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Ptolus: Running the Campaign – Managing Your Supporting Cast

June 29th, 2018

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

In Session 9, the PCs found a note mentioning a mysterious “Urnest”:

To our associate, Mister Linech Cran—

We are in desperate need of your most delicate shipments. As you well know, we have important work which cannot proceed apace without those shipments. Urnest assures me that the consequences will be most dire if you cannot fulfill the responsibilities you have pledged yourself to. But I am pleased to inform you that I have interceded on your behalf. You have until the third of Kadal to deliver those shipments promised to us these two weeks past.

Silion

In this session, while attending the gala at Castle Shard, they encounted Commissar Igor Urnst for the first time.

One was a tall, lean man with a mane of white hair down to his shoulders, a moustache, and goatee. He wore a monacle in one eye, contributing to his regal appearance; a dark blue tunic trimmed with gold; and a matching cloak trimmed with ermine. A heavy sword was strapped to his side and he wore several military honors upon his breast. Tee instantly recognized him as Commissar Igor Urnst, the leader of the city.

Urnst vs. Urnest. That’s not a typo. These are two different characters.

This sort of thing is one of the reasons why it can be valuable to keep a list of names handy for random NPCs, because otherwise your subconscious is likely to be drawn back to the same options over and over again. This is also something you need to watch out for if you’re drawing material into your campaign from many different sources, as it’s quite possible to find unexpected overlaps in naming.

Neither was the case here. Both Urnst and Urnest are drawn directly from the Ptolus sourcebook. Just an odd quirk of the truly massive amount of material Monte Cook had generated over years of running his campaign and then injected into that mammoth tome.

I recognized the potential for confusion because, when I was reading the Ptolus sourcebook, I did become momentarily confused. (“Wait… Are these guys related? Oh, I guess not.”) I probably should have taken my cue from that and changed one of the names to something more distinct, but the thought got lost in my own labyrinthine process of prep.

But as soon as Commissar Urnst showed up in this session, Elestra’s player piped up, “Wait… Don’t we have a note mentioning this guy?” The only reward to be gleaned from my earlier confusion was that I instantly recognized what had happened and was able to quickly clarify the situation.

A DIGRESSION ON DELIVERING META-INFORMATION

It can be argued that the players should have simply been allowed to roll with their confusion and resolve it – or fail to resolve it – on their own. Usually, I would agree with that: Connections, relationships, and/or truths that seem “obvious” to you as their creator will not be obvious to the players, and that’s okay. It’s better for the players to figure these things out for themselves rather than having you disrupt their process of discovery.

In this particular case, however, there were only two possible outcomes: First, and most likely, they’d have laboriously dug through their trove of handouts until they found the one containing the name “Urnest”, realized their recollection was mistaken, and moved on. This was undesirable because we were in an escalating sequence designed to start the Castle Shard party off with a big bang. Disrupting the escalation for a wild goose chase because I’d failed to change a confusion name had no pay-off. It was much easier to just say, “Actually, the name in that letter was ‘Urnest’,” share a laugh about Sauron vs. Saruman, and move on to the meat of the session.

The other possible outcome, which I considered extremely unlikely, was that they would take the time to find the letter and then conclude that it was a typo, meaning that Urnest and Urnst WERE the same person! It can be argued that this was would be a natural, organic consequence of play and it would be perfectly valid to expore it through play, most likely with some very weird and confusing interactions with the Commissar during the party trying to suss out who Silion was. Or maybe it would even result in them feeding some bad intel to Lord Zavere, creating all kinds of weird fallout in the rivalry between Castle Shard and the Commissar!

Here’s what it boils down to: You have a limited amount of time at the gaming table, and that time therefore has value. There are also opportunity costs to consider. Was a 5-10 minute search through handouts culminating in, “Oh, I guess it wasn’t the same guy.” a good use of our time? Would the (apparently null) value of that experience be worth giving up a strong, well-paced introduction to the Castle Shard party?

