DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 37B: An Uneasy City

At the gates of the Necropolis, Tee stopped and spoke with the Keepers of the Veil. She inquired after records of those buried in the Necropolis, hoping that they might indicate the location of Alchestrin’s ancient tomb. The knights didn’t keep records of that sort, but they suggested that one might inquire at the Administration Building in Oldtown.

At the end of Session 36, the PCs realized that what they thought was Alchestrin’s Tomb was actually a false tomb that had been constructed from scavenged sarsen stones that bore Alchestrin’s sigil.

This left them stymied. (Which was surprising to me: I once again thought it would be obvious that the stones must have been scavenged from somewhere nearby – particularly since they had been told Alchestrin’s Tomb was in this area – and therefore all they needed to do was look around the area a little more to locate the actual tomb. But they didn’t think to do that.)

They did, as you can see here, have the idea of asking the Keepers of the Veil – an order of knights who guard the borders of the Necropolis – to see if they would have a record of the tomb.

That makes logical sense, but in this case I knew from my notes that the Keepers didn’t have those records. (I did make a Knowledge check to see if one of the knights they spoke with would just coincidentally know the location of Alchestrin’s Tomb due to their experience with the Necropolis, but they failed the check.)

So at this point we have a fairly straightforward execution of the Spectrum of GM Fiat: I could just say, “No, the Keepers don’t have those records.” But you generally want to avoid simply saying “No” if at at all possible, which means that this is a perfect opportunity for a No, but…

In fact, it’s the perfect opportunity for a diegetic No, but… I know the Keepers don’t have those records, but that such records can be found in the Administration Building. I could just tell the players that (e.g., “Elestra, you’d know that such records would typically be kept in the Administration Building”), but in this case there’s no reason that the Keepers can’t know that. (It actually makes perfect sense: Although they don’t keep these records, it’s easy to imagine why those keeping watch over the undead and other dangers of the Necropolis would need to access them and, therefore, know where to find them.) So I can simply put the No, but… into the mouths of the Keeeprs and make it a natural part of the game world and the flow of play.

Ranthir spent the morning hours at the Administration Building, seeking records of Alchestrin’s Tomb.

Unfortunately, most of that time was wasted as Ranthir was shuffled fruitlessly from one ministry to another. He eventually found his way to the Ministry of Public Works and a relatively friendly older woman who showed him to what she thought “might be the proper room”. It was stacked high with moldering stacks of yellowing, unorganized parchment. In some ways, it was Ranthir’s perfect heaven… but it still left him stymied in his search for the Tomb.

Shortly thereafter, Tee caught up with him, assessed the situation, and made a quick circuit. Leaving a few greased palms in her wake, Tee was able to secure him assistance in sorting through the papers. This sped his task somewhat, but despite the help he was no closer to finding the Tomb by the time he had to leave.

When Ranthir actually goes to the Administration Building later in the session and tries to look up the records, however, I swapped off the Spectrum of GM Fiat and turned things over to the good ol’ fictional cleromancy of the mechanics…

… and Ranthir promptly failed his skill check.

(Tee showed up later and tried to help, but after some more bad rolling, it was still a failure.)

So here we go from No, but… to No.

Of course, some might ask why I had Ranthir roll for this vital information in the first place! If you roll for getting clues like this, then you risk the roll being a failure and the PCs not getting the clue! And, in fact, this horrible disaster is exactly what has happened!

I certainly could have stayed on the Spectrum of GM Fiat and ruled that Ranthir, having gotten to the right place, would automatically find the information he was looking for. But in this case, it’s not what my notes said, so that outcome really would have been a fudge. (Don’t fudge!) More importantly, though, I don’t actually care that Ranthir missed this check. It’s not my problem. It’s the players’ problem!

Because I know that:

• the PCs don’t actually NEED to get into Alchestrin’s Tomb in order to continue making progress in the Banewarrens (so it’s not a load-bearing aspect of the scenario);
• there’s other ways for them to find Alchestrin’s Tomb (remember the Three Clue Rule); and
• there’s lots of other leads the PCs can pursue (so the campaign isn’t going to stall here).

