. Unfortunately, the broken floor of the passage below proved treacherous. Most of them fell haphazardly in the attempt.

The two ratmen where standing in a T-intersection at the far end of the hall. They were firing back at Tee now, but as she came closer they suddenly ducked behind opposite corners. Tee cursed, certain that they were going to reach the other defenders of the temple and raise the alarm before she could stop them.

But Agnarr was already scrambling back to his feet and racing down the hallways. He passed Tee easily, despite her considerable head start, and then slid down the last ten feet of the passage – right past the ratman who had scarcely finished turning to run. Before the  ratman could scamper down the hall, draw a weapon, or even turn back to face him, Agnarr had decapitated him.

The other ratman squeaked and retreated back towards a dead end. Tee rounded the corner and put an arrow through his eye.

As the others caught up with them, Tee knelt down to search the corpses. The ratmen had been carrying little of interest, except for the dragon rifles they had been firing. These were worn and badly damaged, marked with the clear patina of age.

“They’re not chaositech, are they?” Elestra asked worriedly.

“No,” Tee said. “They’re just very old.”

They continued into the complex. Several side passages had collapsed or partially collapsed, but they eventually came to a door of thick, sturdy oak. Tee picked a lock on this and they passed into a room that seemed equal parts meditative study and bedchamber. It was mostly empty, with only a straw mat in the middle of the floor. On the walls hung various tapestries (which Ranthir identified as each depicting great wizards of the past). There was a door directly opposite the one through which they’d entered. At the far end of the room there was a small wooden bookshelf containing a dozen assorted volumes. These, of course, caught the particular attention of Ranthir, who was also delighted to discover that one of them was a thick tome of spells.

Ranthir was not able to study the spellbook completely, but the illustrations of eyes being burnt away with acid were enough to leave him concerned.

Running the Campaign: Action Schticks – Campaign Journal: Session 33D
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 33B: The Interrogation of Arveth

The man laughed. “It’s a fiction. A front for the Brotherhood of Venom.”

“Which you belong to.”

“That’s right.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Being questioned by amateurs.”

Tee wasn’t amused. She signaled Agnarr, who lowered him and began swinging the top of his head through the sewer sludge.

It’s a classic scene: Our hero has been taken prisoner by the villain. An interrogation ensues, with an exchange of witty banter. But who’s learning more? The hero or the villain? And then the denoument: “No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die!” Almost certainly most famous from Goldfinger, the trope extends back to the first James Bond movie and beyond. (You can find it in everything from Prisoner of Zenda to Shakespeare’s Hamlet to John Wick.)

Across a multitude of groups — home games, convention games, open tables, etc. — however, I have rarely seen this dynamic emerge at the gaming table. In fact, exactly the opposite seems far more common: The PCs will have taken someone prisoner and, as in the current session, be the ones coming up with Rube Goldbergian interrogation techniques.

(And, as often as not, just like a Bond villain, the PCs end up giving away more information than they gain. They’ll also do this in another Bond-ian scene which is more common at the game table: As guests at the bad guy’s big social event.)

This might just be a me thing. Maybe PCs in your campaigns are constantly getting captured and interrogated. But I think there are a few factors that cause this to happen:

First, RPGs largely default to the PCs being masters of their domain, by which I mean that they are almost always expected to physically trounce any opposition put in their way. This is in sharp contrast to the protagonists in most action movies, for example, who are almost always completely outgunned. In fact, it’s quite common for the plot of an action movie to be entire about the hero desperately running away (until, of course, the final act when they turn it all around).

Second, unlike Bond, players will generally resist being captured unto their last bloody breath. Many players have had bad experiences with GMs stripping them of their agency, and so they’d literally rather die than endure that again. Game design also factors in here, with the typical RPG providing concrete structures in which the players can influence the outcome of events (or, at least, feel as if they can continue influencing events) as long as they keep fighting, but no such structures for sustaining their agency in a Bond-like fashion if they allow themselves to be captured.