Other GMs might make a different assessment than I did.

TRACKING THE NPCs

In the Shadow of the Spire has a very large cast of supporting characters. When running campaigns like this – with large numbers of NPCs who have complex relationships with both each other and with the PCs – it is tremendously important that both the GM and the players are able to keep track of them all.

If the GM fails to keep track of his supporting cast, the campaign will founder in confusion, contradiction, and missed opportunities. The quality of the players’ interactions with the NPCs will likely also suffer as the GM struggles to portray them with consistency and depth.

As for the players, the interactions with these rich and diverse characters is where a great deal of the immersion and reward from these types of campaigns come from. Action and meaning is driven out of their relationships with the NPCs, and if they can’t track them, the campaign quickly becomes a tumultuous chaos – a great deal of sound and fury signifying nothing to them.

Ultimately, of course, the players need to take some responsibility for this. But there are a number of techniques that the GM can use to encourage and facilitate the groups’ ability to track the supporting cast; they can grease the wheels, so to speak. You might start by reviewing some of the techniques described in Getting the Players to Care, but there’s also a number of specific techniques when it comes to NPCs.

ORGANIZE YOUR NOTES. The first thing you need to do as a GM is to make sure your own house is in order. You need to keep well-organized and easy-to-use notes on the important NPCs in your campaign.

I keep an NPC Roleplaying Template for each member of the supporting cast. When the In the Shadow of the Spire campaign started, I kept them all together in a single alphabetical file. As the complexity of the campaign grew, however, I broke them into a number of broad categories (largely based on a purely utilitarian basis, although obviously influenced by own personal understanding of how different characters – and groups of characters – interacted with each other and were likely to interact with each other). As I write this, those categories include:

General
Ghostly Minstrel
Banewarrens Protectors
Moonsilver Elves
Chaos Cultists
Imperial Church

In doing this, it’s important to distinguish between one-off or scenario-specific characters and campaign characters (i.e., the recurring characters who actually make up your supporting cast). If you don’t distinguish between them, your notes will become choked with irrelevant noise, drowning out the signal and making them more difficult to use.

Of course, it’s also important to recognize that many characters who are initially introduced for a specific scenario will become campaign characters as a result of how events play out and/or how the PCs interact with them. (This is similar to the process of certain NPCs “clicking” with the players that I discuss in the Party Planning game structure, except played out on a larger scale: When the players particularly like a particular character, they’ll seek them out, become interested in their lives, and otherwise keep reincorporating them into the campaign as long as you don’t get in their way.)

ESTABLISH NAMES EARLY AND OFTEN: Imagine your supporting cast as a filing cabinet. Each character is an individual file folder, and the character’s name is the label on that folder. If the players lose track of characters’ names, it’s like all the labels in your filing cabinet have fallen off.

You want to make sure those names stick. So try to get a name applied to an NPC as quickly as possible. (There can be countervailing concerns, but in general nameless people doing mysterious things is a spice best used lightly.) And once the players have a name for the character, use it over and over and over again. It might make for bad prose in a novel, but defaulting to an NPC’s name (“Igor walks across the room towards you”) is I think generally superior to our normal practice of defaulting towards pronouns (“he walks across the room towards you”).

STRONG VISUAL REFERENCES: Giving your NPCs an actually face (in the form of a picture) is a great way to make sure they stick in the memories of your players. If you find visual reference like this, make sure to display it when the character is introduced and get it back on the table every time they show up.

These visual references can also be a big help when NPCs start talking to each other. Simply point to or hold up the NPC currently talking and it can go a long way to keeping conversations clear even when you’re just talking to yourself.

A couple of provisos here, though. First, better to have no picture than a picture that isn’t right. “She looks like this, except her hair is different” doesn’t work in practice, because the visual reference will override the description. (You can run into a similar problem with proxy miniatures, which is why I prefer to use purely generic options unless I’ve got the right miniature for the job.) As a corollary, boxing yourself in by only being willing to create NPCs that you can find visual references for is obviously going to cripple you creatively.

