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In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 15C: The Taint of Ghul

October 5th, 2018

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

SESSION 15C: THE TAINT OF GHUL

January 12th, 2008
The 6th Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

MORNING SICKNESS

The next morning, Tee woke up early and was struck almost instantly by a wave of dizziness and nausea. She felt sick in both body and soul.

She woke Dominic, but he wasn’t able to find anything wrong with her. So she decided to cross Delver’s Square to St. Gustav’s Chapel and speak with Brother Fabitor. But, like Dominic, he wasn’t able to find anything wrong with her. She seemed perfectly healthy.

Frustrated and confused, Tee returned to the Ghostly Minstrel in time to join the others for breakfast. When she described what she was feeling, however, Ranthir suddenly spoke up: “Actually, now that you mention it, I haven’t been feeling well since we were exploring that strange temple yesterday.”

“And you didn’t say anything?” Tee was aghast.

“I didn’t think it was of import.”

Now they were all worried. Was the temple the ultimate source of Tee’s illness, as well? And, if so, would they all succumb to it eventually? And how bad would it get?

“It’s not a physical illness and it’s associated with Ghul’s Labyrinth,” Tee said. “Maybe somebody else has run into this before.”

“I could check at the Delver’s Guild Library,” Ranthir suggested.

“Good idea,” Tee said. “I’m supposed to be meeting with Mand Scheben at the Temple of Asche this morning. So I’ll meet up with you here for lunch? See what you’ve found?”

A CONVERSATION WITH MAND

When Tee reached the Temple of Asche, the priests took her directly to Mand’s office.

Mand Scheben Tee had thought it was going to be difficult to explain what was troubling her, but she quickly found that she was gushing information: She told him all about the deal she had made with Malkeen (a detail that not even her comrades knew about) and then went on to describe her encounter with Malkeen the previous morning. This led her into an explanation of who Dullin was and how she had ended up sending him a note (although here, at least, she curtailed the explanation in much the same way she had with Malkeen himself).

Mand was concerned. Malkeen was dangerous, and he was certain that Lord Zavere had never meant for them to attract that kind of attention. He promised Tee that he would bring the matter up with Zavere as soon as possible.

After leaving Mand’s office, Tee felt twisted up inside: She wasn’t sure if she’d done the right thing. She certainly wasn’t happy with all the information that had spilled out of her. But it was what it was. She’d have to live with it.

THE SHADOW OF TAINT

Tee returned to the Ghostly Minstrel. About an hour later, Ranthir came back, as well.

The news wasn’t good: Based on the description of their symptoms and the events surrounding it, Ranthir suspected that they were suffering from a phenomenon known as “taint”. Taint was a perversion of the natural order – a corruption so profound it warped the very nature of reality. It was a manifestation of extreme evil or chaos concentrated into a single creature, artifact, ritual, location, or act.

Ranthir suspected that the temple they had explored was a tainted place. It was also possible that some of the items they had taken from the Labyrinth were tainted themselves (which would explain why Tee didn’t begin manifesting symptoms until hours later).

“How can we know for sure?” Tee asked.

“Certain divination spells – particularly those which can detect the presence evil or chaos – can detect the taint,” Ranthir said.

Dominic said that he would be able to pray for such divinations in the morning, but Tee wasn’t willing to wait. She marched them all straight back to the Temple of Asche.

Mand was surprised to see that Tee had come back so quickly, but when he heard the situation he quickly summoned in one of the other priests and had him perform the appropriate rites.

These confirmed their fears: Tee and Ranthir had been touched by the taint, which clung to them like a miasma. In addition, several of the objects that Tee carried proved to be tainted themselves – specifically the two cube-like hunks of metal; the small box of metallic discs (specifically the discs themselves); the glass sphere filled with blackish liquid; and the twenty arrows of milky-white glass.

Mand Scheben knew that there were holy rites that could cleanse the taint out of them, but they would be expensive – even with the favored status in which the Temple of Asche held them. (There were lesser rites that wouldn’t be so expensive – but they would leave some residue of the taint behind.)

