DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Chaos Lorebook: The Bloated Lords

Some among the zaug were transformed by the Galchutt and “turned to a new purpose”. As the zaug were made living receptacles for manifest corruption, the zaug soulharvesters became living prisoners for captured and tormented souls.

“Their very flesh burned with the fire of the souls which screamed within them.”

“Their hunger was without end, fed eternally by the torment of those who seared their flesh.”

This week’s campaign journal is The Bloated Lords, a lengthy chaos lorebook describing the zaug, one of the Servitors of the Galchutt.

In the Ptolus campaign setting, the Galchutt are lords of chaos and the Servitors of the Galchutt are demon-like creatures who, as their name suggests, serve them. Along with the strange arts of chaositech which are inimically tied to these entities, you can point to a goulash of antecedents Monte Cook is drawing from — Lovecraft, Moorcock, Warhammer, cenobites, etc. — but the result, particularly when blended into traditional D&D fantasy, is very distinct.

When I brought Ptolus into my own campaign world, however, the Galchutt posed a conundrum: I already had my own pantheon of Mythos-adjacent strange gods.

I thought about replacing the Galchutt with my own pantheon, but then I’d lose a lot of cool stuff. It would be a bunch of extra work for, at best, a neutral result.

Another option would have been to simply add the Galchutt to my pantheon: The more strange gods the merrier! For various reasons, though, they didn’t really sync. I’m a big fan of adaptation and reincorporation, but it’s not always a boon. Sometimes you shove stuff together and you’re left with less than what you started.

So what I eventually ended up doing was nestling the Galchutt into a lower echelon, as “Dukes” in the Demon Court. They brought with them the Dukes (powerful, demon-like entities) and the Elder Brood (demonic monsters who serve the Dukes). This worked really well, creating an unexpected bridge (Elder Brood → Dukes → Galchutt → Demon Court → even stranger depths of the pantheon) between the inexplicable and the mortal world. It’s a good example of how you can pull in influences from a lot of different places and gestalt them into something cool.

Another example of this was the Elder Brood: In the Chaositech sourcebook, only two examples of the Elder Brood are given (the obaan and the sscree). I knew I wanted more than that, so I hit up one of my favorite monster manuals: The Book of Fiends from Green Ronin. (Which also played a major role in my remix of Descent Into Avernus.) I pulled all the cool devils and demons from that book that had the right flavor for the Elder Brood and added them to the roster.

Along similar lines, the zaug — one of the Servitors and described in The Bloated Lords lorebook — were expanded in my campaign to include the Soulharvesters. These were adapted from solamiths, a monster described in Monster Manual V.

If I recall correctly, the specific sequence here was:

• I was looking for a miniature I could use for the zaug (since I knew that one would appear in the Mrathrach Machine).
• I found the solamith miniature and realized it belonged to a monster from Monster Manual V.
• I checked out the solamith write-up and realized thar it could be folded into the mythology of the zaug.

It’s been a while, though, so my sequencing on this may not be correct. (I may have found the solamith write-up first while scavenging monsters for the campaign and then tracked down the miniature from there.) In any case, it’s a technique I’ve used with monster manuals for a long time. It’s similar to The Campaign Stitch, but rather than melding adventures it takes monsters and asks: What if these are the same monster?

It’s kind of like palette shifting, but rather than taking one stat block and using it to model a multitude of creatures, this technique — let’s call it monster melding — takes a bunch of different stat blocks and brings them together.

Another example is that, in my personal campaign world, goblins, orcs, hobgoblins, and ogres are all the same species. (Which, conveniently, gives me access to a much larger variety of stat blocks to plug-‘n-play with while stocking goblin villages.)

What I like about this technique — in addition to utilitarian stocking adventages — is that, much like gods and ventures, the melded monsters can often be more interesting than using the two separately. (For example, the implications of hypertrophic dimorphism in goblins raises all kinds of interesting worldbuilding questions and the soulharvesters, in my opinion, make zaug society much more interesting to explore.)

So ask yourself:

• What if these are the same creature with slightly divergent careers, abilities, etc.?
• What if these are the same creature at different stages of its life cycle?
• What if they live in some kind of symbiosis or parasitic relationship?

Bring these creatures together and see what you get!