Second, “this guy can’t be important, he doesn’t have a picture” (and vice versa) as a form of metagame knowledge can be a serious problem. (And I find it to be so even if the players aren’t specifically acting on that knowledge; it still ends up coloring their understanding of the game world.)

So add chaff to the signal: Use pictures for NPCs who aren’t important. And be willing to have important NPCs who don’t have pictures. (The first proviso will naturally assist you here.)

In the absence of (and in addition to) strong visual references, finding a unique voice, physical mannerism, or strong personality are also ways to help your players clearly distinguish (and remember!) different NPCs. The NPC Roleplaying Template will help with this, too.

KEEP THEM ONSTAGE: The best way for the players to become familiar with the supporting cast is, conveniently, to use them. Don’t “save” an NPC until it’s time for some big moment with them; give them an active life and keep them involved with the PCs. This is important not only so that the players don’t respond to the big moments by saying, “Who?” but so that your players will actually care about the NPCs.

The good news is that beyond a certain critical mass (and with characters that the players care about), they’ll start seeking out and creating these interactions on their own. I would know that a particular NPC had successfully clicked with my group when they’d get back to the Ghostly Minstrel and ask, “Is Jevicca here tonight?”

When prepping for a session, take a look at your supporting cast list and ask yourself if there’s anybody who the PCs haven’t seen in awhile who should be brought back onstage. Schedule events with them in your campaign status document.

Remember that you can also reincorporate members of your existing supporting cast when creating new scenarios. You should also discover that new scenarios are being born out of the evolving relationships the PCs have with the supporting cast.

PRUNING AND FOCUSING: On the other hand, you also have to know when to let go of certain members of the supporting cast.

This is true from a practical standpoint if nothing else: If all you ever do is introduce new characters to the campaign, the supporting cast will eventually collapse under its own bloated weight. As you (and your players) gain more experience – both generally and in terms of a specific campaign – you’ll find that the “active size” of the supporting cast you can manage will grow. But, ultimately, there’s a limit. As you add new characters, you have to be willing to let some of the old characters exit stage right to make room.

Recognize when a character’s story is done (and there are no more stories to tell)
Recognize when the players don’t care any more (which is not the same thing as them hating the character)
Recognize when the NPC has chosen to move on (either from the PCs, from the area, or from the shared interests that drew them together)

This is a process of pruning. But it can also be thought of as a process of focusing. Instead of just thinking negatively (what characters can I do without?) also think positively: What characters do you want to spend more time with? What characters have interesting stories to share?

Saying goodbye to an NPC, of course, doesn’t mean saying goodbye forever. Old friends (and enemies) can always return.

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Ptolus: Running the Campaign – Gray Spaces in World Design

June 22nd, 2018

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Harvesttime – Part 3: Tee and the Greeting of Old Friends

This fracture, however, is minor compared to the Reformist movement which began in Astalia (one of the Vennoc Protectorates).

When creating our fantasy worlds, one thing I think we inherit from both published examples and our grade school textbooks is an encyclopedia impulse: We want to list every elven king. We want to create a comprehensive map. We want to nail things down.

What I’ve learned, however, is that it’s better to leave yourself room for future ideas.

For example, I’ll consciously avoid constructions like “The Last Blah-Blah” or “there’s only two Bleurghy-Bloogedy-Bloogs in the whole universe!” This is something that I think is even more vital when developing a shared universe, and something I very specifically cautioned writers against when I was working as the Line Developer for the Infinity RPG: Unless your idea requires a hard limit applied to the entire setting… don’t do it.

And of course, sometimes you do need to draw a hard line. The One Ring isn’t the One Ring if it isn’t the One Ring; it can’t be part of a JCPenney jewelry collection.

