DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 25A: The Second End of Ghul’s Labyrinth

They stepped forward into Elestra’s sanctuary. The wall closed behind them, transforming itself into a fireplace with a crackling fire already lit. Directly above the fire, a mirror was hung.

“What is this place?” Tee asked.

“A secret,” Elestra said, looking around with a sense of vague familiarity overwhelming her. “I think I’ll be able to open a doorway to this place no matter where we might be. We should be safe here. No one can see the entrance from the outside.”

Elestra is an urban druid.

The seed of this custom class came from an article in Dragon Magazine #317, but although the original packet of photocopied pages are still nestled away in the player’s folder, we’ve made any number of alterations to it over the years.

The original impetus was that Elestra’s player was interested in playing a druid, but it didn’t seem like a good fit for an all-urban campaign. She proposed playing the urban equivalent of a druid instead and I was able to pull the Dragon Magazine article from my archives.

Which, I suppose, is the first lesson when you’re looking to customize the game: See if somebody else has already done the work for you.

Actually, as we’ve continued customizing the class — modifying it to reflect both her vision and my vision of what an “urban druid” should be — most of what we’ve done is basically the same thing, with the only twist being that I’m frequently re-skinning material to achieve the desired effect.

“Re-skinning” something in an RPG system just means that you’re taking a mechanical element designed to model one thing in the game world and instead using it to model something else. For example, in this session you can see an example of how we’ve re-skinned a rope trick spell with a flavor conducive to the urban druid (i.e., opening the walls of a city and literally crawling inside them).

I’m a big fan of re-skinning. In fact, the very first RPG article I ever published was about re-skinning magical spells. (It appeared in an electronic fanzine distributed through the old Prodigy online service.)

Until recently I had a vague memory that I’d been introduced to the concept via an entire article discussing it in Dragon #162 (which was my first issue of the magazine). But upon going back to verify that, I discovered it was actually just one sentence in an article about roleplaying intelligent undead by Nigel D. Findley:

Finally, a lich fascinated with the aesthetics and nuances of magic, rather than its eventual outcome, might have eccentric versions of familiar spells: magic missiles that look like multicolored sparks, or fireballs that explode accompanied by a musical tone, for example.

I think I may have been conflating memories of the fanzine article that I wrote with Findley’s off-hand suggestion, but this is still a great re-skinning technique. And I’ll actually employ it on-the-fly when running NPCs: I’ll see that they have some vanilla spell in their spell list, but then describe it with radically different special effects in actual play. (In some cases, the players have then made a point of seeking out the enemy spellcaster’s spellbook so that they can learn the intriguing variant.)

The versatility of re-skinning becomes even more apparent when you realize you can also make small changes while re-skinning: Grab a goblin stat block and give it +2 armor to model a humanoid ant. Or a fly speed and stinger attack to model a humanoid bee.

At a certain point while doing this sort of work, you’ll probably realize that the difference between re-skinning and homebrewing something from scratch is much more of a spectrum than it is a sharp distinction: Using existing elements of a system as a touchstone for how the new thing you’re designing should work is more of a necessity than an option. The nice thing about straight-up reskinning is that it essentially lets you homebrew in the middle of a session without missing a beat.

As a final note, for some reason when I talk about re-skinning mechanics, some people become confused and think that this somehow means that the mechanic is dissociated. The argument seems to be that if a mechanic can model two different things in the game world, it must mean that it’s not associated with either of them. But this is not true: Just because we resolve an attack with a sword and an attack with a mace using the same rules for attack rolls, it doesn’t follow that your character doesn’t understand what a sword or a mace is.

I mention this mostly because I think the sword/mace distinction can be useful for grokking re-skinning: There are some RPGs in which there may be some slight mechanical distinction between a sword and a mace, but even the most detailed RPG is still an incredibly abstract model of the “reality” of the game world. One should not be surprised to discover, for example, that a tree, a crumbling wall, and a cliff face might all be described as a DC 15 Athletics check to climb.

PUTTING THE MYSTERY IN THE MAGIC

The other thing you might note here is that I use the re-skinning of Elestra’s rope trick to further deepen the meta-mystery scenario of the PCs’ amnesia: Her spell creates a place that they both remember and do not remember.

