DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 26D: Elestra Digs Deep

Jamill slammed back the last of his amber-colored drink. “Okay, this is your last chance. Who sent you?”

Elestra suddenly became aware that two rather large men with short clubs strapped to their thighs had suddenly materialized out of the crowd behind her. She stammered, unable to find any kind of answer that would satisfy Jamill.

Jamill jerked his head and headed towards the back of the bar. The two thugs laid their hands on Elestra’s arms. She got the message and let them hustle her out through the back door of the tavern.

When you have factions in your game, those factions should react to the actions of the PCs.

But if factions act as if they know every action the PCs take – as if they were omniscient, all-knowing entities with an eavesdropping device planted under the gaming table — that becomes a frustrating experience for the players and stifles their ingenuity.

There are a number of methods you can use for handling this, but I’ve generally gotten good results taking the decision out of my hands and mechanically determining it.

For example, you might have a random faction encounter check, similar to a random encounter check. For example, roll 1d6 once per day and if you roll a 1, some faction is going to take action against the PCs (or, at least, based on what they know about the PCs’ actions). Increase this to a 2 in 6 chance if the PCs have been making a lot of “noise.”

Another option is to mechanically check whether specific PC actions are detected by relevant factions (e.g., the faction they’re taking the action against or a faction that has them under surveillance). You can think of this as a stealth-type resolution, but at a more abstract level (and possibly using different skills).

Note: This is different than a situation where a faction DEFINITELY knows what the PCs are doing. For example, if the PCs break into a Renraku facility and get spotted by surveillance cameras or fight NPCs who escape and can identify them, you can just actively play Renraku’s response.

A key thing I recommend here is that the PCs should be able to influence the outcome of these mechanics, ideally in a way that involves meaningful choices by the players and is more than just an all-or-nothing decision to take or not take the risky action.

For example, the events in this session use the counter-intelligence system I shared here on the Alexandrian back in 2010. (When I originally mentioned them in this article and talked about the gameplay they made possible that otherwise would never have arisen, it was specifically this Ptolus campaign I was talking about.)

The other thing to note about these counter-intelligence mechanics is that they aren’t uni-directional: The players can also use them to figure out if people are asking questions about them.

In the case of this session, the impact on play was pretty straightforward:

• Elestra succeeded on her Gather Information check to gain information about the cult Iltumar was involved with.
• But the cult also succeeded on their counter-intelligence check to detect that Elestra had been asking questions about them, resulting in the ambush at the Onyx Spider.

Elestra really had dug a deep hole for herself here, and I thought it quite likely that the scenario was now going to turn into a rescue op by the other PCs. (Or possibly even somebody finding Elestra’s body in an alley. The decision not to tell anyone else in the group what she was doing was incredibly risky.) But she managed to turn the tables quite nicely.

Taking Jamill back to their rooms, on the other hand, was a potentially disastrous decision from a counter-intelligence standpoint: The bad guys didn’t know who Elestra was, but if they knew where she lived they’d be able to figure it out pretty quick.

Tee recognized the risk and took some very smart actions to blunt the counter-intelligence vectors that had been established. Just dumping Jamill somewhere would have left him free to continue trying to figure out who Elestra was and why she’d been asking questions. Running him out of town under the guise of the cult itself AND planting the idea that Elestra had been “dealt with” even if she decided to stay in town was both a plan and a contingency plan.

The follow-up decision to then use Jamill’s identity to infiltrate the cult itself was also smart play, and would shape how the entire scenario would play out.

NEXT:
Campaign Journal: Session 27A – Running the Campaign: Missing Clues
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 26C: A Disposition of Treasure

To kill the time, Elestra grabbed some newssheets and started asking around about recent events in the city. After spending several days in Ghul’s Labyrinth, she was still feeling a little disconnected.

On the 12^th, a man named Doonhin – a salt merchant in the South Market – was accused of killing his wife by throwing her off the Stormwrought Campanile. Doonhin has been pleading his innocence, claiming to have been magically charmed by a sorcerer.

