DISCUSSING:
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 23C: Beneath Pythoness House

But when they returned to the statue, they found that the hole in its stomach had closed up.

“It’s like its reset or something,” Elestra muttered.

“I MUST FEED…”

Now, standing in this hall, they were sure that the voice was emanating directly from the statue itself.

Last week we talked about techniques that break down the natural firewall of the dungeon: Techniques that will have you and your players thinking holistically about the entire dungeon environment instead of just one room at a time.

Today’s journal entry features a similar technique in the form of cyclical dungeon activity.

Basically, all of these techniques seek to take a static dungeon — in which each room passively exists in a status quo until the PCs enter it — and transform it into an active complex. The advantages of this are myriad and probably obvious: it deepens the players’ immersion by making the game world seem truly alive; it increases the strategic challenge of the scenario; it emergently creates complex dramatic situations and difficult dilemmas.

Cyclical dungeon activity is one way of accomplishing this.

THE GLOBAL TIMER

The concept of a “global timer” comes from video games. To simplify greatly, it’s a counter that is constantly iterating and helps keep all of the events in the game in sync. In video games this can range from the broad to the very specific. (For example, in Mario 64 small snowflakes generate when the counter is even and large snowflakes are generated when the timer is odd.)

You are not a computer and you shouldn’t run your game as if you were.

But we can borrow the concept of the global timer and apply it fruitfully. You can see a simple example of this in Pythoness House:

• When the statue says, “Come to me…” the spirit within it seals the castle so that the PCs cannot easily escape.
• When the statue says, “I must feed…” the statue itself is warded by a curse.
• When the statue says, “Chaos is the key…” the depression into which the spiral contrivance can be inserted opens on the statue’s belly.

In short, your “global timer” is a set of discrete states, with each state determining particular features in the dungeon. As the state changes, the topography, feature, and/or inhabitants of the dungeon will shift.

The advantage of the technique is that you only need to keep track of one thing — Which state is the dungeon currently in? — and you can apply that one piece of information to whatever area the PCs are currently in. This lets you manage dungeon-wide changes and activities with incredibly simple bookkeeping.

PLAYER INTERACTION

As you can see in the example of Pythoness House, the switch state can be both diegetic (i.e., something actually shifting in the game world) and directly apparent to the players (everyone in the dungeon can hear the spirit’s declaration).

Neither is necessarily true. There may be no clear “signal” that will notify the PCs that the state of the dungeon has changed (or what it has changed to). It’s also quite possible for the global timer to be partially or entirely an abstraction that exists only for your managerial benefit.

For example, you might design a slavers’ fortress in both a Day state and a Night state, but this doesn’t mean that the slavers all become clockwork automatons. (Although a fortress of clockwork slavers has some fascinating thematic implications. But I digress.) The global timer is a useful tool for broadly modeling the fortress, but if the PCs start closely examining the place what they’re “really” going to see is quite different than that abstraction.

Regardless, as you can see in the campaign journal, this type of cyclical dungeon activity can naturally function as a puzzle for the players, ranging from the simple to the complex. In addition to more specific effects, figuring out how the dungeon’s cycle works will make it easier for the PCs to navigate and overcome the dungeon’s challenges. (For example, figuring out when the best time to strike the slavers’ fortress would be.)

Something else to consider are player-triggered state changes. This might be something they deliberately choose to do, but more often it’s not: The dungeon might shift every time they enter a particular room, go down a particular staircase, or drink from a particular fountain.

When combined with obfuscated or nonexistent signals, these player-triggered state changes can create delightfully complicated puzzles.

(It’s also fun when the players think that there must be something they’re doing to trigger the state changes, but it’s actually just random or on a global timer.)

Such state changes could also be a one-time event: The dungeon is in one state until the PCs trigger a trap, and then the whole dungeon shifts into a different (and presumably more dangerous) state.

This also creates the possibility for NPC-triggered state changes: Everything is fine until one of the bad guys manage to hit the big red PANIC button and the alarm klaxons start sounding.

KEEP IT SIMPLE

With only a little imagination, it’s easy to see how such timers could be made quite complex, dynamic, and perhaps even conditional.

So let me just briefly reiterate: Don’t do that.

You are not computer. The whole point of this technique is to simplify your bookkeeping and management of the dungeon. It’s real easy to become enamored of the Rube Goldberg device you’re constructing until the tail starts ferociously wagging the dog.

