The door was locked, so Tee kneeled next to it and got to work. Agnarr, standing nearby, decided to start oiling the hinges. Tee, remembering the last time Agnarr had decided some hinges needed oiling, began grinding her teeth, but managed to ignore him… mostly.
This session contains a callback to Session 10A: The Labyrinths of Ghul. In that session, I described the ancient hinges of a door in the dungeon as squealing loudly. While Tee explored the room beyond:
Agnarr, meanwhile, started playing with the iron door – moving it back and forth and causing the ancient hinges to squeal horribly. Tee was visibly annoyed. “Stop it. We don’t know what’s down here.”
First, I’d like to take a moment and acknowledge what a great roleplaying moment this is. We often think of great roleplaying as being exemplified in big dramatic or emotional scenes, but this simple little interaction actually demonstrates the heart of all great roleplaying. It’s a player being fully immersed in a moment and simply asking themselves (almost unconsciously), “What would my character do?”
And in this particular moment of boredom the answer was, “Play with this squeaky door.”
Now, at the table, this action is not actually annoying. There is no actual door squeaking. But Tee’s player becomes visibly annoyed because she, too, is immersed in the moment and is fully imagining the sound of this bloody door echoing through the room while she is trying to concentrate. So she tells him to cut it out. And then:
Tee went back to searching. Agnarr shrugged and pulled some oil out of his bag, spreading it liberally over the hinges of the door. That did the trick and the door stopped squeaking. Agnarr grinned, swinging the door back and forth, and called out: “Tee! Look!”
Tee whirled around: “What?!”
As she turned, the mound of rubble behind her exploded. A foul and terrible creature rose up amorphously behind her – its forms constantly shifting through virulent shades of purplish-blackish horror. Agnarr’s eyes widened and the smile fell from his face as two muscular extrusions slashed vicious claws across Tee’s back, ripping open vicious wounds.
Tee screamed in pain. “I hate you Agnarr! I hate you!”
Agnarr sees that Tee is upset and wants to help, so he figures the best way he can do that is by fixing the squeaky hinge that’s upsetting her. Having fixed the “problem,” he just wants to share his happiness with Tee and let her know that he’s solved it!
From Tee’s perspective, of course, the problem is not the squeaky hinge, it’s that Agnarr keeps distracting her. And now he’s distracting her again! There’s a complete mismatch of expectation and emotion as she whirls around.
And then shit goes bad.
In terms of actually “running the campaign,” per se, I contributed virtually nothing to this moment:
I randomly described a door hinge as being squeaky.
When Agnarr wanted to fix the hinge with some oil, I called for a check to see if he did that. (He made it.)
I called for a Spot test to see if Tee noticed the chaos beast lurking in the rubble. (She failed it.)
I mostly just got out of the way, which is often the best thing you can do as a GM.
What makes this moment special?
Hard to say, honestly. There’s an emotional truth here which seems to capture an essential element of the relationship between Tee and Agnarr. The simplicity of the actual interaction coupled with a near-catastrophic outcome creates strong dramatic contrast.
Because I’m talking about this in the context of the long-term legacy of the moment – as demonstrated in this journal entry, it becomes a running joke for Agnarr to oil hinges while Tee grits her teeth – it’s tempting to sight the replicability of the moment (there are lots of opportunities for dungeon adventurers to oil hinges). But the truth is that this had become an in-joke for the group long before Agnarr did it again. The players would bring it up during sessions. They’d also joke about it in other social contexts. Ten years later, in fact, they’re still doing so (much to the bewilderment of many an out-group listening to these conversations).
In sharing these campaign journals I’ve occasionally wondered about the degree to which these in-jokes translate to people who weren’t “there” when it happened. But it’s not unusual for long-term campaigns to develop these in-jokes. Like any in-joke, they build a sense of community and common purpose. They become both shibboleths and fond memorials of shared joy.
May 18th, 2008
The 10th Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty
Meanwhile, the skeletal leader – in a frenzied flurry of blades – had been cut down by Tor and Tee. Tee, inspecting the body, discovered the chain armor was of superb quality. The woman had also worn a ruby ring and matching gold bracelet worth a small fortune. On the interior of the bracelet was inscribed a name:
RADANNA
Laying near the gruesome remains of whatever deadly ritual had been held here there was a slim, red book. On the cover, traced in blood, was the symbol of a spiral. Ranthir began examining it as Tee continued searching the room.
