DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 44B: Time to Fly

 Tor grabbed up Agnarr’s body and turned, churning his way down the hall.

The twisting vines continued to confound their orderly retreat, but several of them had broken free now and were running back across the lounge. Tee, who was still trying to assist Tor’s retreat, tossed Nasira her magical lockpicking ring: “Get out! Quick as you can!”

Nasira reached the door to the long hall of whores and swung it open. Looking both ways she sighed with relief and called back over her shoulder, “All clea—“

The door at the far end of the hall opened. Two of the armored serpents and six unarmored ones poured through. “There they are!”

As I mentioned in Prepping Porphyry House, this adventure has been enhanced with an adversary roster. And it’s a pretty great example of the kind of dynamic play that having an adversary roster can unlock for you.

In the early part of the session, you can see that the players have already internalized the consequences of dynamic dungeons: When they stealthily take out some of the guards, they know they can’t just leave the bodies lying around, because it’s very possible that they’ll be discovered by other cultists moving throughout the building.

But a little while later you can see the evidence of me actively using the adversary roster:

Tee, on the other hand, did head into the room and quickly inspected the well (finding nothing unusual about it – it was a perfectly ordinary well). She was about to move on to the equipment in the corner—

When a patrol of two fully-armored serpent-men came around the corner in the hall.

One of them immediately turned and ran back around the corner. Tor, Agnarr, and Elestra quickly converged on the remaining serpent and hacked it to pieces. But by the time they were finished with it, two more had appeared at the end of the next hall in a four-way intersection between several doors.

The PCs get spotted, some of the bad guys run to raise the alarm, and things begin to spiral out of control.

Last week, Dave Oldcorn asked, “Does this not happen an awful lot of the time with adversary rosters?” And the answer to the question is complicated.

The first thing to recognize is that the PCs made a mistake and then got unlucky with their dice rolls: The mistake was leaving most of the party standing in the hallway (a high-traffic area) while Tee was searching a room (a time-consuming activity). They might have still had the opportunity to avoid catastrophe, but they rolled poorly and didn’t hear the guard patrol coming. And then, on top of that, they lost initiative, so the guards both had the opportunity to see them and run reinforcements before they could do anything.

Mistakes and bad luck will happen, of course, so it’s not necessarily unusual for this sort of thing to happen. But you’ll also see plenty of other examples in this campaign journal where the PCs didn’t make mistakes and/or the dice were in the favor, and so kept control of the situation. In fact, it’s not difficult to imagine how just one thing going a little differently might have caused the entire Porphyry House scenario to play out in a completely different way.

Which leads us to a second important principle when it comes to adversary rosters: They shift some of the responsibility for encounter design from the GM to the players. By the point where the PCs were facing off against multiple squads of guards, an angry spellcaster, and a giant stone golem, they were clearly in over their heads. But that wasn’t an encounter that I created for them. It was, in most ways, an encounter they’d created for themselves.

This creates a really interesting dynamic where (a) the players feel ownership of their fate and (b) they can engage in truly strategic play, often controlling the difficulty and pace of the encounters they’re facing. (What happened in this session was, ultimately, a series of strategic failures followed by some strategic genius that ultimately allowed them to escape a rapidly developing catastrophe.)

In order for this to work, though, the GM needs to play fair. An important part of that is respecting the fog of war: The other reason “every monster in the place descending upon you instantly” isn’t the default outcome is because it isn’t the automatic outcome of the PCs getting spotted by a bad guy. That bad guy has to decide to run for help; the PCs have to fail to stop them from doing that; and then it takes time for them to fetch that help. And even once they have gotten help… where are the PCs? Did they just stay where they were? If not, how will the bad guys figure that out? What mistakes might be made within the fog of war? How can the PCs take advantage of that?

Above all, an adversary roster is a tool that lets you, as the GM, easily roleplay all the denizens of the dungeon. Truly embrace that opportunity by putting yourself fully in their shoes — thinking about what they know; what they would prioritize; and the decision they would, therefore, make — and playing to find out.

The final thing that pulls all of this together is the Dungeon as Theater of Operations: If the encounter in this session were glued to a single room — or if the players felt like they weren’t “allowed” to leave the borders of the battlemap — this would not have been compelling session. In fact, it would have almost certainly ended with all of the PCs dead. It’s only because the PCs were able to strategically duel with the actively played opposition of Porphyry House in an engagement ranging across fully half of the building’s first floor that (a) the PCs survived and (b) the session was a thrilling escapade from beginning to end.

Campaign Journal: Session 45A – Running the Campaign: Recognition as Reward
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 44A: Whorehouse of Terror

Agnarr flew into a rage. “Stay away from her!”

The serpent-men in the far hall had now thrown open one of the doors there. “Erepodi!” they shouted through it. “We’re under attack!”