If you do want to increase the complexity of your dungeon states, try adding a second global timer — unconnected to the first and out of sync with it — to your dungeon. I suspect you’ll find the combinatory interactions between the two cycles will add a delightful amount of complexity while keeping your bookkeeping dead simple. This will, in particular, be more than sufficient to mask the nature of cycles you would prefer to keep hidden from your players (because, for example, they’re a non-diegetic abstraction intended to create a living world).

NEXT:
Campaign Journal: Session 23D – Running the Campaign: The Price of Magic
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

SESSION 23C: BENEATH PYTHONESS HOUSE

June 7th, 2008
The 10th Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

As far as they could tell, the keep was now empty except for themselves and the Cobbledman. They turned their attention to the statue in the first hall of the keep, and were surprised – as they rounded the corner towards it – to discover that a gap had opened in the statue’s stomach, revealing a circular depression into which the spiraled disc would fit perfectly.

They concluded that the depression must have opened when they had joined the two halves of the disc together.

Tee stepped forward, but Agnarr took the disc from her and fitted it carefully into the statue. With a twist of the wrist he was able to turn it counter-clockwise. With a rumbling groan and a burst of stale air, the statue rolled down the hall towards him. Agnarr stepped deftly to one side and saw, where the statue had been, a hole in the floor.

A twenty-foot shaft dropped straight down into a room with a ten-foot-high ceiling. Iron rungs set in the side of the shaft made it an easy climb. The chamber itself was of plain stone, but the floor to one side was interrupted by a fleshy membrane that quivered in the draft of air that flowed up towards the keep above. On the other side of the room, slumped against the wall, was a giant’s skeleton.

The skeleton was of titanic proportions and clad in age-tattered robes. The hem of these robes were embroidered with strange, round-shaped runes. Ranthir, glancing over from the iron rungs as he climbed down, instantly recognized them as Lithuin runes. These strange runes – now unreadable – were believed to have been used by the Titan Spawn of the legendary city of Lithuin. Only a few samples of such runes were known to survive. He was excited to study them in more detail.

But as Tee’s foot touched the floor, the skeleton began to stir – clouds of dust rising from its form as it slowly lurched to its feet. “Agnarr!” Tee cried. “Tor!”

Agnarr let go of the ladder and dropped to the floor (he was only a few feet above it in any case). Tor, taking up the rear guard as usual, had to jump clear of the wall to avoid hitting Ranthir and Dominic on the way down, but he landed easily, his sword already drawn.

Things went poorly at first: The titan spawn skeleton’s massive hand easily swept past their defenses, delivering bone-crushing blows. But then Dominic reached the floor and was able to lay his hands on Agnarr – at his touch, the familiar divine strength poured into Agnarr’s body and he grew to match the skeleton’s height and girth.

And despite his size, Agnarr was still possessed of greater speed and agility than the lumbering skeletal giant. Even as he finished his divinely-inspired growth, he whirled low and whipped his sword around – cutting at the giant’s shins and shearing straight through one of its legs.

“Don’t hurt the runes!” Ranthir cried, darting forward a few steps from where he stood in the corner (keeping a safe distance from the titanic struggle).

Dominic, summoning his inner strength, called upon the same divine energies a second time and let them flow into Tor.

Tor, growing as Agnarr had done, followed Agnarr’s example. Ducking low, his blow swept in from the opposite direction and cleaved the giant’s other leg. It crashed precipitously to the floor.

With perfect timing, Ranthir released an arcane attack – piercing the creature’s barrel-like eye socket with a blast of frigid energy that froze the bone. The jarring impact of its collapse caused the brittle bone to break and shatter, sending great gaping cracks racing across the dome of its skull.

Whatever enchantment had knit those bones together in undeath was broken, and the giant collapsed.

THE FRIGID CAVERN

Ranthir drew a knife and carefully cut away the Lithuin runes from the hem of the titan spawn’s robe. Meanwhile, the others were moving towards the fleshy membrane. It was slightly translucent and appeared to be stretched across another shaft leading down.

“What do we do?” Elestra asked.

“Well, the key we were looking for – are looking for – must be down here somewhere,” Tee said. “And there’s no where else to go.” She shrugged, drew her dragon pistol, and blasted the membrane.

