Session 14D: In the Beast Pits

As she moved to search it for hidden compartments or the like, the illusion screening it suddenly dropped away, revealing a wolf lying on the table. Its back had been carefully cut open and the flaps of flesh carefully pinioned to the table’s surface.

This moment in the campaign – with the illusion dropping away to reveal a splayed open wolf – was, in practice, a pretty good example of an “RPG jump scare”.

Generally speaking, without special circumstances, you don’t get actual jump scares in tabletop RPGs. Vocal narration simply isn’t a medium in which true jump scares can be properly performed. But there are broadly similar moments in which unexpected twists can be abruptly presented and provoke “oh shit!” responses from the table.

The illusion falling away, in this particular context, created immediate fear that the group was about to be hit with a trap. (A fear carefully cultivated throughout the Labyrinth of the Beast by a variety of immersive, disturbingly thematic traps.) The gruesome visage of the wolf itself capitalized on this fear, riding the emotional wave and using it as a channel for emphasizing the creepy imagery (and the even more horrific implications).

(Note the importance of the moment’s interactivity was also important here: If the PCs had just seen a dead wolf, the description might have creeped the players out a little bit. But the stasis field – and the implicit decision of whether to leave the stasis field intact or turn it off – forces the players to engage with the moment. That makes the moment more “real” and more meaningful than a simple description.)

But if you give this scene a degree of thought, you might be struck by a question: Why was there an illusion spell? Despite the moment playing out rather successfully, it seems a little odd, right?

The reason for that is simple: This isn’t how I prepped the scene.

WHOOPS…

What you’re reading here is actually the result of a mistake. When the PCs entered this room, I misread the room key and didn’t describe the wolf’s corpse lying on the table.

Doh.

Once I realized my mistake, I had several options:

First, the wolf no longer exists. I didn’t describe it. The environment has been interacted with as if it wasn’t there. So… it’s not there. Never was. The notes never made the jump from prep to the “reality” of what actually transpires at the table.

If you’re dealing with something nonessential, this can often be the easiest course to take. In the case of the wolf, it was, in any larger sense, nonessential. But it was very cool (if I do say so myself), and it would have been a shame to lose it.

Second, the simple retcon. “Whoops, I forgot to mention that there’s a dead wolf on the operating table.”

This approach is fairly straightforward, obviously. The drawback is that the open retcon inherently disrupts the natural flow of the game world’s presentation. Often this disruption is not so significant as to cause problems, but sometimes it is. One common example is if the PCs have already taken an action which they wouldn’t have taken if they knew the information you forgot to tell them. (Handling this specific example is something I discuss at greater length in GM Don’t List #1: Morphing Reality.)

In this case the PCs had not taken such an action, but I knew that the “retcon disruption” would blunt the impact of the imagery. (The players would be cognitively focused on processing the retcon instead of fully focused on the description.) And since the entire function of the corpse was its creepy imagery, blunting the impact of that imagery would defeat the purpose.

Third, swap rooms around. This technique works particularly well if there are multiple similar rooms in a particular area. For example, the PCs are supposed to find a dress with some weird stains on it. You goof up and forget to give them the clue in the Master Bedroom. I guess the dress is in the closet of a different room. (Or maybe it’s in the laundry room downstairs.)

So if there had been another convenient examination room nearby, I might have just moved the wolf corpse in there.

Fourth, create a reason why your screw-up wasn’t a screw-up. This is what I did with the wolf. Why didn’t they notice the wolf as soon as they walked into the room? Because there was an illusion spell preventing them from seeing it.

This basically moved the wolf from something noticed with passive observation (which is automatically triggered) to something that required a declaration of action from the players (i.e., interacting with the illusion). But you can apply the same technique in other ways, too: That NPC really should have told them about the Duke’s relationship with Countess Lovelace. Why didn’t they? Come up with an explanation. Blackmail? A hidden agenda that creates a conflict of interest?

The interesting thing about this technique is how often it actually creates additional interest: The RPG jump scare of the illusion dropping was effective. An NPC with a secret agenda is probably more interesting (and the scenario more dynamic) as a result.

