DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 45B: On a Hill of Corpse Flowers

Several stone sarsens jutted up from the ground, forming a rough and imperfect circle. Each of the sarsens bore the sigil of Alchestrin and were worn with age and crept-over with moss. The grass had grown tall around them, and here and there even taller plants had sprung up with broad, shiny leaves and brightly-colored flowers. More disturbingly, they could see the corpses of small animals scattered here and there around the sarsens.

A faint whiff of pungent decay wafted down the hill towards them, but they decided to brazenly ignore the animal carcasses and head straight up the hill towards the sarsens. As they drew near the circle, they could see in its center a large iron plug etched with bronze and set into the earth….

In my experience, it’s difficult to take a simple environmental hazard and turn it into compelling gameplay at the table. Not impossible. The same principles that make for compelling traps can also apply to natural hazards. I just find, without the element of human ingenuity behind the construction of a deliberate trap, that it’s harder to justify those principles.

With that being said, this session demonstrates a fundamental design principle that I find incredibly useful: If you have an environmental hazard, you can add almost literally any creature to the encounter and you’ll instantly make both the hazard and the creature more interesting.

If I had just added corpse flowers around the entrance to Alchestrin’s Tomb, it would have taken, at best, a trivial effort by the PCs to burn them away. Similarly, if they had found nothing except a coldsnake curled up on top of the iron plug, the result would have been a pretty perfunctory combat encounter. Either way, it would have been a pretty forgettable experience.

But put the two together and… Presto! You’ve got a unique experience.

This principle works, in part, because it can:

• Force target selection. Which problem are the PCs going to deal with first? (If they only have one target — or their targets are indistinguishable — then there’s no meaningful choice. As soon as you have multiple options, however, there’s an opportunity for tactical choice.)
• Create weird and unexpected interactions and/or synergies, potentially giving a fresh spin to even familiar abilities.
• Offer tactical opportunities that can be taken advantage of by either the bad guys, the PCs, or both.

You get similar results from combining multiple monsters of different types into the same encounter.

Fortunately, Tee – trying to suppress a cough that seemed as if it would rip out her lungs – spotted one of the tall, brightly-colored flowers turning towards them with an almost sadistic purpose. Making an intuitive leap she realized that the flowers – not the serpent – were the true source of the noisome plague. She shouted out a warning to the others while lurching towards the nearest flower, but her weakly-swung sword failed to produce any effect on its thick, armored stalk as she collapsed.

In this case, I hadn’t actually planned for the PCs not to realize the source of the poisonous malaise afflicting them, but it’s exactly the sort of thing that can just spontaneously emerge from encounters like this.

LOOTING BESTIARIES, REDUX

I’ve previously discussed how I’ll systematically loot bestiaries as part of the development cycle for a campaign. In this case, as I prepared Alchestrin’s Tomb, I went on a mid-campaign survey looking for stuff that would be cool to plug into the adventure:

• Corpse Flowers are from Creatures of Freeport.
• Coldsnakes are, unfortunately, from a disreputable publisher I won’t direct you towards because they scammed me.
• The iron plug and its riddling inscription is taken from the brief description of Alchestrin’s Tomb in the Ptolus)

I love RPGs with lots of high quality adventures, because those can be plugged directly into a campaign structure. But even better is an RPG with tons of modular material that can be plugged directly into scenario structures and scene structures (i.e., encounters). It’s just so much fun to go browsing through these toys, grabbing the coolest ones that catch your eye, and then seeing how they can be combined into cool stuff.

Campaign Journal: Session 45C – Running the Campaign: Agenda Pressure
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 45A: By Commissar’s Decree

“I’m glad you could come here today,” Carrina said. “The Commissar appreciates all of the work and sacrifices you have made for this city.”

“Happy to oblige,” Tor said.

“As your recent actions in the Temple District suggest, you’re already familiar with the recent surge in cultist activities within the city,” Carrina continued.

“Intimately so,” Tee said.

