DISCUSSING:
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 23D: The Chaos Cultists

The end of the key seemed to be twisting and, looking more closely at it, Tee could see that it was actually made of innumerable pieces almost too small for the eye to see – they were constantly in flux, seeming to warp and twist and move in an almost impossible manner, as if their movement were not truly determined by the limitations of the natural world.

Tee was fascinated – almost enthralled – by the artifact. With delicate fingers she reached down and picked it up…

And felt a coldness rush up from her fingers and seem to bury itself in her soul. Despite the throbbing pain and waves of weakness emanating from the key, her curiosity could not be contained. She turned to the next chest, the one labeled “Mysteries of the Purple City”. Inserting the golden key carefully into the lock she turned it.

The lock opened with a satisfying click. But the pain and the cold intensified. Tee almost felt as if her soul were being ripped out through her. Her hand flew to her head and she sagged, nearly fainting where she stood.

“Tee!” Elestra cried. “Is everything alright?”

“I’m fine,” Tee said. “But I don’t think I should be using this key any more.” She slipped it into her bag of holding… but even there she could still feel its presence like a cold weight on her soul.

Dungeons & Dragons generally embraces a fairly simple binary when it comes to enchanted items: There are magic items, which are good. And there are cursed items, which are bad.

This dichotomy, of course, leaves out a fairly large middle ground. And it is, in fact, a middle ground that is occupied by many magic items in fantasy and mythology. Often these items are not simply a boon, but carry some price for their use: Tyrfing, the sword that would never rust or miss a stroke, but which was cursed to kill a man each time it was drawn. The Necklace of Harmonia which granted eternal youth and beauty, but also ill fortune. The Nine Rings given to mortal kings which grant immense power, but slowly transform their wielders into slaves of the Lord of the Rings.

Requiring a price to be paid for the power offered by a magic item can create interesting stories and also unique dilemmas for the wielders (or would-be wielders) of the items. Pathfinder introduced the Drawback curse, which was actually a collection of minor curses that could be applied to an item so that it could “usually still be beneficial to the possessor but carry some negative aspect.”

But you can push the concept farther than that by using the cursed price of a magic item to actually balance (or limit) abilities that would otherwise by unbalanced or undesirable for the PCs to possess.

You can see an example of such an item in the all-key found by the PCs in this session: The key (referred to by the players as Freedom’s Key based on the inscription of the chest they found it in) allows its user to open ANY lock that has a keyhole.

The narrative potential of this key is really interesting. But it’s also problematic because it would essentially excise an entire slice of game play: With the all-key, the PCs would never have to pick another lock or kick down another door.

Removing an entire facet of gameplay like this isn’t inherently problematic, but should be approached with caution. And that caution, in this case, is the price paid by the user of the all-key: Merely carrying the all-key inflicts negative levels, and additional negative levels are inflicted each time the key is used.

The intended result (and, in fact, what ends up happening in the campaign) is that the PCs can’t just carry the all-key around with them and whip it out for every lock they encounter: They need to tuck it away some place safe and only fetch it when they have great need for its power.

This not only keeps the lockpicking and key-finding aspects of a  typical D&D generally intact, but it also makes each use of the all-key momentous: It requires a certain threshold of need to even consider using it, and then its use explicitly involves careful planning. Ironically, the all-key actually feels MORE powerful because of its limitations than an unfettered item with the same ability whose use would become a trivial bit of irreverent bookkeeping.

One of the risks of attempting to balance otherwise undesirable power with a price, however, is that such drawbacks can end up being highly situational and thus, with a little effort, easily avoided. This can be particularly true if you are drawing inspiration from fantasy and mythology, where the drawbacks of the items are often not only idiosyncratic, but would be non-mechanical when translated into D&D. Such limitations either put the weight on the DM to make them meaningful or, in some cases, are simply irrelevant to the PC who might get their hands on the item. (“Using the One Ring will slowly corrupt my soul and turn me into a Dark Lord?” said Sir Patrick ‘the Bloodstained Butcher’ Rasseroth. “That’s adorable.”)

