DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 36C: Hunting the Hunters

They headed back up to Oldtown and gathered Ranthir from the Nibeck Street mansion. From there they retraced Elestra’s steps, rapidly tracking the query-laden trail of the cultists who had been asking after “Laurea”.

They caught up with them in the Boiling Pot, a small tavern in the southern end of Oldtown. There were five of the cultists – easily picked out from the crowd by their prominent tattoos depicting black hands. Each also appeared to be marked by some horrible deformity or mutation. They were scattered throughout the crowd, asking their questions.

Tor and Tee, having barely stepped through the door, turned to look at each other – forming a plan of action in less than a glance. They split off from the others (who were left somewhat confused near the door). Tor headed into the crowd, quietly warning people that they should leave. Tee, meanwhile, palmed a dagger and headed towards a cultist who was draped over the bar, favoring a hideously twisted arm.

What’s described in the journal here is basically what happened at the table: Tee’s player and Tor’s player look at each other and, without saying a word, knew exactly what their play was going to be. The other players were momentarily baffled and just kind of carried along in their wake.

This sort of thing, at both macro- and micro-scales, will happen all the time in an RPG campaign as the group racks up time playing together. You’ll spend less time talking your way through all the options and more time knowing exactly what’s going to happen next.

You can often see this in a very tangible way during combat. It’s one of the x-factors that make challenge ratings and similar encounter building tools “unreliable,” because groups that get into this groove will not only make fewer mistakes, they’ll start discovering collaborative tactics and synergies between their characters that can greatly increase their effectiveness both tactically and strategically.

It’s also why I think, in a game like D&D, it’s important for PCs to spend at least three sessions at each level. Because it’s deeply rewarding to learn new abilities, play around with them for a bit, and then master them before adding even more new stuff. And what we’re kind of talking about here is that there’s even another level beyond mastering our own character’s abilities, and that’s when you start mastering the other PCs’ abilities: You know what they need. You know how to set things up for them. You know what weaknesses they have and how you can defend them.

But as you can see from the example of this session, this sort of party chemistry – the collective mastery of the group – extends beyond combat. Whether it’s solving mysteries or masterminding heists, the group will be learning what techniques work best, and they’ll be refining those techniques with experience. Where do you look for clues? How do you gather intel on your target? Who’s best at this? Who enjoys doing it the most? (Try to get these last two to align… although breaking up these patterns of behavior and seeing what happens when people are thrust into unfamiliar circumstances can also be fun.)

Another fairly concrete example of this is splitting the party: When the PCs need to do X, which subgroup becomes their go-to? If you’re a player, consciously realizing that this is a thing and consciously thinking about how you can improve your results can be a really big deal. If you’re the GM, recognizing these patterns can allow you to either play into them with confidence OR spice things up a bit by deliberately challenging the easy habits of the group. (When they need to do X, that’s usually character A. But when they need to do Y, they usually send A, B, and C to do it. Well… if you frame things up so that X and Y need to happen at the same time, then the players will feel pressure. Where is A most needed?

Along these same lines, something else that can be easy to overlook is that, as the GM, you’re ALSO part of the group. As you run more and more game, it’s not just that you’re gaining more experience as a GM. It’s that you’re gaining more experience running games for that specific group. You’ll learn the types of stuff the group likes to do, and you’ll figure out better ways of handling the actions they propose. You’ll also learn how to counter their best shots. (And there’s endless philosophical debates about how/when/if it’s appropriate for you to do that.)

And it’s not just about how you handle them at the table. This chemistry with the group, and understanding that each group’s chemistry is unique, will also improve your prep: You’ll figure out not only what you should be prepping to be “ready” for the players, but also what will let you rise to the opportunity and help them soar.

Campaign Journal: Session 36D – Running the Campaign: Missing the Obvious
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

SESSION 36C: HUNTING THE HUNTERS

January 24th, 2009
The 19th Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

CATCHING THE HUNTER’S SCENT

While the others had gone to Mahdoth’s and the Hammersong Vaults, Elestra had been walking the streets of Oldtown. Two stories were competing among the newssheets, the rumor-mongers, and the tavern-hangers. Headlines proclaiming “Blood in the Bathhouse” and the like led stories relating to the events in the Row Bathhouse, while “Vile Rites Performed in Oldtown” spoke of what the City Watch had discovered in the Oldtown apartment complex used by the cultists.

