Session 16C: Black Centurions

And then it sublimated away into the black cloud of acid. Agnarr stumbled back. He tried to whirl to face the last remaining centurion. But the pain was too much. His legs failed him. He fell heavily to the floor and, as he lost consciousness, there was only one thought in his mind:

He had failed.

Twice during the course of Session 16 – and in relatively quick succession – the PCs ended up in very bad positions during a fight. Positions which, if things had gone a little differently, could have very easily ended up with all of them dead.

As a GM there’s going to come a moment when you’re looking at the evolving situation on the table and you’re looking at the stat blocks of the adversaries behind your screen and you’re going to think to yourself, “Oh shit. They might all die here.” Often the players themselves will realize their peril. The tension is going to ratchet up. The stakes riding on every action and every die roll are going to skyrocket. Everyone’s focus is going to tunnel in on survival. On how the day can be won.

And you, as the GM, are going to have to make a choice: Do you take the TPK gamble? Or do you pull back from the moment – fudge your dice rolls, pull your punches, nerf your damage rolls and health totals?

And speaking from years of experience, here’s what I have to say: Take the gamble.

Take the gamble every single time.

Because, in my experience, at least nineteen times out of twenty, the risk you’re seeing on the horizon won’t come to pass: The players will figure out a way to either save the day or escape their certain doom. Often you (and they) will be delighted to discover it’s something you never could have predicted! (We saw that back in Session 13 with the Tale of Itarek, right?)

And even when that twentieth time crops up and the party goes down, you’ll often discover that a total combat loss is not the same thing as a total party kill. That survival is possible without any nerfing or fudging or pulling of punches. (And we saw that in Session 7, right?)

Because the other option is to look at that incredible intensity; that focused passion; that pure adrenaline that’s pumping at the table… and choose to deflate it. To stare down the barrel of the impending TPK and lose your nerve.

And I get it. It’s tough being under that kind of pressure. Round after round grinding away at you. You want to blink. You want to look away. You want a release.

But here’s the deal: These are the moments that make a campaign. The investment that happens in these kinds of moments – when the players are completely engage; when everyone is emotionally involved in what this very next dice roll could bring – is what makes a campaign come alive, and that investment will transition into every other aspect of the campaign. So buckle up and bring it home.

And to be clear, eminent TPKs aren’t the only way to achieve these heightened moments. But when you cheat in these moments – when you drain the tension instead of bringing it to a glorious crescendo of relief – it will have the exact opposite effect: It will poison the well. It will taint every other moment of the campaign.

“But I’ll just lie to the players and they’ll never know!”

Tell yourself whatever you need to, but what I’m telling you right now is that this is a gamble that’s even bigger than the TPK gamble. And it’s not a gamble that I’m willing to take: The payoff is nothing and the loss can be everything. Because once you lose the trust of the table – once your players no longer believe that what’s happening is really happening – it’s almost impossible to regain, and you will lose these rare and precious moments of magic forever.

But… they’ll never know… right?

Oh, it’s quite likely they’ll never say anything. But they’ll know. Anyone who’s spent a decent amount of time on the player’s side of the screen has experienced this truism. You might fool them once. You might fool them twice. But the odds get longer every time and eventually you’re going to lose your gamble. And unlike the TPK gamble, it’s one you only get to lose once.

A FEW PROVISOS, A COUPLE OF QUID PRO QUOS

Sometimes, of course, you take the TPK gamble and… the TPK happens. I’m not trying to pretend otherwise. I’ve had campaigns end that way, and it’s a real punch to the gut. But some of the best stories from my tables are the TPKs. There can be both a grace and a greatness in failure.

With that being said, games where death is irreversible have a much lower threshold of tolerance for this. You can lose five out of six D&D characters and the party will be back up and running 15 minutes later. Heck, you can actually have a TPK in Eclipse Phase and have the whole group back in play 5 minutes later. Take out a Trail of Cthulhu character, on the other hand, and that’s all she wrote.

So, that’s the first proviso: Know where your system’s danger zone is. The risk of irreversible consequences in D&D is different from Eclipse Phase is different from Trail of Cthulhu.

(It should be noted that this is why I prefer systems with a nice meaty barrier between “out of combat” and “totally dead”.)

Here’s the second proviso: If you’ve legitimately screwed up as the GM – you mucked up the rules; you used the wrong stat block; whatever – that’s a whole different kettle of fish. My recommendation here is to just come clean.