(How to know if your idea requires its uniqueness? Simply ditch the uniqueness and see if the idea still works. Is your “Only Female Ninja in the Whole World” still a cool character even if she’s not the only female ninja? Probably. Can you throw the One Ring in Mount Doom and save the world if Sauron has a whole cabinet full of Master Rings? Probably not.)

But the real trick I use is to create deliberate “gray spaces” within my world design. There are actually two of them featured in the Harvestime PBeM campaign journal entry: The Vennoc Protectorates and the Reformists. I have very specifically avoided defining exactly how many nations there within the Protectorates and I have similarly avoided figuring out exactly how many or what all the Reformists sects are.

Why?

When I was creating the Western Lands, a very early step was drawing a map of the Five Empires. (Which were, at the time, called the Five Nations. I renamed them when Eberron ended up using the same nomenclature half a decade later. Personally, I had Kipling and the Iroquois Confederacy bouncing around in my head to make “Five Nations” feel particularly catchy when I brainstormed it. I’m guessing Baker did, too.) But I immediately spotted the trap: I had designed Seyrun, Barund, Arathia, and Hyrtan to cover a broad swath of fantasy tropes, giving me a lot of canvas for fitting in all kinds of ideas. But they were also inherently limited: I had one Emperor. If I needed a different Emperor, I didn’t have one.

So the Vennoc Protectorates – inspired by the Holy Roman Empire and Ancient Greece – exist as a confused tangle of ever-changing city-states, duchies, kingdoms, principalities, and alliances all operating under a loose, common banner. So if tomorrow I think to myself, “You know what would be a cool? A kingdom secretly ruled by Deep Ones!” all I have to do is squeeze in another Protectorate.

The other option, of course, would be to just keep adding bits to the edge of the map. That works, too. But it can also be a little too easy: It encourages you to keep spreading your ideas out, instead of bringing them together, forcing them to rub up against each other, and seeing what happens in the collision.

For the same reason, I limited the Western Lands to a single pantheon of exactly nine gods. I’ve recently discussed how that decision has forced me to develop that pantheon in depth rather than just cramming more thinly realized gods into the setting, but I also recognized that I needed to give myself room within that pantheon to develop cool ideas and variants. If there were just nine gods supported by nine specific churches, the resulting palette would be fairly limited. I wanted the ability to continue adding cool fantasy religion ideas to the game world, and I also wanted to be able to create stories based around religious tension.

The Reformists were a gray space that allowed me to accomplish both goals. The Nine Gods cover a broad array of divine/mythological archetypes; the Reformists allow me to interpret those archetypes into myriad forms. If I need a nature cult that venerates nymphs, that can be reflected within the imagery of Sayl or Tohlen or both. (Maybe the cult believes nymphs are the divine children of those gods?) If I need steampunk machine worshipers, I can place them within a facet of Vehthyl. If I need a repressive religious autarchy, I’m not prevented from doing that by the limitations of the Imperial Church. These will all fit into niches within the Reformist gray space.

The Temple District

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Ptolus: Running the Campaign – An Interstice of Factions

June 15th, 2018

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Harvesttime – Part 2: Dominic and the Guidance of Vehthyl

When Dominic headed across the bridge into the Temple District, he made gentle inquiries into the worship of Vehthyl and discovered four options: First, the Order of the Silver God. Second, the Temple of the Clockwork God. Third, the Temple of the Ebon Hand. And, finally, an itinerant minotaur priest named Shibata.

What I’m going to talk about here isn’t really a preconceived or formal technique. It’s something that I’ve just kind of instinctively done in the past without even really thinking of it as being a distinct “thing” that I’ve been doing. But as I was re-reading the campaign journal and thinking about what I had done as a GM, it kind of jumped out and bit me. I’m not even sure I would have noticed at all if it wasn’t for the close proximity of what I did with Tor and Dominic here.

