Session 12C: To the Aid of Goblins

“The rest will be needed here. To hold the bridge,” Itarek said. “And they would not last long against the horrors that we have seen.”

Here’s something that I wish I was better at as a GM: Running NPC allies accompanying the PCs.

The internet is filled with horror stories of the dreaded “GMPC” – where the GM essentially tries to be a player in their own campaign by running a character indistinguishable from being another PC in the party. Although technically possible (and you can find a few success stories here and there), what usually happens is that the GMPC becomes the unabashed star / spotlight hog of the entire campaign and/or is used to forcibly railroad the players.

Because, frankly, the GM already controls the entire world, which should be power and participation enough for anyone. So 99 times out of 100, for a GMPC to exist there has to be some other shitty agenda motivating it in the first place.

The idea of running a GMPC isn’t just an obvious anathema to my whole ethos as an RPG gamer, I’m pretty sure it’s something I’m actually incapable of doing.

When circumstances, like those in the current campaign journal, dictate that NPCs will be allying with the PCs and traveling with them for some length of time, what generally happens is a simple, three-step process:

1. I make an effort to make sure those NPCs are contributing and present in the group.
2. I get distracted.
3. “Oh, crap. Right. Robert is here. Uh… I guess he was standing in the back this whole time?”

Itarek and the other goblins in the current sessions actually work out pretty well because so much of their time onscreen is spent in raid-type or combat situations, which means that I’ve got an initiative list which constantly pushes them back into the center of my attention.

It’s odd, really, because I can successfully run incredibly complex social interactions featuring dozens of characters without a hitch. But as soon as an NPC gets firmly aligned with the PCs, it feels almost inevitable that they’re going to turn invisible.

I think there’s probably a couple of factors at play here.

First, to pat myself on the back a little bit, I am usually pushing myself to the limits of my mental gymnastics when it comes to running a game. I’m a pretty big believer in the idea that there’s always another element you could be adding to improve your game, it’s just a question of whether or not you can. So if something seems non-essential, it’s easy for it to get replaced by a different ball and fade away unnoticed.

Second, I think I have a strong, instinctual predilection towards viewing NPC allies as non-essential. One of my primary pleasures as a GM is seeing how player-driven decisions interact with the situations I’ve created in the game world. NPC allies, who should logically and naturally become part of the group’s decision-making process, aren’t just superfluous to that creative agenda, they’re actually kind of innately hostile to it.

GMPCs being anathema to my values as a gamer? I meant that pretty literally.

So whenever things heat up in the campaign, NPC allies are just naturally the first thing to get dropped in favor of almost literally anything else.

When you have a weakness like this, there’s generally three things you can do about it. First, you can steer away from it. And you will, in fact, notice that it’s a rather rare day when you’ll see me deliberately pushing scenarios in which NPCs will naturally ally with the PCs. (When allies do crop up, it’s far more likely to be because the PCs are seeking them out.)

Second, you can focus on improving it. In the case of losing focus on NPC allies, part of that is just literally focusing, of course. But you can also try other methods of keeping the NPC in the forefront of your brain. Giving them a unique miniature, for example, can help. (Although in some of the chaotic battlefields I run, they can still get lost.) An idea that just occurred to me as I was writing this: Clip a picture of the NPC ally to the inside of my GM screen so that the NPC is literally looking me in the eye. (Not sure why something so obvious has never occurred to me before.)

Third, find alternative techniques to achieve the same ends. For example, I’ll often kick an NPC ally to one of the players and ask them to run them as a secondary character if at all possible. (Often it isn’t, unfortunately, because the NPC has an independent agenda that can’t be assumed by the players, for reasons rather similar, actually, to why GMs shouldn’t be running GMPCs.) For NPC allies that are sticking around for awhile, I’ve even been known to invite in temporary players to assume the role. Having a co-GM who can focus on the areas where you’re weak can also be effective.

When you can have successes in the areas where you’re weak, of course, you’ll enjoy a real sense of accomplishment. That turned out to be the case with Itarek and his goblins, who came – as you’ll begin to see in Session 13 – to assume a very special place in the campaign.

Session 12B: A Party at Castle Shard

It was not the evening that any of them had expected – it had been both more and less than that. But it was an evening that none of them would ever forget.