Third, there’s the distinct difference between the group dynamics of the typical PC group in an RPG and the dynamic of the lone protagonist in other media. Most stories in other media protagonize a single character, even if that character is operating in a group. In the comparatively rare stories where there are a gaggle of main characters (e.g., Ocean’s Eleven or Stranger Things), it’s still virtually unheard of for them to always travel together in one big pack.

(Consider the group dynamics of the The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship is quite large, but during the period where the whole group is together, the story remains pretty firmly fixed on Frodo as the main character. It’s only when the Fellowship splits up that other characters start acting as protagonists.)

Even more unusual (again, compared to other media) is the penchant for most RPG groups to almost never frame scenes around a PC vs. PC conflict. (Not necessarily in the sense of a physical confrontation; in the sense of conflicting agendas.) Usually when you have a large, central cast of characters in other media, most of the storytelling is about the relationships and conflicts between those characters, but not so in most RPG groups.

Better RPG groups will, in fact, rise above this. But it’s pervasive largely because it arises naturally from the expected dynamic of “the GM preps material for the players to experience.” This inclines the GM towards presenting their prep and causes the players to slide into a weird midpoint between passive audience and hive-mind protagonists.

Anyway, the point is that PCs often interrogate NPCs as if they were Bond villains.

Weird, huh?

Campaign Journal: Session 33C – Running the Campaign: Action Schticks
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

SESSION 33B: THE INTERROGATION OF ARVETH

December 28th, 2008
The 18th Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

After briefly discussing what they wanted to ask the prisoners and how they would go about interrogating them, they started with Arveth. Agnarr grabbed her by the ankles and held her upside down above the turgid sewer sludge. Tor slapped her awake.

She woke up angry.

“Who are you who dare to defy the powers of chaos?” She scanned their faces, but when she came to Tee’s she blanched.

“That’s right,” Tee smiled with vicious glee.

“You bitch!”

Tee smiled and shrugged. “Where’s Wuntad?”

Arveth’s eyes filled with confusion. “Who?”

Tee studied her carefully for a moment, and then suddenly her face broke into a large grin. “Oh! You don’t know anything, do you?”

“You insignificant worm! You’re not worthy of knowing the secrets of chaos!”

“Wrong answer.” Tee signaled to Agnarr, who dipped her into the channel of sludge. She came back up spluttering and gagging.

Tee pulled out the thick stack of papers they had collected. “Did you mean these secrets of chaos? Because I know these secrets. For secrets they don’t seem very well secured.”

Arveth glared. “You came so close to greatness.”

Tee laughed in her face. “Let’s try something simple. Who do you work for?”

“Dilar.”

“The centaur? Okay. What else can you tell me?”

Arveth hesitated.

“I guess you really don’t know anything. Well, in that case…” Tee raised her hand in Agnarr’s direction. The barbarian began lowering Arveth back towards the sewer sludge. Arveth panicked.

“I know things! I know!”

Tee held up her hand to stop Agnarr. “Like what?”

“There are at least eight people who come in and out of this building.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do they do here?”

Arveth hesitated again. Tee laughed. “You really don’t know anything. Did you even tell anyone before you came rushing in?”

“Yes. They’ll be here soon.”

She spat the words. But she’d hesitated for just a moment. Tee laughed again. “You didn’t! And you just tried to lie to me again.” She leaned in close and whispered in her ear. “You came so close to greatness…”

Tee gave a signal. Arveth had just a moment to struggle, certain that she was about to die, before Agnarr slammed her head into the wall of the sewer, knocking her unconscious again. Dominic took a moment to make sure that the wound wasn’t lethal and then they turned their attention to the spellcaster.

THE INTERROGATION OF URANIK

“I’ve seen him before,” Ranthir said. “He was one of the Venom cultists who killed the cultist from the Brotherhood of the Ebon Hand.”

“The one you saw while using clairvoyance?” Tee asked. Ranthir nodded.

They blinded the cultist and Agnarr dangled him above the sewer sludge. Elestra slapped him awake.

“Whoever you are, you’re already dead.” His voice was possessed of a cruel, sardonic tone.

Elestra laughed at him.

Tee ignored him. “Do you know where you are?”

“You blindfold me and then ask me where I am?” The man sneered.

At Tee’s signal, Agnarr hit him across the face. Hard.

