DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 42B: False Brothels

With the other mothers still trapped in the web. Tee was able to broker a bargain in which they would be freed if one of them would lead the party to the southern sewer entrance. While the mothers were carefully freed from the web, Tor started discreetly taking ears and fingers from the dead as trophies. Meanwhile, Elestra distracted the ratlings with small talk to keep them from noticing Tee looting the coffers of the nest master (which were filled with gems, jewelry, and large amounts of coin; although given the bones and skulls dangling from the ceiling, Tee didn’t want to spend too much time thinking about where it had all come from).

A surprisingly frequent critique of xandering the dungeon is that navigational choice in a dungeon is irrelevant because, when confronted with Path A and Path B, the players will have no way of knowing where either path goes. Since the choice is blind, the “logic” goes, the choice is meaningless and no different than a linear dungeon!

This entire concept is so utterly alien to my experience running dungeons that I honestly have difficulty understanding what’s happening at these tables. I try to imagine a session in which the players are repeatedly making these navigational choices without ANY insight or reason and I literally can’t fathom what it would look like. It would seem to require both the GM and the players to deliberately go out of their way to make it happen.

Let’s start with the GM. It’s a common rejoinder to the “it’s all blind choices!’ gambit that it’s the GM’s responsibility to fill the dungeon with navigational hints like:

• strange sounds emanating from a passage
• physical evidence (e.g., tracks, blood smeared on the walls)
• treasure maps or similar intel
• navigational cues used by the inhabitants (e.g., signs or runes)

This isn’t bad advice. Any dungeon will certainly be improved by including this kind of stuff. Plus, if you’re designing your dungeon as a real place filled with history and life, this stuff will just naturally find its way into your dungeon key.

But I’m a pretty big believer in RPGs as a collaborative activity, and I’ve grown pretty skeptical of design philosophies that position the GM as the sole bearer of responsibility for the group’s experience. In practice, it’s just not necessary for the GM to lard up every crossroads with clues in order for the navigational choice to have meaningful context.

For example, a pillar of old school dungeon design is that the further down you go, the more deadly the challenges become (and the larger the rewards). Even in the absence of this classic design conceit, “going deeper into enemy territory is more dangerous” is going to be generally true just as a situational truism. (Particularly if the bad guys are being played as an active opposition and not just XP pinatas waiting for the PCs to kick down their door.)

Obviously, this principle won’t apply to every dungeon, but there are other diegetic cues that emerge from even the most cursory understanding of what’s happening and where you are. For example, “Should we finish clearing out this tower first or make a beeline for the central ziggurat?” or “Should we chase those goblins that ran away before they can reach reinforcements or should we move to a completely different sector of the dungeon to avoid pursuit?”

Similarly, if the PCs choose to “always go right,” that’s a meaningful navigational choice, as are other maze-solving techniques.

All of these provide a broad context for the players that can meaningfully guide navigational decisions even if they lack all other knowledge about the dungeon.

That lack of more specific knowledge should also be considered, however, because even if the PCs end up faced with a navigational choice for which they truly have no information, that only makes the choice meaningless if they ALSO lack the ability to gain that information. As long as they have that ability, the choice to NOT get that information is, in fact, a meaningful choice in itself.

And the truth is that, even without the GM seeding specific hints and clues into the adventure, the players have ample opportunities to gather the information they need.

Let’s start with the ubiquitous opportunities for interrogation. Almost anyone you can fight, you can also hold at sword point and demand answers from. “Which way to the lair of Bartox One-Eye?”

Note: This is a good place to mention that if you, as the GM, don’t want to bear sole responsibility for force-feeding information to your players, then you also need to make sure you’re not blocking the players from taking that responsibility. An occasional henchmen biting down on a cyanide capsule is all well and good, but if you teach the players that they ALWAYS bite down on cyanide capsules and they should never waste time trying to gain actionable intelligence, then you’ll have needlessly flattened — and perhaps even crippled — your game.

Even if there are no bad guys they can question, you can often just ask the gods. D&D comes well-stocked with divination spells that can be used to glean information about the dungeon. Augury, for example, is a 2^nd-level spell and I’ve often seen it make the difference between life and death.