I’ve had a couple of people mention, when they realized what the heart of Session 12 was going to be, that they were interested in seeing what the Party Planning game structure I wrote up awhile back would look like in actual play. Unfortunately, this is one of those occasions where the nature of writing up a campaign journal entry creates something of a distortion field.

Everything that’s described in the campaign journal actually happened at the table, of course, but events have been both rearranged and heavily condensed. My goal was not, in fact, to provide a transcript of the session, but rather an effective summary that could serve as both entertainment and reference document as the campaign moved forward.

Perhaps the most significant “deception” to be found here, for example, is the degree to which the campaign journal fails to represent how much cutting back and forth there was between scenes: When the party split up and went to talk to a bunch of different people, I would engage in conversation for a couple of minutes and then swap to another group and then again and then again. These interactions have not only been boiled down to their key highlights, they’ve also generally been grouped together into complete conversations.

With this limitations in mind, however, let’s take a closer look at how the Party at Castle Shard worked in actual play.

SETTING IT UP

To start, let’s consider what the function of the party was. This was several fold, actually:

• It was a reward for their hard work. In Getting the Players to Care I talk about how one of the methods of doing that is to make it treasure. This is a somewhat unusual variant on that principle, but by making this party clearly part of the lavish pay-off for the hard work (and near death experiences) they had put in for Lord Zavere, the players became deeply invested in the party and were anticipating it for months in the real world.
• It was a signal that the PCs had risen to a new level in the world. This inherently meant closing one “chapter” of the campaign and beginning the next.
• It was an opportunity to introduce a bunch of new characters, drastically expanding the supporting cast of the campaign and setting up relationships that would drive the campaign forward into Act II (which is still a little ways down the road at this point, but which was definitely on my horizon).

It was also, of course, intended to be an entertaining evening of gaming.

THE GUEST LIST

Let’s take a moment to look at the new characters I was introducing here. There were a total of eighteen guests at the party (not including the PCs), of which five were previously known to the PCs.

Familiar Faces: The familiar faces were quite intentional. First, because it would provide islands of familiarity for the PCs to fall back upon (and around which social interactions with the new NPCs could coalesce). Second, because the PCs had been compartmentalizing the various aspects of their lives and I knew that bringing some of these aspects together (and most likely overlapping with each other) would create dramatic tension.

New Faces: Nonetheless, throwing more than a dozen new NPCs at the players all at once may seem like a lot at first glance. But the party planning structure is designed to break them up into smaller groups, and introduce them in manageable chunks.

More importantly, I’ve found that it can be quite effective to introduce a bunch of new characters in a cluster (whether all at once in a party like this or just rapidly over the course of a few sessions) and then have spans where only established characters are being reintroduced. If I was going to theorize about why this works, I would say it’s partly because some NPCs will “click” with players and some won’t, and when you introduce them in clusters your focus will naturally be drawn towards the NPCs who are resonating. (You’ll notice that this echoes, at a macro-level, something I talk about in Party Planning at a micro-level.)

But it’s also because having all of these new characters interact with and collide with each other is a great way of revealing character; and also a great way of drawing the PCs into their drama.

Stacking Interesting NPCs: The other way I think about this technique is that I’m “stacking” interesting NPCs. It’s like I’m laying in a supply. Each NPC is a tool, but you can often let the PCs figure out how they’ll actually end up getting “used” down the line.

For example, look at how the PCs pursue selling the orrery they found in Ghul’s Labyrinth here, creating a plot thread that will run for several more sessions. You’ll also want to pay attention to how the PCs’ relationship with Aoska develops in the future.

Of course, in some cases I’m planting NPCs in order to very specifically set things up in the future. The great thing is that, if you do your job right, the players won’t be able to figure out which is which. Honestly, if you do it right, then down the line you’ll probably have difficulty looking back and remembering which was which.

BANG, BANG

“Ah, Mistress Tee!” Zavere’s deep baritone called out to her. “Perhaps you could help me talk some sense into Leytha Doraedian.”

With something of a sick feeling in her stomach, Tee turned. It was true. Doraedian was standing there with Lord Zavere. He had a look of absolute surprise on his face.

