IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Prelude 2: The Awakening – Tee

In which our heroine elf awakes to a welcome (yet surprising) homecoming, only to discover that things are not always what they seem and the past is not so easily forgotten (even if it has been completely misplaced)…

When I pitched In the Shadow of the Spire to my prospective players the campaign didn’t even have a name yet. Actually, it didn’t have much form at all. I only knew two things:

(1) I had pre-ordered Ptolus and it would be arriving within a couple of weeks. I already knew enough about the city to know that I wanted to run an urban-based campaign there, but I (obviously) didn’t know a lot of the details.

(2) I wanted to incorporate the Banewarrens adventure into the campaign. I first read this adventure back in 2002 and I’d been itching to run it ever since. In some ways I had actually started laying the groundwork for this campaign way back then, when the players in my original 3rd Edition campaign passed through the port city of Ptolus and saw the Spire for the first time:

(That’s a player handout modified from a DM-only reference image.)

As I started wading through the Ptolus tome and the campaign began to take shape in my mind’s eye, one of the things I realized early on was that the PCs shouldn’t be from Ptolus itself. It would be more interesting, in my opinion, if their characters were exploring the city with the same fresh eyes that they were. It would also be more disorienting (for both players and PCs) to awake with amnesia in completely unfamiliar surroundings.

Those of you who have been reading the campaign journal from the start, however, may have noticed a slight incongruity here: Tithenmamiwen is from Ptolus.

No plan, however, survives contact with the enemy… or, in this case, the players.

Actually, though, trying to push this one off on the player is a bit disingenuous on my part. Tee’s player simply came to me with the idea of playing an elf. The character concept she was discussing in general terms, however, struck off all kinds of resonance for me with the work I had just recently put into fleshing out some of the elven communities in Ptolus itself.

Taking a step back, I realized that it made more sense to tap into this pre-existing development work and use it as part of Tee’s background. I also came to the conclusion that variety is the spice of life: Yes, it was interesting to have both players and PCs coming to the city with fresh eyes. And, yes, that lack of familiarity was disorienting.

But there was also something inherently interesting in the broken homecoming experienced by Tee: She had left home for reasons she didn’t fully understand and now she was back again for reasons she didn’t even know. There was a disoriention to be found there as well, and a useful contrapuntal beat to the other characters.

This decision also had some long-term consequences that I hadn’t fully considered. For example, Tee had a greater sense of ownership in the city than the other PCs… which meant that her reputation was important to her from Day One. She needed to be able to live there when all was said and done, which meant that she helped to keep some of the more radical impulses of the group in check.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

PRELUDE 2C: THE AWAKENING – AGNARR

PBeM – March 5th thru 9th, 2007
The 15th Day of Amseyl  in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

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IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Prelude 2C: The Awakening – Agnarr

In which our hero awakes on the softest bed and pillow he’s ever laid his head upon. (Could it really be stuffed with feathers?)  And many other astonishing sights and sounds are to be seen and heard.

One of the advantages of using Ptolus as a setting is the wealth of graphical resources available for the setting. The big book itself is packed full of full-color illustrations, maps, symbols, and all manner of such things.

For example, there’s the Ghostly Minstrel — an inn and tavern specifically designed to service delvers, wanderers, and adventurers of all sorts. Here’s what it looks like:

Illustration from Ptolus: City by the Spire

It’s located in Delver’s Square, a plaza of small businesses dedicated to profiting off the gold-rush explorers of the caverns and complexes beneath the city. It, too, is illustrated. And so, when Agnarr looked out the window in this week’s installment, I was able to show his player:

Illustration from Ptolus: City by the Spire

I also spent $5.00 to pick up the Ptolus: Deluxe City Map supplement, so if I wanted to I could print this out as a handout for my players:

Illustration from Ptolus: Deluxe City Map

(When snipped out of the deluxe map, that defaults to a 7.5″ x 7.5″ image.)

And since I was planning to use the Ghostly Minstrel as the initial homebase for the campaign, I also spent $4.50 on Ptolus Adventure Maps: Ghostly Minstrel. This wonderful product gave me beautiful, miniature-scaled maps of the Ghostly Minstrel. Since the campaign has moved to the table-top, these maps have proved ridiculously useful over and over again — whether the PCs are getting ambushed in their rooms or surprising gangsters in the entry hall.