In fact, the only way they could afford the more expensive rituals would be with the money they were going to get for the gemstones Tee had consigned to Edarth’s the day before. They hadn’t been paid for that consignment yet, but they would be soon enough. Tee asked Mand if the proper rites could be prepared for the next day. Mand agreed.

Tee also asked him if the church would be willing to take the tainted objects from them. But at this Mand balked: He would have to consult with the elders of the church before agreeing to such a thing. Tee was frustrated by this – “You’re a church! That’s what you’re supposed to do!” – but really had no choice in the matter.

NEXT CAMPAIGN JOURNAL

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Ptolus: Running the Campaign – Tavern Time

September 28th, 2018

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Session 15B: The Ghostly Minstrel Plays

In setting up the In the Shadow of the Spire campaign, I was fairly certain that the PCs would choose to settle down in the Ghostly Minstrel: The campaign hook had them awaking there with missing memories, which I felt would create a certain gravitational pull all by itself. I then spiked the situation a bit more by prepaying their rent. (So that going anywhere else would incur additional expense.)

I was basically right. In more than a hundred sessions there have only been two occasions when I think their position at the Ghostly Minstrel was seriously jeopardized: The first relatively early in the campaign when it seemed as if they might all move into Tee’s house. (A different set of rent-free lodgings!) The second later in the campaign when various would-be assassins kept finding them at the Minstrel and they began to conclude that it was no longer safe for them there. (They found a different solution to that problem.)

Tor also had a long-standing fascination with the idea of buying a house, which is only poorly reflected in the campaign journal (as it usually only came up tangentially during other conversations). He never seemed able to convince anyone else of the virtues of real estate investment, however.

Knowing that the PCs would be staying at the Ghostly Minstrel, I wanted to make sure to bring that building to life for them. To make it feel like a real place. To make it feel like home.

I’ve previously discussed the graphical advantages of using Cook’s elaborately detailed setting. This included not only multiple pictures of the Ghostly Minstrel, but also complete floorplans of the entire building. But what would really breathe life into the Ghostly Minstrel would be its patrons.

I knew that establishing would be a long-term project. Dumping them on the PCs all at once wouldn’t create meaningful relationships; it would just be informational overload. These NPCs needed to become familiar faces.

BUILDING A CAST OF CHARACTERS

The first step was to actually establish who the characters at the Ghostly Minstrel were. Here, too, Monte Cook had done the initial work for me, astutely including a list of “regulars” at the tavern: Sheva Callister, Daersidian Ringsire, Jevicca Nor, Rastor, Steron Vsool, Urlenius the Star of Navashtrom, Araki Chipestiro, Mand Scheben, and the Runewardens.

Some of these characters resonated with me. Others did not. I culled the list and then supplemented it with other characters that I knew would likely feature later in the campaign. Then I did a little legwork to pull details on these characters together onto a single cheat sheet for easy reference during play.

USING THE CAST

At this point what you have is something that’s not terribly dissimilar from the Party Planning game structure I’ve discussed in the past. The primary difference is that rather than being crammed into a single big event, the interactions in the Ghostly Minstrel’s common room were decompressed over the course of days and weeks. Using the Party Planning terminology:

Who’s in the common room each night?
What’s the Main Event Sequence for tavern time?
What are the Topics of Conversation?

For the first few days of the campaign, I took the time to hand-craft these elements. This allowed me to think about the pacing and sequence for introducing different NPCs. (Would it be more interesting for them to meet Jevicca and have her mention Sheva? Vice versa? Meet them both at the same time?)

Eventually, the campaign moved beyond that phase. At that point, an evening at the Ghostly Minstrel would consist of:

Looking at my cheat sheet and randomly selecting a mix of characters to be present.
Looking at my campaign status sheet to see what the current news on the street was and assuming that those would likely be the current Topics of Conversation.
Occasionally interject a specific, pre-planned development – either in terms of character relationships or scenario hooks.

