Session 18A: Key to the Past

Session 17D: Shilukar’s Secrets

Scattered throughout the laboratory, the warren of the spider-things, and Shilukar’s bedchamber they found a large number of notes and other papers. Many of these were written in strange characters resembling those they had found upon the obsidian statues within Ghul’s Labyrinth, and these required Ranthir’s arcane arts to decipher.

The ways in which I develop and use lore handouts – of which you can see copious other examples in my remix of Eternal Lies, including the thousands of words dedicated to the Books of the Los Angeles Cult and Savitree’s Research – is probably deserving of a much longer and more detailed post at some point in the future, but in the current session you can see the PCs pick up a huge dump of such handouts all at once and thus afford us an opportunity to discuss a few points of potential interest regarding them.

First: Why so many handouts all at once?

This is glossed over somewhat quickly in the journal (although highlighted in the quote I selected above), but not all of these handouts were found in a big stack: They were scattered across several different areas, and also in different spots within those areas.

The parceled pieces serve as a reward for exploration. (It’s more interesting to have tidbits in several rooms than it is to have one room with a big handout and then a bunch of rooms without substantive rewards.) But split up like this they also reward partial exploration: As the scenario played out, the party routed Shilukar and took possession of the lair. But the scenario could have just as easily ended with them snatching a few pieces of obvious paper off Shilukar’s worktable and then beating a hasty retreat, leaving them with only a few fragments of information.

And in either case, rather than having a monolithic block of text to read through, the players are instead left with disparate puzzle pieces which must be pieced together. This forces them to actively engage with and think deeply about the material.

There is also mixture of function. Some of the information in this info dump is immediately useful; it pertains to the present. Some of it elucidates the past, revealing additional details or even fully revealing the truth behind previous mysteroes. And finally, some of it hints at the distant future, foreshadowing events and interactions to which the PCs don’t currently have access (but will or may later).

Particularly when elucidating the past, note that the handouts have been customized to reflect actual events (i.e., things the PCs have actually seen or, better yet, done). By referencing the actions taken by the players in the tangible form of an actual plot, you’re deeply investing in the idea that their actions matter and that they are rippling out into a wider world far beyond their immediate sensorium.

The handouts also take different forms of text – epistolary, the summary of books, scratched notes, research documentation, diagrams, sketches. Each form inherently encodes information differently, providing different perspectives on the game world. (This also tends to encourage the GM not to become overly didactic, which aids in creating the puzzle-like combination of information. Also: Show, don’t tell.)

In addition to the works described in full below, they also discovered The Book of Lesser Chaos, which described in detail a technomantic art known as “chaositech”.

Present in this session, but not directly included in the campaign journal, was The Book of Lesser Chaos: This was a lengthy, multi-page handout. In D&D, I frequently use these big lorebooks as a way of introducing new mechanics into a campaign.

Over the years I’ve found that getting players enthused about some cool new sub-system can be a bit hit-or-miss. Often I would prep a packet of rules, pass it out to everyone with a ton of enthusiasm, and then… nada. The packet would get shuffled around for a few sessions before disappearing into a drift of paper and being forgotten.

Including the same material as a handout, on the other hand – framed with in-character material – tends to have a much higher success rate. I think it inherently makes the rules more interesting, and it also sort of demands engagement. The steps necessary to include it as a prop also encourage me, as a GM, to significantly integrate the new sub-system into the campaign world. (For example, it’s only logical for Shilukar to have a lorebook about chaositech if he’s practicing chaositech, and thus his entire lair is filled to the brim with chaositech-in-action.) This integration will also increase player engagement with the material, often stretching that engagement over longer periods of time.

Ideally, the best way to get new mechanical material fully integrated into a campaign is for it to be heavily featured in at least one session and also appear intermittently (but not consistently) over several more sessions.

But I digress. This is a different topic for another time.

Session 17C: Shilukar’s New Friends

The illusion might not have fooled Shilukar if he had been in his right mind, but at this point he was far from it due to the debilitating spells Ranthir had cast upon him. The elf waved his wand in the direction of the illusion (which, of course, had no effect) and banked sharply to the right – flying away from Dominic and Tee.

