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Posts tagged ‘running the campaign’

Mansion

Back in 2015, I shared Game Structure: Party Planning. This is an incredibly flexible scenario structure that GMs can use to design and run large, dynamic social events without being overwhelmed by their complexity.

In getting ready to run one of these social events — whether it’s a bounty hunter trade conference, a political fundraiser, the Ilvermorny debutante ball, or a pleasure cruise to the center of a Hollow Earth on a flying ship — a GM can certainly pour a lot of prep into them. And the scenario structure is a powerful one which will reward that prep.

But I also included a quick ‘n dirty version of the structure that GMs can use with about 5 minutes of prep when they don’t have a lot of time to pour into it: If a big social soirée crops up in the middle of a session, you can call for a quick break and rapidly get your social event set up.

That’s the situation I found myself in while running Dragon Heist last weekend, and I thought it might be illuminating to walk through how it played out at the table.

(This post will contain copious spoilers for Dragon Heist.  I will do my best to make it comprehensible to those not familiar with the campaign, but check out the Alexandrian Remix if you’re feeling lost. Part 1 of the Remix alone should give you enough context to fully grok the proceedings.)

PROLOGUE TO THE OMEN COMING ON

Before we dive in, let’s take a moment to briefly establish the given circumstances of the situation.

The PCs — Kittisoth, Pashar, Kora, Edana, and Theren — had aggressively pursued their investigations into the nimblewrights which were being sold throughout Waterdeep. As such, they had (a) identified Captain Zord, the leader of a small fleet of carnival vessels based out of Luskan, as the person selling them and (b) discovered that Zord, or the Luskans he was working for, had implanted clairvoyant crystals into the nimblewrights and were using them to spy on various noble families and organizations throughout the city. They’d also made contact with a young dragon, Zellifarn, who had also been spying on Captain Zord, and could tell them that the crystal ball the clairvoyant crystals were bound to was located in a submersible underneath Zord’s flagship.

The group had also recently become invested as agents of the Harpers, and therefore felt honor bound to shut down Zord’s operation. As such, they began planning a heist to seize the crystal ball from Zord.

Largely by chance, the night they chose for their operation was Ches 25th. As noted here, this is also the night of the Shipwrights’ Ball, an event that was once a guild celebration, but which has now turned into one of the biggest social events of the Fleetswake festival season.

This is important because, elsewhere in the campaign, Kittisoth had been relentlessly flirting with Renaer Neverember (the young noble that the PCs had saved several weeks earlier). And I had decided that Renaer was going to ask Kittisoth to attend the Shipwrights’ Ball with him.

This was a great complication for the planning of their heist, so I fully embraced it.

All of which leads us up to the current situation:

  • Theren and Edana, using a stockpile of invisibility and waterbreathing potions that the group had used all their resources to acquire, would infiltrate Captain Zord’s ship and steal the crystal ball.
  • Pashar and Kora would provide what support they could from the shore (and be ready to step in if the shit hit the fan).
  • Kittisoth would simultaneously go on a date with Renaer to the Shipwrights’ Ball.

Only problem? At least in part because I was running the campaign in big, marathon sessions, all of this had developed over the course of a single session. I didn’t have the Shipwrights’ Ball fully prepped, and I knew that — particularly with it playing out simultaneously with the Eyecatcher heist — I needed a strong structure for everything to play out to best effect.

So that’s when I called a 10 minute break, grabbed a sheet of paper, and quickly sketched out the Shipwrights’ Ball.

SET UP

The quick ‘n dirty version of party planning looks like this:

  • Make a list of 3-5 places people can congregate
  • Make a list of 10 characters
  • Make a list of 5 events
  • Make a list of 5 topics of conversation

And I basically ran straight down this list.

