DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 29C: Skirmish in the Cauldron

“Friends of that meddlesome paladin!” The minotaur turned back towards the northern passage. “Stop hiding like cowards! Attack!”

The minotaur dashed forward, quaffing a potion that caused him to suddenly blur with speed. Bunching his powerful leg muscles he leapt up onto the thick rim of the immense iron cauldron.

“They’re drinking our wealth away!” Tee cried, firing at the minotaur.

I’m a big fan of consumable magic items: Drink a potion, it’s gone. Use up the charges in a wand, it’s done. 5^th Edition D&D turning a bunch of consumable items into permanent items via recharging charges is somewhat inexplicable to me.

See, the great thing about a consumable item is that you can give it to the PCs with an almost completely clear conscience: If you give them a permanent item and it screws up game balance, then you’ve got a permanent problem. Miscalculate and give them a consumable item that’s more powerful than you thought it would be? It’s a self-correcting problem.

In fact, you can do this deliberately: Here’s an incredibly powerful item far beyond anything you’d normally be able to get your hands on. It can literally change the course of the entire campaign… but it’s only got one charge. Use it wisely.

(You’ll see some of these uber-powerful consumables show up in future sessions.)

Monte Cook’s Numenera is a game that leans in hard on consumables: A billion years in the future, cyphers are the enigmatic remnants of the mega-civilizations which lie between our own time and the neo-Renaissance of that far-flung epoch. All cyphers are consumables and the vast majority of them are one-use items. Furthermore, due to strange interactions between cyphers it’s very dangerous to carry more than a few of them, so you’re heavily motivated to use the stuff you’ve got so that you can pick up more.

It’s a fantastic mixture of lore and mechanic: The cyphers are constantly injecting a wild mixture of new abilities, keeping the game fresh and exciting.

Even when treasure hordes get larded with consumables, though, I too often see GMs ignore them during encounters. As you can see here, that’s not my philosophy: My bad guys will use their personal stockpile of consumables to best effect, which has the dual effect of (a) injecting them with unexpected abilities and (b) enraging players who are being blasted at the expense of their own reward!

But it’s a good rage: It motivates players to think strategically and strike hard to preserve “their” loot. It’s a very diegetic way of rewarding better performance with bigger rewards.

When I’ve set up an encounter, I actually enjoy rolling on some random magic item tables to generate one or two or a grab bag of consumables. It’s a great way to shake up an encounter and make it a unique experience: An elite squad of goblin commandos who suck down potions of giant strength are very different from the ones with potions of gaseous form or invisibility.

TANGENT: THEATER OF OPERATION

In Running the Campaign: Dungeon as Theater of Operations I talked about how you should stop thinking of an encounter as “belonging” to a specific room and instead start thinking of the dungeon as a holistic environment.

I mentioned that when you, as the GM, think about the dungeon this way and run encounters this way, that the players will also learn to think that way. And you can really see that in this session:

• The lamia flees from Area 11 to Area 10.
• NPC reinforcements arrive from Area 1.
• Agnarr is forced to flee down towards Area 17.
• Ranthir blocks the hallway between Area 10 and Area 17 to cut off the reinforcements.
• Later, Ranthir races up through Area 6 and into Area 3 to try to cut off the goblins’ escape.
• Missing some of them, he chases them through Area 1 and down the long hallway, while Tee also fetches up in Area 3 and takes out some of the other goblins.

This is an encounter that could have stayed locked to Area 11. Instead, it ranged across almost the entire dungeon level.

Campaign Journal: Session 30A – Running the Campaign: Cut on the Cliffhanger
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 29B: A Knight in Mourning

And then he knew what he had to do. This entire place reeked of evil and these creatures clearly had foul intentions. He and Rasnir had charged into battle. During the melee, the crone who had opened the door managed to duck through it. But moments later Kalerecent had fought his way to it and wrenched it shut.

“There was another flash of light and the door sealed shut behind me. But even in that moment, one of the creatures – a half-leonid fiend – slew Rasnir. I killed several of the goblins, but the other creatures escaped.”

A really common trope in D&D-style fantasy is the dungeon that’s been “sealed for a hundred years” (or a thousand or whatever). It’s a great trope because it makes the dungeon redolent with the enigma of age: Who knows what forgotten lore or antique treasures you’ll discover?

