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Ptolus: Running the Campaign – Improvising a Raid

May 24th, 2019

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Tor had caught sight of Tee out of the corner of her eye. Tee, looking down the street, saw Tor give an almost imperceptible nod of acknowledgement. Tee gestured frantically down towards the front door, trying to make Tor understand that Shilukar was heading their way.

Let’s briefly review what brought us to this point.

First, back in Session 17, Shilukar managed to escape when the PCs raided his lair.

This was not the expected outcome: Once the PCs tracked down his lair, I’d assumed that Shilukar would be either captured or dead by the end of their raid.

Second, the PCs chose not to immediately take the Idol of Ravvan from Shilukar’s lair, considering it to be too dangerous for them to handle.

This was not the expected outcome: I’d assumed the PCs would loot the Idol. When they left it in situ, I was left scrambling and had to look at the totality of the scenario I had designed to figure out what would happen next.

The short version is that there was a third party that had been keeping Shilukar under observation and they took advantage of the unguarded lair to sneak in and grab the Idol. (I’d created this third party to satisfy the Three Clue Rule by providing one possible path the PCs could follow to Shilukar’s Lair. The PCs never followed the trail that would have taken them to this clue, but that didn’t mean the third party observers weren’t still there.)

The PCs wouldn’t directly cross paths with this third party until much, much later in the campaign, but it would ultimately result in the creation of a completely new scenario in Act II. If you’re reading this several years in the future, you can track where the Idol ends up, look at the campaign-transforming consequences that happen as a result, and kind of have your mind blown when you look back and realize it all boils down to this one decision.

Third, the PCs very cleverly think to hire Shim to find Shilukar.

Before this happened, I actually assumed that the PCs had basically completely failed here: Shilukar was in the wind and there was no clear path (or, at least, no prepared path) by which they could find him before the deadline he had given Lord Zavere expired. I assumed the next time they saw Shilukar, he would be a well-protected “guest” of Castle Shard.

(Another interesting decision the PCs make here at the dawn of Act II: To not tell Shim that they had lost their memories and to NOT hire him to investigate their period of lost time. I had really assumed that one or both of these things would happen, which would have potentially revealed a lot of new information about what they had been doing.)

Fourth, because the PCs had hidden their identities from Shilukar during Session 17, I had (for various reasons) concluded that Shilukar would blame the Shuul for the assault on his lair. As a result, I noted in the campaign status document for Session 18:

09/08/790: Shilukar is reported to have broken into a Shuul facility.

Shilukar also wanted his Idol back, and if he thought the Shuul had it I figured he would go looking for it.

As a result, however, when the PCs asked Shim to track down Shilukar, I looked at the totality of my notes, made some skill checks for Shim, and concluded that he must have somehow discovered the upcoming heist.

“I don’t know what you’re doing in Agnarr’s room, but Shilukar is planning to attack the Foundry in the Guildsman’s District in less than 30 minutes. If you want him before dawn, this will be your only chance.”

All of which ultimately brings us to the PCs staging a raid on the Foundry in order to capture Shilukar, who is simultaneously staging a raid on the Foundry.

Why the Foundry? Well, I hadn’t specified which Shuul facility Shilukar would have been attacking overnight. The Foundry, however, is the only Shuul facility which is thoroughly detailed in Monte Cook’s Ptolus, including – most importantly! – a map. When you’re faced with unexpectedly improvising an entire scenario in the middle of a session, it’s not bad practice to default to whatever tools you’ve already got at your fingertips.

So at this point I:

Grab my Shilukar stat block.
Go to page 186 of Ptolus and grab the map of the Foundry.
Go to page 133 of Ptolus and grab the stat blocks for the Typical Shuul Agent.

I look at the map and:

Since it’s the middle of the night, conclude that the Foundry is mostly shut down for the night.
Figure out what sort of guard the Shuul would place on the facility: Guards go here. A pair of patrols around the outside of the building.
Ask myself, “How would Shilukar broach these defenses?”

You saw the answers to these questions in Session 18C (which is when all this improvisation was going on).

At that point, I can turn things over to the players.

They sneak up and put the building under observation. They see the two patrols circling the building. Tee’s player asks me if there’s a blind spot in which she could sneak into the building. I look at the map: I’d decided the patrols were equidistant around the building to maximize their field of view, but because of how the warehouse sticks out on one side of the building… yeah, there’s an unusually long period during which neither patrol would have their eyes on that corner.