And so this is yet another situation where I can just be okay with failure being meaningful and seeing where it will take the campaign.

Campaign Journal: Session 37C – Running the Campaign: Patron Exhaustion
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 37A: Dominic Departs

They had an almost impossible number of possible courses to pursue. First, there were the Banewarrens. They had been hired by Jevicca to seal them and by Rehobath to retrieve the Sword of Crissa.

Agnarr raised the possibility of following up on Demassac Tovarian, assuming that Jevicca hadn’t already done so. They knew he was experimenting with chaositech.

“He might even be the one who supplied the items that let the bone rings into the Banewarrens,” Ranthir said.

Ah! Demassac Tovarian!

He’s one of those roads untraveled that almost always crop up here and there in any campaigns that aren’t purely episodic.

(Spoilers: The PCs never actually pursue the Demassac Tovarian lead. Well, I guess at least not yet. We’re still playing the campaign, so I guess it could happen. But it seems extremely unlikely at this point.)

Tovarian was one of the scenario nodes forming Act I of the campaign. The PCs first encountered a reference to him while investigating the Cran crime family in Session 8, but despite frequently mentioning the lead, they never actually pursued it. I actually primed the pump a bit by having a patron (Jevicca) offer to hire them to check out Tovarian’s operation, but in Session 15 they turned down the job because they were too busy with other stuff.

At that point, I figured the Tovarian scenario was dead, and so I was actually a little surprised when it came up during this Second Meeting of All Things – what the players’ called their mega-planning sessions. That’s also something that’s fairly common in campaigns like this: The players will reach back and pull on the most unexpected threads.

In this case, of course, the tugging still didn’t go anywhere.

There were other clues that would have also pointed to Tovarian, but the PCs either missed those clues (because they got captured by Malkeen Balacazar and never explored the smuggler caves thoroughly) or actually missed the entire adventure those clues were placed in. (I don’t think the Ennin Slavers have even been so much as mentioned; the PCs missed them entirely.)

In fact, there were a BUNCH of Act I scenarios that the PCs skipped past. (And which the players remain unaware of to this day.) Tovarian and the Ennin Slavers collectively had a bunch of clues pointing to things like the Swords of Ptolus, Jirraith, and the Pale Dogs. Because the PCs missed both Tovarian and the Ennin, that whole wing of the campaign kinda just fell away.

And that’s just fine.

I’ve previously mentioned that one of the GM’s biggest friends is a simple question asked at the end of every session: “What are you planning to do next time?”

It’s not foolproof, but it will save you from a lot of wasted prep. In this case, I knew how Tovarian and the Ennin and Jirraith and the Pale Dogs and the Swords of Ptolus all connected to each other because I’d prepped a revelation list. But because the PCs never got anywhere near most of those nodes, I never actually prepped the scenarios. So the only thing I “lost” were a few scribbled concept notes.

(Some of which I would eventually circle back to: The Ennin Slavers had connections to the Vladaams, and so they eventually got hooked in from the opposite direction.)

Of these scenarios, the one I spent the most time on was Demassac Tovarian, because there were a few points where I thought the PCs were going to be heading in that direction.

This work included a map of the alley where the House of Demassac Tovarian was located:

I also mapped the house itself (A1), but as you can see, I never actually finished keying it:

I never got as far as mapping the Undercity located beneath the alley, nor the Tomb of St. Thessina. In the case of the latter, I’m not even sure what my intentions were: The only thing preserved in my notes is the name.

