IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Character Background: Dominic Troya

With the first prelude concluded, we now move on to introducing the rest of the main characters for In the Shadow of the Spire, starting with an Imperial priest named Dominic Troya.

But while you’re reading that, I’m going to back up and continue talking about the first prelude featuring Tee and Agnarr. This prelude was a modified version of The Lost Vault of Tsathzar Rho, an adventure by Mike Mearls.

One of the issues I faced in designing the prelude was the non-standard party composition: Agnarr was a 1st-level barbarian and Tee was a 1st-level rogue. A barbarian is obviously pretty interchangeable with a fighter, but that still left two of the four core roles — cleric and wizard — unfilled.

But, truth be told, I find the typical hand-wringing over the need for a “standard party” to be a trifle overwrought. I’ve played with lots of odd-sized and odd-classed parties in D&D before, and I’ve virtually never found it to be a problem.

The one exception I’ve found is the mostly immutable need for some form of magical healing. Combat in D&D is strongly designed around the hit-and-heal cycle: The game assumes that you’re going to get hit and that you will then be healed.

Everything else, in my experience, is negotiable. Yes, if you’re missing other key roles in the party they will be missed. Without the consistency of a fighter, adventuring days will probably be shorter. Without the firepower of an arcanist, more powerful enemies will need to be avoided. Without a rogue, traps will become far more dangerous. And so forth. But, as I talked about in Fetishizing Balance, this is just a matter of adjusting the difficulty of encounters and the style of gameplay to suit the characters that the players want to play.

In fact, I’ve even played in a couple of short adventures without magical healing. This isn’t so much impossible as it is radically different. Without magical healing, combat in D&D almost instantly turns into a grim ‘n gritty exercise. Wounds take days or weeks to heal and any kind of serious injury — which can be almost trivial to receive — will force the party into rehabilitation. Hit point inflation still makes it possible for higher level characters to pull off some amazing things, but they’ll suffer for it.

In the case of the prelude, however, this grim ‘n gritty environment wasn’t what I was shooting for. (In no small part because I was using a published adventure as a foundation and I would have had to pretty much toss out the whole thing.) So I targeted the party’s shortcoming — magical healing — and provided a healing totem that had been given to Agnarr by the shamans of his tribe.

Mechanically this was basically just a wand of cure light wounds that worked with a command word instead of a spell trigger (so that it could be used without having a cleric in the party). And, if you’ll pardon the pun, it worked like a charm. Several encounters still needed to be adjusted due to the smaller group size, but with a large supply of magical healing available to them the barbarian and the rogue were still able to enjoy traditional-style romp through a dungeon crawl.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

PRELUDE 1B: THE LOST VAULTS CONTINUED

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IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Prelude 1B: The Lost Vaults Continued

Before our first proper session of In the Shadow of the Spire, I offered to run prelude sessions for any players who were interested. I had never done this before, but I had several reasons for trying it now:

(1) We had some scheduling problems which meant that there was about a three week gap between creating the PCs and starting the campaign. It wasn’t that people weren’t available to play — it was just that we were never all available to play at the same time.

(2) I knew that the campaign was going to start as the PCs woke up with partial amnesia and a period of lost time. I felt this might have a larger impact if the players had actually spent some time playing their characters — in other words, if they actually lost the time.

Because without that first-hand experience, there isn’t that much difference between a character background that ends with the line “… and then you go to the Adventurers ‘R Us Tavern” and one that ends with “… and then you wake up in a bed you don’t know.”

(3) Because most of us were new to the online tools we were using for our virtual gaming table, I thought it might be advantageous to tackle them with smaller groups and work out the kinks.

This experiment with preludes was something of a mixed success. On the one hand, I was mostly right: The smaller groups let us work out the kinks of using the virtual gaming table, the preludes let us get some gaming into a gap when we would have otherwise been idle, and those who participated did feel the effects of the lost time more personally than those who didn’t. (In fact, when one of the players realized what I was doing at the end of the prelude session, they spontaneously exclaimed, “Son of a bitch!”)

On the other hand, only the prelude featuring Tee and Agnarr actually happened. The scheduling for the others just never worked out. Some of the material from those preludes was worked into the character backgrounds of the other characters, but most of it wasn’t.