But then you go into the dungeon and there are three dozen different monsters who have all coincidentally moved in during the last week. It’s like Indiana Jones and the snakes in Raiders of the Lost Ark, except often without the clear explanation for where the goddamn snakes are coming from.

The reason this happens, of course, is because combat encounters are an expected part of the D&D dungeoncrawl, and “stuff to fight” is kind of the antithesis of “sealed for a hundred years.” You can use undead, of course, but that can get monotonous. And so the temptation to add a big ol’ hole in the ceiling and explain that a clan of yuan-ti moved in last Tuesday grows strong.

But so what? As long as you’ve got some sort of plausible explanation, there’s no problem… right?

Well, yes… but also no.

This sort of thing certainly can be done right. (The Mines of Moria, for example, have been “abandoned” for centuries in order to set up the twist that the balrog and goblins who sacked the place never actually left.)

But one of the really cool things about the “sealed for a hundred years” concept is that it means the PCs are the first ones to step foot here in a hundred years. It makes the PCs special. They’re doing something momentous. They’re experiencing something unique.

… unless, of course, a yuan-ti clan, a tribe of goblins, a couple of ogres, and a flock of kenku all casually beat them to the punch.

Then it’s not so special.

THE OTHER GUYS

But… combat! Gotta have combat!

Well, not really. But for the sake of argument, let’s roll with it.

A good way of squaring the difference here is to have another faction (or multiple factions) actively pursuing exploration/exploitation of the dungeon at the same time (and possibly for the same reasons) as the PCs.

That’s basically what you’re seeing with the Pactlords of the Quaan here. (Technically, the Pactlords were the ones who got here first and the PCs are the ones following in their wake, but that will shift back and forth as the campaign proceeds and different sections of this ancient dungeon are breached. The competition to be the first one to discover or enter a particular section of the dungeon can actually be a great motivator in its own right.)

I’ll be discussing how I actively played the various Banewarrens factions in more detail in future Running the Campaign posts. This first instance was fairly straightforward, and more or less taken directly from the Banewarrens campaign book: As described by Sir Kalerecent, the Pactlords had retreated, but (a) the lamia Demimach remained in Area 11 and (b) the rest of the team, with reinforcements, was planning to return. “Nevertheless, at some point while the PCs are in the [Broken Seal area], the rest of the Grailquest Team returns.”

Once the PCs were hooked into the Banewarrens, I simply added a section to my campaign status document:

BANEWARRENS STATUS

PACTLORDS: GQT1 has retreated from the Broken Seal area and will return shortly.

As I said: Short and sweet.

Now I had an open proactive event at my fingertips which I could choose to trigger at whatever time felt appropriate. As it played out during the actual session, this seemed most dramatically appropriate:

At that moment, Tee and Tor caught up. Seeing itself badly outnumbered and already seriously injured, the lamia turn and ran towards a staircase at the far end of the hall. It howled plaintively…

… and was answered by a second howl!

Howl for howl.

Campaign Journal: Session 29C – Running the Campaign: Looting Consumables
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 29A: Wraiths and Wards

The pedestal was made of stone and carved with a variety of tiny symbols. Atop the crystal, clutched in a claw-like sculpture of brass, was a purple-red crystal, glistening ever so slightly with its own inner light.

Tee crossed the chamber. She quickly estimated the value of the jewel-like crystal to be several thousand gold pieces at the very least. She set to work meticulously inspecting the claw-like sculpture and quickly discovered a pressure-operated trigger, designed to activate some device within the pedestal if the weight of the crystal was removed.

She had only barely started to disable the pressure trigger when a second wraith came screaming out of the crystal. As it passed over the top of Tee’s head it struck her twice – once on each shoulder – chilling her entire body and leaving flaming lacerations in its wake.

In this session, the PCs have an encounter with a malignant crystal which sustains purple wraiths: Whenever a wraith is slain, it is regenerated by the crystal. The only way for the PCs to “defeat” the encounter is to figure out where the wraiths are coming from and then destroy the crystal. If they don’t destroy the crystal, the wraiths will just keep coming.