LOCATIONS: The Shipwrights’ Ball takes place at Shipwrights’ House. I took a few minutes to dig through the existing lore for the Shipwrights’ House hoping there would be some material to pilfer, but there wasn’t much. The House had been briefly described, a century earlier, in the City of Splendors boxed set as:

D19 Guild Hall: Shipwright’s House
2-story Class B building
HQ: Order of Master Shipwrights

As a Class B building, it’s a “larger, more successful and elaborate building,” and most likely freestanding. Briefly looking into the Order of Master Shipwrights, I discovered that in the 14th century they had been rivals with the Master Mariners’ Guild. I decided that, at some point in the last century, the Master Mariners’ Guild had been wiped out, and the Order of Master Shipwrights had grown rich indeed with a near-monopoly of shipbuilding in Waterdeep.

I stuck some Post-It flags to mark the appropriate pages in case I needed to reference this scant reference material and moved on.

On my single prep sheet, I quickly sketched out a “map” that basically looked like this:

Dragon Heist - Shipwrights' Ball Map

Except, of course, sketched in pencil and with my sloppy handwriting scrawled across it.

I knew that the Bigass Staircase went down to Dock Street near Asteril’s Way (based on the 2nd Edition and 3rd Edition maps), which it turned out was surprisingly near to where I had placed the Eyecatcher (Zord’s flagship) in the previous session.

Location of the Eyecatcher & Shipwrights' House

The Ballroom and Dinner Wing kind of speak for themselves. (The latter were a “wing” because I knew there would be lots of small, private dining areas and bars jutting off from the main dining hall, just in case that would be useful.) Galleon Hall was so called because it had about a half-dozen full-sized ships inside it as installation pieces. (You know that scene in Moana with all the ships in the cave? That was my visual touchstone. Except in a giant room of marble-encrusted wealth instead of a cave.) Private Rooms off to one side of the ballroom because it would give me smaller spaces for conversations to move into as necessary. And the Garden Terraces were 4-5 huge terraces jutting off the back of the building with winding paths leading through them; bioluminiscent plants would give the terraces a “Pandora from Avatar” kind of feel, and the whole complex would be hemmed in from the rest of the city by a “wall” of huge, dark, old-growth pine trees.

I didn’t write any of that down: Too time-consuming. A quick sketch-map for reference and the rough images that had been conjured up in my head were all that I needed. I had the 3-5 locations.

CHARACTERS: As I mentioned in Party Planning, “If the social event is growing organically out of game play, then you’ve probably already got the NPCs…” And that was definitely true here. Basically I just flipped through Dragon Heist and wrote down this list:

  • Rubino Caswell – Guildmaster
  • Renaer
  • Laeral (207)
  • Vajra (216)
  • Jalester Silvermane (20)
  • Obaya Uday (20)
  • Cassalanters
  • Mirt (211)
  • Remalia Haventree (215)

The numbers in parentheses were page references to their write-ups. Several of these characters had already appeared in the campaign (Renaer, Jalester, Mirt) Laeral Silverhandand several others I had already planned on introducing in the near future (Vajra, the Cassalanters). The only new character was the guildmaster.

As the party progressed, I would simply place a check mark next to each name as Kittisoth had an interaction with them. (It’s not that she wouldn’t be able to continue having additional interactions with them, but this helped me keep an eye on which characters I hadn’t used yet so that I could make sure that everyone got brought “onstage” at some point during the evening.)

EVENTS: At this point in the campaign, I knew that the Cassalanters needed to make contact with the PCs and invite them to a meeting at their villa. I decided this was as good a time as any for that to happen, and I quickly included that in a list that largely consisted of the Ball’s social agenda:

  • Grand Promenade
  • Rubino’s Speech
  • Cassalanter’s Approach
  • Zero-G Dancing (Vajra & Laeral)
  • Dinner

I’d indicated Vajra & Laeral in parentheses because I had an image of those characters being introduced to Kittisoth while she was dancing with Renaer. (The zero-g dancing is exactly what it sounded like: A cool magical effect where everyone could literally dance their partners off their feet.) As it turned out, this is it NOT how Kittisoth ended up meeting Vajra the Blackstaff and Laeral the Open Lord of Waterdeep.