Campaign Journal: Session 40C – Running the Campaign: Moral Dilemmas of Magic
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

THE BLOATED LORDS
(Chaos Lorebook)

They were the least of those that served. They were corruption given flesh; a corpulence of festering death and decay. Rebellious in spirit, yet forever bound to the power of their masters.

This tome describes the zaug – one of the “servitors of the Galchutt”. Physically the zaug were grossly obese humanoids with no hair. They had wide mouths full of teeth, claws for hands, and short horns on their heads. Some are described as possessing vestigial, rotting wings. A few passages describe their bodies as “corrupted receptacles”. Sores and oozing pus and bile covered their fat flesh. And much of their skin hung loose in rotting folds, pocked with holes from which intestines and other guts hung out – spurting vile fluids.

Several passages are given over to describing festering poisons and other vile alchemical substances that could be created from the “bile of the zaug”, although no true details of the required procedures are given.

The flesh of the zaug itself is ever-regenerating – allowing it to survive despite the diseases, poisons, and parasites that teem through its body. They are said to never eat or drink or breathe, and to speak only telepathically.

THE SOULHARVESTERS

Some among the zaug were transformed by the Galchutt and “turned to a new purpose”. As the zaug were made living receptacles for manifest corruption, the zaug soulharvesters became living prisoners for captured and tormented souls.

“Their very flesh burned with the fire of the souls which screamed within them.”

“Their hunger was without end, fed eternally by the torment of those who seared their flesh.”

Where the flesh of the zaug festered, the beruned and corpulent flesh of the soulharvesters was glistening and taut. And pressing out against the green-veined and pallid skin of their guts were the screaming faces of those imprisoned within them.

The “soulfire flesh” of the zaug soulharvesters is described as an immense, living power source.

THE LORE OF THE LATTER YEARS

And while their masters slept, the labors of the zaug were endless.

Later lore describes the zaug working with the “titans of the Purple City” in labors of “the technology of the taint” as they worked to “perfect the crafts gifted from beyond the Demonweb”.

Other passages refer to the zaug working in the laboratories of Ghul the Skull-King. “And their works turned to the binding and changing of the flesh, and the lesser races were turned into weapons of dark might.”

KASTRALATHAKASAL

And in the sleep of the Galchutt and the sealing of the Vaults of the Rhodintor, the zaug at last found their freedom. And in their caverns of the deep, their works turned inward.

Deep beneath the surface of the earth, it is said that Kastralathakasal – the City of the Zaug – “stands citadel upon the Throne of Darkness”. The city itself is described as a stronghold of alien metals and living, organic components.

Running the Campaign: All Your Zaug Belong to Us – Campaign Journal: Session 40C
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Chaos Lorebook: Lore of the Demon Court

Its face was like the mirror nothingness. Its gaze a river of fire that touched thought but not earth.

Above all Those Who Slumber was the power of the One Who Was Born of Destruction, the Song Render, the Ender of Souls, the Dweller in Darkness. And among those who would speak his name, his name was Shallamoth Kindred – the act of desolation given life and mutilation given flesh.

And he did move with the quickness of a razor.

In the palace of the Kindred of Shallamoth, the eyes of the Galchutt are shut.

In the Temple of the Ebon Hand, the PCs discovered a cache of lore books.

These are specifically part of what I refer to as the chaos lorebooks, a collection of roughly fifty different lore books in the campaign dealing with:

• chaos cults
• chaositech
• the demon court
• servitors of the Galchutt
• the elder brood
• Wuntad’s plans for the Night of Dissolution

The root of this collection is the Book of Faceless Hate, which looks like this in my version of the lore book:

THE BOOK OF FACELESS HATE

No title marks the tattered, dark brown cover of this book. Its contents are written in a nearly illegible scrawl that could only have been born of hopeless madness. The first several pages of the book are covered in repetitions and variations of a single phrase: FACELESS HATE. (They wait in faceless hate. We shall burn in their faceless hate. The faceless hate has consumed me. And so forth…)

CHAOS: True chaos, or “deep chaos”, is a religion based on the fundamental aspects of hate, destruction, death, and dissolution. The philosophy of chaos is one of constant and endless change. It teaches that the current world is a creation of order and structure, but that it was flawed from the dawn of time due to the lack of foresight into what living sentience truly wants and need. The gods of creation – the gods of order – are untouchable and unknowable. They are aloof and uncaring, says the teaching of true chaos.

