DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 41E: Return to the Lower Nests

By the time Agnarr had forced the board aside, Tee had joined him. She ducked through first, finding the ratlings waiting with another volley of fire that she narrowly dodged.

If she worked her way carefully down the tunnel in an effort to avoid the traps she knew were waiting, the ratlings would tear her apart with their rifle fire. Throwing caution to the wind, Tee threw herself down the hall – trusting to her instincts and reflexes to avoid the seemingly never-ending stream of dangers.

In Rulings in Practice: Traps, one of the advanced techniques I discuss is combining traps with combat encounters to make them more dynamic and fun in play. It’s a tip you’ll find — either implicitly or explicitly — in a bunch of GMing advice. But if you’re wondering exactly how to do this effectively, you can see on simple recipe for success in the current session: Position the traps as a dilemma gauntlet.

1. Fill a space with traps so that moving through that space becomes a dangerous gauntlet.
2. Put some or all of the bad guys on the far side of that gauntlet.
3. Give the bad guys the ability to attack the PCs while they’re on the far side of the gauntlet or moving through it. (This doesn’t have to be terribly fancy; any effective ranged attack will get the job done.)
4. Make the PCs aware that the traps exist. (Which may simply be accomplished when the PCs trigger the first trap and realize it may not be the only one.)

The PCs will now be faced with the simple dilemma of rushing through the trapped area (unleashing the fury of the traps) or trying to work their way carefully through the trap by detecting and/or disabling them (but also enduring the attacks of their enemies).

And here are a few ways to make things even nastier:

• Have some of the trap effects push them back to the beginning of the gauntlet. (Or set things up so that the NPCs can do the same.)
• Stock the gauntlet with traps that reset. (This prevents, or at least complicates, the strategy of having one character brute force their way through as a human mine detector, clearing the path for the rest of the party behind them.)
• Create the gauntlet in multiple stages, such that — when the PCs penetrate the first stage of the gauntlet — the bad guys can fall back through another section of traps and present them with the same dilemma all over again. (Or, rather than having the bad guys move from one stage to the next, simply position different groups of bad guys between each stage.)

Use them to season your dilemma gauntlet to taste.

You can set up dilemma gauntlets like this when you prep an adventure, but one of the great things about the simple dynamic of this setup is that it’s easy to deploy during play when you’re using adversary rosters to actively play the opposition in a scenario: Simply make note of where traps are located in the complex, and then have your bad guys position themselves to take advantage of them (or even lure the PCs into the gauntlet).

Even more fun is that the PCs can almost as easily create their own dilemma gauntlets: Once they learn where the traps in a dungeon are located, they can similarly force bad guys into the gauntlet. This may work less well, of course, if the bad guys know where the traps are located, but just knowing the traps are there may not help much when you’re getting pelted by ranged attacks.

Creating a dilemma gauntlet can also be useful when you’re restocking a dungeon area to reflect defensive measures being taken by the inhabitants: While the PCs are taking their long rest, the abeil are buzzing away setting (or resetting) layers of traps to help them defend the hive.

Campaign Journal: Session 42A – Running the Campaign: TBD
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 41D: Back Amongst the Rats

They returned to the temple and found four watchmen standing guard before the outer door. The surrounding buildings had been evacuated.

When Tor went to speak with them he learned that a major operation involving watchmen from across the city had attempted to “root out those filthy rats”. But eight watchmen had been killed in attempting to explore the areas below the temple and now they were simply bricking up the basement to seal the problem away.

The watchmen weren’t supposed to let anyone through, but since it was Tor they didn’t think it would be a problem…

The PCs are called to adventure; they venture forth; they triumph over evil or claim the treasure or kiss the prince… and now it’s time to move on to the next adventure.

Something we don’t often think about, though, is the often-quite-literal wreckage that the PCs leave in their wake. In this session, for example, they return to the site of their previous adventure and discover that (a) the city watch has attempted to clean up the site; (b) failed rather badly; and (c) is now boarding the place up.

This establishes that the world is in motion — that stuff keeps happening even when the PCs aren’t there to see it. It also shows that the PCs’ actions have consequences. (Would those watchmen have been killed if you’d finished clearing out the rats?) Plus it’s an opportunity for exposition (as the PCs learn more about the watch and how they handle the dungeon access points within the city).

You don’t need the PCs to specifically “return to the scene of the crime” to make this work. For example, if they burn down a house while fighting gangsters in an urban campaign, you could add that to your list of landmarks (as described in So You Want to Be a Game Master) and have them notice it while traveling through that district in the future.

