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Ptolus: Running the Campaign – Fictional Rituals

October 4th, 2019

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

The doors of the cathedral opened again. The holy symbols of the nine gods – each crafted from glowing godwood – were brought forth. As they passed Dominic, each symbol pulsed with scintillating brilliance, prompting a fresh cheer from the crowd. The symbols were placed in a circle around Rehobath, who kneeled in the center of them and lowered his head in prayer. After a few moments he raised his face to heaven.

One of the things that I think can add a lot of depth to the world is populating it with specific rituals: Not just, “I say a prayer to my god.” But, “How, specifically, do Imperial priests say their prayers?”

Invoking the rites of smart prep, it’s probably best to only prep rituals that are of particular significance to the PCs: Either rituals that they’re going to participate in, or which are part of events which have particular significance to them. (As, for example, in this session of In the Shadow of the Spire.) Particularly large and complex rituals can also be used as the basis for entire scenarios. (For example, I have not infrequently used them as the backbone of a party-planning scenario.)

When it comes to creating these rituals, it’s a little too easy to just say, “Become familiar with lots and lots of real world rituals.” For example, when designing this particular ritual — the inauguration of a Novarch — I’m pretty sure I just spun it up without additional reference; I was drawing on a lifetime of familiarizing myself with different religious traditions. I don’t say that to pat myself on the back, but to point out that studying the real world is the best way to improve your fictional creations. As the old saying goes, if you want to write better fantasy, you’ve got to read more stuff than just fantasy.

The important thing, though, is that you want the traditions and rituals of your world to be more than just thinly veiled copies of some real world tradition or ritual. There’s a ton of mediocre D&D worldbuilding you can find out there, for example, that’s based around people only familiar with the Christian traditions they grew up with basically trying to map those traditions directly onto fantasy pantheons.

So as you’re broadening your studies of real world history and culture, it’s not just about increasing the number of sources you can copy-and-paste from. Rather, it’s about seeing how different cultures took meaning (often similar meanings) and turned them into symbols. And as you come to understand the breadth and variety of that process, you’ll be arming yourself to duplicate the process rather than just pasting in various bits.

REAL-WORLD ANALOGS

For example, if I had been faced with creating a ritual for inaugurating the novarch when I was just starting out as a DM in the early ‘90s, my instinct would have been to look at a real-world analog (say, the coronation of the Christian pope). And then I would have basically taken that ritual, reskinned each step of the ritual with some fantasy equivalent, and been happy with the result.

If you’re in the position of wanting a real-world analog to work from, though, the first thing I’d suggest is to look for a real-world equivalent that is more distant from the fictional ritual you’re trying to create. For example, maybe you’d want to look at the rituals by which a British monarch is crowned. The reason for this is that the greater distance between the real-world analog and the fictional reality will force you to make larger creative decisions, transforming the ritual into something truly unique to your world.

You can do this with other elements of the game world, too. For example, let’s say that you’re looking for inspiration to fill in the history of a kingdom in your world that looks a lot like medieval France. Your first instinct would be to look at the actual history of medieval France, right?

What I would do instead is reach for the history of Japan. Using the cool bits of Japanese history that resonate with you in a medieval European-esque kingdom will force you to translate them — politically, culturally, geographically — in such radical ways that the result will necessarily be infused with a healthy amount of your own creativity.

Layering is also good: Go through the history of Japan and pull out the cool stuff you like. And then go through the history of, say, Russia and do the same thing. Now you’ve got a whole gestalt of influences and the kingdom you’ll end up with will feel unique and rich; and not just a cheap copy of Charlemagne.

PRACTICE SESSIONS & SIMPLE RITUALS

Bringing it back to rituals, the key thing to understand is that all ritual is fundamentally about symbolic equations. In order to make a cool ritual, you need to figure out what the ritual is trying to say or do and then symbolically realize that.

Using the novarch’s inauguration, for example, the ritual is about indicating that this person is now in charge of the Imperial Church of the Nine Gods. So:

They have the approval/blessing of the Nine Gods. (The holy symbols of the Nine Gods are placed in a circle around them. Over time, these symbols are likely to be made out of a special material. Godwood makes sense.)
They are symbolically transitioning from a mortal life to one divinely chosen. (Liquid light washes their former life away.)
They are given a symbol of their new authority. (The liquid light is drawn up into a circlet of elfin gold. They are dressed in the crimson robes of their new office.)

