DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 40E: A Final Questioning

Tor was able to quickly explain the situation and turn the children over to the custody of the watchmen. He decided, however, to claim that he had rescued them from the Temple of the Rat God instead of the Temple of Ebon Hand. (He was already concerned about them delving into the dangerous depths of the former; he didn’t think adding the dangers of the latter was a good idea.)

Meanwhile, the others were loading up the carts. Tee and Nasira drove those over to the Ghostly Minstrel, where they met with Tor and presented the paving stones to Tellith. She was delighted when they showed her how they worked, and they quickly made arrangements to get them installed as the front steps of the inn.

These magical paving stones are a pretty minor detail in the campaign journal here, and you won’t see them suddenly play some huge and significant role later on.

But I love them so much.

I originally added the paving stones to the Temple of the Ebon Hand because I had the idle thought that people arriving via sewer tunnel would be kinda gross. A prestidigitation spell would solve the problem, and the form factor — schlupping the sewer waste back down into the sewers — just made sense.

The others quieted and Tee walked through the wall. As she passed onto the white marble, the floor suddenly glowed brightly and the filth of the sewer was drawn away from her body, down through the illusionary wall, and into the sewer channel beyond.

“That’s handy.” Tee smiled, pleased that her clothes weren’t going to be ruined by the sewer after all. But she was concerned about the light, so she levitated up (with one last schlurping noise) and worked her way along the ceiling.

I never imagined that the PCs would be interested in looting the paving stones. It was, after all, a minor magical effect packaged into a huge form factor. But when the players had the idea of gifting the stones to the Ghostly Minstrel, it was a truly inspired thought.

(I don’t actually recall exactly which player first had the idea. In fact, I didn’t even remember it a few hours after the session, which is why it’s not recorded in the journal.)

The stones were, in fact, installed in front of the inn. And almost every single time the PCs comes home, they make a point of standing on the stones so that the blood and gore and sludge can all be whisked away. I also make a point of occasionally mentioning other delvers arriving at the Ghostly Minstrel and taking advantage of the stones.

As such, these stones have become an ever-present memorial to their accomplishments. They’re also a permanent feature in Ptolus now; a constant reminder, albeit a minor one, that the PCs actions have meaning and can transform the world around them.

Which goes a long way towards explaining why I love it when the PCs loot infrastructure — not for its monetary value, but because it can be repurposed. It shows that the players have become invested in the setting. I love seeing what they build, and I also love the tangible trophies of their exploits being a living part of the campaign.

Of course, not all of this infrastructure needs to be magical or even structural. Looting décor is also a common variant: In my first D&D 3^rd Edition campaign, an elemental cleric named Talbar (played by the same player who created Agnarr) had a bag of holding dedicated exclusively to beautiful antique furniture he was collecting to furnish the temple he was planning to build.

When the players start laying down roots, all kinds of interesting things can grow.

Campaign Journal: Session 41A – Running the Campaign: Make It Cost Them
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 40D: Children of the Hand

The blood trail ended abruptly (Tee guessed that Malleck had magically healed himself), but Tee’s sharp nose caught the passing of his scent. With something of a wild guess, she directed Elestra to send a burst of lightning in that direction—

And struck the invisible Malleck!

Malleck howled with pain. He was still invisible, but Tor followed his voice and caught him in another spray of blood.

“May the Galchutt consume you!” Malleck appeared, his hand outstretched towards them. A pillar of fire erupted around Tor.

Back in Session 38, we talked about the Secret Life of Silion: A major villain who, in accordance with the Principles of RPG Villainy, got shot in the back of the head before the PCs ever saw her face.

I follow the Principles in moments like that because, first, the players love that sort of well-earned victory: They put in the work to take Silion by surprise, and they were rewarded.

But I also do it because it sets up moments like the one you see in this session:

The grey-skinned man turned to one of the priests, “Give me your potion! Now!”

“Yes, Malleck.”

“It’s Malleck!” Tee cried with triumph.

Malleck swallowed the potion and disappeared.

“Dammit!”

The villain Malleck is trying to escape! Will he succeed?!

If the players thought I was just trying to gimmick Malleck’s escape — that it was a preordained conclusion — this would be the moment when they would check out of the session. At best I might get a few perfunctory (or extremely frustrated) attempts to “find” him, but the writing would be on the wall and they’d just be going through the motions.

But because I played fair with Silion, they know that I’m playing fair now: Malleck might escape. But if he does, it will be because they failed to stop him; not because I prohibited them from interrupting the cutscene.