Let’s call this clever combat. It refers to any combat encounter that the PCs can’t win (or can’t easily win) unless they do something clever. For example:

• There are stormtroopers firing through a one way forcefield. The PCs will need to figure out how to shut off the forcefield before they can defeat the stormtroopers.
• The goblins have a large crystal that can project a death ray guarding the entrance of their fortress. A frontal assault is technically possible, but it’ll probably be easier to figure out another way in, use an invisibility spell, or find some other clever bypass.
• It’ll be a tough fight against these cerberus spawn… unless the PCs realize they can break the dam and wash the hounds into the river.

D&D trolls are actually the OG clever encounter: Until you figure out that they need to be damaged with fire, they are absolutely terrifying. (This has been largely blunted in these latter days, where it seems this lore has seeped pretty thoroughly into the popular consciousness.)

Not every encounter needs to be a clever combat. In fact, they almost certainly SHOULDN’T be. It’s far better to deploy this sort of thing as a way of spicing things up from time to time.

The greatest thing about using a clever combat from time-to-time, though, is that it will condition your players to get clever in every encounter, even — perhaps especially! — the ones where you didn’t prep anything clever.

The only thing you need to do to encourage this is to not get in their way: If they come up with some clever way to upset the odds or peremptorily sweep an entire combat encounter off the board without breaking a sweat… For the love of the gods, LET THEM. The result will be far more memorable than slogging through another vanilla fight, and it will encourage them to keep coming up with more clever ideas in the future.

On the other hand, you can also flip this around: A typical group of PCs is a formidable foe. What clever ways can their enemies find to make handling them easier?

(The really great thing is that this tends to reflect into an infinite loop: A clever foe creates a threat that the PCs will, in turn, have to be clever to overcome.)

Campaign Journal: Session 29B – Running the Campaign: Abandoned Dungeons
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 28C: Into the Banewarrens

Elestra, thinking quickly, fished a flask of oil out of her pack and threw it at the vermin-thing Tor was fighting. Agnarr stepped back, pivoted, and landed a blow with his flaming sword. The oil ignited and the vermin-thing was immolated by the wave of flames.

Tee stepped back and, drawing her own flask of oil, hurled it at the one Agnarr had just turned his back on. Agnarr whirled and a moment later there was nothing left of the creatures but two inky patches of burning grease.

The history of burning oil in D&D is something I find really interesting.

If you look back at the 1974 edition of D&D, there are two references to oil First, you can buy a “flask of oil” for 2 gp. (Most obviously intended to fuel the lantern, which appears immediately above it in the equipment list.) Second, you can use it as part of the Flight/Pursuit mechanics:

“Burning oil will deter many monsters from continuing pursuit.”

Okay, but what should happen if someone — whether monster or PC — should end up in the burning oil? The rulebooks are silent on this issue, but it seems likely that many GMs followed the same train of logic I did when making a ruling on this:

• How much damage should it deal? Well, all attacks deal 1d6 damage in 1974 D&D, so almost certainly 1d6.
• How large of an area does one flask of oil cover? Most the game defaults to 10 ft. increments, so a single 10-ft. square seems likely. (Enough to block a standard dungeon corridor.)
• How long does it burn for? Hmm. Probably more than just one round, right? 1974 D&D pretty reliably reaches for a six-sided die whenever it needs a randomizer, so let’s say it burns for 1d6 rounds.

This makes burning oil quite useful: It’s an area attack available to anyone willing to pony up the cash for it, and it’s incredibly useful for taking control of a battlefield or, as provided for in the rules, escaping from a fight that’s turned against you.

(Tangentially, in one of my D&D campaigns a PC invented a flash-burn oil specialized for combat: It cost 10 gp per flask and would deal 2d6 (take highest) damage, but only burn for 2d6 (take lowest) rounds. I gave it the name dragon’s milk. But I digress.)

The potential for abuse is, it should be noted, incredibly high if you (a) don’t enforce encumbrance and (b) don’t enforce any other consequences for hauling around huge quantities of highly flammable liquid. People will just throw oil all day with nary a care in the world.