The difficulty is that there was probably a reason why this additional layer of interest didn’t exist in the first place. (Or maybe not. Good ideas develop through play all the time.) It can be difficult to make sure that the continuity tracks on your hidden retcon.

For example, what if the players want to know why there’s an illusion spell covering the operating table?

First, you should have some rough idea of why the retcon makes sense, even if it doesn’t necessarily track 100% right out of the gate. In this case, my rationalization was that the wolf, in mid-surgery, is super gross. Nobody wants to look at that. Might as well throw up an illusion spell so you don’t have to look at it right?

Second, you’ll benefit from the fact that continuity problems that seem glaring to you behind the screen will be significantly less so to the players. The wolf-masking illusion, for example, ends up being pretty deep into fridge logic territory.

Third, you can just smile enigmatically. You are not obliged to pull back the curtain on your campaign and explain its inner workings. If something seems mysterious to the players and they want to figure out the why and wherefore of it, the obligation lies on them to take actions in character and figure it out. (In the process of which, you’ll probably be able to flesh out your initial rationalization to the point where it actually does make complete sense.)

CODA

It should be noted that none of these techniques are ideal. In an ideal world, you don’t screw up the room description in the first place, right?

Session 14C: The Temple of Ebony

They decided to start with the hall to the east: The iron doors opened onto a large room paved in glistening ebony. It rose in three tiers. Two horrific statues stood in the corners of the second tier. To the left a twisting pillar of coiled tendrils and to the right a squat monstrosity. In the center of the third tier, at the top of the room, there was a slab of black ebony…

One of the cool things about a well-designed dungeon is that you can never be entirely sure about what sequence the PCs will encounter content in. It’s like tossing all of your scenes into a blender: Stuff will end up juxtaposed in ways you never anticipated, prompting all manner of creative interactions and dynamic consequences.

For example, the very first room of the Laboratories of the Beast features three exits. Two of these expand outwards in ever-growing, heavily xandered loops. The third exit – which PCs heading straight ahead through the initial chamber would pass through – led to a single room: The temple of the dark gods described near the beginning of this week’s journal entry.

In designing the dungeon this way, I had lightly assumed that this temple would be encountered relatively quickly: It was right at the entrance! As you can obviously see, this ended up not being the case and the PCs actually spent prodigious amounts of time exploring this dungeon complex over the course of several expeditions before finally entering the temple.

As a result, they entered the temple dedicated to the dark gods after they’d already encountered Morbion, who worshipped one of those dark gods. The intended foreshadowing, therefore, was completely inverted: Rather than, “Oh shit, here’s one of those dark gods!” it became, “Oh shit! That dark god is a bigger and older deal than we realized!”

… except the PCs didn’t actually connect the dark gods of the temple to the dark god worshipped by Morbion, so the whole thing actually became a lingering mystery rather than being thematically connected.

With all that being said, of course, the design of a dungeon DOES impart some degree of sequencing, some or most of which will stick. So this is something you want to give some thought to when you’re designing things.

CHOKEPOINTS: There are points, even in a xandered design, where certain areas will lie beyond a chokepoint. For example, it was basically impossible for the PCs to reach the Laboratory of the Beast without first passing through the Complex of Zombies. Or, “If they go to Shardworld, it’s because they definitely passed through the Portal of Shattered Obsidian.” That sort of thing.

If there’s something that the PCs should know or experience before being in a given location, place it in a chokepoint they have to pass through in order to reach that location.

Note that chokepoints can also be non-physical: You need to find the gillweed gardens before you can extensively explore the underwater portion of the complex. Or you need to find the mending stone before you can use the damaged portal without ripping yourself into a thousand shards.

Chokepoints also don’t have to boil down to a specific chamber or door or the like. They can be more abstract than that: The PCs don’t have to pass through a specific room to get to the Lilac Caverns, but they do have to pass through the Golem’s Workshop complex. I sometimes think of a dungeon has having different “phases” or regions”.

How does the idea of establishing a particular piece of knowledge or experience sync up with this concept of a phased chokepoint? Well, think about the Three Clue Rule. You want them to know that the Golem was obsessed with cloning his creator before they find the creator’s body in the Lilac Caverns? Well, every facet of the workshop can (and should!) reflect that obsession in an almost fractal way, right?