And so, instead of the players checking out, the stakes were instead ratcheted to a whole new high. The table was electrified, and every player’s attention was laser focused on the game, bending their wits and pulling out every trick they could think of to figure out where Malleck had gone to and how they might force him out of invisibility.

As you can see from the journal, the PCs ultimately pull it off. Malleck wasn’t able to escape. It was a very different victory than the one they had with Silion, but it was just as well-earned and just as satisfying.

Just as Silion’s death had set up this sequence with Malleck, so, too, did Malleck’s death set things up for the next villain. She’ll arrive — or, rather, return — in the next session. And unlike Silion and Malleck, the PCs won’t be so lucky in preventing her escape.

But the great thing is that when she does escape, they won’t blame me. They won’t dismiss her slipping through their grasp by thinking that it was foreordained. Just like they own their successes, they also have to own their failures. And that makes those failures — and the consequences of those failures — even more powerful.

No one in this campaign doubts that I play fair with my villains, because I do, in fact, play fair with my villains. The proof is in the pudding.

When you establish the honesty and integrity of the game world, everything lands harder, victories and setbacks and the consequences of both. So when you’ve established that kind of trust with your players, you’ll ALL reap the benefits for years to come.

Campaign Journal: Session 40E – Running the Campaign: Looting Infrastructure
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 40C: Malleck’s Last Stand

Nasira had turned her attention to the boy. She found that his heart was failing him. The process that was transforming him was obviously botched and incomplete and now it was killing him.

Hearing this, Agnarr couldn’t contain his rage. He was furious over the boy. With a grim look of determination he charged back out through the secret door.

Magic is cool because it brings a lot of flashy bling to the table: Balls of fire. Personal aerobatics. Magic missiles.

But what I think makes magic awesome is that it lets you explore unique and impossible situations, and some of the most powerful of these are moral dilemmas, because they provide a really powerful crucible for character to express itself. Who are you? What do you value? When put between a rock and a hard place, what will you choose to do?

What makes magical moral dilemmas special is their novelty. Most of us are probably familiar with the trolley problem, and we’ve each literally spent a lifetime figuring out our moral and ethical compass when it comes to the situations we encounter in our lives. We likely even have long-settled opinions on big issues, even though it’s unlikely we’ve ever personally had to, for example, make the decision to declare or not declare war.

There are nevertheless, of course, ways that we could challenge and explore these moral issues through play. (And, of course, our characters will not necessarily share our moral or ethical outlooks.) But we’ll be walking through familiar territory either way.

With a fantastical dilemma, on the other hand, the fantastical element immediately confronts us with a parameter we’ve never had to deal within our own lives, and likely have never thought about before. Even when there’s a fairly obvious and direct parallel between the fantastical dilemma and a set of real world ethics, the mismatched edges will often crop up and challenge our trite, preconceived answers in the most surprising ways.

For example: Is it ethical to use an invisibility spell to eavesdrop on a private conversation? And, if so, under what circumstances?

Here we could probably draw a fairly direct connection to wiretapping. But what if you’re just coincidentally invisible and people walk into the room you’re in? Do you have an ethical obligation to reveal your presence?

And consider the moral situation the PCs find themselves in with the Children of the Hand. What moral obligation do they have to children who have been fully transformed in monsters? Does the same hold true a child that has only partially been transformed? What if that child is in agonizing pain and no longer able to communicate?

To see how the PCs dealt with this, here are some minor spoilers from the beginning of the next campaign journal:

They regrouped in the laboratory. The boy, whimpering in pain, was fading fast.

“Is there anything we can do for him?” Tee asked. Nasira shook her head. Tee, wanting to spare him the pain, slid a dagger through the boy’s ribs and into his heart.

Even as Tee’s dagger was coming free, Agnarr was dumping Silion’s body out of the bag of holding, removing the iron collar from around her neck, and placing it on the boy. A debate immediately broke out: Some wanted to preserve Silion for a second round of questioning. Others wanted to do the same for Malleck.

“We need Malleck to tell us what he’s done with the missing children,” Elestra said.

“We know what he did with them,” Agnarr said. He was adamant that they keep the boy alive, and it looked like the iron collar was the only way to do it.

Here we see another magical element — the iron collar that preserves dead bodies so that they can be raised at a later time — add new facets to the dilemma.

You can draw some parallels to medical ethics, of course, but they’re not straight lines. Is this more like a medically induced coma, temporarily stopping someone’s heart when they have tachycardia, or illegal medical experimentation?

And while we’re here: What, exactly, are the ethics of keeping a bunch of dead corpses in a magical netherspace between dimensions so that you can periodically yank them out and question them under compulsive sorceries?

Asking for a friend.