Erepodi… The name was familiar to Tee. It took her a moment to wrack her memory, but eventually she alighted upon its source: The small picture locket they had found in Pythoness House.

And indeed, in the very moment that Tee remembered the locket, Erepodi herself strode into view through the door, scarcely changed from her picture.

“I know not who you are! Or why you have come! But none shall disturb my house!”

This is a moment where the player has forgotten something that happened during the campaign. This isn’t unusual. As human beings we forget stuff all of the time, and unlike our characters we aren’t living in these fictional worlds 24-7. (Or whatever the hours, days, and weeks look like in your fantasy milieu of choice.)

I don’t remember exactly how this precise moment was resolved, but it generally happens in one of three ways.

First, one of the other players does remember this bit of continuity and simply reminds the table what happened. It’s up to the player to decide whether that’s an in-character moment (e.g., Tee forgot and Ranthir reminded her) or not. (I’m pretty confident this isn’t what happened in this moment, as this happens all the time and I wouldn’t have recorded it in the journal.)

Second, the campaign journal is consulted. Creating a record of continuity is, after all, exactly why we’re keeping a campaign journal in the first place. In the case of the In the Shadow of the Spire campaign, one of the players has loaded the journal into the group’s private wiki so that it can be rapidly searched (along with digital copies of many of the handouts and other records the group has created).

Third, I’ll have the PC make a memory check. For my D&D 3^rd Editon campaigns, I simplified and adapted a rule from the Book of Eldritch Might 3 for this.

MEMORY CHECK

Whenever a character might remember something that happened to them either in actual play, from their own (pregame) past, or something that happened “off stage”, they should make a memory check. (This could also be to remember some minor detail that the DM didn’t point out specifically because it would have caused undue suspicion and attention…)

A memory check is a simple Intelligence check. Characters cannot Take 20 and retries are not allowed. (Characters can Take 10 in non-stressful situations, however.)

Characters also have access to the following feats:

• Excellent Memory: +5 to memory checks
• Photographic Memory: +15 to memory checks. (Requires Excellent Memory.)

This material is covered by the Open Gaming License.

THE GM’s ROLE

What about my role as the GM here? Shouldn’t I just tell the players when they’ve forgotten something?

Maybe.

This is a tricky bit of praxis, in my opinion. On the one hand, I don’t want the players stymied because they’ve forgotten something that their characters should remember. On the other hand, figuring out how things fit together is a deeply satisfying and rewarding experience, and I don’t want to be constantly short-circuiting that by spelling everything out for them. Conclusions are just infinitely more fun if the players figure them out for themselves.

And, in fact, it can also be fun when the players could have figured something out, but didn’t. That, “Oh my god! It was right in front of us the whole time!” moment can be really incredible, but none of you will ever have the chance to experience it if you’re constantly spoonfeeding them.

So if I can see that my players have “missed” something, the first thing I’ll ask myself is, “Have they forgotten a fact or are they missing a conclusion?” I may or may not provide them with a missing fact, but I will do almost anything in my power to avoid giving them a conclusion.

(This situation with Erepodi is an interesting example because it kind of lands in a gray area here: It’s partly about remembering a fact they learned in Pythoness House — i.e., the name “Erepodi” — and partly about drawing the conclusion that this is the same person. So it’s a little tricky.)

The next thing I’ll consider is, “Is this something that their character should remember?” The answer to that may be an obvious Yes, in which case I’ll provide the answer. If the answer isn’t obvious, call for a memory check. (This can usually just default to some kind of Intelligence or IQ check if your system doesn’t have a formal memory check mechanic.)

Tip: An advanced technique you might use, if you have a searchable campaign journal like we do, is to say something like, “You should check the campaign journal for that.” The disadvantage is that this consumes extra time. But it has the benefit that the players still feel a sense of ownership about “figuring it out.” Logically, it shouldn’t make a difference. In practice, it can be an effective bit of psychological finesse.

Another key consideration is how essential this information is to the structure of the scenario and/or the PCs’ current situation. If it’s just an incidental detail leading to a revelation that could just as easily simmer for a long time, then I might be a little more likely to let it pass and see if the players notice it or figure it out later. If, on the other hand, they’re in a middle of an investigation, are rapidly running out of leads to follow, and forgetting this detail will likely derail the investigation completely, I’m more likely to default to giving them the info.

A final factor here is if the players are directly asking for the info. For example, if they say something like, “Erepodi? That name sounds familiar. Justin, where have we heard that name before?” This is a very strong indicator, and I’m almost certainly going to either point them in the right direction (“check the campaign journal” or “do you still have that letter from the duke?”), call for a memory check, or simply give them the information.

Conversely, if they aren’t saying anything, players often know more than you realize. It’s not unusual for me to call for a memory check, have it succeed, and give them the information, only for the player to say, “Oh, yeah. I already knew that.” This is another reason why, in the absence of other factors, I’ll usually default to not saying anything and seeing how things develop through actual play.