Such locations can develop over time: The house is rebuilt. A new family moves in. And so forth.

How things change over time will help set the theme and tone of the campaign. At the broadest level, are things getting better or getting worse? (Either in general, or in response to the PCs’ actions.)

MOVING IN

One of my favorite schticks along these lines is to look at a dungeon freshly emptied by the PCs and ask myself, “Who would move in here?”

In a previous session, we saw this happen with an ally when Sir Kabel moved into Pythoness House. We can also imagine infrastructure being claimed (or reclaimed) by local authorities: The town reopens the mine now that the skeletons have been cleared out; the tunnels discovered under the tavern are repurposed as a granary.

But it’s just as likely that the answer is a new villain! “Thanks for arresting all of Dr. Cairo’s minion,” says the Red Death. “A good secret lair is so hard to find these days!

The activities of such a villain, of course, will quickly vector back to the PCs, intersecting their path and creating new scenario hooks that will pull them back to the familiar location.

Done too often, of course, this can become repetitive and frustrating. (“We have to go back to the old lighthouse again?”) Used judiciously, however, or as part of an open table, this can be a delightful way of, once again, showing the players how their actions are affecting the game world. It’s also a fun experience because the players can take advantage of their existing knowledge of the location while also being surprised by how the new tenants have remodeled the joint.

(For similar techniques, also check out (Re-)Running the Megadungeon.)

Of course, sometimes the PCs will gun down all the cartel members at a mansion in Miami and then they’ll never see or think about the place again. (It was probably bought by some incredibly boring, but very rich, neurosurgeon.) If you want to evoke a living world, the loose threads are important, too. Not everything should play out as a closed loop.

Campaign Journal: Session 41E – Running the Campaign: Tactical Traps
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 41C: I’ll Be Seeing You

They returned naturally to the question of their lodgings: Should they go? If so, where?

Jevicca suggested the Nibeck Street mansion. It was currently abandoned, it would give them a base of operations as close to the Banewarrens as they might care to have, and it would let them defend the entrance to the Banewarrens.

On the other hand, as Agnarr put it, “Living over the hellmouth? No thanks.”

After Arveth’s assassination attempt in the previous journal entry, the PCs were highly motivated to figure out what their permanent — and secure! — home base in Ptolus would be.

Wanting to establish a permanent residence wasn’t an entirely new thread in the campaign, however. As the GM, in fact, I was kind of surprised it hadn’t happened already.

When I was initially ginning up the In the Shadow of the Spire campaign, of course, I had anticipated that the Ghostly Minstrel would serve as their initial home base:

• It was a well-detailed location.
• There were cool, poster-sized maps of the inn to enhance play.
• I had positioned the inn as central to the mystery of the PCs’ missing time.

But then, during character creation, Tithenmamiwen unexpectedly ended up being from Ptolus. As described here, the initial pitch was that, although the campaign would be set in Ptolus, none of the PCs should be from the city, but this shifted as we developed Tee’s character background. This meant that Tee actually owned a house in Ptolus, and I assumed it was quite likely that the group would end up staying there:

But when the PCs went there, way back in Session 1, something unexpected happened:

Returning to her house, Tee found everything undisturbed – essentially as she had left it, except for a thick covering of dust. With a distracted, almost manic air, she immediately set to spring cleaning the place. Others in the group offered to help, but they had not gotten far into the work when Ranthir suddenly came to a stop: “If we’ve been back in this city for two weeks and you have not returned to this place… Perhaps there was a reason for that?”

Tee stopped what she was doing. It seemed to tear her up inside, but she was forced to admit that Ranthir was right. They left and she locked the door behind them.

And, with only a couple small exceptions, the PCs, in order to keep her friends and family safe, have not returned to Tee’s mothballed home.

When Tor’s player joined the campaign, they really wanted the group to get a house. It was something that they, as a player, had always wanted to do in a D&D game, but had never had the opportunity to actually make it happen.

I fully expected that this would happen, so I reached out and grabbed Rosegate House from the Ptolus sourcebook (pictured at the beginning of this post).

The PCs in Monte Cook’s original Ptolus campaign were gifted Rosegate House, and he set it up as a resource specifically for GMs like me who had players looking for a house in the city. (One of the great things about Ptolus as a setting is that, having been born from actual play, it’s chockablock with these kinds of practical tools and toys.)