From this point forward, I’m just playing the scenario: I know what Shilukar will do. How do the Shuul respond to that? As the PCs take actions, how do all of my NPCs react to that? Having put the pieces into play, now I’m free to just live in the moment and see what happens.

FINISHING TOUCHES

Because we had to wrap for the night before the raid on the Foundry was finished, however, I was able to spend some time between sessions polishing things up. This was particularly relevant when it came to the lower level of the Foundry, which I was able to spend a few minutes fleshing out with a proper key.

In addition to being able to give some meaningful thought to what various projects the Shuul might be working on down there, this also gave me the opportunity to seed the Foundry basement with a number of clues pointing to other nodes in the campaign.

And as we’ve been discussing unforeseen outcomes and long-ranging consequences, consider the letter they find from Maeda to Brother Savane down there.

That letter doesn’t exist if the PCs don’t make some very clever choices to bring them some place I never thought they’d be. And it also probably doesn’t exist if the timing of the sessions had been a little different, the raid hadn’t been split up across two sessions, and I hadn’t gotten the extra prep time to write it up.

And it literally changes everything in the campaign.

This is Session 19. You can literally go to Session 119 and discover that the entire session is dependent on this letter existing and the decision Dominic makes as a result of it.

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Ptolus: Running the Campaign – Simple Dramatist Tactics: Hear the Reinforcements

May 3rd, 2019

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Session 18C: The Smoke of the Foundry

Sun Tzu said:

If large numbers of trees move, they are approaching. If there are many [visible] obstacles in the heavy grass, it is to make us suspicious. If the birds take flight, there is an ambush. If the animals are afraid, [enemy] forces are mounting a sudden attack.

Back in Session 13 I discussed the value of having a toolkit of basic tactical techniques in your back pocket as a Game Master. The headline for that essay was “Simple Simulatonist Tactics,” and the reason I did that is because I believe that the Game Master’s tactical acumen is not necessarily limited to the diegetic tactics of their NPCs.

In other words, the tactical techniques you use as a GM don’t always map to what would purely constitute tactics in the real world. You can think of tactics as being the techniques by which you achieve your desired effect upon the battlefield: In the real world / simulationist play, the desired effect is usually victory. (Often the method used is to manipulate your opponents’ thoughts and their decisions – see the Battles of Trebia and Cannae, for example – but ultimately you goal is victory.)

In dramatist and gamist play, however, your tactical choices as the GM may be made to achieve ends other than victory. Instead, you use tactics to achieve either dramatic effects or to create interesting challenges.

For example, the combat system in D&D 4th Edition is heavily designed to create My Perfect Encounters™. These encounters are balanced on a razor’s edge in order to create a gamist tactical challenge, and in order for the game to work properly the GM needs to make tactical choices appropriate to that paradigm.

When I was playing the D&D Gamma World version of this ruleset, for example, I once forgot what system I was using and had the bad guys perform a tactical retreat from a combat they were losing and seek reinforcements: This completely unbalanced the precarious encounter balance of 4th Edition and resulted in a near-TPK. (You can read a fully playtest report here.)

Even when a system isn’t mechanically tying your hands like this, though, you can still make decisions like this: It would be more interesting, from a gamist perspective, to fight the Big Bad Guy in his stronghold, so he won’t come charging out from his sanctum to save his minions. It’s dramatically more interesting to fight a sequence of elementally-themed bad guys, even if it would make more sense for the bad guys to form mixed-force tactical groups. And so forth.

HEAR THE REINFORCEMENTS

Here’s a simple dramatist tactical technique your can add to your toolkit: Letting the PCs hear the reinforcements coming.

(To be clear: This is certainly something that can arise naturally out of simulationist play – as the result of opposed Listen and Stealth checks, for example – but if the GM is specifically choosing to let the PCs hear the reinforcements coming order to create effect, that’s a dramatist decision.)

This is a great technique because it gives the players a space in which to make decisions that aren’t possible when the reinforcements just burst into the middle of the encounter: How can they prepare for what’s coming? Is there a way that they can delay the arrival of the reinforcements? Do they take the opportunity to withdraw before the reinforcements arrive? Do they pull out some heavy guns to clear their current opponents? And so forth.