It’s perhaps unsurprising to learn, given the efficacy and, frankly, importance of burning oil in D&D, that AD&D 1^st Edition spends much more time focusing on it. In fact, although the price of a flask of oil has dropped to just 1 gp, burning oil literally becomes a controlled substance on the Armor and Weapons Permitted table:

A number of protections against burning oil (like the resist fire spell) are also explicitly introduced.

And, of course, guidelines are given for many practical aspects of using burning oil:

• If you throw a burning flask of oil, it affects a 3’ diameter area, dealing 1d3 damage to everyone in the area (save vs. poison to negate). If you hurl a lantern, it only affects a 2’ diameter area.
• If it strikes someone directly, it deals 2d6 damage + 1d6 damage on the second round (and then burns out).
• Walking through or standing in an area of burning oil deals 1d6 damage per round and requires a saving throw to avoid being lit on fire.
• A lighted torch can be thrown to light an oil covered area (with guidelines for determining where it goes if you miss).

As with so many things in 1^st Edition, it’s an odd bag of contradictory details. (If you hit someone with oil, it burns out after 2 rounds. Should that rule also apply to “puddles” of oil that are lit? Is the 1d3 splash damage in addition to the 1d6 damage for standing in the burning pool? Or does a thrown flask of oil not create a pool and only creates splash?)

Regardless of the hazy parts here, it does generally appear that oil continues to be an effective method of performing an area attack. Nowhere near as powerful as a fireball, certainly, but far more accessible and flexible.

Let’s briefly detour over to the 1977 Basic Set. Here we find:

• 1 flask of oil can create a 5-foot-wide pool. It will burn for 10 rounds, dealing 2d8 damage per round.
• A creature struck directly with oil suffers 1d8 damage in the first round and 2d8 damage in the second round. (It’s then “assumed that the oil has run off, been wiped off, burned away, etc.) This is accompanied by a truly dizzying system for actually targeting the creatures. (You need to roll 11+, but then you adjust for Dexterity score, and also the height of the target.)
• You have to ignite oil AFTER throwing it. (You apparently can’t light it like a pipe bomb and then throw it.)
• Flaming oil will not harm non-corporeal monsters like wraiths and specters. It deals only half damage to skeletons, zombies, ghouls, wights, and mummies. Monsters that normally use fire weapons (e.g. red dragons, fire giants, hell hounds) are also immune.

We can see here that J. Eric Holmes did, in fact, follow a logic similar to my own (albeit with a smaller area affected and more damage afflicted). This version is more powerful than AD&D’s and would basically persist throughout the later version of Basic D&D (with the addition of a grenade-like, wick-fueled burning oil bomb to the equipment list).

LANTERN OIL DOESN’T WORK LIKE THAT!

I don’t care.

Why are lanterns in D&D fueled with such an insanely flammable liquid? I don’t know. Maybe it’s harvested by alchemists from the glands of fire lizards and is absurdly cheap compared to other options, and house fires are a huge problem in this world. Or maybe the characters are carrying a bunch of different types of oil, and we just doesn’t worry about trying to figure out exactly which one is which.

The point is that D&D-style burning oil creates interesting gameplay and has strategic interest.

Although I will note that AD&D 2^nd Edition did make a point of distinguishing between “Greek fire” (10 gp per flask) and “lamp oil” (6 cp per flask; can’t be used offensively, but can sustain existing blazes).

THE BIG SHIFT

The big shift for burning oil in D&D starts with 3^rd Edition, which divided the weapon into alchemist’s fire (1d6 damage per round for two rounds, can’t be used as an area attack) and oil (5 ft. area, 1d3 damage, burns for two rounds; if thrown, only has 50% chance of igniting properly).

You can see how these rules were derived from AD&D, but the efficacy of oil as an area attack has been crippled.

4^th Edition’s treatment of oil is actually hilarious. On page 210 it says:

Here’s an overview of the contents of this chapter:

(…)

Adventuring Gear: The tools of the adventuring trade. Look in this section for everburning torches, flasks of oil, backpacks, and spellbooks.

Emphasis added. But guess what isn’t in the Adventuring Gear section of the Player’s Handbook? Guess what isn’t in the book anywhere at all?

Ah, 4th Edition. Never change.

