Session 13C: The Tale of Itarek

This is not the first time that I’ve shared the Tale of Itarek here at the Alexandrian. Several years ago it appeared as a Tale From the Table. I was motivated to pluck this particular story out because of the great impression it had made on both myself and my gaming group. It was a truly significant event, and one which still lives large in our shared memory of the campaign more than a hundred sessions later.

I’ve been asked, in the past, about what the story behind the Tale of Itarek was. Sometimes these queries come colored with a clear subtext: Why did you plan for this to happen? And how did you manage to actually make it happen at the table?

If you’re familiar with literally everything else I’ve ever written about running a game, you probably won’t be shocked to discover that the answers are (a) I didn’t and (b) I didn’t.

There’s not really anything “hiding” behind the events depicted in the campaign journal: Elestra’s desperate need to save her python gave birth to the Tragedy at the Door, which saw the party get absolutely brutalized by Morbion’s area effect spells. (It’s pretty rare in classic D&D for me to see an enemy spellcaster get a chance to dump their entire spell list into the PCs; Morbion did it before taking any damage himself.) Poor skills mixed with unfortunate skill checks turned the rope into an impassable barrier, preventing the group from retreating. Their panic caused their communication and coordination to fall apart, allowing them to be picked off one by one.

When Dominic was the only character left, it wasn’t because I’d put my thumb on the scale. It was because everybody else had lost all their hit points. The campaign really was a hairsbreadth away from ending in a TPK, and the whole table knew it. You could have cut the tension with a knife.

So, no, I didn’t plan this.

I also wasn’t the one who came up with the idea of healing Itarek. That was Dominic. Dominic knew he had no chance at winning a duel with Morbion and no path of escape. He needed a champion, so he picked one from the limited options he had available to him.

I will take credit for having Itarek issue a formal challenge to Morbion. Without that particular point of inspiration on Itarek’s part, Morbion would have simply snuffed out Dominic and Itarek wouldn’t have lasted long.

That’s how these things work, right? Emergent narrative from the unexpected interstices of independent creative impulses.

(Couldn’t I have just decided to not have Morbion attack Dominc? Technically, yes. But in every important way, no.)

Once Itarek issued his challenge, the outcome still wasn’t certain. Dominic barely managed to keep Itarek on his feet from round to round by outpacing the damage Itarek was dealing out. (If Morbion still had his most powerful spells it would have gone differently; of course, if he still had his most powerful spells the party wouldn’t have been in this situation.)

Intriguingly, I have had two different people with reactions to this story ranging from irate to outright anger that I would “do this” to my players. “Bad form in any system”as one of them said.

Intriguing because, as I noted, my own players consider this one of the true highlights of the campaign. (And there are plenty of other people who can read this story and seem to appreciate what an awesome moment it was.) I think this reveals a fundamental difference in perception between players who have taken (and have had the opportunity to take) ownership of their actions versus those who are force fed material by the GMs. I’ve talked in the past about the penumbra of problems created by railroading techniques – the literally crippling weight that a GM is forced to carry when they take on sole responsibility for everything experienced by the PCs. This is an example of that: When faced with a situation that has gone pear-shaped, players who have taken responsibility for their own actions will become ecstatic and feel a great sense of achievement when they manage to work their way out of it. Those who have been conditioned to believe that the GM is feeding them pre-packaged content are likely to instead become upset that the GM has miscalculated and given them something “too tough” which knocked them all out of the action.

There’s some other version of this campaign where these two rooms and the handful of bad guys keyed to them are largely unremarkable. And that’s okay, because in that other version of the campaign there’s almost certainly some completely different moment which those other-dimensional versions of my players remember as being an incredible, never-rending crucible which, in this dimension’s version of the campaign, passed in a fairly pedestrian fashion.

One final peek “behind the campaign journal” here: Dominic doesn’t speak Goblin.  Since everyone else was unconscious, the players did not initially know what Itarek was saying to Morbion. Their exchange – clearly portentous and meaningful – was a mystery to them. It wasn’t until I wrote up the campaign journal (and a dramatic re-enactment of the scene at the beginning of the next session) that the full story of what had happened was revealed to the players.

I think that enigma may have played a small, but significant, role in why this particular moment lived large in their imaginations. Always leave them wanting more, right?

(Although the electric thrill of surviving a near-death experience shouldn’t be undervalued.)