Which touches on a wider design ethos: Your party has a location, a guest list, a main event sequence, and topics of conversation. If you want to create a truly kick-ass party, your primary design goal is to liberally seed all of these elements with moments of dramatic potential.

Note that I didn’t say dramatic moments. I said moments of dramatic potential. The actual dramatic moments will arise out of that potential during actual play. What you’ll find even more surprising is how these varied moments of dramatic potential will begin interacting with each in ways you never anticipated.

For example, when it came to Tee’s mentor, Leytha Doraedian, I had only a single note:

Surprised to see Tee at Castle Shard.

I didn’t know how (or even when) that surprise would manifest, exactly, but I think the dramatic potential in it is clear.

In my Topics of Conversation, I had listed:

Argument between Doraedian, Zavere, and Moynath about the Commissar’s weak attitude towards the Balacazars.

It was only as the events of the party actually played out that Tee became the character who approached this debate in progress and these two moments joined together to create the very memorable scene you see in the campaign journal. (Nor had I anticipated the way in which Tee’s earlier interactions with the Commissar would increase her own tension and confusion over this topic.)

Many of these dramatic moments can be thought of as bangs around which scenes (or mini-scenes) can be framed during the party. But others are just angles of tension (old relationships, new debates, hidden agendas), and the bang will be discovered during play as these elements interact with each other.

And some of your bangs may not ignite. For example, the Graven One has a bad history with the Inverted Pyramid and I wrote, “His cold indifference with the Inverted Pyramid will manifest itself if he interacts with Jevicca Nor.” But in the organic ebb and flow of the party, that never happened. (Which is, of course, just fine.)

In other cases, of course, the PCs will aggressively pursue agendas and create bangs (either directly or indirectly) that you had no way of anticipating. Make sure you don’t miss those moments! Pursue them aggressively!

A STRONG START

“Master Ranthir!” The Iron Mage cried, crossing the room towards him and resuming his scan of the room. “Mistress Tee! Agnarr, Elestra, and Dominic! Master Tor! To my side! I have an errand for you!”

All of this talk about discovering things during play aside, there’s no reason to be afraid of having some strong, pre-designed moments. The sudden appearance of the Iron Mage is one such example of this: It’s a very strong bang that demands a response from the PCs.

In many ways, this is the primary function of the Main Event Sequence: You let things play out organically, but if you feel like the current pool of dramatic tension is being exhausted, trigger the next event, which will usually be some strong, dramatic moment – perhaps accompanied by a specific bang the PCs need to react to – which will cause all the pieces of the party to suddenly move in new directions and begin a fresh set of collisions.

One place where you’ll want to make a point of stocking these ready-to-go moments is at the very beginning of the party: You want a good, strong start to set things in motion. Once you’ve got some momentum built up, the action will generally begin driving itself. But you’ve got to get that momentum going.

You can see this in the Party at Castle Shard with the opening sequence of events, which, in my notes, I actually separated out as a separate event track labeled “Arrival – Events”:

• Arrival (Kadmus greets them and leads them to Zavere’s private office; they’re eyed by other guests who are being taken directly upstairs)
• Meeting with Zavere (chance to spot the writing on the map; Zavere tells them Linech’s burrow has been destroyed; he personally escorts them to the ballroom)
• Rehobath and the Commissar (Kadmus barring their entry; a loud argument; Zavere smooths things over)
• Guests of Special Honor (Zavere introduces them as “guests deserving of much honor, for their recent service to both myself and to the interests of the City of Ptolus” in order to needle the Commissar)

This sequence introduces them to a handful of characters; gives everyone a chance to start warming up to social interactions; and gives the PCs two BIG bangs. I don’t know what their reaction to those bangs will be, but they’re pretty much guaranteed to color how the rest of the party progresses.

You can also see how I used these first moments to establish, in brief, several key pieces of exposition which would be major hubs for the rest of the party:

• Conflict between Zavere and the Commissar.
• Destruction of Linech Cran’s burrow (which could have also been learned before the party if the PCs had been seeking information, but they were stuck underground).
• The other guests are intrigued by the PCs being included on the guest list.