Their involvement in both affairs were not the subject of wagging tongues, but there were other whispers circling through the city: People were asking all over town for “Laurea” (the pseudonym Tee had used with the cultists).

It was nearing the time when they would need to refresh the alarm they had placed on the door in the Banewarrens. Ranthir volunteered to do so and remain behind, freeing Elestra to return to the Ghostly Minstrel with the others.

On the way, they returned the golden key to Tee’s vault and stopped by the Temple of Asche to relieve the en it had placed on her soul. When they reached  Delver’s Square, Tee let the others head into the inn ahead of her while she went down into the Undermarket to check in with the Delver’s Guild. There she found waiting for her a message to “Laurea” from the cultists:

YOUR PAYMENT WILL BE IN KIND.

Grimacing, Tee went to join the others in Ghostly Minstrel. But even there they discovered that Iltumar had been asking around the common room earlier that day for “Laurea”.

“Oh, Iltumar…” Tee murmured.

HUNTING THE HUNTERS

They needed to deal with this before it got out of hand. The good news, at least, was that Tee’s true identity hadn’t been discovered. At least not yet. But they feared it was only a matter of time. “They’ve got descriptions for all of us,” as Elestra put it.

They headed back up to Oldtown and gathered Ranthir from the Nibeck Street mansion. From there they retraced Elestra’s steps, rapidly tracking the query-laden trail of the cultists who had been asking after “Laurea”.

They caught up with them in the Boiling Pot, a small tavern in the southern end of Oldtown. There were five of the cultists – easily picked out from the crowd by their prominent tattoos depicting black hands. Each also appeared to be marked by some horrible deformity or mutation. They were scattered throughout the crowd, asking their questions.

Tor and Tee, having barely stepped through the door, turned to look at each other – forming a plan of action in less than a glance. They split off from the others (who were left somewhat confused near the door). Tor headed into the crowd, quietly warning people that they should leave. Tee, meanwhile, palmed a dagger and headed towards a cultist who was draped over the bar, favoring a hideously twisted arm.

Tee tried to strike up a conversation with the cultist at the bar, trying to get some sense of whether the cultists were still asking after “Laurea” or if they had some inkling that it was a false identity.

Tor’s ministrations, however, didn’t go unnoticed. One of the cultists, seeing what he was doing, started crossing the tavern towards him. As the cultist’s hand landed on Tor’s shoulder, however, Tee sprung into her action – her palmed dagger easily gutted the cultist in front of her.

Confusion instantly exploded from one side of the tavern to the other. Two more cultists rushed her from either side, but Tee slit the throat of one while drawing her rapier to run the other through.

Tor meanwhile had drawn his own blade with preternatural speed and leveled it at the throat of the cultist who had approached him (taking advantage of the confusion Tee had created on the other side of the room). “Yield.”

The cultist went for his sword and Tor cut open his throat. The last cultist came running up behind him and was almost instantly cut him down as well.

The entire blood-soaking confrontation had taken only seconds.

Tor turned to face the remaining patrons, who were mostly frozen in shock. “Sorry about that. We were hoping to get you out of here before what needed to happen happened.”

The bartender was incensed. “Who’s going to clean up all this blood?!”

Tee dropped ten gold pieces onto the bar.

The bartender immediately scooped them up. “I’m going to clean up this blood… Now if you wouldn’t mind leaving before the watch shows up.”

Tee quickly had Ranthir write a note (using his great skill with pen and ink to scribe it in a different hand):

PAYMENT NOT NECESSARY.

Using a common dagger, she fastened it crudely to one of the dead cultist thugs.

Running the Campaign: Group Chemistry – Campaign Journal: Session 36D
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 36B: The Madness of Mahdoth

But this time their conversation returned to the strange, obsidian box that Ranthir had found in his rooms upon awaking for the first time at the Ghostly Minstrel.

“I really want to know what’s in there,” Tee said.

“Maybe it’s a magic box. Maybe our memories are trapped inside,” Ranthir said, only half-joking. “We just open the box and we get our memories back.”