THE SCARLET OATH
On the cover of this book, written in blood, is the symbol of a coil. On the first page is an oath:
“I pledge my body, soul, and purpose to the furtherance of chaos. We shall act as one. We shall breathe as one. We shall think as one. And in our crimson coils we shall choke out the life of those who would bring us death. We shall choke out the order which stifles life. We shall choke out the civilization which crushes liberty.”
The rest of the book teaches the ways of the Brotherhood of the Crimson Coil. The cult acts like a virus – their faces hidden; their identities submerged into the Coil itself. The members of the cult do not mix in normal society, preferring to remain cloistered in remote temples or hidden demesnes. The only time the cultists make an appearance is to carry out a Purging. During a Purging the cultists appear en masse to carry out some act of terrible destruction.
The cult chooses a target, seemingly at random, and then show up to burn down a building; set fire to a field; slaughter a family; or deface a monument. They are neither subtle nor gentle. They show neither mercy nor fear. Usually, their raids come so suddenly and unexpectedly that they meet little resistance. They usually appear in numbers so great, they simply cannot be stopped—a hundred cultists to burn down a single house, a dozen to murder a merchant walking down the street. They disappear quickly, often using spells to cover their escape.
Arrows suddenly fell among them. One of them clipped Elestra’s shoulder. All of them were suddenly in motion – diving for cover in different directions. Somehow six skeletal women – most clad in the tattered remnants of their brothel fineries – had crept onto the upper terrace and were now firing arrows down into the ruined garden at them.
A novice GM looks at the map of the dungeon. The PCs are about to open the door to Area 5, so he checks the key (in this case from B3 Palace of the Silver Princess) and sees that (a) it’s a library and (b) there are five kobolds in the room.
A fight breaks out. If the novice GM is talented, then the events of that fight will be influenced by the details of Area 5: Maybe the bookshelves topple over on top of people and the kobolds are throwing books. But the kobolds are keyed to Area 5, and so that’s where the kobolds are met and where the fight happens.
Time passes and our novice GM has gotten more experience under his belt. This time, when the PCs get ready to open the door to Area 5, he doesn’t just look at the description of Area 5. He looks around the map and checks nearby areas, too, to see if there are other monsters who might come to join the fight. He looks at Area 7, for example, and sees that it’s a barracks for five goblins.
A fight breaks out. The GM makes a check for the goblins in Area 7. He determines that they DO hear the fight, and a couple rounds later they come rushing over and join the melee in the library.
What the experienced GM is doing can be made a lot easier by using adversary rosters in addition to a basic map key. But there are other methods that can be used to achieve similar results. For example, the sounds of combat might increase the frequency of random encounter checks.
Random encounter mechanics might also lead this GM to another revelation: Combat encounters can happen in areas where they weren’t keyed. For example, maybe the PCs are poking around at the sulfur pool in Area 20 when a random encounter check indicates the arrival of a warband of kobolds.
At this point, our more experienced GM has accomplished a lot: Their dungeons are no longer static complexes filled with monsters who patiently wait for the PCs to show up and slaughter them. They feel like living, dynamic spaces that respond to what the PCs are doing.
THE THEATER OF OPERATIONS
There’s still one preconception that our GM is clinging to. He’s likely unaware of it; a subconscious habit that’s been built up over hundreds of combats and possibly reinforced through dozens of modules relying on preprogrammed encounters (even as he’s moved beyond such encounters).
When the goblins came rushing over to join the fight in the library? It was still the fight in the library. When the kobolds ambushed the PCs by the sulfur pools? The GM still thought of that fight as somehow “belonging” to Area 20.
One of the reasons this happens is because our method of mapping and keying a dungeon is designed to do it: We conceptually break the map into discrete chunks and then number each chunk specifically to “firewall” each section of the dungeon. It makes it easier to describe the dungeon and it makes it easier to run the dungeon, allowing the GM to focus on the current “chunk” without being overwhelmed by the totality.