One of the Shuul who had been in the front hall, satisfied that Tor and Dominic were pacified, turned and headed back through the hall and into the materials storehouse. Two more turned and headed into the second foundry, directly below Tee’s feet. In the sudden silence pervading the Foundry, Tee could hear their footsteps echoing ominously below her…

You don’t really get the Platonic ideal of, “Oh shit! There are more goblins coming!” in this multi-faceted conflict between the PCs, Shilukar, and the Shuul, but there are numerous examples of how auditory cues of what’s happening elsewhere can affect the immediate battlefield.

In this case, the basic technique of hearing the reinforcements coming is being complicated through the more advanced techniques of crossovers. In practice, this single battle is being treated as several different encounters, with things happening in one battle crossing over (often through those auditory cues) into the other encounters. (The proximity of those encounters also means that characters – particularly the NPCs – are often rushing between one encounter and another.)

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Ptolus: Running the Campaign – Gather Information vs. Knowledge (Local)

April 29th, 2019

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Session 18B: Missed Opportunities

“The Crimson Coil?” Elestra said. “I think I’ve heard something about them. Random acts of violence. Vandalism. That kind of thing. I got the impression they hadn’t been around for years, though.”

“That’s right,” Tee said. “I was still living here. The cult members wore blood-red robes and hoods. They’d spontaneously appear in huge gatherings to wreak random chaos. Then, about two or three years ago, the Knights of the Pale tracked them to their stronghold – I think it was called Pythoness House. Reportedly the whole cult was wiped out.

Last year I wrote Rulings in Practice: Gather Information, which discussed how to handle information-gathering tasks like canvassing and research.

The 3^rd Edition of D&D, however, features a very interesting and fairly clear-cut distinction between “information you gather” (in the form of a Gather Information check) and “information you just know” (in the form of a Knowledge (local) check). Given that the information in question was often the exact same information, I found it necessary to really figure out exactly what the relationship was between these skills and how they should be handled in play. It’s a distinction that I think remains valuable in subsequent editions of D&D, including Pathfinder (which has the exact same distinction) and even 5^th Edition (which lacks the specific skills but nevertheless will run into similar issues of adjudication).

The short version:

Knowledge (local) gets you the same information, but at +5 DC.

Knowing something off the top of your head is simply more difficult than going to look it up. From a balance standpoint, the +5 DC is also the cost you pay for not needing to spend 1d4+1 hours (in the case of 3^rd Edition) looking for the information.

This same basic principle can be applied widely, even in systems that don’t mechanically distinguish between different forms of knowledge acquisition: In some cases, depending on the exact mechanics involved, you might test to see if they know something off the top of their head and then, if they spend the time necessary to actively look for that information, you can apply a bonus to their check.

(If you wanted to focus even more attention on this aspect of game play, you could even vary the size of that bonus based on how they actively look: Better libraries give better research bonuses, for example.)

In practice, there are some forms of information that very specifically require canvassing and, therefore, Knowledge (local) simply isn’t applicable for. (Did anyone see Bob Anonymous in the silver light district on Friday night? You need to actually go down there and ask around.) In practice, though, I recommend generally being pretty liberal in what you allow people to now.

ACCLIMATION

The other issue raised by Knowledge (local) was exactly what “local” consists of and also what happens with the skill when you leave one “local” and go to a different “local.”

As a loose guideline, I would apply a -4 penalty to Knowledge (local) checks on a scale from whatever your “local” was: Different city in the same area. Different region in the same kingdom. Different kingdom. Different continent (or similar divide). Different plane.

(So the penalty would be -8 if you were from the boondocks and went to the capital.)

This penalty could be quickly abrogated by a character who became acclimated to a new locale. At various times I would use a period of a fortnight or a month, but at the end of each period the size of the penalty would be reduced by -1. (That reduction was against the base -4, not the total penalty.)

The logic was that part of your Knowledge (local) skill is, in fact, the knack for picking up local knowledge.

On one occasion a player wanted to speed this process up, so I allowed them to make Gather Information checks once per day (and with the normal time required) vs. DC 15. Each success reduced the number of days required by the margin of success on the check.