But for whatever reason, despite often talking about it (both at the table and away from it), the PCs never did it. They never actually went looking for a house on sale. (I was surprised that even in this session, as they were actively exploring a bunch of different options, it didn’t actually come up.)

The other major candidate that had been floating around for awhile was Pythoness House, which had first appeared as an adventure location before being cleared out by the PCs. (As I’ve previously discussed, Pythoness House also has awesome graphical resources that were published for it.) I suspect that if the players hadn’t just ensconced Sir Kabel and the Order of the Dawn in Pythoness House a few sessions earlier, that this would, in fact, have been their solution. But since Pythoness House wasn’t currently available (and was also now tangled up in Church politics), it no longer seemed like a viable alternative.

For whatever reason, I had not expected them to approach Lord Zavere about the possibility of staying at Castle Shard. (If I recall correctly, that didn’t work out because they blew their Charisma check.)

PLAYER RENOVATIONS

At this point, therefore, I had actually expected the players to have long since left the Ghostly Minstrel. (Although I did hope that it would still be a place they’d visit as a social hub.)

Instead, with other options not quite panning out for a bunch of different reasons, the PCs ended up doubling down on the Ghostly Minstrel.

Which was great!

When the PCs settle into a long-term home base, I think it’s almost always a good idea to create a map of it. First, I think it makes it feel more like a real, concrete place to the players. Second, the odds that at some point they’ll get involved in a fight or some similar action scene there is approximately 110%.

In this case, as I mentioned above, there was already a great one for the Minstrel (and we’d been using it for a while):

Second Floor of the Ghostly Minstrel

Once the PCs have a home base, though, the moment will almost inevitably come when they want to remodel the joint.

So they decided to stay where they were. Instead of hiding, they would bunker down. They laid out a plan for remodeling an entire wing of the Ghostly Minstrel: A false room with a secret door would be used as a pass-thru to a real suite of other rooms connected by new, interior doors.

They spoke with Tellith, who agreed to the remodel if they paid for it and if they also paid at a year’s rent in advance for the rooms they would be converting. This done, they spent several thousand crowns and arranged for more than twenty contractors (including several master craftsmen) to install the secret door, punch thru the two new connecting doors, and to strengthen the security on the existing doors. They also hired an arcanist to ward the windows with permanent alarms. And then they spent even more money to speed a project that should rightfully take weeks until it would take only two days to complete. On top of all that, Tee set aside enough money to pay every single person working on the project a hefty bonus to forget that they had ever worked on it.

Nasira was somewhat taken aback by the sheer amount of money they were able to throw at the project (more than 5,000 crowns when all was said and done). And while the project surely tapped deeply into their resources, they all felt it was an investment worth making.

Which is also great! It’s how the PCs can truly take ownership over a space and make it definitively theirs.

Once the PCs start making major modifications, though, what do you do with your beautiful maps? Well, sometimes you’ll end up just making an all-new map. More often than not, though, I’ll us a map patch like this one:

These alter just the section of the map that has been changed. Sometimes I’ll apply the match digitally and simply print out a new copy of the full map. In this case, I just printed out a copy of the map patch itself. Several sessions later, when the renovations were complete, I was able to present the patch to the players and let them actually add it to the map themselves — a little metagame ceremony that let them share in their characters’ excitement at touring their new rooms.

You can find other map patches I’ve done for cities and wilderness maps here and here.

To create map patches like these, I simply load the map into a graphics editing program like Photoshop (scanning it first if necessary). Then a little judicious copy-and-pasting combined with the clone tool generally lets me use elements of the original map as a palette for the new one. For location maps like the Ghostly Minstrel, seek out:

• Clean sections of wall without surrounding décor. (You’ll likely need both straight walls and corners.)
• Empty floor tiles.
• Doors and windows.

Other elements can also be useful, obviously, but if you can get these basics in place, you can usually do almost anything.

You might also find it useful to seek out other maps by the same cartographer to source other useful elements while maintaining the same visual style.

It’s vitally important, of course, to keep the resolution of the patch synced to the original image so that applying the patch (whether digitally or physically) can be seamless and easy.

Campaign Journal: Session 41D – Running the Campaign: Aftermath of Adventure
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 41B: The Return of Arveth

At Myraeth’s, they found a bag of holding formed from links of golden chain with a dragon worked in crimson links within it. It was larger than the ones they already owned and Tee – envying the dragon design – was depressed to find it was too bulky and heavy for her to carry.

Ranthir took it instead, nesting it among his many bags and pouches.