If nothing else, when they realize their mistake, it will also encourage the players to keep better notes!

ADVANCED TECHNIQUE: DELAYED RECALL

Here’s a technique I haven’t actually used, but by sheer synchronicity I was reading through Aaron Allston’s Crime Fighter RPG this week and stumbled across a cool idea. In the introductory scenario “New Shine on an Old Badge,” the PCs are tracking down a criminal who turns out to be an ex-cop dressing up in his old uniform. When the PCs have an opportunity to catch a glimpse of this fake/ex-cop from a distance, Allston recommends:

As the investigation and paperwork continues, the characters will find that no one knows who the officer was. Let the characters make INT rolls. If anyone achieves a 17 or better, he’ll remember who the guy is — “Ray Calhoun — only that can’t be right, because he retired six or seven years ago; he used to visit the station pretty regularly, even after he retired.”

If someone achieves a fourteen or better, he’ll wake up in the middle of the night remembering who the guy is.

Emphasis added.

In this case (pun intended), this isn’t something the players have forgotten or would be capable of remembering. (Their characters met Ray Calhoun before the campaign began.) But the idea of taking a partial success and resolving it as, “In the middle of the night you wake up and realize you forgot something!” is, I think, a really interesting framing for this.

Along similar lines, you might decide, “Well, they don’t immediately remember encountering the name ‘Erepodi’ before. But the next time they encounter the name, it will all fall into place for them.”

CONCLUSION

Some of the issues you’ll run into with player memory vs. character memory will be very similar to the issues that can arise when adjudicating idea rolls. For a deeper discussion on those, you might want to check out GM Don’t List #10: Idea Rolls.

Campaign Journal: Session 44B – Running the Campaign: Adversary Rosters in Action
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 43E: Snakes in a Whorehouse

They found a secluded corner on the northern side of the building, well-shielded from prying public eyes, and drilled through. They found themselves in a long hallway that looked to run almost the entire length of the building. On the long opposite wall of the hall were roughly a dozen secret doors – or, rather, the back-side of secret doors. Although their construction clearly indicated that they were designed to be lay flush with the wall on the opposite side, from this side their nature and operation were plain. The hall was capped at either end by similar doors.

They had finally breached the walls of Porphyry House.

“The Porphyry House Horror” is an adventure by James Jacobs published in Dungeon Magazine #95. I scooped it up when I was looting scenarios from Dungeon during my original campaign prep: I skimmed through 40-50 issues, looking for stuff that I could incorporate into the campaign. While the PCs ended up skipping several adventures I’d pulled for Act I of the campaign, there’s a bunch of cult-related adventures that I used to add depth to Wuntad’s conspiracy/gathering of the cults in Act II.

(For some reason I started referring to the adventure as “Porphyry House of Horrors” in my notes. I had a real Mandela Effect moment when I went back to reference the original magazine for this article.)

I thought it might be useful to take a peek at how I went about prepping this adventure.

The original scenario was 30 pages long. My prep notes for the scenario, on the other hand, fill a 45-page Word document. That might sound like I completely ripped the module apart and put it back together, but that’s not really the case.

• 25 pages of my notes are actually handouts I designed for the players. (I’ll talk more about these later.)
• 10 pages are stat sheets for the adventure. This was partly so that I could use the stat sheets for easy reference (instead of needing to flip around in the adventure), and also because I wanted to adapt the stat blocks to an easier to use format.

So you can see that only about ten pages of material was actually making substantive changes to the module. And most of that was mostly dedicated to adding stuff. “The Porphyry House Horror” is just ar really great adventure. There’s a reason why I snatched it up.

LINKING THE ADVENTURE

After making a list of all the cult-related scenario nodes in Act II of the campaign — some pulled from Monte Cook’s Night of Dissolution, others from Dungeon Magazine, a couple from Paizo adventures, several of my own creation — I went through and made a revelation list with all the leads pointing from one scenario node to another.

While getting ready to prep Porphyry House, I went through this list and wrote down all the clues that needed to be available there, forming a clue list for the adventure:

• Porphyry House to Final Ritual.
• Porphyry House to Temple of Deep Chaos.
• Porphyry House to Kambranex (Water Street Stables).
• Porphyry House to White House.
• Porphyry House to Voyage of the Dawnbreaker.

(Actually, a couple of those may not have been on the list yet. I may have discovered them while prepping Porphyry House and then added them to the list afterwards. If so, however, I don’t recall which ones were which.)

At this point, these connections would have been almost entirely structural. They represent my broad understanding of the macro-scale connections between the various cults — i.e., Porphyry House is using chaositech that would be sourced from Kambranex — but I don’t know what the specific clues actually are yet. This is functionally a checklist of blank boxes I need to fill while prepping the adventure.