Now, honest to god, while I was planning all of this, I completely forgot that Captain Zord’s carnival was scheduled to perform a parade from their ships to the Shipwrights’ Ball! It was only after returning to the table and beginning to review my notes for the heist portion of the evening that I realized that the two events were going to feature this dramatic and unexpected crossover event.

This is one of those incredible moments of serendipity that can only really happen when you have a truly robust scenario prepared and you’re actively playing it hard for all its worth. You keep setting things in motion, and the billiard balls inevitably start colliding in amazing patterns that you never anticipated and had no way of planning.

In any case, I reached back over to my list and added “Sea Maidens Faire Parade” as the first entry.

TOPICS OF CONVERSATION: “If the social event is growing organically out of game play, then you’ve probably already got the NPCs and the topics of conversation…” This was also basically true. I quickly jotted down:

  • Embezzlement [meaning Lord Dagult’s embezzlement of 500,000 dragons]
  • Explosion [meaning the fireball that the PCs were investigating]
  • Black Viper robberies [this had not yet come up in the campaign, but was part of my prep]

This wasn’t quite enough, though. You really want to have a range of topics that you can cycle through to keep a party alive. Also, it would be more interesting to have more topics that the PCs weren’t already aware of. AND it would be good to have some topics that weren’t directly related to the plot of the campaign. So I added two more kind of out of left field:

  • Misra Tesper eloped to Daggerford (with a half-orc) [this whole thing, including Misra Tesper, was made up out of whole cloth; I pulled her last name from a list of Waterdeep noble families and I pulled her first name from the list of fantasy names that I keep on hand as a GM tool]
  • Black Gold in Moonshae (extrusion of the Feydark) [meaning that a new Black Gold rush had begun in the Moonshae Isles; I’d previously pulled this really obscure reference to MOON1-3: Black Gold, a 4th Edition Living Forgotten Realms scenario, as an explanation for why a house was abandoned in Part 2: Gralhund Villa, and here I was simply flipping through the binder containing my prep notes for inspiration, saw the reference and decided to foreshadow the later development if it ever came up… which it probably wouldn’t, but it doesn’t really matter]

And that was it. I now had everything I needed to run the Shipwrights’ Ball on a single sheet of paper. As I mentioned, the whole thing took me less than 10 minutes. In fact, I’ve spent far more time explaining the whole process here than I did actually jotting down my lists at the time.

Next: Run-Time

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Session 17D: Shilukar’s Secrets

Scattered throughout the laboratory, the warren of the spider-things, and Shilukar’s bedchamber they found a large number of notes and other papers. Many of these were written in strange characters resembling those they had found upon the obsidian statues within Ghul’s Labyrinth, and these required Ranthir’s arcane arts to decipher.

The ways in which I develop and use lore handouts – of which you can see copious other examples in my remix of Eternal Lies, including the thousands of words dedicated to the Books of the Los Angeles Cult and Savitree’s Research – is probably deserving of a much longer and more detailed post at some point in the future, but in the current session you can see the PCs pick up a huge dump of such handouts all at once and thus afford us an opportunity to discuss a few points of potential interest regarding them.

First: Why so many handouts all at once?

This is glossed over somewhat quickly in the journal (although highlighted in the quote I selected above), but not all of these handouts were found in a big stack: They were scattered across several different areas, and also in different spots within those areas.

The parceled pieces serve as a reward for exploration. (It’s more interesting to have tidbits in several rooms than it is to have one room with a big handout and then a bunch of rooms without substantive rewards.) But split up like this they also reward partial exploration: As the scenario played out, the party routed Shilukar and took possession of the lair. But the scenario could have just as easily ended with them snatching a few pieces of obvious paper off Shilukar’s worktable and then beating a hasty retreat, leaving them with only a few fragments of information.

And in either case, rather than having a monolithic block of text to read through, the players are instead left with disparate puzzle pieces which must be pieced together. This forces them to actively engage with and think deeply about the material.