On the 13^th, there had been another Flayed Man killing. This one had taken place in the Guildsman’s District, suggesting that the killer might be moving out of the Warrens.

And only a few hours earlier, around noon, the Rat’s Nest – a pub on Tavern Row – had been vandalized.

In Smart Prep, I discuss the use of background events: a timeline of events that don’t directly involve or affect the PCs, but which are nevertheless a part of the world they live in. These events can manifest themselves as:

• newspaper headlines
• random rumors
• topics of casual conversation
• incidental details contextualizing revelations

And so forth.

They may have some non-direct but practical function – foreshadowing, exposition, etc. – but they’re often just about the world existing. Because in a real, living, breathing world, of course, things happen all the time that aren’t about you.

An example I like to use is a campaign set in New York city during World War II. The PCs aren’t soldiers; they aren’t going to the front lines. But the newspapers are going to be filled with D-Day and Saipan the 1944 election. That’s the type of stuff (along with local news and gossip) that will appear in your list of background events.

Like World War II, many background events will persist – evolving and developing over time. They can be a little like short stories seen at a great distance. Depending on the campaign, I’ll usually try to have a few of these “short stories” running at any given time, but I’ll also make sure to mix in a few completely random tidbits to flesh things out. In the example above, the Tavern Row vandalism is the beginning of a new event sequence, but the murder(?) at the Stormwrought Campanile is a one-off.

In a fluid campaign – particularly a sandbox – you may find that background events sometimes become foreground scenarios (and vice versa). There tend to be two common forms of this.

First, the PCs get involved. This may be the result of a player getting curious: they hear about a background event and think, “That sounds interesting,” and start nosing around. That might go nowhere or it might lead to the background event suddenly being very much an active part of the campaign.

This can also happen when the GM uses the background event as an active tool to respond to PC actions. The events are designed to be flexible tools – to be used in conversations as background details, etc.

For example, you’ve got a series of background events running about Triad attacks in Shanghai. The PCs need some hired muscle and they start asking around about who they can hire. You don’t have anything prepped for that, so you reach for the Triads that you know are part of the setting. The Triads are willing to help the PCs, but they’re going to need a favor in return. What type of favor? Well, maybe they’d like to retaliate against the rival Triad who bombed a restaurant under their protection (as previously detailed in a background event).

Now the background events aren’t in the background at all.

In the other direction, scenario hooks that the PCs choose to ignore can quite naturally transition into short background event sequences. The Flayed Man killings, above, are actually an example of this: the players in the campaign just kind of ignored the related hook and the timeline of Flayed Man killings I’d jotted down in my scenario outline simply played out.

(The scenario itself, in this case, was never fully prepped: The PCs didn’t follow that lead, so I didn’t do the prep.)

Some people get really antsy about this, declaring it “railroading” if, for example, the Flayed Man killings keep happening because the killer hasn’t been caught yet. But that’s not the case. As I’ve mentioned before, choices have meaningful consequences is the opposite of railroading (in which you choices are negated).

By the same token, it may be useful to remember that the function of background events is to demonstrate that the world doesn’t revolve around the PCs: Every job they turn down shouldn’t automatically end in utter disaster. It’s probably more likely, in fact, that the person trying to hire them finds somebody else to do the job (and do it successfully).

Letting action flow offscreen and into the background events is a great way to make the players feel as if they’re really living in the world and that their actions have meaningful and far-reaching consequences that persist even when they can’t see it. And giving players the freedom to engage with background events and make them suddenly the focus of the game is a great way to make the world feel huge and real; as if the PCs could go anywhere or open any door and find a living, breathing world waiting for them.

NEXT:
Campaign Journal: Session 26D – Running the Campaign: Counterintelligence Vectors
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 26B: A Disposition of Treasure

There were three main problems to overcome: The sheer weight of the arcane equipment and precious metals. The pit of chaos warping the hallway. And the difficulty of lifting the material out of the basement here at Greyson House.

Out of everything, the “Drill of the Banewarrens” was going to prove the most difficult: Everything else could be mostly parceled up into smaller bundles, but the drill was both bulky and weighed several thousand pounds all by itself.

