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Ptolus - In the Shadow of the Spire

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…)

 IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

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.

Ptolus - Monte CookNeither 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 Commissar Igor Urnst - Ptolus - Monte Cookbang. 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.

Ptolus - The Ghostly Minstrel

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.

Ptolus - In the Shadow of the Spire

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

SESSION 12A: AWKWARD INTRODUCTIONS

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

Tee and Ranthir, on their way back to the Ghostly Minstrel, met Tor at the mouth of Delver’s Square. The Barundian grinned. “Did anybody order some clothing?”

Tee was eager to see her new dress, but not as eager as Elestra. As the elf headed back to her room, the young girl dashed out of hers: “Tee! How do I look! Do I look all right? Do you think it’s okay if I bring my viper?”

Tee looked her up and down. Then she considered her words carefully. “No. I think you should leave the viper here. It’s rather… large.” Then she guided Elestra into her room and carefully fixed up her make-up and the back of her hair.

Tor, meanwhile, was dropping off Agnarr’s clothes from Nestor’s. After a moment of consideration over the barbarian’s generally unkempt appearance, he decided to drag him down to the Row Bathhouse.

After that, all of them were busy getting ready. (more…)

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Harvesttime – Part 3: Tee and the Greeting of Old Friends

This fracture, however, is minor compared to the Reformist movement which began in Astalia (one of the Vennoc Protectorates).

When creating our fantasy worlds, one thing I think we inherit from both published examples and our grade school textbooks is an encyclopedia impulse: We want to list every elven king. We want to create a comprehensive map. We want to nail things down.

What I’ve learned, however, is that it’s better to leave yourself room for future ideas.

For example, I’ll consciously avoid constructions like “The Last Blah-Blah” or “there’s only two Bleurghy-Bloogedy-Bloogs in the whole universe!” This is something that I think is even more vital when developing a shared universe, and something I very specifically cautioned writers against when I was working as the Line Developer for the Infinity RPG: Unless your idea requires a hard limit applied to the entire setting… don’t do it.

The One RingAnd of course, sometimes you do need to draw a hard line. The One Ring isn’t the One Ring if it isn’t the One Ring; it can’t be part of a JCPenney jewelry collection.

(How to know if your idea requires its uniqueness? Simply ditch the uniqueness and see if the idea still works. Is your “Only Female Ninja in the Whole World” still a cool character even if she’s not the only female ninja? Probably. Can you throw the One Ring in Mount Doom and save the world if Sauron has a whole cabinet full of Master Rings? Probably not.)

But the real trick I use is to create deliberate “gray spaces” within my world design. There are actually two of them featured in the Harvestime PBeM campaign journal entry: The Vennoc Protectorates and the Reformists. I have very specifically avoided defining exactly how many nations there within the Protectorates and I have similarly avoided figuring out exactly how many or what all the Reformists sects are.

Why?

When I was creating the Western Lands, a very early step was drawing a map of the Five Empires. (Which were, at the time, called the Five Nations. I renamed them when Eberron ended up using the same nomenclature half a decade later. Personally, I had Kipling and the Iroquois Confederacy bouncing around in my head to make “Five Nations” feel particularly catchy when I brainstormed it. I’m guessing Baker did, too.) But I immediately spotted the trap: I had designed Seyrun, Barund, Arathia, and Hyrtan to cover a broad swath of fantasy tropes, giving me a lot of canvas for fitting in all kinds of ideas. But they were also inherently limited: I had one Emperor. If I needed a different Emperor, I didn’t have one.

So the Vennoc Protectorates – inspired by the Holy Roman Empire and Ancient Greece – exist as a confused tangle of ever-changing city-states, duchies, kingdoms, principalities, and alliances all operating under a loose, common banner. So if tomorrow I think to myself, “You know what would be a cool? A kingdom secretly ruled by Deep Ones!” all I have to do is squeeze in another Protectorate.

The other option, of course, would be to just keep adding bits to the edge of the map. That works, too. But it can also be a little too easy: It encourages you to keep spreading your ideas out, instead of bringing them together, forcing them to rub up against each other, and seeing what happens in the collision.

For the same reason, I limited the Western Lands to a single pantheon of exactly nine gods. I’ve recently discussed how that decision has forced me to develop that pantheon in depth rather than just cramming more thinly realized gods into the setting, but I also recognized that I needed to give myself room within that pantheon to develop cool ideas and variants. If there were just nine gods supported by nine specific churches, the resulting palette would be fairly limited. I wanted the ability to continue adding cool fantasy religion ideas to the game world, and I also wanted to be able to create stories based around religious tension.

The Reformists were a gray space that allowed me to accomplish both goals. The Nine Gods cover a broad array of divine/mythological archetypes; the Reformists allow me to interpret those archetypes into myriad forms. If I need a nature cult that venerates nymphs, that can be reflected within the imagery of Sayl or Tohlen or both. (Maybe the cult believes nymphs are the divine children of those gods?) If I need steampunk machine worshipers, I can place them within a facet of Vehthyl. If I need a repressive religious autarchy, I’m not prevented from doing that by the limitations of the Imperial Church. These will all fit into niches within the Reformist gray space.

Ptolus - The Temple District

The Temple District

Ptolus - In the Shadow of the Spire

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

HARVESTTIME – PART 3: TEE AND THE GREETING OF OLD FRIENDS

PBeM – November 12th through December 1st, 2007
Harvesttime in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

When Tee said her farewells to Tor and asked him to pick up her dress from the Jade Woman her intention was to return to her room and recuperate the injuries she had suffered. Instead she found herself pacing endlessly, lost in eddying currents of hopeless thought.

She knew that only a scant distance away, the Harvesttime Festival in Narred was getting ready to begin. There would be song and dancing on the green. The community hall would be opened for food and drink. All her kin and friends would be there.

It was more than she could bear – to be so close to her old life and yet unable to touch it.

Unable to stay where she was, but unwilling to lead any danger to her community, she decided to seek counsel from Doraedian. She headed towards Iridithil’s Home. But when she arrived, Doraedian wasn’t there. He had been summoned away to a meeting of the Twelve Commanders and would likely go straight from there to the festival at Narred.

Intensely frustrated, Tee returned to the Ghostly Minstrel. By the time she got there, she’d made her decision: She sat down and quickly wrote out notes for her childhood friends – Aradan, Rissien, and Santiel – saying that they should meet at her house as soon as they could. She paid a messenger to deliver the letters and then hurried over to her house.

Ptolus Sketchbook - Volume 1: Midtown

By this time she knew that the crowds of the Harvesttime Festival would have already gathered around the communal hall and Moon Lily Pond. So, being as discrete as possible, she circled south around the Herbalists’ Guildhall. Approaching her house from behind, she came up Vadarast Street. The familiar, if somewhat disturbing, scents of Bueles’ potion shop just a few buildings down Iron Street brought back sharp memories as she slipped around the corner of her house and, with a cautious glance, unlocked the door.

She was fairly certain she wasn’t noticed, although she could see the crowd gathering across the Narred green. Her thoughts were naturally distracted as she quickly gathered up the drop-cloths and tried to make the house look a little less deserted – not so much lived in, but at least a little more familiar… a little more welcoming.

Then she sat down to wait. (more…)

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