This technique is consistent with Putting the “Magic” in Magic Items, in which I wrote:

All of this advice can really be boiled down to a simple maxim: Life is in the details.

The difference between a cold, lifeless stat block and a memorable myth is all about the living details that you imbue your game world with.

If you let something like a rope trick spell exist in your campaign as a purely mechanical construct, then it will generally have only the blandest of utilitarian function. But when a spell truly lives in your campaign world, it can become an expression of personality, a clue to a deeper mystery, possess any multitude of meanings, and form any number of vivid memories.

And re-skinning can help unlock all of that potential.

NEXT:
Campaign Journal: Session 25B – Running the Campaign: Player-Initiated Vectors
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 24D: The Second Hound of Ghul

Everyone fell silent. Impossibly, the shadows seemed to deepen. And then, out of the darkness, the second hound of Ghul appeared: It was a bony, undead thing. At its shoulder, it stood nearly twice as tall as Agnarr. Four interlocking, razor-sharp sabered fangs punctuated a jaw of jagged teeth. Its claws were nearly as large. Its bones were thick and at the end of a long, sinuous tail was a bulbous ball of bone twice the size of a grown man’s skull.

“By the gods…” Elestra murmured.

In this session we see the dawn of one my favorite RPG in-jokes of all time, as Tithenmamiwen tells the illiterate Agnarr that “C-A-T” is the elvish word for “faithful companion,” leading the barbarian to name his new pet dog Seeaeti. I think every long-running campaign develops these shibboleths that are only meaningful to the players, and this one has been part of our group for thirteen years now. (And will probably remain so until we’re all dust in our graves.)

Speaking of Seeaeti, if you’ve been following In the Shadow of the Spire you know that getting a dog has been a major goal for Agnarr as a character. I’ve previously talked about how other milestones in this quest including important character crucibles that permanently reshaped the course of Agnarr’s life (and the entire campaign).

When I was designing the Laboratory of the Beast and included the dog-soon-to-be-known-as-Seeaeti, I did suspect that this particular hound might become Agnarr’s. In fact, would I have included the slumbering dog if Agnarr hadn’t been looking for a dog? Maybe not (leaning towards probably not).

(At the table, though, there was a moment when I thought Tee was going to kill the dog before Agnarr even had a chance to see it. Given my previous comment about a thirteen year shibboleth, it’s really weird to think about that alternate reality.)

Later in the session, the group runs into an undead dog and Ranthir uses a spell to enslave it. For awhile there, it actually looked like this dog would also become a permanent addition to the group, but (as you can see here) it ended up getting destroyed instead.

Ranthir, of course, did not have a long-standing goal to get a dog and the ghulworg skeleton wasn’t something that I had anticipated becoming a “hireling.” So you can kind of see both sides of the coin here: Elements that we bring into the narrative because they’re long-standing goals of the players/their characters and elements that emerge out of the narrative.

We saw a third sign of this coin (thus irreparably rupturing our metaphor) earlier in this session, when Tee reached out to the Dreaming Apothecary and arranged to purchase a magical item that she particularly wanted. (With the twist that rather than just getting the magical lockpicks she wanted, the Dreaming Apothecary delivering a cool lockpicking ring.)

A few years ago there was a big folderol about magic item wish lists. I’m not actually sure what specifically prompted this advice fad, but it seems to have faded away a bit, along with the controversy that surrounded it.

Basically, the advice was that players should prep a wish list of the magic items (and other stuff) that they wanted for their characters and give it to their DM so that the DM could then incorporate that stuff into the campaign.

The controversy arose because many felt that this pierced the veil and ruined immersion, “Oh! I’ve always wanted a +1 flaming ghost touch dire maul! It’s so wonderful that we just coincidentally found it in this pile of treasure!” It also reeked of a sense of privilege and laziness: “Here’s my shopping list, Ms. Dungeon Master, please have it delivered to me as soon as possible!”

Personally, I think the controversy mostly misses the point.