But wishing the box open wouldn’t make it happen…

… unless they’d been over-looking the solution.

“What about the key from Pythoness House?” Tor asked. “The one that can open any lock?”

In Night of Dissolution, the published adventure mini-campaign by Monte Cook that I’m using for part of In the Shadow of the Spire, everything kicks off when the PCs fight a couple ogres and end up with a treasure chest they can’t open. Due to some strong warding, they’re meant to conclude that the only way to open the chest is by obtaining Neveran’s all-key, a powerful magical device that (a) can open any door and (b) was last seen in Pythoness House.

This hooks the PCs and send them to Pythoness House, where they eventually obtain the all-key and open the chest (which contains some miscellaneous magic items).

For a published scenario, this is a pretty good scenario hook. But published scenarios, of course, are extremely limited in the types of scenario hooks they can use: The writer doesn’t know who your PCs are and they don’t know what’s going on in your campaign, so they can obviously only present broad, generic hooks.

(I talk about this more in my video on Better Scenario Hooks.)

In the case of this specific hook, it means that:

• The ogres are basically just a random encounter.
• The hook to the all-key is a little weak. (The PCs are just supposed to make a Knowledge check to remember that the all-key exists and that it might help them.)
• The stuff inside the chest are just generic magic items.

The all-key itself is, notably, also just a McGuffin: Its function is to get the PCs to Pythoness House, where they’ll start getting wrapped up in the lore and machinations of the chaos cults that will drive the rest of Night of Dissolution, but it remains largely irrelevant to any of those events (except insofar as the PCs might make use of it, of course).

A generic hook like this in a published adventure isn’t really a flaw. (It’s not as if Monte Cook can magically divine what will be happening in your campaign.) But, as a GM, you should definitely view them as an opportunity.

And what makes the hook from Night of Dissolution pretty good, as I mentioned, is that Cook has seeded it with a bunch of juicy elements that you can easily leverage.

• The ogres carrying the chest: Where did they get it? Who are they delivering it to? Where do the PCs encounter them, exactly?
• Of course, the ogres aren’t required: A chest that cannot be opened. You could find that almost anywhere.
• And what’s in the chest? You can swap out the generic magic items for almost anything that the PCs might want or need.

Think about whatever campaign you’re running right now (whether it’s a D&D campaign or not): What could you put into a box the PCs can’t open that would be vitally important to them? Or, alternatively, who could the box belong to that would make finding it feel likely a completely natural and organic part of your game?

In my case, I knew that I was going to use Night of Dissolution as part of Act II in my campaign even before the campaign began. (We’ve previously discussed how the triggers for Act II were set up.) This meant that I could not only weave the box and all-key into the ongoing events of the campaign, I could also weave it into the PCs’ backgrounds during character creation.

In this case, this just meant that the PCs started the campaign with the box they couldn’t open, presenting an immediate enigma that was tied into the larger mystery of their amnesia.

The contents of the box were, of course, further keyed to that mystery and are, in fact, laying the groundwork for triggers much later in the campaign, too. (No spoilers here! You’ll just have to wait and find out like my players!)

The other thing I wanted to work on was the link from “box you can’t open” to the all-key: A simple skill check felt unsatisfying, and hoping that a player would spontaneously think, “Hey! Let’s do some research into magic items that could help us open this box!” wasn’t exactly reliable.

But I could make it reliable by just scripting it into their amnesia: During their period of lost time, they had done exactly that research, found the answer, and then hired Shim to locate the all-key, setting in motion the chain of events that would have Shim unexpectedly arrive and deliver the information to them.

(It was also possible, of course, that they actually could think to do research and ironically retrace the steps I had scripted for their former selves: That might have led to Pythoness House by a completely different path. Or it might have led them straight back to Shim again. Either way… mission accomplished!)

And that’s all it really took to take a generic McGuffin and integrate deeply into the fabric of the campaign.

Campaign Journal: Session 36C – Running the Campaign: Group Chemistry
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

SESSION 36B: THE MADNESS OF MAHDOTH

January 24th, 2009
The 19th Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

Leaving Castle Shard, they headed down into South Market. There they found Mahdoth’s Asylum – a small, rather nondescript building on Childseye Street.