The membrane ripped apart, and as it did so a howling blast of frigid air rushed up from the shaft below. Looking down through the hole, Tee could see that the frost-rimed shaft ended in another chamber twenty feet below, although all she could see of this chamber was a narrow patch of floor that appeared to be covered completely with ice.

“I’m going to go down and check it out.” Tee pulled out a sunrod, stepped off the edge of the shaft, and levitated down.

The chamber below appeared to be some sort of natural cave, but it was unnaturally – even impossibly – cold. The floor, walls, and ceiling of the cave were entirely coated in a thick layer of ice. The air was cold enough here that Tee thought there might be a real risk of frostbite.

Tee noticed that along one edge of this cavern, the ice appeared a little thinner. Looking at this broad patch more closely, she could see what appeared to be liquid water under the surface.

With a thoughtful look, she floated back up to the others. “Ranthir, I need you down there for a second.”

It took more than a second, but Ranthir was able to perform several divinations which confirmed that the unnatural cold was the result of a magical aura permeating these chambers. He could also tell that this magical aura extended through the liquid water in a tunnel that curved down and away before it passed behind too much solid rock for his arcane sight to penetrate. He attempted to unwork the magic of the aura, but failed.

Tee and Ranthir returned to the others and reported what they had found. “I think we have to go through that tunnel,” Tee said.

Tor shook his head. “If it’s as cold down there as it feels up here, we’ll all get hypothermia trying to swim through that water.”

“I know certain magicks that could protect us against the cold,” Elestra said.

“So do I,” Dominic said.

“Between the two of us, we should be able to protect everybody.”

“But we’ll need to prepare the proper spells,” Dominic said.

“I hate to wait,” Tee said. “I’ve got an appointment tomorrow. But if we need to rest, then we need to rest.”

“We could stay here,” Agnarr suggested.

Elestra gave the barbarian an incredulous look. “I think we should head back to the Ghostly Minstrel.”

“Assuming we can leave,” Tee said ominously.

“That’s true,” Tor said with a slightly worried tone.

Ranthir, meanwhile, had been getting a thoughtful look on his face. Now he suddenly turned to the others. “Come with me! Quickly!”

The others followed him as he climbed back up into the keep. Once everyone had joined him, he reached out and easily pulled the spiral contrivance out of the statue. As soon as he had done so, the statue rumbled back to its original position.

“It suddenly occurred to me that there was still a demon wandering around up here,” Ranthir said. “We could have been trapped.” He pushed the disc back into place. As the statue rumbled open again, he turned to Tee. “Once I’m down below, remove the disc and wait a couple of minutes. Then open it again.”

Tee followed his instructions. Ranthir, from below, watched the statue close above him… there was no keyhole for the spiraled disc down here. When Tee opened the statue again, Ranthir climbed up and informed the others. “As long as we’re down there, we can be trapped by anybody who comes along and removes the disc.”

HUNTING A DEMON

“We have to find that demon,” Tee said.

“And kill it,” Agnarr added.

“Well, we saw it descend beyond the outer walls, correct?” Ranthir said. “Perhaps we should start by searching the grounds outside.”

The others agreed, but after circling the keep they could see nowhere that the demon could have been hiding.

“Maybe he’s returned to his nest,” Ranthir suggested.

They walked back through the gate. “At least we know we can get out of here now,” Tee said.

“COME TO ME…” The familiar voice echoed through the keep.

“Didn’t he already say that?” Elestra asked.

“A couple of times, I think,” Tor said.

The demon had not, in fact, returned to its nest. Tee sighed heavily with frustration. “All right, let’s go back to the Minstrel. Maybe when we come back tomorrow, the demon will have returned and we’ll be able to kill it.”

But when they reached the gate, they found the invisible wall of force had once again been raised to block their passage.

“You’ve got to be joking,” Tee said, her hand pressed up against the energy field.

TRAPPED AGAIN

After a brief discussion, they decided that – if they were stuck here anyway – they might as well try a more mundane way of overcoming the frigid chamber below: Fire. They would gather up the older furniture from around the keep, drag it to the icy chamber, and then burn it.

But when they returned to the statue, they found that the hole in its stomach had closed up.

“It’s like its reset or something,” Elestra muttered.

“I MUST FEED…”

Now, standing in this hall, they were sure that the voice was emanating directly from the statue itself.

“It must be Segginal,” Ranthir concluded. “They bound Edlari so they could bind Segginal to this statue.”