INTEGRATING THE ADVENTURE

With these links forged, I made a copy of “The Porphyry House of Horrors” and slid it into an accordion folder along with other adventures I had sourced for the campaign. I then didn’t touch the adventure two years. There were, after all, a bunch of other adventures for the PCs to tackle before they would get anywhere near Porphyry House.

According to the file info, I began prepping my notes for Porphyry House at 7:56 PM on August 15^th, 2009. This makes sense: That’s also the date that I ran Session 41 of the campaign, during which the PCs decided that they wanted to go to Porphyry House. I would have written the campaign journal that session, and then begun prepping the scenario.

(It’s likely that I had actually reread the original adventure after Session 40, when the PCs first heard about Porphyry House. At that point they would have clearly been just a couple sessions away, and so I would have begun preparations.)

The first thing I did was figure out how to integrate the background of Porphyry House into the campaign. In this case, it was pretty straightforward:

• Porphyry House is a whore house.
• Wuntad’s first chaos cult was based out of Pythoness House, another whorehouse.

Sometimes integrating a published scenario into an ongoing campaign is tricky. Sometimes it’s more like drawing a straight line.

• “The Porphyry House of Horrors” is set in the town of Scuttlecover. I just dropped that material and picked a location for Porphyry House in Ptolus.
• I also dropped the entire original adventure hook. (I knew that the players would be getting hooked in to the cult’s activities there via the leads from other cult nodes.)
• The original Porphyry House cult was dedicated to Demogorgon. I simple palette-shifted that to a Galchutt-focused chaos cult.
• Erepodi, a minor background character from the Pythoness House adventure, was made the founder of Porphyry House. (I knew I would need to add her to the scenario.)
• Wulvera, the cult leader from the Porphyry House adventure, was given a tweaked background that synced with the lore from Ptolus and my own campaign world.
• I also knew that I wanted Wuntad to keep a guest room at Porphyry House. (This would be a useful vector for clues, and also be in accord with the Principles of RPG Villainy.)

With those details determine, I put together a very brief (roughly half a page) timeline summarizing the canonical version of events for my campaign. The original adventure also included a Gather Information table, and I adapted this to fit the new lore. (This filled the other half of that page.)

ADVERSARY ROSTER

The next thing I did was the adversary roster.

The first step was simply reading through the adventure and listing the location of every denizens. Sometimes this is all I need to do to have a ready-to-use roster, but in this case there was a lot of tweaking and adjustments that were made as I was developing the scenario. (For example, I was adding Erepodi to the adventure.)

The most significant change I made here was deciding that Porphyry House would have a different adversary roster during the Day than it would have at Night. This sort of major shift in inhabitants can be a huge pain in the ass with a traditionally keyed dungeon, but is incredibly easy with an adversary roster.

The roster was quite large, so I put the Day Roster on one page and the Night Roster on another.

PREP NOTES

I then worked my way through the location key, making diff notes as described in How to Prep an Module. In an adventure with 46 keyed locations, I made changed to 15 of them. These were almost entirely:

• Adjusting lore (e.g., shifting the original Demogorgon references)
• Adding handouts (see below)
• Making the adjustments required for integrating the adventure (as described above)
• Adding clues to flesh out the adventure’s revelation list (mostly relating to the horrific ritual Porphyry House is making preparations for)

For example, in the original module there are four rooms all keyed to Area 16:

16. DOCUMENTS AND LIBRARY

These rooms store both idle reading material for the yuan-ti to relax with, as well as exhaustive records of their guests. None of the records have any indication that Porphyry House is anything other than a well-managed and profitable brothel, although the documents make for interesting reading; it seems that the yuan-ti keep records on everything their customers ask for…

I took advantage of this by re-keying these rooms as 16A through 16D:

• 16A was the Customer Records
• 16B was a Dark Reading Room
• 16C was Wuntad’s Guest Quarters
• 16D was Erepodi’s Quarters

In re-keying these chambers, I did things like:

• Flesh out the customer records to (a) add clues to some of the central revelations in the scenario and (b) add leads pointing to other cult nodes (e.g., sums being delivered to the Temple of the Fifty-Three Gods of Chance and “Illadras at the Apartment Building on Crossing Streets”).
• Add a selection of chaos lorebooks to the Dark Reading Room.
• Add some of the items Wuntad took from the PCs at Pythoness House to his guest room.
• Added a handout depicting a mosaic floor (with chaos cult symbols).

And so forth.

One other interesting change I made here was greatly increasing Porphyry House’s size through the simple expedient of changing the map scale from 5’ per square to 10’ per square. (I liked the slightly more grandiose dimensions this gave Porphyry House, and it also better fit the dimensions of the building I’d selected on the Ptolus city map for the location.)

HANDOUTS

Anyone familiar with the Alexandrian Remix of Eternal Lies knows that I love props. (I created over 300+ of them for that campaign.) I love handing stuff to the players because the players love it when you hand stuff to them.