Then there’s literally just physically scouting your options. From a central junction you can go left, take a peek around, then come back, go right, and poke around a little more. With information about both options in hand, you can figure out which direction seems the most promising and/or least dangerous.

Often, though, you don’t even need to personally go and check things. Given what you’ve already discovered about a dungeon, it’s often not difficult to use logical induction to make informed choices. For example, “We know the kobold warrens are in that direction, so it’s likely this tunnel will also lead us to them.”

You’ll also obviously have navigational information if you’re revisiting a location. This might be because you’re mounting a fresh expedition into the dungeon after returning to town or taking a long rest. It might be because you’ve been repelled by the kobolds and are trying to figure out a way around them.

You can also see from this how these different methods of gathering information can combine and reinforce each other: If you’ve previously been repelled by a kobold stronghold and encounter a small force of koblds while physically scouting, you can easily conclude that this passage must also be connected to that stronghold somehow. This conclusion would only be reinforced if, consulting your maps, you can see it’s also heading in the direction of that stronghold. This might prompt you to cast speak with dead and question one of the dead kobolds, which could lead to you learning that the passage does lead to the stronghold, but via a rear entrance which is only lightly guarded. Do you use this information to mount a fresh assault on the kobolds or choose a different path and avoid them?

What we’re beginning to touch on here is the dungeon as both a tactical and strategic battlefield. I’ve previously talked about Dungeon as a Theater of Operations, and once you start thinking of the dungeon experience in this more holistic fashion it’s easy to see how it can inform almost any navigational decision the PCs are making.

AN IMPERFECT WORLD

It should be noted, though, that the goal of all this is generally not for the PCs to end up with a perfect understanding of the dungeon. That might happen occasionally, but it’s not to be expected and, even if it does happen, it’s likely to pass quickly (as the PCs’ information becomes dated or irrelevant).

Sometimes your educated guesses don’t turn out right. And that’s just fine. Desirable, even.

It turns out that one of the key ways you can distinguish choice from calculation is through imperfect information. And these choices — rather than calculations — are the heart and soul of meaningful gameplay.

You can see an example of what it looks like when the PCs have made a mistake in the current campaign journal. The PCs have formed a goal (find an underground entrance to Porphyry House) and are actively pursuing it. You can see that they’ve engaged in a bunch of the different information-gathering techniques we’ve discussed:

• They’ve found maps.
• They’ve interrogated prisoners.
• They’ve used inductive reasoning to figure out where various passages are likely to lead.

The only problem?

Elestra flung open the shutters on a nearby window… and looked out over the Southern Sea. They were on the coast cliffs deep within the Warrens. Far from Porphyry House.

They retreated back to the sewer, retraced their path, and used the kennel rat to take the sewer route they hadn’t chosen before. The rat brought them to another tunnel leading away from the sewer proper, and although this one bore no resemblance to the work of Ghul, they sought out the nearest sewer entrance, poked their heads into the street above… and concluded that this wasn’t Porphyry House either.

In utter frustration at the time they had wasted, they left the sewers altogether and decided to head straight to Porphyry House’s front door.

The route to Porphyry House that they concluded must exist… doesn’t. Whoops.

But that’s OK. The choices they made along the way were still meaningful. They still led to interesting adventures. And, at every step along the way, the PCs were continuing to gather information and feeding that information back into their choices (both navigational and otherwise).

Campaign Journal: Session 43A – Running the Campaign: It’s Gotta Be Here!
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 42A: Rat Mothers

But Ranthir, upon hearing the word “flee”, whirled around and webbed the far side of the room: The mothers, the albino, and Berq were all helplessly caught – except for one mother, trapped in the corner, who futilely screamed for help in her despair. Tor closed on her and ruthlessly killed both her and the baby ratlings.

With the other mothers still trapped in the web. Tee was able to broker a bargain in which they would be freed if one of them would lead the party to the southern sewer entrance. While the mothers were carefully freed from the web, Tor started discreetly taking ears and fingers from the dead as trophies. Meanwhile, Elestra distracted the ratlings with small talk to keep them from noticing Tee looting the coffers of the nest master (which were filled with gems, jewelry, and large amounts of coin; although given the bones and skulls dangling from the ceiling, Tee didn’t want to spend too much time thinking about where it had all come from).