Campaign Journal: Session 40D – Running the Campaign: The Villain Who Doesn’t Escape
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Chaos Lorebook: The Bloated Lords

Some among the zaug were transformed by the Galchutt and “turned to a new purpose”. As the zaug were made living receptacles for manifest corruption, the zaug soulharvesters became living prisoners for captured and tormented souls.

“Their very flesh burned with the fire of the souls which screamed within them.”

“Their hunger was without end, fed eternally by the torment of those who seared their flesh.”

This week’s campaign journal is The Bloated Lords, a lengthy chaos lorebook describing the zaug, one of the Servitors of the Galchutt.

In the Ptolus campaign setting, the Galchutt are lords of chaos and the Servitors of the Galchutt are demon-like creatures who, as their name suggests, serve them. Along with the strange arts of chaositech which are inimically tied to these entities, you can point to a goulash of antecedents Monte Cook is drawing from — Lovecraft, Moorcock, Warhammer, cenobites, etc. — but the result, particularly when blended into traditional D&D fantasy, is very distinct.

When I brought Ptolus into my own campaign world, however, the Galchutt posed a conundrum: I already had my own pantheon of Mythos-adjacent strange gods.

I thought about replacing the Galchutt with my own pantheon, but then I’d lose a lot of cool stuff. It would be a bunch of extra work for, at best, a neutral result.

Another option would have been to simply add the Galchutt to my pantheon: The more strange gods the merrier! For various reasons, though, they didn’t really sync. I’m a big fan of adaptation and reincorporation, but it’s not always a boon. Sometimes you shove stuff together and you’re left with less than what you started.

So what I eventually ended up doing was nestling the Galchutt into a lower echelon, as “Dukes” in the Demon Court. They brought with them the Dukes (powerful, demon-like entities) and the Elder Brood (demonic monsters who serve the Dukes). This worked really well, creating an unexpected bridge (Elder Brood → Dukes → Galchutt → Demon Court → even stranger depths of the pantheon) between the inexplicable and the mortal world. It’s a good example of how you can pull in influences from a lot of different places and gestalt them into something cool.

Another example of this was the Elder Brood: In the Chaositech sourcebook, only two examples of the Elder Brood are given (the obaan and the sscree). I knew I wanted more than that, so I hit up one of my favorite monster manuals: The Book of Fiends from Green Ronin. (Which also played a major role in my remix of Descent Into Avernus.) I pulled all the cool devils and demons from that book that had the right flavor for the Elder Brood and added them to the roster.

Along similar lines, the zaug — one of the Servitors and described in The Bloated Lords lorebook — were expanded in my campaign to include the Soulharvesters. These were adapted from solamiths, a monster described in Monster Manual V.

If I recall correctly, the specific sequence here was:

• I was looking for a miniature I could use for the zaug (since I knew that one would appear in the Mrathrach Machine).
• I found the solamith miniature and realized it belonged to a monster from Monster Manual V.
• I checked out the solamith write-up and realized thar it could be folded into the mythology of the zaug.

It’s been a while, though, so my sequencing on this may not be correct. (I may have found the solamith write-up first while scavenging monsters for the campaign and then tracked down the miniature from there.) In any case, it’s a technique I’ve used with monster manuals for a long time. It’s similar to The Campaign Stitch, but rather than melding adventures it takes monsters and asks: What if these are the same monster?

It’s kind of like palette shifting, but rather than taking one stat block and using it to model a multitude of creatures, this technique — let’s call it monster melding — takes a bunch of different stat blocks and brings them together.

Another example is that, in my personal campaign world, goblins, orcs, hobgoblins, and ogres are all the same species. (Which, conveniently, gives me access to a much larger variety of stat blocks to plug-‘n-play with while stocking goblin villages.)

What I like about this technique — in addition to utilitarian stocking adventages — is that, much like gods and ventures, the melded monsters can often be more interesting than using the two separately. (For example, the implications of hypertrophic dimorphism in goblins raises all kinds of interesting worldbuilding questions and the soulharvesters, in my opinion, make zaug society much more interesting to explore.)

So ask yourself:

• What if these are the same creature with slightly divergent careers, abilities, etc.?
• What if these are the same creature at different stages of its life cycle?
• What if they live in some kind of symbiosis or parasitic relationship?

Bring these creatures together and see what you get!

Campaign Journal: Session 40C – Running the Campaign: Moral Dilemmas of Magic
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Chaos Lorebook: Lore of the Demon Court

Its face was like the mirror nothingness. Its gaze a river of fire that touched thought but not earth.

Above all Those Who Slumber was the power of the One Who Was Born of Destruction, the Song Render, the Ender of Souls, the Dweller in Darkness. And among those who would speak his name, his name was Shallamoth Kindred – the act of desolation given life and mutilation given flesh.