Something you may notice throughout the campaign journal is me giving specific, unique descriptions to various items. Sometimes I’ll even go so far as to prep visual handouts for them.

This is probably even more prevalent at the actual table, since only the most notable or pertinent examples actually make it into the journal.

(I should mention that I’m not prepping all of these ahead of time. A lot of them – including the bag of holding described above – are being improvised at the table. The principles of smart prep apply here.)

Some of these descriptions end up being ephemeral – useful for a moment to conjure an image of the world before the inner eyes of the players, but otherwise largely or entirely forgotten.

Others, however, will stick.

Which ones?

Nobody knows.

Sometimes I try to predict it (“this is so cool, they’ll obviously remember it forever!”), but I’m almost certainly wrong more often than I’m right. What sticks with this sort of thing is usually a lot more situational than you might think. Attention and memory can be fickle things, and which objects sentimental value and notoriety attaches to often has at least as much to do with what’s happening to both characters and players at that precise moment as it does the object itself.

The point, though, is that for anything to stick you have to keep throwing stuff out there. Enough stuff that you can start winning the numbers game.

Although, on the other hand, you don’t want to throw out so much stuff that it overwhelms the players and becomes indistinguishable noise. Not every rusty sword the PCs find in a moldering crypt needs to be lovingly detailed. And, if you are giving an item the bespoke treatment, you don’t need to lavish it with multiple paragraphs. Usually just one or two cool details will get the job done. (Maybe three on the outside.) Even if you know that not every item you describe will ultimately stand out, you still want every object to have the opportunity to do so.

Which is why, in D&D, I’ll often focus this descriptive detail on magic items. It inherently narrows the field for me. I also want magic items to feel special. For example, it’s easy for every bag of holding to glob together into a generic nonentity, and they really shouldn’t.

(Although by no means should this dissuade you from occasionally hyping up a mundane item with a cool description. It certainly doesn’t stop me.)

This is not going to be a comprehensive discussion of all the different ways you can give objects cool descriptions, but here are a few things I like to think about.

First, what’s the utility of the object? What does it actually do? How could that be reflected in the structure of appearance of the object?

For example, a staff of fire gives its wielder resistance to fire damage and can be used to create flame-based effects (burning hands, fireball, wall of fire). Some quick brainstorming suggests various options:

• Someone attuning to the staff is limned in a flickering flame.
• The staff is topped be a large ruby, inside which is trapped an eternally burning flame (and all the various fire spells blast out from this ruby).
• The entire staff is actually made from a frozen flame.
• The staff is warm to the touch.
• When one attunes to the staff, it scorches the hand holding the staff, leaving a brand depicting the arcane sigil of the wizard who created it.
• The staff is a long shard of obsidian, split down the middle. To create one of the staff’s fire effects, pull the two ends of the staff apart, revealing the heart of flame held within.

Second, add one other purely decorative or incidental detail. If the utility hasn’t already added some flash to the item, this is a good opportunity to do so. These details might also suggest ownership, origin, or similar information. (Which may just be flavor, but could also reveal relevant information about the situation or scenario.)

Let’s do another one. A keycharm, from Eberron: Rising from the Last War, allows you to cast alarm, arcane lock, and glyph of warding spells that alert the holder of the keycharm if they’re triggered or bypassed. The item description suggests that this looks like a “small, stylized key.” If we stick that, we might still look at options like:

• The key is formed from a black stone with strange purple veins running through it.
• The key is made from taurum, the true gold and its bow bears the sigil of House Abanar.
• The key is a living “bud” sprouted from the heartwood of a dryad’s tree by druidic arts.
• A plain key of battered copper, but the bits of the key are a whirling, ever-shifting blur.

As you’re improvising these descriptions, remember that you can put your thumb on the scale of the party’s reaction by thinking about what you know the players or their characters already love (e.g., Tee’s infatuation with dragons) or hate.

(I would honestly pay good money for a book that was just a dozen different “looks” for every magic item in the Dungeon Master’s Guide.)

Campaign Journal: Session 41C – Running the Campaign: Home Bases
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 41A: Dominic’s Denunciation

“I would ask your help,” Agnarr said. He pulled the body of the boy out of his bag of holding. “Is there anything you can do?”

“Perhaps,” Aoska said, examining the boy. “The damage runs deep. It will take us time to find a cure, if one is possible at all. And we would need to keep this collar upon him, to preserve him in his current state of stasis.”

Agnarr readily agreed. “Send word.”