There is also mixture of function. Some of the information in this info dump is immediately useful; it pertains to the present. Some of it elucidates the past, revealing additional details or even fully revealing the truth behind previous mysteroes. And finally, some of it hints at the distant future, foreshadowing events and interactions to which the PCs don’t currently have access (but will or may later).

Particularly when elucidating the past, note that the handouts have been customized to reflect actual events (i.e., things the PCs have actually seen or, better yet, done). By referencing the actions taken by the players in the tangible form of an actual plot, you’re deeply investing in the idea that their actions matter and that they are rippling out into a wider world far beyond their immediate sensorium.

The handouts also take different forms of text – epistolary, the summary of books, scratched notes, research documentation, diagrams, sketches. Each form inherently encodes information differently, providing different perspectives on the game world. (This also tends to encourage the GM not to become overly didactic, which aids in creating the puzzle-like combination of information. Also: Show, don’t tell.)

In addition to the works described in full below, they also discovered The Book of Lesser Chaos, which described in detail a technomantic art known as “chaositech”.

Present in this session, but not directly included in the campaign journal, was The Book of Lesser Chaos: This was a lengthy, multi-page handout. In D&D, I frequently use these big lorebooks as a way of introducing new mechanics into a campaign.

Over the years I’ve found that getting players enthused about some cool new sub-system can be a bit hit-or-miss. Chaositech - Monte CookOften I would prep a packet of rules, pass it out to everyone with a ton of enthusiasm, and then… nada. The packet would get shuffled around for a few sessions before disappearing into a drift of paper and being forgotten.

Including the same material as a handout, on the other hand – framed with in-character material – tends to have a much higher success rate. I think it inherently makes the rules more interesting, and it also sort of demands engagement. The steps necessary to include it as a prop also encourage me, as a GM, to significantly integrate the new sub-system into the campaign world. (For example, it’s only logical for Shilukar to have a lorebook about chaositech if he’s practicing chaositech, and thus his entire lair is filled to the brim with chaositech-in-action.) This integration will also increase player engagement with the material, often stretching that engagement over longer periods of time.

Ideally, the best way to get new mechanical material fully integrated into a campaign is for it to be heavily featured in at least one session and also appear intermittently (but not consistently) over several more sessions.

But I digress. This is a different topic for another time.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Session 17C: Shilukar’s New Friends

The illusion might not have fooled Shilukar if he had been in his right mind, but at this point he was far from it due to the debilitating spells Ranthir had cast upon him. The elf waved his wand in the direction of the illusion (which, of course, had no effect) and banked sharply to the right – flying away from Dominic and Tee.

When characters suffer ability score damage, it’s an awesome opportunity to lean into a roleplaying challenge. This is particularly true of damage to the mental ability scores, which will directly affect the character’s personality and decision-making.

HAL-9000You can see that in this session, where Shilukar’s dwindling Intelligence score not only resulted in increasingly muddled decision-making, but also a growing sense of panic as Shilukar felt his mind slipping away from him: In a fantastical equivalent to HAL-9000, you have a character getting more and more desperate to solve a problem as it becomes more and more impossible for them to figure out how to do so.

Existential horror as a combat tactic.

But that’s just one option. Back in Session 15, we saw that ability score damage can also be played for comedic effect:

Tor, in his befuddled state, was becoming completely entranced by the Ghostly Minstrel’s performance. He began to dance and then to sing along – vigorously and loudly.

Tee, seeing what was happening, excused herself from Mand Scheben and pushed her way through the crowd to Tor’s side. “Tor! Tor!” She finally managed to get his attention. “Calm down! Look, I don’t really think you should be doing that right now.” She looked meaningfully at Tor’s acid-burned and blood-stained clothes.

Tor seemed to think about his seriously for a few moments… and then diligently began stripping off his clothes. Cheers went up from various people around the room.

“No!” Tee grabbed at him, but Tor was intent on getting his clothes off now. Looking around, Tee spotted Agnarr and urgently waved him over. Between the two of them, they were able to get Tor back up to their rooms and settled down.