THE LORDS OF CHAOS: According to the book, the Lords of Chaos – or “Galchutt” – are gods of unimaginable power. But they are “mere servants of the true gods of change, the Demon Princes”. It is written that the Galchutt came to serve the Princes during the “War of Demons”, but while the Princes have “left this world behind”, the Galchutt still “whisper the words of chaos”.

VESTED OF THE GALCHUTT: Although they sleep, the Galchutt still exert some influence upon the world. This influence can be felt by the faithful through the “touch of chaos” and the “mark of madness”, but it can also be made manifest in one of the “Vested of the Galchutt” – powerful avatars of their dark demi-gods’ strength.

CHAOS CULTS: The book goes on to describe (but only in the vaguest of terms) many historical and/or fanciful “cults of chaos” which have risen up in veneration of either the Galchutt, the Vested of the Galchutt, or both. These cults seem to share nothing in common except, perhaps, the search for the “true path for the awakening of chaos”. The book would leave one with the impression that the history of the world has been spotted with the continual and never-ending presence of these cults – always operating in the shadows, save when bloody massacres and destruction bring them into the open.

As originally presented in Monte Cook’s Night of Dissolution (p. 93), the Book of Faceless Hate was a much more comprehensive player briefing of the entire cosmology of chaos in the Ptolus setting. I knew that I would need to create my own version of the book because I had moved Ptolus to my campaign world, and was therefore adapting this cosmology and melding it to my cosmology.

But I also knew that I wanted to make the Book of Faceless Hate more enigmatic, creating a much larger conspiracy and mystery that the PCs would need to unravel: How many cults were working with Wuntad? What were their true intentions? What was the true nature and secret history of the “gods” they worshipped?

My motivation was partly aesthetic: I just thought the chaos cults would be a lot cooler if they were drenched in mystery.

But it was also practical. Doing a big data dump to orient the players in the opening scenario of the published Night of Dissolution makes sense, because it was a mini-campaign with five scenarios, but I was planning a much larger exploration of the chaos cults that would involve a couple dozen scenarios. If I gave the players a comprehensive overview of who the cults were and everything they were doing, then the rest of the campaign would just become a rote checklist. It would be difficult to maintain a sense of narrative interest and momentum, and things would likely decay into “been there, done that.”

I also knew that if the players were forced to piece together disparate lore, slowly collecting different pieces of evidence to eagerly weave together while collecting the leads they need to continue pursuing their investigation and pasting all of it onto a literal or figurative conspiracy board, that it would get them deeply invested in the chaos cults. It would make them care.

(And when the players started holding lore book meetings and discussing the chaos cults even when we weren’t playing the game, I knew I’d pulled it off.)

DISTRIBUTING THE BOOKS

So I broke up The Book of Faceless Hate into a bunch of pieces, adapted the content to my campaign world, and reframed everything using lore book techniques so that the players would feel like they were “really” reading these strange tomes and oddly moist pages. Then I started adding even more lore books to flesh things out more, ending up with, as I mentioned, roughly fifty different books.

Okay, but what did I actually do with all of these lore books?

The short answer is that I seeded them into all the adventures in the campaign, spreading them around so that the PCs would collect them book by book.

I had about twenty chaos-related adventures where these books could be found, so this meant that many of them would be stocked with multiple lore books. Sometimes they were clustered together in a secret library; other times they would be scattered throughout the adventure.

In practice, I had even more options (and was adding even more chaos lorebooks) because most of these books weren’t unique volumes. They were books and religious scriptures. Secretive, yes, but still meant to be copied and disseminated. Thus, for example, the PCs could find a copy of The Touch of the Ebon Hand in Pythoness House in Session 22, but also, unsurprisingly, later find a bunch of them in the Temple of the Ebon Hand.

Note: And because I wasn’t worried about duplicating them, the PCs went off into an unexpected direction and I ended up adding new scenarios, I could easily reach into my stock of chaos lorebooks, grab a few, and sprinkle them around.

I was also able to add them to other scenarios, unrelated to the chaos cults, to make the entire campaign world feel like a unified whole and create the impression that the chaos cults were a pervasive, ever-present influence.

Along these same lines, I realized it was generally ideal if a cult’s primary lorebook could be found OUTSIDE the cult’s headquarters. In other words, if it was possible for the PCs to learn about a cult (setup) and then later discover where they were operating (payoff).