And most of the time, it’s not even about combat: Being able to show the crowded common room by actually showing the crowded common room is delightful. And just having this kind of visual reference, I think, helped to make the Ghostly Minstrel feel more like home.

It also meant, as the PCs were waking up in strange rooms with no memory of how they had gotten there, I could pretty much instantaneously prep handouts like this one:

Agnarr’s Room

“Here’s what you see. Now, what do you do?” That type of handout immediately raises questions. What’s in those dressers? What’s beyond the door? What can I see out the windows?

Even if I had the artistic chops to pull off this kind of work on my own (and I don’t), it’s still incredibly rewarding to have this kind of graphical panoply to draw upon. To be sure, the Ghostly Minstrel is an exceptional example of what Ptolus offers as a gaming resource — but the detail of the Deluxe City Map alone (which may be the best $5 I’ve ever spent) is enough to guarantee that, if I want it, there’s no place in the city that I can’t give some sort of visual reference for.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

PRELUDE 2B: THE AWAKENING – DOMINIC

PBeM – March 5th thru 9th, 2007
The 15th Day of Amseyl  in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

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IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Prelude 2B: The Awakening – Dominic

In this installment of the campaign journal, you’ll find some custom-made, Latin-esque spell names and a prayer to Vehthyl, the God of Magic. Both of these were created by Dominic’s player, who simply spun them out of wholecloth during our PBeM sessions.

I really appreciated him doing this.

I know from personal experience that releasing some of your control over the game world can be difficult for a GM to do. But this type of player-initiated world-building should be encouraged for a number of reasons.

First, getting the players to care about the game world is actually quite difficult. Lectures rarely get processed. And even the focused world-briefings I hand out before a campaign rarely make much of an impression. (In the case of Ptolus, I have — on multiple occasions — been able to treat information from the pre-campaign handouts as mysteries that the PCs have to track down information about. The players haven’t noticed. In another instance, events in the same handouts were effecively retconned when I realized it would be more interesting for the PCs to play through those events. At this point, I would actually prefer it if the players didn’t read this and try to track down their copies of those handouts.)

But if the player creates the information themselves? That’s something that they’ll remember. That’s a thread that you can weave into the wider tapestry — and if they follow that thread that they’ve created, then they’ll have a chance to see part of the bigger picture.

Second, you can use this material as a pretty solid indicator of what the player cares about. If he’s designing rituals and heraldry for the order of knighthood his character has joined, you can pretty quickly identify the order as being important. That means that hooks and scenarios involving the order will be effective.

Third, no GM has an infinite amount of time on their hands. If your players are willing to be a resource, you should be willing to take advantage of that. Someone has mapped out the floorplan for their liege lord’s castle? Awesome. When assassins break into the castle, the player has already designed the scenario maps for you.

And won’t he be surprised to discover that there’s a secret passage in that castle that neither he nor his character ever knew about!

Which leads me to my next point: In most roleplaying games, it’s still the GM’s world. And for a large variety of reasons, the GM still needs to be able to exert some control over it. Which means that some ideas may need to be vetoed.

But I’d recommend using a “soft veto” if at all possible. If someone cares enough to put the time and the effort into creating something original and unique, then I think it’s worth your time to try to figure out how you can make it work for them. I have two varieties of soft veto:

THE SOFT VETO: “This looks good, but can we change X and Y?” For example, I remember a campaign from years ago where a player wanted to run a Scottish highlander. Now, my D&D campaign world at the time didn’t feature anything even remotely resembling the Scottish highlands. We took an underdeveloped kingdom on another continent and worked it over until it gave her what she wanted. She didn’t get the kilt that she wanted, but she was able to play the character that she wanted to play.

THE SOFTEST VETO: Sometimes I allow a “questionable” element into one campaign only to drop it from the game world after the campaign has been completed. This is for stuff that doesn’t quite mesh with my vision of what the game world looks like, but isn’t so problematic that there’s any good reason to reject it for a player who wants it.

But the truth is that player-created content is often pretty awesome. At some point I’m going to be able to properly utilize the element-worshipping Talbarites — a religious sect given its genesis entirely by a PC named Talbar (who, in a different campaign, was played by the creator of Agnarr the Barbarian).