“What does it mean by ‘feed’, do you think?” Elestra asked.

“I don’t know,” Tee said. “Maybe if we feed it, it’ll open the keyhole again.”

Tee walked up to the statue and touched it… she instantly felt a sharp pain and was overwhelmed by dizziness. Pulling her hand back, she saw that her fingertips were covered in a sheen of blood. She cursed.

Next, with a certain sense of desperation, Tee tried breaking the spiral key in half again (it broke naturally along the same line as before). Then she rejoined the two halves. There was another flash of light and the disc was made whole again… but the statue stubbornly remained shut.

“There might be another way,” Agnarr said. He led them back to the courtyard and pointed to the well. “It’s almost directly above the icy caverns below. There might be another way of reaching those caverns at the bottom of the well.” A way not blocked by the statue or its spirit.

Agnarr took the boots of levitation from Tee. He drew his sword – both for protection and for the light its flame would provide – and descended more than fifty feet into the dark, cramped well before he spotted the well water below him.

Something seemed to be stirring in that water… some great, white shape rising towards him. Instinctively Agnarr retreated back up the shaft, but before the slow power of the boots could take him far enough a flaccid arm of doughy white flesh burst out of the water and grasped his ankle.

Whatever the foul creature was, it began dragging its way up the length of Agnarr’s leg. A face of melted, white flesh emerged – gaping a maw of vicious, needle-like fangs.

But Agnarr had already reversed his grip on his sword and, as the creature lurched up towards him, the blade plunged down through its gullet and Agnarr, with a savage whipping of his thews, tore the creature in half.

Taking a deep breath of the now acrid air, Agnarr descended into the greasy, gore-spattered water… and met with a dead end. The water had a depth of perhaps fifteen feet, but did not open out into any larger cavern. He returned to the surface to report his disappointment to the others.

“What do we do?” Elestra asked again.

“Let’s try talking to the Cobbledman,” Tee suggested. “He lives here. He might know something about the statue.”

They found the Cobbledman in his tower.

“Cobbledman?” Tee asked tentatively, unsure of which head was in command.

“Tee!” The right head grinned broadly and the Cobbledman lurched to his feet. “You came back! … do you have food?”

Tee smiled. “Yes, I have food.”

She handed it over and the Cobbledman began munching contentedly.

“Do you know who Segginal is?” Tee asked.

The Cobbledman’s face became crestfallen. “Bad fat man!”

“He was a bad man?”

“Bad fat man!”

“Who is he?”

“Wuntad brought him. Now he watches. Watches all the time.”

“Does he do anything else?”

“Sometimes. Hurts when you touch him.”

“The statue?”

The Cobbledman nodded.

“Is there any way to stop him from watching?”

The Cobbledman shook his head. “But sometimes he goes away.”

“When does he go away?”

“Chaos is the key…”

Tee thanked him and gave him some more food. Then she climbed up to where the others were waiting. “The statue is Segginal. And he’s on a cycle.”

“Is there any way to speed it up?” Elestra asked.

Tee shook her head. “Not that he knew, anyway.”

Since it seemed as if they had nothing better to do for the moment, they began a complete search of Pythoness House again – from top to bottom. Perhaps the demon had snuck back into the keep and was hiding somewhere. Or perhaps there was some undiscovered nook or hidden door.

But that didn’t seem to be the case. Fortunately, as they finished their search and gathered back in the courtyard, the voice of the chaos spirit boomed forth once again: “CHAOS IS THE KEY…”

They returned to the statue and confirmed that, once again, the keyhole had opened on its stomach.

“The gate should be open now, too,” Tee said.

Since they understood the patterns and limitations of the ritual now, they felt comfortable in recuperating before journeying any deeper beneath the keep. They returned to the courtyard and headed towards the gate…

NEXT:
Running the Campaign: TBD – Campaign Journal: Session 23D
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING:
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 23B: Binding Foul and Fair

“Well, the book should tell us more,” Ranthir said, and picked it up. He flipped it open… and the pages seemed to blur before his eyes, forming a black maw that seemed to open inside his very mind… threatening to overwhelm him… to swallow his very mind…

Ranthir jerked the book away, slamming it shut and throwing it onto the table.

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

Ranthir rubbed his forehead. His thoughts seemed blurred. The edge of his intellect dulled. “The book… the book betrayed me!”