This never really came up in the Ptolus campaign, of course, because it’s all set in one city. But in other campaigns I found it was a nice balance between making the Knowledge (local) skill useful for globetrotting characters and also allowing characters to enter strange places f without instantly being experts on their minutia.

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Ptolus: Running the Campaign – Beginning Act II

April 26th, 2019

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Session 18A: Key to the Past

I’ve found a lead on the key. Meet me in the alley off Yarrow Street.

This session of In the Shadow of the Spire marks the beginning of Act II of the campaign.

As we’ll see (and be discussing) in the future, Act II is primarily structured around two major threads. Before the first session began, I knew that there would be two triggering events – one for each thread – that would kick off Act II.

The letter the PCs receive at the beginning of this session is one of those triggers: During the period of amnesia which began the campaign, I knew that the PCs had hired someone named Shim to help them find a magical artifact. Despite the PCs no longer being aware of it, the investigation had continued apace and had now yielded results.

The letter acts as an external event: Since the PCs were not interacting with Shim (nor were engaged in any activities which might bring them into Shim’s sphere of influence), I had full control of when Act II would begin and, more importantly, I could build all of the investigations that would sprout from Shim’s contact without needing to really think about how the events of Act I might turn out. The material was, effectively, located behind a firewall.

(This should not be taken to mean that the events of Act I were somehow irrelevant to the events of Act II. In this very session, the PCs are going to make some truly momentous choices that will completely alter how they intersect with the major events of Act II: The situation that’s triggered by Shim’s letter exists behind a firewall; but once the firewall is breached, the PCs and everything surrounding the PCs will begin to interact with it.)

A firewall like this is not necessarily impregnable. We saw an example of this earlier in the campaign when the PCs independently interacted with the Hammersong Vaults and then spontaneously concluded (correctly!) that they may have stored other items of value there during their amnesia. (And we could imagine a similar hypothetical scenario in which the PCs needed the services of someone like Shim, identified Shim as an option, and chose to contact him. Which would have led to a possibly far more interesting – and confusing! – conversation.)

PULLING THE TRIGGER

With a trigger like this in place, how do we know when to put it into play?

You could simply schedule the event: As soon as you know that the trigger is going to happen, you figure out when it should happen and literally place it on the calendar. (A campaign status document is great for this.) This is what I had done with the Hammersong Vaults, for example.

Alternatively, you could mechanically check to see when the trigger occurs. For example, you might make a 1 in 8 random check each day to see if that’s the day Shim finishes his investigation. Or you could set up a progress clock coupled to a mechanical structure for determining when the clock gets ticked.

For a more dramatist bent, you can simply decide when to pull the trigger to best narrative effect. This is largely what I did for the beginning of Act II, with my primary concern being effective macro-pacing: I knew I wanted to space out the two Act II triggers a little bit. I also knew I wanted some crossover with ongoing Act I material so that there was a sense of continuity instead of a sharp discontinuity.

Since Act I wasn’t linear in design, this was not necessarily a straightforward process: There was a bunch of Act I scenarios the PCs never engaged with (and which, as a result, I mostly never prepped) and there were a bunch of other scenarios in Act I that hadn’t been part of the original plan, so I needed to make a judgment call about whether or not certain scenarios had been permanently “written off” and, therefore, how close to the end of Act I we really were.

In practice I also sort of combined methods (which is another valid option): When it was clear that Act I was closing out, I scheduled the trigger for the near future on a specific date. This meant that I wasn’t 100% in control of exactly when or how it might interact with the ongoing activities of the PCs.

Thus begins Act II.

It’s a doozy. Twelve years later, we’re still in the middle of Act II. I’ll almost certainly discuss the reasons for that in a future post.

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Running the Campaign – Dragon Heist: Running the Shipwrights’ Ball (Part 2)

April 12th, 2019

Go to Part 1

Edana and Theren took the stairs down from the orlop deck to the upper hold of the Eyecatcher. As they rounded the corner to head down to the lower hold where they knew Captain Zord’s quarters were, however, a giant spider dropped down from the ceiling and landed directly on top of Theren’s invisible back.

I didn’t see this one coming, either. Running the Eyecatcher from an adversary roster, I saw that there were four giant spiders in Area J17. Flipping open the Monster Manual to the giant spider stat block, I was surprised to discover that 5^th Edition had replaced the spider’s tremorsense from previous editions with blindsight.