REINCORPORATION

The final step was to reincorporate the Ghostly Minstrel NPCs into other facets of the campaign (and vice versa). You can see that, for example, with the Harvesttime celebration at Castle Shard, where Sheva and Urlenius both showed up. Conversely, although he also appeared on Cook’s list of regulars at the Ghostly Minstrel, I introduced Mand Scheben first as someone looking to hire the PCs and then had them notice him hanging out in the common room.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Lately I’ve gotten a little lazier when it comes to the cast of characters at the Ghostly Minstrel. Other parts of the campaign have gotten quite complicated, and there are a lot of balls being kept in the air without also juggling in tavern time. The PCs themselves are also less focused on the Minstrel, and their penchant for simply teleporting directly into and out of their rooms also bypasses the traditional “you see so-and-so and so-and-so chatting in the common room” framing that often marked the end of a long adventuring day during these early sessions.

Fortunately, if you put in the early work on this sort of thing, it builds a foundation that you can comfortably coast on for a long a time. For the players, the Ghostly Minstrel is a real place that they have a personal history with, even if it’s been awhile since it’s had a spotlight shone on it. And it only takes a few light reminders – and a few familiar faces – for the Ghostly Minstrel to surge back to life for them.

Recently, however, we’ve had a new player join group and this, for lack of a better term, complacency has become problematic: The simple references which resonate with the other players simply have no resonance for him.

(At the most basic level, think of it like this: When I say, “You walk into the Ghostly Minstrel,” to the long-established players, a vivid and fully-detailed image is conjured up in their mind’s eye. That’s all it takes because we’ve all collectively done the work, right? That doesn’t happen for the new player, though, because it’s not a place that already lives in his imagination. The same thing applies, but even moreso, for the relationships with the NPCs.)

As such, I want to kind of beef up the group’s engagement with the Ghostly Minstrel again for at least a little awhile. It was probably time to do so any way, because a lot of these relationships had just been kind of floating along in a gentle haze for a long time now.

Because I do have so many other aspects of the campaign I’m juggling, however, I’ve decided to approach this through a slightly more formal structure. (The structure allows me to offload at least some of the mental load, right? It frees up more of my brain to focus on other things during actual play.) So what I’ve developed is:

A random guest list for determining who’s in the common room on any given night that the PCs stop in. (Roll on it 1d6 times.)
Stocking each guest with a short sequence of conversational gambits or interpersonal developments.

My expectation is that I should be able to very quickly reference this page in my campaign status sheet and rapidly generate a 5-10 minute roleplaying interaction any time the PCs choose to engage with the common room.

EXAMPLE OF PLAY

So this is the random table I set up:

1	Sheva Callister
2	Parnell Alster
3	Daersidian Ringsire & Brusselt Airmol
4	Jevicca Nor
5	Rastor
6	Steron Vsool
7	Urlenius
8	Mand Scheben
9	Cardalian
10	Serai Lorenci (Runewarden)
11	Shurrin Delano (Runewarden)
12	Sister Mara (Runewarden)
13	Canabulum (Runewarden)
14	Aliya Al-Mari (Runewarden)
15	Zophas Adhar (Runewarden)
16	Talia Hunter
17	Tarin Ursalatao (Minstrel)
18	Nuella Farreach
19	Iltumar
20	The Ghostly Minstrel

I roll 1d6 and get a result of 4. Using d20 rolls, I note that Aliya Al-Mari, Serai Lorenci, Shurrin Delano, and Urlenius are in the room. (There’s probably also other people, but these are the notable characters, several of whom the PCs have previously been introduced to.)

Next I look at the short list of topics I had prepped for these characters. I actually prepped the adventuring party known as the Runewardens as a group, so this particular slate of results simplifies things somewhat:

RUNEWARDENS

Serai Lorenci has joined the Inverted Pyramid. Drinks all around!
Canabulum is challenging people to arm wrestling.
Aliya Al-Mari storms out of the common room. She’s angry because Serai has told her he’s in contact with Ribok again.