“Killing orc babies” in D&D is a trope not so much because DMs are deliberately trying to present their players with this moral dilemma, but rather because it arises pretty naturally out of the standard D&D adventure type: Dungeons inhabited by X. “Inhabited” leads to community; community leads to babies. And, of course, it’s not just orcs. In this session it happened to be ratlings.

Now, there’s a whole discussion to be had about the colonialist themes in D&D and also the degree to which the traditional fantasy tropes of “species which is inherently evil” and/or “humanoid species with sub-human intellects” are manifestations of and/or informed by real world racism, but I’m going to put a pin in that.

What I’m focused on at the moment is less the specific moral dilemma, and rather the phenomenon of emergent moral dilemmas.

There can sometimes be the impression that moral dilemmas are something that GMs need to specifically create, frame up, and present to the players. But the real world is filled with moral dilemmas with nary a GM in sight, so it’s not really surprising that they’ll also crop up more or less unbidden in our simulated game worlds – whether that’s ratling babies in the ratling nests; the decision to betray a friend; or the opportunity to profit at the expense of others.

Whether a particular moral dilemma is crafted by a GM or emerges from the narrative of play, it can offer a rich opportunity for roleplaying, allowing players to explore their characters at a deep and meaningful level. Like any form of play, it can also be a way to safely explore complex issues.

Or, alternatively, being a form of play, it can also provide an escape from the complexities of the real world.

This is where moral dilemmas can create strife at your table: When some players are approaching the game world as a place of deep meaning and other players are approaching the game world as an ephemera of casual play, this can easily create discordant perceptions. To some extent, of course, this is always true, but when it comes to moral dilemmas, the inherently heightened takes – e.g., killing babies! – will naturally amplify the discordance.

(The issues of how much a player’s actions/beliefs are separated from their character’s actions/beliefs also complicates this, but I’m going to put a pin in that, too.)

Not only will different players have different responses to these situations, the same player can easily have a different response depending on the nature and context of the moral dilemma.

To use a video game analogy, I’ve never seen anyone seriously object to Mario curbstomping koopas to death, but change the context to running down pedestrians in Grand Theft Auto and now there are many people who would find it distasteful. But some of the people who object to running down pedestrians have no problem with stealing cars in the same game! Others who will happily go on mass murder sprees in the game will draw the line at running over a sex worker you just paid so that your character can get the money back.

Why?

Because people are complicated.

In the case of the ratling babies in my own campaign, what happened was a combination of several factors:

• A general coarsening of the group’s morality in the face of hardships. (Something which has been commented on several times in recent sessions.)
• The perceived moral positioning of ratlings, with some of the players/characters perceiving them as being more like worgs or cannibalistic apes than human-equivalent sentients.
• The moral importance of the game world. The group was largely on the same bandwidth here, but there were definitely some players with a slightly more casual approach.

Because the players were mostly in alignment with each other – and also because they all had the same clear understanding that character actions were not player actions – these factors kind of balanced each other out: While one player might be slightly more cavalier than another, a player who was taking the world a little more seriously could nevertheless interpret those actions as being consistent with the other character “losing their moral compass,” and it would all sort of muddle out in a collective experience everyone was happy with.

Of course, this will not always be the case! It’s quite possible for disparate reactions to a moral dilemma to cause serious strife!

And the broader point is that, because moral dilemmas will naturally emerge from your narrative, you can’t dodge this issue by just saying, “Well, I just won’t include any moral dilemmas in the campaign, then.” You need to be aware and stay aware of what’s happening at your game table, and when player expectations get out of alignment you need to be prepared to hit the pause button and help everyone get back on the same page.

Safety tools – i.e., structures for having these conversations in clear and productive ways – are obviously helpful with this, and I particularly recommend using them if you’re playing with someone for the first time or with familiar players in a new genre. But a lot of safety tools are focused on identifying topics or themes, and moral dilemmas can often hit the group from unexpected angles and in unanticipated ways. So keep your eyes open!

Campaign Journal: Session 42B – Running the Campaign: Scouting Dungeons
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 41E: Return to the Lower Nests

By the time Agnarr had forced the board aside, Tee had joined him. She ducked through first, finding the ratlings waiting with another volley of fire that she narrowly dodged.