For Porphyry House this included:

• A map showing the location of Porphyry House.
• Magic item references. (I frequently write these up — often including an image of the item — for any magic items the PCs find that aren’t from the DMG. It’s a fun way to make the loot feel extra special, and it’s a super useful reference the player can use for their new items.)
• Graphics depicting various NPCs and monsters. (Got a cool picture in your adventure? I will not hesitate to rip it out and give it to my players, including Photoshopping it if I need to.)
• Various bespoke lorebooks, such as Wuntad’s Notes on the Feast of the Natharl’nacna and Wilarue’s Flaying Journal. (As noted above, there were also chaos lorebooks — copies of which were spread around throughout the campaign — to be found here.)
• Various correspondence, such as Letter from Shigmaa Cynric to Wuntad and Instructions to the Madames.

Prepping handouts like these is often the most labor-intensive portion of my scenario prep, but it can also be the most rewarding.

WRAPPING THINGS UP

In practice, of course, a lot of this work is iterative: I’m updating a room key, taking notes on the handouts found there, and then bouncing back to work on more room keys. Or maybe details in one of the letters I’m writing will cause me to go back and add additional details to the background notes and timeline.

But, ultimately, this is pretty much all there is to it. At the end of this process, I had a really fantastic adventure that felt as if it had been custom-written for my campaign and my players.

Campaign Journal: Session 44A – Running the Campaign: Recalling the Lore
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 43D: Escapades of the Ogre

Agnarr called Seeaeti off the ogre so that it could successfully regenerate. They wanted to question it.

But when it woke up, it was the one asking the questions. “Who are you?”

They naturally refused to answer. But although they tried to question it, threaten it, intimidate it, and scare it, the ogre just kept on asking questions. “Who sent you? What do you want?” And so forth.

But they resolutely refused to answer.

“Ah,” the ogre said at last. “I see I will learn nothing here.”

And it turned to gas… and then the gas itself vanished.

I think there can be a tendency for NPCs to be passive and reactive in conversations.

There are any number of reasons for this: The PCs are, obviously, positioned as protagonists. As GMs we’re juggling a lot of different elements, and it can be easier to juggle everything if it’s relatively stable (and, therefore, possessed of a certain passivity). Plus, at least for me, GMing is often reaction — the PCs do something and then we play to find out what happens. It can be easy for a conversation to slip into the same pattern, with the PCs setting the (only) agenda and the NPCs simply reacting to their efforts.

Unfortunately, a one-sided conversation is pretty boring. This inclination can also lead is into some bad habits, with NPCs who are either pushovers or complete intransigents who just senselessly say, “No!” to everything the PCs suggest.

Sometimes, of course, we key specific information to an NPC and their function is to deliver that information to the PCs: “Yes, I saw Sally down by the lake last night.” That has the advantage of giving the conversation some narrative substance, but it’s ultimately still pretty passive and placid.

To truly bring an NPC conversation to life, you need to ask one simple question:

What does this NPC want?

What is this NPC’s goal? What is the thing they’re trying to achieve? Why?

And perhaps most importantly:

How is this conversation going to help them get it?

What do they need the PCs do? What information do they want from the PCs? What do they need the PCs to believe? What do they need to hear the PCs say? What do they need to hide from the PCs?

This is the NPC’s agenda. You want to keep it simple, short, and actionable. And then you want to play it hard, with the NPC employing all kinds of tactics and conversational gambits to get what they want.

In this session, we see a particularly strong example of this with an ogre whose overwhelming motivation is figuring out who the PCs are, where they come from, and what their interest in the Banewarrens is. He also wants to make sure that the PCs don’t find out anything about his own organization or their intentions.

Since the PCs want the exact opposite, this puts them into a strong antithesis and the entire scene can boil out from there.

Importantly, however, this kind of open antithesis isn’t necessary to generate an interesting thing. The NPC just needs to want something different than the PCs, even if it’s only subtly different.

It’s also important to remember that, when antithesis does exist, that doesn’t mean it should never be surmountable. Yes, it’s dramatic when the Jedi Council refuses Qui-Gon Jinn’s request to train Anakin Skywalker. But it’s also a classic moment when Robin Hood convinces Friar Tuck to join his Merry Men.

In other cases the solution will be for the PCs to figure out how both their interests and the NPCs’ interests can be mutually achieved. That’s a puzzle for the players to ponder!

And, of course, achieving any of this will require first figuring out what the NPC actually wants! Some characters will politely (or not so politely) announce the intentions of course, but others will be quite sly about it.

Sometimes the conversation won’t be about overcoming or fulfilling the NPCs’ agenda at all! Nevertheless, the presence of the agenda — and the NPCs’ desire to fulfill it — will fill the scene with life.

In summary, for each meaningful NPC in a conversation, think about what the NPC’s conversational agenda is. Ideally, you should be able to state this in one clear sentence.