URLENIUS

Interested in the rhodintor. (Heard about their presence in the White House from City Watchmen.) He has had visions foretelling that they both were and will become a great threat to Ptolus.
He spoke with Dominic recently. Matters weigh heavily with him, but he is trusting to Vehthyl.
Tells a rambunctious story about how he, Soren Clanstone, and six soldiers of Kaled Del once transformed a cavern into a fortress and withstood the siege of two dozen dark elves. Then demands a PC tell a story.

Some of these notes may only make sense with the full context of the campaign and/or the Ptolus sourcebook behind them, but hopefully the general thrust here is clear. (Ribok, for example, is a chaositech expert who made introductions between Serai and the Surgeon in the Shadows. Serai almost got himself in quite a bit of trouble when the Surgeon attempted to modify his body, and the other Runewardens barely bailed him out. So Aliya isn’t happy he seems to be dabbling with this dangerous technomancy once again.)

When in doubt, I’m going to default to the first bullet point. And given the preponderance of Runewardens my dice have generated, a celebration of Lorenci’s acceptance by the Inverted Pyramid makes sense. (I also decide that the other Runewardens will show up later in the evening if the PCs engage here.)

Urlenius might be doing his own thing, but he knows members of the Runewardens, so let’s go ahead and just have him drinking with them. The PCs know him better than the members of the Runewardens present, so he can also invite them over. The Runewardens can chat about their news, then Urlenius will ask the PCs about the rhodintor. Might prompt the Runewardens to mention their own run-ins with rhodintor or rhodintor lore. (I’ll check my rhodintor notes for that.)

I’ll mark these items as used on my campaign status sheet, and as part of my prep for the next session I’ll replace the bullet points I’ve used with new points.

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In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 15B: The Ghostly Minstrel Plays

September 28th, 2018

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

SESSION 15B: THE GHOSTLY MINSTREL PLAYS

January 12th, 2008
The 5th Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

THE BEJEWELLED SCARABS

They returned to the door at the base of the stairs. Tee was able to easily pick the lock and then swing it open.

The walls of the thirty-foot long chamber beyond the doors gently curved out and then curved back to a narrow open doorway. Everywhere Tee looked, the walls and floor of the chamber glittered brightly in their torchlight. It took a moment for her to realize that they were completely covered in the gleaming carapaces of large scarab beetles… and that each carapace appeared to be studded with large gemstones.

However, none of them were moving. It appeared that all of the scarabs were dead.

Unfortunately, appearances could be deceiving: As Tee crossed the threshold of the room, a metallic skittering filled the room and the layers of bejeweled scarabs began shifting.

One of them scurried out into the center of the room, stopped, and turned towards to Tee. Before she could react, one of the diamonds studded upon the scarab’s back flared with a blinding brightness.

Tee stumbled back, her eyes overwhelmed by the flash. Several of the others who had also been standing in the doorway were blinded, too.

Agnarr barged his way into the room and Tor followed, but the tight quarters made it difficult for them to find or hit the scarabs. Indeed, not all of the scarabs in the room were moving – only some of them. But these were now spitting painful acid and emitting blasts of impossibly cold air which withered the skin where they touched.

After several minutes of complete disarray, it seemed as if they were beginning to get the upper hand. Several of the scarabs had been smashed, and the frequency of their attacks – and the blinding flashes of light – were decreasing as their numbers were thinned.

Unfortunately, the sounds of their struggle had attracted the attention of something else: A mechanical creature – lithe and angular with a body of smooth blue-gray metal – rounded the far corner. Vicious tines protruded from the joints along its arms, legs, and curved spine.

They were out of position and taken by surprise. Worse yet, the scarabs had not yet been vanquished – the diamond scarabs continued to emit their blinding flashes of light, leaving them painfully vulnerable to the construct’s slashing tines, crushing blows, and serrated fangs.

Agnarr and Tor tried to move into a defensive front – blocking the powerful construct from their more vulnerable comrades. Unfortunately, this proved disastrous. Every few moments the construct’s single eye – a malevolent green orb – would pulse brightly, and in that instant powerful telepathic waves filled with hate and rage would wash over those nearest to it.