They were greeted in the small, rather dingy offices of the asylum by a plain-faced, brown-haired man who introduced himself as Danneth Sonnell.

“Ah… I believe you sent me a letter, sir,” Ranthir said with a slight smile.

“And you are, sir?”

“Master Ranthir.”

“Ah, of course. Yes. I am glad that you have come.”

Danneth led them down a back stair into a basement of remarkable size. Not only its scope, but the stonework of its construction was quite out of keeping with the plain wooden construction above. (It had almost certainly been repurposed from some older structure.) They were taken through several rooms and then into a long hall lined with iron-doored cells.

Halfway down this hall a figure suddenly threw himself against the bars of the nearest door: “Please! Get them out of here! Get them out! They’re driving me mad!”

Danneth quickly crossed to the door and shut the outer shutter, but not before they had recognized the prisoner as the dwarf who had been summoning fell creatures during Tavan Zith’s escapade through Oldtown.

At the end of the hall they turned into another, similarly lined with cells. Danneth led them to one of the doors along this hall, removed a large ring of keys from his belt, and unlocked it.

“What exactly do you want us to do?” Tee asked.

“I honestly don’t know,” Danneth said. “When he is not asking for Master Ranthir he simply raves.”

“What’s his name?”

“Tabaen Farsong, an elf of House Erthuo.”

They exchanged glances and shrugs. None of them recognized the name.

Danneth opened the door. Crouched against the far side of the cell, feebly pawing at the wall and murmuring inarticulately under his breath, was a scrawny figure dressed in shabby clothes. As the inmate looked up they saw that it was another of Tavan Zith’s victims: The elf who had been driven mad during the ordeal.

Tabaen’s eyes seemed drawn to Ranthir’s, locking his gaze upon the mage. He said in a desperate, sibilant whisper: “A key. A noble key. You know the door. The key is the hand which will open the door. You have to get it. You have to get in to keep them out. A key which is a hand and a staff which is a knife. Many dangers. So many evils!”

The words poured out of his mouth, but as soon as they were done the elf’s eyes emptied of thought and he sank back against the wall.

Danneth rushed to his side and quickly examined him. “There’s no response.”

“He’s comatose?” Dominic asked.

Danneth nodded.

“I’m sorry,” Ranthir said, sincerely abashed.

Danneth shook his head. “I don’t know. This might be for the best. At least his mind is at rest.”

“They’re here master!”

The sudden cry had come from the far end of the hall. Looking that way they saw a dark-haired halfling peering around the corner.

There was a moment of puzzlement and then, floating into view from around the corner, came a beholder.

“What’s happening here?” The beholder’s voice was gruff and impatient. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

“We were summoned,” Tee said brashly. “Who are you?”

“My name is Mahdoth. This is my asylum. You are not welcome here.”

Danneth emerged from the cell.

“Master, I—“

“I told you that there were to be no visitors here.”

Danneth fell silent.

Mahdoth turned to the rest of them. “Leave. Now.”

Tee walked up to him. “You’re being very rude. We were asked to be here.”

Mahdoth glowered down at her with his large eye. “Danneth should not have brought you here.”

“That’s between you and him.”

“Zairic, show them out.”

The obsequious halfling scuttled forward and escorted them out of the complex. As they walked down the street away from Mahdoth’s, they chatted briefly about the encounter.

“Do you think he was hiding something?” Ranthir asked.

“I’m sure of it,” Tee said. “On one of his eye-stalks he was wearing a bone ring.”

THE ALL-KEY AND THE CODEX

When they returned to the mansion on Nibeck Street, they found Elestra waiting for them. they ran through the now familiar checklist of unanswered questions and tasks left uncompleted. But this time their conversation returned to the strange, obsidian box that Ranthir had found in his rooms upon awaking for the first time at the Ghostly Minstrel.

“I really want to know what’s in there,” Tee said.

“Maybe it’s a magic box. Maybe our memories are trapped inside,” Ranthir said, only half-joking. “We just open the box and we get our memories back.”

But wishing the box open wouldn’t make it happen…

… unless they’d been over-looking the solution.

“What about the key from Pythoness House?” Tor asked. “The one that can open any lock?”

“Would that work?” Tee asked. “There were no moving parts in the lock.”