I often talk about how one of the unique strengths of the dungeoncrawl structure is the way in which it firewalls individual rooms: If you’re a GM – particularly a new GM – you don’t have to keep an entire adventure scenario in your head. You only have to think about the room the PCs are currently standing in. All the information you need right now almost certainly fits on a single piece of paper, and you don’t have to worry about anything else until the PCs choose an exit and go to the next room.

It’s the equivalent of juggling one ball.

This also extends to creating the dungeon scenario in the first place: In its most inchoate form, the dungeon is made up of entirely independent rooms. The new GM can fill a dungeon room with fun stuff and then move on to filling up the next room without any concern for what they put in the first room.

Once you’re no longer a beginning GM, though, you’re going to start using techniques that break down this firewall. You’re not going to completely eschew the advantages of the clearly defined room key (no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater), but you will slowly stop thinking about the dungeon only one room at a time and start adding extra dimensions and complexity to your dungeon scenarios.

You’re going to start juggling multiple balls at the same time.

One such technique is the adversary roster: Instead of keying encounters to specific rooms, adversary rosters make it relatively easy for the GM think about and actively play the inhabitants of a dungeon as they move around the location, living their lives and responding to the incursions of the PCs.

Another technique are dungeon clues. To generalize, a dungeon clue is information in one room of a dungeon which influences or determines the PCs’ actions in a different room.

Some of these clues will likely be quite straightforward: For example, the key in Room 11 that opens the door in Area 41.

Other clues, however, will be complicated, perhaps requiring a series of revelations gleaned from clues in multiple locations throughout the dungeon before the final solution can be found. You can see an example of this here in Session 23, as the PCs piece together the clues that will let them locate the broken halves of the spiral contrivance.

“If the key is in the square tower and it requires a ladder to reach the secret entrance, maybe that entrance isn’t on the wall of the tower – maybe it’s under the tower.”

They returned down to the large, empty room on the fifth floor of the tower. “We should be directly beneath the tower here,” Ranthir said.

Tee floated up to the ceiling and quickly found a bit of false plaster. Scraping that aside with one of her dragon-hilted daggers, she revealed a small keyhole. She took out the key she had found in the nook below the ruined garden and found that it was a perfect fit.

A particularly effective technique is to design your dungeon clues so that the PCs are forced to crisscross the dungeon — gaining information in Area A that takes them to Area B, before sending them back to Area A to complete the sequence. These types of interactions help to transform the dungeon from a linear experience to a multi-dimensional one, in which expertise and knowledge gained from one traversal of the dungeon become rewarding when the players revisit those areas a second time.

In sufficiently complex dungeon scenarios, you can have multiple enigmas featuring overlapping patterns of dungeon clues in play at the same time. This creates navigational interest in the dungeon as the players now have to figure out their own priorities and the routes that proceed from those priorities.

The last thing to note is that dungeon clues frequently aren’t necessary to successfully complete a scenario. For example, the PCs could have found the pieces of the spiral contrivance without necessarily obtaining or figuring out all the clues. If the revelation indicated by your dungeon clues is necessary for the scenario, though, you’ll want to remember the Three Clue Rule.

THE DYNAMIC CYCLE

For the GM, dungeon clues usually aren’t something they need to think about too much while running the game (although for sufficiently complicated scenarios it might involve tracking a revelation list), but that’s obviously because the clues are getting baked in during prep. Players, on the other hand, will be actively engaged with these clues — collecting them, thinking about them, trying to figure them out — during play.

In fact, all of these techniques — adversary rosters, dungeon clues, etc. — don’t just break down the GM’s firewall. They also force the players to stop thinking about things one room at a time and instead start thinking about the dungeon as a whole. In other words, the players will stop thinking only tactically about their immediate circumstances and start thinking strategically about the broader scenario.

Once the players have been nudged in this direction, you’ll discover that their strategic consideration of the dungeon will actually feed back into the scenario itself, creating dynamic interactions which were never explicitly part of your prep: The deliberately placed dungeon clues will get them thinking about how Room 11 and Room 33 relate to each other, for example. But now that they’re thinking like that, they’ll also think about:

• Using a passwall spell to move from Room 14 to Room 22.
• Tricking the goblins in Rooms 9 thru 12 into attacking the ogre in Room 41.
• Scavenging alchemist’s fire from the traps in the lower hallways to destroy the cursed tapestries in Room 42.