But the next step is to go through that abstraction and come out the other side. We don’t want to abandon the advantages of conceptually “chunking” the dungeon, but we also don’t want to be constrained by that useful convention, either.
When combat breaks out, for example, we don’t want to be artificially limited to a single, arbitrarily defined “room.” Instead, I try to think of the dungeon as a theater of operations — I look not just at the current room, but at the entire area in which the PCs currently find themselves.
You can see a very basic version of this in the current campaign journal:
While the PCs are in Area 21: Rooftop Garden, I’m aware that the skeletal warriors in Area 25: Radanna’s Chamber have become aware of them. They sneak out onto Area 27: Battlements and fire down at the PCs, initiating combat across multiple rooms (and, in fact, multiple levels).
Here’s another simple example, the hallway fight from Daredevil:
This is basically just two rooms with a hallway between them. But note how even this simple theater of operations creates a more interesting fight than if it had been conceptually locked to just one of the small 10’ x 10’ rooms individually.
Also note how the encounter actually starts before he even enters the first room. This way of thinking about dungeons goes beyond combat: What’s on the other side of the door they’re approaching? What do they hear? What do they see through the open archways?
LEARNING THROUGH ZONES
Awhile back, I wrote about how abstract distance systems in RPGs mimic the way that GMs think about and make rulings about distance and relative position. Zones — like those used in Fate or the Infinity RPG — are a common example of such a system, and using a zone-based system can also be a great set of training wheels for breaking away from the idea that combat takes place in a single keyed location, because zones naturally invite the GM to think of neighboring rooms as being a cluster of zones.
For example, I have Monte Cook’s Beyond the Veil sitting on my desk here. Here’s a chunk of the map from that scenario:
And Area 8 on that map is described like this
8. DRAGONPODS
This large chamber was once a gathering hall with tables and benches, and trophies on the wall. There are only vague remnants of those now. Instead, the room has a large number of strange brown and yellow pods on the floor, and clinging to the walls and ceiling, each about three to four feet across. Six of them remain unopened, while at least a dozen have burst from the inside. A few smaller dragonpods lie cracked and brittle on the ground, unopened but obviously long-dead. All of the pods are of some hard organic matter covered in a thick, sticky mucus. They smell of sour fruit.
Storemere’s mating with a carrion crawler produced some strange results. Carrion crawlers normally lay hundreds of eggs at a time. But Storamere’s crawler mate produced dozens of strange, egg-like pods. Some of them hatched, and produced half-dragon carrion crawlers. Others never produced anything viable. Still others have yet to hatch, even though their parents are long dead.
Strangely enough, the union of dragon and carrion crawler seems to have spawned a creature with entirely new abilities. These half-breeds thrive for a time and then curl up and die, producing yet another dragonpod. Even if slain conventionally, the body of the dead dragon crawler will create a new pod and thus a new creature. Only destruction by fire prevents a dead specimen from forming into a pod.
As soon as anyone without dragon blood enters the chamber, four dragon crawlers scuttle out from behind the pods and attack. The round after combat starts, another one drops down from the ceiling to attack a random character. These creatures are covered in black scales and have green, dragon-like eyes on their stalks. Each has dragon wings but they are too small and ill-fitting to allow them to fly. Instead, they flutter and flap their wings to distract opponents.
The room is large enough to comfortably run the entire melee against the four dragon crawlers in there. A neophyte GM might even treat the whole room as kind of being a big square, featureless space.
What an experienced GM will do (and what zones basically formalize) is break that whole region of dungeon map up into zones:
Hallway
Kitchen (Area 9)
Gaulmeth’s Chamber (Area 10)
And then do the same in Area 8, too:
North entrance
Eastern doors
Bottom of the stairs
Dragonpod muck
Ceiling pods
The result will be their theater of operations. (Which could expand even further into the dungeon depending on how the encounter proceeds.) Thinking in terms of zones will naturally invite you not only to conceptually break up large spaces, but to group spaces together. And once you’ve done this a few times, you’ll realize that you don’t need the specific mechanical structure of zones in order to do this.