The man licked blood from his lip. “All right. I’ll play along. Judging by the smell, I’d guess we’re in the sewers.”

“That’s right. We found our way down here.”

“You found a huge hole in the floor? Congratulations on your powers of perception.”

Agnarr hit him again.

“What do you want to know?”

“Let’s start with your name”

“Uranik.”

“So you can tell the truth.” Tee smiled through her bluff. “That’s right. We know who you are. Now, tell us about the Brotherhood of Ptolus.”

The man laughed. “It’s a fiction. A front for the Brotherhood of Venom.”

“Which you belong to.”

“That’s right.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Being questioned by amateurs.”

Tee wasn’t amused. She signaled Agnarr, who lowered him and began swinging the top of his head through the sewer sludge.

“Stop it.” Uranik managed to keep his sardonic tone, but there was a slight edge of tension in his voice.

“Pull him up,” Tee said. “Hmm. You seem to have gotten a little dirty. Now, I’ve got one of your fancy pieces of cloth here – the one with the purple liquid on it. I suppose I could just wipe your face clean with it…”

“This isn’t necessary,” Uranik said. “If you let me live and let me go, I’ll tell you whatever you want.” He was outwardly calm, but it was clear that Tee had rattled him.

Tee considered it for a moment. “Dunk him so that we can talk.”

Uranik opened his mouth to protest… which was a mistake.

While he gurgled they quickly talked it over. Elestra didn’t like the idea of letting him go – unlike Arveth, Uranik had been directly responsible for the atrocities performed in the apartment building above them. But the rest of them decided to accept his terms.

Agnarr hauled him back up and they sat him down on the ledge. Tee quizzed him about the work that had been done in the apartment complex, and by comparing those answers to the papers they had retrieved she confirmed that he was being truthful… about that at least.

They learned that the cultists had broken into the apartment complex and started their experiments on the residents. When they ran out of residents, they started bringing in slaves from the Temple of the Rat God.

“And what’s down here in the sewer?”

“The Temple of Deep Chaos,” Uranik said. “It was founded by Wuntad.”

They quizzed him about Wuntad. He had apparently left the Temple here about a month and a half ago and Uranik hadn’t seen him since, although he believed that Illadras – who was now in charge of the Temple – was in contact with him. Uranik claimed to know nothing about Pythoness House.

“You work here with the Ebon Hand?”

“And others.”

“So why did you kill the other priest?”

“Reggaloch? He was planning to betray us.”

“And yet he’s the one who’s dead.”

“There were two of us and only one of him.”

“How do you get into the Temple?”

He told them of two entrances – an iron door down the western tunnel and a secret entrance up the northern tunnel. If they went through the iron door, they would enter a long stone hall. He described one of the walls of this hall as being illusionary, and said that there were four priests who stood as guardians and could look into the hall through a peephole.

“And through the secret entrance?”

“There’s a tunnel with two sentries on duty. If you can get past them, you should be able to come up behind the priests through their quarters. There’ll be a staircase down—“

“We’re going to leave you here. When you get out of your ropes, don’t try to warn your friends. We’ll make sure they know you’re a traitor. And we both know what you do with traitors.”

Agnarr knocked him unconscious. Tor loosened his ropes… slightly.

Running the Campaign: Bond. The Opposite of Bond. – Campaign Journal: Session 33C
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 33A: Down the Sewer Hole

They collected their two cultist prisoners (replacing the manacles with knotted ropes firmly tied by Tor) and dragged them over to the hole in the back corner of the first floor. Climbing down the rope ladder they found themselves, as they had predicted, in the sewers. Tee came last, dragging a rug over the hole behind her to help conceal its presence, cutting the rope ladder, and then floating down using her boots of levitation.

They were standing at the intersection of four major sewer passages. Narrow walkways of beslimed stone ran along a wide, slowly flowing channel of raw sewage. Agnarr examined the ground and determined that the walkways to the north and west had recently seen a great deal of traffic. They suspected that was the direction the cultists would come…

You’ll often read that the large, walkable sewer tunnels that we see in movies, TV shows, and our D&D campaigns are complete nonsense and have no basis in reality.