Cutting here, with the spider on Theren and their stealthy infiltration of the Eyecatcher at risk, is a solid cliffhanger cut. But it also gives me a chance to regroup slightly and quickly review some rules while multitasking the other scene.

Captain Zord rode his polar bear into the midst of the crowd. “The Sea Maiden Faire has arrived!” He twirled a baton high into the air and had the bear catch in his mouth. Behind him, a giant dragon float began a low swoop over the gathered crowd.

“The baton is a little much, don’t you think?” Kittisoth said with scorn.

“What do you mean he’s behind the automatons?” Renaer asked.

And then the whole story poured out: How Captain Zord was selling nimblewrights constructed by the technomancers of Luskan and that the nimblewrights had been outfitted with clairvoyant crystals which would allow Zord to spy on anyone who owned a nimblewright using a specially attuned crystal ball.

Renaer grabbed her hand and began pulling her through the crowd. “Come on!”

Kittisoth grinned. “I’ll bet you knew something like this would happen when you asked me here tonight.”

“It’s always exciting with you, my dear!”

Meanwhile, back on the Eyecatcher, Theren and Edana had managed to fight the spiders off long enough to run down the stairs and into Zord’s cabin, slamming the door shut behind them. The heavy scent of lavender hung thick in the air as the spiders slammed into the door behind them.

The lavender here is a very clever bit of keyed foreshadowing that’s built into Dragon Heist. You’ll see how it pays off in a little bit, and it’s one of the many places in the campaign where Perkins, Haeck, Introcaso, Lee, and Sernett show an excellent attention to detail that truly elevates the material.

Leaving the fair behind them (as Zord, with another wave of his baton, sent a volley of fireworks into the sky), Renaer led Kitti up to a staff-wielding woman in the crowd.

“Kitti, this is Vajra. Vajra, Kitti. Tell her what you told me.”

And the story spilled out again.

This event is being driven from character action, but it’s still taking place within the party planning structure: Vajra is on the guest list. A PC has had an interaction with her. So I put a checkmark next to her name.

As Kitti finished, Vajra furrowed her brow with thought. “If they’re keyed to a crystal ball, do you know where the crystal ball is located?”

“On their ship.”

At this point Edana’s player says, “Dammit, Kitti.”

“Well, I’m already this far in, right?” Kitti’s player says.

When the other players at the table not only start commenting on the action, but having sharp emotional reactions to it, you know things are working well. It may not be immediately obvious, but this is also the payoff from establishing crossovers between the scenes: Edana’s player can immediately see how this thing Kitti is doing is going to eventually snapback and impact her.

“And do you know who currently owns nimblewrights?”

“Oh,” Kittisoth said. “So many people.” And she began to list them: Nobles. Major guilds. Prominent citizens. Vajra’s eyes narrowed.

But before they could continue, a man with greased-back hair that tufts up around his ears mounted the stairs of the mansion. As the final volley of fireworks died away, he threw up his hands and announced loudly, “The carnival shall remain here throughout the evening! But for now, it is time for the Grand Promenade to begin!”

Once again I’m actively playing the party structure: I’m looking at my main event list and triggering the next event in sequence.

How do I know the time has come for this to happen? Mostly it’s just dramatic instinct. It felt like enough stuff had happened on the front lawn of the mansion and that it was time for a shift in scenery. From a practical standpoint, it also allowed Vajra to say:

“All right. I need to take my place in this. You get back on Renaer’s arm—” Renaer took Kitti’s arm. “We’ll meet up inside. I need to figure out the damage of… whatever this is.”

Following rules of social etiquette that Kitti didn’t understand, guests began going up the stairs and into the mansion in order of precedence. One of the first was a silver-haired elf in a scintillating blue dress that sparkled with living starlight. Kitti gave a low whistle.

“That’s Laeral Silverhand,” Renaer said. “Open Lord of Waterdeep.”

“Why didn’t you ask her?” Kitti asked.

“She intimidates me.”

“Oh. I get that,” Kitti said. “Yeah.”

And then, surprisingly early in the proceedings, Renaer was pulling her forward, up the grand stairs, and into the cavernous grand ballroom beyond, where the Grand Promenade was circling like a whirlpool into an endless spiral.