“Just so,” Carrina smiled thinly. “That’s why the Commissar has chosen to deputize you to investigate the cultist activity.”

“We’re already doing that,” Elestra blurted.

“Then it should be no great hardship to do it in the Commissar’s name,” Carrina said. “You will each be paid 75 gold pieces a month, with additional bonuses to be paid at my discretion for tangible results.”

One of my favorite things to do as a GM is having powerful and important people – the people in charge – recognize and acknowledge what the PCs have been doing in the campaign. Sometimes this is a good thing. Sometimes it isn’t. Often it’s a little bit of both. But either way, this is almost always guaranteed to excite the players.

Focusing on just the good stuff for the moment, recognition in my games have resulted in the PCs being:

• Recruited to exclusive organizations
• Featured in news reports
• Invited to exclusive social events
• Deputized to solve a problem
• Given a spaceship
• Granted lucrative contracts
• Knighted
• Given noble titles

Sometimes this acts as a kind of reverse patronage: Instead of having someone rich and powerful offer them payment up front, they instead materialize after the fact and give the PCs a monetary or material reward for something they did for completely different reasons.

An earlier example of recognition as reward in this campaign was the Harvesttime party at Castle Shard. In that case, the social event reward also served as a way to advance several threads of the campaign, introduce new NPCs, and drop a number of clues.

Similarly, in this session, the PCs are getting deputized, giving them official recognition and a small stipend for doing the thing they’re already doing (investigating the chaos cults). Deputization is also an example of the techniques I talk about in Random GM Tips: Calling in the Little Guys, where the official response to the PCs calling the cops (or the local equivalent) is to say, “Wow! Yeah! That’s definitely a problem! Can’t wait to see how you resolve it!” So, in this case, I’m kind of preemptively taking “let’s go to the authorities!” off the table: Yes, the Commissar would definitely be interested in stopping the chaos cults. Rather than letting that potentially sideline the PCs, let’s instead seize the opportunity to put them in the spotlight!

In other words, delivering recognition as reward can often serve multiple purposes at the same time.

As such, no matter how positive the immediate recognition, it’s also almost always a double-edged sword: Being recognized as important also means painting a target on yourself. You’re an important superhero? Then supervillains may want to preemptively take you off the board. You’re known to have the ear of the crown prince? That makes you a target for grifters, conmen, and others who see the PCs as a means to their ends. (This is also what happened when Rehobath schismed the Imperial Church.)

To flip this one last time, though, the reason recognition attracts negative attention like moths to flame is specifically because the PCs are burning so bright! Even without a formal position (like becoming deputies), recognition can be as empowering as any magic item. Often moreso. Having the ear of the crown prince isn’t just really cool, it also lets you do things that would otherwise be impossible.

This not only enhances your current camapign. It’s also a signal that you’re ready for a new kind of adventure.

Campaign Journal: Session 45B – Running the Campaign: Monster + Environment
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 44B: Time to Fly

 Tor grabbed up Agnarr’s body and turned, churning his way down the hall.

The twisting vines continued to confound their orderly retreat, but several of them had broken free now and were running back across the lounge. Tee, who was still trying to assist Tor’s retreat, tossed Nasira her magical lockpicking ring: “Get out! Quick as you can!”

Nasira reached the door to the long hall of whores and swung it open. Looking both ways she sighed with relief and called back over her shoulder, “All clea—“

The door at the far end of the hall opened. Two of the armored serpents and six unarmored ones poured through. “There they are!”

As I mentioned in Prepping Porphyry House, this adventure has been enhanced with an adversary roster. And it’s a pretty great example of the kind of dynamic play that having an adversary roster can unlock for you.

In the early part of the session, you can see that the players have already internalized the consequences of dynamic dungeons: When they stealthily take out some of the guards, they know they can’t just leave the bodies lying around, because it’s very possible that they’ll be discovered by other cultists moving throughout the building.

