IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

SESSION 10B: RETREAT TO THE SURFACE

November 3rd, 2007
The 28th Day of Amseyl in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

With Tee in such a state, they really had no choice: They had to return to the city and seek the healing they had foregone before.

They carefully bound Tee’s arms and legs – partly to stop her from injuring herself; partly to stop her from injuring them – and Agnarr gently lifted her and carried her back down the corridors they had already explored.

It took them the better part of an hour, but they finally emerged – bedraggled and soaked with blood and ichor – into Greyson House.

They headed down Upper God Way to the Street of a Million Gods and the Temple of Asche, attracting many stares. The priests there explained that Father Mand Scheben was not present in the church that day, but he had left instructions that they were to be offered healing at the lowest of possible costs. This was good news for the party, who still had to dip deep into their funds to afford the several hundred gold pieces required for the necessary components and divine casting.

When the clouds of madness cleared from Tee’s eyes, she was left with two sentences burning in her mind: “The lance is being built. The runebearers will not come in time.” She wasn’t sure what to make of it.

The priests allowed them to use their baths to clean up, and then they headed back towards the Ghostly Minstrel. On their way back, a flying ship passed overhead. This startled most of the group, but Tee described it as a common sight in Ptolus – the aeroship of House Shever.

When they reached the Ghostly Minstrel, Tee pulled Ranthir to one side and told him the phrase she had emerged with from her madness. He wasn’t sure what it meant either, but he promised to research it the next time he went to the Delver’s Guild Library.

…which turned out to be immediately after dinner. Ranthir and Elestra both headed to the library. While Ranthir researched the things Tee had asked him to look into, Elestra read up on Ghul the Skull-King. What she found confirmed their suspicion that the complex they were exploring was connected with him: There was, in fact, an expansive construction beneath Ptolus referred to collectively as “Ghul’s Labyrinth”. The Delver’s Guild believed that these were the breeding chambers, barracks, and laboratories of Ghul during his dark reign. Much of the treasure drawn up from the depths came from chambers within the Labyrinth. Many delvers were even reporting the discovery of chambers protected with ancient preservation magicks – their contents untouched through the eons. (When Elestra briefed the rest of the group on what she’d found, Dominc grimaced: “Preserved corpses… No… Well, I hope not…”) To find an unexplored section of the Labyrinth, as they had done, promised many rewards.

Tee, meanwhile, bought a newssheet for a copper piece and browsed through it while she taught Dominic the rules of dragonscales. She discovered that earlier that day an older, well-known, and well-liked City Watch guard named Devaral Unissa had been found killed with the shape of a raven carved into his chest. This was the sign of a gang-killing by Kevris Killraven’s men.

Agnarr, boozing it up, was hearing the same thing from others in the Ghostly Minstrel’s bar. Tee was surprised to hear that the Killravens were now considered to rival the Balacazars as the premiere criminal gang in the town. When she had left Ptolus a little more than a year before, the Killravens had only just arrived in town. It was rumored that many of Kevris’ top lieutenants had come with her from out of town.

After talking it over, Tee and Dominic decided to head over to the Cloud Theater and try to talk to the “Dullin boy”. Tee was convinced that this boy’s life was in danger, and she wanted to warn him.

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IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Session 10A: The Labyrinths of Ghul

Tee and Elestra both recognized the statues as depicting the legendary figure of Ghul the Skull-King…

Towards the beginning of the campaign journal for Session 10, there are a couple large blocks of text – one for Ghul the Skull-King and another for shadowveined rock — which were originally written up as handouts for the players: If/when their characters succeeded on the requisite Knowledge checks, I’d be able to hand them these one page summaries.

The alternative to this, obviously, would be for the GM to simply read or summarize this information out loud. So why go to the extra effort to write up a handout?

First, you’ll note that there’s a lot of information being conveyed in these handouts. I’ve tried to keep the presentation of that information efficient, but that’s just resulted in the information being quite dense. Presenting this amount of information in written form (particularly if accompanied by visual references or enhancements) can aid comprehension.

Second, it highlights the information as being of particular importance, helping to make sure that the players pay attention to it. Of course, this only works if you don’t overuse the technique. (These two handouts weren’t explicitly designed to be delivered in such rapid succession, but the group had failed their earlier Knowledge checks to recognize Ghul’s Labyrinth by ways of its unique architectural features, and it was only the more explicit examination of the statues of Ghul himself which provoked their memory.)