And, really, that’s all it takes to get the ball rolling.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

SESSION 12B: A PARTY AT CASTLE SHARD

December 2nd, 2007
Harvesttime in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

HANDSHAKES – ELVES & OGRES

Agnarr glanced around, looking for the biggest guy in the room. He spotted a stocky man with black hair pulled back into a pony-tail and piercing blue-grey eyes – not tall, but with a muscular build and a weathered face. He headed in his direction.

Tor, with one eye on Agnarr, also noticed the man. Tor recognized him as Sir Kabel Dathim, one of the knights of the Order of the Dawn who had ridden at the Harvest Tournament that afternoon. He noticed that Sir Kabel was headed directly towards where Rehobath and the Commissar were standing.

Agnarr interposed himself in Sir Kabel’s path and vigorously shook his hand. Kabel clearly wasn’t quite sure what to do about the massive barbarian’s enthusiastic greeting, but Tor slid calmly to their side, offered his own introductions, and congratulated Kabel on his performance during the tournament.

Sir Kabel thanked him for his compliments, and apologized for his brevity, but said that he had business to attend to. Making his excuses he brushed by them and continued on his path towards the Commissar and Rehobath. Agnarr made to follow him, but Tor caught him by the arm and shook his head.

Tee, meanwhile, had seen another elf among those assembled – a tall, slim, and exceptionally beautiful elven maid. Both her hair and her eyes were a captivating, shimmering silver. She wore a dress of dark blue silk and silver-embroidery. Around her neck, on a golden chain, she wore a golden cross of Athor upon a field of crimson. (Tor, noticing her from across the room, recognized it as the heraldic emblem of the Knights of the Golden Cross.)

As Tee approached, the elf introduced herself as Kaira Swanwing. “It’s an honor to make you acquaintance, Mistress Tithenmamiwen,” she said. “Master Doraedian has spoken well of you.”

Tee wasn’t quite sure what to make of Leytha Doraedian speaking of her, but she thanked Kaira for the kind words.

“And what brings you to a party at Castle Shard?” Kaira asked.

Tee smiled demurely. “The same thing that brings us all – an invitation from Lord Zavere.”

“Ah,” Kaira said. “But what brings such an invitation?”

“We performed some small service for him.”

“What type of services?”

“Discrete ones.” (more…)

Session 12A: Awkward Introductions

In Session 9, the PCs found a note mentioning a mysterious “Urnest”:

To our associate, Mister Linech Cran— 

We are in desperate need of your most delicate shipments. As you well know, we have important work which cannot proceed apace without those shipments. Urnest assures me that the consequences will be most dire if you cannot fulfill the responsibilities you have pledged yourself to. But I am pleased to inform you that I have interceded on your behalf. You have until the third of Kadal to deliver those shipments promised to us these two weeks past. 

    Silion  

In this session, while attending the gala at Castle Shard, they encounted Commissar Igor Urnst for the first time.

One was a tall, lean man with a mane of white hair down to his shoulders, a moustache, and goatee. He wore a monacle in one eye, contributing to his regal appearance; a dark blue tunic trimmed with gold; and a matching cloak trimmed with ermine. A heavy sword was strapped to his side and he wore several military honors upon his breast. Tee instantly recognized him as Commissar Igor Urnst, the leader of the city.

Urnst vs. Urnest. That’s not a typo. These are two different characters.

This sort of thing is one of the reasons why it can be valuable to keep a list of names handy for random NPCs, because otherwise your subconscious is likely to be drawn back to the same options over and over again. This is also something you need to watch out for if you’re drawing material into your campaign from many different sources, as it’s quite possible to find unexpected overlaps in naming.

Neither was the case here. Both Urnst and Urnest are drawn directly from the Ptolus sourcebook. Just an odd quirk of the truly massive amount of material Monte Cook had generated over years of running his campaign and then injected into that mammoth tome.

I recognized the potential for confusion because, when I was reading the Ptolus sourcebook, I did become momentarily confused. (“Wait… Are these guys related? Oh, I guess not.”) I probably should have taken my cue from that and changed one of the names to something more distinct, but the thought got lost in my own labyrinthine process of prep.

But as soon as Commissar Urnst showed up in this session, Elestra’s player piped up, “Wait… Don’t we have a note mentioning this guy?” The only reward to be gleaned from my earlier confusion was that I instantly recognized what had happened and was able to quickly clarify the situation.

