IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Session 8A: Waking in Chains

In which unfortunate bargains are made in caverns deep beneath the city, and our intrepid heroes learn not to look a gift mobster in the mouth…

This session begins with the PCs waking up in chains after a disastrous battle.

There are several ways I could have handled this particular moment:

• I could have had all the characters wake up simultaneously.
• I could have arbitrarily chosen the order in which they would wake up.
• I could use some sort of mechanical resolution to determine how they would wake up.
• I could have had one of the character(s) get woken up by the bad guys.
• I could have the character(s) wake up by themselves.

Seems like a relatively simple crux — and I don’t want to suggest that I spent a lot of time staring at my navel on this one — but the ways in which you resolve moments like this can have a surprisingly large impact as the consequences of that moment ripple out.

First things first: I felt it was more interesting for the PCs wake up on their own. Why? Well, if they wake up on their own they have an opportunity to take actions (or choose not to take actions) which would no longer be available to them once the bad guys engaged with them. Conversely, anything interesting that might happen from the point where the bad guys wake them up would probably end up happening even if they did wake up first.

When in doubt, go for the option with a larger number of potentially interesting outcomes. (Particularly if you’re not giving anything up to do it.)

Beyond that, I decided to turn to fictional cleromancy: I made a mechanical ruling and let it determine the order in which the PCs would wake up. (In this case, margin of success on a Listen check with a relatively low DC. As the characters woke up, they were then allowed to make Bluff checks to keep the bad guys from realizing they were awake.)

Couldn’t I — as the GM — have made a better decision myself?

Different, certainly. But better? Probably not. If I had arbitrarily decided for myself, I’d probably have chosen Tee to wake up first (since she would be the best positioned to stealthily slip her bonds). That would have potentially given a big, splashy scene. But when the cleromancy selected Dominic, the scene instead gave a quiet opportunity to spotlight a character who often just “went along with the group”. And although the choice to patiently wait and see what would happen might seem like a “non-choice”, it was actually very revealing of Dominic’s personal character (both to the table as a whole and, I think, to Dominic’s player).

Which is why I encourage GMs to trust the fictional cleromancy.

It’s important, of course, to properly set the stakes for any mechanical resolution and to make sure that you (and the rest of the table) will be satisfied with the possible outcomes. There’s no reason to let the mechanics drive you into a wall.

But, in my experience, games are much, much better when you set them free and see where they’ll take you. They’ll surprise and amaze you and create moments you never could have imagined happening in a thousand years.

You can see a couple other examples of this general sort of thing in the current campaign journal. First, resolving Agnarr’s Sense Motive check to notice that his friends had been brainwashed on a graduated scale led to his hilarious attempt to conspire with Elestra.

Second, in the back half of this session, Agnarr attempts to locate a stray dog to make his own… and abysmally fails his Animal Handling check. (Resulting in me describing him giving the dog iron rations, which the dog did not like at all.)

Why not just Default to Yes and let him have the dog? Gut instinct more than anything else. Getting the dog seemed important to the character, and I felt it would be more appreciated if it had to be worked for. It paid off: Failing to attract stray dogs became a running joke for several sessions, and when Agnarr finally did find his dog, the moment was more meaningful for the path that had been walked to get there.

All of this is an art, not a science.

LEARNING FROM FAILURE

Something else to note in this session, particularly in the wake of the near-TPK in the previous session, is how the group adjusted their tactics for underwater fights. Most notably, they made a point of making sure that they stuck together even when disparate results on Swim checks would have driven them apart. And you can see the payoff as they mopped up a whole sequence of combat encounters.

They learned from their mistakes and they learned from their failure.

There’s a branch of GMing philosophy which is basically terrified of the PCs failing at something. And I don’t just mean avoiding TPKs: They can never lose any fight. Every quest must be a success. No clue can ever be missed. No mystery can ever remain unsolved. No personal goal can be frustrated.

There are a couple of major problems with this philosophy.