At this point I already know what Vajra is going to do, so I’m taking the opportunity of the Grand Promenade to establish who Laeral Silverhand is. That lets the next beat land in the arc that Kittisoth has abruptly transcribed more effectively than if I had waited to introduce Laeral. You can actually see that a bit with the introduction of Vajra: The player doesn’t know she’s the Blackstaff, so her introduction by Renaer doesn’t carry that weight of identity. But now I’ve set it up so that when Kitti actually meets Laeral, both player and character will get the full impact of it.

One thing to note here is that I have NOT put checkmarks next to Laeral’s name. Although Kittisoth has seen her, she hasn’t actually had a meaningful social interaction with her. So she’s still on my To Do list.

While Theren moved a heavy dresser in front of the door to stop the spiders – and anyone else the spiders attracted – from getting in, Edana started looting Zord’s cabin of its valuables.

As she transitioned to scooping up any paperwork that looked useful, Theren whipped back the fur rug on the floor and revealed a hatch they had suspected lay there. Ripping it open, they looked down a short airlock towards a second hatch.

They’d found their entrance to the submersible.

Back at Shipwright’s House, the portly man with the greased hair had mounted a stage at the far end of the room. It turned out that he was Rubino Caswell, the guildmaster. He began giving an. Incredibly. Boring. Speech.

“You have to do this every year?” Kittisoth asked.

As Rubino spoke, however, an incredibly beautiful woman in a dress of yellow silk glided over to Kittisoth and leaned down to whisper in her ear. “Is this a good place to talk about an ‘explosive’ matter?”

Kittisoth glanced at her. “No. I don’t think so.”

“Then come with your comrades — your other comrades — to our villa tomorrow morning for a more… discrete discussion.”

And the woman glided away.

Renaer leaned in. “What was that all about?”

“She seems to know something about our investigation into the explosion that killed Dalakhar,” Kitti said.

Renaer frowned. “Be careful around the Cassalanters,” he warned her. That was useful. Kittisoth wouldn’t have had a clue who the woman was otherwise.

This is somewhat unusual: With Rubino’s Speech and the Cassalanters’ Approach, I am very rapidly triggering events from the main event track. Much more rapidly than I normally would. (Generally speaking, you’ll trigger an event and then let all kinds of social eddies and currents spin out from that before shaking up the status quo again with the next event.)

Why?

Because Kitti has initiated a sequence of actions here which I know is going to yank her completely off the main event track I had designed for the evening. I wasn’t entirely certain how the next scene would end, but it was quite possible it would derail the party entirely. The Cassalanters’ Approach was included as an essential hook that would come one way or another (even if Kitti had skipped the party entirely, the Cassalanters would have sought the group out through some other channel), so I wanted to drop that invitation now before the next scene took place and I potentially lost the opportunity.

Meanwhile, Theren and Edana clambered down through the airlock and into the submersible. Passing by the engine room carried them out to a main passageway: At the far end of it they could see that the front of the ship opened up into a sort of bulbous, multi-level control room. The walls of the control room were large, globular windows looking out into the blackwaters of Waterdeep Harbor.

CUT TO: Rubino was finally finishing his speech and the crowd was beginning to form little social clusters that either drifted through the ballroom or made their way back out towards the carnival displays that the Sea Maidens Faire had rapidly erected. Renaer and Kittisoth made their way through a bramble of social introductions, trying to figure out where Vajra had gotten to. They eventually spotted her opening the door to a small, private room off to one side of the ball room.

Nothing too fancy here: The same way that we’ve been looking at our guest list and main event list, I’m now looking at the zones I’ve sketched out on my location map and picking one for the next scene.

They rushed over to Vajra and through the door. Kitti was looking back over her shoulder, scanning the crowd as she entered. As Vajra shut the door behind them, she turned around and–

Standing right in front of her was Laeral Silverhand.

Oh no.

The, “Oh no,” of course, was actually spoken out loud by Kitti’s player at the table. A character’s inner monologue becoming manifest through a player’s meta-commentary on what’s happening can be really great.

“All right,” Laeral said. “What is this all about?”

And Kitti’s player said, “I tell her the thing about the thing that I’ve been telling everybody all night with my big fucking mouth.”