But this is not entirely accurate.

It’s true that sewer systems (both today and historically) were mostly made up of pipes too small for humans to traverse. (The drain in your sink does not drop directly into a tunnel.) It’s also true that medieval European cities mostly lacked sewer systems of any kind. (Paris, for example, didn’t have an underground sewer until 1730.)

But that doesn’t mean sewer systems don’t have any walkable tunnels. (They do. Ironically, Paris now has one of the largest networks of walkable sewer tunnels.) It’s also not true that sewers are a modern invention, or that historical sewer systems lacked the larger tunnels. (As far as I can tell, they were actually more common because (a) it was more likely that humans would need access to clear out clogs and debris and (b) older sewer systems were more likely to be primarily focused on draining storm and flood water than waste disposal, and therefore needed very high capacity.)

Rome, for example, had the Cloaca Maxima, which had tunnels, walkways, the whole bit. The final act of The Third Man, Carol Reed’s classic noir film featuring Orson Welles, takes place in the sewers beneath Vienna and was filmed on location: These spacious tunnels were also constructed by the Romans in the 2^nd century. Other Roman sewers of similar design have been preserved in Herculaneum and Pompeii.

Although it appears that Romans were allowed to connect their privies to theses systems, recent archaeology suggests that they rarely did: Their toilets notably lacked traps, so nothing would stop sewer gases (and smells) from simply coming up the toilet. Animals and other pests would also use them to invade homes. (We have tales about alligators coming up from the sewers: Aelian and Pliny tell us of an octopus in Iberia that would swim up the drainage tunnels at high tide and sneak into kitchens to eat the pickled fish. On a similar note, there were Victorian tales of pigs living in the sewers of Hampstead. But I digress.)

On the gripping hand, it would nevertheless be quite unusual to find a sewer system like this–

–with twenty-foot-wide passages kept surprisingly tidy and flanked on both sides by walkways. (The entrances to weird, subterranean caverns are actually slightly more plausible: It wasn’t unusual for ancient sewer construction to piggyback or unexpectedly run into preexisting underground structures. In fact, many ancient sewers, including possibly the earliest version of the Cloaca Maxima, were just rivers that had been bricked over.)

But all of this, of course, begins to rub up against the fantastical architecture at the heart of D&D. If the cities of D&D were meant to be strictly modeled on the cities of medieval Europe, we could sagely nod our heads, stroke out chins, and pronounce that it’s just silly for them to have sewers like this.

But D&D cities aren’t medieval European cities, are they?

First, there’s no reason that a completely alternative history wouldn’t see your D&D civilizations preserve the hydrological knowledge of the Romans.

Second, as we’ve seen, some medieval cities DID have sewers like this because they preserved Roman ones. (And it’s not like D&D-land isn’t peppered with ancient civilizations.)

Third, even our declaration of “medieval European city” is pretty biased. The Byzantines were still building large waterworks during this time, as did the Ottomans after the fall of Constantinople.

Fourth, the construction capacity and resources of a typical D&D setting far outstretch those of medieval Europe due to the presence of ubiquitous magic (whether arcane or divine).

So if I want to feature something like this in a D&D campaign, instead of reaching for reasons why it can’t exist, I instead reach for the reasons that it can and then apply them.

In doing so, of course, I don’t necessarily need to achieve absolute realism — just plausibility. Because, sewers aside, fantastical construction is a concept that D&D’s worldbuilding inherently holds in tension. The entire game is fundamentally based on architecture which is simultaneously fantastical and irrational: To what possible purpose could the tunnels beneath Castle Blackmoor have been constructed?

(There’s a reason that both Gygax’s Greyhawk and Greenwood’s Undermountain are justified by the whims of a Mad Mage, Zagyg and Halaster respectively.)

We don’t want to abandon logic entirely — because then the PCs are simply trapped in a madhouse of random noise, unable to meaningfully apply thought or problem solving — but the skein of verisimilitude can be pulled very tight when it comes to D&D and a milieu which often operates only on laws of convention.

Campaign Journal: Session 33B – Running the Campaign: Bond. The Opposite of Bond.
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index