DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 40B: Temple of the Ebon Hand

Once set on its course, the kennel rat seemed quite certain in its path and seemed to have no desire to escape.

“For a rat it’s well-trained,” Agnarr said.

“You can’t keep it,” Tee said.

After winding through the sewers for the better part of an hour, however, the kennel rat began to wander aimlessly.

Not far away she discovered that a ten-foot-wide section of the wall was, in fact, nothing more than an illusion: She could put her hand through it as easily as insubstantial air. With a shrug of her shoulder she struck her head through: The illusion was not particularly thick and she found herself looking up an empty, ramping hall of well-constructed stone…

When I talk about designing node-based campaigns, which is primarily how Act II of In the Shadow of the Spire is designed, I’m sometimes asked how I know where one scenario “ends” and another scenario “begins.”

To quickly bring you up to speed if you’re not familiar with node-based scenario design, in a node-based campaign:

• You have a number scenarios, each of which can be thought of as a “node.”
• These scenarios are linked to each other by clues.
• You use the Inverted Three Clue Rule — the players should have access to at least three unused clues at any time — to make sure the connections between the scenarios between the scenarios are robust.

But what actually constitutes a “scenario”?

Sometimes this is obvious, but often it’s not, particularly because individual scenarios can also be node-based, with scenes and locations linked together by clues internal to the scenario.

You can see a good example of how this can get fuzzy in this session. You’ve got:

• the Temple of the Rat God
• the Ratmen Nest beneath the Temple of the Rat God
• a nearby sub-level connected by a medium-length tunnel
• the shivvel dens in the Warrens controlled by the Temple of the Rat God and reached via the sewer tunnels and guide rats
• the Temple of the Ebon God, also “connected” to the Temple of the Rat God via the sewer tunnels and guide rats

Should these be five different scenarios? Or should all the stuff related to the Temple of the Rat God be one scenario and the Temple of the Ebon Hand be another scenario? Or is all this stuff actually part of a larger “Chaos Cults” scenario?

In my case, none of the above. I decided the scenario breakdown would be by location, so I ended up with:

• CC01 Temple of the Rat God
• CC01A Warren Shivvel Dens
• CC02 Temple of the Ebon Hand

(Note that I’ve grouped the alphanumeric codes for CC01 and CC01A together because they’re run by the Cult of the Rat God. Although I consider them separate scenarios, this keeps related material grouped together in my notes.)

Okay, but why did I decide this was the scenario breakdown to use?

It really boils down to what’s useful. Or, to put it another way: When you’re running this material, what are you going to be actively thinking about? What information are you going to want to cross-reference and have at your fingertips? When you’re creating or prepping the material, what’s the stuff that should be built together?

Sometimes this is about immediate logistics. Sometimes it’s more about the conceptual organization that makes the most sense in your own head. Sometimes it’ll be about how people in the game world think about and organize things.

(What you largely won’t be concerned about is how the players will be thinking about this material. These notes – and the way they’re organized – is for you. It’s the experience created at the table that’s for the players, and, honestly, the less they’re seeing how your notes work, the more immersive that experience will be for them.)

In this case, for example, even though the Temple of the Rat God also controls the shivvel dens in the Warrens, it’s unlikely that anything in the shivvel dens will directly affect the situation in and around the temple on the Street of a Million Gods. (The ratlings probably aren’t going to send reinforcements, for example.) So it makes a lot more sense to completely segregate that material so that it’s not any kind of distraction at the table.

Conversely all the rat warrens beneath the Street of a Million Gods are very likely to be relevant if, for example, the PCs mount an assault on the temple. (Or, vice versa, the temple will be relevant if they enter the complex through the sewers and work their way up.) So I naturally grouped those together.

But, like I say, this is all about practicality, and the truth of that will really strike home as a campaign develops over time.

SPOILERS AHEAD!

For example, in the upcoming section of the campaign covered by Ptolus Remix: The Mrathrach Agenda, my original adventure notes were organized like this:

• NOD5 Mrathrach Machine
• NOD5A Aggah-Shan’s Catacombs
• NOD5B White House
• NOD5C Mrathrach Table Raids

All of these clearly are related to each other (the Mrathrach Machine is reached from the White House via Aggah-Shan’s Catacombs; the Mrathrach Table Raids were focused around the Mrathrach game), which is why they all have the NOD5 tag, but nothing else about this breakdown really makes sense from an objective point of view.

What you’re looking at is just a strange agglutination that emerged piece by piece from actual play: The Mrathrach Machine scenario was taken from Night of Dissolution and was one of the original cornerstones of Act II, so when it looked like the PCs were going to approach the Mrathrach Machine from “below,” it made sense to get my prep notes for the adventure done, and if they made it through that adventure and exited out the “top” of the Machine into Aggah-Shan’s catacombs, then I could get that prepped as needed.