“Could we just sell the location of the drill to somebody?” Elestra asked.

“Like House Erthuo?” Tee said. “I doubt they’d be all that interested considering what just happened.”

“How can you make encumbrance fun?”

You can’t.

But you also can’t make hit points fun, and for much the same reason.

Hit points are just a number: It goes up. It goes down. At a certain value you might suffer penalties. At another you fall unconscious.

So, too, with encumbrance: The number goes up. The number goes down. At a certain value you suffer penalties. At another you can’t carry any more.

Hit points and encumbrance are simple gauges, and you can’t make them “fun” for the same reason you can’t make the gas gauge on your car fun.

But driving a car? That can be fun. And so is combat in D&D and a lot of other roleplaying games that use hit points.

The gauge isn’t fun. It’s just a gauge. But the system in which that gauge is used – for which, in fact, that gauge may be an essential part – can be all kinds of fun.

So the better question is:

“Why do we want to track encumbrance?”

Encumbrance is often most useful in expedition-based play: You put together the resources for an expedition, then expend those resources on the expedition to maximize your returns.

Encumbrance is, in large part, a budget. Without a budget, the solution is always “bring everything,” which is kind of like playing 52-card draw poker: Without limited resources, there is no challenge.

(Tangentially, one interesting facet of such play in 1974 D&D, because it had a system for resolving characters fleeing from combat, is jettisoning equipment in order to pick up speed in flight-pursuit situations. It became a unique way for bulk resource management to impact combat-based play.)

This kind of gameplay does become obfuscated if the encumbrance system is unwieldy and difficult or fiddly to use. (Imagine if hit points, for example, could only be tracked by keeping an exhaustive list of forty or fifty different individual entries on your character sheet. Combat would almost certainly become a slog.) Unfortunately, a lot of encumbrance systems are unwieldy and difficult to use, with the result that many groups simply ignore it (either decisively or by default through “close enough” fudging).

What you want, of course, is an encumbrance system that’s easy to use so that encumbrance-based play will effortlessly integrate into your play. Correctly designed slot-based systems, like Encumbrance By Stone, for example, can make tracking nitty gritty encumbrance as easy as writing down your equipment list.

THE OTHER HALF OF THE EXPEDITION

Prepping the resource pool for an expedition and then expending those resources efficiently in order to maximize your success is the front half of an adventure.

The other half of the adventure is returning home with what you’ve gained, which, in the case of D&D, is usually treasure.

We’ve talked about this a bit before, but creating bulky, difficult-to-transport treasure (and/or putting it in places where it’s difficult to extract it) can create its own unique challenges. We’ve seen the players here come up with a creative solution for disposing of the orrery, and now they’re being challenged once again with the Drill of the Banewarrens and some of the other treasure.

(And this stuff is all just a few hundred feet under a major city. Stick it in the middle of a jungle and watch what happens!)

“But, Justin, challenge isn’t really a big focus for my group! We’re much more interested in narrative, storytelling, and roleplaying!”

Drama is born of adversity.

And I don’t mean that you’re wrong or that you should value challenge-based gameplay more, I mean that in expedition-type stories encumbrance-based challenges are a fundamental part of the drama you’re looking for. (Look at, say, Indiana Jones trying to get the Ark of the Covenant out of Egypt.)

For example, a scene in which the players are roleplaying through the crushing guilt their characters are feeling because their decisions resulted in the deaths of innocent people that they feel responsible for? Grappling with the difficult dilemmas created by balancing expediency of liquidating their treasure against the responsibility of who’s benefiting from that treasure? This stuff is pure gold for dramatic play!

NEXT:
Campaign Journal: Session 26C – Running the Campaign: Running With Background Events
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 26A: Tor’s Training

After several mournful minutes in which little was said, they quickly decided that someone needed to return to the surface and notify House Erthuo of the death of Faeliel and the others.

Dominic and Ranthir took that heavy task on themselves. Tor left with them, needing to keep an appointment later in the morning.