“Look, folks, I made a major mistake here and the consequences are looking irreversible. We need to fix it before it gets that far.”

You’re still going to lose that moment; the tension will artificially deflate and that’s going to be an anti-climactic disappointment. But (a) you won’t be taking big gambles at a rigged table and (b) you will keep the trust of the table. And that’s priceless. That trust is what everything else is built on.

Session 16B: The Sanguineous Drinker

This took them into a small area with four chambers similar to the antechambers in which they had found the black cords upstairs. In each of the chambers, they could see the smashed remnants of complex machinery.

“What are these things?” Elestra openly wondered.

As you’re going to see in the next campaign journal, the PCs are about to get their asses kicked by the black centurions – golems of pitch black metal with the devastating attribute of sublimating into caustic vapor when they’re destroyed.

The centurions did not, however, take the PCs completely by surprise. They’re an example of what I’m going to call fair peril: The PCs encountered clues suggesting that this danger existed before they encountered the danger itself.

The particular technique I used for this specific fair peril is repetition in dungeon design: As the PCs explore a given dungeon complex, the will encounter certain features over and over again. As they interact with these features, they will learn more about how they function, allowing them to be more successful in their future interactions with those features.

In this case, the PCs encountered a number of these four-chamber clusters.

Near one of the cables, lying on the floor, was a black, metallic hand. It looked as if it might have been broken off from some sort of life-sized statue. Ranthir picked it up and began studying it. He had just noticed that the joints of the hand were fully articulated when he carried it out into the hallway. The hand almost instantly sublimed into a cloud of caustic black vapor that burned his eyes and his skin.

In this one, for example, they encountered the caustic vapor trick, which might have warned them about what the full black centurions would do when they encountered them. (They didn’t actually connect the dots, but they could have. And after the fact they were able to look back and go, “Oh no! We should have known better!” Which can be just as satisfying, albeit in a different way.)

I find it generally more effective to repeat these patterns with variations. These repeated elements within your dungeon design form a puzzle of sorts. When it’s the exact same thing every time, it ends up being a really boring puzzle.

You can see this design philosophy strongly in my redesign of the Tomb of Horrors, although there the expectations are subverted with the repeated design elements sometimes creating a false expectation of similar function (even when other clues are warning the PCs that this is not the case).

Sandy Petersen’s Creepy Stuff Rule is another example of how fair peril can be designed into your scenarios.

The good news is that you really don’t need to overthink this: Fair peril elements will flow naturally out of designing things that are true to your game world. When these laboratories were still functioning aeons ago, for example, they were protected by the black centurions. It follows that (a) black centurion stations would be located at various places around the dungeon complex and (b) those stations would be in various states of disrepair.

The other great thing about fair peril is that it’s basically synonymous with suspense, anticipation, and tension: Suspecting what dangers might lie around the next corner is what will make your players dread turning that corner.

AMBUSH DANGERS

With that being said, please don’t mistake fair peril as being the one true way. Ambush dangers – the perils that appear without any warning whatsoever – also have their place, and the jump scares they provide can be very effective.

And, in fact, the centurions in this scenario could just as easily have been an ambush danger if the PCs had explored the dungeon in a different sequence. (It’s a very nonlinear complex.)

Of course, if they’d done that, you’ll note that the trap of the sublimating caustic hand would have become fair peril. See what I mean about how easy this stuff is if you design realistic, interconnected and consistent worlds?

Session 16A: To Labyrinth’s End

There was another hall directly opposite the one they had emerged from, but they could see that it ended in a complete collapse after only a few dozen feet. (A careful examination of Ranthir’s maps suggested that this was part of the same collapse that had blocked their progress on the upper level.

In the Laboratory of the Beast I use collapsed tunnels primarily to create an illusion of scale. Although this particular complex was already quite large (comprising 60+ rooms), I wanted to give the impression that it had originally been even larger. So I simply collapsed part of the complex.

There are a couple techniques that I think help to sell this illusion:

First, the complex needs to already have some scale to it. I’ve found that if you just map two or three rooms and then collapse a tunnel that supposedly leads to a vast complex that no longer exists, the players don’t really feel it.

Second, include smaller collapses that the players can discover the other side of (by circling around). The fact that stuff exists behind this collapse will reinforce the illusion that there were vast chambers behind all of those other collapses, too.