But then the PCs didn’t’ actually go to the Mrathrach Machine, and they actually got involved in the White House via a completely different vector. (So originally those notes were part of a completely different set of adventures notes in my background events!) As part of that, it looked like the PCs were going to find the secret entrance to the catacombs and check them out, so I prepped those adventure note as NOD5A (since they were clearly linked to NOD5 Mrathrach Machine)… but then the PCs didn’t actually explore that passage, either!

Even later in the campaign they came back around to investigating Aggah-Shan, so I pulled together all my notes for the White House (which were now lying around all over the place, including my campaign status document archive), updated them for current events, and collected them in NOD5B White House.

But then the PCs, in a series of events described here, created their own special ops mission targeting Mrathrach tables across the entire city! So I prepped that as a new scenario, and assigned it code NOD5C.

Which all makes sense to me because it reflects how we played through this material, but, as I said, obviously isn’t how you’d organize this stuff if you had a master plan!

Campaign Journal: The Demon Court – Running the Campaign: Distributing Chaos Lorebooks
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 40A: Rats of Kennel and of Brain

But it may have been for the best that Tee was watching. A piece of crumpled paper flew past her head and something about it caught her eye. Snatching it out of the air, she unfolded it to reveal a crude map.

Tee cleared her throat and held up the map. Agnarr turned around. His face split into a huge grin. “You see? You do search trash better than me!”

Tee wasn’t sure whether she should think of that as a compliment or not. She suspected not.

RPGs usually include some sort of Help action or Aid Another option, and if they don’t then you’ll probably want to figure out how you’re going to adjudicate it quickly, because it’s a pretty common situation to crop up during play.

(The two broad mechanical approaches are to either (a) have all of the helpers roll and take the best result or (b) have one of the characters “take point” as the primary check and have the helper(s) give a bonus or advantage to their roll. Check out Art of Rulings: Group Actions for a deeper dive on this topic.)

But the mechanical resolution, of course, is only half the picture, and this is where I see a lot of GMs make the same mistake: Someone declares an action, another player declares that they’re helping, the check is rolled… and then the helper disappears from the resolution. When the outcome is narrated, only the point person or highest roller is described as contributing to the success or failure of the action.

This is unfortunate.

First, it disenfranchises the helper. You have the opportunity to put multiple PCs in the spotlight simultaneously — seize it!

Second, it creates a mild dissociation between player and character. If the character’s actions are never reflected in the fiction, then the declaration of “I help!” at the game table has become a purely mechanical catechism that can rapidly degrade into a declaration gotcha.

Finally, as the GM, you’re missing out on the opportunity to draw inspiration from the characters’ collaboration to create novel interactions and descriptions. For example, when you’re describing how a character acting alone is going to “search X,” you can take some degree of inspiration from whatever X is (e.g., rummaging through a pile of garbage is different from tossing hotel room, which is different than searching a mobster’s office when you don’t want them to realize anyone was here), but as this basic action pattern is repeated dozens or hundreds of times over the course of a campaign, you’ll discover that there are only to many ways to describe it.

As soon as you add a second character, on the other hand, the potential dynamics of the check can multiply exponentially.

IN PRACTICE

To put this into practice, start by encouraging the players to work collaboratively and help each other. If your game of choice doesn’t already have an Aid action or the like, don’t just think about how you might resolve these actions, but come up with a concrete solution and let the players know that it’s an option.

Then, when a player announces that their character is going to help on a check, prime the pump for yourself by asking the player how they’re actually helping. The declaration to help is just like any other action declaration: It needs to be actionable in the fiction, and therefore you need player expertise to actually activate character expertise. You need to be able to clearly visualize what the character is doing and how they’re doing it so that you can resolve the action.

Finally, depending on the specific mechanics in your current system, you may be able to pull additional inspiration from the dice results — e.g., who had the best roll vs. who had the worst.

However, don’t fall into a default of simply determining which character “actually succeeded” while the others failed. That’s an option, but it’s only one option among a vastly larger variety of true collaborations in which multiple characters contributed to the final success.

Along these same lines, instead of imagining all the characters doing the same thing, try to think about how they could each be doing completely different things that are all contributing to success in different ways.