When characters suffer ability score damage, it’s an awesome opportunity to lean into a roleplaying challenge. This is particularly true of damage to the mental ability scores, which will directly affect the character’s personality and decision-making.

You can see that in this session, where Shilukar’s dwindling Intelligence score not only resulted in increasingly muddled decision-making, but also a growing sense of panic as Shilukar felt his mind slipping away from him: In a fantastical equivalent to HAL-9000, you have a character getting more and more desperate to solve a problem as it becomes more and more impossible for them to figure out how to do so.

Existential horror as a combat tactic.

But that’s just one option. Back in Session 15, we saw that ability score damage can also be played for comedic effect:

Tor, in his befuddled state, was becoming completely entranced by the Ghostly Minstrel’s performance. He began to dance and then to sing along – vigorously and loudly.

Tee, seeing what was happening, excused herself from Mand Scheben and pushed her way through the crowd to Tor’s side. “Tor! Tor!” She finally managed to get his attention. “Calm down! Look, I don’t really think you should be doing that right now.” She looked meaningfully at Tor’s acid-burned and blood-stained clothes.

Tor seemed to think about his seriously for a few moments… and then diligently began stripping off his clothes. Cheers went up from various people around the room.

“No!” Tee grabbed at him, but Tor was intent on getting his clothes off now. Looking around, Tee spotted Agnarr and urgently waved him over. Between the two of them, they were able to get Tor back up to their rooms and settled down.

If you’re feeling uncertain about how to play a modified ability score, consider querying your character by way of the game mechanics: Make an Intelligence test to see if your character is capable of thinking their way through a problem at the moment. Make a Wisdom test to see if they’re able to inhibit their impulse to take off their clothes. Make a Charisma test to see how short-tempered they are.

Note that these same principles apply to physical ability scores, with modifications to those scores being reflected in both action selection and description. Getting hammered by a 10 point loss of Strength must feel as if your body has just been brutalized by a chemotherapy treatment. Think about how a loss of Constitution would leave your character gasping for breath and struggling to wheeze out words. Describe your characters clumsily fumbling with a formal tea service or tripping over the furniture as a result of their reduced Dexterity score.

Keep in mind both the absolute rating of the ability score AND the relative change: Someone who has been knocked down to Intelligence 10 from Intelligence 18 isn’t suddenly a dithering idiot (they have a perfectly average intellect), but from their perspective it’s as if the entire world has been wrapped in gauze. (Although if the loss is permanent, it’s likely that they’ll eventually adapt to their new acuity.)

These moments also offer us an opportunity to reflect on how ability scores define our characters and what their normal ability scores really mean, although this begins to transition us into a broader discussion how we can roleplay characters with abilities – particularly mental abilities – vastly different from our own (which is, perhaps, a topic for another time).

There’s also a flipside to this: What do magic items and buffs that increase your ability scores do to your character?

Just as there should be a change in your character’s behavior if they’re blasted from Wisdom 10 to Wisdom 5, so, too, should reading a tome of clear thought that boosts your Wisdom from 10 to 15. Think about how your character’s perception of the world changes; think about how the decisions they make (and choose not to make) will change; think about how their personality will shift as a result.

Note, too, that I think there are differences between short-term buffs (which are shocks to the system, but fade relatively rapidly) and long-term alterations (which will become integrated into the character’s personality).

And while tomes are one thing, there’s actually something really fascinating about a worn magic item that permanently alters your state of consciousness (i.e., modifies your mental abilities). As you spend more and more time wearing such an item, the existence you know with that item will increasingly become your perception of self. What happens to you when you take off the item? Or have it taken from you?

There’s a transhumanist quality here, as if Vernor Vinge’s True Names would be a good source text for this: Like the character for whom part of their personality and thought process now exists in the networked computing devices, so too does the wizard with a tiara of intelligence +4 have an important part of their mind – of themselves! – tied to that item. Are they even the same person without that item? If they lose that item and they replace it with a talisman of intelligence +4, will that restore who they were? Or will they become someone else? Are all +4 boosts the same? Can you just swap out parts of your brain? Or does granting the Ship of Theseus sentience transform the paradox?