Session 13B: The Tragedy at the Door

Sun Tzu said:

To cross mountains follow the valleys, search out tenable ground, and occupy the heights. If the enemy holds the heights, do not climb up to engage them in battle. This is the way to deploy an army in the mountains.

The army likes heights and abhors low areas, esteems the sunny [yang] and disdains the shady [yin]. (…) You must quickly get away from deadly configurations of terrain such as precipitous gorges with mountain torrents, Heaven’s Well, Heaven’s Jail, Heaven’s Net, Heaven’s Pit, and Heaven’s Fissure. Do not approach them. When we keep them at a distance, the enemy is forced to approach them. When we face them, the enemy is compelled to have them at their rear.

When on the flanks the army encounters ravines and defiles, wetlands with reeds and tall grass, mountain forests, or areas with heavy, entangled undergrowth, you must thoroughly search them because they are places where an ambush or spies would be concealed.

I was originally going to write that a lot of emphasis has been given recently to creating “dynamic terrain” or “tactically rich environments” or “interesting areas” or whatever other term somebody has decided to hang on the concept (all of which are just euphemisms for “two guys standing next to each other in an open field beating on each other is really boring”). But then I realized that this emphasis has actually been going on for like 10-15 years, which I suppose means it doesn’t really qualify as “recent” any more.

(Get off my lawn.)

What I will say to all you whippersnappers is that I think this has become significantly over-emphasized. This includes My Precious Encounter™ design where GMs become obsessed with creating the “perfect” encounter terrain, filled with all kinds of pre-programmed tactical features. It also includes the strange, Rube Goldbergian edifices that I’ve seen spring up where you need to mechanically “tag” the battlefield like some kind of amateur graffiti artist so that the characters can use a whole ‘nother set of mechanics in order to “invoke” the tags in order to (usually) gain some prepackaged, generic effect. Or, worse yet, you custom-build mechanical interfaces into every tag so that the players can dock into them with keywords or some such.

Gah.

Basically, what I’m saying is that if this is how you’re achieving dynamic terrain in your games, then you’re really over-thinking the whole thing.

Just create realistic, detailed locations and then have your bad guys use them logically. (Or insanely awesomely depending on circumstance and genre.)

You don’t need to drape mechanics over it. The staircase can just be a staircase. You don’t need to pre-tag it with the “Banisters” property so that people can slide down them. And I’d argue that you shouldn’t spend a lot of time pre-planning the stunts your Triad martial artist mooks are going to be performing, because the fight might just as easily happen in the next room or the PCs might just blow them all up with a grenade before the fight even starts.

In fact, rather than trying to nail everything down and covering it with an encrustacean of extruded mechanics, I tend to embrace the largely opposite approach as championed by Robin D. Laws:

In Feng Shui, you want to be able to decide on the spur of the moment that there just happen to be awnings hanging over that walkway between buildings, or there is indeed a ledge big enough for that hoodlum to jump off of. (…)

An alternative to maps are color pictures from magazines. Travel or architectural magazines often have excellent photos which you can use as the basis of your set design. You can show these to your players to help visualize where their characters are, and they will stimulate the imaginative process instead of hampering it.

If a player says they want to slide down the banister, then unless the staircase was explicitly established as not having a banister, then it almost certainly does now. (And if that’s case, why would I need to not only spell that out in my notes, but also dump a bunch of mechanics into it? See what I’m saying?)

EASIER SAID THAN DONE

It is, of course, really easy to just say, “Describe terrain and then be awesome with it!” And with thirty years of experience, maybe I am overestimating how easy it is to do this in practice for people who haven’t done it before.

But I will say this: It’s a skill and it will improve with practice. And all that mechanical over-engineering? It’s not practice for this skill. It’s a completely different thing.

And here’s my super secret technique for creating dynamic terrain:

1. Try not to describe empty spaces.
2. Think about how the space is actually used.
3. Make sure to include the third dimension. (Both up and down.)
4. Create chokepoints.
5. During the actual fight, think about the unintended ways in which characters can affect the environment and vice versa.

That’s basically it. If you find that you’ve jotted down an empty, featureless room in your notes (or conjure up that visual while improvising on-the-fly during play), second guess that impulse.

If you’re looking for inspiration, think about why the room exists: What purpose is it currently being used for? (Or was being used for if the area has been abandoned.) What furniture would be there? What physical shape would the space possess? What decorations or accoutrements would people put here?

Finally, remind yourself that your map may be two-dimensional, but the game world isn’t.