First, one simply has to acknowledge that many people are playing in linear and/or railroaded campaigns. I can talk endlessly about why that’s a bad idea and that there are better ways to run your campaign, but unfortunately that’s still not true for a lot of people. Probably most people. And when a GM runs a linear/railroaded campaign, one of the many problems they create for themselves is a massive responsibility for everything that happens in the game: Since the players don’t have any meaningful control over what happens, the GM needs to ensure that every challenge is correctly balanced; that everyone has the appropriate spotlight time; and on and on and on and on.

Within that broken paradigm, for better or for worse, the magic item wish list provides the players with a method for communicating their desires as players, and it’s also useful to the GM who has, unfortunately, made themselves completely responsible for everything that goes into the game (particularly if they’re not using random methods for stocking treasure). It’s good for everybody involved. It’s good advice.

But, in my opinion, the magic item wish list has utility even beyond that linear/railroaded paradigm. It’s really just a specific subset of the wider concept of players clearly communicating what their goals (and the goals of their characters) are. That expression can be done diegetically, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it being directly communicated in the metagame (via a character’s background, a frank discussion, a wish list, or whatever). And although I’ve seen some who feel that it’s not “realistic” for a fantasy hero to say, “I really need some magic lockpicks!” I just don’t see it that way. They live in a world filled with magic and they use that magic in their daily lives to accomplish their goals. It’s no different than me trying to figure out what tripod I need for my teleprompter.

Here’s the key thing, though: The perception is that the magic item wish list makes the players passive; that by expressing their desire to the GM, it automatically follows that they’re just going to sit back and wait for the GM to deliver what they want without making any effort on their own part.

In my experience, this isn’t really the case. With a “wish list” in hand, there are still three core techniques for how it can be fulfilled:

• The players can take initiative. (Tee ordering her magic lockpicks. Or Agnarr’s earlier efforts in the campaign to find a stray dog.)
• The GM can seed their goals into their adventure prep. (Putting a sleeping dog into Ghul’s Labyrinth, which the PCs are exploring for reasons that have nothing to do with the dog.)
• The GM can seed the opportunity to achieve their goals into the campaign world. (For example, by having them hear a rumor in a local tavern that the legendary +1 flaming ghost touch dire maul of Leeandra the Nether Brute might lie within the Tomb of Sagrathea.)

Understanding what the goals of your players and their characters are will allow you to use the full plethora of these techniques to enrich the campaign. Achieving that understanding can come in a number of different ways, whether it’s a wish list, a character background, session post mortems, or diegetically framed campfire chats.

NEXT:
Campaign Journal: Session 25A – Running the Campaign: Re-Skinning
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 24C: The First Hound of Ghul

Returning to the tunnels beneath Greyson House, they proceeded carefully past the point where the pit of chaos now lay entombed. The stone above it was now visibly warping and buckling, making it clear that the effort to seal away the pool would not last for more than a few more days at most.

But, soon after, their fears regarding the unknown intruders were laid to rest: Drawing near to the former bloodwight nests, Tee could easily distinguish the distinctive sound of elvish voices. Stepping into the open, she confirmed that this was a party of workers and scholars from House Erthuo.

In this session, the PCs return to the Laboratory of the Beast. They’ve been here before. In fact, depending on how you count, this is their third or fourth foray into this section of Ghul’s Labyrinth. (It won’t be the last.)

What’s pulled them back this is the desire to wrap up some unfinished business. There are a couple particular examples of this I’d like to draw your attention to.

First, in this week’s campaign journal, Tee obtains a set of magical lockpicks which allow how to open doors which had previously thwarted their efforts to open.

Second, in the next installment of the campaign journal, you’ll see them figure out how to haul some of the larger treasures out of the labyrinth.

Some GMing advice will tell you to fear failure: Your players couldn’t open the door? Didn’t find the secret passage? Missed a clue? You’ll find plenty of people who will tell you these outcomes aren’t “fun” and shouldn’t be allowed.

But this is myopic advice.

Failure is rarely the end of the story. It is an opportunity for the players to use their ingenuity to find a different path to success. And often the stories we discover along these paths are the most memorable and enjoyable.