Of course, if you’re designing an item for use in your own campaign, you can tailor its design to the PCs to make sure that the price will, in fact, be paid.

NEXT:
Campaign Journal: Session 23E – Running the Campaign: Diegetic Mechanics
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING:
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 23C: Beneath Pythoness House

But when they returned to the statue, they found that the hole in its stomach had closed up.

“It’s like its reset or something,” Elestra muttered.

“I MUST FEED…”

Now, standing in this hall, they were sure that the voice was emanating directly from the statue itself.

Last week we talked about techniques that break down the natural firewall of the dungeon: Techniques that will have you and your players thinking holistically about the entire dungeon environment instead of just one room at a time.

Today’s journal entry features a similar technique in the form of cyclical dungeon activity.

Basically, all of these techniques seek to take a static dungeon — in which each room passively exists in a status quo until the PCs enter it — and transform it into an active complex. The advantages of this are myriad and probably obvious: it deepens the players’ immersion by making the game world seem truly alive; it increases the strategic challenge of the scenario; it emergently creates complex dramatic situations and difficult dilemmas.

Cyclical dungeon activity is one way of accomplishing this.

THE GLOBAL TIMER

The concept of a “global timer” comes from video games. To simplify greatly, it’s a counter that is constantly iterating and helps keep all of the events in the game in sync. In video games this can range from the broad to the very specific. (For example, in Mario 64 small snowflakes generate when the counter is even and large snowflakes are generated when the timer is odd.)

You are not a computer and you shouldn’t run your game as if you were.

But we can borrow the concept of the global timer and apply it fruitfully. You can see a simple example of this in Pythoness House:

• When the statue says, “Come to me…” the spirit within it seals the castle so that the PCs cannot easily escape.
• When the statue says, “I must feed…” the statue itself is warded by a curse.
• When the statue says, “Chaos is the key…” the depression into which the spiral contrivance can be inserted opens on the statue’s belly.

In short, your “global timer” is a set of discrete states, with each state determining particular features in the dungeon. As the state changes, the topography, feature, and/or inhabitants of the dungeon will shift.

The advantage of the technique is that you only need to keep track of one thing — Which state is the dungeon currently in? — and you can apply that one piece of information to whatever area the PCs are currently in. This lets you manage dungeon-wide changes and activities with incredibly simple bookkeeping.

PLAYER INTERACTION

As you can see in the example of Pythoness House, the switch state can be both diegetic (i.e., something actually shifting in the game world) and directly apparent to the players (everyone in the dungeon can hear the spirit’s declaration).

Neither is necessarily true. There may be no clear “signal” that will notify the PCs that the state of the dungeon has changed (or what it has changed to). It’s also quite possible for the global timer to be partially or entirely an abstraction that exists only for your managerial benefit.

For example, you might design a slavers’ fortress in both a Day state and a Night state, but this doesn’t mean that the slavers all become clockwork automatons. (Although a fortress of clockwork slavers has some fascinating thematic implications. But I digress.) The global timer is a useful tool for broadly modeling the fortress, but if the PCs start closely examining the place what they’re “really” going to see is quite different than that abstraction.

Regardless, as you can see in the campaign journal, this type of cyclical dungeon activity can naturally function as a puzzle for the players, ranging from the simple to the complex. In addition to more specific effects, figuring out how the dungeon’s cycle works will make it easier for the PCs to navigate and overcome the dungeon’s challenges. (For example, figuring out when the best time to strike the slavers’ fortress would be.)

Something else to consider are player-triggered state changes. This might be something they deliberately choose to do, but more often it’s not: The dungeon might shift every time they enter a particular room, go down a particular staircase, or drink from a particular fountain.

When combined with obfuscated or nonexistent signals, these player-triggered state changes can create delightfully complicated puzzles.

(It’s also fun when the players think that there must be something they’re doing to trigger the state changes, but it’s actually just random or on a global timer.)

Such state changes could also be a one-time event: The dungeon is in one state until the PCs trigger a trap, and then the whole dungeon shifts into a different (and presumably more dangerous) state.