Consider, also, this diagram, also found in Pythoness  House in Session 22:

It depicts the symbols for a variety of chaos cults working with Wuntad, giving a default structure of:

• Who does this symbol belong to?
• It belongs to X!
• We found where X is / what X is doing!

You can see the simple progression of setups and payoffs that lead to a satisfying conclusion, and in this case we’ve complicated things through the simple expedient of having seven iterations of this progression happening simultaneously and overlapping with each other.

In actual practice, though, I muddied things up a bit more by

• including a couple symbols on the diagram that the PCs would never actually encounter in the campaign (where are they?!); and
• writing up lorebooks describing several additional chaos cults that weren’t part of Wuntad’s scheme at all (how many of them are there?!).

But I digress. Let’s get back to how the lorebooks were distributed.

What I quickly realized was that I needed a plan. You need to remember that I wasn’t prepping the entire campaign ahead of time: I had created an adventure track that indicated what the individual adventures were and how they were linked to each other, but I was prepping the keys for those adventures as they became relevant. Although I started off by simply adding whatever chaos lorebooks made sense in a particular adventure, it became clear that

• there was a bias towards some of the lorebook topics, causing them to be over-represented; and
• with so many lorebooks in play, there was a real risk that I would lose track and fail to place some of the lorebooks.

I started by putting together a simple checklist (i.e,. Have I placed this lorebook yet?), but realized I could still end up writing myself into a corner. (Where the PCs would get to the end of Act II and I would realize I still had way too many lorebooks to place and not enough adventure to place them in!) So I swapped to a spreadsheet with a list of all the lorebooks and a list of all the adventure cross-referenced.

This let me see and shape the totality of the chaos lorebooks: Where were they concentrated? Which books still needed to be placed and where could they go for best effect? Was it possible to find the book outside of the cult’s own lair?

Note: On this worksheet, I also made a point of distinguishing between which lorebooks had actually been placed – i.e., I’d keyed the adventure and they were in the adventure key—as opposed to which lorebook locations were only planned and had not yet been executed.

While doing this work, I also realized that there was a principle similar to the Three Clue Rule: Most of these lorebooks weren’t structurally essential, but they were — if I do say so myself — really cool, and I’d also put a lot of prep work into them. So for most of the books, I made a point of including them in at least three different adventures. (And if, for some reason, it wouldn’t make sense for a lorebook to be so widely disseminated, I would try to include multiple copies in the adventures where it could logically be found.)

As seen in the current session, this obviously resulted in the PCs often finding copies of chaos lorebooks that they already had. You might think this to be repetitive, pointless, or even disappointing, like a someone saying, “Aw, man… I already have this one!” when opening a pack of baseball cards. In practice, though, that really wasn’t the case.

First, the primary effect was fare more along the lines of, “Oh no… The cult has been here, too.”

Second, because it did, in fact, make diegetic sense for multiple copies of these books to exist, the presence of multiples made the world feel like a real place. It made the books “real,” rather than being a collectibles achievement in a video game.

Finally, because the campaign was being played out over months and even years of real time, the second or third encounter with a chaos lorebook would simply remind the players of what they have, often prompting them to pull out their copy of the handout and review it. Thus, the lore of the campaign was being constantly and organically reinforced until the players knew it in their bones.

Which was, of course, the point of the chaos lorebooks in the first place.

Campaign Journal: The Bloated Lords – Running the Campaign: All Your Zaug Belong to Us
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

LORE OF THE DEMON COURT
(Chaos Lorebook)

And in the darkness of his prison, the Nameless One spun the first strands of the Web of Demons. And the web was laid between and beside the world, building upon the corruption that he had laid. And so he became the Weaver.

And in the world which he had lost, there were those who felt the touch of his web. And they were like unto gods. And chief among them were the Four Princes of the Demon Court: The Nightwalker, the Blood Goddess, the Scarlet Lord, and the Bane of Fire.

THE ORDERS OF THE DEMON COURT

And in the first rank of the Demon Court there were the Princes of Chaos.

And in the second rank of the Demon Court there were the Dukes of Chaos. And their chief was Shallamoth Kindred. And among them were Bhor Kei and Dhar Rhyth and Jubilex and Kihomenethoth and Ravvan the Beast.

And in the third rank of the Demon Court, there were the servitors of the Dukes – rhodintor and zaug, carach and shaddom, vreeth and the teeming hordes of the Elder Brood.

