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).

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

PRELUDE 2A: THE AWAKENING – RANTHIR

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 2: The Awakening – Ranthir

I started gaming in the summer of 1989. It was right around this time that I also discovered the local BBS scene in Rochester, MN — most notably the North Castle BBS. At the raging speeds made possible by a 1200 baud modem I was able to plug into the ADND FidoNet echo.

For those of you unfamiliar with FidoNet, it was similar to Usenet: A set of completely text-based messageboards. However, unlike Usenet, the individual BBSes that made up the FidoNet were not in perpetual contact with each other. Instead, during each day, the FidoNet systems would call each other during the ZoneMailHour (ZMH) and exchange messages. Local systems would push messages up to regional hubs and those hubs would circulate the message around the world and then push them back down to local systems.

Which meant that sometimes it would take you several days to see a message posted by someone else and sometimes you would see it immediately (if the person posting it was on the same BBS you were).

One of the features of the ADND FidoNet echo were the campaigns that were played through it. This was my earliest exposure to the concept of Play-By-Mail (PBM) games.

My first experience with roleplaying games was when I created my own. My second major experience was the true old school play of campaign-hopping characters, whipping out dungeons on graph paper, and playing during every possible stolen moment of the school day. But my third major experience was watching and playing in the PBEM (Play-By-Echo-Mail) games of the ADND echo.

Because of the asyncrhonous nature of communication, the ADND games all followed a similar structure: The DM would post a lengthy summary of events and then the players would respond. If they were facing a physical challenge or combat, player responses were usually tactical in nature — summarizing a strategy for the next several rounds of play instead of specifying particular actions. If it was a conversational situation, players would just start responding to each other’s messages.

But the asynchronous communication, of course, meant that not all of these responses necessarily meshed. (For example, you might have two characters both respond to a straight line with the same joke.) So, at some point, the DM would draw a line in the sand and end that particular phase of play. They would then gather up all the responses and summarize the official version of events. These summaries were referred to as “Moves”.

From my understanding, this system is similar to the original Play-By-Mail games which were played by physically posting letters — but with the added advantage that the players could actually talk to each other without the DM acting as an intermediary.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying: PBeM games had a major impact on my formative years as a gamer.

But, on the other hand, I profess that I have never seen a PBeM campaign end successfully. Even keeping a tabletop campaign together is difficult, and while it would seem as if the non-intensive nature of a PBeM would help keep it running… in practice the lack of any physical demand for attention means that players tend to just wander away and interest tends to atrophy.

Which is unfortunate, because — in my experience — PBeM play has some unique strengths. It lends itself particularly well, for example, to a more contemplative style of play. In ongoing tabletop campaigns, I’ve found PBeM to be a good way of dealing with certain types of side-action. It can also be used to fill in the occasional lengthy gap between playing sessions.

All of these features made PBeM play ideal for launching the Ptolus campaign: The characters were separated, the contemplative style gave the players time to ease themselves into their roles, and we had a gap of time before the campaign could start because of incompatible schedules.

(And if anyone reading this happens to have an archive of old FidoNet ADND games — particularly those run by Bruce Norman — I would dearly love to get a copy. I used to have a substantial archive myself, but it was wiped out by a bad floppy disk. Now I only have a handful of random moves that were tucked here and there.)