But a little while later you can see the evidence of me actively using the adversary roster:

Tee, on the other hand, did head into the room and quickly inspected the well (finding nothing unusual about it – it was a perfectly ordinary well). She was about to move on to the equipment in the corner—

When a patrol of two fully-armored serpent-men came around the corner in the hall.

One of them immediately turned and ran back around the corner. Tor, Agnarr, and Elestra quickly converged on the remaining serpent and hacked it to pieces. But by the time they were finished with it, two more had appeared at the end of the next hall in a four-way intersection between several doors.

The PCs get spotted, some of the bad guys run to raise the alarm, and things begin to spiral out of control.

Last week, Dave Oldcorn asked, “Does this not happen an awful lot of the time with adversary rosters?” And the answer to the question is complicated.

The first thing to recognize is that the PCs made a mistake and then got unlucky with their dice rolls: The mistake was leaving most of the party standing in the hallway (a high-traffic area) while Tee was searching a room (a time-consuming activity). They might have still had the opportunity to avoid catastrophe, but they rolled poorly and didn’t hear the guard patrol coming. And then, on top of that, they lost initiative, so the guards both had the opportunity to see them and run reinforcements before they could do anything.

Mistakes and bad luck will happen, of course, so it’s not necessarily unusual for this sort of thing to happen. But you’ll also see plenty of other examples in this campaign journal where the PCs didn’t make mistakes and/or the dice were in the favor, and so kept control of the situation. In fact, it’s not difficult to imagine how just one thing going a little differently might have caused the entire Porphyry House scenario to play out in a completely different way.

Which leads us to a second important principle when it comes to adversary rosters: They shift some of the responsibility for encounter design from the GM to the players. By the point where the PCs were facing off against multiple squads of guards, an angry spellcaster, and a giant stone golem, they were clearly in over their heads. But that wasn’t an encounter that I created for them. It was, in most ways, an encounter they’d created for themselves.

This creates a really interesting dynamic where (a) the players feel ownership of their fate and (b) they can engage in truly strategic play, often controlling the difficulty and pace of the encounters they’re facing. (What happened in this session was, ultimately, a series of strategic failures followed by some strategic genius that ultimately allowed them to escape a rapidly developing catastrophe.)

In order for this to work, though, the GM needs to play fair. An important part of that is respecting the fog of war: The other reason “every monster in the place descending upon you instantly” isn’t the default outcome is because it isn’t the automatic outcome of the PCs getting spotted by a bad guy. That bad guy has to decide to run for help; the PCs have to fail to stop them from doing that; and then it takes time for them to fetch that help. And even once they have gotten help… where are the PCs? Did they just stay where they were? If not, how will the bad guys figure that out? What mistakes might be made within the fog of war? How can the PCs take advantage of that?

Above all, an adversary roster is a tool that lets you, as the GM, easily roleplay all the denizens of the dungeon. Truly embrace that opportunity by putting yourself fully in their shoes — thinking about what they know; what they would prioritize; and the decision they would, therefore, make — and playing to find out.

The final thing that pulls all of this together is the Dungeon as Theater of Operations: If the encounter in this session were glued to a single room — or if the players felt like they weren’t “allowed” to leave the borders of the battlemap — this would not have been compelling session. In fact, it would have almost certainly ended with all of the PCs dead. It’s only because the PCs were able to strategically duel with the actively played opposition of Porphyry House in an engagement ranging across fully half of the building’s first floor that (a) the PCs survived and (b) the session was a thrilling escapade from beginning to end.

Campaign Journal: Session 45A – Running the Campaign: Recognition as Reward
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 44A: Whorehouse of Terror

Agnarr flew into a rage. “Stay away from her!”

The serpent-men in the far hall had now thrown open one of the doors there. “Erepodi!” they shouted through it. “We’re under attack!”

Erepodi… The name was familiar to Tee. It took her a moment to wrack her memory, but eventually she alighted upon its source: The small picture locket they had found in Pythoness House.

And indeed, in the very moment that Tee remembered the locket, Erepodi herself strode into view through the door, scarcely changed from her picture.