This also creates the possibility for NPC-triggered state changes: Everything is fine until one of the bad guys manage to hit the big red PANIC button and the alarm klaxons start sounding.

KEEP IT SIMPLE

With only a little imagination, it’s easy to see how such timers could be made quite complex, dynamic, and perhaps even conditional.

So let me just briefly reiterate: Don’t do that.

You are not computer. The whole point of this technique is to simplify your bookkeeping and management of the dungeon. It’s real easy to become enamored of the Rube Goldberg device you’re constructing until the tail starts ferociously wagging the dog.

If you do want to increase the complexity of your dungeon states, try adding a second global timer — unconnected to the first and out of sync with it — to your dungeon. I suspect you’ll find the combinatory interactions between the two cycles will add a delightful amount of complexity while keeping your bookkeeping dead simple. This will, in particular, be more than sufficient to mask the nature of cycles you would prefer to keep hidden from your players (because, for example, they’re a non-diegetic abstraction intended to create a living world).

NEXT:
Campaign Journal: Session 23D – Running the Campaign: The Price of Magic
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING:
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 23B: Binding Foul and Fair

“Well, the book should tell us more,” Ranthir said, and picked it up. He flipped it open… and the pages seemed to blur before his eyes, forming a black maw that seemed to open inside his very mind… threatening to overwhelm him… to swallow his very mind…

Ranthir jerked the book away, slamming it shut and throwing it onto the table.

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

Ranthir rubbed his forehead. His thoughts seemed blurred. The edge of his intellect dulled. “The book… the book betrayed me!”

I often talk about how one of the unique strengths of the dungeoncrawl structure is the way in which it firewalls individual rooms: If you’re a GM – particularly a new GM – you don’t have to keep an entire adventure scenario in your head. You only have to think about the room the PCs are currently standing in. All the information you need right now almost certainly fits on a single piece of paper, and you don’t have to worry about anything else until the PCs choose an exit and go to the next room.

It’s the equivalent of juggling one ball.

This also extends to creating the dungeon scenario in the first place: In its most inchoate form, the dungeon is made up of entirely independent rooms. The new GM can fill a dungeon room with fun stuff and then move on to filling up the next room without any concern for what they put in the first room.

Once you’re no longer a beginning GM, though, you’re going to start using techniques that break down this firewall. You’re not going to completely eschew the advantages of the clearly defined room key (no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater), but you will slowly stop thinking about the dungeon only one room at a time and start adding extra dimensions and complexity to your dungeon scenarios.

You’re going to start juggling multiple balls at the same time.

One such technique is the adversary roster: Instead of keying encounters to specific rooms, adversary rosters make it relatively easy for the GM think about and actively play the inhabitants of a dungeon as they move around the location, living their lives and responding to the incursions of the PCs.

Another technique are dungeon clues. To generalize, a dungeon clue is information in one room of a dungeon which influences or determines the PCs’ actions in a different room.

Some of these clues will likely be quite straightforward: For example, the key in Room 11 that opens the door in Area 41.

Other clues, however, will be complicated, perhaps requiring a series of revelations gleaned from clues in multiple locations throughout the dungeon before the final solution can be found. You can see an example of this here in Session 23, as the PCs piece together the clues that will let them locate the broken halves of the spiral contrivance.

“If the key is in the square tower and it requires a ladder to reach the secret entrance, maybe that entrance isn’t on the wall of the tower – maybe it’s under the tower.”

They returned down to the large, empty room on the fifth floor of the tower. “We should be directly beneath the tower here,” Ranthir said.

Tee floated up to the ceiling and quickly found a bit of false plaster. Scraping that aside with one of her dragon-hilted daggers, she revealed a small keyhole. She took out the key she had found in the nook below the ruined garden and found that it was a perfect fit.

A particularly effective technique is to design your dungeon clues so that the PCs are forced to crisscross the dungeon — gaining information in Area A that takes them to Area B, before sending them back to Area A to complete the sequence. These types of interactions help to transform the dungeon from a linear experience to a multi-dimensional one, in which expertise and knowledge gained from one traversal of the dungeon become rewarding when the players revisit those areas a second time.