So this installment of Running the Campaign is probably going to be a little more rough around the edges as I kind of grope my way towards both understanding and articulating the technique here.

To start with, you have a PC who has an interest.

Tor is interested in becoming a knight.
Dominic is interested in learning more about Vehthyl.

Dominic’s interest has arisen out of play and is primarily player-driven, and so the response is being created on-the-fly. (Fairly literally in this case, as the bluebooking for this session allowed me to basically roll along with the player’s intentions and develop material in a very reactive way.) Tor’s interest was collaboratively built up in character creation, so I built a good chunk of this material up in parallel with that character creation process and have been waiting to incorporate it into the campaign for several sessions now.

(Although the specific impetus, it should be noted, was still ultimately player-driven even here: Tor’s player had seen the tourney fields on the map of the city and said, “I want to go to there.” I just needed to figure out how I could use the existing material I built in support of this impulse, and vice versa.)

He cantered Blue over to the Board of Ranks, on display just outside of the lists. Each name was noted with heraldry, and he noted that most of the names were accompanied by the three prominent heraldries on display (along with a smattering of others): The cross upon a field of a crimson of the Knights of the Golden Cross; the sword-and-vortex of the Knights of the Pale; and the dawning sun above the martial field of the Order of the Dawn.

The key technique here is that, in response to these PC interests, I haven’t built one thing which would satisfy that interest: There’s not one Church of Vehthyl for Dominic to go ask his questions at. There’s not a single order of knighthood in Ptolus for Tor to pursue.

Instead, I’ve created – or pulled forward – a nest of factions surrounding their area of interest. In the case of this particular session, the factions are actually quite explicitly spelled out (although that doesn’t necessarily need to be the case; there are a lot of different ways to introduce these factions into play), as you can see in the quotes above.

These factions all inherently have overlapping interests and competing agendas regarding those interests because they’re all specifically related to the PCs interests. (Which means that the PC – and presumably their player – will also be inherently vested in those interests.) At this point, I don’t really have a firm idea of how the interactions between these factions are going to play out, but if you’ve got enough people pointing guns at each other (either literally or figuratively) something interesting is probably going to fall out as a result of the PCs bouncing around like ping-pong balls.

WHY DOES THIS WORK?

First, it gives the player a meaningful choice in how their character is going to pursue their interest.

What you want to avoid here, of course, is reverting this back to a meaningless choice where, for example, there are eight different Churches of Vehthyl, but it doesn’t matter which one the player chooses. The factions Dominic has to choose between can, on a certain level, be boiled down to:

The Imperial Church
A well-established Reformist Church
A Reformist cult
A lone, unaffiliated religious teacher

Ignoring all of the other details about those factions, this essential choice about where Dominic will turn first in his desperate need for guidance is going to speak volumes about his faith and about who he is as a person.

Tor, by contrast, isn’t really in need during this session. He’s really just checking out the buffet and seeing what’s available, so you can see that the distinctions between the different orders of knighthood are not as sharply drawn here. That’s partly because the player wasn’t motivated to dig deeper: Tor could’ve taken the opportunity of the tourney to meet more of the knights and learn more about their different missions and ideologies. The fact he didn’t at this particular time is actually a meaningful choice in itself. But even if it wasn’t, that’s fine: The meaningful choices are going to come later for Tor and they are going to have a ton of weight.

Second, the inter-relationships between the factions turns the PC into a billiard ball. The player’s initial choice is their first shot, and the effect they’ll have on the table full of balls is impossible to predict. As a result, the outcome of that choice (and their subsequent choices) will be completely surprising to everyone at the table, including the GM. The campaign will be forever different as a result, and it’s quite likely the campaign world will be, too.

As a result, it’s not just a meaningful choice, it’s a momentous choice.

Players can sense that. They know when their choices have completely and irrevocably shaped what the experience of the campaign is. And they love it. They eat it up.