This dynamic play on the part of the players will, in turn, give you the opportunity of rising to the challenge and finding more ways to actively play the scenario in order to respond to them.

NEXT:
Campaign Journal: Session 23C – Running the Campaign: Dungeon Cycles
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

SESSION 23B: BINDING FOUL AND FAIR

June 7th, 2008
The 10th Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

CLEARING THE KEEP

They headed across the bridge and into the Cobbledman’s tower. Climbing down, Tee found herself in a chamber littered from broken bones and filth. On a dirty pallet of grey straw, the Cobbledman lay sleeping.

Tee approached him and gently shook him by the shoulder. He stirred, and then the eyes on his second head – the one that hadn’t spoken before – shot open. His hand shot out and grasped Tee by the throat, choking the life out of her. The second head let out a low growl of rage.

Tee panicked for a moment, but then thought quickly. She slapped the other head soundly across the cheek. It woke up, bleary-eyed. It took in Tee. It took in the other head. “No! Don’t!”

The Cobbledman’s other arm darted out and punched the Cobbledman’s second head.

The hand on Tee’s throat dropped away and she fell to the floor (realizing only then that she had been lifted up into the air).

“Are you all right?” the Cobbledman asked. The second head was glaring and sulking.

“I think so,” Tee said, rubbing her throbbing throat. “I’m sorry I woke you up. But you said we might be able to borrow the spiral key that Maquent gave you. Do you think we could do that?”

The Cobbledman grasped at his shirt front. “…I don’t know.”

“We have the other piece,” Tee said., holding it up. “We’d only need it for a little while. And once we were done, you could have both parts.”

“Really?” the Cobbledman’s right face split into a wide grin. “All right.” From under his shirt he pulled out the other half of the spiraled disc.

With a sharp tug, he broke the leather strap it was hanging from and handed it over to Tee. She smiled, thanked him, and gave him some more food. Then she climbed back up to where the others were waiting.

“Got it.”

“What do we do with it?” Elestra asked.

“I don’t know,” Tee said.

“Could this be the key you were looking for?” Tor asked.

“No, I don’t think so,” Tee said. “I think the key we’re looking for is below the statue. I think this is something the cultists made.”

“How will we get the two pieces back together again?”

Tee shrugged and pressed the two pieces together. There was a bright flash of light, and the pieces were seamlessly joined.

“I thought that might work.”

Even with the key in hand, they still wanted to make sure that the rest of the keep had been cleared out before doing anything else. Leaving enemies at their back while they journeyed down into whatever waited beneath the house didn’t seem like a good idea.

Fortunately, they had already explored most of the keep. They started by climbing the stairs that led from the roof of the house up to the central tower. There they found a chamber filled with a weblike nest of bits of old cloth and other rubbish, held together with a hardened, glistening excretion of some kind.

“Disgusting,” Tee said, and then stepped aside to let Agnarr chop his way through it. She could see that there was a ladder on the far side leading up to the tower’s parapet. But a few moments later she was holding up her hand: “Stop!”

Agnarr stepped back and Tee stepped forward: She had been right. There were two more of the red robes which had apparently belonged to the Crimson Coil cult stuck in the nest. “These might come in useful,” she said, carefully prying them out. One of them was in fairly shabby condition (“I can fix that!” Elestra said.), but the other was in good condition (albeit filthy).

Agnarr went back to work, and within a few minutes Tee was pushing open the trapdoor leading to the parapet. Poking her head through, her gaze was immediately arrested by a crown sitting in the center of the parapet.

With a closer look, she quickly realized that the crown itself was nothing but cheap wood painted gold. But her interest was piqued by the eight large blue garnets: To her trained eyes, these appeared real… and, if they were, they would easily be worth 200 gold crowns each.

BINDING FOUL AND FAIR

That left only one nook left to explore: The lower levels of the Cobbledman’s tower. These couldn’t be accessed from above, however, so they circled back down through the keep and then climbed back up.

This brought them to a small, poorly furnished room. In the center of the room there was a rickety wooden table. On the top of the table a pentagram had been inscribed in charcoal. Three objects stood within the pentagram, positioned at points of power within the diagram: A jar of yellowish liquid; a short, fat candle half-expended; and, on a copper plate, a book.