Partly this is due to the sense of accomplishment and progress: When you discover that you can achieve a goal that was previously impossible, that’s satisfying. And when you figure out how to find a success that overcomes failure, that’s a success which you own. The context of failure gives meaning to the eventual triumph.

Also, the consequences of failure are usually fascinating and far more interesting than the consequences of success. This can be particularly true of roleplaying. As Admiral Kirk says of the Kobyashi Maru, “It’s a test of character.” How we deal with failure is far more revealing – and meaningful – than how we deal with success.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE DUNGEON

The other reason the challenges of failure often result in great stories is because they force you to re-engage with a situation.

You can see that in a pretty pure form in this session: There’s nothing inherently amazing about picking the lock on a door, but it motivates the PCs to come back to this dungeon. Which, in turn, allows them to see how the dungeon has been transformed as the result of their actions.

The Laboratory of the Beast is a fairly sterile complex, inhabited primarily by the remnants of technomantic and necromantic experiments from the distant past. But even here, the PCs encounter the researchers from House Erthuo: The things which they have done in the past are having a tangible effect on the game world.

This makes the game world feel real. It also gives meaning to the actions of the characters and the choices of the players. The first engagement with something is often scarcely removed from exposition — it establishes the basic facts, but can rarely delve deep in exploring them. It is in the re-engagement that story happens.

Of course, there are other ways that you can motivate players to, for example, revisit a dungeon. But simply allowing failure to exist in your campaign will see this behavior emerge organically from the events of play with little or no effort on your part.

LOGISTICAL CHALLENGES

Much like failure, you’ll often see GMing advice which suggests that logistical elements like encumbrance are “boring” and should just be skipped over.

There are certainly times when the logistical hurdles of a situation are clearly manageable and, therefore, the trivial details of exactly how they are managed are best skipped. And there are certainly, for example, encumbrance systems which are so burdensome that it’s better to find an alternative.

But that’s really no different than, say, an overly complicated combat system or the fact that you don’t need to bust out the initiative rolls to let 15^th level PCs intimidate and rough up some street thugs. And I think it’s a mistake to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

D&D, in particular, is a game of expeditions. When you remove the logistics from an expedition, you remove most or all of the challenge from that expedition. And I don’t just mean that in a mechanical sense. When you remove adversity from a narrative, it generally doesn’t improve the narrative!

In the current session, you can see how the logistical problem of getting bulky-yet-valuable items out of the dungeon forced the players to come up with alternative solutions. That includes bringing the House Erthuo researchers to the dungeon (“if we can’t move the orrery to sell it somewhere else, we can sell access to it where it is”). It also created a failure state which, once again, brought the players back to the dungeon.

You can see another example of this in Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, actually. Once the players have found the huge cache of coins which is the ultimate reward in that campaign, the question of how they’re going to get that gold out when there are potentially multiple factions looking to steal it out from under them is really interesting.

(With minimal spoilers, Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon is a mind-bending look at a similar conundrum.)

NEXT:
Campaign Journal: Session 24D – Running the Campaign: Magic Item Wish Lists
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 24B: The Meeting of All Things

As they discussed it, they realized that they had a wider need to take stock of what they had accomplished, analyze what remained to be done, and make some hard decisions – as a group – regarding what their immediate and long-term goals should be.

As the others returned to the inn, therefore, they gathered them together in Elestra’s room.

Tee asked the most important question: What are our immediate goals?

This week’s campaign journal is attempting to accomplish two goals.

First, it’s trying to capture the actual experience of the session, in which the players spent a significant amount of time poring over their notes, discussing their actions, and setting an agenda for the session to come.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, it is seeking to preserve the essence of that debate, its conclusions, and, for lack of a better term, its findings of fact so that they can be easily referenced by the players in the future. In other words, it’s more or less serving as the detailed minutes of the meeting.

Something to be aware of if you’re a GM writing a campaign journal like this, is that this actually takes a fair degree of delicacy. The difficulty is that they were attempting to figure out mysteries to which I already know the answers: In summarizing their thoughts and conclusions, therefore, it can be quite easy for me to subconsciously focus on the correct solutions.