One way of doing this is to work backwards: Look at the result of the check (whether success or failure) and think about how that result could be split up into distinct chunks. Then simply give each chunk to a different character and explain how their actions achieved it (or caused it). Gathering information or research is an easy example of this, where you might have three or four different facts about a topic — e.g., where the target works, where they live, who they’re married to, who they’re having an affair with — and if the PCs are all doing the legwork, you just need to assign each fact to a different PC and give a brief explanation for how they found it. Creates a little extra texture for the game world and makes everyone at the table feel included.

(Note how you’ll also get more interesting failures with multifaceted consequences out of this, too!)

While doing this, try to avoid an unconscious bias about what it means to Help on a check. I, personally, find it easy to imagine the person on point in the check or rolling highest to be the one actually doing the work, while others kind of hover around them, run around as gofers, or offer helpful advice. But, depending on the interaction, it’s just as easy to imagine the experienced character mentoring, overwatching, and/or advising a team effort where it’s actually all the other characters who putting in the work under their guidance.

For example, you might imagine that Agnarr’s player was the one making the check in this scene, since it was Agnarr who was actually digging through the pile. But it was actually Tee’s player who made the check, receiving the +2 bonus for Aid Another from Agnarr. In this case, if I recall correctly, it was actually Tee’s player who proposed that she’d just keep an eye on the garbage Agnarr was throwing around, making my job as the DM describing the outcome incredible easy.

Campaign Journal: Session 40B – Running the Campaign: One Scenario or Two?
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 39C: Liberation of the Slaves

Tor became a whirling dervish – a one-man electrical storm – at the top of the stairs, holding off the churning wall of fur. Several of the ratlings leapt down onto the stairs behind him, surrounding him utterly, but they were no match for the speed or ferocity of Tor’s electrical blade.

When the furious job was done, Tor and Elestra quickly got the prisoners up the stairs and out the front door of the temple. They sent them, with money in their pockets and food in their bellies, to the watch station in Delvers’ Square.

Particularly in campaigns where the PCs are Big Damn Heroes™, I think it can be really powerful to show how their actions have earned them a reputation.

You save the world a few times and people start taking notice, ya know?

One technique I particularly like is the Big Social Event, as we saw back in Session 12: A Party at Castle Shard. As I discussed in Game Structure: Party Planning:

I’ve … found them to be effective as a way of signaling when the PCs have changed their sphere of influence. You rescued the mayor’s daughter from a dragon? Chances are you’re going to be the belle of the ball. And you’re going to discover that powerful and important people have become very interested in making your acquaintance.

When these events work, they’re exciting and engaging experiences, often providing a memorable epoch for the players and spinning out contacts and consequences that will drive the next phase of the campaign.

But, more broadly, the attitude of the world towards the PCs should shift. Partly because the players get a huge thrill out of their actions being recognized. Partly because it just makes sense.

One thing I find frequently useful for this is some form of Reputation system. For In the Shadow of the Spire, I’ve been using a streamlined variant of the Reputation mechanics from the 3^rd Edition Unearthed Arcana sourcebook.

The short version is:

1. Stuff that the PCs do earn them Fame or Infamy points, which collectively create a reputation bonus.
2. When the PCs meet a new NPC for the first time, the NPC makes a DC 25 skill or Intelligence check + the PCs’ reputation bonus.
3. On a success, they recognize the PCs. Their reaction depends on their opinion of the actions the PCs’ took to earn their Fame/Infamy (and this may also inflict bonuses or penalties to subsequent social skill checks equal to the reputation bonus).

I can also flip that around and give NPCs a Reputation score so that PCs can recognize them with a successful Knowledge (Local) + reputation check.

In this case, I decided that recusing the slaves from the Temple of the Rat God would create a big enough splash that it would add a half point to their PCs’ reputation. To track this, I have a short section in my campaign status document that looks like this:

REPUTATION

FAME: 5.5

INFAMY: 0

FAME: Rescued Phon. Recovered Jasin’s body. Castle Shard party. Shilukar’s bounty. Association with Dominic. Tavan Zith riot. Freeing slaves and children from Temple of the Rat God.

The quick rep reference basically gives me a menu of stuff that I can have NPCs who recognize the PCs mention. (“Didn’t I see you at the Harvesttime party at Castle Shard?” or “Oh my god! You saved my brother during the riot in Oldtown!” or “I heard you helped us out on that Shilukar case.”)

In practice, I grade these on a pseudo-logarithmic scale: Rescuing the pregnant Phon was enough to get earn their first point of Fame (people might recognize them as “the delvers who rescued that pregnant woman!”), but after that they aren’t going to earn Fame for every single person they rescue.

In any case, I’ve found this minimalist reputation system to be pretty effective. It tends to only be meaningful once every few sessions (although as their Reputation grows, that becomes more frequent), but the maintenance cost is extremely low and the moments when it’s triggered provide nice little spontaneous pops of payoff and, in some cases, unexpected twists.