OTHER THOUGHTS

As you’ll see, Tor’s and Dominic’s factions actually end up overlapping and interacting with each other as the campaign continues. This increases the chaotic unpredictability of your campaign once you set these forces in motion; it also helps to draw the PCs closer together.

This overlap is something that you can specifically design into the factions when you set them up, but you’ll also find it arising organically through play: After all, these factions will all end up having a common connection through the PCs. Eventually, that will bring them into orbit with each other… and send them crashing into each other.

What about wasted prep? I’ve been talking about smart prep lately, and here I seem to have deliberately set up wasted prep: Dominic chooses one of the Vehthyl-related factions to seek advice from and then nothing happens with the others.

Well, first, this stuff usually doesn’t require a heavy initial prep load. Most of the time you can probably get away with one or two paragraphs, and then you can develop more in response to the direction the PC chooses to leap. Prep will also overlap. For example, knowing how the orders of knighthood operate in the Five Empires is going to be meaningful to Tor’s character goals regardless of which order of knighthood he chooses to pursue.

More importantly, the prep you don’t immediately use will almost certainly end up getting reincorporated in other ways down the line. These are, after all, significant factions. The whole point is that they’re deeply involved in your campaign world. And they are, after all, related to each other, so no matter which one the PC chooses, the others are likely not too far away.

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Ptolus: Running the Campaign – Bluebooking

June 8th, 2018

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Harvesttime – Part 1: Tor at the Tourney Fields

The next day, despite the weariness with which they had collapsed, they all awoke bright and early – looking forward to the festivals of Harvesttime and a day of rest and relaxation before attending the party at Castle Shard that evening.

I’ve previously discussed my personal background when it comes to general PBeM gaming, but dedicated PBeM gaming is not the only way to take advantage of the medium. Running PBeM sessions for some or all of the players between regular face-to-face sessions of a campaign is a technique which I really love in theory. Unfortunately, I rarely do it. And even when I attempt it, it never seems to quite work out right. (You can see that here, actually, with Agnarr and Elestra basically doing nothing because their players just didn’t reply to the e-mails.)

Let’s back up for a second.

BLUEBOOKING

Inter-sessional play-by-email is a form of bluebooking. Back in 1988, Aaron Allston’s Strike Force campaign supplement for Champions was a revolutionary text, describing techniques for running and playing RPGs that transformed the games of those who read it. (It was also, sadly, an incredibly obscure text.) One of the unique techniques he described was “bluebooking”, named after the semi-disposable exam books.

Bluebooking grew out of what Allston referred to as “paranoia notes”. (When the GM passes a player a scrap of paper or vice versa in order to keep their communication secret from the other players. They’re “paranoia” notes because that’s what they create.) Rather than using scraps of paper, Allston’s group would pass notepads around. And then something interesting happened: The players started passing the notepads to each other, using them to develop privately roleplayed side-scenes. They also started to use the pads for in-character journaling, developing character histories, and the like. The pads were then replaced with the blue books which, to my understanding, allowed specific books to be dedicated to particular characters, interactions, etc.

Eventually, whole game sessions were occasionally given over to blue-booking. In these sessions, the players put their characters through solo activities, or conversations with one another, which pertain to their ongoing stories. One player will write with the GM concerning his investigations; one will be conducting a romance with an NPC; one will be vacationing in Greece; another may actually be conducting a whole solo adventure with the GM.

Allston identified three specific advantages to bluebooking:

Privacy (for obvious reasons)
Permanence (the exam books provide an organized record of what occurred)
Breakdown of Inhibition

The last of these is particularly interesting:

It’s hard to conduct some game activities during active play. For instance, a male GM playing a female NPC who’s having a passionate affair with a male PC may have a tough time uttering the lines of high romance in a roomful of gamers. But while blue-booking the dialogue, the GM can be detached enough to write the NPCs’ lines as he wishes her to say them, can take the time to make sure the dialogue he’s writing isn’t clumsy or inane, and can give the player-character a more satisfying subplot.