And then pursue it with all the strength you can muster!

Campaign Journal: Session 43E – Running the Campaign: Prepping Porphyry House
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 43C: Battle of the Banewarrens

They had pushed the lamia back into the generator chamber itself, but discovered that the darkness extended even here.

Tor, hanging close to the lamia in an effort to keep her under control, was taking a terrible beating. He called out for help. Nasira, still standing outside the area of magical darkness, shook her head. “I don’t want to go in there.”

But she plunged in anyway. They needed her, after all.

The exact details of how you need to handle magical darkness — particularly the mechanical details — will depend on exactly how it’s defined in your RPG of choice. For the purposes of this discussion, let’s assume that magical darkness

• fills a specific three-dimensional area; and
• nullifies and blocks all light within the area.

So no light source within the area will illuminate and you also can’t see light (or anything else) on the far side of an area of magical darkness. (As opposed to normal darkness, in which you could see a distant light even if you couldn’t see some of the intervening space due to a lack of illumination.)

In real life, if you had to fight or maneuver in a sealed room without any light you would effectively be blind. If you were swinging a sword, you would just be swinging it wildly, perhaps guided a little by sound or physical feedback (e.g., your sword hitting the wall or furniture or even your target).

At the game table, though, this is difficult to emulate. If a character blindly gropes in front of them with their hand, how should we determine what they feel? If they swing their sword, how do we figure out if they actually hit anything?

KNOWLEDGE OF THE SPACE

The first thing to consider is whether the character knows what’s in the darkness.

Imagine a room in your house that’s been shrouded in magical darkness. You might even have experienced something akin to this if the power has gone out in a windowless room or on a moonless night. You would have an advantage navigating through this space even in utter darkness because you’ve seen it before. You know the rough dimensions of the room and where the furniture is and where the exits are.

But if the same thing happened to you in a room you’ve never seen before, you’d be much more likely to bark your shins on the coffee table.

This is also going to be true for a character in an RPG: Standing in a room and having darkness cast on you after you’ve already observed your surroundings is fundamentally different than, for example, opening a door in a dungeon and being confronted by a face full of darkness with no idea what lies beyond it/within it.

So this is the first paradigm to grasp in running magical darkness: Moving blindly through a known space is different than blindly exploring an unknown space.

Let’s start by assuming that the PC knows the space, but can’t see it:

1. They’re still going to be using their sense of touch to try to orient (i.e., putting their hand out to find a piece of furniture they know is “around here somewhere”).
2. They’re probably going to be moving more slowly/cautiously.
3. There’s still a risk that they’ll make a mistake and “get lost” – ending up in the wrong place, tripping over something, etc.

To achieve the first point, you’ll want to adopt a strong POV narration. As GMs, it’s not unusual for our descriptions to be in the third person, describing rooms in holistic, general terms of what the whole group collectively sees. This inclination can leave you baffled when you try to describe the blind character’s perceptions, for they will largely not have a holistic view of the room — they will often be perceiving only sound, perhaps some details of the surface they’re walking on (texture, angle, etc.), and the one thing that their outstretched hand is touching. You can (and should!) employ the Three of Five (sans sight, of course), but frame the description intimately for each PC as they take action:

You step towards where you remember the door being. After a couple of steps, you feel the crunch of the broken eggshells under your feet. Your hand touches the back of the rocking chair, and you can run you fingers along that, reaching out with your other hand until it finds the back of the door.

Darkness turns us all into islands. Even if the PCs are all in the same room, it will likely feel much more like they’ve split up and are all exploring different areas at the same time. (Although clever PCs may counteract that to some extent by, for example, linking arms so that they don’t become separated.)

In terms of movement, I generally find it useful to have a mechanical model for both caution and disorientation. It’s also useful if the player can choose to trade-off between the two — e.g., they can try to move faster, but the risk of running into stuff goes up; or they can move even more cautiously and reduce their potential hazard.

A simple example would be, when blind:

• You must make a Perception check. On a failure, you suffer a disorientation complication due to being unable to see. (This is at the GM’s discretion — e.g., you become disoriented and go in the wrong direction. Or you stumble over something and have to make a Tumble check or fall prone.)
• You move at half speed. If you choose to move at full speed instead, you must make a Tumble check or fall prone and your Perception check to avoid a disorientation complication is made at a penalty.
• You can move with extra caution at one-quarter speed, in which case you gain advantage on your Perception check to avoid disorientation.

This is, again, just one example. You could also imagine:

• When PCs are moving blind, the GM rolls 1d6. On a roll of 1 or 2, they suffer a disorientation complication. On a roll of 6 they must make a save vs. Paralysis or fall prone.
• PCs moving with caution at half-speed through darkness only suffer a disorientation complication on a roll of 1.