Agnarr almost immediately succumbed to the telepathic assault, and immediately turned on Dominic – who was standing directly behind him. Tor shouted a warning, but before anyone could react, Agnarr’s greatsword had smote Dominic to the floor. The powerful blow dropped the priest to his knees, blood gushing from his chest. (more…)

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Ptolus: Running the Campaign – Unsolved Mysteries

September 27th, 2018

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Session 15A: The Labyrinth’s Machines

…and then arcs of purplish electricity began to leap between the bulb-tipped rods protruding from the machinery in the center chamber and the rods in the coffin chambers. From there, the arcs converged on the coffins themselves. The electrical bolts danced with a horrible beauty, filling the three chambers with harsh light that seemed barely dimmed by the smoky glass.

Since writing the Three Clue Rule, I’ve spent just over a decade preaching the methods you can use to design robust mystery scenarios for RPGs that can be reliably solved by your players.

Now, let me toss all of that out the door and talk about the mysteries that your players don’t solve. And that, in fact, you’re okay with them not solving!

Note that I did not say “that you WANT them not to solve.” And there’s an important distinction there: If there’s a mystery you don’t want the PCs to solve (for whatever reason), then you simply don’t include the clues necessary for them to solve it. That’s not what we’re talking about here: These are mysteries that the PCs can solve. They just don’t.

And that’s OK.

In fact, it can greatly enhance your campaign.

You can see examples of this in the current campaign journal with the strange machinery the PCs investigate and are, ultimately, unable to fathom.

“So what did it do?” Elestra wondered.

“Without occupants for the coffins, most likely nothing,” Ranthir said.

First, why is this OK?

Because the mystery is structurally nonessential. There is something to learn here, but the failure to learn it does not prevent the scenario from continuing.

When we, as game masters, create something cool for our campaigns, there is a natural yearning for the players to learn it or experience it. But that’s a yearning which, in my opinion, we have to learn how to resist. If we force these discoveries, then we systemically drain the sense of accomplishment from our games. Knowledge is a form of reward, and for rewards to be meaningful they must be earned.

Second, why can this be awesome?

The technique I’m suggesting is that your scenarios can be studded with literally dozens of these nonessential mysteries. At that point, it becomes an actuarial game. When including a bunch of these in a dungeon, for example, it becomes statistically quite likely that the PCs won’t solve all of them. (They might, but they probably won’t.) And the ones they don’t are going to create enigma; they’re going to create a sense of insoluble depths. Of a murky and mysterious reality that cannot be fully comprehended.

And that’s going to make your campaign world come alive. It’s going to draw them in and keep them engaged. It will frustrate them, but it will also tantalize them and motivate them.

It should be noted that one of the things that I think makes this work is that these mysteries are, in fact, soluble. I think that, on at least some level, the players recognize that. And the fact that there is, in fact, a solution has a meaningful impact on how you design and develop your campaign world.

(There’s also a place for the truly inexplicable. My 101 Curious Items is an example of that. But it’s a different technique and its effect is distinct.)

In the end, that’s really all there is to it, though: Spice your scenarios with cool, fragile mysteries that will reward the clever and the inquisitive, while forever shutting their secrets away from the bumbling or unobservant. When the PCs solve them, share in their excitement. When the PCs fail to solve them, school yourself to sit back and let the mystery taunt them.

If you’re wondering what one of these little mysteries looks like when the PCs solve it, check out Session 10 when they’re confronted with the gory remnants of an ancient tragedy:

When they approached the corpses they discovered that they were just two among many: Rounding the corner into the larger room they saw more than a dozen humanoid corpses strewn around the room. In the center of these corpses a massive, wolf-like corpse lay – it, too, had been horribly burned until its remains were nothing more than charcoal which had endured the ages.

Investigating the other chamber flanking the door of glass and bronze revealed an even stranger sight: Shards of iron had been driven with seemingly random abandon into the walls of the room. They recognized this iron: It was of the same type used in the cages they had seen before.