For example, over the course of the conversation the group might make five different hypotheses about why Character X did Y. One of the five hypotheses is actually what’s happening. In summarizing that conversation for the journal (a process which, by its nature, streamlines the discussion), I could thoughtlessly trim away the superfluous hypotheses and only include the correct guess. (Because, after all, that’s the only important one, right?) In fact, without careful consideration and note-keeping, it can quite difficult to even remember what the other hypotheses were.

THE COLLATION

The meeting itself is of a type which I have found to be pretty much inevitable in any campaign featuring extensive lore books (the creation and use of which I discussed a couple months ago). Or, more accurately, any campaign in which extensive clues and lore have been encoded into handouts. At some point the density of this information reaches a point at which the players feel the need to organize it, collate it, and figure it out.

(Such meetings will sometimes trigger in other campaigns, but this is usually due to extensive recordkeeping by one or more of the players: Those notes become the hardcoded data store that needs to be sorted through and sorted out. For example, in my Castle Blackmoor open table, there was a session where all of the various PCs who had been mapping the megadungeon specifically scheduled a session where they could all get together, compare their maps, and figure out how to connect them into a larger, more definitive map.)

These sessions are, in my experience and without exception, fantastic. They can be particularly spectacular when the players all commit to carrying out the discussion in character, turning the whole thing into a tour de force of focused roleplaying that almost invariably deepens the players’ instinctual grasp of their characters while simultaneously immersing them deep into the lore of the campaign.

Oddly, I can rarely predict when one of these lore book meetings (as I’ve come to think of them) will break out. They often come when the players have run out of obvious threads to pull on, but can also happen when the players feel overwhelmed by the number of loose threads they have in hand. They almost always happen when the characters themselves are in a moment of quiescence, and are often triggered by just one or two players who decide that it’s time to “figure all this stuff out.”

I know some GMs who get antsy in sessions like this. I think it’s because they aren’t doing anything and it doesn’t seem as if the players are doing anything. I think this sensation is heightened because the GM knows all the solutions: Watching someone solve a puzzle you already know the solution isn’t exactly exciting, even though the person bending all of their brainpower upon the problem is, in fact, intensely engaged with it.

There may be times, however, when the group has truly run aground and you need to gently prod them back into motion. This, too, requires a light touch because, once again, you know the answers: It’s just not your place to push them in a particular direction. I know you’re excited for them to discover the incredibly cool thing you made, but your hints are almost certainly defeating the purpose of making it an engaging mystery in the first place!

Honestly, your job in these sessions is almost always to just sit back and enjoy the show, while perhaps occasionally helping players track down a particular prop or answer questions which their characters would know the answer to.

With that being said, though: Listen carefully! The players are going to drop a lot of clues for you in figuring out where the PCs are going next and what you should be prepping.

NEXT:
Campaign Journal: Session 24C – Running the Campaign: Back, Back to the Dungeon
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 24A: The Squire of Dawn

Sir Kabel returned the bow with a nod and then sat down on the couch, motioning Tor to a nearby chair. “Sir Torland of Barund, if I remember correctly? We spoke of horses at Harvestime, did we not?”

“Yes, but I am no knight, sir.”

“Truly?” Sir Kabel raised his eyesbrows. “Yet you bear a sword at your side and you carry yourself like a warrior.”

“I am trained in the blade,” Tor said. “But I belong to no order.”

“Would you like to?”

In this week’s session, Tor makes a choice about which order of knighthood to approach in his quest to become a knight. This might be a good time, therefore, to do a call back to an earlier Running the Campaign essay, “An Interstice of Factions,” in which I looked at how and why I’d set up this choice in the first place.

I honestly have no idea how things might have played out if Tor had instead selected the Knights of the Golden Cross or the Knights of the Pale. But as you can see in the campaign journal (although Tor really doesn’t), Sir Kabel had not only become aware of Tor’s martial prowess, he also had political motivations for keeping Tor close to him. As a result, Tor’s entrance into the order is heavily accelerated as he moves almost immediately into almost informal Trials of Arms, which are what I’d like to discuss today.