As she finished, Laeral said, “Bring me Captain Zord. Right. Now.” And her eyes sparked with tiny shards of blue lightning.

“Oh. Oh no,” Kittisoth babbled. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea right now, is it?”

Laeral smiled as her guard hurried out of the room. “I promise you we will not make too much of a scene.”

CUT TO: Theren and Edana cautiously made their way down the passageway and looked down into the lower level of the control room. Several gnome tinkerers were at work there, apparently overseen in their work by… a dark elf. That was no good. They cautiously backed up.

The motivation for the cut to Theren and Edana here is probably pretty obvious: The appearance of Laeral had cranked the stakes way up. Reading the room, it was clear that everyone was completely on tenterhooks waiting to see what would happen. So you cut away. You let them live in that moment for a bit.

Laeral took a seat on the far side of the room. “So who is this, Renaer?”

“I’m not really anybody,” Kittisoth demurred.

“I doubt that’s true,” Laeral said with a smirk, looking at the way Renaer’s hand was resting on Kitti’s arm.

“I’m sorry,” Kitti said. “I don’t know what to say. You’re very intimidating.”

Laeral smiled and took Kitti’s hand. “It’s all right. Everything is going to be fine. We appreciate all the hard work you’ve been doing on behalf of Waterdeep. Please, step over here for just a moment.” She reached out into midair and her hand disappeared into some sort of dimensional pocket; a moment later she drew back a decanter of brandy.

“What’s our play here?” Vajra asked while Laeral poured.

“I like shock and awe,” Laeral said. “We’re going to talk to ‘Captain Zord’ and find out exactly what game he’s playing here.”

The handle turned and the door began to open–

CUT TO:

The table literally shrieked in frustration here. Yeah. That’s when you’re doing it right. You can’t force this sort of thing and you don’t want to overplay your hand, but when the anticipation is building sharp, quick cuts will heighten it even further, so that when the moment arrives it lands with even more power.

Faced with several doors, Theren and Edana picked one at random.

At this point I asked, “Exactly how do you open the door?” This prompted them to detail with great care and specificity exactly what precautions they were taking.

This was actually irrelevant for this particular door, but it would have been relevant for any other door they had picked in that passageway. (They got very lucky with their random pick. It would be the last luck they would have for awhile.) By asking them the question regardless I (a) remove metagame anticipation if I need to ask the question for future doors (“he already asked and it wasn’t relevant, so we know this is just a routine question he asks”) and (b) build a moment of suspense that pays off even if there isn’t an ambush on the other side of the door.

As they very gently eased open the door… the scent of lavender washed over them.

And here’s the lavender scent pay-off. The players take a great deal of satisfaction in the simple act of concluding that this room must also belong to Zord.

The crystal ball was sitting on a padded cushion of black velvet on a pedestal in the middle of the cabin. They scooped it up and dropped it into their sack.

CUT BACK TO: The door opened.

Captain Zord, flanked by the two watchmen, entered the room. The watchmen remained outside, closing the door behind him.

Zord swept the hat from his head and bowed deep. “Milady Silverhand, how may I be of assistance to you?”

Laeral gave a silent hand signal to Vajra. Vajra pointed her staff at him. There was a brief purple pulse from the end of the staff and Zord’s disguise spell melted away, revealing a dark elf.

At this point, my plan was to dramatically reveal Jarlaxle’s picture. But I actually fumbled retrieving the picture and wasn’t able to cleanly display it.

That was all right, though, because the lore-steeped players at my table had gotten ahead of me and did the work for me: “It’s Jarlaxle,” says one of them. “Oh no!” cries another. A third has dim memories of the Drizzt novels she read in her youth stirred up at the name.

This is pure RPG as an audience: None of the characters know who Jarlaxle is, so this is all firewalled away. But as players, they are all on the edge of their seats and completely engaged and BAM one last amazing revelation has them amped up about as high as they can possibly go.

Laeral spoke. “Jarlaxle. What do you think you’re doing?”

Jarlaxle’s eyes widened in mock innocence. “Milady, whatever do you mean?”

“Crystal balls. Nimblewrights. Explain yourself.”