At the other end of the spectrum, there are the daily, simple rituals that are part of everyone’s life in the world. When you’re designing these, you don’t want to overcomplicate them. Look at the daily rituals people do in the real world. Generally speaking, they are not ornate or overwrought.

One of the reasons for this, of course, is that any daily ritual that starts out as particularly complicated will simplify itself over time. Think about how, for example, the complexities of Christian prayer have generally simplified down to “put your hands together.”

You can actually duplicate this process in developing your own rituals. (This is also really good practice for getting a gut instinct for how these symbolic representations work.) For example, you worship the God of War and you want to request their blessing for a battle. What is it you’re asking for? To be better at killing your foes, right? And what’s the most literal way you could do that? Kill a foe.

So, asking for this blessing from the God of War would have originally consisted of plunging your blade into the heart of a captured foe.

But that’s obviously really complicated and difficult. So how could it be simplified?

Instead of needing to kill a human foe, you can symbolically use an animal sacrifice instead.
Killing one animal for every single person in your army is inconvenient, so everyone just needs to get their blade bloody from a single common sacrifice.
What if there’s no animal handy? Well, cut your thumb on the edge of your blade. Blood is blood, right?
What if you’re not using a bladed weapon? Could you could instead prick your thumb on the sharp point of the God’s holy symbol instead?

And there’s your simple ritual: Followers of the God of War prick their fingers with their god’s bladed holy symbol before going into battle.

You could also look back over this progression and find interesting variations or combinations:

A feudal lord cuts himself with the God’s holy symbol and holds out his hand so that the knights he is leading into battle can each receive a drop of his blood on their blades.
It’s not unusual for followers of the God of War to incorporate the God’s holy symbol into the hilt of their blade. A hidden catch or similar device that can provide a sharp edge allows them to knick themselves for their before-battle prayer.

And so forth.

You can see how a similar process, in the real world, leads to “hold your sword up in front of you as if it were a cross and ask for the Christian God’s blessing,” but because we started with a different symbolic base we ended up in a distinct and interesting place.

It should be noted, of course, that there’s not a single right answer here. This is the progression that occurred to me. You could start with a completely different initial ritual (breaking a weapon captured from a foe) and end up in a symbolically different place (you bend the blade of your holy symbol, representing the broken blades of your enemies). Or you could start in the same place and end up in a symbolically different place. (When the priest of a god of war provides a blessing – i.e., casting a buff spell like bull’s strength – it actually creates a small, illusory animal that the recipient of the spell must “sacrifice” in order to receive the god’s boon.)

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Ptolus: Running the Campaign – Post-It Mapping

September 20th, 2019

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Session 20F: The Ghost Appears

From here Tee could look down onto an outdoor terrace surrounding three-quarters of the courtyard. Half of this terrace had, at some point in the past, been turned into a rooftop garden. Various boxes and pots – most in disrepair and many spilling their dirt out onto the stone roof – lay here and there. Many of the plants were still alive, although most of the garden had been overrun with weeds.

Almost directly across from Tee – on the wall near the door leading to this terrace – she could see a strange face that had been carved into the wall. Something glinted in the eyesocket of the carving, glittering like a gemstone.

The “Pythoness House” adventure comes from The Night of Dissolution, a campaign supplement for Ptolus written by Monte Cook. It’s a fantastic little haunted house scenario that’s greatly enhanced by the convoluted, heavily xandered design of Pythoness House itself.

As with many of the Ptolus scenarios, SkeletonKey Games designed absolutely gorgeous battlemaps for the whole keep:

If you’re thinking about running Night of Dissolution on a digital tabletop, these maps are absolutely perfect. You can buy them in PDF here.

I, however, was no longer running the campaign on a digital tabletop at this point, and so I was faced with a choice:

First, I could follow my standard operating procedure of chicken-scratching out the map onto a Chessex battlemap. This would be both time-consuming (due to intricate, overlapping complexity of the maps) and force me to sacrifice the awesome visuals of the SkeletonKey maps.