First, you are eliminating a huge swath of the human experience (and drama!) from your games. Go watch a movie. Read a book. Reflect on how often the main characters are thwarted; suffer setbacks; get stymied. Look at how those failures are used to raise the stakes, drive the story forward, and frame new scenes — scenes that can’t exist if failure isn’t an option.

Second, when you never allow someone to make a mistake, they never learn that they’re doing something wrong.

If you spend any amount of time in RPG discussion groups, you’ll perennially come across GMs complaining that, for example, their players always rush headlong into every fight even when they’re clearly outnumbered and outgunned.

Do you ever let them lose those fights?

Of course not!

Well… I’ve spotted your problem.

Here the group had a problem with underwater combat. They suffered horrendous consequences. And then they fixed the problem.

This is a general theme you’ll see throughout these campaign journals: Not only characters (and their players) refining their strategic and tactical choices, but also figuring how to approach problems from new angles and with alternative solutions when their first options don’t work.

Failure is, in my experience, the root of creativity.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Interlude: Visions on the Edge of the Void

In which lost memories return as the party lingers on the edge of oblivion…

As I mentioned in the last installment of Running the Campaign, the near-TPK in Session 7 led to the lengthy break which resulted in the campaign’s Retcon.

When the campaign started back up, I decided to kick things off with the visions described in this installment of the campaign journal. If I recall correctly, I e-mailed these visions to the players a few days before the session to gin up anticipation. I also printed out individual copies so that the players could review them at the beginning of the session, with the joint-but-separate cliffhanger at the end of each vision leading directly to the first moment of Session 8.

In addition to simply getting people excited about playing again, I also wanted to make an experience which had ended up being unexpectedly traumatic and significant to the group in the real world an equally significant milestone for the characters, and I hoped that these visions would help drive home how close to real and meaningful death the PCs had come.

The actual visions themselves, however, were not created for this particular moment. They had been designed before the campaign ever began.

PURPOSE OF THE FLASHBACKS

The campaign began with the PCs experiencing a period of “lost time”. I took extra efforts to make sure that the players really felt this missing gap in their lives, because the things which had happened to them during that time were really significant.

The next step was to make sure that this missing time continued to be significant to them throughout the campaign, so that it wouldn’t just fade into “something that happened awhile back and isn’t really significant any more”. One way of doing this, as I’ve described previously, was to create a meta-scenario featuring a mix of investigating the past and also consequences from the past coming back into the oblivious lives of the PCs.

The other way I decided to keep the “lost time” as a pervasive factor throughout the campaign was through the use of flashback visions: Glimpses that the PCs would have into their lost memories. These visions were carefully excerpted from the “secret history” I had prepared regarding the period of lost time, and would hopefully also tie-in with the various meta-scenarios revolving around that lost time. (The idea was to create synergy between multiple tracks running persistently throughout and behind the other adventures of the PCs.)

FLASHBACKS IN PRACTICE

The triggers for these flashbacks were intentionally designed flexibly. (And most flashbacks had multiple triggers.) They generally weren’t things like, “During Adventure #5 when X happens, the PCs receive this vision.” Instead it was, “If something kind of like this happens, it’ll probably cause the PC to flashback to this moment.”

I also never hesitated to use a flashback — or create a new flashback! — if something that felt dramatically appropriate happened which I hadn’t anticipated. By and large, that’s what happened here: There were some flashbacks that had “near death” as a trigger; others that felt thematically appropriate. (I was also trying to strengthen the relationship Elestra and Dominic had before the lost time, since I had identified that this had not really been as deeply invested in by the players as the Agnarr-Tee relationship had been because the Elestra-Dominic prelude didn’t actually happen at the game table. It still didn’t really take. Things that happen at the game table are just more “real” than things that are only written down in character backgrounds.)

You’ll also note that the flashback visions are static. I’ve talked in the past about using playable flashbacks, but in this case I didn’t want the players to feel authorship of them or the ownership which would come with it. I wanted them to be alienated from these experiences; for these experiences to feel as if they had “happened to somebody else” even while they knew that it was, in fact, something that had happened to them.