I think you can actually broaden this to a more general category of Exploring the Unusual by allowing you to play through moments and topics that you can’t (or won’t) explore at the table. That can be stuff that the group finds uncomfortable (like intense romance for some groups), but it can also just be stuff that people aren’t interested in. It might even be stuff that you’re not interested in exploring outside of your blue book. (For example: What does a typical day in the life of your character look like? That might be really boring to play out moment-by-moment, but really interesting for you to explore interactively.)

To Allston’s list of advantages, I would also personally add two more:

Thoughtful Consideration. Bluebooking allows you to create at a different pace than the immediate demand of live improvisation. It gives you a chance to get your character “right” in a way that doesn’t always happen in the organic, real-time flow of the table. This allows you to explore your character – and their life – in different ways. Not just in terms of your ability to think about what you’re creating, but also the depth with which you are developing your ideas: How does your character think? What are their childhood memories? Who’s important to them in their personal life and why?

In addition to the immediate creative pleasure of this sort of thing, what I find interesting is the ability for this development to feed back into and inform the live improv of the character going forward.

In this session, for example, you might notice that the PCs’ dialogue has suddenly taken on a different feel from previous journal entries. That’s because the players are – consciously or otherwise – exploring how their characters talk in a way that they haven’t before. Some of that (like Tee’s awkward, undefined fear and struggle with feeling like an adult amongst her childhood friends) sticks; some of it (like Tor’s relatively heavy accent) doesn’t. And that’s okay. That’s how creativity works; that’s how ideas grow.

(Bluebooking will also inevitably display some of the stilted traits of amateur fiction. That’s okay, too.)

This isn’t just useful for the players, of course. The GM also benefits from being able to give thoughtful consideration to a PC’s actions. This makes bluebooking particularly useful for complex or uncertain situations where the GM isn’t sure how or what to prep; improvising in slow motion lets the GM respond truthfully without compromising quality, depth, or long-term planning.

Opportunistic Play. The ubiquitous availability of e-mail and other forms of digital communication mean that, unlike for most people in 1988 when Allston wrote Strike Force, you don’t have to be in the same room to bluebook with other people. This means that bluebooking also allows you to continue roleplaying – to continue developing and experiencing the campaign – even when you’re not in a session.

That’s what was happening in this “session”, for example: I was working in a temp job with a lot of dead time, so I was able to swap e-mails with people on the boss’ dime. I don’t actually remember why we did it; what prompted us to explore the daylight hours of Harvesttime via e-mail. It certainly wasn’t something we made a habit of. (We’d already had mixed results attempting something similar at the beginning of the campaign, and my one other attempt to do this within the context of the Ptolus campaign to date –what was supposed to be an opportunity to roleplay through Tithenmamiwen’s birthday party – ended up being such a non-starter that we ended up retconning the entire event out of the campaign.)

ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS

For those who aren’t interested in full-blown bluebooking (or who, like me, struggle with making it work or getting their players to buy in), a more limited variant that can be very useful – particularly for certain eras of gaming – is in-character correspondence. I often do this with my Cthulhu-related gaming, as the deeper psychological exploration it encourages feeds nicely into Mythos-inspired insanity and it can also be a lovely way of thinking more deeply about historical milieus.

On that note, I recommend checking out Michael Oracz’s De Profundis (which I am excited to have just discovered – having thought it long out of print – is currently available in an expanded second edition from Cubicle 7). It’s a “game” in which each player takes on the role of a particular character experiencing some Mythos-related oddity and then corresponds with the other players, developing that idea over time. It’s not really a game, serving as more of a structured activity, but it’s a rich and insightful text that I’ve found useful as a general resource for correspondence roleplay.

I also remain intrigued by Monte Cook’s upcoming Invisible Sun roleplaying game, which is supposed to be designed to specifically encourage and support bluebooking between sessions.