Second, I could print out a copy of the maps and lay them down on the table. But this would almost certainly compromise the fun of actually exploring the castle.

In many cases, you can mitigate this by laying out sheets of paper or notecards in order to block sections of the map and then only reveal them as they’re explored. But this tends to be finicky and unreliable (as papers get nudged or blown around). It was also a poor fit for these particular maps because of their claustrophobic, interwoven design.

So I used another technique that I’m going to refer to as Post-It mapping:

As you can see here, I cut out each individual room and labeled the back of each room with its keyed number (to make it easier to find the correct rooms during play). As the PCs explored, I could pull out each room one at a time and attach it to the neighboring rooms using Post-It notes.

If you’re familiar with digital tabletops, this is basically an effective way of creating an analog fog-of-war effect.

USING THE POST-IT NOTES

Post-It notes are ideal for this method because the temporary adhesive makes it easy to correct mistakes and rearrange room tiles as necessary. As the map begins to grow on the table, you can easily slide a Post-It note partially under edge of the map (without needing to pick the map up) and press the edge of the map down to adhere it to the Post-It note. You can then position the new room tile and press it firmly down to easily attach it to the map.

What you end up with looks like this on the backside:

But the front side, as you can see here, is very clean and gives a great presentation:

(click for larger image)

In practice, it will actually look a little better than this: These are photos of the maps I used when running “Pythoness House” back in 2008. They’ve seen a lot of use over the last eleven years and have bounced around any number of storage solutions (some of them quite poor).

And although they have gotten a little ragged around the edges here and there, I think this is also a testament to just how durable Post-It mapping can be in practice: These are also the original Post-It notes. So, despite all the abuse these maps have received over the years, they’ve held together almost as well as a flat print out would have done.

The drawback of this technique, obviously, is that it does require a fair amount of prep work to set it up. So is it appropriate for every dungeon? I wouldn’t say so. (Although there are plenty of people who build out 3D terrain for every single dungeon they run, so your mileage may definitely vary here.) But I do use it from time to time when I want to be able to share a particularly awesome piece of cartography with the players.

This, of course, also requires a module’s publisher to actually present their maps in a format and resolution that makes printing them out as battlemaps viable. Over the years I have seen so many incredibly gorgeous pieces of cartography and been immensely saddened by the fact that it was all so much wasted effort that the players would never get to enjoy.

Thankfully, the rise of digital tabletops seems to be changing this, with more and more publishers recognizing that if they’re going to spend hundreds of dollars on great cartography, then it’s in their best interest to make that cartography accessible at the actual gaming table.

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Ptolus: Running the Campaign – Character Crucibles

September 13th, 2019

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Session 20E: Into Pythoness House

Good Dog

Agnarr beamed: “A dog!” He caught it deftly in his hand.

The dog continued struggling, trying ineffectually to claw and bite at Agnarr. It also continued its shrill barking: Yip! Yip! Yip! Yip! Yip! Yip!

Tee grimaced. “Agnarr…”

Yip! Yip! Yip! Yip! Yip! Yip!

“It’s a dog! Not a real dog… but a dog!”

Yip! Yip! Yip! Yip! Yip! Yip!

Tee grabbed the dog from Agnarr’s hand and smashed it to smithereens on the floor. Agnarr’s face fell…. but at least the incessant yipping stopped.

Arguably the most powerful and memorable moments you will experience at a gaming table are those in which a PC faces a crucible of character: Where the outcome of a particular moment will not only change the direction of future events, but will in a very meaningful way rewrite who the character is on a fundamental level.

Often these moments will blindside you: You won’t even realize the significance of what’s happening until you’re abruptly in the moment and the dial has suddenly cranked up to 11.

And in some cases you may be sitting at the same table — or even running the game — and not realize that a character crucible is happening right next to you until long after the fact. This is because, during a roleplaying session, everyone has a unique and privileged view of the game: As a GM, I am gifted with near-omniscience and can see all that is happening from a vast perspective. But each player is given the exclusive ability to experience what’s happening inside the head of their character.

Take, for example, this yipping dog.