Ranthir shrugged. “I don’t know. It might.”

And so, quite unexpectedly, they turned towards the Hammersong Vaults. There Tee removed the golden key from her lockbox (immediately feeling the heavy weight of its soul-wearying effect) and Ranthir retrieved the obsidian box from his. They returned with both of them to the Banewarrens and rendezvoused with Elestra. They quickly explained their plan to her.

“That might be why we were looking for they key in the first place!” Elestra exclaimed.

“Here goes nothing,” Tee said. She slipped the key into the feature-less lock of the obsidian box.

It turned effortlessly.

Tee felt the strength of her soul pulled through the key and into the lock. In the same instant, a thin sliver of light spread along the box’s impenetrable seam. A moment later the lid popped open with a burst of stale air.

FLASHBACKS

In that moment, Tee found her vision turned inward: There was an echoing, thundering crash… and she found herself stepping through a wall of broken stone and shattered shards of adamantine. Beyond it, in a small vault of sorts, there stood only two columns of stone. And atop each column was a solid block of obsidian, gleaming with a faint iridescence. And a voice spoke: “At last! The secrets of the Stonemages!”

Ranthir found himself sitting in an inn’s common room, hunched over a table. A fire roared a few feet away. He was speaking to an older man, with white hair and a well-trimmed beard. “I’ve found it. It’s being carried by a northern barbarian and an elven girl.”

Dominic and Elestra once again found themselves standing before the door of shadows upon the cliff-wall of the Northern Pass.

And, Agnarr, too found his thoughts cast back to the interior of a black coach. Tee was sitting there, fingering her necklace thoughtfully while gazing out over the landscape of green hills rolling past the carriage window.

WITHIN THE BROKEN BOX

The visions – as vivid as they were – lasted for only a moment and then they found themselves once more huddled around the box.

Lying within the box there was a small codex with pages of thick vellum and covers of banded, blackened adamantine.

With an air of exhaustion, Tee pulled the key out of the box. Ranthir eagerly scooped up the book. As he flipped through the book (discovering it to be written entirely in dwarven), Agnarr was playing with the lid of the box – opening and closing it, only to find that it could not be resealed.

None among them were familiar with dwarven characters, but Ranthir was hardly going to let that stand in their way now: With a wave of his hand he began to translate the text…

CODEX OF THE SHARD

(written in Dwarven)

A study of the Great Crystal, recovered from the ruins of Ibbok Turren in the 943^rd Year of the Great Thane.

These are the first words in a small codex with pages of thick vellum and covers of banded, blackened adamantine. The rest of the book is dedicated to a meticulous study of a small crystalline jewel. It is written in several distinct hands.

The jewel registers with an overwhelming magical aura, thwarting more mundane efforts at identifying its properties… while simultaneously deepening the evident curiosity of the writers.

• Various efforts aimed at creating “elemental sympathies”, “energetic repercussions”, and “lesser effect echoes” meet with failure. But dozens of pages are dedicated to each experiment.
• The experimenters then turn their attentions to divination magicks. These meet with unexpected reactions. Weaker divination spells seem more powerful in the presence of the crystal, but reveal nothing of the crystal itself – the term “reflection” is often used to describe the failure, although even the writer seems hazy on what exactly that means.
• When more powerful divination spells are attempted, the casters are apparently driven mad. Despite this, the effort is attempted three times.
• The third caster is referred to by name: Sulaemesh. Like the others Sulaemesh is driven mad, but apparently his madness takes the form of scrawling or screaming the same phrases over and over again: “The Tower of the Dragon. The Lake of Silt and Ash. The City Fractured. The Stone Broken. The Net of Black Iron. The End of All Dreams.”
• At this point, it appears that the writers stop studying the crystal directly and focus their attention on trying to decipher the Vision of Sulaemesh. Many elaborate theories are concocted, but it is clear that they are mostly leading to frustration.

A period of several years appears to pass with little or no activity in the Codex. Then there is a new entry in a fresh hand, beginning with:

The crystal matches, in all respects, the properties of the dreaming shard.

The next several pages are a collation of research apparently drawn from several different sources. The dreaming shard is one small sliver of a much larger artifact known as the Dreaming Stone. The Dreaming Stone is described as “the source of all dreams” and “the resonance of the Dreaming”, among other descriptive titles.