A DIGRESSION ON DELIVERING META-INFORMATION

It can be argued that the players should have simply been allowed to roll with their confusion and resolve it – or fail to resolve it – on their own. Usually, I would agree with that: Connections, relationships, and/or truths that seem “obvious” to you as their creator will not be obvious to the players, and that’s okay. It’s better for the players to figure these things out for themselves rather than having you disrupt their process of discovery.

In this particular case, however, there were only two possible outcomes: First, and most likely, they’d have laboriously dug through their trove of handouts until they found the one containing the name “Urnest”, realized their recollection was mistaken, and moved on. This was undesirable because we were in an escalating sequence designed to start the Castle Shard party off with a big bang. Disrupting the escalation for a wild goose chase because I’d failed to change a confusion name had no pay-off. It was much easier to just say, “Actually, the name in that letter was ‘Urnest’,” share a laugh about Sauron vs. Saruman, and move on to the meat of the session.

The other possible outcome, which I considered extremely unlikely, was that they would take the time to find the letter and then conclude that it was a typo, meaning that Urnest and Urnst WERE the same person! It can be argued that this was would be a natural, organic consequence of play and it would be perfectly valid to expore it through play, most likely with some very weird and confusing interactions with the Commissar during the party trying to suss out who Silion was. Or maybe it would even result in them feeding some bad intel to Lord Zavere, creating all kinds of weird fallout in the rivalry between Castle Shard and the Commissar!

Here’s what it boils down to: You have a limited amount of time at the gaming table, and that time therefore has value. There are also opportunity costs to consider. Was a 5-10 minute search through handouts culminating in, “Oh, I guess it wasn’t the same guy.” a good use of our time? Would the (apparently null) value of that experience be worth giving up a strong, well-paced introduction to the Castle Shard party?

Other GMs might make a different assessment than I did.

TRACKING THE NPCs

In the Shadow of the Spire has a very large cast of supporting characters. When running campaigns like this – with large numbers of NPCs who have complex relationships with both each other and with the PCs – it is tremendously important that both the GM and the players are able to keep track of them all.

If the GM fails to keep track of his supporting cast, the campaign will founder in confusion, contradiction, and missed opportunities. The quality of the players’ interactions with the NPCs will likely also suffer as the GM struggles to portray them with consistency and depth.

As for the players, the interactions with these rich and diverse characters is where a great deal of the immersion and reward from these types of campaigns come from. Action and meaning is driven out of their relationships with the NPCs, and if they can’t track them, the campaign quickly becomes a tumultuous chaos – a great deal of sound and fury signifying nothing to them.

Ultimately, of course, the players need to take some responsibility for this. But there are a number of techniques that the GM can use to encourage and facilitate the groups’ ability to track the supporting cast; they can grease the wheels, so to speak. You might start by reviewing some of the techniques described in Getting the Players to Care, but there’s also a number of specific techniques when it comes to NPCs.

ORGANIZE YOUR NOTES. The first thing you need to do as a GM is to make sure your own house is in order. You need to keep well-organized and easy-to-use notes on the important NPCs in your campaign.

I keep an NPC Roleplaying Template for each member of the supporting cast. When the In the Shadow of the Spire campaign started, I kept them all together in a single alphabetical file. As the complexity of the campaign grew, however, I broke them into a number of broad categories (largely based on a purely utilitarian basis, although obviously influenced by own personal understanding of how different characters – and groups of characters – interacted with each other and were likely to interact with each other). As I write this, those categories include:

• General
• Ghostly Minstrel
• Banewarrens Protectors
• Moonsilver Elves
• Chaos Cultists
• Imperial Church

In doing this, it’s important to distinguish between one-off or scenario-specific characters and campaign characters (i.e., the recurring characters who actually make up your supporting cast). If you don’t distinguish between them, your notes will become choked with irrelevant noise, drowning out the signal and making them more difficult to use.

Of course, it’s also important to recognize that many characters who are initially introduced for a specific scenario will become campaign characters as a result of how events play out and/or how the PCs interact with them. (This is similar to the process of certain NPCs “clicking” with the players that I discuss in the Party Planning game structure, except played out on a larger scale: When the players particularly like a particular character, they’ll seek them out, become interested in their lives, and otherwise keep reincorporating them into the campaign as long as you don’t get in their way.)