At this point in the campaign, it had become a running gag that Agnarr (a) wanting a dog and (b) could not find a goddamn dog. Speaking of the unique path of actual play, this running gag was not planned: It emerged organically because every time Agnarr would go looking for a stray dog in Ptolus he could completely flub his Animal Handling check. (Hence the quote at the end of Session 20A: “It’s like there are no damn dogs in this entire city!”)

That brings us to Pythoness House, where the PCs find a porcelain dog that was put there by Monte Cook:

Six of these statuettes remain intact. Due to the power of the spirits inhabiting this place, they leap off and attack 1 round after anyone enters the room. Each figurine is a Tiny animated object. Most are statuettes of people, although one is a dog and one is a winged angel. The angel figurine flies rather than walks.

The yipping was my idea, and it was probably crucial to this moment happening because it was really annoying and almost certainly prompted Tee to take the unilateral action of smashing the dog.

AGNARR’S TWO PATHS

At this point in his life, Agnarr was deeply discontented: He’d lost his village. He’d lost a chunk of his life (and, with it, seemingly any chance of recovering his village). He found the crowded, confusing streets of Ptolus disconcerting and frustrating.

When Seth took over the character of Agnarr, he saw the conflict the character was in and he responded by briefly sketching out two potential paths the character might follow as they leveled up: On one path, Agnarr would multiclass into the Tactical Soldier prestige class and specialize in feats and abilities that would make him a natural leader for the team; coordinating the actions of others and enhancing their achievements through his presence. And on the other path, Agnarr would multiclass into Frenzied Berserker, consumed by his rage to the point where he would even become a hazard to his companions.

In the present moment, however, Agnarr wanted a dog. It was a fairly definitional desire that had been established by Dave, his original player, and Seth had continued that pursuit. What was a running joke to me and the rest of the table (including Seth as a player) was actually really serious for Agnarr as a character: All he wanted was an animal companion; a faithful hound that would remind him of the simple and natural life that had been taken from him. But the confusing, frustrating city denied him even this simple thing.

In this moment, with the yipping porcelain dog, Agnarr felt a legitimate emoment of simple joy: The city had finally given him one thing. It wasn’t exactly what he wanted, but it was still a kind of victory.

And then Tee smashed the dog.

Right in front of his face.

And none of his “friends” cared.

They laughed about it.

And that was it. The choice had been set. Agnarr was turned towards the path of rage and alienation. It wasn’t like a switch had been flipped — he didn’t suddenly Hulk out or anything — but he had been set into motion.

Later there would be another crucible. A moment that would turn Agnarr away from that path and towards another. (You might spot it in the campaign journal when it happens.)

Now, here’s the thing: I didn’t know about any of this. Nobody at the table did except for Seth. In fact, I think it was literally years later that Seth revealed this.

But that doesn’t make the moment any less important. Or special.

In fact, quite the opposite: In the best campaigns, the fact that everyone is experiencing a personal narrative from their unique perspective of their character is what makes the totality of the shared narrative woven together from those threads so incredibly powerful and unlike the experience of any other medium.

If you’d like another example of this sort of “private narrative” being experienced by a single player — one so powerful that it literally moves people to tears — check out Matt Colville’s beautiful summary of the climax of the first season of Critical Role:

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Ptolus: Running the Campaign – Not Available Right Now

September 7th, 2019

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Session 20D: The Talk of the Town

They headed over the Temple of Asche. Unfortunately, Mand Scheben wasn’t there. They made plans to come back the next day. They also tried to meet with Lord Zavere, but he was also out (Kadmus told them that he had gone out with Lord Abbercombe and was not expected back until the next morning).

This sort of “the person you went to go see isn’t available right now” moment is actually a really great way to make sure that your world feel like it’s actually a real, living place with a persistent existence beyond the PCs: The NPCs aren’t just video game characters with yellow exclamation marks over their heads.

Although it’s a very minor technique, in practice it’s actually a fairly sophisticated one and I honestly wouldn’t recommend it for beginning GMs. That might sound crazy for something that seems to incredibly easy to execute: When a player says they want to go see Person X, you just say, “No.” Simple.

But the fact that you’re saying “No” is actually what makes it tricky to pull off well. Remember that you generally want to Default to Yes when you’re GMing. So if you’re doing this, you want to make sure that you’re not just doing it in order to stymie your players (i.e., that you’re not preventing them from seeing Person X because you want to railroad them onto a different path).