The iron collar used to preserve the horrifically transformed child in a state of gentle repose is, if I say so myself, a pretty cool magic item. The players loved it. The flavor was fun, the aesthetic was punk, and the utility was phenomenal (in both keeping them alive and conserving their healing resources).

I hadn’t actually expected it to be such a big hit when I added it to the Laboratory of the Beast, but I was equally delighted by its presence in the campaign.

So why take it away from them?

Precisely because it was important to them.

And also because saving the life of the boy was important to them.

Taking a step back, one of your fundamental goals as a GM is to get the players to care about the campaign. Almost everything else is built on top of that. If they don’t care, then nothing else matters. But if you can get them to care about something – literally anything – in the campaign, then you can use that to get them invested: Outcomes suddenly matter. Consequences have meaning. The stuff they experience at the table will stick with them and they’ll be champing at the bit to come back and play again.

Care often works like a circle: The easiest thing to get a player to care about is their own PC. They invested personal effort into making the character; it’s quite likely they were creatively engaged during character creation; and the more they play the character, the more time they’ve personally invested in it.

It’s also usually pretty easy to grow the circle a little bit and get the player to care about the other PCs in the group: They’re directly connected to real people that the player is spending time with and likely already cares about.

Expanding the circle more than that, though, can feel like a quantum leap. You’re asking the players to care about things that don’t actually exist.

Tee insisted that Tor deal with it. He had been the one to kill them; it was his problem to solve.

“You’ve forgotten your compassion,” Tee said. “This place has made you hard.”

Tor nodded. “Sometimes you need to be hard to survive. I learned that from the horses.”

If the players can make that leap, though, the payoff can be huge. Your options for motivating them (and for motivating themselves) multiply exponentially. You can run far better horror games by putting things at risk other than the PCs’ life or death. Roleplaying will become richer and, as the players become invested in the stakes, more intense.

The other great thing is that this care can be viral: Once the players start caring about one thing in the campaign world, it will naturally lead to them carrying about other things.

You can also use this to your advantage: It can be hard to get them to care directly about some abstract idea (e.g., the Duchy of Kithos trying to win its independence from the Empire), but if you can get them to start caring about a character, then you can use that get them to care about the things that character cares about. (Or, if that care takes the form of loathing the NPC, then vice versa.)

So what I’m looking at in this session is a goddamn holy grail: The players have literally never even spoken to this NPC, but they have become emotionally invested in his fate and are willing to go out of their way to help him. Jackpot! This is what winning looks like!

Naturally, of course, the PCs now go looking for a way to help this NPC. When you see something like this happen at the game table, you might think to yourself, “Well, the last thing I want to do is discourage them! So I should make it as easy as possible for them to help the boy!”

Surprisingly, though, it turns out that this is exactly the opposite of what you want to do.

Which brings us back to the collar.

The collar is a cost. The players want to accomplish something and I’m making them pay a price to do it.

Vitally, this was a choice for them. If, I dunno, an astral vulture swooped out of the Ethereal Plane, grabbed the collar, and flew off, that would be meaningless. Even if Aoska, without announcing her intentions, had just zapped the collar out of existence and used its magical power to restore the boy, the effect wouldn’t be the same.

This cost is also not capricious, obviously. It flows logically from the narrative. As the GM, though, I could have declared that the Pale Tower had their own resources for dealing with the situation and let Agnarr take the collar with him.

But by imposing a cost, I’m forcing the players to demonstrate their care. I’m asking them, “Do you care enough about this to pay this cost?” Paradoxically, this makes them care even more. By paying the cost, they’ve become invested. The thing they’re paying the cost for – and, by extension, the game world as a whole – becomes endowed with value.

It turns out that this works even if they don’t pay the cost; if they had said, “No, this cost is too high. We can’t help this boy.” (Which is something that actually did happen earlier in the campaign when Tee couldn’t bear the cost of selling her house to save Jasin. Although in that case it was Agnarr’s player who proposed the cost; I didn’t even have to get my hands dirty.) In making the decision to pay or not pay the cost, the players have made a value judgment. Just making that value judgment gets them thinking critically about the game world (and their opinions of the gme world), which is enough.

This can work if the cost is just monetary. But it works even better if the cost is something more concrete than that – a specific person, organization, ideal, or, as in this case, object.

The fact that the cost, in this case, is also something they care about only enhances the result.  This is one of the reasons that care can become viral, but it’s also where the hard choices come from.

And the harder the choice, the bigger the payoff.

Campaign Journal: Session 41B – Running the Campaign: What the Magic Looks Like
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index