I did have a general vibe in mind for Demassac’s demesne, which was largely inspired by the slightly surreal fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith. He possessed a dream sifter – a piece of powerful chaositech that he used to steal dreams from people. I had several strong images which were the touchstone and inspiration for the adventure, and a handful of these I’d worked up into preliminary room keys, like the Room of Endless Night:

A perpetual gloom shrouds the room. Thick shutters and inky drapes cover the walls and window. The light seems to twist and turn beyond the threshold of the room, casting only a strange phosphorescence that barely illuminates the contents of the room: In one corner of the room stands a heavy basalt statue of a squat, reptilian beast with a grotesque, horned head, stunted bat-like wings, and crooked claws. In another corner there is a sphere of black glass standing on a pedestal of black stone. In the center of the room, a large stone pool or basin is filled with water. Stretched across the top of the pool is a stone slab. The slab has been fitted with manacles.

And the Corridor of Lost Dreams:

This corridor, with a hall at one end of it, is shrouded in a perpetual gloom. Dozens of small glass spheres are suspended on nearly invisible wires here and there from the ceiling. Ghostly sounds of laughter and merrymaking float through the air. Sparks of multicolored light seem to dance through air, leaping sedately from one glass sphere to another.

There’s just enough of Demassac that came into existence that I do sometimes think of him and wonder what might have been, and perhaps some day I will return to this strange alley of madmen, dark technomancy, and strange visions. But for the moment, much like the fleeting dreams Demassac fights so hard to preserve, he has tripped along merrily into a lost realm of imagination.

Campaign Journal: Session 37B – Running the Campaign: No, But…
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 36D: Crypt of Webs

“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.”

This moment from earlier in Session 36 – where the PCs abruptly realize, completely out of the blue and more than a dozen sessions after getting the all-key, exactly WHY they were looking for the all-key in the first place – is the one of those moments that would feel completely “wrong” in a film or book. After a hundred pages, the detective just suddenly realizes something for no reason? Just because? That feels forced and unsatisfying.

Authors, therefore, feel compelled to offer some explanation for what prompted the character’s sudden insight or new idea: Another character will say something innocuous, but it has a double meaning that ignites a light bulb! Or a beam of a light falls on something that jars their memory. Or a burnt out neon sign transforms its meaning. Or, if all else fails, a montage of flashbacks reveals the hidden pattern.

At the game table, though, these moments feel completely natural and are often deeply satisfying. Because they are, of course, really happening, in a way that the events of a novel or film can never be.

On the other hand, you might be looking at this and thinking: “Hang on… They found the all-key in Session 23 on June 7^th, and then they just… didn’t do anything with it until Session 36 on January 24^th? And the campaign just stalled for seven months?”

Well, no. The campaign didn’t stall. As you can see from the campaign journals, lots and lots and lots of stuff was happening. But this can be difficult to wrap your head around if you’re used to prepping and running linear scenarios and campaigns. In those campaigns, if the PCs don’t trigger the next scene or scenario in the sequence, then the whole campaign runs into a brick wall.

What we have in this case is a meta-scenario that’s running alongside the primary campaign structure. One of the great about meta-scenarios like this is that you can just let them simmer — often for very long spans of the time — while the main line(s) of the campaign continue apace.

But you can get similar results from any non-linear campaign structure: For example, in a hexcrawl the clues pointing the PCs to Siren’s Cove can be ignored for almost any length of time while the players are exploring any number of the other hexes available to them. Similarly, in a node-based campaign, the hook to a scenario can lie dormant while the PCs are busy engaging with the other options they have.

In some cases, these lengthy delays will be entirely due to the decisions the players are making: They know those clues point to Siren’s Cove and they could choose to go there at any time, but they were simply more interested in the Fane of Pandemonium and, while they were trapped within the Fane, the situation in Bluewood has turned into a crisis that they need to deal with immediately.

In other cases, though — like the current session — the players literally haven’t solved the mystery yet: They haven’t figured out how to decipher the map to Siren’s Cove. They don’t make the connection that “M.R.” are the initials of Montgomery Rosemount. They haven’t realized the all-key can unlock the box.

Those are the times when you can get the big payoff — that ultimate moment where they decipher the map, abruptly discover who the mystery “M.R.” is, or open the box that’s tantalized them for months or years — by just being willing to give your players the space to struggle for a while.

And what is the payoff?