“I know not who you are! Or why you have come! But none shall disturb my house!”

This is a moment where the player has forgotten something that happened during the campaign. This isn’t unusual. As human beings we forget stuff all of the time, and unlike our characters we aren’t living in these fictional worlds 24-7. (Or whatever the hours, days, and weeks look like in your fantasy milieu of choice.)

I don’t remember exactly how this precise moment was resolved, but it generally happens in one of three ways.

First, one of the other players does remember this bit of continuity and simply reminds the table what happened. It’s up to the player to decide whether that’s an in-character moment (e.g., Tee forgot and Ranthir reminded her) or not. (I’m pretty confident this isn’t what happened in this moment, as this happens all the time and I wouldn’t have recorded it in the journal.)

Second, the campaign journal is consulted. Creating a record of continuity is, after all, exactly why we’re keeping a campaign journal in the first place. In the case of the In the Shadow of the Spire campaign, one of the players has loaded the journal into the group’s private wiki so that it can be rapidly searched (along with digital copies of many of the handouts and other records the group has created).

Third, I’ll have the PC make a memory check. For my D&D 3^rd Editon campaigns, I simplified and adapted a rule from the Book of Eldritch Might 3 for this.

MEMORY CHECK

Whenever a character might remember something that happened to them either in actual play, from their own (pregame) past, or something that happened “off stage”, they should make a memory check. (This could also be to remember some minor detail that the DM didn’t point out specifically because it would have caused undue suspicion and attention…)

A memory check is a simple Intelligence check. Characters cannot Take 20 and retries are not allowed. (Characters can Take 10 in non-stressful situations, however.)

Characters also have access to the following feats:

• Excellent Memory: +5 to memory checks
• Photographic Memory: +15 to memory checks. (Requires Excellent Memory.)

This material is covered by the Open Gaming License.

THE GM’s ROLE

What about my role as the GM here? Shouldn’t I just tell the players when they’ve forgotten something?

Maybe.

This is a tricky bit of praxis, in my opinion. On the one hand, I don’t want the players stymied because they’ve forgotten something that their characters should remember. On the other hand, figuring out how things fit together is a deeply satisfying and rewarding experience, and I don’t want to be constantly short-circuiting that by spelling everything out for them. Conclusions are just infinitely more fun if the players figure them out for themselves.

And, in fact, it can also be fun when the players could have figured something out, but didn’t. That, “Oh my god! It was right in front of us the whole time!” moment can be really incredible, but none of you will ever have the chance to experience it if you’re constantly spoonfeeding them.

So if I can see that my players have “missed” something, the first thing I’ll ask myself is, “Have they forgotten a fact or are they missing a conclusion?” I may or may not provide them with a missing fact, but I will do almost anything in my power to avoid giving them a conclusion.

(This situation with Erepodi is an interesting example because it kind of lands in a gray area here: It’s partly about remembering a fact they learned in Pythoness House — i.e., the name “Erepodi” — and partly about drawing the conclusion that this is the same person. So it’s a little tricky.)

The next thing I’ll consider is, “Is this something that their character should remember?” The answer to that may be an obvious Yes, in which case I’ll provide the answer. If the answer isn’t obvious, call for a memory check. (This can usually just default to some kind of Intelligence or IQ check if your system doesn’t have a formal memory check mechanic.)

Tip: An advanced technique you might use, if you have a searchable campaign journal like we do, is to say something like, “You should check the campaign journal for that.” The disadvantage is that this consumes extra time. But it has the benefit that the players still feel a sense of ownership about “figuring it out.” Logically, it shouldn’t make a difference. In practice, it can be an effective bit of psychological finesse.

Another key consideration is how essential this information is to the structure of the scenario and/or the PCs’ current situation. If it’s just an incidental detail leading to a revelation that could just as easily simmer for a long time, then I might be a little more likely to let it pass and see if the players notice it or figure it out later. If, on the other hand, they’re in a middle of an investigation, are rapidly running out of leads to follow, and forgetting this detail will likely derail the investigation completely, I’m more likely to default to giving them the info.