Tor, looking at the jar, grimaced. “We’ve found somebody’s chamberpot.”

Tee turned back to the ladder. “Ranthir! Get up here!”

Ranthir was quickly able to identify the ritual as an exploitation of sympathetic magic. “It’s a binding ritual,” he explained. “The jar is either formed of diamond crystal or a polymorphed diamond – I can’t tell which. But you can see that the purity of the crystal has been corrupted. The pattern of the pentagram also suggests that it was, in fact, a dual-binding ritual: One spirit was bound here, to this jar. But this minor ritual was used, through the laws of sympathetic magic, to trigger a much larger binding somewhere else. And the spirits would have been opposed – one evil or chaotic; the other lawful or good. The burning of the candle would have triggered the sympathetic connections of the ritual and… Yes, here on the candle we can see inscribed the name Segginal in arcane runes.”

“Who’s Segginal?” Tor asked.

“I don’t know,” Ranthir said.

“The Cobbledman,” Tee suggested. “One bad head; one good head. A spirit bound to each.”

“Perhaps,” Ranthir said. “But the nature of the ritual suggests that one of the spirits is still bound here, in the jar. Or rather to the jar.”

“Then which one was bound in the jar? The good one or the bad one?”

“It could be the spirit that haunts the castle,” Tor said. “The ritual could have been what bound it here.”

“Well, the book should tell us more,” Ranthir said, and picked it up. He flipped it open… and the pages seemed to blur before his eyes, forming a black maw that seemed to open inside his very mind… threatening to overwhelm him… to swallow his very mind…

Ranthir jerked the book away, slamming it shut and throwing it onto the table.

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

Ranthir rubbed his forehead. His thoughts seemed blurred. The edge of his intellect dulled. “The book… the book betrayed me!”

Ranthir remained in a rather foul mood as they discussed their options. He’d heard of the foul corruptions which could turn a book into an inversion of itself – a consumer of knowledge instead of a giver of knowledge – but he still felt personally violated by the experience. It was a betrayal that struck at the heart of everything he held dear.

After weighing their options, Tee decided that they should break the jar. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

“Death,” Tor said.

Agnarr, hearing this as they came back down the ladder, grinned. “Sounds like my kind of plan.”

They went down to the courtyard.

“Are we sure we want to do this?” Dominic asked.

Tee shrugged and threw the jar against the stone wall. It shattered into shards and, where the shards fell, a whirlwind sprang up. It grew suddenly in strength, whipping their hair and causing some to fall back a step. Elestra cursed. Tor tightened his grip on his sword.

And then the whirlwind gave way and disappeared. In its place, a tall figure with pale blue skin and white-feathered wings hovered in the air. He looked down at them with eyes of pure light.

“My name is Edlari. I thank you for freeing me from my foul imprisonment. I owe you a debt that cannot easily be repaid.” He turned his gaze to the sky and frowned. “What year is it?”

“790.”

“Has it been so long?” He shook his head sadly. “I can sense a great evil in this place, but it lies beneath us where I cannot reach it. Will you accept my aid, meager though it may be?”

“Of course,” Tee said.

He flew to each of them in turn, his heavy wings beating softly at the air, and laid his hand upon their brows. They felt their wounds and aches fade from their bones and blood. Ranthir could feel the fog left by the evil tome fade from his thoughts. Tee, with great joy, could feel the rigors of the taint fading from her soul… although, in the same moment, she felt the weight of the dark items which lay in the bag at her side.

“And now,” Edlari said, “I must return to the Pale Tower. Seek for me there if you would speak with me again.”

With that, he was gone – his wings carrying him up and over the walls of the keep.

NEXT:
Running the Campaign: Dungeon Clues – Campaign Journal: Session 23C
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING:
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 23A: Let Slip the Dogs of Hell

“WHO DARES TO VIOLATE THIS SANCTUARY OF CHAOS?”

They whirled around and looked up. Above, on a balcony in the tower directly above them, a demon with a goat-like head was floating several feet off the ground. It carried a vicious looking axe with a blade that gleamed in the sun.

Although this is not well-represented in the campaign journal, I actually ended Session 22 in a cliffhanger: The demon showed up, shouted, “Who dares?!”, and that’s where I wrapped up the night.

Cliffhangers are great. There are all kinds of cliffhangers, but two significant ones for RPGs are unresolved peril and the escalating bang.