In other words, rather than locking yourself down into a specific “this is the experience they need to have”, you can can kind of spew “experience DNA” everywhere and let the actions of the PCs slowly assemble a custom experience of their own out of it.

NON-SYMMETRICAL APPROACHES: Thinking of things strictly in an “experience A before B” way is a trap, though, and you should avoid it. When you’re looking at a key room (or suite of rooms) and thinking about how it’s structured, you can also embrace the fact that there are multiple paths to that area.

One of the things you can do to make your dungeon a richer and more interesting environment is to specifically make the experience of the area different depending on which direction you approach it from. A really easy example of this is entering a Goblin Princess’ bedchamber by fighting your way through the guards outside vs. slipping in through the forgotten secret door at the back of her boudoir.

DON’T THINK ABOUT IT: The other thing to keep in mind is that you don’t actually have to try to keep all of this stuff in your head while you’re designing the dungeon. In fact, it can become way too easy to start obsessing about this, at which point you can end up with a kind of hyperthyroidic version of My Precious Encounters™, except now you’re trying to carefully cultivate specific experiences by somehow conceptually corralling an incredibly complex and dynamic scenario.

You’ll generally be happier (and have better games) if you don’t rely on things playing out in a specific sequence. And, in reality, it’s not that hard: Use situation-based design as your primary design stance and things tend to work out. This is really the same thing as Don’t Prep Plots: Don’t prep pre-packaged experiences, prep situations.

So why bring up dungeon sequencing at all? Because it WILL have an effect on how a scenario plays out, so you shouldn’t blind yourself to that or simply leave it up to blind chance. I’m just saying it should be used at a broader, more conceptual level and primarily as a diagnostic tool rather than the primary motivation for your design.

For example, consider the Goblin Caverns of the Ooze Lord scenario that ran from Session 10 through Session 13. I designed the scenario like this:

Thus, the PCs encounter the goblins suffering the ooze infection before traveling to the ooze caverns from whence the ooze infection originates.

But I could have just as easily designed the scenario like this, with virtually no changes to the local topographies:

So that when the PCs come to the checkpoint manned by the (as yet unnamed) Itarek, as described in Session 10D, they would have the choice of turning left to the clan caverns or turning right to the ooze caverns.

(This would also change the logic of the world somewhat: In the scenario-as-designed, the goblins are – wittingly or otherwise – guarding the surface world against the Ones of Ooze. In this alternate version of the scenario, it’s far more likely that the PCs will encounter ooze-goblins coming up through the Laboratory of the Beast and infiltrating Ptolus. Which is what I mean by a situation-based design stance, right? But I digress.)

You could even go one step farther with:

So that the PCs enter the ooze caverns, probably fight Morbion, and only later discover the goblins who were being victimized by them.

(This wouldn’t work at all with the original seed for the adventure, which posited that the goblins in Grayson House were refugees who fled to the surface to escape the growing threat of the ooze-goblins. We could probably just swap it up, though, and have them instead be ooze-goblins who Morbion sent to the surface as initial scouts. But I digress again.)

It shouldn’t be too difficult to see how each of these macro-sequences would fundamentally change how the resulting scenario would play out at the table, right?

The specifics, of course, are all still up in the air: As I’ve discussed in the past, I didn’t anticipate the PCs forming a long-term alliance with the Clan of the Torn Ear. But that option wouldn’t have even been on the table if I’d sequenced the dungeon in a different way.

And that’s what you have to be mindful of: Not trying to pre-control outcomes, but figuring out what the most interesting chaotic bundle of unrealized potentials is and bringing that into play.

Session 14B: Malkeen Dawning

Before the development of the modern clone spell – a powerful magical rite that would allow a spellcrafter to duplicate his own body – the archaic version of the spell was dangerous to both subject and spellcaster. However, the now largely forgotten blood clone spell was safer, although it was not as useful (the subject would awaken an amnesiac). Most modern practitioners of the craft now considered blood clone to be only one step removed from raising the dead, since one was essentially capturing a soul which would then lose its own identity.