UNUSUAL RULINGS

“I’ll rest on little ceremony here,” Kabel said. “This is your First Trial of Arms. We’ll begin with the Test of the Blade. Strike me. If you can.”

Tor attacked… and Kabel easily parried the thrust. “Good form. Controlled, yet fierce.”

Tor feinted to the left and then slashed to the right. Kabel almost completely ignored the feint and easily parried the slash, but Tor deflected his blow and plunged the point of his blade toward’s Kabel’s chest. Kabel was forced to twist his own sword in order to parry the follow-thru. “Excellent!”

Tor backed off half a pace and then quickly brought a strong blow down directly towards Kabel’s head, but Kabel was quick enough to shift his footwork, right his form, and block the blow.

“Enough!” Kabel cried, disengaging. “Now for the Test of the Shield. Defend yourself!”

A lot of mechanics in RPGs are clearly designed for one specific implementation, and this can often be seen quite clearly with combat mechanics. One of the great things about having a GM who can make ruilings, though, is that even these mechanics can be creatively turned to new uses when the occasion calls for it.

In this case, for example, I plucked attack rolls out of the combat system and structured them as a series of checks which included parsing some mechanical failures into partial successes – i.e., attacks which could impress Sir Kabel even if they were not, in fact, successful at striking him.

The cool thing about using mechanics in unusual ways – instead of just doing some ad hoc fiat – is that (a) the player still feels like they’re in control of the situation because they can apply their mastery and understanding of the rule system and (b) the GM can also continue to use the supporting infrastructure around those mechanics to support and enhance their rulings.

For example, I was able to use my house rules for fighting defensively to increase Sir Kabel’s effective AC (since he was entirely focused on parrying Tor’s blows). Conversely, Tor’s player realized she could do the same, using the Aim ability on Tor’s final attack.

PLAYER-FACING MECHANICS

Tor loosed the shield from his back and lowered himself into a defensive posture. Sir Kabel unleashed a withering flurry of attacks, and although Tor blocked many of them, Kabel’s sword seemed to constantly find the weak points in his defense.

After several exchanges, Kabel stepped back again. “I’m impressed. It’s clear you have had little formal training, but your instincts are strong and you have clearly been tested by the true heat of battle. The Order would be honored to have you serve as its squire.”

The other thing I did here was shift to a player-facing defensive roll when Sir Kabel moved to the Test of the Shield.

A player-facing mechanic involves the player always being the one to roll the dice: If a PC is attacking, the player rolls the attack dice against a static target number representing the target’s defense. If the PC is defending, on the other hand, the player makes a defense roll against a static target number representing the attacker’s skill.

(A system where both the attacker and defender roll on each attack is NOT player-facing; that’s dual-facing. D&D attacks are generally neither, with the attacker always being the one to roll.)

A player-facing mechanic can have advantages in both practice and design, but perhaps the biggest advantage is psychological: Even though the mathematical effect of a player-facing mechanic can be utterly irrelevant, we nevertheless associate rolling the dice (i.e., an action taken at the table) to the action of the character for whom the dice are being rolled; it feels as if that character is the one in “control” of the outcome.

This is also due to the variability of the dice: If I roll for the attacker but not the defender, then the defender’s outcome is constant. Ergo, our subconscious assumes that success or failure is entirely dependent on what the attacker did – on the variability of their outcome.

(I talk about this effect a bit more in “The Design History of Saving Throws,” and also how you can consciously choose to break this psychological default when narrating outcomes in The Art of Rulings.)

Long story short, I deliberately chose to have Tor make a player-facing defensive roll — rolling 1d20 + AC modifiers vs. Kabel’s attack bonuses + 10 — because it centered Tor as the most important character in that moment.

And, of course, the player rolling the dice is the one actually engaged in the resolution, and you can see that quite clearly in this example: If I’d followed the normal mechanics and rolled Kabel’s attack rolls during the Trial of the Shield, Tor’s player would have just sat there watching me roll dice and narrate outcomes. Having the player roll the dice, regardless of any other factors, simply made for a more satisfying game play experience.

NEXT:
Campaign Journal: Session 24B – Running the Campaign: Lore Book Meetings
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index