If you’re feeling uncertain about how to play a modified ability score, consider querying your character by way of the game mechanics: Make an Intelligence test to see if your character is capable of thinking their way through a problem at the moment. Make a Wisdom test to see if they’re able to inhibit their impulse to take off their clothes. Make a Charisma test to see how short-tempered they are.

Note that these same principles apply to physical ability scores, with modifications to those scores being reflected in both action selection and description. Getting hammered by a 10 point loss of Strength must feel as if your body has just been brutalized by a chemotherapy treatment. Think about how a loss of Constitution would leave your character gasping for breath and struggling to wheeze out words. Describe your characters clumsily fumbling with a formal tea service or tripping over the furniture as a result of their reduced Dexterity score.

Keep in mind both the absolute rating of the ability score AND the relative change: Someone who has been knocked down to Intelligence 10 from Intelligence 18 isn’t suddenly a dithering idiot (they have a perfectly average intellect), but from their perspective it’s as if the entire world has been wrapped in gauze. (Although if the loss is permanent, it’s likely that they’ll eventually adapt to their new acuity.)

These moments also offer us an opportunity to reflect on how ability scores define our characters and what their normal ability scores really mean, although this begins to transition us into a broader discussion how we can roleplay characters with abilities – particularly mental abilities – vastly different from our own (which is, perhaps, a topic for another time).

There’s also a flipside to this: What do magic items and buffs that increase your ability scores do to your character?

Just as there should be a change in your character’s behavior if they’re blasted from Wisdom 10 to Wisdom 5, so, too, should reading a tome of clear thought that boosts your Wisdom from 10 to 15. Think about how your character’s perception of the world changes; think about how the decisions they make (and choose not to make) will change; think about how their personality will shift as a result.

Note, too, that I think there are differences between short-term buffs (which are shocks to the system, but fade relatively rapidly) and long-term alterations (which will become integrated into the character’s personality).

And while tomes are one thing, there’s actually something really fascinating about a worn magic item that permanently alters your state of consciousness (i.e., modifies your mental abilities). As you spend more and more time wearing such an item, the existence you know with that item will increasingly become your perception of self. What happens to you when you take off the item? Or have it taken from you?

True Names - Vernor VingeThere’s a transhumanist quality here, as if Vernor Vinge’s True Names would be a good source text for this: Like the character for whom part of their personality and thought process now exists in the networked computing devices, so too does the wizard with a tiara of intelligence +4 have an important part of their mind – of themselves! – tied to that item. Are they even the same person without that item? If they lose that item and they replace it with a talisman of intelligence +4, will that restore who they were? Or will they become someone else? Are all +4 boosts the same? Can you just swap out parts of your brain? Or does granting the Ship of Theseus sentience transform the paradox?

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Session 17B: The Coming of Shilukar

As they reached the intersection, Agnarr tried to bring his sword down upon the first of them. But before he could, the gray goblin darted to one side and used its scythe-like claws to gash the flesh of the wall. On the other side of the hall, a second goblin did the same. A thick, arterial spray of viscous blood gushed forth. The floor suddenly became slick and treacherous. Agnarr and Tor both fell, with Tor toppling backwards into Dominic and carrying him to the ground as well.

One of the cool things about D&D fantasy is that the creatures you fight are often packages of unique abilities which makes an encounter with, say, a basilisk completely different from an encounter with a hydra. This creates innate variation in tactical challenges, preventing the bevy of combat encounters that usually make up the core of a D&D scenario from becoming rote or repetitive with an absolutely minimal effort from the DM.

Hydra - LadyofHats

With that being said, our familiarity with this form factor – unique abilities being delivered by packaging them into monster stat blocks – can blind us to other vectors for delivering those encounter-defining abilities.

In other words, if you’re thinking, “I really want the PCs to fight some monsters who can do X,” it might be worthwhile to think of ways that the monsters can do that without innately possessing those abilities.