Third, such handouts can serve as rewards. This is particularly effective with certain groups (the ones who light up and start clapping their hands with glee when the GM dips his hand into the Big Box of Handouts), but even with players are less inherently excited by this sort of thing

For example, the original version of the Shadowveined Rock handout included a number of mechanics, as you can see in this PDF version of the same:

I didn’t include these mechanical details in the campaign journal, eschewing them for a purely narrative approach, but the original handout included all kinds of information that would allow the PCs to leverage their discovery of the shadowveined rock to maximum effect (including unique items that they could either commission or have Ranthir create, for example).

Fourth, on a similar note, such handouts serve as reference material, allowing the players to easily review what they know about a particular topic (without having to freshly quiz the GM about it). This is particularly important because these handouts — like any exposition dump — should only exist for a purpose. The GM shouldn’t just start waxing rhapsodic about obscure details of their campaign world in the middle of the session without any rhyme or reason.

In the case of the shadowveined rock handout, the primary purpose was to serve as a rules reference when the players needed it later. (I do this a lot, actually: Packaging up snippets of non-core mechanical material into handouts and effectively drip-feeding the content into the campaign. In the case of shadowveined rock, it was something I had created. But this is also a really effective technique for incorporating material from supplements.)

In the case of the Ghulwar handout, the knowledge of Ghul provided context that helped them to navigate the dungeon they were standing in. So being able to refer back to these key facts regarding his life and exploits was continually useful for them (particularly as their expeditions extended between sessions and, later, years of out-of-game time).

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

SESSION 10A: THE LABYRINTHS OF GHUL

November 3rd, 2007
The 28th Day of Amseyl in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

The group briefly considered the possibility of returning to the city above to obtain healing services for the poison that was weakening Agnarr’s body. But Dominic testified that the poison would not prove mortal – that it had, in fact, already run the worst of its course – and the tempting enigma of whatever lay beyond the door of blue steel was too tantalizing to resist.

Tee pushed the door open, revealing a long hallway made from the same cream-colored stone. About sixty feet away her elven eyes could dimly make out that the hallway opened out into a larger chamber of some sort.

The sunrod in Agnarr’s hand was sputtering, so he threw it aside and cracked a new one. With his light behind her, Tee headed down the corridor. The shadows flicked and leaped around her as she made her way towards the larger chamber.

Emerging into it, she found the ceiling vaulting more than forty feet above her. In each corner of the room, upon ten-foot high daises, stood immense statues more than twenty-feet high. Each statue was identical, carved from a dark gray rock that stood in sharp contrast to the pale stone and depicting a broad-shouldered figure wearing a skull-faced mask who looked down upon the center of the chamber with his arms crossed proudly upon his chest.

Tee and Elestra both recognized the statues as depicting the legendary figure of Ghul the Skull-King.

THE GHULWAR

The Ghulwar was a legendary conflict which took place in the area around Ptolus sometime during the misty aeons of prehistory. It had long been discounted by serious historians and scholars as a mere fancy entertained only by the gullible and credulous. But recent discoveries in the subterranean labyrinths beneath the city would seem to lend credence to at least some of the ancient tales. The tales vary in their character, but the general outlines are such:

Ghul – the Skull-King, the Half God, the Sorcerer’s Get – built a great fortress called Goth Gugamel upon the Spire of Ptolus. He claimed to be descended from the Banelord (a still older, malevolent figure whose tale has been lost entirely to the modern world). Within his black fortress, Ghul worked dark arts upon the orcs, raising up a mighty army of them. This army poured forth from Goth Gugamel and laid waste to the all the lands from coast to mountain.

This was the First Campaign of the Ghulwar, and it only came to an end when an Army of Sorcerers stood up to Ghul and stopped his rapacious armies. His goals of conquest thwarted, Ghul then called forth the Utterdark – a magical darkness which blanketed all the lands which he had conquered. Thus began the Cold Quiet, during which Ghul labored within the halls of Goth Gugamel.

The Cold Quiet ended as the Second Campaign of the Ghulwar began: Ogres and trolls and creatures of even worse countenance had joined the army of the Skull-King. The tales of this Second Campaign are even wilder than the first: Armies of dragon-mounted elves. A conflagration which burnt all the lands beyond the Mountains of the West to ash. In the end, the Utterdark was banished and Ghul fled from the Forces of Light which had been arrayed against him. It is said that the Avatars themselves hunted down Ghul and slayed him.

