IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

SESSION 11C: A WEARY TWILIGHT

November 11th, 2007
The 30th Day of Amseyl in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

THE RAINBOW LAKE

In the sudden stillness which pervaded the cavern, things looked bleak. Without the stress of combat the torturous nausea diminished, but their wounds were grievous. Itarek had merely been knocked unconscious, but even after the soothing of Dominic’s divine ministrations he still oozed blood from countless wounds and moved with the stiff pain of torn muscles.

Itarek looked down at the body of his warrior which lay near by and with a weary voice asked, “Can you heal him?”

Dominic looked at the body — its skull caved in and its chest mangled — and shook his head. “No. There’s nothing we can do.”

Itarek nodded. “We must leave. Tend to our wounded.”

Tee, who had been prepared to argue for precisely that, quickly agreed. But Ranthir suggested that they should take a look — a cautious look! — further down this passage. They may be in poor condition, but knowing what lay ahead might better inform their decision.

Tee nodded and, while the rest of the group quickly stripped the duskblade’s body of anything that looked remotely interesting or valuable (taking particular note of a finely crafted sword, steel shield, and chain shirt), she slipped quietly through the shadows ahead of them. (more…)

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Session 11B: Garden of the Sickstone Elementals

The arrow flew straight and true, striking one of the goblins in the back of the head. The pure force of Tee’s draw smashed the arrow through the creature’s skull, so that the tip of it emerged out of its eye.

If you’ve been reading these campaign journals for awhile, one of the things you might have noticed is that Tee frequently shoots enemies through the eye.

Is this some sort of special feat? Or does the player just like making called shots?

No. It’s nothing mechanical. It’s just how I ended up describing some of her kill shots. This started all the way back in the prelude sessions:

After defeating them (Tee skewering one through the eye and Agnarr cleaving them both in twain)…

But another of the reptilians walked in and started squawking: Tee drove an arrow through his eye, pinioning him to the rock, and Agnarr followed through with a devastating decapitation.

This wasn’t something that I had planned for. It’s one of a hundred different things I said in describing the early combat scenes of the campaign, but this is the one that resonated with us: Bam. Tee shoots something through the eye and it brings us joy and laughter.

It’s a running gag. They’re small things, but I think they really help to tie a campaign together. They’re a great example of the things which can help elevate a long-form campaign above episodic one-shot play.

Honestly, though, I don’t think you can plan for these. Or, if you can, they still won’t be nearly as effective or satisfying as those developed organically through play.

But you do have to be aware of them. You have to pay attention, spot the moments when these running gags have the opportunity to emerge, and then make the effort to cultivate and reinforce them over time.

You have to read the room.

These gags can be almost anything. The first time I ran Eternal Lies, for example, it was the character who managed – through pure luck and circumstance – to never be present when the supernatural elements manifested during the first half dozen or more sessions of the campaign. Once the player called this out, it became a consistent light-hearted moment whenever the rest of the group would begin rambling about what they had just experienced.

As these examples hopefully demonstrate, running gags don’t need to be huge, overblown, mood-killing things. Nor should they be overly frequent, as they will quickly kill the gag and sap the joy from it. But used with moderation and care, they become shared joy, a sense of community, and a lovely contrapuntal beat.

PLAYING WITH THE GAG

Here’s a couple of other things you can do with running gags, although they require great care and surety in their use.

Breaking the Gag. There may come a point when it’s most effective to end a running gag. In my Eternal Lies campaign, the character eventually did witness the supernatural firsthand. The player, rather cleverly I thought, chose to let the gag persist a little longer, but now the tone of the gag had changed: It was no longer a humorous Sculley-esque tolerance for the lovable crazy people she was associating with; it was a desperate and increasingly willful denial that she was using to cling to her sanity.

Eventually the time came for the gag to end completely. When the horrors which surrounded them had so completely and deniably impinged themselves upon the character that she had no choice but to break and accept what was happening to her.

And this really demonstrates the power of a good running gag: That final break – that final, mad acceptance of the supernatural – was made more powerful by the tradition which had proceeded it.

The trick with breaking a running gag, of course, is that you want to make sure that you’re not doing so cheaply or frivolously: The payoff you’re getting needs to more than outweigh all the future good that the gag could bring. (Or it needs to be so utterly necessary and demanded by circumstance as to be undeniable.)