The walk back to the surface took a little more than twenty minutes. Then they took carriages in opposite directions: Tor back towards Midtown; Ranthir and Dominic towards the Nobles’ Quarter.

In The Art of Pacing, I explain running an RPG for a split party is basically the easy mode for handling pacing as a GM: Because you no longer need to wait for the end of a scene before cutting back and forth between the groups, you not only have a whole bunch of new pacing techniques you can use, you’re also freed up from needing to honor the structure of the current scene (since you’ll be cutting back to it later).

In Random GM Tip: Splitting the Party, I delve a bit deeper into the practical side of splitting the party and share some basic best practices.

But if splitting the party is the easy mode for pacing, then splitting the party in an urban environment is the easy mode for splitting the party.

First, in my experience it’s much easier to convince groups to split up in the first place in an urban environment. Even groups that adamantly profess, “Never split the party!” will often still be comfortable doing it in an urban environment where (a) the risk seems minimal and (b) typical tasks so readily lend themselves to multitasking. (“You sell those mage-touched swords we took from the bandits and I’ll arrange for our rooms while the wizard gets his reagents. We can meet at the Onyx Spider afterwards.”)

WHO FIRST?

When the group splits up, whose scene should you frame first?

In general, what you’re looking for is the group whose scene is most likely to be interrupted the fastest. This might be:

• A complicated decision.
• A skill check.
• Some sort of logistical calculation.
• A dramatically appropriate moment.
• An unexpected rules look-up.

And so forth. Basically, any of the reasons you’d normally cut from one scene to another.

The reason for this is pretty straightforward: You’re dipping your toes in the first scene, and then as quickly as possible cutting away to another group. Not only does this keep everyone engaged, but you’re getting to the time-saving advantage of multitasking as quickly possible (with Group 1 continuing to resolve stuff in their scene while you’ve turned your attention to Group 2).

The slightly more advanced technique here is to first check for effective crossovers (those moments when elements or outcomes from one scene have an impact on another scene) and make sure you line them up.

For example, in this session I knew that the House Erthuo guards were likely going to stumble onto Tee, Agnarr, and Elestra with the corpses of the Erthuo researchers. This suggested a natural sequence in which:

• Ranthir and Dominic arrived at House Erthuo.
• Tee, Agnarr, and Elestra are discovered by the House Erthuo guards, resulting in a cliffhanger.
• Cut away from the cliffhanger back to House Erthuo, where Cordelia arrives and explains what the guards are doing there.
• Cut back to Ghul’s Labyrinth, to finish resolving the confrontation.

HOW LONG?

As you start juggling multiple scenes playing out across a city, you’ll need to answer the question of how all these scenes relate to each other in terms of time.

First, remember that you don’t have to keep time perfectly synced between the groups. In fact, you’ll almost always want to NOT do that.

For example, maybe the Erthuo guards showed up 30 minutes before Ranthir and Dominic arrived at House Erthuo and the whole interaction between the guards and the dungeon group “actually” played out before anything of interest happened with Ranthir and Dominic. But that would have been dramatically far less interesting. And, even more importantly, you want to scale time to balance table time.

The key thing is not to push this so far that PCs can’t respond to things they reasonably should be able to respond to. (For example, if Ranthir and Dominic would have been able to warn the other PCs that the Erthuo guards were coming, it wouldn’t have been fair to frame things in a sequence that would prevent them from doing that.) But, generally speaking, you’ve got a fairly large fudge factor and the players will generally support you by not deliberately doing anything that violates established causality.

(And if something does go askew, a minor retcon is rarely going to hurt anything.)

Speaking of the fudge factor, you’re usually going to find it easier to juggle multiple groups doing stuff at the same time if you “chunk” time. You can kinda think of this as establishing ad hoc turns, with each discrete group usually being able to do one thing per “turn.”

I usually think in terms of:

• the hour,
• the watch (4 hours), or
• the half day (morning/afternoon)

Which mental construct I find most useful depends on how “meaty” the PCs’ planned actions are. If someone is planning to gather information down at the Docks, I might think to myself, “That’ll take about half a day.” And so the active question becomes: What is everyone else doing with that half day?