A final factor here is if the players are directly asking for the info. For example, if they say something like, “Erepodi? That name sounds familiar. Justin, where have we heard that name before?” This is a very strong indicator, and I’m almost certainly going to either point them in the right direction (“check the campaign journal” or “do you still have that letter from the duke?”), call for a memory check, or simply give them the information.

Conversely, if they aren’t saying anything, players often know more than you realize. It’s not unusual for me to call for a memory check, have it succeed, and give them the information, only for the player to say, “Oh, yeah. I already knew that.” This is another reason why, in the absence of other factors, I’ll usually default to not saying anything and seeing how things develop through actual play.

If nothing else, when they realize their mistake, it will also encourage the players to keep better notes!

ADVANCED TECHNIQUE: DELAYED RECALL

Here’s a technique I haven’t actually used, but by sheer synchronicity I was reading through Aaron Allston’s Crime Fighter RPG this week and stumbled across a cool idea. In the introductory scenario “New Shine on an Old Badge,” the PCs are tracking down a criminal who turns out to be an ex-cop dressing up in his old uniform. When the PCs have an opportunity to catch a glimpse of this fake/ex-cop from a distance, Allston recommends:

As the investigation and paperwork continues, the characters will find that no one knows who the officer was. Let the characters make INT rolls. If anyone achieves a 17 or better, he’ll remember who the guy is — “Ray Calhoun — only that can’t be right, because he retired six or seven years ago; he used to visit the station pretty regularly, even after he retired.”

If someone achieves a fourteen or better, he’ll wake up in the middle of the night remembering who the guy is.

Emphasis added.

In this case (pun intended), this isn’t something the players have forgotten or would be capable of remembering. (Their characters met Ray Calhoun before the campaign began.) But the idea of taking a partial success and resolving it as, “In the middle of the night you wake up and realize you forgot something!” is, I think, a really interesting framing for this.

Along similar lines, you might decide, “Well, they don’t immediately remember encountering the name ‘Erepodi’ before. But the next time they encounter the name, it will all fall into place for them.”

CONCLUSION

Some of the issues you’ll run into with player memory vs. character memory will be very similar to the issues that can arise when adjudicating idea rolls. For a deeper discussion on those, you might want to check out GM Don’t List #10: Idea Rolls.

Campaign Journal: Session 44B – Running the Campaign: Adversary Rosters in Action
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 43E: Snakes in a Whorehouse

They found a secluded corner on the northern side of the building, well-shielded from prying public eyes, and drilled through. They found themselves in a long hallway that looked to run almost the entire length of the building. On the long opposite wall of the hall were roughly a dozen secret doors – or, rather, the back-side of secret doors. Although their construction clearly indicated that they were designed to be lay flush with the wall on the opposite side, from this side their nature and operation were plain. The hall was capped at either end by similar doors.

They had finally breached the walls of Porphyry House.

“The Porphyry House Horror” is an adventure by James Jacobs published in Dungeon Magazine #95. I scooped it up when I was looting scenarios from Dungeon during my original campaign prep: I skimmed through 40-50 issues, looking for stuff that I could incorporate into the campaign. While the PCs ended up skipping several adventures I’d pulled for Act I of the campaign, there’s a bunch of cult-related adventures that I used to add depth to Wuntad’s conspiracy/gathering of the cults in Act II.

(For some reason I started referring to the adventure as “Porphyry House of Horrors” in my notes. I had a real Mandela Effect moment when I went back to reference the original magazine for this article.)

I thought it might be useful to take a peek at how I went about prepping this adventure.

The original scenario was 30 pages long. My prep notes for the scenario, on the other hand, fill a 45-page Word document. That might sound like I completely ripped the module apart and put it back together, but that’s not really the case.