Sharing the Gag. After they’ve been well established, some running gags that “belong” to a particular character can benefit from another character “guest-starring” in them. For example, once everyone firmly associates shooting people in the eye with Tee, it can reduce a table to tears of laughter when the normally bumbling Dominic suddenly does so almost by accident.

Here care must be used because you can end up watering the gag down. Tee shooting people in the eye has become a strong character trope in the campaign; if everybody starts shooting people in the eye, the gag loses its distinctive character (pun intended).

This is not, of course, to say that running gags can’t belong communally to the whole group. Some do. But others don’t. You need to make sure you understand what makes the gag work (and what makes it rewarding) so that you can cultivate it properly. Otherwise it’s like over-watering a cactus.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

SESSION 11B: GARDEN OF THE SICKSTONE ELEMENTALS

November 11th, 2007
The 30th Day of Amseyl in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

SICKSTONE ELEMENTALS

Seeing Tee climb down Elestra eagerly bounded forward and grabbed the rope. With her python viper wrapped around her waist, she swung over the edge of the ledge and tried to imitate the elf – rappelling quickly towards the floor of the cavern. Unfortunately, she set too fast a pace for herself. She lost her grip on the rope while she was still twenty feet off the floor. She landed with a rib-battering crash that was scarcely alleviated by the thin layer of moss-like growth.

With a deep groan, Elestra rolled over and sent her python viper forward to see if he could follow the trail of the spellcasters by scent. She was still staggering to her feet by the time he was halfway across the cavern.

Agnarr was moving a little distance into the cavern, as well. However, this may have been as over-hasty as Elestra’s climb, for as he drew near the first pair of rocky outcroppings the sound of a great rumbling and scraping echoed through the cavern and the outcroppings began to move.

They reared up into vaguely-humanoid forms which, with the creaking groan of an impending avalanche, stretched limbs of sickstone-laced rock. Agnarr immediately drew his greatsword. The goblins, still on the ledge above, briefly chattered to each other and then Itarek and another of the goblins grabbed the rope and began climbing down simultaneously.

Elestra’s snake, loyal to her last command, continued following the scent trail. “Agnarr!” she shouted. “Follow the snake!” (more…)

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Session 11A: Into the Caverns of the Ooze Lord

At the same moment, two of the greenish, ooze-like creatures dropped from the ceiling of the chamber and landed in front of the passage. They were not as large as the creature they had just defeated, but between the two of them the entire width and much of the height of the tunnel was filled.

In some design circles, there is a tremendous amount of focus and energy expended on making encounters mechanically interesting and/or mechanically novel. While I generally agree that a game (and thus encounters) should be both mechanically interesting and varied, I also think that there’s currently way too much emphasis being placed on this.

In my experience, you don’t need special snowflake mechanics in order to have memorable encounters. Of course, this doesn’t mean that mechanical interest isn’t important. Those who go to the other extreme and act as if mechanical design, mechanical effects, and mechanical interaction aren’t significant in the design and experience of combat encounters (and other gameplay elements) are blinding themselves and needlessly crippling their toolkit as a GM.

NOVELTY STAT BLOCKS

There are several ways to generate mechanical interest. For the moment, let’s limit our discussion to mechanical novelty in stat blocks – i.e., studding the stat blocks of your adversaries with unique abilities.

This is a particular area where it seems to have become fashionable to expend way too much effort on creating these unique, special snowflake stat blocks in the name of creating “memorable” encounters. There are 4^th Edition modules, for example, where seemingly every single encounter features an orc with a different suite of special abilities.

Not only do I think this is unnecessary, I think it can actually backfire: One of the things which creates mechanical interest is mastering a mechanical interface and then learning how to interact with it. Chess doesn’t become more interesting if you only play it once and then throw it away to play a different game; it becomes less interesting because you never learn its tactical and strategic depths. Similarly, when every single orc is a special snowflake with a package of 2-3 unique abilities that aren’t shared by any other orc, you never get the satisfaction of learning about what an orc can do and then applying that knowledge.

A constant, never-ending stream of novelty doesn’t make for a richer experience. It flattens the experience.

This is why video games generally feature a suite of adversaries who each possess a unique set of traits, and over the course of the game you learn how to defeat those adversaries and become better and better at doing so. That mastery is a source of interest and a source of pleasure.

(Of course, conversely, most video games will also feature bosses or other encounters that feature special mechanics or unique abilities. I’m not saying you should never have something a little special; I’m just saying that when everything is “special”, nothing is.)