If she worked her way carefully down the tunnel in an effort to avoid the traps she knew were waiting, the ratlings would tear her apart with their rifle fire. Throwing caution to the wind, Tee threw herself down the hall – trusting to her instincts and reflexes to avoid the seemingly never-ending stream of dangers.

In Rulings in Practice: Traps, one of the advanced techniques I discuss is combining traps with combat encounters to make them more dynamic and fun in play. It’s a tip you’ll find — either implicitly or explicitly — in a bunch of GMing advice. But if you’re wondering exactly how to do this effectively, you can see on simple recipe for success in the current session: Position the traps as a dilemma gauntlet.

1. Fill a space with traps so that moving through that space becomes a dangerous gauntlet.
2. Put some or all of the bad guys on the far side of that gauntlet.
3. Give the bad guys the ability to attack the PCs while they’re on the far side of the gauntlet or moving through it. (This doesn’t have to be terribly fancy; any effective ranged attack will get the job done.)
4. Make the PCs aware that the traps exist. (Which may simply be accomplished when the PCs trigger the first trap and realize it may not be the only one.)

The PCs will now be faced with the simple dilemma of rushing through the trapped area (unleashing the fury of the traps) or trying to work their way carefully through the trap by detecting and/or disabling them (but also enduring the attacks of their enemies).

And here are a few ways to make things even nastier:

• Have some of the trap effects push them back to the beginning of the gauntlet. (Or set things up so that the NPCs can do the same.)
• Stock the gauntlet with traps that reset. (This prevents, or at least complicates, the strategy of having one character brute force their way through as a human mine detector, clearing the path for the rest of the party behind them.)
• Create the gauntlet in multiple stages, such that — when the PCs penetrate the first stage of the gauntlet — the bad guys can fall back through another section of traps and present them with the same dilemma all over again. (Or, rather than having the bad guys move from one stage to the next, simply position different groups of bad guys between each stage.)

Use them to season your dilemma gauntlet to taste.

You can set up dilemma gauntlets like this when you prep an adventure, but one of the great things about the simple dynamic of this setup is that it’s easy to deploy during play when you’re using adversary rosters to actively play the opposition in a scenario: Simply make note of where traps are located in the complex, and then have your bad guys position themselves to take advantage of them (or even lure the PCs into the gauntlet).

Even more fun is that the PCs can almost as easily create their own dilemma gauntlets: Once they learn where the traps in a dungeon are located, they can similarly force bad guys into the gauntlet. This may work less well, of course, if the bad guys know where the traps are located, but just knowing the traps are there may not help much when you’re getting pelted by ranged attacks.

Creating a dilemma gauntlet can also be useful when you’re restocking a dungeon area to reflect defensive measures being taken by the inhabitants: While the PCs are taking their long rest, the abeil are buzzing away setting (or resetting) layers of traps to help them defend the hive.

Campaign Journal: Session 42A – Running the Campaign: Killing Orc Babies
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 41D: Back Amongst the Rats

They returned to the temple and found four watchmen standing guard before the outer door. The surrounding buildings had been evacuated.

When Tor went to speak with them he learned that a major operation involving watchmen from across the city had attempted to “root out those filthy rats”. But eight watchmen had been killed in attempting to explore the areas below the temple and now they were simply bricking up the basement to seal the problem away.

The watchmen weren’t supposed to let anyone through, but since it was Tor they didn’t think it would be a problem…

The PCs are called to adventure; they venture forth; they triumph over evil or claim the treasure or kiss the prince… and now it’s time to move on to the next adventure.

Something we don’t often think about, though, is the often-quite-literal wreckage that the PCs leave in their wake. In this session, for example, they return to the site of their previous adventure and discover that (a) the city watch has attempted to clean up the site; (b) failed rather badly; and (c) is now boarding the place up.

This establishes that the world is in motion — that stuff keeps happening even when the PCs aren’t there to see it. It also shows that the PCs’ actions have consequences. (Would those watchmen have been killed if you’d finished clearing out the rats?) Plus it’s an opportunity for exposition (as the PCs learn more about the watch and how they handle the dungeon access points within the city).

You don’t need the PCs to specifically “return to the scene of the crime” to make this work. For example, if they burn down a house while fighting gangsters in an urban campaign, you could add that to your list of landmarks (as described in So You Want to Be a Game Master) and have them notice it while traveling through that district in the future.