But, as you can see, this general paradigm can be adapted for use across many different mechanical systems. (And can usually incorporate what the system’s normal mechanics for blindness — vis-à-vis penalties on Perception/Spot Hidden/whatever rolls — may be.)

UNKNOWN SPACES

When a character is entering a darkened area they haven’t seen before, it becomes more difficult because the player can’t describe their intentions in terms of the known space. (They can’t, for example, say, “I’m going to head over towards the couch,” or, “I’m going to try to find the door on the far side of the room,” because, obviously, they don’t know the couch or the door exist.)

There a couple ways to handle this.

First, there’s groping by square. This works best if you’re using something like a Chessex battlemap where you can literally draw the room one space at a time. The player essentially moves their character one space at a time, revealing the space as they go. If they encounter an obstacle, you can call for perception-type tests and acrobatics-type tests to avoid complications tripping over stuff, making loud noises, and/or suffering damage (depending on the situation).

Second, there’s groping by vector. This is generally the way I prefer to handle it. The players will announce an intention about how they’re going to try to move through the darkness — e.g., “I’m going to walk into the room” or “I’m going to put my hand on the wall and try to follow it around” — and you can think of that as a vector pointing through the darkened area. Follow that vector until it hits something — e.g., a couch, the far wall, an ogre mage — and describe the scene accordingly. For example, “Okay, you walk into the room, you hand outstretched. You go about ten feet and then your hand encounters some sort of firm object covered in a velvety fabric.”

Characters can burn up additional movement or perhaps expend an action or bonus action, depending on the system you’re using, to stop and investigate obstacles they encounter.

As they explore the darkness, of course, they’ll be building up a mental picture of where stuff is in the darkened space.

Note: What about getting disoriented and moving in the wrong direction? Practically speaking, this is essentially impossible when groping by square. If you’re groping by vector it’s more achievable as a complication, but will almost always result in horrific confusion for the players. Unless you’re specifically aiming for that, I recommend avoiding it. You can reintroduce getting lost once they’ve established a mental picture of the space and begin declaring intentions like, “Okay, I’m going to go back over to the couch.” (Do they actually get to the couch or end up missing it in the dark?) In other words, as the unknown space transitions to a known space — even if they only know it through their fingertips — you can similarly transition to the known space structure.

PINPOINTING

Another useful mental model for handling blindness is pinpointing sound. For example, a PC hears someone running through a darkened room. Can they figure out where the footsteps are coming from and where they’re going?

To put this another way, when describing what the PCs hear in a darkened area there are, I tend to think of it as being in one of three broad states:

• They can hear it (e.g., you hear something breathing loudly).
• They have a general sense of where it’s coming from (e.g., you hear heavy breathing coming from off to your left).
• They can pinpoint its location (e.g., you hear heavy breathing; someone — or something! — is standing by the bookshelf).

Which state applies will depend on the situation. (For example, if the PCs are in a bathroom and they hear splashing, you don’t have to wonder whether or not they can figure out it’s coming from the full bath they saw before the lights went out.)

If a PC hasn’t already pinpointed where a sound is coming from, they can likely do so through a perception-type test. When implementing this mechanically, I recommend doing so in a way that lets them pinpoint and take an action in the same round (e.g., as a reaction to the sound or as a bonus action in D&D 5^th Edition). It’s possible that different thresholds of success will give a more accurate idea of location — e.g., DC 10 means you hear the heavy breathing; DC 14 means you have a general sense of where it’s coming from; DC 18 means you can pinpoint its location.

If you’re already making perception-type tests for maneuvering through the darkness, you might also use the results from that check to feed auditory information.

IN COMBAT

Now that we have a basic mental model for how to handle characters interacting with and moving through darkened areas, we can add the massive complication of trying to fight people in the darkness.

It’s not unusual, of course, for an RPG to have specific mechanics for fighting in darkness. Sometimes these mechanics are great. Sometimes they’re convoluted messes. Sometimes, like in D&D 5^th Edition, they’re just dumb. (It’s just as easy to shoot someone completely hidden in darkness as it is to shoot someone standing in broad daylight because the advantage and disadvantage cancel out! Derp, derp, derp.)

Broadly speaking, though, there are three things to consider for combat in darkened areas:

1. Movement, which can be handled as per the above.
2. If you want to make an attack, you need to guess where you target is.
3. Your attack will have some sort of penalty or miss chance.

The penalty to your attack will usually be handled by your RPG’s mechanics. (If not, of course, you’ll need to make a ruling on this. Generally, I would suggest a moderate penalty: Needing to guess the target’s location is going to cause a lot of whiffing all by itself.)

If they’re guessing on a battlegrid, this is as simple as the player declaring what space they’re going to target. If someone/something is standing there, you can resolve the attack. (Even if there isn’t, I recommend still having them roll attack as a metagame effect. You can imagine someone potentially wailing away at a coat rack while being utterly convinced they’re locked in mortal combat.)