Campaign Journal: Session 40A – Running the Campaign: Show the Help
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 39B: Shivvel, Slaves, and Gold

“If they’re running a major drug operation here, this isn’t nearly enough money.”

It was clear, too, that there had once been much more of the shivvel stored here. Tee suspected that the destruction of Linech Cran’s operation was continuing to affect the ratlings’ supply.

Poking around the rest of the room she discovered that a section of the wall could be removed, revealing a detailed map of the Warrens with several locations marked with crude symbols.

When discussing node-based design, a lot of focus tends to be put on how it can be used for scenarios like the 5-node mystery. Which makes sense. It’s a very versatile scenario structure, easy to use and adaptable to a lot of different situations.

But I first came to node-based design as a campaign structure, as described in Node-Based Campaigns: Not linking together scenes in an adventure, but as a way of linking one adventure to another. In the Shadow of the Spire, a campaign I was actually running and designing when I wrote Node-Based Scenario Design, is almost entirely built using a node-based campaign structure.

You can see a pretty focused example of what that looks like in the current adventure.

I labeled each adventure with an alphanumeric code. So the PCs are currently in CC01 Temple of the Rat God. The “CC” stands for “Chaos Cults.” Act II of the campaign also includes BW and NOD adventures, for Banewarrens and Night of Dissolution, respectively. The distinction of “BW” adventures reflects that Act II of the campaign is built around two separate forks (the chaos cults and the Banewarrens), while having “NOD” and “CC” designators started as a convenient way of distinguishing “stuff from the Night of Dissolution campaign book” from the wide variety of additional chaos cult scenarios I was adding to the campaign.

But why have alphanumeric codes at all?

Mostly convenience and clarity.

For example, it made it easy to say that the Marked Map of the Warrens handout (as seen below) was pointing to CC01A Warren Shivel Dens.

Why “CC01A” instead of “CC02” or some other distinct number? Again, it mostly boils down to what I found most useful. I generally found it useful to group together scenarios that were more closely related to each other. For example, the adventures found in Ptolus Remix: The Mrathrach Agenda were originally NOD5 Mrathrach Machine and NOD5A The White House.

The warren shivvel dens directly operated by the ratling cultists were more closely/directly related to CC01 Temple of the Rat God than they were to, for example, CC07 Porphyry House of Horrors. In this case, I’d also “discovered” the warren shivvel dens existed while prepping CC01 Temple of the Rat God, so it just made sense to me to insert them into the numbering sequence here.

Other clues the PCs found here include:

• Sewer Routes to the Coast, a map which is an alternate clue to CC01A and also to 004A Slaver’s Enclave (an adventure from Act I).
• Questioning the slaves, which would also lead to 004A Slaver’s Enclave.
• Sewer Tunnels to Oldtown, a map leading to NOD4 Temple of Deep Chaos.
• Broken square symbols forming a trail in the sewer tunnels, which could be followed to CC02 Temple of the Ebon Hand.

And here you can directly see the dynamics of a node-based campaign in play. Having found all these clues, the PCs have to make a decision about which lead they’re going to pursue next. (And, in this case, that actually includes, “Do we keep exploring the dungeon we’re in? Or do we switch gears?”) The players are immediately drawn into this discussion (at least in part because they’re collectively puzzling out what the clues mean and how they’re connected to things they’ve learned elsewhere in the campaign), causing the group to collectively think deeply about the campaign and get drawn further into the game world.

Also, because of the redundancy of the Inverted Three Clue Rule, it would also have been fine if, for example, they didn’t question the slaves…

…which, from a structural standpoint, they didn’t.

Ranthir, meanwhile, was feeding the malnourished slaves while Tor gently questioned them. It turned out that most of them had been freshly captured off the streets of Ptolus, many from the Warrens. Several were obviously shivvel addicts and easily preyed on. There was an elven prisoner, however, who had a different tale to tell: He had lived in the village of Onsafal in the Teeth of Light. He and most (if not all) of his village were captured by slavers and then sold through the black markets of Freeport. He had arrived at the Docks, been taken to a warehouse, and then sold to the ratlings.

Ranthir heard from one of the slaves how they’d been kidnapped and taken to a warehouse in the Docks, but he never followed up by asking the elf where the warehouse was located. (A classic example of a player not realizing that a clue is actually a clue.)

In fact, as the campaign continues, you’ll discover that the PCs didn’t follow MOST of these clues.