In sufficiently complex dungeon scenarios, you can have multiple enigmas featuring overlapping patterns of dungeon clues in play at the same time. This creates navigational interest in the dungeon as the players now have to figure out their own priorities and the routes that proceed from those priorities.

The last thing to note is that dungeon clues frequently aren’t necessary to successfully complete a scenario. For example, the PCs could have found the pieces of the spiral contrivance without necessarily obtaining or figuring out all the clues. If the revelation indicated by your dungeon clues is necessary for the scenario, though, you’ll want to remember the Three Clue Rule.

THE DYNAMIC CYCLE

For the GM, dungeon clues usually aren’t something they need to think about too much while running the game (although for sufficiently complicated scenarios it might involve tracking a revelation list), but that’s obviously because the clues are getting baked in during prep. Players, on the other hand, will be actively engaged with these clues — collecting them, thinking about them, trying to figure them out — during play.

In fact, all of these techniques — adversary rosters, dungeon clues, etc. — don’t just break down the GM’s firewall. They also force the players to stop thinking about things one room at a time and instead start thinking about the dungeon as a whole. In other words, the players will stop thinking only tactically about their immediate circumstances and start thinking strategically about the broader scenario.

Once the players have been nudged in this direction, you’ll discover that their strategic consideration of the dungeon will actually feed back into the scenario itself, creating dynamic interactions which were never explicitly part of your prep: The deliberately placed dungeon clues will get them thinking about how Room 11 and Room 33 relate to each other, for example. But now that they’re thinking like that, they’ll also think about:

• Using a passwall spell to move from Room 14 to Room 22.
• Tricking the goblins in Rooms 9 thru 12 into attacking the ogre in Room 41.
• Scavenging alchemist’s fire from the traps in the lower hallways to destroy the cursed tapestries in Room 42.

This dynamic play on the part of the players will, in turn, give you the opportunity of rising to the challenge and finding more ways to actively play the scenario in order to respond to them.

NEXT:
Campaign Journal: Session 23C – Running the Campaign: Dungeon Cycles
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING:
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 23A: Let Slip the Dogs of Hell

“WHO DARES TO VIOLATE THIS SANCTUARY OF CHAOS?”

They whirled around and looked up. Above, on a balcony in the tower directly above them, a demon with a goat-like head was floating several feet off the ground. It carried a vicious looking axe with a blade that gleamed in the sun.

Although this is not well-represented in the campaign journal, I actually ended Session 22 in a cliffhanger: The demon showed up, shouted, “Who dares?!”, and that’s where I wrapped up the night.

Cliffhangers are great. There are all kinds of cliffhangers, but two significant ones for RPGs are unresolved peril and the escalating bang.

Unresolved peril is fairly self-explanatory: The PCs — or people/things they care about — are in a state of jeopardy and we “leave them hanging,” uncertain of the outcome. The anticipation of the cliffhanger is based on desperately wanting to know the fate of the things we care about.

I discuss escalating bangs in The Art of Pacing. This is the point in a scene where the stakes are either precipitously raised to a whole new level and/or when the stakes you thought the scene were about abruptly change into something completely different. If you cut more or less on the exact moment that the escalating bang is revealed, the anticipation of the cliffhanger is based on being uncertain about where the scene is going and also the eagerness of wanting to take action in the new reality presented by the bang.

This particular cliffhanger is basically a combination of both types: The escalating bang of the demon’s arrival has both changed the nature of the scene and put the PCs in jeopardy.

(As I point out in Part 5 of The Art of Pacing, cliffhangers also don’t always have to come at the end of a session: If the group has split up, you can create numerous cliffhangers by cutting from one group to another.)

“Anticipation” is a key word here. What makes the cliffhanger desirable as a dramatic technique is that the players immediately want to keep playing, while simultaneously denying that to them. It’s a great way of ending a session, because it makes the players eager for the next session.

ENDING THE SESSION

Cliffhangers are not the only effective way to end a session. At the end of Session 21, for example, we closed on the resolution of some pretty heavy stakes for the character of Dominic. Those significant character beats — particularly if the characters themselves are thinking deeply about how things turned out — are a good place for a session break because it lets the players live long in that moment.