ESTABLISH NAMES EARLY AND OFTEN: Imagine your supporting cast as a filing cabinet. Each character is an individual file folder, and the character’s name is the label on that folder. If the players lose track of characters’ names, it’s like all the labels in your filing cabinet have fallen off.

You want to make sure those names stick. So try to get a name applied to an NPC as quickly as possible. (There can be countervailing concerns, but in general nameless people doing mysterious things is a spice best used lightly.) And once the players have a name for the character, use it over and over and over again. It might make for bad prose in a novel, but defaulting to an NPC’s name (“Igor walks across the room towards you”) is I think generally superior to our normal practice of defaulting towards pronouns (“he walks across the room towards you”).

STRONG VISUAL REFERENCES: Giving your NPCs an actually face (in the form of a picture) is a great way to make sure they stick in the memories of your players. If you find visual reference like this, make sure to display it when the character is introduced and get it back on the table every time they show up.

These visual references can also be a big help when NPCs start talking to each other. Simply point to or hold up the NPC currently talking and it can go a long way to keeping conversations clear even when you’re just talking to yourself.

A couple of provisos here, though. First, better to have no picture than a picture that isn’t right. “She looks like this, except her hair is different” doesn’t work in practice, because the visual reference will override the description. (You can run into a similar problem with proxy miniatures, which is why I prefer to use purely generic options unless I’ve got the right miniature for the job.) As a corollary, boxing yourself in by only being willing to create NPCs that you can find visual references for is obviously going to cripple you creatively.

Second, “this guy can’t be important, he doesn’t have a picture” (and vice versa) as a form of metagame knowledge can be a serious problem. (And I find it to be so even if the players aren’t specifically acting on that knowledge; it still ends up coloring their understanding of the game world.)

So add chaff to the signal: Use pictures for NPCs who aren’t important. And be willing to have important NPCs who don’t have pictures. (The first proviso will naturally assist you here.)

In the absence of (and in addition to) strong visual references, finding a unique voice, physical mannerism, or strong personality are also ways to help your players clearly distinguish (and remember!) different NPCs. The NPC Roleplaying Template will help with this, too.

KEEP THEM ONSTAGE: The best way for the players to become familiar with the supporting cast is, conveniently, to use them. Don’t “save” an NPC until it’s time for some big moment with them; give them an active life and keep them involved with the PCs. This is important not only so that the players don’t respond to the big moments by saying, “Who?” but so that your players will actually care about the NPCs.

The good news is that beyond a certain critical mass (and with characters that the players care about), they’ll start seeking out and creating these interactions on their own. I would know that a particular NPC had successfully clicked with my group when they’d get back to the Ghostly Minstrel and ask, “Is Jevicca here tonight?”

When prepping for a session, take a look at your supporting cast list and ask yourself if there’s anybody who the PCs haven’t seen in awhile who should be brought back onstage. Schedule events with them in your campaign status document.

Remember that you can also reincorporate members of your existing supporting cast when creating new scenarios. You should also discover that new scenarios are being born out of the evolving relationships the PCs have with the supporting cast.

PRUNING AND FOCUSING: On the other hand, you also have to know when to let go of certain members of the supporting cast.

This is true from a practical standpoint if nothing else: If all you ever do is introduce new characters to the campaign, the supporting cast will eventually collapse under its own bloated weight. As you (and your players) gain more experience – both generally and in terms of a specific campaign – you’ll find that the “active size” of the supporting cast you can manage will grow. But, ultimately, there’s a limit. As you add new characters, you have to be willing to let some of the old characters exit stage right to make room.

• Recognize when a character’s story is done (and there are no more stories to tell)
• Recognize when the players don’t care any more (which is not the same thing as them hating the character)
• Recognize when the NPC has chosen to move on (either from the PCs, from the area, or from the shared interests that drew them together)

This is a process of pruning. But it can also be thought of as a process of focusing. Instead of just thinking negatively (what characters can I do without?) also think positively: What characters do you want to spend more time with? What characters have interesting stories to share?

Saying goodbye to an NPC, of course, doesn’t mean saying goodbye forever. Old friends (and enemies) can always return.