After making sure that the chamber was safe, Tee waved the rest of the group forward. As the light drew closer she was able to look down the corridors leading away from the room. Down the far corridor she saw double-doors of gray stone, but looking down the other two corridors she found halls lined with niches in which stood life-size statues of orcish warriors.

The group ultimately decided to follow one of the statue-lined halls. Tee again took the lead, drifting on the edge of shadow with her keen elven eyes plumbing the shadowy course ahead of her.

She came to another large room – nearly the same size as the last. As she drew near to it, however, she found the air growing suddenly cold. Her breath steamed. She came to a stop and waited for the others to catch up to her.

Looking into the room, she could see that nearly the entire floor was covered with a raised bas relief of black stone that depicted a skull-like sigil:

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IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Session 9C: Jade

Session 9 was a momentous and very busy session. There’s a lot of stuff I should really comment on, but I’m running out of space to do so, so we’re going to tackle a number of micro-topics here.

TALES FROM THE TABLE

You may recognize the story of “Athvor Krassek”. It’s been told on the Alexandrian before, in Tales from the Table: Unexpected Successes.

This is also the session from which the introductory transcript of Legends & Labyrinths is drawn. If you compare the campaign journal to that transcript, you’ll notice that the transcript has been altered from the original version of events in a number of ways to tighten the sequence of events and create clarity.

I also made alterations in order to highlight specific mechanics, since I was using the transcript in combination with the sidebar reference system to create a seamless tutorial of how narrative, mechanic, and table conversation weaves together to form a typical RPG session. (I tried to do something similar with the Infinity RPG, but it didn’t quite work out for a variety of reasons. Which is a pity, because I think the approach is really effective at introducing new players to RPGs through the medium of text.)

THE UNEXPECTED HAMMERSONG

Ranthir, however, had been struck by a thought: Since the Hammersong Vaults was essentially the only bank in town, it seemed there was a good chance that they might have stored something here between the time they came to Ptolus and the morning they woke up with amnesia.

Holy crap.

This is literally the type of thing that I live for as a GM, but it nevertheless flabbergasted me completely. Let’s review the three key factors that led to this moment:

First, I used using Monte Cook’s Ptolus, which, as a city supplement, is insanely detailed. Its incredible depth and richness means that when the players say “I want to go to a bathhouse” or “I want to find a bank”, instead of improvising something off the cuff you can instead crack open the 650 page tome and say, “Okay, here are the bathhouses in town.”

In this case, when they went to find a bank for storing their newfound wealth, there was really only one option: The dwarven-run Hammersong Vaults.

Second, when designing the back story of what had happened during their amnesia I had followed the exact same thought process. Where would they go? Not the exclusive banks servicing the Merchant Houses. They’d have rented space in the Hammersong Vaults.

Third, one of the players needed to have the inspired insight to realize that their amnesiac selves might have done the exact same thing they just did.

And, in fact, they had. Which is just so unspeakably cool.

And when people ask, “Why would you want a 650 page tome detailing a city in such lavish detail?” this story is basically the answer to that question. It creates these moments of immense immersion by granting the game world a sense of concrete reality; turning it into an incredibly detailed sandbox for the players (and GM) to manipulate and experience.

So how was this “supposed” to play out? Well, as I’ve mentioned before, the investigation of their lost memories was a multi-stage process that was triggered over time by a number of different revelations that would each lead to meta-investigations. One of these triggered revelations was supposed to lead them to where they had hidden their key to the Hammersong Vaults, which they could have traced back to the vaults and used to access the vault they had rented.

Ironically, when this triggered event came along much later, they never figured it out and, thus, never found the key. Which means that if Ranthir hadn’t made this intuitive leap, they probably never would have found their old vault.

As it was, I was able to use their lack of a key to temporarily delay their access to the vault. (Although there were other options: They could have broken in, for example.) I did this primarily for reasons of balance, but it ended up paying off in the long run: The anticipation of waiting for the day when they would be able to access the vaults massively ramped up the sense of accomplishment because they were constantly being reminded of it, and, commensurately, cranked up the satisfaction of the reward they eventually received.

It was, after all, well earned.

METHUL = HELMUT

Tee had often speculated that Helmut might, in fact, be the mysterious Methul Watcher: “Methul” was an anagram of “Helmut”, and Helmut was an astronomer – a Watcher of the skies.