There are a variety of reasons for this. For example, the redundancy between the Sewer Tunnels to Oldtown map and the Marked Map of the Warrens caused them to conflate the two. They chose to approach the shivvel dens above ground, and ended up ignoring the fact that Sewer Tunnels to Oldtown also included a tunnel leading to the Docks (and the warehouse the elf had mentioned).

(It’s particularly fun when something like this happens, they eventually find a different path, and then many moons later they’re reviewing their notes, discover the clue they ignored, and say, “Holy crap! We had the solution the whole time!”)

There are a few other connections to note.

The shivvel they find here is a payoff from previous foreshadowing. Way back in Session 9, the PCs had found a note indicating that Silion was getting shipments of shivvel from Linech Cran. This was an existential lead, as described in Running Mysteries: The Two Types of Leads – it told the PCs that Silion existed, but didn’t give them any way of actually finding her. That foreshadowing set up Silion as an antagonist, and here we complete the circuit.

The Deathmantle cult symbol the PCs find here is the opposite end of the same thing: The PCs learn the Deathmantle cult exists, but have no way of finding them right now.

The evidence that the cultists are having problems sourcing shivvel (which is further developed in CC01A) because the PCs took out Linech Cran’s shivvel operation is another form of payoff, this time showing the impact of the PCs’ actions on the game world.

Along similar lines, in Session 39C the PCs also find a note indicating that the Temple of the Rat God had begun investigating the Arathian Job, giving them a well-earned pat on the back for a job well done, while also making them just slightly paranoid that the cultists were on their trail.

Don’t worry: A little paranoia is good for the players.

Campaign Journal: Session 39C – Running the Campaign: Reputation
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 39A: Chamber of Bone

Tee felt the ratlings throw their weight against the door, but she was able to hold it against their charge.

Tee signaled for the others to back up out of the chamber of bone, bracing the door against another pounding from the ratlings on the other side. Then she jumped back herself and, as the ratlings charged through, shot out the pillars of bone.

A cascade of bone collapsed. Several of the ratlings, pouring into the room, were struck about the heads and shoulders; one was even knocked unconscious by a particularly heavy chunk of pelvis. Others slipped and tripped, their feet turned treacherously by the shifting mass beneath their feet.

In Rulings in Practice: Traps, I said that you’ll know you have the balance right when the players start harvesting supplies from the traps or finding other ways of turning them to their advantage. In practice, this is probably a specific application of a wider principle: The more time players spend creatively interacting with stuff in the game world, the more you’ll know that (a) you’re succeeding in including cool stuff that’s bringing the world to vivid life and (b) that you’ve got great players.

Conversely, if you’re a player, pay attention to your character’s surroundings and look for opportunities to turn them to your advantage.

In this case, my players were very on top of things. Here’s what the key for this room looked like:

AREA 8 – BONE CHAMBER

The walls of this chamber are stacked high with bones — human bones. They have been arranged in intricate and detailed patterns with an effect which is entirely ghastly. Four pillars of interlocking skulls and femus reach from the floor to the ceiling.

Handout: The Bone Chamber

Bone Pillars: Any blow to one of these pillars (AC 3) will cause it to collapse, causing a cascade of bone. Characters within 5 ft. of the pillar must make a Reflex save (DC 15). On a failure, they are dazed and must make a Fortitude save (DC 12) to avoid being stunned.

Swinging Weapons: Characters who swing weapons within range of a bone pillar must succeed on a Reflex save (DC 10) to avoid striking the pillar. Alternatively, they can carefully avoid the pillar while making their attack — this requires no saving throw, but does impose a -2 penalty to their attack rolls.

(This room was inspired by the Sedlec Ossuary. The handout consisted of photos from the actual ossuary, which you can see in the linked campaign log.)

In addition to just being a creepy room, I’d intended for the ratlings to take advantage of the environmental hazard. The PCs, however, were savvy enough to be suspicious of the ones, realize they were precarious, and then almost immediately turn the situation to their own advantage.

In this case, the idea of the bone piles being precarious had occurred to me during prep. But the key thing is just including the bone piles as set dressing in the first place. Even if I didn’t have an answer prepped, a nigh identical scene could have emerged simply from the players asking, “Do the piles look unstable?”

Of course, it’s not just the bone stacks they’re using here. They start by using the door to control the start of the campaign, giving them time to estalblish their tactical position (as we’ve also discussed in Running the Campaign: Battles at the Door). And then, at the end of the fight, Agnarr rips the crossbow bolts out of his shoulder and uses them as improvised weapons!

When you fill your description of the world with interesting details, you’re providing the raw ingredients. Once you’ve done that, it become very easy for the whole group to start cooking.

Campaign Journal: Session 39B – Running the Campaign: Clues Linking Scenarios
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index