• 25 pages of my notes are actually handouts I designed for the players. (I’ll talk more about these later.)
• 10 pages are stat sheets for the adventure. This was partly so that I could use the stat sheets for easy reference (instead of needing to flip around in the adventure), and also because I wanted to adapt the stat blocks to an easier to use format.

So you can see that only about ten pages of material was actually making substantive changes to the module. And most of that was mostly dedicated to adding stuff. “The Porphyry House Horror” is just ar really great adventure. There’s a reason why I snatched it up.

LINKING THE ADVENTURE

After making a list of all the cult-related scenario nodes in Act II of the campaign — some pulled from Monte Cook’s Night of Dissolution, others from Dungeon Magazine, a couple from Paizo adventures, several of my own creation — I went through and made a revelation list with all the leads pointing from one scenario node to another.

While getting ready to prep Porphyry House, I went through this list and wrote down all the clues that needed to be available there, forming a clue list for the adventure:

• Porphyry House to Final Ritual.
• Porphyry House to Temple of Deep Chaos.
• Porphyry House to Kambranex (Water Street Stables).
• Porphyry House to White House.
• Porphyry House to Voyage of the Dawnbreaker.

(Actually, a couple of those may not have been on the list yet. I may have discovered them while prepping Porphyry House and then added them to the list afterwards. If so, however, I don’t recall which ones were which.)

At this point, these connections would have been almost entirely structural. They represent my broad understanding of the macro-scale connections between the various cults — i.e., Porphyry House is using chaositech that would be sourced from Kambranex — but I don’t know what the specific clues actually are yet. This is functionally a checklist of blank boxes I need to fill while prepping the adventure.

INTEGRATING THE ADVENTURE

With these links forged, I made a copy of “The Porphyry House of Horrors” and slid it into an accordion folder along with other adventures I had sourced for the campaign. I then didn’t touch the adventure two years. There were, after all, a bunch of other adventures for the PCs to tackle before they would get anywhere near Porphyry House.

According to the file info, I began prepping my notes for Porphyry House at 7:56 PM on August 15^th, 2009. This makes sense: That’s also the date that I ran Session 41 of the campaign, during which the PCs decided that they wanted to go to Porphyry House. I would have written the campaign journal that session, and then begun prepping the scenario.

(It’s likely that I had actually reread the original adventure after Session 40, when the PCs first heard about Porphyry House. At that point they would have clearly been just a couple sessions away, and so I would have begun preparations.)

The first thing I did was figure out how to integrate the background of Porphyry House into the campaign. In this case, it was pretty straightforward:

• Porphyry House is a whore house.
• Wuntad’s first chaos cult was based out of Pythoness House, another whorehouse.

Sometimes integrating a published scenario into an ongoing campaign is tricky. Sometimes it’s more like drawing a straight line.

• “The Porphyry House of Horrors” is set in the town of Scuttlecover. I just dropped that material and picked a location for Porphyry House in Ptolus.
• I also dropped the entire original adventure hook. (I knew that the players would be getting hooked in to the cult’s activities there via the leads from other cult nodes.)
• The original Porphyry House cult was dedicated to Demogorgon. I simple palette-shifted that to a Galchutt-focused chaos cult.
• Erepodi, a minor background character from the Pythoness House adventure, was made the founder of Porphyry House. (I knew I would need to add her to the scenario.)
• Wulvera, the cult leader from the Porphyry House adventure, was given a tweaked background that synced with the lore from Ptolus and my own campaign world.
• I also knew that I wanted Wuntad to keep a guest room at Porphyry House. (This would be a useful vector for clues, and also be in accord with the Principles of RPG Villainy.)

With those details determine, I put together a very brief (roughly half a page) timeline summarizing the canonical version of events for my campaign. The original adventure also included a Gather Information table, and I adapted this to fit the new lore. (This filled the other half of that page.)

ADVERSARY ROSTER

The next thing I did was the adversary roster.

The first step was simply reading through the adventure and listing the location of every denizens. Sometimes this is all I need to do to have a ready-to-use roster, but in this case there was a lot of tweaking and adjustments that were made as I was developing the scenario. (For example, I was adding Erepodi to the adventure.)