In this journal entry you can see a gimmick that I find appealing: The idea that the magical spells and equipment found in the core rulebook represent the current “state of the art” when it comes to magical understanding in the game world, but that, like any other body of knowledge, it was preceded by long aeons of experimentation and cruder antecedents.

And when you go poking around in the dark and dusty portions of the world (like, say, subterranean vaults) you’re likely to stumble across those antecedents (or their remnants).

Sometimes you can find weird oddities in the way this older stuff works, presenting utility which may have been lost with the more efficient modern versions. (Odd parallel with the Old School Renaissance there.) But this unexpected utility isn’t really the point; the point is to create a sense of antiquity. Or, I suppose more accurately, to give the game world actual antiquity. The sort of real depth that breathes life into a setting and makes the word “ancient” in “ancient ruins” into something that’s meaningful.

Hence the blood clone facility the PCs find here.

If you’re designing antecedent magic for your own campaign, here are a few angles to think about.

LIMITED EFFECT: Like the blood clone spell, look at a magical element and figure out how you could strip out some aspect of its utility. Just stripping out that utility and having a slightly crappier version of the spell is okay, I guess, but it’s better if you can look at that limitation and find a way to evocatively express it.

For example, a mirror image spell which was limited to casting your duplicate images into actual mirrors. Or a teleport artifact based on an older version of the spell that leaves a peephole-sized tear in reality for 1d4 minutes, making it easy for people to see where you’ve gone.

BIGGER: Look at your smartphone. Imagine how many warehouses it would have taken to house that much computing power back in the ‘40s. Now, apply the same logic to magic.

For example:

LEY-LACED MARBLE

Ley-laced marble is a naturally occurring stone. During the metamorphic processes which form the marble, ley-energy permeates the impurities lacing the original sedimentary rocks. The resulting marble (which is usually found on or near ley lines) is possessed of properties similar to a pearl of power. (In fact, it’s hypothesized that pearls of power were created by reverse-engineering ley-laced marble.)

Unlike pearls of power, however, ley-laced marble is not particularly efficient in its retention of magical energy. In addition to being difficult to excavate from the ground, ley-laced marble must be maintained in such large chunks in order to maintain its properties that it is rarely if ever portable in any true sense of the word.

However, rites have been perfected which allow a piece of ley-laced marble to be keyed to a specific object. Anyone carrying the keyed object can access the powers of the ley-laced marble at a distance of 1 mile per caster level.

Later in the campaign, the PCs find the statue of an archer carved from ley-laced marble and the adamantine arrow to which the statue has been keyed in the collection of a lich. Not only does this emphasize that the lich’s legacy stretches back into time immemorial, it also creates treasure with unique interest.

SIDE EFFECTS: You could do the same thing back in Ye Olden Days, but there were consequences we no longer suffer from; kinks that generations of patient work and research have managed to work around.

For example, did you know that the earliest magical potions required you to surgically extract and pulp the brain of a freshly dead arcanist who had memorized the spell? Once established, these could be alchemically maintained sort of like sourdough starters. The problem is that sometimes the drinker of such a potion would be “infected” with the memories of the original arcanist from which the potion stock had been derived. False memories, geas-like obsessions, and other strange affectations could result.

You can also use this to push magical research in the opposite direction: Somebody figures out how to create a magic item that’s more powerful than the common variety, but they haven’t worked out all the kinks yet. For example, I had a potion master in my campaign who had developed potions with unusually powerful effects, but also unusually powerful side effects. For example:

Granite Hide: This grainy, chalk-tasting, orange liquid turns the imbiber’s skin into a pliable yet hard-as-granite substance. (Treat as stoneskin spell.) The potion lasts for 1 hour. After the potion wears off, the victim suffers 1d6 points of Dexterity damage from a calcification of the joints (temporary damage, no save).

Caster Level: 7^th; Prerequisites: Brew Potion, stone skin; Market Price 2,350 gp

MISSING LINKS: Once you’ve established one piece of antecedent magic, you can also look at filling in the “missing links” between then and now. For example, later in the campaign the PCs had the opportunity to discover another blood clone facility, but in this case one which showed that the ancient arcanist had figured out how to re-imbue the clone with the original’s memories. It was still an overwrought and complicated process compared to a modern clone spell, but it’s getting closer.