This is useful in scenarios where the PCs are facing a large number of the same type of monster over and over again. (“Oh. Look. It’s Goblin #789.”) By allowing the monster to utilize an externalized ability, you can introduce the same variety that you would normally get from varying the creature types involved. (And, yes, you could just mix in other creature types into the encounter mix, but that’s not always logical in the context of a given scenario.)

Agnarr swung his blade high and cut down into the pulpy flesh. And from the wound a spray of blood burst forth, coating the walls and floor… and Shilukar.

An even cooler feature, as seen in this week’s campaign journal, is that tactical interest which has been externalized can be seized by the PCs and turned to their advantage, encouraging creative and memorable play.

In pursuing the image of a spray of blood which works in a fashion similar to a grease spell I could have very easily made that an ability inherent to a creature. (And, in fact, I would later do so in the form of the blood terrors.) But because the goblins triggered this ability by slashing the walls, it allowed the PCs to use the same tactic to their own advantage.

Externalized tactical interest can be environmental (like the walls that can be slashed to create blood sprays). An even more straightforward variety is simply equipment: The goblin with a magic item that lets them throw a lightning bolt or grow to giant size or create a caustic cloud at the head height of a human (but which Small creatures can easily run around underneath) is distinct from a typical goblin. And just as the wall can be slashed, so the enemy’s equipment can be looted and turned to the PCs’ use (creating long-term tactical adjustments).

EXTERNALIZED TACTICAL INTEREST AS DYNAMIC TERRAIN

Back in July I talked about the importance of dynamic terrain / tactically rich environments. Some may perceive a contradiction between my argument in that essay that “you don’t need to drape mechanics over it” in order to create dynamic terrain and this essay in which I’m basically saying, “Include a wall that can be slashed to mimic the effects of a grease spell.”

The difference is one of focus, intent, and utility.

There is a difference between saying, “There is a staircase here,” and saying, “The banister is here so that characters can slide down it, so I’ve applied the Slideable tag to it so that they can do so.” The former is a statement of existence; the latter features not only what I would describe as wasted prep in the form of contingency planning, but also an overly complicated mechanical framework for interacting with the environment.

When I say, “There is a wall which gouts blood when its damaged,” the statement I’m making is, in my opinion, more similar to the former statement than the latter. Yes, there is a mechanical component. But the mechanical component exists because the properties of the wall are a unique ability. It’s the same way that punching someone with a fist is generally handled with a general purpose mechanic rather than giving individual creatures a “Punching” tag.

The distinction may be a subtle one, but I think an important one. Note, for example, that I did not specifically anticipate (or even attempt to anticipate) that the wall’s ability to spray blood would reveal the presence of an invisible adversary. That’s because my focus was on modeling the wall’s existence, not its utility.

By way of contrast, note how saying “this Banister is here so that characters can slide down it” is a statement which ideologically suggests one needs to predetermine and list all the other potential functions to which the banister might be put. (For example, “characters can seek cover behind the banister.”) Whereas, the statement “there is a staircase here” doesn’t waste any time making suppositions about how it might be used during play (even though we are immediately cognizant of the fact that it can be walked up and down).

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Session 17A: Shilukar’s Lair

The features revealed as their hoods fell back were those of goblins – but goblins possessed of sickly gray skin. More disturbingly, the eyes and mouths of each goblin had been sewn shut with thick, black string. Despite this, all of them moved with sure, fluid motions.

In the Shadow of the Spire is actually the fifth campaign I’ve run in my Western Lands setting. I believe I’ve actually previously discussed that Ptolus first appeared at my gaming table 5+ years earlier when a group passed through the city and noted its distinctive Spire as they passed from the Southern Sea back towards Deepfall Pass in the west.

Ptolus - The City By the Spire

One of the players in that campaign, Dave, was Agnarr’s creator. Two other players had also previously played in Western Lands campaigns.