In other cases, like the end of Session 19, you might want to break at the point where a scenario has reached a definitive conclusion. This helps to solidify a sense of accomplishment — the idea that a new milestone in the campaign has been reached. When you look back at a campaign, these milestones will chart out the course you’ve all taken together. (From a practical standpoint, this can also be a good place to wrap up for the night so that everyone — including you! — can have some time to think about what they want to do next.)

If you want to study different types of effective session endings, think about how other serialized forms of entertainment — television shows and comic books, for example — wrap up their installments. You’ll find a lot of different types of endings, and also a lot of variations within those types.

The real trick with an RPG, though, is finding that ending. Unlike a scriptwriter, you only have a limited amount of control over where the game session will take you and how fast it will take you there. That’s actually why I use the word “finding”: Whereas the scriptwriter can sculpt the ending they want, as a GM you need to instead be aware of when the ending happens and then actually end the session.

If you miss a potential ending, there probably won’t be another coming along for awhile. That’s when you’ll end up just kind of awkwardly cutting at some arbitrary point because you’ve run out of time.

THE ENDING WINDOW

To find an effective ending, you’ll first need to be aware when you’re in what I call the “ending window.” That’s the window of time at the end of the session in which it’s acceptable to say, “That’s all folks!” It doesn’t matter how perfect an ending a particular moment would be if it comes two hours into a four hour session. (Although that might be a good place to take a break.)

For me, in a four hour session, the ending window is generally from about 15 minutes before our scheduled end time to about 10 minutes after. (If I’m running for a group where the end time is hard-and-fast, it’s more like twenty to twenty-five minutes before the scheduled end of the session.) If I’m in that window or approaching that window, I know that I’m looking for an ending and can start framing and pacing the action accordingly.

I have a simple trick for staying aware of where I am in the session: A kitchen timer. Before the session starts, I simply set the timer to go off at our scheduled end time and put it discretely behind my screen. (It’s usually surrounded by a pool of dice.) I can then tell in a glance where we’re at: Three hours left. Two hours left. One hour left. Half an hour left. In the ending window.

Why not just use the timer on your phone? The timer on my phone generally needs to be checked – i.e., I have to turn on the screen. It also opens up the potential for other distractions in the form of notifications and the like. The kitchen timer, by contrast, just sits there in my peripheral vision. Not only can I check it with a flick of my eye, but I’ll periodically notice it throughout the session without having to actively think about checking the time. It keeps me tuned in.

Over time, you’ll find that your knowledge of where you are in a session will bring other benefits besides pacing for effective endings. Some of this is practical (like knowing when you should take a break). Others can be a little more ephemeral — you’ll start to develop a gut instinct for pacing; when you have time to let things play out and when you need to get the players moving with harder framing and higher stakes.

NEXT:
Campaign Journal: Session 23B – Running the Campaign: Dungeon Clues
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING:
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 22C: Workings of the Chaos Cult

Tee, meanwhile, had discovered that one of the wood panels on the floor was loose. Prying it up revealed a small cache containing two books and a gold ring bearing the device of a broken square. Ranthir was immediately distracted by the books. Eagerly taking them from Tee’s hands he began flipping through them.

In this session we see a couple examples of what I refer to as lore books. These are generally one page handouts (although it’s fine if they end up being longer) that are given to the players when the PCs discover a book with significant information:

If you want to see a particularly large number of examples, check out the Books of the Los Angeles Cult and Savitree’s Research from the Alexandrian Remix of Eternal Lies. (I produced a, frankly speaking, ludicrous number of these for that campaign. To rather good effect in actual play, but I wouldn’t recommend it as an example of my standard practice.)

In practice, these handouts more or less serve as an executive summary for a book that doesn’t actually exist. (If you’re not familiar with these, they really do exist: People pay services to read books – usually business-related books – and produce brief summaries that can be quickly digested without reading the full book. This didn’t make a lot of sense to me until I realized just how much endless, repetitive blather can be found in these books. Although I’m always curious if this is because the authors of these books know that they’re just going to get boiled down to a set of highlights… But I digress. The nice advantage to this is that you can find any number of resources on line about how to write effective executive summaries.)