And he did move with the quickness of a razor.

In the palace of the Kindred of Shallamoth, the eyes of the Galchutt are shut.

In the Temple of the Ebon Hand, the PCs discovered a cache of lore books.

These are specifically part of what I refer to as the chaos lorebooks, a collection of roughly fifty different lore books in the campaign dealing with:

• chaos cults
• chaositech
• the demon court
• servitors of the Galchutt
• the elder brood
• Wuntad’s plans for the Night of Dissolution

The root of this collection is the Book of Faceless Hate, which looks like this in my version of the lore book:

THE BOOK OF FACELESS HATE

No title marks the tattered, dark brown cover of this book. Its contents are written in a nearly illegible scrawl that could only have been born of hopeless madness. The first several pages of the book are covered in repetitions and variations of a single phrase: FACELESS HATE. (They wait in faceless hate. We shall burn in their faceless hate. The faceless hate has consumed me. And so forth…)

CHAOS: True chaos, or “deep chaos”, is a religion based on the fundamental aspects of hate, destruction, death, and dissolution. The philosophy of chaos is one of constant and endless change. It teaches that the current world is a creation of order and structure, but that it was flawed from the dawn of time due to the lack of foresight into what living sentience truly wants and need. The gods of creation – the gods of order – are untouchable and unknowable. They are aloof and uncaring, says the teaching of true chaos.

THE LORDS OF CHAOS: According to the book, the Lords of Chaos – or “Galchutt” – are gods of unimaginable power. But they are “mere servants of the true gods of change, the Demon Princes”. It is written that the Galchutt came to serve the Princes during the “War of Demons”, but while the Princes have “left this world behind”, the Galchutt still “whisper the words of chaos”.

VESTED OF THE GALCHUTT: Although they sleep, the Galchutt still exert some influence upon the world. This influence can be felt by the faithful through the “touch of chaos” and the “mark of madness”, but it can also be made manifest in one of the “Vested of the Galchutt” – powerful avatars of their dark demi-gods’ strength.

CHAOS CULTS: The book goes on to describe (but only in the vaguest of terms) many historical and/or fanciful “cults of chaos” which have risen up in veneration of either the Galchutt, the Vested of the Galchutt, or both. These cults seem to share nothing in common except, perhaps, the search for the “true path for the awakening of chaos”. The book would leave one with the impression that the history of the world has been spotted with the continual and never-ending presence of these cults – always operating in the shadows, save when bloody massacres and destruction bring them into the open.

As originally presented in Monte Cook’s Night of Dissolution (p. 93), the Book of Faceless Hate was a much more comprehensive player briefing of the entire cosmology of chaos in the Ptolus setting. I knew that I would need to create my own version of the book because I had moved Ptolus to my campaign world, and was therefore adapting this cosmology and melding it to my cosmology.

But I also knew that I wanted to make the Book of Faceless Hate more enigmatic, creating a much larger conspiracy and mystery that the PCs would need to unravel: How many cults were working with Wuntad? What were their true intentions? What was the true nature and secret history of the “gods” they worshipped?

My motivation was partly aesthetic: I just thought the chaos cults would be a lot cooler if they were drenched in mystery.

But it was also practical. Doing a big data dump to orient the players in the opening scenario of the published Night of Dissolution makes sense, because it was a mini-campaign with five scenarios, but I was planning a much larger exploration of the chaos cults that would involve a couple dozen scenarios. If I gave the players a comprehensive overview of who the cults were and everything they were doing, then the rest of the campaign would just become a rote checklist. It would be difficult to maintain a sense of narrative interest and momentum, and things would likely decay into “been there, done that.”

I also knew that if the players were forced to piece together disparate lore, slowly collecting different pieces of evidence to eagerly weave together while collecting the leads they need to continue pursuing their investigation and pasting all of it onto a literal or figurative conspiracy board, that it would get them deeply invested in the chaos cults. It would make them care.

(And when the players started holding lore book meetings and discussing the chaos cults even when we weren’t playing the game, I knew I’d pulled it off.)

DISTRIBUTING THE BOOKS

So I broke up The Book of Faceless Hate into a bunch of pieces, adapted the content to my campaign world, and reframed everything using lore book techniques so that the players would feel like they were “really” reading these strange tomes and oddly moist pages. Then I started adding even more lore books to flesh things out more, ending up with, as I mentioned, roughly fifty different books.

Okay, but what did I actually do with all of these lore books?

The short answer is that I seeded them into all the adventures in the campaign, spreading them around so that the PCs would collect them book by book.