This last point, almost entirely by itself, can carry a lot of the heavy weight when it comes to dynamic terrain. You can see an example of that in this session, when the PCs get trapped trying to descend and ascend the sinkhole. That one tactical reality pretty much defines the entire encounter (which is one of the most memorable of the entire campaign for the group). There was a similar example back in Session 11, actually, where there was a short ten or fifteen foot drop down into the fungal garden corrupted by sickstone.

“Okay,” you say, “but what if the group is outside and there are no walls and they’re in the desert or the prairie or some other vast, wide open space?”

Well, in that case the point of interest is the vast, wide-open space. What does that distance do to the combat (particularly the initial encounter range) compared to the claustrophobic knife fights that most RPG combat tends towards?

Just don’t do it all the time, because anything repeated often enough will become boring. Find a box canyon or something. Or just throw a couple of hills up. (Ask Paullus and Varro what can be done to you with a couple of hills.)

Session 13A: At the Sinkhole’s Edge

Session 12C: To the Aid of Goblins

“The rest will be needed here. To hold the bridge,” Itarek said. “And they would not last long against the horrors that we have seen.”

Here’s something that I wish I was better at as a GM: Running NPC allies accompanying the PCs.

The internet is filled with horror stories of the dreaded “GMPC” – where the GM essentially tries to be a player in their own campaign by running a character indistinguishable from being another PC in the party. Although technically possible (and you can find a few success stories here and there), what usually happens is that the GMPC becomes the unabashed star / spotlight hog of the entire campaign and/or is used to forcibly railroad the players.

Because, frankly, the GM already controls the entire world, which should be power and participation enough for anyone. So 99 times out of 100, for a GMPC to exist there has to be some other shitty agenda motivating it in the first place.

The idea of running a GMPC isn’t just an obvious anathema to my whole ethos as an RPG gamer, I’m pretty sure it’s something I’m actually incapable of doing.

When circumstances, like those in the current campaign journal, dictate that NPCs will be allying with the PCs and traveling with them for some length of time, what generally happens is a simple, three-step process:

1. I make an effort to make sure those NPCs are contributing and present in the group.
2. I get distracted.
3. “Oh, crap. Right. Robert is here. Uh… I guess he was standing in the back this whole time?”

Itarek and the other goblins in the current sessions actually work out pretty well because so much of their time onscreen is spent in raid-type or combat situations, which means that I’ve got an initiative list which constantly pushes them back into the center of my attention.

It’s odd, really, because I can successfully run incredibly complex social interactions featuring dozens of characters without a hitch. But as soon as an NPC gets firmly aligned with the PCs, it feels almost inevitable that they’re going to turn invisible.

I think there’s probably a couple of factors at play here.

First, to pat myself on the back a little bit, I am usually pushing myself to the limits of my mental gymnastics when it comes to running a game. I’m a pretty big believer in the idea that there’s always another element you could be adding to improve your game, it’s just a question of whether or not you can. So if something seems non-essential, it’s easy for it to get replaced by a different ball and fade away unnoticed.

Second, I think I have a strong, instinctual predilection towards viewing NPC allies as non-essential. One of my primary pleasures as a GM is seeing how player-driven decisions interact with the situations I’ve created in the game world. NPC allies, who should logically and naturally become part of the group’s decision-making process, aren’t just superfluous to that creative agenda, they’re actually kind of innately hostile to it.

GMPCs being anathema to my values as a gamer? I meant that pretty literally.

So whenever things heat up in the campaign, NPC allies are just naturally the first thing to get dropped in favor of almost literally anything else.

When you have a weakness like this, there’s generally three things you can do about it. First, you can steer away from it. And you will, in fact, notice that it’s a rather rare day when you’ll see me deliberately pushing scenarios in which NPCs will naturally ally with the PCs. (When allies do crop up, it’s far more likely to be because the PCs are seeking them out.)

Second, you can focus on improving it. In the case of losing focus on NPC allies, part of that is just literally focusing, of course. But you can also try other methods of keeping the NPC in the forefront of your brain. Giving them a unique miniature, for example, can help. (Although in some of the chaotic battlefields I run, they can still get lost.) An idea that just occurred to me as I was writing this: Clip a picture of the NPC ally to the inside of my GM screen so that the NPC is literally looking me in the eye. (Not sure why something so obvious has never occurred to me before.)