And in the passing of the Demon Court, there were left the Vested and the Cults – the seeds of chaos.

THE SHADOW THAT NEVER SLEEPS
(Chaos Lorebook)

Above all Those Who Slumber was the power of the One Who Was Born of Destruction, the Song Render, the Ender of Souls, the Dweller in Darkness. And among those who would speak his name, his name was Shallamoth Kindred – the act of desolation given life and mutilation given flesh.

This volume is a collection of lore regarding the Galchutt known as Shallamoth Kindred. It is a mixture of texts: Some poetical, some religious, some scholastic, some bombastic.

RANK WITHIN THE HOST: The Galchutt are not given to any order or hierarchy, and yet Shallamoth Kindred is often seen as their leader. No other Galchutt has ever been known to disobey it, and one of the ancient texts cited tells that “the Dweller in Darkness shall lead the Natharl’nacna host into the heart of creation, there to deliver all unto oblivion”.

THE FORM OF MAN: Shallamoth Kindred is described as being of two forms. The first of these – the form of man – takes the shape of a tall, lithe humanoid with indistinct features. This entire form is black like the deepest part of a bottomless pit, with the exception of its dagger-shaped eyes, colored the yellow-brown of diseased teeth.

THE FORM OF SOUL: The second form – the form of soul – is that of a squirming mass of ropy tendrils surrounding a bulbous, obese, pox-covered, decaying body with a vaguely humanoid shape. In some of the grotesque illustrations contained within this volume, vestigial bat-like wings hang limply around this form.

THE SUDDENNESS OF DESTRUCTION: “And he did move with the quickness of a razor.” “And in that moment he both came and was gone, leaving a wake of black madness in his tread.” These and similar quotations attest to Shallamoth Kindred’s ability to move with blinding speed and agility. It is literally capable of being there one moment and then gone in the next.

THE FACELESS FACE: “Its face was like the mirror nothingness. Its gaze a river of fire that touched thought but not earth.” Shallamoth Kindred never displays emotion. It never grows angry and it never shows fear. It does not gloat. It does not rejoice. It is impossible to manipulate or even to reason with.

THE CITADEL WITHOUT LIGHT: “And in the palace of the Kindred of Shallamoth, the eyes of the Galchutt are shut.” This phrase stands alone in the lower left hand corner of a page otherwise covered in a strangely warped mandala. Other passages refer to this place as the Citadel Without Light, and some speak of an inner sanctum: The Tourbillion. The Vortex of the World. From this Vortex, one can “step forth into the world”.

Another fragment describes the palace as being built entirely of mirrors which sometimes reflect less than can be seen, sometimes more, and sometimes something entirely alien.

Running the Campaign: Distributing Chaos Lorebooks – Next: The Bloated Lords
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 40B: Temple of the Ebon Hand

Once set on its course, the kennel rat seemed quite certain in its path and seemed to have no desire to escape.

“For a rat it’s well-trained,” Agnarr said.

“You can’t keep it,” Tee said.

After winding through the sewers for the better part of an hour, however, the kennel rat began to wander aimlessly.

Not far away she discovered that a ten-foot-wide section of the wall was, in fact, nothing more than an illusion: She could put her hand through it as easily as insubstantial air. With a shrug of her shoulder she struck her head through: The illusion was not particularly thick and she found herself looking up an empty, ramping hall of well-constructed stone…

When I talk about designing node-based campaigns, which is primarily how Act II of In the Shadow of the Spire is designed, I’m sometimes asked how I know where one scenario “ends” and another scenario “begins.”

To quickly bring you up to speed if you’re not familiar with node-based scenario design, in a node-based campaign:

• You have a number scenarios, each of which can be thought of as a “node.”
• These scenarios are linked to each other by clues.
• You use the Inverted Three Clue Rule — the players should have access to at least three unused clues at any time — to make sure the connections between the scenarios between the scenarios are robust.

But what actually constitutes a “scenario”?

Sometimes this is obvious, but often it’s not, particularly because individual scenarios can also be node-based, with scenes and locations linked together by clues internal to the scenario.

