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.”
The doors of the cathedral opened again. The holy symbols of the nine gods – each crafted from glowing godwood – were brought forth. As they passed Dominic, each symbol pulsed with scintillating brilliance, prompting a fresh cheer from the crowd. The symbols were placed in a circle around Rehobath, who kneeled in the center of them and lowered his head in prayer. After a few moments he raised his face to heaven.
One of the things that I think can add a lot of depth to the world is populating it with specific rituals: Not just, “I say a prayer to my god.” But, “How, specifically, do Imperial priests say their prayers?”
Invoking the rites of smart prep, it’s probably best to only prep rituals that are of particular significance to the PCs: Either rituals that they’re going to participate in, or which are part of events which have particular significance to them. (As, for example, in this session of In the Shadow of the Spire.) Particularly large and complex rituals can also be used as the basis for entire scenarios. (For example, I have not infrequently used them as the backbone of a party-planning scenario.)
When it comes to creating these rituals, it’s a little too easy to just say, “Become familiar with lots and lots of real world rituals.” For example, when designing this particular ritual — the inauguration of a Novarch — I’m pretty sure I just spun it up without additional reference; I was drawing on a lifetime of familiarizing myself with different religious traditions. I don’t say that to pat myself on the back, but to point out that studying the real world is the best way to improve your fictional creations. As the old saying goes, if you want to write better fantasy, you’ve got to read more stuff than just fantasy.
The important thing, though, is that you want the traditions and rituals of your world to be more than just thinly veiled copies of some real world tradition or ritual. There’s a ton of mediocre D&D worldbuilding you can find out there, for example, that’s based around people only familiar with the Christian traditions they grew up with basically trying to map those traditions directly onto fantasy pantheons.
So as you’re broadening your studies of real world history and culture, it’s not just about increasing the number of sources you can copy-and-paste from. Rather, it’s about seeing how different cultures took meaning (often similar meanings) and turned them into symbols. And as you come to understand the breadth and variety of that process, you’ll be arming yourself to duplicate the process rather than just pasting in various bits.
REAL-WORLD ANALOGS
For example, if I had been faced with creating a ritual for inaugurating the novarch when I was just starting out as a DM in the early ‘90s, my instinct would have been to look at a real-world analog (say, the coronation of the Christian pope). And then I would have basically taken that ritual, reskinned each step of the ritual with some fantasy equivalent, and been happy with the result.
If you’re in the position of wanting a real-world analog to work from, though, the first thing I’d suggest is to look for a real-world equivalent that is more distant from the fictional ritual you’re trying to create. For example, maybe you’d want to look at the rituals by which a British monarch is crowned. The reason for this is that the greater distance between the real-world analog and the fictional reality will force you to make larger creative decisions, transforming the ritual into something truly unique to your world.
You can do this with other elements of the game world, too. For example, let’s say that you’re looking for inspiration to fill in the history of a kingdom in your world that looks a lot like medieval France. Your first instinct would be to look at the actual history of medieval France, right?
What I would do instead is reach for the history of Japan. Using the cool bits of Japanese history that resonate with you in a medieval European-esque kingdom will force you to translate them — politically, culturally, geographically — in such radical ways that the result will necessarily be infused with a healthy amount of your own creativity.
Layering is also good: Go through the history of Japan and pull out the cool stuff you like. And then go through the history of, say, Russia and do the same thing. Now you’ve got a whole gestalt of influences and the kingdom you’ll end up with will feel unique and rich; and not just a cheap copy of Charlemagne.
PRACTICE SESSIONS & SIMPLE RITUALS
Bringing it back to rituals, the key thing to understand is that all ritual is fundamentally about symbolic equations. In order to make a cool ritual, you need to figure out what the ritual is trying to say or do and then symbolically realize that.
Using the novarch’s inauguration, for example, the ritual is about indicating that this person is now in charge of the Imperial Church of the Nine Gods. So:
They have the approval/blessing of the Nine Gods. (The holy symbols of the Nine Gods are placed in a circle around them. Over time, these symbols are likely to be made out of a special material. Godwood makes sense.)
They are symbolically transitioning from a mortal life to one divinely chosen. (Liquid light washes their former life away.)
They are given a symbol of their new authority. (The liquid light is drawn up into a circlet of elfin gold. They are dressed in the crimson robes of their new office.)
At the other end of the spectrum, there are the daily, simple rituals that are part of everyone’s life in the world. When you’re designing these, you don’t want to overcomplicate them. Look at the daily rituals people do in the real world. Generally speaking, they are not ornate or overwrought.
One of the reasons for this, of course, is that any daily ritual that starts out as particularly complicated will simplify itself over time. Think about how, for example, the complexities of Christian prayer have generally simplified down to “put your hands together.”
You can actually duplicate this process in developing your own rituals. (This is also really good practice for getting a gut instinct for how these symbolic representations work.) For example, you worship the God of War and you want to request their blessing for a battle. What is it you’re asking for? To be better at killing your foes, right? And what’s the most literal way you could do that? Kill a foe.
So, asking for this blessing from the God of War would have originally consisted of plunging your blade into the heart of a captured foe.
But that’s obviously really complicated and difficult. So how could it be simplified?
Instead of needing to kill a human foe, you can symbolically use an animal sacrifice instead.
Killing one animal for every single person in your army is inconvenient, so everyone just needs to get their blade bloody from a single common sacrifice.
What if there’s no animal handy? Well, cut your thumb on the edge of your blade. Blood is blood, right?
What if you’re not using a bladed weapon? Could you could instead prick your thumb on the sharp point of the God’s holy symbol instead?
And there’s your simple ritual: Followers of the God of War prick their fingers with their god’s bladed holy symbol before going into battle.
You could also look back over this progression and find interesting variations or combinations:
A feudal lord cuts himself with the God’s holy symbol and holds out his hand so that the knights he is leading into battle can each receive a drop of his blood on their blades.
It’s not unusual for followers of the God of War to incorporate the God’s holy symbol into the hilt of their blade. A hidden catch or similar device that can provide a sharp edge allows them to knick themselves for their before-battle prayer.
And so forth.
You can see how a similar process, in the real world, leads to “hold your sword up in front of you as if it were a cross and ask for the Christian God’s blessing,” but because we started with a different symbolic base we ended up in a distinct and interesting place.
It should be noted, of course, that there’s not a single right answer here. This is the progression that occurred to me. You could start with a completely different initial ritual (breaking a weapon captured from a foe) and end up in a symbolically different place (you bend the blade of your holy symbol, representing the broken blades of your enemies). Or you could start in the same place and end up in a symbolically different place. (When the priest of a god of war provides a blessing – i.e., casting a buff spell like bull’s strength – it actually creates a small, illusory animal that the recipient of the spell must “sacrifice” in order to receive the god’s boon.)