Here we see one of the unexpected perils of using pre-published material.

In this case, I had heavily modified the original scenario (which is found in the Ptolus corebook) and added additional layers of conspiracy and intrigue around the identity of “Methul Watcher”… all of which became completely irrelevant because, as Tee noted, “Methul” is an anagram of “Helmut”.

Tee’s logic here is, in fact, so unassailable that I have to believe that this was deliberately done by Monte Cook. Unfortunately, Cook neglected to mention this in the published adventure and I, unlike Tee, didn’t notice it.

So here, too, I was caught completely flat-footed by the cunning insights of my players.

I could use more “problems” like this.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

SESSION 9C: JADE

October 21st, 2007
The 27th Day of Amseyl in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

RANTHIR REVEALS THE COMPASS

On the way back to the Ghostly Minstrel, Ranthir finally had a chance to discuss the appearance of the Iron Mage and the compass he had given to him. Ranthir had checked the compass at several intervals throughout the day, and found it pointing in different directions depending on when he looked at it. His first inclination had been to suspect that the compass was pointing towards some specific location… but this was quickly dashed when he realized it had been pointing north when he had been given the compass in Oldtown and, later, pointing south when he had been almost directly east in Midtown.

The others had little insight to give on the compass itself, but Elestra and Tee were both aware of the Iron Mage. He was something of a legendary figure in Ptolus. He would appear at random – just as he had for Ranthir – give seemingly nonsensical instructions and then disappear again. The purpose behind some of these random actions would become clear days or weeks or even years later, but others were without any true explanation. What his true goals and aims were no one could say for certain, but those who helped him were usually rewarded.

ELESTRA AND THE DREAMING APOTHECARY, PART 3

That night, Elestra placed the purple token of the Dreaming Apothecary under her pillow.

In the middle of the night she was awakened to discover a woman with long blond hair floating in the middle of her room. She was sitting in the lotus position and surrounded by a softly glowing halo of light.

In the brief conversation that followed, the woman explained to Elestra that the Dreaming Apothecary could provide her with any magic item she might desire… for the right price. Elestra discussed the enchantment she wanted placed upon her sword, but it became clear that – at least for the moment – it was beyond Elestra’s ability to afford.

The woman smiled, and assured Elestra that – when she had the money – she had only to place the token beneath her pillow again and the Dreaming Apothecary would fulfill her needs. Then she slowly faded from sight, and Elestra found herself slipping back into a deep slumber…

RETURN TO GREYSON HOUSE

(08/28/790)

The next morning, with no pressing crises to distract them, the group resolved to return to the passageways beneath Greyson House.

It had been nearly a week since they were last at the house. The boards on the door had been replaced, but Agnarr simply ripped them loose again. Reaching the pit of chaos was a walk of nearly twenty minutes, and the subterranean passages seemed as empty and deserted as they had before.

Beyond the pit of chaos they moved carefully back into the complex of rooms in which they had been assaulted by the strange creatures they were now referring to as bloodwights.

Moving through the large entry chamber, they carefully moved into the warren of small rooms that they had been attempting to explore before being overcome. There didn’t appear to be any creatures left in the open, so Tee and Agnarr moved methodically from one door to the next, slamming them open and instantly attacking anything that lay within.

A handful of the desiccated corpses were quickly eradicated in this way, with Agnarr’s flaming greatsword reducing them to dust before they had a chance to shed their cocoons of dead skin.

With the complex of small rooms secured, the rest of the party kept watch in the outer chamber while Tee spent more than an hour scouring the area for anything of interest. She quickly discovered, mired in the dusty remnants of one of the rooms, a small hexagonal emblem of jade. A strange rune was carved into one side of the emblem, but none of them recognized it (at least, not immediately).

Tee also discovered a small cache hidden under a false flagstone. It contained a diamond ring, a few random coins, and a small portrait of a black-haired girl badly worn with age.

Once Tee was satisfied, the group moved across the outer chamber to the opposite door. After doing a cursory check for traps and other dangers, Tee prudently waited on the opposite side of the room while Agnarr opened the door and revealed a short hallway ending in another door.

Beyond this door lay a room filled with a massive contraption of brass, copper, and worm-eaten wood. Great hoops of metal were suspended about a central sphere, with various lumps, pulleys, cranks, and levers protruding here and there in an apparently chaotic and incomprehensible jumble.

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