Once you’ve collected those declarations, it’s not hard to become sequencing how things should resolve.

Here’s my final tip: If the group has fractured into three or four or more groups (often in the form of individuals scattering to the winds), write down their declarations. Just jot them down in your notebook. You don’t have to get fancy or specific with this, just a quick one or two word reminder:

• Tee/Agnarr/Elestra: packing
• Tor: training
• R/D: Erthuo

Just enough that you can re-orient yourself with a glance at he end of each scene.

NEXT:
Campaign Journal: Session 26B – Running the Campaign: Treasure Logistics
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 25B: Blood on the Orrery

The scene they found was gruesome: Bodies were scattered throughout the first two chambers of the bloodwight complex, many in various states of dismemberment. Faeliel’s body was spread-eagled across the orrery itself, dripping blood down upon the silver spheres.

Ranthir, coming upon the scene, eased Faeliel’s body to the ground. With tears welling in his eyes, he turned back to the others with a crack in his voice. “He wouldn’t have wanted the mechanisms damaged… is there anything we can do?”

The bloody fate of House Erthuo’s research team in this session is a good opportunity to spotlight an important part of how I run an RPG campaign, because it’s a fairly unadulterated example of the technique.

Let’s back up a dozen or so sessions: The PCs have discovered and are exploring the Laboratory of the Beast, a dungeon which is part of Ghul’s Labyrinth beneath Ptolus. At this point, neither House Erthuo nor the Surgeon in the Shadows are involved in this scenario. In fact, not even I — as the Dungeon Master — have the slightest inkling that these factions are going to become involved in this scenario. (Let alone that it’s going to end up in this horrific massacre.)

While exploring the dungeon, the PCs discover both a huge, antique orrery (too large for them to move) and a number of chaositech artifacts. Later, after leaving the dungeon, they’re intent on liquidating their loot.

First, they make some inquiries around town and sell some chaositech items. Looking at my campaign notes, I know that there’s an organization of chaositech dealers led by the Surgeon in the Shadows who is going to be part of an upcoming scenario in the campaign. If the PCs are selling chaositech, it’s likely the Surgeon in the Shadows will become aware of it and send an agent to negotiate with the PCs for it.

Second, during a party at Castle Shard in Session 12, Tee tells some of their contacts about the orrery, hoping for a recommendation on someone who might (a) be interested and (b) have the resources to remove the orrery from the dungeon. Looking at my notes for the party, I see that Lady Peliope Erthuo is attending the party. In her background notes, I’ve copied some descriptive text from the Ptolus sourcebook about House Erthuo: “House Erthuo is said to possess one of the finest collections of rare books, antiquities, and artifacts of historical significance in this part of the world.”

At this point I don’t have any particular plans for House Erthuo in the campaign: I’ve included Lady Peliope at the party as one of the incidental guests. (Not every single person the PCs meet in the campaign needs to be an Important Character™.) But she’s obviously a perfect fit for what Tee is looking for and it’s a great vector for prompting the PCs to continue circulating through the event. So Tee’s contact points here in that direction and she makes arrangements with Lady Peliope to meet with Cordelia Erthuo in order to arrange the sale of the orrery.

THE VECTORS ESTABLISHED

At this point, the actions of the PCs have created two vectors in the campaign that did not previously exist.

Now, if you’ve stopped prepping plots and are running situation-based scenarios, you’ll know that this sort of thing happens all the time. But this particular example, as I mentioned, is particularly clear-cut because it’s not only the vectors which didn’t previously exist in either the campaign or the specific scenario of the Laboratory of the Beast, but also the elements of the campaign world which have been pushed into motion.

Moving forward, in Session 14 the PCs met with Cordelia Erthuo and sold her the location of the orrery. This vector is now obviously pointed back into the dungeon, with House Erthuo planning to send a research team to study the orrery. (I make a note in my campaign status document to this effect.)