In this case, the unavailability of Lord Zavere was actually something that I had plotted out in my campaign status document, and it self-evidently had nothing to do with Tee’s specific desire to see him here (since I’d had no idea that any of this was going to happen before we started play). For Mand Scheben, there’s an indicator of my good faith in making the decision in the fact that the PCs actually manage to catch up with him a little later.

But it’s actually a little trickier than that: It’s not enough for you not to be intentionally blocking a player choice, you also need to make sure that the players don’t perceive you as having intentionally blocked their choice. These usually go hand-in-hand, but sometimes that’s not the case. This technique is a particular quagmire in this regard: Any time you say “No” to the players without a clear explanation for why the answer is “No” you risk them interpreting that decision as capricious and, therefore, that they’re being railroaded; but the entire point of this technique is, in fact, to establish that the game world exists beyond their perceptions and does not owe them answers!

How do you square that circle? Largely by earning the players’ trust. And you do that by being earnest and forthright in how you’re running your game. If you establish – repeatedly and consistently – that your decisions are coming from the game world and that the players can trust you to roll with their ideas and to follow them to the most unexpected places, then when they’re met with the inexplicable and the frustrating they will identify that frustration as coming from the game world and not from the Game Master.

And that’s valuable well beyond the confines of this simple little technique, because when your players stop trying to keep one eye on the wizard behind the curtain it allows your game world to truly come alive.

BEGINNER-LEVEL TECHNIQUE

A much easier version of this technique can be done by inverting the approach: Instead of having an NPC unavailable when the PCs want to talk to them, have the PCs unavailable when an NPC wants to talk to them. The PCs return to their office and find a note slipped under the door (“It is urgent that we meet at once!”) or come home to find a message on their answering machine.

If you schedule NPC approaches to the PCs in the campaign status document, you’ll find that these moments arise completely organically. (The sheet says Person X is coming to see them at their office at 3pm on the 10th, but at 3pm on the 10th they’re fighting xorbloids from Aldebaran.)

Because you’re not blocking a player-chosen intention, pulling this off without negative side-effects is fairly trivial. (Although you’ll probably still want to avoid overdoing it.) But it achieves a similar effect by asserting that the other characters in the world have lives and schedules that are not completely centered on the activities of the PCs. With that being said, when the consequences for missing a meeting turn bad (their would-be client gets killed before they can contact her, for example), it will nevertheless be much more effective if you’ve established trust with the players (because they’ll blame themselves for the bad outcome and not you — you didn’t arbitrarily choose to have them miss the client, they could have been there; they could have saved her).

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In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 20D: The Talk of the Town

September 7th, 2019

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

SESSION 20D: THE TALK OF THE TOWN

April 27th, 2008
The 8th Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

GATHERING AT THE GHOSTLY MINSTREL

When they had gotten some distance away from the cathedral, Tee asked Dominic whether he thought they ought to tell Mand Scheben about what was happening. “Even if he can’t advise us, I think he should at least hear it from us.”

Dominic agreed and they headed over to the Temple of Asche. Unfortunately, Mand Scheben wasn’t there. They made plans to come back the next day. They also tried to meet with Lord Zavere, but he was also out (Kadmus told them that he had gone out with Lord Abbercombe and was not expected back until the next morning).

Stymied (at least for the moment), they returned to the Ghostly Minstrel in time to meet the rest of the group for dinner.

Tee and Dominic gave a brief, but complete, overview of what had happened with the Silver Fatar. Dominic also told them that he had decided to simply not show up at the Temple of the Clockwork God the next day. He still wasn’t sure what Maeda wanted, but he didn’t feel safe about it.

With that decision made, Elestra began telling them everything she had learned that day about Pythoness House; the second Flayed Man killing; and – most exciting of all – the fact that their names were being mentioned all over town as a result of Shilukar’s capture!

“It’s being talked about all over town?” Tee said.

“Yes!” Elestra said.

Tee’s face went white. She pushed her chair back and stood up quickly. “Excuse me. I have to go.”

She ran out of the Ghostly Minstrel, leaving the others to look after her and exchange puzzled frowns. (more…)

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