As you can see, this won’t be the last time antecedent magic crops up in this campaign journal. After all, it is, as I said, a gimmick that I like.

Session 14A: Many Unhappy Returns

When Ranthir awoke, he quickly prepared the magical rites he would need to analyze and identify the equipment they had taken from Morbion. Much of this proved to be magical, but perhaps the most valuable were the finely-crafted boots he had worn. These had been enchanted with a levitation charm.

I think managing your gear is an important (possibly essential) part of Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t think it should be a painful or belabored process (and have even gone so far as to create house rules to streamline gear management), but both the balance of the game and its narrative dynamic are driven by PCs managing their equipment.

Some people may think that sounds like a strange idea, but the current session offers a couple good examples of what I’m talking about.

The first, which I already talked about briefly in “Treasure With Context”, is the orrery: A valuable treasure which is difficult to remove from the dungeon due to its bulk. If you were in a campaign that tended to just gloss over matters of encumbrance, it might be simple to simply handwave this away, too. “Once the complex is cleared, you’re able to figure out how to extract the orrery and sell it. Add X amount of gold to your bank account.”

But because there are structures and expectations in place, this campaign defaults to the players needing to figure out exactly how they’re going to solve this problem. The solution they came up with (selling the location of the artifact instead of the artifact itself) was incredibly clever, and thus both entertaining and rewarding in itself. But it also pushed the PCs to enter into an arrangement/alliance with a powerful noble family. That sort of thing has consequences.

Eventually, however, Tee was able to use the boots to reach the high cavern and confirm that there was, indeed, a cindershard outcropping there. Tee threw a rope and grappling hook down to her companions below, allowing Agnarr and Tor to climb up and join her in harvesting the crystals.

The second is the cindershard expedition: Notice that overcoming the challenges preventing them from harvesting the crystals couldn’t be easily overcome until they were properly equipped. Realizing that you aren’t currently carrying the right tools for the job will force a group to disengage and then, importantly, re-engage with the dungeon. Or it will force them to improvise around the lack. Either option will tend to create multi-faceted interest in the form of both challenge and drama as the groups deals with either the immediate jeopardies involved with improvising around missing equipment or dealing with the strategic complexities (and evolving narrative) that comes from leaving and then returning to the dungeon.

Dungeon expeditions are, above all, expeditions: It is a prolonged journey into a dangerous unknown where you are, for the duration of the expedition, cut off and unable to resupply from civilization. The decision to take resource X will unlock certain experiences, but comes at the expense of taking resource Y (which would have unlocked different experiences).

And if you look at Dungeons & Dragons from 1974-2008, the structures of the game are all ultimately focused on (and balanced around) the strategic elements of expeditionary play. While D&D is flexible enough that you can do many different things with it, the further your get from expeditionary play – the further you drift from Arneson’s and Gygax’s expected play – the more mechanical problems you’re going  to find cropping up.

OTHER DYNAMICS

This is often mistaken for one-true-wayism. That’s not the case. Gear management is rewarding for D&D’s dynamic; it often isn’t rewarding for other play dynamics.

Blades in the Dark, for example, focuses on criminal crews performing scores. Such scores are generally intended to be (and usually work when they are) one-shotted. You don’t want to disengage and then reengage with them; you want to run them.

To create challenging and drama-filled runs, Blades’ game play is built around two pillars: First, improvisation and retroactive planning. Second, ticking clocks and resource ablation that pushes the PCs to the wall and makes them hurt. The game, therefore, uses an equipment system in which you select a specific Load before each score. The Load determines how many useful items of gear your character is carrying (3 for a Light Load, 5 for a Normal Load, etc.), but you don’t have to decide exactly what those items are until you use them. (Thus you can improvise freely by simply declaring that you planned for and brought exactly the right item for this circumstance, but are also faced with the possibility of running out of Load slots, leaving you unequipped for the next challenge.)

Another example is Trail of Cthulhu, which has a Preparedness skill. As long as an investigator has access to their kit, they can make a Preparedness test to see whether or not they have a particular piece of equipment. This is desirable in Trail because the game’s focus is the investigation; periodically putting the investigation on hold in order to prepare an equipment list doesn’t enhance the core game play, it distracts from it. You want to move from getting a clue to seeing the payoff from the clue; you don’t want to pause between those two points for an equipment break.