A brief digression here: Why did I decide 60+ rooms was enough and then evoked the rest of the complex by collapsing corridors?

Simple: I ran out of ideas.

When I sat down to design the Laboratory of the Beast, I brainstormed a bunch of ideas, reviewed the original brainstorming notes I had compiled when starting the campaign, and did a quick survey through some bestiaries for cool stuff I could include. Then I started mapping, jotting down which ideas went into which rooms as I went. Along the way I discovered some new ideas, and other stuff got thrown out when I discovered I didn’t actually like it or that it didn’t fit with how the rest of the complex was developing.

And then, somewhere down on the second level, my list of ideas had dwindled to almost nothing. So I collapsed the remaining tunnels. Then I went back up to the first floor and tweaked the map so that the collapse extended vertically, too.

WHY?

From a design standpoint, the primary reason to use this technique is when a particular dungeon concept requires a certain scale – “vast dwarven city”, “sprawling military laboratory”, “petrified remains of a demon so large its veins are corridors” – but in actual practice you’re not interested in spending the time necessary to explore the entirety of that scale.

This can also be true in a fractal sense: This complex should have had barracks for 500 men. It’s not difficult to map that, but searching 500 nondescript beds is boring, so drop a ceiling on most of the barracks complex and call it a day: The PCs will still be able to get a sense for how the dungeon functioned (“I guess these were the barracks”), but you bypass potential drudgery.

In general, collapsed tunnels also suggest age and imply danger. They can also create a sense of mystery. (And sometimes that mystery will be paid off if a collapse can be navigated or circumnavigated.)

In the dungeons of Castle Blackmoor, Dave Arneson used collapses in order to change the topography of the dungeon itself, thus altering the tactical and strategic properties of the megadungeon. Perhaps most easily used in campaign structures where the PCs are repeatedly re-engaging with the same dungeon complex, it’s also possible to sparingly use this gimmick by collapsing tunnels while the PCs are still inside the dungeon. In addition to the immediate peril of the collapse itself, the PCs will be posed with a new challenge as they try to figure out how to get back out of the dungeon. (There’s a scenario by JD Wiker in Dungeon #83 called “Depths of Rage” which uses this gimmick and which I ran to great effect in my first 3^rd Edition campaign.)

Collapses can also open passages that didn’t previously exist. And, in either capacity, they can serve as triggers: The dark dwarves who are invading the outer dwarven settlements because their own realms have been destroyed by a cataclysm. The breaching of an ancient eldritch prison. Deep goblins finding new pathways to the surface. And so forth.

AND WHAT IF?

One thing to be aware of when using collapsed tunnels is the possibility that the PCs will figure out how to excavate or bypass them. (This becomes particularly true as they reach higher levels and gain access to magical resources that can make this task increasingly trivial.)

It can be useful, therefore, to have some sense of what’s “back there” behind the collapse, just in case your players make it necessary for you to know. This is probably just good design advice in general, honestly, and you can see that with the examples above: I knew that there were more beast-themed laboratories beyond the collapses. When we dropped the ceilings on the barracks, we knew that they were barracks. These complexes weren’t just random assemblies of randomness; they were built (and inhabited) with purpose, and if you understand that purpose then you’ll just naturally know what’s behind the collapse.

Thinking about this too much, of course, is a trap. The odds of the PCs deciding to clear some random collapse are actually quite low, so going into any sort of detailed prep about what’s back there is almost certainly wasted prep and should be avoided. (It also likely negates the entire reason you collapsed those tunnels in the first place; i.e., to avoid prepping that stuff.)

BUT WAIT!

What if you want the PCs to excavate a tunnel and find a bunch of cool stuff behind it?

This can be tricky to reliably pull off. The natural reaction most people will have to seeing a blockade of solid stone is to go somewhere else. Most players will also be guided by the meta-knowledge that dungeon collapses rarely have anything mapped behind them, so the hard work of clearing all that rock is likely to be met with the GM literally stonewalling them.

(Pun intended.)

In order to overcome that natural and cultivated aversion, you’ll need to turn the area beyond the collapse into an attractor: You need to create a specific desire/need for the PCs to clear the collapse. For this, you’ll want to employ the Three Clue Rule: Old maps depicting the area beyond the collapse. Withered undead who murmur about lost riches. And so forth. Maybe it will become clear that whatever brought the PCs to the dungeon in the first place must lie beyond the collapse.

Get digging!