One significant divergence between my technique and the writing of an executive summary is that I will usually also discuss the actual physical interaction with the book. For example:

This slim, peculiar volume purports to be “a dream woven from the true and factual accounts of many diverse peoples of the world,” but it is rather difficult to separate what is meant to be scholarship from fancy. It is perhaps notable that the author’s name has been savagely crossed out on every page on which it would normally appear with a thick, dark ink, making its recovery utterly impossible. The volume’s only other distinguishing mark is an imprimatur placing its publication in Shanghai.

Or:

This slim folder of supple hide, clasped shut with a length of emerald green ribbon, contains a dozen or so individual sheets of parchment. Written in an archaic – almost alien – form of the common tongue, they tell a sad and cautionary tale.

The idea, of course, is to communicate the sensation of actually reading the book to the player.

“Why not just write the entire book and give it to them as a handbout?” …you’re adorable. But, seriously, I get asked this with surprising frequency, despite the answer seeming to be blindingly obvious: Writing a 50,000 or 100,000 word book as a handout is not necessarily out of the question (if it were to be a centerpiece of an entire campaign, for example), but is certainly not an endeavor to be undertaken trivially. And even if I were to write such a thing, pausing the campaign to allow the player(s) to read book-length confabulism would be to change one recreational activity into a fundamentally different one.

Conversely, though, why not forego the entire exercise and simply give the players the pertinent clue?

First, this is a variation of the Matryoshka search technique: Simply telling the players what they find is a less engaging and less entertaining experience than the players actually plucking the information out of the “book” (even if it is just a summary).

Second, these lore books can be densely packed with information: Not just the clue (or clues) that can lead the PCs to a new revelation, but also deeper lore about the game world that can provide a broader context for the merely procedural action. (It’s significant that a lore book inherently hits on several of the techniques discussed in Random GM Tips: Getting the Players to Care.)

Third, it’s easier to hide clues in the full text of a lore book. It’s deeply unsatisfying for the players when the GM says something like, “Oh my gosh! You remember reading something about this in the Unaussprechlichen Kulten!” Conversely, it’s VERY satisfying when a player suddenly shouts out, “Oh my god! We read about this! Hang on, let me grab the book!”

(In a similar fashion, lore books also offer the opportunity to present puzzles which must be solved. Sometimes this “puzzle” is cross-referencing information across several lorebooks obtained over time.)

Fourth, the physical handout makes it easier for players to reference the key information from the book and to refresh their memory whenever they choose. (This goes beyond merely lore books, but if there’s particularly crucial information – or information that will be relevant across many different sessions – putting it in the form of a handout is a very good idea.)

Fifth, it’s frankly just a more immersive experience for the players. They may not actually be reading the book, but it feels like it. Plus, a book that you just describe verbally is a transient experience. But a book that’s physically at the table – even if it’s just in the form of a piece of paper – really and truly exists. Just the act of players saying things like, “Who has the Fragments of Bal-Sagoth? I want to check what it has to say about Gol-Goroth,” or “Remember when we read The Book of Mrathrach?” is significant.

TIPS & TRICKS

Writing a lore book is more art than science, but here are a few things to keep in mind.

I almost always try to include a picture. In the case of the chaos lorebooks from In the Shadow of the Spire, that was frequently a cult sigil or the image of a chaos creature that was the subject of the book. In the case of Eternal Lies this was almost always the cover of the book. (These days it’s trivial to find scanned images of antique books online that can be repurposed with little or no image manipulation.) Visuals are nice in any case, but there’s also a base utility here: The image makes the handout distinct, not only in the players’ memories, but also when they need to find it again among their various notes and handouts in the future.

To establish the style of the book or to capture the enigmatical nature of the “source” text, include quotations. These can be short fragments or lengthy passages, depending on both your inspiration and need. For example:

The last few pages of the book appear to be a prophetic rambling of sorts, beginning with the words, “In the days before the Night of Dissolution shall come, our pretenses shall drop like rotted flies. In those days the Church shall be broken, and we shall call our true god by an open name.”