“Did something cause one of the cages to explode?” Elestra said.

“Or explode out of it?” Ranthir hypothesized.

“Like that creature in the other room?” Elestra said.

In this case, you can see how the PCs apply information they’ve gained from other encounters within the Labyrinth to shed light on the current forensic analysis. I hadn’t really planned that, per se. I just knew what the story was behind this room and how that story tied in with the rest of the complex. So when the players started asking questions about the metal fragments in the walls, I knew they were related to the cages they’d already encountered.

Note that this specifically works because these aren’t purely random bits of dungeon dressing. These nonessential mysteries aren’t just unrelated puzzles: They’re all part of the scenario, which inherently means that they’re also related to each other. Thus, as the PCs solve some of them and fail to solve others, what they’re left with is an evolving puzzle with some of it pieces missing. Trying to make that puzzle come together and glean some meaning from it despite the missing pieces becomes a challenge and a reward in itself.

This advice doesn’t just apply to dungeon scenarios, either. Any scenario can have these nonessential background mysteries woven around its essential structure: What’s the true story of how the Twelve Vampires came to rule Jerusalem? How did the Spear of Destiny end up in that vault in Argentina? What exactly was Ingen doing on Isla Nublar in Jurassic Park III? Who left these cryptic clues painted on the walls of the Facility?

In general, though, don’t think of this as something “extra” that you’re adding to the scenario. This stuff will usually arise organically out of the scenario as you’re designing it: You need to figure out what happened to the Isla Nublar facility, for example, to build your dinosaur island hexcrawl around its ruins.

This technique, therefore, can also help you avoid one of my pet peeves in scenario design: The incredibly awesome background story that the players have no way of ever learning about. Look at the background you’ve developed for the scenario: If there are big chunks of it which are not expressed in a way which will allow the players to organically learn about it, figure out how the elements of that background can be made manifest in the form of nonessential mysteries.

In the case of the Laboratory of the Beast, I knew that this section of Ghul’s Labyrinth had been used to work on several distinct research projects. Every lab, therefore, could be a separate little mini-mystery revealing exactly what Ghul’s arcanists had been working on down here and, thus, collectively also tell the story of these laboratories.

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In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 15A: The Labyrinth’s Machines

September 21st, 2018

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

SESSION 15A: THE LABYRINTH’S MACHINES

January 12th, 2008
The 5th Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

Taking another turn down a hallway led them to a complex of three large chambers. In the center chamber, a massive apparatus of machinery had been built up in the middle of the room. Nearly ten feet across, it extended from the floor to the ceiling.

The far wall of this chamber was inset with a large, ten-foot wide sheet of smoky, opaque glass flanked by two doors.

To the left and the right, the other two chambers of the complex lay down short halls. In each of these rooms, short flights of stairs led up to large, coffin-like boxes of metal lying on the floor. To either side of these boxes were thick, metallic rods thrusting up from the floor with large, bulbous ends.

For now, Tee skirted around the machinery and checked out the doors. They were unlocked, leading to a small side chamber from which one could look through the smoky glass and observe the outer chamber. The northern all of the side chamber was covered in a morass of machinery – wires, glass tubes partially filled with liquid, convoluted gearworks, and the like.

Ranthir was fascinated. He had never seen anything like it before. It quickly became apparent that both the equipment in the side chamber and the main chamber was actually sunk into the floor, and probably connected to each other.

Tee moved to the coffin-like metal boxes. She discovered that their lids could be rotated to one side, revealing an interior surface coated with twisting tubes of glass. These formed coccoon-like depressions – one apparently shaped for a humanoid; the other for a large dog or wolf. Both were outfitted with manacles.

Ranthir, meanwhile, believed he had puzzled out the strange activation method used by the equipment: Several metallic spheres would need to be “spun up” by hand and then, while those were still in motion, three levers would need be flipped, and, at last, a button pushed.

“Should we try it?” Elestra asked. (more…)

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