Unresolved peril is fairly self-explanatory: The PCs — or people/things they care about — are in a state of jeopardy and we “leave them hanging,” uncertain of the outcome. The anticipation of the cliffhanger is based on desperately wanting to know the fate of the things we care about.

I discuss escalating bangs in The Art of Pacing. This is the point in a scene where the stakes are either precipitously raised to a whole new level and/or when the stakes you thought the scene were about abruptly change into something completely different. If you cut more or less on the exact moment that the escalating bang is revealed, the anticipation of the cliffhanger is based on being uncertain about where the scene is going and also the eagerness of wanting to take action in the new reality presented by the bang.

This particular cliffhanger is basically a combination of both types: The escalating bang of the demon’s arrival has both changed the nature of the scene and put the PCs in jeopardy.

(As I point out in Part 5 of The Art of Pacing, cliffhangers also don’t always have to come at the end of a session: If the group has split up, you can create numerous cliffhangers by cutting from one group to another.)

“Anticipation” is a key word here. What makes the cliffhanger desirable as a dramatic technique is that the players immediately want to keep playing, while simultaneously denying that to them. It’s a great way of ending a session, because it makes the players eager for the next session.

ENDING THE SESSION

Cliffhangers are not the only effective way to end a session. At the end of Session 21, for example, we closed on the resolution of some pretty heavy stakes for the character of Dominic. Those significant character beats — particularly if the characters themselves are thinking deeply about how things turned out — are a good place for a session break because it lets the players live long in that moment.

In other cases, like the end of Session 19, you might want to break at the point where a scenario has reached a definitive conclusion. This helps to solidify a sense of accomplishment — the idea that a new milestone in the campaign has been reached. When you look back at a campaign, these milestones will chart out the course you’ve all taken together. (From a practical standpoint, this can also be a good place to wrap up for the night so that everyone — including you! — can have some time to think about what they want to do next.)

If you want to study different types of effective session endings, think about how other serialized forms of entertainment — television shows and comic books, for example — wrap up their installments. You’ll find a lot of different types of endings, and also a lot of variations within those types.

The real trick with an RPG, though, is finding that ending. Unlike a scriptwriter, you only have a limited amount of control over where the game session will take you and how fast it will take you there. That’s actually why I use the word “finding”: Whereas the scriptwriter can sculpt the ending they want, as a GM you need to instead be aware of when the ending happens and then actually end the session.

If you miss a potential ending, there probably won’t be another coming along for awhile. That’s when you’ll end up just kind of awkwardly cutting at some arbitrary point because you’ve run out of time.

THE ENDING WINDOW

To find an effective ending, you’ll first need to be aware when you’re in what I call the “ending window.” That’s the window of time at the end of the session in which it’s acceptable to say, “That’s all folks!” It doesn’t matter how perfect an ending a particular moment would be if it comes two hours into a four hour session. (Although that might be a good place to take a break.)

For me, in a four hour session, the ending window is generally from about 15 minutes before our scheduled end time to about 10 minutes after. (If I’m running for a group where the end time is hard-and-fast, it’s more like twenty to twenty-five minutes before the scheduled end of the session.) If I’m in that window or approaching that window, I know that I’m looking for an ending and can start framing and pacing the action accordingly.

I have a simple trick for staying aware of where I am in the session: A kitchen timer. Before the session starts, I simply set the timer to go off at our scheduled end time and put it discretely behind my screen. (It’s usually surrounded by a pool of dice.) I can then tell in a glance where we’re at: Three hours left. Two hours left. One hour left. Half an hour left. In the ending window.

Why not just use the timer on your phone? The timer on my phone generally needs to be checked – i.e., I have to turn on the screen. It also opens up the potential for other distractions in the form of notifications and the like. The kitchen timer, by contrast, just sits there in my peripheral vision. Not only can I check it with a flick of my eye, but I’ll periodically notice it throughout the session without having to actively think about checking the time. It keeps me tuned in.

Over time, you’ll find that your knowledge of where you are in a session will bring other benefits besides pacing for effective endings. Some of this is practical (like knowing when you should take a break). Others can be a little more ephemeral — you’ll start to develop a gut instinct for pacing; when you have time to let things play out and when you need to get the players moving with harder framing and higher stakes.

NEXT:
Campaign Journal: Session 23B – Running the Campaign: Dungeon Clues
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index