You can see a good example of how this can get fuzzy in this session. You’ve got:

• the Temple of the Rat God
• the Ratmen Nest beneath the Temple of the Rat God
• a nearby sub-level connected by a medium-length tunnel
• the shivvel dens in the Warrens controlled by the Temple of the Rat God and reached via the sewer tunnels and guide rats
• the Temple of the Ebon God, also “connected” to the Temple of the Rat God via the sewer tunnels and guide rats

Should these be five different scenarios? Or should all the stuff related to the Temple of the Rat God be one scenario and the Temple of the Ebon Hand be another scenario? Or is all this stuff actually part of a larger “Chaos Cults” scenario?

In my case, none of the above. I decided the scenario breakdown would be by location, so I ended up with:

• CC01 Temple of the Rat God
• CC01A Warren Shivvel Dens
• CC02 Temple of the Ebon Hand

(Note that I’ve grouped the alphanumeric codes for CC01 and CC01A together because they’re run by the Cult of the Rat God. Although I consider them separate scenarios, this keeps related material grouped together in my notes.)

Okay, but why did I decide this was the scenario breakdown to use?

It really boils down to what’s useful. Or, to put it another way: When you’re running this material, what are you going to be actively thinking about? What information are you going to want to cross-reference and have at your fingertips? When you’re creating or prepping the material, what’s the stuff that should be built together?

Sometimes this is about immediate logistics. Sometimes it’s more about the conceptual organization that makes the most sense in your own head. Sometimes it’ll be about how people in the game world think about and organize things.

(What you largely won’t be concerned about is how the players will be thinking about this material. These notes – and the way they’re organized – is for you. It’s the experience created at the table that’s for the players, and, honestly, the less they’re seeing how your notes work, the more immersive that experience will be for them.)

In this case, for example, even though the Temple of the Rat God also controls the shivvel dens in the Warrens, it’s unlikely that anything in the shivvel dens will directly affect the situation in and around the temple on the Street of a Million Gods. (The ratlings probably aren’t going to send reinforcements, for example.) So it makes a lot more sense to completely segregate that material so that it’s not any kind of distraction at the table.

Conversely all the rat warrens beneath the Street of a Million Gods are very likely to be relevant if, for example, the PCs mount an assault on the temple. (Or, vice versa, the temple will be relevant if they enter the complex through the sewers and work their way up.) So I naturally grouped those together.

But, like I say, this is all about practicality, and the truth of that will really strike home as a campaign develops over time.

SPOILERS AHEAD!

For example, in the upcoming section of the campaign covered by Ptolus Remix: The Mrathrach Agenda, my original adventure notes were organized like this:

• NOD5 Mrathrach Machine
• NOD5A Aggah-Shan’s Catacombs
• NOD5B White House
• NOD5C Mrathrach Table Raids

All of these clearly are related to each other (the Mrathrach Machine is reached from the White House via Aggah-Shan’s Catacombs; the Mrathrach Table Raids were focused around the Mrathrach game), which is why they all have the NOD5 tag, but nothing else about this breakdown really makes sense from an objective point of view.

What you’re looking at is just a strange agglutination that emerged piece by piece from actual play: The Mrathrach Machine scenario was taken from Night of Dissolution and was one of the original cornerstones of Act II, so when it looked like the PCs were going to approach the Mrathrach Machine from “below,” it made sense to get my prep notes for the adventure done, and if they made it through that adventure and exited out the “top” of the Machine into Aggah-Shan’s catacombs, then I could get that prepped as needed.

But then the PCs didn’t’ actually go to the Mrathrach Machine, and they actually got involved in the White House via a completely different vector. (So originally those notes were part of a completely different set of adventures notes in my background events!) As part of that, it looked like the PCs were going to find the secret entrance to the catacombs and check them out, so I prepped those adventure note as NOD5A (since they were clearly linked to NOD5 Mrathrach Machine)… but then the PCs didn’t actually explore that passage, either!

Even later in the campaign they came back around to investigating Aggah-Shan, so I pulled together all my notes for the White House (which were now lying around all over the place, including my campaign status document archive), updated them for current events, and collected them in NOD5B White House.

But then the PCs, in a series of events described here, created their own special ops mission targeting Mrathrach tables across the entire city! So I prepped that as a new scenario, and assigned it code NOD5C.

Which all makes sense to me because it reflects how we played through this material, but, as I said, obviously isn’t how you’d organize this stuff if you had a master plan!

Campaign Journal: The Demon Court – Running the Campaign: Distributing Chaos Lorebooks
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index