My general approach to stat blocks is basically the exact opposite of this novelty-driven excess: Not only do I get a lot of mileage out of standard goblin stat blocks, I’ll also frequently grab a goblin stat block and use it to model stuff that isn’t even a goblin.

The other big benefit, of course, is that this is so much easier. So there’s also an aspect of smart prep here: Is all the effort you’re expending to make every single stat block unique really paying off commensurately in actual play? For a multitude of reasons, I don’t think so.

SYMBIOTIC TACTICS

The other two goblins passed into the slime creatures and… stopped there. Their swords lashed out from within the protective coating of the slime, further harrying Agnarr.

Perhaps the primary reason I don’t think so, is that there are so many ways of creating novelty (including mechanical novelty) in encounters without slaving over your stat blocks. One way of achieving this is through the use of symbiotic tactics.

Basically, symbiotic tactics are what happens when you build an encounter with two different creatures and, in their combination, get something unique that neither has in isolation. The current sessions includes an extreme example of that in the form of the ooze-possessed goblins who can fight from inside the green slimes (and are, thus, shielded from harm).

Symbiotic tactics, however, don’t need to always be so extreme in order to be effective in shaking things up. A particularly common form of symbiotic tactics, for example, are mounted opponents: Wolf-riding goblins are a distinctly different encounter than either goblins by themselves or wolves by themselves.

Symbiotic tactics also often appear in other media. For example—

—the fastball special from X-Men comics.

Unfortunately, to truly enjoy symbiotic tactics it’s not enough to simply design an encounter with multiple creature types. If you design an encounter with ogres and dragons and then the ogres simply fight separately from each other, it’s not necessarily a bad encounter, but it’s not employing symbiotic tactics. In order to have symbiotic tactics the goblins have to walk into the slime creatures.

(So to speak.)

Like many GMing skills, this is something that you can practice. Grab your favorite bestiaries, flip them open to two random pages, and then think about how those two creatures could cooperate to do something neither could do on their own.

Some actual examples I just generated:

• Dyrads + Ogres. A dryad is typically limited by their tree dependency, but this dryad is worshipped by a cult of ogres who carry their tree in a holy receptacle. The dryad is thus more mobile than usual, and will entrap opponents on the edge of their at will entangle ability so that the ogres can stand safely 10 feet away and use their reach to pound on them.
• Ankheg + Homunculus. An ankheg’s homunculus will fly above the surface, acting as a spotter for ankheg’s moving undetectably below the surface of the earth. (Yes, this does beg the question of how an ankheg ends up with a homunculus. Probably an interesting story there.)
• Harpy + Bebilith. The harpy uses their captivating song to keep victims passive while the bebilith snares them in their web.

What you end up may or may not be an encounter which even makes any sense. The point here isn’t necessarily to generate usable ideas. You’re flexing a muscle, and developing your sense of how creatures with disparate abilities can work together in interesting and creative ways.

In the process, you may start finding familiar themes: For example, after the three above I generated a Red Slaad + Ettercap. That can be another “stun ‘em, then web ‘em” combination like the Harpy + Bebilith.

Those types of discoveries are useful because you’ll begin building up a toolkit of such common tactical combinations that you can improvise with during play. But for the purposes of the exercise, try to pushing past the repeats and finding something unique. For example, the ettercaps might use their webs to stick the red salads to the ceiling. When the PCs enter the cavern, the ettercaps slice their webs and the red salads drop down all around them in an unexpected ambush.

Similarly, remember that you’re not necessarily trying to get their mechanical abilities to interact with each other in a purely mechanical way. It’s OK if that gives you an interesting idea, but it’s also limiting. Think outside the mechanical box and look at how these creatures might actually interact with each other. If that takes you back towards the mechanics, great! If it doesn’t, also great!

The final note I’ll make here is that this is not something I typically spend a lot of time (or any time) prepping before play. When you’re first exploring symbiotic tactics, it may be something that you do want or need to include your prep notes. But as you gain experience (as you exercise the muscle), you’ll likely find that you can dynamically figure out how different creatures can interact with and mutually benefit each other on the battlefield during actual play. You’ll be able to just focus on designing general situations (“there are ooze-possessed goblins and slime creatures in this area”) and then discover the rest of it during play. (Which will also have the benefit of allowing your encounters to dynamically respond to the actions of your PCs without losing depth or interest.)