It’s that little thrill you feel in knowing that if you HADN’T figured it out, the GM was never going to give it to you. It’s the tingling little frisson that runs up the spine when you discover that your actions in the game truly matter. There’s no script and you’re certainly not following it. The good stuff happened because YOU made it happen, and if you don’t want the bad stuff to happen, you’re going to have to try a little harder.

I said that this moment works in an RPG because it’s really happening, and that’s also the root of what makes the payoff so satisfying.

What can make these payoffs feel HUGE for the players is literally the anticipation: They’d been wondering what was inside this box for nearly two years at this point!

Of course, I’d figured that the pay-off for that wait would have come when they snagged the all-key… but it didn’t. They didn’t make the connection. And I really wanted to see that payoff. I’d been waiting for it, too! It was so tempting — and so easy! — to say something like, “Do y’all have any locks you haven’t been able to open?” or, “Do you remember that box your woke up with?” Or maybe I could have had them make an Intelligence check to see if one of them had the idea to use the all-key on the sealed box? (Ugh.)

But I didn’t succumb to that temptation, and the payoff was even better for it. Because it was worth the wait. And because it was their reward. They’d earned it. I hadn’t stuck my nose in and undermined their moment.

Of course, not every instance of “missing the obvious” will burn low for multiple sessions. Often the payoff comes a lot quicker. For example, at the end of this same session the PCs went looking for Alchestrin’s Tomb:

It was only a couple of hours before dusk and the sun was already low in the sky, but they felt they had already wasted enough time. They headed to the Necropolis, aware that they would need to finish their work there before darkness fell.

Once they had reached Darklock Hill, Dominic used his connection with the gods to fixate upon Alchestrin’s sigil and locate its nearest occurrence. He led them to a crudely built crypt with thick walls built from heavy stone slabs. Elestra recognized that these slabs were, in fact, repurposed stone sarsens. Several of them had the distinctive – yet heavily worn – sigil of Alchestrin worked into them.

This scenario was designed to be deliberately deceptive: Someone had scavenged the sarsens from the stone circle above Alchestrin’s Tomb and used them to build their own tomb nearby. So somebody looking for the tomb would likely spot Alchestrin’s sigil on the false tomb instead, become confused, and go on a little mini-dungeoncrawl.

At the actual table, though, I was surprised when Elestra made a point of specifically examining the sigils. I don’t remember exactly what skill check I called for, but she rolled well and would clearly recognize that the sigils were carved into stone sarsens that had been repurposed for the walls of this tomb.

At this point, I figured the jig was up: If the sarsens weren’t originally part of this tomb, then obviously this tomb couldn’t be Alchestrin’s Tomb.

But then the players… just didn’t see it. They missed the obvious.

It was only later, as more and more stuff about the false crypt didn’t add up, that Ranthir suddenly realized the importance of what Elestra had seen and doubled back to check his hypothesis.

“I think I have the answer,” Ranthir said, coming back down the stairs from above. “The stones on which Alchestrin’s sigil is marked are stone sarsens – originally designed as part of a stone circle. They must have been scavenged to build the walls of this crypt.”

Now, in this case I could have been tempted to fudge Elestra’s original check so that she wouldn’t learn that the walls were repurposed sarsens.

Or, after she made that check, I could have been tempted to spell it out and make the connection for her: “No, no. I said they were repurposed sarsens from a stone circle! So the sigil doesn’t belong to this crypt, but to wherever those stone sarsens came from!”

But how much more satisfying was it for the players to not only (a) finally make that conclusion for themselves, but also (b) realize that they’d had the solution the whole time and could have avoided the whole fiasco!

This wasn’t something that I had, as the GM, had done to them. I hadn’t pulled a fast one. I hadn’t cheated. And so the outcome was infinitely more satisfying on every level.

(And, of course, if it had all played out differently, that would have been okay, too. That is, after all, the whole point.)

Campaign Journal: Session 37A – Running the Campaign: The Adventure Not Taken
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

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

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