Such locations can develop over time: The house is rebuilt. A new family moves in. And so forth.

How things change over time will help set the theme and tone of the campaign. At the broadest level, are things getting better or getting worse? (Either in general, or in response to the PCs’ actions.)

MOVING IN

One of my favorite schticks along these lines is to look at a dungeon freshly emptied by the PCs and ask myself, “Who would move in here?”

In a previous session, we saw this happen with an ally when Sir Kabel moved into Pythoness House. We can also imagine infrastructure being claimed (or reclaimed) by local authorities: The town reopens the mine now that the skeletons have been cleared out; the tunnels discovered under the tavern are repurposed as a granary.

But it’s just as likely that the answer is a new villain! “Thanks for arresting all of Dr. Cairo’s minion,” says the Red Death. “A good secret lair is so hard to find these days!

The activities of such a villain, of course, will quickly vector back to the PCs, intersecting their path and creating new scenario hooks that will pull them back to the familiar location.

Done too often, of course, this can become repetitive and frustrating. (“We have to go back to the old lighthouse again?”) Used judiciously, however, or as part of an open table, this can be a delightful way of, once again, showing the players how their actions are affecting the game world. It’s also a fun experience because the players can take advantage of their existing knowledge of the location while also being surprised by how the new tenants have remodeled the joint.

(For similar techniques, also check out (Re-)Running the Megadungeon.)

Of course, sometimes the PCs will gun down all the cartel members at a mansion in Miami and then they’ll never see or think about the place again. (It was probably bought by some incredibly boring, but very rich, neurosurgeon.) If you want to evoke a living world, the loose threads are important, too. Not everything should play out as a closed loop.

Campaign Journal: Session 41E – Running the Campaign: Tactical Traps
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 41C: I’ll Be Seeing You

They returned naturally to the question of their lodgings: Should they go? If so, where?

Jevicca suggested the Nibeck Street mansion. It was currently abandoned, it would give them a base of operations as close to the Banewarrens as they might care to have, and it would let them defend the entrance to the Banewarrens.

On the other hand, as Agnarr put it, “Living over the hellmouth? No thanks.”

After Arveth’s assassination attempt in the previous journal entry, the PCs were highly motivated to figure out what their permanent — and secure! — home base in Ptolus would be.

Wanting to establish a permanent residence wasn’t an entirely new thread in the campaign, however. As the GM, in fact, I was kind of surprised it hadn’t happened already.

When I was initially ginning up the In the Shadow of the Spire campaign, of course, I had anticipated that the Ghostly Minstrel would serve as their initial home base:

• It was a well-detailed location.
• There were cool, poster-sized maps of the inn to enhance play.
• I had positioned the inn as central to the mystery of the PCs’ missing time.

But then, during character creation, Tithenmamiwen unexpectedly ended up being from Ptolus. As described here, the initial pitch was that, although the campaign would be set in Ptolus, none of the PCs should be from the city, but this shifted as we developed Tee’s character background. This meant that Tee actually owned a house in Ptolus, and I assumed it was quite likely that the group would end up staying there:

But when the PCs went there, way back in Session 1, something unexpected happened:

Returning to her house, Tee found everything undisturbed – essentially as she had left it, except for a thick covering of dust. With a distracted, almost manic air, she immediately set to spring cleaning the place. Others in the group offered to help, but they had not gotten far into the work when Ranthir suddenly came to a stop: “If we’ve been back in this city for two weeks and you have not returned to this place… Perhaps there was a reason for that?”

Tee stopped what she was doing. It seemed to tear her up inside, but she was forced to admit that Ranthir was right. They left and she locked the door behind them.

And, with only a couple small exceptions, the PCs, in order to keep her friends and family safe, have not returned to Tee’s mothballed home.

When Tor’s player joined the campaign, they really wanted the group to get a house. It was something that they, as a player, had always wanted to do in a D&D game, but had never had the opportunity to actually make it happen.

I fully expected that this would happen, so I reached out and grabbed Rosegate House from the Ptolus sourcebook (pictured at the beginning of this post).

The PCs in Monte Cook’s original Ptolus campaign were gifted Rosegate House, and he set it up as a resource specifically for GMs like me who had players looking for a house in the city. (One of the great things about Ptolus as a setting is that, having been born from actual play, it’s chockablock with these kinds of practical tools and toys.)