Third, find alternative techniques to achieve the same ends. For example, I’ll often kick an NPC ally to one of the players and ask them to run them as a secondary character if at all possible. (Often it isn’t, unfortunately, because the NPC has an independent agenda that can’t be assumed by the players, for reasons rather similar, actually, to why GMs shouldn’t be running GMPCs.) For NPC allies that are sticking around for awhile, I’ve even been known to invite in temporary players to assume the role. Having a co-GM who can focus on the areas where you’re weak can also be effective.

When you can have successes in the areas where you’re weak, of course, you’ll enjoy a real sense of accomplishment. That turned out to be the case with Itarek and his goblins, who came – as you’ll begin to see in Session 13 – to assume a very special place in the campaign.

Session 12B: A Party at Castle Shard

It was not the evening that any of them had expected – it had been both more and less than that. But it was an evening that none of them would ever forget.

I’ve had a couple of people mention, when they realized what the heart of Session 12 was going to be, that they were interested in seeing what the Party Planning game structure I wrote up awhile back would look like in actual play. Unfortunately, this is one of those occasions where the nature of writing up a campaign journal entry creates something of a distortion field.

Everything that’s described in the campaign journal actually happened at the table, of course, but events have been both rearranged and heavily condensed. My goal was not, in fact, to provide a transcript of the session, but rather an effective summary that could serve as both entertainment and reference document as the campaign moved forward.

Perhaps the most significant “deception” to be found here, for example, is the degree to which the campaign journal fails to represent how much cutting back and forth there was between scenes: When the party split up and went to talk to a bunch of different people, I would engage in conversation for a couple of minutes and then swap to another group and then again and then again. These interactions have not only been boiled down to their key highlights, they’ve also generally been grouped together into complete conversations.

With this limitations in mind, however, let’s take a closer look at how the Party at Castle Shard worked in actual play.

SETTING IT UP

To start, let’s consider what the function of the party was. This was several fold, actually:

• It was a reward for their hard work. In Getting the Players to Care I talk about how one of the methods of doing that is to make it treasure. This is a somewhat unusual variant on that principle, but by making this party clearly part of the lavish pay-off for the hard work (and near death experiences) they had put in for Lord Zavere, the players became deeply invested in the party and were anticipating it for months in the real world.
• It was a signal that the PCs had risen to a new level in the world. This inherently meant closing one “chapter” of the campaign and beginning the next.
• It was an opportunity to introduce a bunch of new characters, drastically expanding the supporting cast of the campaign and setting up relationships that would drive the campaign forward into Act II (which is still a little ways down the road at this point, but which was definitely on my horizon).

It was also, of course, intended to be an entertaining evening of gaming.

THE GUEST LIST

Let’s take a moment to look at the new characters I was introducing here. There were a total of eighteen guests at the party (not including the PCs), of which five were previously known to the PCs.

Familiar Faces: The familiar faces were quite intentional. First, because it would provide islands of familiarity for the PCs to fall back upon (and around which social interactions with the new NPCs could coalesce). Second, because the PCs had been compartmentalizing the various aspects of their lives and I knew that bringing some of these aspects together (and most likely overlapping with each other) would create dramatic tension.

New Faces: Nonetheless, throwing more than a dozen new NPCs at the players all at once may seem like a lot at first glance. But the party planning structure is designed to break them up into smaller groups, and introduce them in manageable chunks.

More importantly, I’ve found that it can be quite effective to introduce a bunch of new characters in a cluster (whether all at once in a party like this or just rapidly over the course of a few sessions) and then have spans where only established characters are being reintroduced. If I was going to theorize about why this works, I would say it’s partly because some NPCs will “click” with players and some won’t, and when you introduce them in clusters your focus will naturally be drawn towards the NPCs who are resonating. (You’ll notice that this echoes, at a macro-level, something I talk about in Party Planning at a micro-level.)

But it’s also because having all of these new characters interact with and collide with each other is a great way of revealing character; and also a great way of drawing the PCs into their drama.

Stacking Interesting NPCs: The other way I think about this technique is that I’m “stacking” interesting NPCs. It’s like I’m laying in a supply. Each NPC is a tool, but you can often let the PCs figure out how they’ll actually end up getting “used” down the line.

For example, look at how the PCs pursue selling the orrery they found in Ghul’s Labyrinth here, creating a plot thread that will run for several more sessions. You’ll also want to pay attention to how the PCs’ relationship with Aoska develops in the future.

Of course, in some cases I’m planting NPCs in order to very specifically set things up in the future. The great thing is that, if you do your job right, the players won’t be able to figure out which is which. Honestly, if you do it right, then down the line you’ll probably have difficulty looking back and remembering which was which.