If they’re guessing in the theater of the mind, the challenge is getting a clear targeting declaration from the player and then figuring out how to translate that into the combat mechanics. Diegetically, you’re going to get (or want to encourage) declarations like:

• “He’s off to my left! I swing my sword at him!” (i.e., a direction)
• “I think she’s standing by the bookshelf! I empty my pistol at her!” (i.e., a landmark)
• “She’s trying to run away! I lay down suppressive fire on the doorway!” (i.e., a specific spot)
• “I can hear splashing, so they must be somewhere down by the water line!”

A useful mental model for parsing these declarations it to classify them as:

• specific spot
• small area
• large area
• wild shot (e.g., “I shoot the darkness!”)

Think about how you might mechanically adjudicate these to make them distinct and meaningful. That might be a random determination if they actually hit the right spot; a miss chance check; or simply a penalty to their attack roll. For example:

• Specific Spot: If there’s a target there, resolve the attack normally, with modifiers for being blind.
• Small Area: 5 in 6 chance they picked right.
• Large Area: 2 in 6 chance they picked right.
• Wild Shot: 1 in 6 chance they picked right.

Again, this is just one possible way of adjudicating the underlying mental model of the ruling.

When shooting blindly into an area, you may also want to model the risk of hitting the wrong target. For example, if there are three potential targets (enemy and ally alike) in the area a PC has said they’re wildly swinging their sword through, then you might pick one randomly before checking to see if they hit anything at all.

Note: You can also use the techniques for declaring targets in the theater of the mind when using a battlemap. There may be times when a player’s understanding of the situation is just better suited to “I swing sword wildly off to my left” or “I shoot towards the grand piano” are better fits than “I pick that specific square.”

NPCs

Of course, to do any of this you will need to keep track of where the NPCs are located.

If you’re running the encounter in the theater of the mind, then you can just handle this the way you always do. You just won’t give the players access to information that the PCs don’t have.

If you’re using a battlemap, on the other hand, then darkened areas pose a unique difficulty (unless you’re using some sort of VTT option that can handle line of sight automatically). What I typically do is just transition darkened areas into theater of the mind tracking. You might instead prefer to sketch out a small map of the darkened area behind the GM screen and keep track of the NPC combatants on that.

The truth is that, no matter which approach you take, there will likely be some metagame knowledge for the players to contend with. (For example, when you tell Arathorn’s player that they can feel a door with their outstretched, groping hands, Lady Emily’s player will also become aware of that even if her character doesn’t yet.) If you’ve got a group who can handle that kind of metagame knowledge maturely, things will be a lot easier. If not, then you may need to figure out what information needs to be communicated secretly (which tends to create a lot of extra headaches and confusion).

Note: Keep in mind there’s a gray area here. Can we assume, for example, that Arathorn calls out the door’s location to his companions even if he doesn’t explicitly say that? Frequently. And if Lady Emily is attacked by goblins, it’s not unreasonable for other players to act as if their players heard the attack and her screams of pain even if, again, that’s never explicitly stated.

Another factor to consider is roleplaying blinded NPCs. Unlike the players, as the GM you have an omniscient knowledge of the battlefield. This makes it essentially impossible for you to truly make blind guesses for where the NPCs will be targeting their attacks.

The key, though, is really in the word “roleplaying.” When deciding what a particular NPC will do, you really want to imagine yourself in their shoes: What do they know? What are they thinking? What emotions are they feeling? What decision might they make as a result?

When in doubt, use perception-type tests to figure out if they’ve got a PCs’ location narrowed down to a pinpoint, small area, or large area. Or just flip a coin to see if they make a mistake.

IN SUMMARY

This has been a lengthy discussion. It may feel like it’s too complicated or overwhelming. The truth, though, is that if you make this a practice point and maybe run a few training scenarios featuring darkness, then you’ll quickly come to grips with it.

The key thing to grok is that there are a handful of useful mental models for making these rulings.

How PCs move through the dark.

• They declare movement by either a known landmark or groping (by square or vector).
• They likely move with a reduced speed.
• There is a risk of a complication (falling, making noise, suffering injury, etc.).

How PCs perceive information in the dark.

• Emphasize touch and sound with a strong POV narration.
• For sounds, characters can hear it, have the sense of a general location, or pinpoint its location.

How the PCs declare a target in the dark.

• They can declare their target by specific area, small area, large area, or wild shot.
• There may be a risk of hitting the wrong target.

You will also need to keep track of where characters are located.

Once you master these mental models, you’ll find it fairly easy to use them to make rulings in almost any RPG you choose to run. The specific mechanics, of course, will vary and have an impact on how things actually work in play, but the model will give consistent guidance and help you provide a high-quality experience at the table.

Campaign Journal: Session 43D – Running the Campaign: NPC Conversation Agendas
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index