Here the lengthier passage captures the unique quality (and also vaguery) of the religious imagery. Conversely:

A closer reading quickly reveals that these deformities – referred to as “the touch of the ebon hand” – are venerated by the writers as the living personification of chaos incarnate.

In this case, I could have just as easily dropped the quotation marks. But including them presents a little “window” into the full text through which the player can project themselves.

As I mentioned before, describe the experience of reading the book. This can be the physicality of the book itself, but you can also relate the sequencing or revelation of knowledge (e.g., “a closer reading quickly reveals” or “on the final pages”).

You can prepare multiple versions of the text, with different versions being “unlocked” under certain circumstances. For example, you might have one handout that describes the physical characteristics of a drow lore book, and another which only becomes available once the PCs are able to read the drow language. A particular insight might require the character to have a particular skill, or a skill of a high enough level. Or there might be a hidden puzzle in the initial handout which, if the player can solve it, will allow them to discover additional layers of meaning in the text (provided in an additional or expanded handout).

You can combine (and expand) these last two ideas by presenting different editions of the same book. This is a common conceit with Mythos texts, for example. Thus the players can find an expurgated or damaged copy of a book early in the campaign, and then find a more complete copy (or one with an alternate ending) later. Marginalia can also be used to distinguish individual copies of a book.

Books can also cross-reference other books. Usually these cross-references don’t really “exist” (there’s not a lore book prepped for them), but in other cases these additional sources (often ripe with deeper information) will crop up later in the campaign. If you’re running a game in the real world, it can sometimes be fun to cross-reference real books.

WRITING THE BOOK

In terms of figuring out what information should be in a lore book, the process is basically part and parcel with plotting out the revelations of a scenario or campaign.

A key insight, however, is that the book should generally not just blandly state the conclusion you want the PCs to make. Instead of writing the conclusion, you are writing the clue which will let the players figure out the conclusion. It’s a subtle difference, but a meaningful one. Often I achieve this effect by presenting the information in an oblique or mythic manner. (For an example of how complicated and interwoven this can be, you might trace the references – both direct and oblique – to Azathoth in the Eternal Lies lore books.)

Along the same lines, it is often useful if the key information is not what the book is primarily about. Or, to think of it in a different way, the primary goal of the fictional author of the book is not to communicate the key information. Write the lore book as a description of what the book is – a scholastic study of Byzantine emperors, a 19^th century poetry collection, a manual describing elven funeral practices – and then drop the campaign-relevant information as an aside or one detail among many or an example serving a purpose in the text distinct from that to which the PCs will put it (or interpret it).

(This is not universally true. It can often be just fine to have a book whose primary function is to tell people about the very thing that the PCs need to know. This is particularly true if the lore book is being used to convey a great deal of pertinent information. I often think of these as a “briefing documents,” and the two lore books in the current session – Truth of the Hidden God and Touch of the Ebon Hand – are of this nature.)

Lore books don’t have to be just about clues, either. I often build mechanical benefits or character advancement opportunities into lore books.

• GUMSHOE games have a great mechanic for this in the form of dedicated pool points, so that if a player has the book with them it can mechanically benefit their investigations. This also has the nice effect of procedurally adding additional content to the book beyond the initial summary in response to player-initiated actions.)
• D&D spell books are an easy example. Relatively simple handouts containing the spell lists from captured spell books can offer a surprisingly rich amount of game play.

This is a great way to introduce homebrew or supplementary content into a campaign, particularly for players who aren’t typically interested in that sort of thing. I’ve used lore books to introduce new feats, new spells, new class features, and even whole new mechanical sub-systems.

My last piece of advice is this: Get specific. Lore books with a narrow focus are often more interesting than general cyclopedias. But even as you’re writing out a broad summary of what the book is about, pepper it with specific examples. Instead of having a book that’s “about haunted houses,” give examples of specific haunted houses. That specificity is what will make the lore book come alive.

NEXT:
Campaign Journal: Session 23A – Running the Campaign: Cliffhangers
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index