BANG, BANG

“Ah, Mistress Tee!” Zavere’s deep baritone called out to her. “Perhaps you could help me talk some sense into Leytha Doraedian.”

With something of a sick feeling in her stomach, Tee turned. It was true. Doraedian was standing there with Lord Zavere. He had a look of absolute surprise on his face.

Which touches on a wider design ethos: Your party has a location, a guest list, a main event sequence, and topics of conversation. If you want to create a truly kick-ass party, your primary design goal is to liberally seed all of these elements with moments of dramatic potential.

Note that I didn’t say dramatic moments. I said moments of dramatic potential. The actual dramatic moments will arise out of that potential during actual play. What you’ll find even more surprising is how these varied moments of dramatic potential will begin interacting with each in ways you never anticipated.

For example, when it came to Tee’s mentor, Leytha Doraedian, I had only a single note:

Surprised to see Tee at Castle Shard.

I didn’t know how (or even when) that surprise would manifest, exactly, but I think the dramatic potential in it is clear.

In my Topics of Conversation, I had listed:

Argument between Doraedian, Zavere, and Moynath about the Commissar’s weak attitude towards the Balacazars.

It was only as the events of the party actually played out that Tee became the character who approached this debate in progress and these two moments joined together to create the very memorable scene you see in the campaign journal. (Nor had I anticipated the way in which Tee’s earlier interactions with the Commissar would increase her own tension and confusion over this topic.)

Many of these dramatic moments can be thought of as bangs around which scenes (or mini-scenes) can be framed during the party. But others are just angles of tension (old relationships, new debates, hidden agendas), and the bang will be discovered during play as these elements interact with each other.

And some of your bangs may not ignite. For example, the Graven One has a bad history with the Inverted Pyramid and I wrote, “His cold indifference with the Inverted Pyramid will manifest itself if he interacts with Jevicca Nor.” But in the organic ebb and flow of the party, that never happened. (Which is, of course, just fine.)

In other cases, of course, the PCs will aggressively pursue agendas and create bangs (either directly or indirectly) that you had no way of anticipating. Make sure you don’t miss those moments! Pursue them aggressively!

A STRONG START

“Master Ranthir!” The Iron Mage cried, crossing the room towards him and resuming his scan of the room. “Mistress Tee! Agnarr, Elestra, and Dominic! Master Tor! To my side! I have an errand for you!”

All of this talk about discovering things during play aside, there’s no reason to be afraid of having some strong, pre-designed moments. The sudden appearance of the Iron Mage is one such example of this: It’s a very strong bang that demands a response from the PCs.

In many ways, this is the primary function of the Main Event Sequence: You let things play out organically, but if you feel like the current pool of dramatic tension is being exhausted, trigger the next event, which will usually be some strong, dramatic moment – perhaps accompanied by a specific bang the PCs need to react to – which will cause all the pieces of the party to suddenly move in new directions and begin a fresh set of collisions.

One place where you’ll want to make a point of stocking these ready-to-go moments is at the very beginning of the party: You want a good, strong start to set things in motion. Once you’ve got some momentum built up, the action will generally begin driving itself. But you’ve got to get that momentum going.

You can see this in the Party at Castle Shard with the opening sequence of events, which, in my notes, I actually separated out as a separate event track labeled “Arrival – Events”:

• Arrival (Kadmus greets them and leads them to Zavere’s private office; they’re eyed by other guests who are being taken directly upstairs)
• Meeting with Zavere (chance to spot the writing on the map; Zavere tells them Linech’s burrow has been destroyed; he personally escorts them to the ballroom)
• Rehobath and the Commissar (Kadmus barring their entry; a loud argument; Zavere smooths things over)
• Guests of Special Honor (Zavere introduces them as “guests deserving of much honor, for their recent service to both myself and to the interests of the City of Ptolus” in order to needle the Commissar)

This sequence introduces them to a handful of characters; gives everyone a chance to start warming up to social interactions; and gives the PCs two BIG bangs. I don’t know what their reaction to those bangs will be, but they’re pretty much guaranteed to color how the rest of the party progresses.

You can also see how I used these first moments to establish, in brief, several key pieces of exposition which would be major hubs for the rest of the party:

• Conflict between Zavere and the Commissar.
• Destruction of Linech Cran’s burrow (which could have also been learned before the party if the PCs had been seeking information, but they were stuck underground).
• The other guests are intrigued by the PCs being included on the guest list.

And, really, that’s all it takes to get the ball rolling.