The prelude had a few other notable effects:

First, it meant that Tee and Agnarr started the campaign at 3rd-level while the others started at 1st-level.

Second, it created a meaningful chemistry between Tee and Agnarr that the other characters didn’t have at the beginning of the campaign. All of the characters (and players) quickly bonded, but I think the instant Tee-Agnarr alliance helped propel Tee into a stronger leadership position.

The original plan had been for two other characters to similarly share an adventure together. Some of that survived into the character backgrounds and, from there, into the actual campaign, but there really is a difference between something that you write up in a character background and something that you’ve “lived” in play. I suspect that if the other preludes had taken place, there would have been a second strong pairing and the group dynamic would have been very different for the rest of the campaign.

Finally, the content of the preludes wasn’t irrelevant to the larger themes and events of the campaign. Many hints and clues could be gleaned from the events that took place (or would have taken place) during the prelude adventures. Most of the content from the other preludes was not included in their character backgrounds, which meant that this material would emerge in different ways throughout the rest of the campaign.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

PRELUDE 1A: THE LOST VAULTS

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IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Prelude 1A: The Lost Vaults

Now we get to the start of the actual campaign journal — the chronicling of what actually happened at the (virtual) game table.

Writing the campaign journal is actually the most time-consuming part of running a game for me. I spend more time maintaining the campaign journal than I do prepping the adventures or running them. So why do I bother?

(1) The campaign journal is an invaluble reference tool for both me and the players while the campaign is actually running. In the Shadow of the Spire, for example, started in February 2007. Events that happened in those very first sessions continue to be relevant a year and a half later. So being able to quickly reference those events is important.

(2) I have a finely tuned sense of nostalgia. Any RPG session results in a unique story created by the GM and the players. These stories don’t function particularly well as narrative constructs, but when viewed as a chronicle of events I think they can actually be quite fascinating. I have many fond memories from the gaming table and, when a campaign is all said and done, I enjoy going back to read the campaign journals and having those memories refreshed. The campaign journal may take a lot of time in its own right, but it also greatly extends the long-term enjoyment to be gleaned from the campaign.

The desire for a reference tool and the concept that a campaign journal is a chronicle of events have come to shape the format I use for my journals. Most notably, I use bullet-pointed paragraphs. This evolved out of my earlier campaign journals (which were literally just bullet-point lists of events that would read something like “Talbar went to the temple” without any kind of supporting detail; the journals were more like cheat sheets for the session designed to jog our faulty memories). But I’ve also found it to be a useful psychological trick: If I’m writing in standard paragraphs, I tend to slip into trying to structure events into a narrative. This is more difficult and time-consuming. It also tends to distort events.

(For example, when Shakespeare wrote Henry V he didn’t try to record what Henry did every day. Instead he distilled those events into a compelling narrative structure. When I’m writing a campaign journal, on the other hand, I am trying to record what the PCs did every day.)

Which brings us to the next question: How accurate is this recounting of events?

Lots of campaign journals will try to polish or jazz up what actually took place at the gaming table. Events will end up being just a little bit more dramatic; dialogue will be a little more eloquent; and everything will come off just a little bit cooler.

For the most part, I try to avoid that temptation. Partly, again, because I’m shooting for an accurate reference tool. But also because I like to humor myself into thinking that we’re plenty awesome without needing to revise the historical record.

Which isn’t to say that there isn’t an editorial process: Routine shopping trips will frequently hit the cutting room floor. Lengthy conversations will be summarized or edited down to the salient points. But virtually all of this takes the form of deciding what not to write about, rather than altering anything. Basically, if you read it in the journal than that actually happened at my gaming table.

(And even with the editorial process I’ll err on the side of conservation. If I had a nickel for every time the PCs suddenly decided to make contact with the scribe they hired 10 sessions ago… Well, I’d have a nickel. But you get the point.)

SPOILERS: It should go without saying that the journal will contain various spoilers for the Ptolus sourcebook. However, other chunks of the campaign are drawn from various published modules. When that happens, a spoiler warning identifying the source will be affixed to the top of the relevant journal entry.

PICTURES: Pictures featured in the campaign journal are almost always pillaged from other sources. Whenever possible, these pictures are hyperlinked to the original source. For example, the map of Stonemarten Village in today’s journal entry was pulled from Grailquest 2: Den of Dragons.