“I see.” Jarlaxle was taken aback. He clearly wasn’t used to it. His eyes darted around the room, quickly taking in who was standing there. “Well… milady… as I have written to you often — and I am so glad that you have granted me an audience this evening! — my interests are simply to gain your support in seeing Luskan given its proper place in the Lords’ Alliance.”

“Do you really think that spying on me and—”

“Ah! I never spied on you! You did not receive an invitation to purchase a nimblewright, and I have taken special efforts to keep them away from you,” Jarlaxle said. “They were merely employed as an information-gathering service. And I can assure you that if any information I had obtained were to indicate a threat to Waterdeep, I would have surely—”

Laeral raised her hand to cut him off. “Jarlaxle, your tongue is as nimble and sweet as I remember. But I am not to be gulled.”

“I was attempting to gain blackmail material to further my cause as the Lord of Luskan,” Jarlaxle said plainly. “As any Lord of a City-State of the Sword Coast has an obligation to do. You yourself, I believe, employed similar tactics with your husband Khelben Arunsun on many an occasion.”

Talking to yourself as the GM is really hard to do, but having distinct characters with clear, conflicting objectives helps a lot. And when you can pull it off well it’s worth it. This moment got an audible, “Ooooo…” from the table as Jarlaxle scored a palpable hit, which was a good indication that it was time to…

CUT TO: Theren and Edana weren’t certain they could make it back through the Eyecatcher and escape. There was no telling what sort of alarm had been raised by the giant spiders they’d left behind.

They decided that their best option was to disconnect the submersible from the Eyecatcher and then swim out of the airlock. They decided that they might as well try to sink the submersible, as well, having no idea what mischief Captain Zord and the Luskans meant to use it for.

But when they opened the hatches, they discovered there was an energy field preventing the ship from flooding. “The only way this is going to work,” Theren said, “is to disable this field from the control room.”

So they snuck back down the hall together. Edana used a mage hand to reach out, grasp the lever, and—

CUT TO:

“Do you know what we do with traitorous captains in the Pirate Isles?” Kittisoth asked the room.

“I don’t,” Laeral said. “What do you do in the Pirate Isles?”

“We tie ‘em to the main mast and wait for the vultures to feast,” Kitti said.

Jarlaxle glowered at her.

“There’s interesting,” Laersal said. “I think he owns a vulture.”

“He owns a lot of sad animals,” Kittisoth said. “Just like himself. I’m sorry. I’m just sharing information. I know you’ve got this well in hand, milady.”

“I like this one, Renaer,” Laeral said. “You should keep her.”

“You can’t call me a traitor!” Jarlaxle protested. “I am not a citizen of Waterdeep. I’m a Luskan patriot.”

“I’m sorry,” Kittisoth said. “The women are talking.”

Another cool thing about this kind of scene-juggling is that it doesn’t just give you, as the GM, a chance to gather your thoughts: It also gives your players a chance to think about what their next course of action (or clever turn of phrase) will be.

Jarlaxle opened his mouth to respond, but then got a distracted look. “What are you doing, Laeral? My ships are under attack!”

Note here that Jarlaxle is basically anticipating something that hasn’t actually happened yet to the other group: He’s responding to the events that play out after Edana pulls that lever. This is a more advanced crossover technique, where you effectively foreshadow what’s going to happen to the other scene before they actually see it for themselves.

Edana pulled the lever.

Water came gushing down the passage behind them. Edana and Theren both grabbed handholds on the walls. As the water ripped into them, Edana kept her grip, but Theren couldn’t. The deluge swept him down the hall, over the railing, and slammed him down onto the deck of the control room, amidst the gnomes and the drow.

With the water still pouring down from above, Theren tried to swim out. But one of the gnomes either heard him or saw his invisible outline in the water. “Someone’s here!”

The drow waved his hand and everything in the control room was suddenly limned with the dancing green flames of faerie fire… including Theren. He surged to his feet to make a run for it, but one of the gnomes lowered his hand and—

After rolling so well all evening, the dice really turned on Theren here. After failing multiple checks to not get gushed into the control room, he now rolled a natural 1 on his saving throw vs. the burning hands spell and then I rolled max damage on 3d6. He only had 16 hit points left and so—

—the flames washed over his chest, blasting him off his feet. Blackness gripped his vision as he splashed back into the water, unconscious and at the mercy of the drow.

And that’s when I called it for the night. Always leave ’em wanting more.

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