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Ptolus: Running the Campaign – Looting the Bestiaries

May 25th, 2018

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Session 11C: A Weary Twilight

Some sixth sense warned Agnarr of the threat. He began to turn, but it was late: The duskblade’s sword lashed out.

As I mentioned a few weeks back, one of the things I did while prepping this campaign was to do a survey of published modules (most notably a large swatch of Dungeon Magazine) looking for really cool scenarios that I could slot into the campaign.

Another survey I’ll do when prepping a new D&D campaign is a wide swath through my myriad bestiaries. This is something I’ve been doing since I was like eleven or twelve years old, and I find it really effective: There’s nothing like a well-written (and well-illustrated) bestiary to spur the imagination in unexpected directions, and one of the great things about 3^rd Edition is that, with third party support, there’s never been a game with such a ridiculous wealth of such resources.

The stage where I’ll do my bestiary survey is generally after I’ve sketched in the broad strokes of the campaign: For example, I might know that a campaign is going to feature a lot of overland travel through a decaying empire; a delve into an abandoned dwarven city; some island-hopping in piratical waters; and then a journey through a portal into hell.

This focuses my attention: I’m not just looking for generically cool monsters; I’m specifically looking for stuff that will be useful (and also cool). The entire point, of course, is still to flesh out material in ways I hadn’t anticipated (which is how I discover that the abandoned dwarven ruins have been taken over by an expedition of dark dwarfs, perhaps), and I’m also hoping to be inspired to include truly unexpected dimensions to the campaign as a result of this material. But every survey ends up being different, even when it’s revisiting the same books, because with every survey I’m looking at the books through a different lens. It can actually be quite exciting to discover new aspects of a book simply by virtue of approaching it from a fresh angle.

This is where Ursaal and the caste of assassins known as the duskblades came from in this scenario: Ursaal is a hobgoblin warcaster from Monster Manual V, and the duskblades are hobgoblin duskblades from the same. I tagged the whole Hobgoblin section of that book as a potentially useful resource because it contained a number of stat blocks for hobgoblins with class levels, so it was easy to reach in and grab them as the need arised.

Wait a minute… hobgoblins? I thought these were goblins!

First, as I’ve mentioned before, I really won’t hesitate to use a stat block for one thing to model something else that it’s appropriate for. If I need to tweak one or two things to make it work, great. But more often than not, even that’s not necessary.

Second, and this is something I may discuss at greater length on some other occasion, I’ve never really gotten a lot of personal utility out of having ninety thousand largely indistinguishable humanoids wandering around. In fact, as a general principle of reincorporation, I find it much preferable to take disparate cultural elements and look at them as being different facets of a single race, rather than splitting every cultural distinction into a separate genetic pool.

In the case of the Western Lands campaign setting where my version of Ptolus is located, this translates to virtually every “bad guy humanoid” getting grouped into either the goblin race or the kobold race. (And why keep that distinction? Primarily because the latter are related to dragons, and that’s an important distinction for deeply ingrained historical reasons.) Even ogres are actually just really big goblins in this world.

The memetic gestalt of D&D being what it is, over time (and many, many campaigns) my “hard line” on this sort of thing has frayed a bit. Halflings, for example, were not originally part of the Western Lands, but they started creeping in when I had a player who cared far more passionately about playing a halfling than I cared about not having halflings in the setting. I had them living in isolated villages on the islands of the Teeth of Light; but once they existed at all it became easy enough to just leave them in situ when using published adventures. (This is particularly true in coastal regions near the Southern Sea, which includes Ptolus. So you’ll see a number of them popping up from time to time throughout these campaign journals.)

Ptolus has also seen ratfolk added to the tally of humanoids, as they are quite pervasive in Cook’s material. They have not yet escaped the confines of In the Shadow of the Spire, so time will tell whether or not they are truly permanent residents of the Western Lands, or merely strange visitors (perhaps the product of Ghul’s laboratories).

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