One of the cool things I think you can do when running multiple campaigns in the same setting (whether concurrently or over time) is to have crossovers between those campaigns. And also to have deep, long-term mysteries that are intrinsic to the setting and which are only slowly revealed

A good example of this sort of thing, from Monte Cook’s original Ptolus campaign, is the revelation that the entire world of Praemal is actually a planar prison for demons. Everyone else is just stuck there by accident, and the demons are constantly trying to dissolve the bonds of the prison and escape. That’s the kind of thing which can be quietly true for any number of campaigns – with various enigmas suggesting the truth only for the final revelation to really blow people’s minds.

(This particular set of metaphysics, it should be noted, isn’t true of the Western Lands, which is one of the reasons why my version of Ptolus diverges from Monte Cook’s, and does so rather severely in some key areas.)

Of course, this sort of thing doesn’t require tapping into the fundamental metaphysics of the entire campaign world. Sometimes it might be, “Hey, you know Good King George? The guy who’s been the beneficent monarch ruling over the kingdom for the last three campaigns? Turns out he’s actually a mind-controlled puppet and the whole kingdom is being run by the drow. And he has been his entire life.”

It’s also fun to have references to the PCs from the other campaigns and/or the things that they did. Those enduring legacies across years of play can really invest players into the setting, knowing that their actions will resonate not just in the campaign itself, but across campaigns. That perhaps players who they have never even met will be affected by what they’ve done today.

(The most ambitious example of this I’ve ever attempted was when the players in one campaign met the future versions of their PCs from the other campaign. Have I told that story?)

On the other hand, sometimes these crossovers are just, “Hey! Remember that cool character/monster/location from the last campaign?!”

Dave, for example, recognized the name Ritharius from that previous campaign. The revelation of Ritharius’ actions later in the campaign would have carried a little extra oomph because of that, I think. (And when Dave left the campaign I made a point of building Ritharius into Tor’s background to reposition that oomph.)

These creepy goblins are a little bit of both.

They first appeared in one of the earliest scenarios I ever ran for 3rd Edition, a remix of The Sunless Citadel in which the lower levels of the scenario had been transformed into a much more horrific venue. In both cases, the nature of these goblins points towards the much deeper truth that [SPOILERS REDACTED] and also that [SECURITY CLEARANCE REQUIRED]. But mostly they would have just been a cool cameo that players from that campaign would recognize.

Unfortunately, the player who would have recognized the goblins left the campaign before they showed up. C’est la vie.

This does highlight, however, that this technique can be of arguably limited value because there is a limited audience capable of appreciating the full context of these crossovers and callbacks. I would argue, however, that when done properly these things still have value even when no one is necessarily there to directly appreciate them.

Silmarillion - J.R.R. TolkienConsider, for example, the success J.R.R. Tolkien had in using the then-unpublished Silmarillion to create mythological depth in The Lord of the Rings. Queen Berúthiel’s cats (a reference in Lord of the Rings which, infamously unlike many of Tolkien’s other “historical” allusions, was created off-the-cuff as he was writing) are also a thing, of course, but there is, I believe, both a qualitative and practical difference between such off-the-cuff improvisations and a fully-integrated body of lore.

The problem, of course, is that creating fully-integrated bodies of lore is a time-consuming process. And as cool as it can be a player digs into something and discovers that there is, in fact, a vast ocean of lore to explored there, the odds of wasted prep are quite high. Campaigns you’ve previously run, however, are inherently “fully-integrated bodies of lore”, and thus this can work both ways: Stuff you’re calling back to is “free prep” for the current campaign (you’ve already prepped it). And, on the flip-side, designing material that’s intended to be useful for campaign after campaign after campaign can be very high value prep indeed.

And, honestly, I find these callbacks and crossovers entertaining and rewarding in their own right on a purely personal level, even if no one else at the table is ever aware of it. In that sense, I am like the watchmaker who carefully filigrees the gear of a pocket watch which the owner will never be able to see: There is a pride and a pleasure in seeing the pieces of a job well done slide into place.

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