D&D 4^th Edition Essentials did manage to remember to give a price for lantern oil, but I’m fairly certain there are still no rules for using burning oil as a weapon.

Burning oil makes a comeback in 5^th Edition, but remains quite weak:

• You have to light oil as a separate action or attack.
• It can cover a 5 ft. area, burning for two rounds.
• It deals 5 fire damage.

So… why was burning oil suddenly nerfed to, in some cases, no longer being a part of the game at all?

Partly I think it’s because of the expectation that encumbrance won’t be enforced, allowing PCs to haul around dozens of flasks of oil that can be deployed ceaselessly. Mostly, I think it’s fear of a mundane item “poaching” what spellcasters can do.

The irony is that you can look at a whole plethora of perpetual D&D design discussions:

• Non-spellcasters not being able to compete with the area attacks of spellcasters.
• PCs not being able to reliably retreat from battle, so players always fight to the death.
• A lack of dynamic control over the battlefield, resulting in boring combat.

… and burning oil is just sitting there waiting for somebody to notice it.

Honestly, I’ve had great results from just using my rulings from 1974 D&D:

• 10 ft. area.
• 1d6 damage per round.
• Burns for 1d6 rounds.

I recommend adding that and dragon’s milk to your 3^rd Edition and 5^th Edition campaigns.

Campaign Journal: Session 29A – Running the Campaign: Clever Combat
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 28B: On the Eve of the Banewarrens

The mansion on Nibeck Street that Jevicca had identified as the origin point for the appearance of the surge of Tavan Zith’s wild magic was very close to Pythoness House. So close, in fact, that they feared there might be a connection. Could the cultists be responsible for the breaching of the Banewarrens?

“If we check it out and there’s nothing there,” Ranthir pointed out, “then we’ve lost nothing. But if there is…”

During the last session, we talked about how I structured the second act of the campaign using two tracks — the chaos cultists and the Banewarrens. Beginning in this session, we can almost immediately see the effects of this structure in actual play.

First, the two tracks confuse the players’ understanding of the situation. Until they learn enough to disambiguate the tracks, this will obfuscate the truth of what’s happening. This makes the campaigns’ enigma(s) fiendishly Byzantine for the players, and therefore even more satisfying for them when they do unravel what’s going on (in large part by figuring out how to disambiguate the tracks).

But until they do, their own actions will often cause interactions — directly and indirectly — between the tracks. The initial effects that we see in this session are fairly minor: Their suspicion that the chaos cults might be involved with the Banewarrens causes them to double back to Pythoness House, where they have a cool roleplaying encounter with the ghost Taunell.

Paradoxically, however, the complexity of these player-forged connections between the tracks will often grow in complexity at the same time that the players are disambiguating the tracks and, therefore, simplifying their understanding of a situation becoming ever more convoluted.

And even when this doesn’t happen, the consequences of the players’ choices will nevertheless be significant. (For example, their verification that Pythoness House is, in fact, vacant in this session — something they would otherwise not have been prompted to do — will actually end up having a profound impact on how later events in the campaign play out.)

They needed to question Tavan Zith, and the only way they could think to do that was by going to Castle Shard. They also needed to know if Lord Zavere was the one responsible for opening the Banewarrens. And, if so, why.

As they rode, Dominic looked at the others. “So… do we have any idea how we’re going to do this without getting killed?”

Agnarr shrugged. “Sure. We ask him. If he didn’t do it, we don’t get killed.”

Of course, these two major tracks are not the only threads in the campaign. This is, after all, Act II. The stuff that the PCs did in Act I of the campaign continues to unspool, and that includes:

• Their relationship with Lord Zavere and Lady Rill at Castle Shard.
• Their deep suspicion of Rehobath and, by extension, the Imperial Church.

And these threads are also interacting with the major tracks and with each other.

For the players, this colors their understanding of Rehobath’s agenda and creates paranoid suspicion of what Zavere might really be up to. There are layers upon layers upon layers! (And the players are unwittingly in the act of adding even more layers themselves.)

But on my side of the DM screen, everything remains neatly sorted into discrete boxes that are easy to prep and easy to run.

Campaign Journal: Session 28C – Running the Campaign: On the Efficacy of Burning Oil
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index