Why couldn’t you just takes Blades-style Loads or Trail-style Preparedness and graft them onto D&D?

Well, you could. But as I alluded to above, equipment management in D&D is only one of the ways in which the game is designed for an expeditionary dynamic: Wizard spell slots, long-term hit point ablation. The game was built on mounting expeditions into the dungeons below Castle Blackmoor, and virtually all of the core game play that isn’t built around a combat simulator is built around those expeditions. Tearing out one chunk of that game play and replacing it with something else isn’t going to single-handedly change the nature of the game. You’re going to end up with a mechanical chimera. One that may, or may not, work out.

(But, if you don’t give careful thought to the actual effect you’re trying to achieve, is more likely not to.)

Session 13D: A Time of Tragic Rest

Poor puppy…

In my experience, there are very few immutable rules when it comes to being a Game Master: Something that would completely ruin one game might be the ultimate coup de grace in another, either because the mechanics are different, the setting is different, the players are different, or just because the situation is different.

But there is at least one truism: If you kill their pets, you are guaranteed an emotional response.

That response will almost certainly include anger, but it will also include anguish and guilt and regret. If you want the PCs to be motivated to seek vengeance, you’ll probably get more consistent results from knocking off Fido than you will from slasher-slaughtering their boyfriend.

Now, if the death of that pet is capricious or forced, then a lot of that anger can end up getting channeled at you. This is one of the advantages of cultivating a reputation of fairness and impartiality: If your players trust you not to just screw with them arbitrarily, then when the hammer comes down they’ll turn their emotional reaction into the fiction and it will deepen their immersion into the game. If they don’t trust you, then the emotional response will be channeled out of the game and damage their immersion.

You can see a fairly clean example of this in the current session: Elestra had been cavalierly sending her python viper into dangerous situations for several sessions, and that had now created a situation which (a) nearly got the entire party killed and (b) resulted in the python’s death.

Heated arguments. Recriminations. All of it turned inward. All of it focused on the relationships between the characters, and thus strengthening the reality and the significance of those relationships (fictional though they may be). Great stuff.

A slightly less clean example happened in my original Eternal Lies campaign. (No spoilers for the published campaign here.) One of the characters owned a horse. The bad guys killed the horse. In this case, I think largely because the event happened “off-screen” while the PCs were in a different country, there was more recrimination aimed at me as the GM. But it was a legitimate consequence: The PCs had let the bad guys identify them; the bad guys had sent them a warning. And that emotional burst was quickly turned back into the game and focused on those bad guys, adding fresh resolve to the investigators and what they were trying to accomplish.

(I will say, though, that I’m pretty convinced killing the horse evoked a bigger response than if I had chosen to target one of their other Sources of Stability – i.e., NPCs who are specifically important to them.)

Conversely, these strong emotional reactions around pets can also be inverted. For example, in the first 3^rd Edition campaign I ever ran there was a time when the party got unexpectedly cut off inside a dungeon. By the time they’d managed to work their way back to the surface, they were fairly convinced that the pack animals they had left tied off – including their beloved steeds – would be dead. There was a fair amount of emotional dread and pre-guilt. Instead, they found their horses unharmed and surrounded by catastrophic devastation and a dozen or so dead bad guys.

Not only was the emotional relief a much-needed “win” at the end of a scenario which had unexpectedly taxed and stressed them in a number of ways, it also deepened their curiosity regarding the mystery of what exactly had happened while they were in the dungeon.

(This technique doesn’t work, of course, if everyone knows that their pets have plot armor and death immunity.)

You can get similar results by putting beloved pets in jeopardy, thus investing the sequence to rescue them with a heightened emotional tension. Although, once again, it’s important to remember that if the danger is capricious or forced, the reaction to it will be directed out of the game and instead reduce the stakes.

Her pet of long years – her last connection to her home in Seyrun – had been slain. Dominic laid a blessing upon the body that would preserve it for three days and nights, but there was nothing more that he could do for it.