OTHER THEATERS OF OPERATION
Thinking in terms of a theater of operations shouldn’t be limited to the dungeon. In fact, it often comes easier in other contexts (in which we haven’t taught ourselves to think in terms of keyed areas), and meditating on how we think about these other examples can often be reflected back into how we think about the dungeon.
For example, one place where GMs often easily think in terms of a theater of operations, even if they don’t in other contexts, is a house. I suspect it’s due to our intimate familiarity with how these spaces work. Think about your own house: Imagine standing in the kitchen and talking to someone in the living room. Or shouting something down the stairs. Or looking up from the couch and seeing what’s happening in the adjacent room.
When we’re talking about the totality of the environment, that’s all we’re talking about. It’s that simple.
At the other end of the scale, there are wilderness environments.
What happens here is that the sheer scale of the wilderness can, paradoxically, cause the theater of operations to similarly collapse into a one-dimensional scope: The forest is vast and, therefore, the entire fight just happens generically “in the forest.” There’s no place for the reinforcements to come from and no capacity of strategic decisions because everything is, conceptually, in a single place — the forest.
The modern over-reliance on battlemaps (particularly battlemaps all locked to a 5-foot scale) tends to exacerbate this problem, limiting the field of battle to a scale that tends to blot out the true theater of operations in the wilderness.
The solution, of course, is to instead embrace the scale of the wilderness. You’re traveling across the plains, but there’s a tree line a few hundred yards away to the north. There’s a family of deer grazing fifty feet over there. There’s a ravine off to your right perhaps a quarter of a mile away that you’ve been paralleling for awhile now. And the goblin warg riders just cleared the horizon behind you. What do you do?
FINAL THOUGHTS
Something I’ll immediately caution against here is getting fooled into making this more formal than it is. If you find yourself trying to prep the “theaters of operation” in your dungeons, then you’ve probably just created another inflexible preconception of the environment. (You’re probably also wasting a lot of prep.) Theaters of operation generally arise out of and are defined by the circumstances of play: What do the PCs know? Where do they go? How have they tipped off the NPCs? What decisions do the NPCs make (often based on imperfect information)?
The point isn’t to try to anticipate all of those things. The point is to learn how to actively play the campaign world; to let the campaign world live in the moment.
The cool thing is that, as you think of the dungeon as a theater of operations and play it as such, you will be implicitly encouraging the players to also think of the dungeon as a totality rather than as a string of disconnected encounters. They’ll start engaging in strategic decision-making not only in combat (“let’s fall back into the hallway!”), but for the exploration of the dungeon as a whole (“can we draw them back into the room with the poison traps and use those to our advantage? can we circle around them? can we split them up?”). And getting the players into this mindset is instrumental in unlocking more complicated scenario structures like heists.
And remember that, as you’ve seen with our examples above, you don’t have to leap straight into juggling massively complicated strategic arenas: Two rooms and a hallway. That’s all it takes to break out of the box.
May 18th, 2008
The 10th Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty
Dominic was led inside the cathedral. Tee, seeing him go, quickly followed. Agnarr, Ranthir, and Tor came too. The Order of the Dawn moved to block them at the cathedral’s door. Tee called out to Dominic, but Dominic – nursing his distracted thoughts and worries – didn’t hear her. Fortunately, Tee’s efforts were enough to convince the guard that they could enter.
They caught up to Dominic just as Rehobath’s procession came to a stop in the sacred hall. The newly-anointed Novarch turned to Dominic and smiled, “Thank you, Dominic. Without your guidance this day would not have been possible. Now I feel as if our paths must part, at least for awhile. We must each work for the gods in our own ways, after all.”
This suited Dominic just fine, who had just been trying to figure out how he could get away from Rehobath and his politics without letting him know how he truly felt.
“Now,” Rehobath said. “Is there anything else I can do for you… for any of you?” His gaze took in Tee and the others.
Dominic seemed ready to get out of there, but Tee wasn’t satisfied yet. “Do you think Dominic will be safe?”
“Two members of the Order of the Dawn are already waiting at the Ghostly Minstrel, as you had requested.” Rehobath smiled. “Do you think more guards might be needed?”
“No,” Tee said, glancing towards Dominic. “That should be fine.”
They headed back outside. Dominic leaned towards Tee. “I need to get out of these robes,” he said. “I don’t feel right in them.”
