DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 27A: The Midnight Meeting

“By coming here, you have already joined this Brotherhood,” Dilar continued. “Over the next few weeks you will be contacted. For many of you there will be training. You will be asked to do things. Many of these things will seem simple or even unimportant, but you should never doubt that in even the smallest service you are aiding the Brotherhood and all that we are attempting to accomplish.”

If you’re a long-time reader of the Alexandrian, you’re probably familiar with the Three Clue Rule: In a mystery scenario, for any conclusion that you want the PCs to make, you should include at least three clues.

This redundancy makes mystery scenarios robust, so that they don’t break down during play and leave either you scrabbling frantically, your players frustrated, or both. In my experience, the process of fleshing out a scenario to support the Three Clue Rule also usually results in a more dynamic and interesting scenario.

When I’m prepping a module, therefore, I make it a point to check each revelation and make sure that the Three Clue Rule is being observed. For published adventures, unfortunately, this often isn’t the case, and I’ll need to add clues. Session 27 of In the Shadow of the Spire is a good example of this.

Many of the events detailed in this session — the secret meeting and project site — are from Monte Cook’s Night of Dissolution mini-campaign. A key revelation is, in fact, the location of the project site. From the secret meeting, the published adventure includes one clue pointing to that revelation:

Dilar has a number of papers and notebooks with him. […] Among other things, the papers show the location of the Brothers of Venom’s secret project: an apartment build in Oldtown off Crossing Street. The documents refer to the building only as the “secret project” or the “joint project,” however. (The address can lead them to the Temple of Deep Chaos, found in Chapter 4.) The pages also discuss the cult’s new allies, the Ebon Hand cult, and mention that cult’s leader, Malleck, and their activities involving kidnapping young people and transforming them.

(You can also see here a secondary revelation — the alliance with the Ebon Hand — which is non-essential.)

Seeing this, the first thing I did was prep Dilar’s papers as a physical handout that I could give to the PCs.

You can see that this is not particularly elaborate, being a fairly simplistic example of the lore books technique we’ve discussed previously. The primary goal here is just to let the players “shuffle through the papers,” rather than listening to me narrate them. The map here also neatly correlates to the map of the city hanging on the wall during our sessions, so the players would’ve been able to take this handout over to the map and literally figure out where they needed to go.

As it turned out, however, the players never actually got this handout. Which is why the next thing I did was so essential: Adding additional clues to support the revelation.

To the adventure’s credit, it does discuss multiple paths by which the PCs might come into possession of Dilar’s papers: They might, for example, kill him and loot them. Or they might bloodlessly infiltrate the meeting, take the opportunity to surreptitiously peek at his papers, and then get out without the cult being any the wiser.

But these routes still all go through Dilar’s papers, creating a chokepoint that makes the scenario fragile. You can see that in actual play here: Because of how events played out, only one PC infiltrated the meeting, making the “kill all the cultists and loot their stuff” outcome basically impossible. Tee was also well aware of how vulnerable she was, meaning that she didn’t want to take any risky actions that might expose her (e.g., looking at papers she shouldn’t be looking at). If I’d run the adventure as written, it would have broken here.

What I needed to do was create additional vectors leading from the secret meeting to the project site. (Alternatively, I could have gone for a node-based approach, adding clues to the secret meeting pointing to cult-stuff other than the project site, and then seeded additional clues to the project site in those other nodes.) My thought process went something like this:

• Well… what is the actual purpose of this meeting?
• What if it’s to brief cult members on the project site? That would also explain why Dilar is bringing notes detailing the project site to the meeting.
• We know that this meeting includes new recruits. They’re not going to be fully read in on the project. (Which is convenient logic, because otherwise all of the scenario’s revelations would get frontloaded into this single scene instead of being slowly peeled back by the PCs over the course of their investigation.)
• What would the cult be asking new recruits to do that might be related to the project?
• They could be assigned as external security/lookouts!

This immediately gives me two new clues:

• The PCs can infiltrate the meeting and get briefed on the contents of Dilar’s notes.
• The PCs could question Iltumar about what he learned at the meeting.

And then, by having the cult members taken directly from the meeting to the project site, I can add another clue:

• Following cult members leaving the meeting will lead PCs to the project site.

While this took a little bit of thought, one thing to note here is how little prep was actually required. This is often the case. In my experience, it takes virtually no effort and a truly minuscule amount of time to add basic clues to a scenario. That’s because clues are just indicators. The meat of the scenario — the stuff you’ll spend the bulk of your prep time on — is what the clues point at.

(The most common exception to this is when you design a handout for the clue, like the lore book for Dilar’s notes. But this is usually not, strictly speaking, necessary, and the time you’re investing there is more in the value-add of the cool handout than it is in the clue itself.)

Despite the relative ease of adding these clues, also note how much depth we’ve added to this scenario. For example, the original adventure only told us:

The cultists are here to plan further murders, trade advice on poison use, and engage in perverted sexual acts.

But we now have a much more specific agenda for the meeting. The natural interrogation of the scenario that happens when we think about the vectors required for clues means that we now understand the what and why of the cultists here. So if the PCs were to eavesdrop on the meeting or, as it turned out, infiltrate the meeting, we have a much firmer foundation to stand on for improvising the scene.

As I say, this happens all the time when you apply the Three Clue Rule in your scenario design.

The other thing you’ll discover is that missed clues will no longer be something that you fear. This can feel weird, but it’s incredibly liberating. For example, if this scenario had still depended on Tee looking at Dilar’s notes, I would have felt the need to reassure her that it was OK to sneak a peek. I would have needed to find some direct or indirect way of letting her know that she didn’t really need to be afraid of exposing herself and getting caught.

But because I knew that I’d made the scenario robust, I didn’t need to do that. The result was a vastly better scene, in which the tension of discovery drove the stakes from beginning to end. It would have been a shame if I’d felt a need to deflate that tension in order to prevent the scenario from breaking.

And this is, again, something that happens all the time when you’ve got the Three Clue Rule backstopping you. Missed clues are no longer catastrophes; they are a vital part of the scenario’s flow.

If you haven’t experienced this firsthand, it can feel paradoxical. It might even feel like a violation of the principles of smart prep: You have this prepped content that you’re not using! It’s wasted! But, in practice, missing a clue isn’t a waste — it’s a consequence, a cost, or a choice. And even if you have a clue that is “wasted,” it’s not that big of a deal because, as we noted before, the clues are mostly ephemera. They aren’t the meat of the scenario.

NEXT:
Campaign Journal: Session 27B – Running the Campaign: Improvising Floorplans
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

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