But for whatever reason, despite often talking about it (both at the table and away from it), the PCs never did it. They never actually went looking for a house on sale. (I was surprised that even in this session, as they were actively exploring a bunch of different options, it didn’t actually come up.)

The other major candidate that had been floating around for awhile was Pythoness House, which had first appeared as an adventure location before being cleared out by the PCs. (As I’ve previously discussed, Pythoness House also has awesome graphical resources that were published for it.) I suspect that if the players hadn’t just ensconced Sir Kabel and the Order of the Dawn in Pythoness House a few sessions earlier, that this would, in fact, have been their solution. But since Pythoness House wasn’t currently available (and was also now tangled up in Church politics), it no longer seemed like a viable alternative.

For whatever reason, I had not expected them to approach Lord Zavere about the possibility of staying at Castle Shard. (If I recall correctly, that didn’t work out because they blew their Charisma check.)

PLAYER RENOVATIONS

At this point, therefore, I had actually expected the players to have long since left the Ghostly Minstrel. (Although I did hope that it would still be a place they’d visit as a social hub.)

Instead, with other options not quite panning out for a bunch of different reasons, the PCs ended up doubling down on the Ghostly Minstrel.

Which was great!

When the PCs settle into a long-term home base, I think it’s almost always a good idea to create a map of it. First, I think it makes it feel more like a real, concrete place to the players. Second, the odds that at some point they’ll get involved in a fight or some similar action scene there is approximately 110%.

In this case, as I mentioned above, there was already a great one for the Minstrel (and we’d been using it for a while):

Second Floor of the Ghostly Minstrel

Once the PCs have a home base, though, the moment will almost inevitably come when they want to remodel the joint.

So they decided to stay where they were. Instead of hiding, they would bunker down. They laid out a plan for remodeling an entire wing of the Ghostly Minstrel: A false room with a secret door would be used as a pass-thru to a real suite of other rooms connected by new, interior doors.

They spoke with Tellith, who agreed to the remodel if they paid for it and if they also paid at a year’s rent in advance for the rooms they would be converting. This done, they spent several thousand crowns and arranged for more than twenty contractors (including several master craftsmen) to install the secret door, punch thru the two new connecting doors, and to strengthen the security on the existing doors. They also hired an arcanist to ward the windows with permanent alarms. And then they spent even more money to speed a project that should rightfully take weeks until it would take only two days to complete. On top of all that, Tee set aside enough money to pay every single person working on the project a hefty bonus to forget that they had ever worked on it.

Nasira was somewhat taken aback by the sheer amount of money they were able to throw at the project (more than 5,000 crowns when all was said and done). And while the project surely tapped deeply into their resources, they all felt it was an investment worth making.

Which is also great! It’s how the PCs can truly take ownership over a space and make it definitively theirs.

Once the PCs start making major modifications, though, what do you do with your beautiful maps? Well, sometimes you’ll end up just making an all-new map. More often than not, though, I’ll us a map patch like this one:

These alter just the section of the map that has been changed. Sometimes I’ll apply the match digitally and simply print out a new copy of the full map. In this case, I just printed out a copy of the map patch itself. Several sessions later, when the renovations were complete, I was able to present the patch to the players and let them actually add it to the map themselves — a little metagame ceremony that let them share in their characters’ excitement at touring their new rooms.

You can find other map patches I’ve done for cities and wilderness maps here and here.

To create map patches like these, I simply load the map into a graphics editing program like Photoshop (scanning it first if necessary). Then a little judicious copy-and-pasting combined with the clone tool generally lets me use elements of the original map as a palette for the new one. For location maps like the Ghostly Minstrel, seek out:

• Clean sections of wall without surrounding décor. (You’ll likely need both straight walls and corners.)
• Empty floor tiles.
• Doors and windows.

Other elements can also be useful, obviously, but if you can get these basics in place, you can usually do almost anything.

You might also find it useful to seek out other maps by the same cartographer to source other useful elements while maintaining the same visual style.

It’s vitally important, of course, to keep the resolution of the patch synced to the original image so that applying the patch (whether digitally or physically) can be seamless and easy.

Campaign Journal: Session 41D – Running the Campaign: Aftermath of Adventure
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index