“You can borrow one of my kilts,” Agnarr offered.
Dominic caught a whiff of Agnarr’s unique odor as he leaned in close. “Um…” He shook his head. “No thanks.”
They met up with Elestra, who had spent her time outside circulating through the crowd. “Everyone here seems pretty excited by this. They’re all talking about the dawn of a new age. But I’ve also heard quite a few of them talking about how they knew to be here. I think the crowd was hand-picked.”
“Doesn’t surprise me,” Tee said. “Come on, lets get out of here.”
When they had gotten some distance away from the cathedral, Dominic stopped and pulled off the purple prelate robes that Rehobath had given to him. He turned to the others. “Does anybody else want to go delving for a couple of weeks?” (more…)
Liquid light in a diamond flask was brought forth. The glowing liquid was poured across Rehobath’s brow, bathing him in its light as it coursed down over his shoulders.
A circlet of elfin gold was produced and placed upon Rehobath’s brow. As it settled into place, the liquid light flowed back up across his body, becoming concentrated in a great glowing bauble that shone forth from his forehead.
About twenty years ago now, I opened a Word document on my computer and saved it as “Fantasy Materials.” It was originally intended to be a magazine article, but it quickly became the sort of project that’s never finished because it can’t be finished. The document became a storehouse for fantastical materials: Not magic items, but rather those strange substances that can only be found where pervasive magic has changed the very substance of mortal reality.
As I wrote in the introduction to the article-that-was-not-to-be:
These are not the common materials of history or the modern world. Items of marvelous grandeur may be forged from gold and silver, but such items lack the spark of the fundamentally fantastic which even a simple blade of mithril possesses. This, then, is a catalog of things which never have been and will never be. Here there are gems which will never sparkle; trees which have never been felled; stones from quarries which will never be mined; metals which will never be forged.
They are the building blocks of a world which can live only in our imagination.
Some of the material in this article was stuff I had created out of wholecloth – like taurum, the true gold which makes common gold naught but a bauble, or wave cypress, a pale blue wood that never rots. Others, following in the grand tradition of mithril, were the result of kitchen-sinking, like Terry Pratchett’s darklight or Fritz Leiber’s snow-diamonds.
This is clearly something that Monte Cook also enjoys, as the Ptolus sourcebook includes a number of unique special materials, too. (Including the liquid light referred to above.)
Any time you want to infuse an element of the game world with the fantastical, you can reach for this list and do so. For example, the ritual of the novarch’s inauguration is studded with liquid light (what it says on the tin), godwood (a pale white wood that glows in the presence of divine magic), and elfin gold (an alchemical admixture of gold and ruby dust with tremendous flexibility).
It allows you to craft structures and vistas impossible in the mundane world. For example, the lighter-than-air stone known as heliothil which makes floating towers and flying ships possible. Or the sheets of ruby crystal which can be used to create literal gemstone rooms.
It can be used to create fantastical challenges for high level characters. Ironwood, for example, requires adamantine axes to fell and can be used to construct incredibly sturdy doors and other structures. Or locks made of cortosis that resist magical knock spells.
It can provide memorable and noteworthy treasures (much like Bilbo’s original mithril shirt). For example, abyssopelagic gems that are fused in the depths of the ocean and melt at the pressures of sea level unless preserved with magical stasis fields. Or the lens of phantomglass that allows you perceive invisible spirits. Or the woven shirt of ghost grass which has the protective properties of chain.
It would be a mistake, though, to constantly fill your world with novel, never-before-seen material. The reason “mithril” resonates with meaning when I say it to you is because you have been exposed to it countless times; its redolent with lore. So the new fantastical materials you introduce to your campaigns will gain meaning over time as you reincorporate them into new contexts: The PCs encounter a statue of elfin gold, the individual strands of its metallic hair impossibly blowing in the wind. They see it used as magical circlet by Rehobath. They discover small craft-ingots of it in the alchemical laboratory of a dark elf. And so forth.
It’s great when the players recognize and truly know these fantastical materials. It’s even better when they’ve internalized them and start seeking them out: “You know what would be useful for this? Some shadow-veined rock.”