I had about twenty chaos-related adventures where these books could be found, so this meant that many of them would be stocked with multiple lore books. Sometimes they were clustered together in a secret library; other times they would be scattered throughout the adventure.

In practice, I had even more options (and was adding even more chaos lorebooks) because most of these books weren’t unique volumes. They were books and religious scriptures. Secretive, yes, but still meant to be copied and disseminated. Thus, for example, the PCs could find a copy of The Touch of the Ebon Hand in Pythoness House in Session 22, but also, unsurprisingly, later find a bunch of them in the Temple of the Ebon Hand.

Note: And because I wasn’t worried about duplicating them, the PCs went off into an unexpected direction and I ended up adding new scenarios, I could easily reach into my stock of chaos lorebooks, grab a few, and sprinkle them around.

I was also able to add them to other scenarios, unrelated to the chaos cults, to make the entire campaign world feel like a unified whole and create the impression that the chaos cults were a pervasive, ever-present influence.

Along these same lines, I realized it was generally ideal if a cult’s primary lorebook could be found OUTSIDE the cult’s headquarters. In other words, if it was possible for the PCs to learn about a cult (setup) and then later discover where they were operating (payoff).

Consider, also, this diagram, also found in Pythoness  House in Session 22:

It depicts the symbols for a variety of chaos cults working with Wuntad, giving a default structure of:

• Who does this symbol belong to?
• It belongs to X!
• We found where X is / what X is doing!

You can see the simple progression of setups and payoffs that lead to a satisfying conclusion, and in this case we’ve complicated things through the simple expedient of having seven iterations of this progression happening simultaneously and overlapping with each other.

In actual practice, though, I muddied things up a bit more by

• including a couple symbols on the diagram that the PCs would never actually encounter in the campaign (where are they?!); and
• writing up lorebooks describing several additional chaos cults that weren’t part of Wuntad’s scheme at all (how many of them are there?!).

But I digress. Let’s get back to how the lorebooks were distributed.

What I quickly realized was that I needed a plan. You need to remember that I wasn’t prepping the entire campaign ahead of time: I had created an adventure track that indicated what the individual adventures were and how they were linked to each other, but I was prepping the keys for those adventures as they became relevant. Although I started off by simply adding whatever chaos lorebooks made sense in a particular adventure, it became clear that

• there was a bias towards some of the lorebook topics, causing them to be over-represented; and
• with so many lorebooks in play, there was a real risk that I would lose track and fail to place some of the lorebooks.

I started by putting together a simple checklist (i.e,. Have I placed this lorebook yet?), but realized I could still end up writing myself into a corner. (Where the PCs would get to the end of Act II and I would realize I still had way too many lorebooks to place and not enough adventure to place them in!) So I swapped to a spreadsheet with a list of all the lorebooks and a list of all the adventure cross-referenced.

This let me see and shape the totality of the chaos lorebooks: Where were they concentrated? Which books still needed to be placed and where could they go for best effect? Was it possible to find the book outside of the cult’s own lair?

Note: On this worksheet, I also made a point of distinguishing between which lorebooks had actually been placed – i.e., I’d keyed the adventure and they were in the adventure key—as opposed to which lorebook locations were only planned and had not yet been executed.

While doing this work, I also realized that there was a principle similar to the Three Clue Rule: Most of these lorebooks weren’t structurally essential, but they were — if I do say so myself — really cool, and I’d also put a lot of prep work into them. So for most of the books, I made a point of including them in at least three different adventures. (And if, for some reason, it wouldn’t make sense for a lorebook to be so widely disseminated, I would try to include multiple copies in the adventures where it could logically be found.)

As seen in the current session, this obviously resulted in the PCs often finding copies of chaos lorebooks that they already had. You might think this to be repetitive, pointless, or even disappointing, like a someone saying, “Aw, man… I already have this one!” when opening a pack of baseball cards. In practice, though, that really wasn’t the case.

First, the primary effect was fare more along the lines of, “Oh no… The cult has been here, too.”

Second, because it did, in fact, make diegetic sense for multiple copies of these books to exist, the presence of multiples made the world feel like a real place. It made the books “real,” rather than being a collectibles achievement in a video game.

Finally, because the campaign was being played out over months and even years of real time, the second or third encounter with a chaos lorebook would simply remind the players of what they have, often prompting them to pull out their copy of the handout and review it. Thus, the lore of the campaign was being constantly and organically reinforced until the players knew it in their bones.

Which was, of course, the point of the chaos lorebooks in the first place.

Campaign Journal: The Bloated Lords – Running the Campaign: All Your Zaug Belong to Us
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index