The most significant change I made here was deciding that Porphyry House would have a different adversary roster during the Day than it would have at Night. This sort of major shift in inhabitants can be a huge pain in the ass with a traditionally keyed dungeon, but is incredibly easy with an adversary roster.

The roster was quite large, so I put the Day Roster on one page and the Night Roster on another.

PREP NOTES

I then worked my way through the location key, making diff notes as described in How to Prep an Module. In an adventure with 46 keyed locations, I made changed to 15 of them. These were almost entirely:

• Adjusting lore (e.g., shifting the original Demogorgon references)
• Adding handouts (see below)
• Making the adjustments required for integrating the adventure (as described above)
• Adding clues to flesh out the adventure’s revelation list (mostly relating to the horrific ritual Porphyry House is making preparations for)

For example, in the original module there are four rooms all keyed to Area 16:

16. DOCUMENTS AND LIBRARY

These rooms store both idle reading material for the yuan-ti to relax with, as well as exhaustive records of their guests. None of the records have any indication that Porphyry House is anything other than a well-managed and profitable brothel, although the documents make for interesting reading; it seems that the yuan-ti keep records on everything their customers ask for…

I took advantage of this by re-keying these rooms as 16A through 16D:

• 16A was the Customer Records
• 16B was a Dark Reading Room
• 16C was Wuntad’s Guest Quarters
• 16D was Erepodi’s Quarters

In re-keying these chambers, I did things like:

• Flesh out the customer records to (a) add clues to some of the central revelations in the scenario and (b) add leads pointing to other cult nodes (e.g., sums being delivered to the Temple of the Fifty-Three Gods of Chance and “Illadras at the Apartment Building on Crossing Streets”).
• Add a selection of chaos lorebooks to the Dark Reading Room.
• Add some of the items Wuntad took from the PCs at Pythoness House to his guest room.
• Added a handout depicting a mosaic floor (with chaos cult symbols).

And so forth.

One other interesting change I made here was greatly increasing Porphyry House’s size through the simple expedient of changing the map scale from 5’ per square to 10’ per square. (I liked the slightly more grandiose dimensions this gave Porphyry House, and it also better fit the dimensions of the building I’d selected on the Ptolus city map for the location.)

HANDOUTS

Anyone familiar with the Alexandrian Remix of Eternal Lies knows that I love props. (I created over 300+ of them for that campaign.) I love handing stuff to the players because the players love it when you hand stuff to them.

For Porphyry House this included:

• A map showing the location of Porphyry House.
• Magic item references. (I frequently write these up — often including an image of the item — for any magic items the PCs find that aren’t from the DMG. It’s a fun way to make the loot feel extra special, and it’s a super useful reference the player can use for their new items.)
• Graphics depicting various NPCs and monsters. (Got a cool picture in your adventure? I will not hesitate to rip it out and give it to my players, including Photoshopping it if I need to.)
• Various bespoke lorebooks, such as Wuntad’s Notes on the Feast of the Natharl’nacna and Wilarue’s Flaying Journal. (As noted above, there were also chaos lorebooks — copies of which were spread around throughout the campaign — to be found here.)
• Various correspondence, such as Letter from Shigmaa Cynric to Wuntad and Instructions to the Madames.

Prepping handouts like these is often the most labor-intensive portion of my scenario prep, but it can also be the most rewarding.

WRAPPING THINGS UP

In practice, of course, a lot of this work is iterative: I’m updating a room key, taking notes on the handouts found there, and then bouncing back to work on more room keys. Or maybe details in one of the letters I’m writing will cause me to go back and add additional details to the background notes and timeline.

But, ultimately, this is pretty much all there is to it. At the end of this process, I had a really fantastic adventure that felt as if it had been custom-written for my campaign and my players.

Campaign Journal: Session 44A – Running the Campaign: Recalling the Lore
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index