Later, in Session 21, an agent of the Surgeon in the Shadows called Ribok comes to the Ghostly Minstrel to negotiate with the PCs. By this point, however, the PCs have learned that chaositech is far more dangerous than they had suspected and they have no interest in selling. They turn Ribok away.

Okay, so what’s the vector from this? Well, the Surgeon isn’t going to take “no” for an answer. They’re going to try to figure out where the PCs are getting the chaositech from. How would they do that? Well, the PCs filed a claim for the labyrinth access under Greyson House… the one which leads directly to the Laboratory of the Beast. It’s possible that the Surgeon will be able to discover that… and a skill check indicates that he does.

So I note this down on my campaign status document, too: On the 12^th of Kadal, the Surgeon in the Shadows sends a chaositech strike team to Greyson House.

THE VECTORS INTERSECT

These two vectors are now pointing at each other.

Here’s the key thing: I still don’t know exactly how these events will play out, but if nothing disturbs these vectors it’s clear that they’re going to intersect and I have a pretty good idea what will happen when they do. So I now have the following entries in my campaign status document:

09/12/790: Surgeon in the Shadows sends a chaositech strike team to Greyson House, they end up killing House Erthuo’s team that’s examining the orrery.

09/13/790: House Erthuo investigates the disappearance of their research team and finds their workers dead. Cordelia contacts the PCs.

09/14/790: The Surgeon’s team leaves the Ghul’s Labyrinth complex with the chaositech artifacts from the temple; they also have discovered the mind-transference device.

What would happen next? Well, I have an inkling. (Ribok’s team couldn’t remove the mind-transference device, but they’re definitely interested in it. So they’ll be coming back – possibly in greater numbers? – to investigate it. Perhaps they’ll even dismantle it and take it back to the Surgeon in Shadows’ laboratory.) But I didn’t spend any time prepping this material or writing it down, because it existed beyond the event horizon: It was overwhelmingly likely that the PCs will have interacted with these elements of the campaign world before that happened (which, in fact, they did), with no way of anticipating how they would affect the vectors in play.

THE VECTORS IN PLAY

And, of course, we’ve now seen how this worked out in actual play: By pure happenstance, the PCs were actually in the dungeon when the Surgeon’s team showed up, creating the fantastic drama of seeing the House Erthuo team only a few short minutes before they were killed.

Could I have forced that outcome? Possibly. (Although I hadn’t actually thought of it until it occurred during play.)

Could I have instead forced the outcome from the undisturbed vectors described above? Certainly. (I could have just delayed Ribok’s arrival until after the PCs left the dungeon again.)

But the point, of course, is that we’re not predetermining the outcome. We’re discovering the outcome through play. And there are any number of other outcomes that could have happened that didn’t. (For just one example, Ranthir could have become fascinated by the discoveries of the House Erthuo team and decided to stay with them while everyone else explored the dungeon. What would have happened if he’d been present when Ribok arrived? I have no idea!)

Looking at just these two vectors in isolation is deceptive anyway: The campaign is actually filled with lots of these vectors (and, as we’ve just seen, the PCs can create new vectors at any time). There’s no way to know how these vectors will actually develop until it happens at the table.

Here’s another way of looking at this: If I had been predetermining events, I would never have set up these vectors in the first place – they were not, after all, part of my prep for the Laboratory of the Beast – and none of this would have happened.

This is what I mean by active play. When the PCs take an action, I think about how the elements of the campaign world are going to react to those actions. Some of those reactions will be direct and immediate (their vectors will immediately intersect the PCs). Others form vectors that I sort of let loose in the campaign world until they intersect with either another vector or the PCs themselves.

(Some of these vectors will end up never intersecting with anything. Or, at least, nothing that is part of the campaign. That’s okay. Sometimes you’re done playing with a toy and you don’t need to pick it up again.)

Of course, not all vectors originate from the PCs. When I create an NPC or faction in the campaign world, they’ll also have proactive vectors determined by their agendas.

NEXT:
Campaign Journal: Session 26A – Running the Campaign: Urban Splits
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index