The tone of the next several entries is one of excited discovery. But then things take a darker turn: There is a reference to “an area of great concern” and then several pages have been ripped out of the Codex. Other pages have been completely blotted out, leaving only vague references to a “Great Crypt” and “—if the shard were to awaken—“

The last few pages of the Codex are intact. They describe the design of an impenetrable box, which the writers hope will “seal both the shard and its dangerous knowledge from the waiting world”. Two boxes are created – one for the shard and one for the Codex.

Running the Campaign: Secrets of the All-Key – Campaign Journal: Session 36C
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 36A: The Knighting of Tor

And in this way, Tor did service upon the Eight Stations and swore the Eight Oaths. The gathered knights lowered their blades and Sir Gemmell laid his own blade upon Tor’s shoulders.

“Rise, Sir Torland.”

A procession was then formed, led by the priests and followed by Sir Gemmell and Sir Tor. They passed through the gates of the Godskeep and then into the inner passages. Tor was guided by a secret way into the basement of the keep itself, and there taken to a chamber where the Statue of Vehthyl stood.

Here the last of the water from the cups of mithril were washed across the feet of Vehthyl and into a final cup of taurum. And from this Tor drank deep.

I’ve previously discussed how I design fictional rituals for my game worlds.

But why would you want to do this? Why not just say something like, “You go to the Godskeep in the morning and, in a formal ceremony in front of all the other knights, Sir Lagenn begins the ritual of officially knighting you… but then Rehobath shows up.” Isn’t that enough detail to play through the scene? Is it really worth your time to invent an entire religious ceremony?

The truth is that it often will be more than enough, and there’ll be no reason to recite an entire liturgy or script a full sermon just because the PCs happen to be walking through a church.

Conversely, though, there are also a lot of situations in which I think it’s absolutely worth the extra effort.

It can emphasize a moment or, alternatively, reflect and respect the emphasis which is already being given to a moment. In this session, for example, Tor is achieving — through perhaps the unlikeliest series of events — major goal that his player had set for the character when she created him. That’s huge! We don’t want to just toss that moment away; we should revel in it and make it feel like a real payoff.

Along similar lines, you can also use rituals like these as a reward. In some cases, just the experience of the ritual itself will be rewarding in its own right, but it’s also quite possibly to build literal mechanical or material rewards into the ritual. For example, perhaps joining an organization gives you access to unique character abilities. Or perhaps every knight receives the magic sword with which they were knighted as a gift.

Rituals can also serve as exposition. Having the players actually roleplay through a call-and-response ritual, for example, is a great way to get them to actually focus on and care about that content. Rituals in the real world have a wide reach and can touch every aspects of our lives, so whether you want to establish facts about religion, history, politics, or even just daily life, it’s pretty easy to find a way to inject that stuff into a ritual.

Similarly, rituals can also set up or emphasize the themes of your campaign. If you’re playing in a campaign that emphasizes oathbreaking, for example, then getting your players to literally swear oaths is a pretty literal invocation of theme. Or you might build a ritual around a legendary tale in which the Trickster God deceived his mother.

For an example of this from another medium, consider the final montage in The Godfather, in which Michael Corleone is show baptizing his child at the same time that he’s having the rival mob bosses assassinated.

This example from The Godfather also shows us how rituals can be a great way of structuring a scene: The cuts between baptism and murder provide a staccato rhythm and regularity to the sequence. (I’ve also talked about this scene in Scenario Structure Challenge: The RPG Montage, if you’d like a more detailed look at how you can pull off similar effects at the gaming table.)

Of course, a montage is not the only way you can use the ritual as a structure. For example, I once ran an exorcism scenario in which the PCs had to (a) research the ritual required for exorcism and then (b) actually perform the ritual during the final scene. The trick was that at least one PC (and player) had to be chanting at all times or the ritual would fail, but there were, of course, a bunch of things that would be interfering with their ability to do that. So, in practice, the scene became structured around the players swapping in and out of the ritual, while also trying to deal with all the demonic incursions and other interference that was happening throughout the ritual.

Campaign Journal: Session 36B – Running the Campaign: Secrets of the All-Key
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index