This would not remain invariably true as the campaign progressed, although there were some unique twists which accompanied their first opportunities to “live” these memories. That, however, is a tale for another time.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Session 7B: Blood in the Water

In which the dark abyss of the harbor claim many a valiant soul, leaving but one to stand vigilance upon disaster…

So what you have in this session of the campaign is basically a TPK. (Ranthir stayed in the boat, but other than that…)

What happened here is a sequence of strategic errors which are, I think, well summarized narratively in the journal, but which may be useful to break out more specifically:

• The players ignored the shark on the surface, dismissing it as not being an active threat.
• When the shark attacked, Tee and Elestra continued swimming down, leaving the rest of the party multiple rounds of movement behind them. (This problem was further exacerbated by poor Swim checks that caused characters to flounder instead of making progress.)
• As the situation got bad, characters rushed forward one at a time (again, exacerbated by poor Swim checks) instead of regrouping.

The result was that instead of facing the encounter as a group, they basically fought the encounter as three sequential micro-groups.

TPK.

The campaign did not end here. I’m explaining because you look nervous.

Once the water was filled with blood, I called a short break. The group was in various states of shock. Things had gone from “pleasant romp” to “horrific” really, really fast. We all needed some time to recover, and that included me. I needed some time to think about what had happened and what was going to happen next.

In many similar circumstances, this would most likely have been the end of the campaign. Or, at least, the campaign in any recognizable form: With Ranthir still alive, it’s possible he might have been able to continue. Maybe called in some favors to bring his comrades back (albeit, with a huge debt weighing them down like a lodestone). Or, more likely, fallen in with a different troupe of delvers.

But there are plenty of TPKs where that’s all she wrote: You got killed by people who don’t care in a place where no one will ever look for you. (Assuming methods of resurrection exist in the milieu of the campaign at all.) Game over. What shall we do next week?

And, by and large, I’m okay with that. I think it’s important that encounters play out to their logical and non-handicapped conclusion because that’s what makes the moments where a group truly rallies and wins a day which had seem lost truly exciting. And the same is true on a large scale: Knowing that a campaign is not fated to end in success makes it more meaningful when a campaign does.

You value what you earn, not what you are given as charity.

In this particular case, however, there was another logical outcome: The sahuagin weren’t a random encounter. They were there for a purpose. And the people who had hired them for that purpose would logically be interested in who the PCs were and why they were there. I also realized, as you’ll see in the next journal entry, that the PCs would be immediately useful to them. In fact, once I stepped into their shoes and thought about what they would do with the situation that was being presented to them, there was only one logical thing they would do:

They’d dump some healing magic in the PCs, wake them up, and start the interrogation.

So… not a TPK.

This time.

CONSEQUENCES

The other great thing about letting things play out (instead of predetermining or forcing an outcome) is that the consequences you discover along the way are inevitably wonderful and unexpected and take you to amazing places you would otherwise have never discovered.

Although, unfortunately, that’s not always the case. This session had severe metagame consequences: Agnarr’s player felt strongly that I should have railroaded the encounter to prevent them getting overwhelmed and knocked out. He also hated the idea of his character being taken prisoner in general, and specifically felt there was no justification for the sahuagin taking prisoners.

He didn’t hang around to see how it played out. He quit the campaign.

Which threw things back into a bit of chaos for awhile, leading to a long break and the sequence of events which eventually resulted in the Big Retcon before we continued.

In the campaign itself, however, the consequences were much more interesting: They resulted in the PCs coming to the attention of (and becoming indebted to) the Balacazar crime family, with wide-ranging consequences that would continue to effect play more than half a decade later.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. You’ll just have to keep reading to see exactly how things turned out.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Session 7A: The Aristocrat’s Table

In which preparations are made for a momentous meeting, secrets are kept, and a fateful flame is seen burning in the harbor…

I’ve talked previously in this series about the role of a journal in enhancing a campaign. This week you can see  some vestiges of the document’s living history: At this early stage of the campaign, many of the characters were keeping secrets from each other. Although there are many ways of handling this, I’ve generally favored having the players also keep the secrets from each other. A little light paranoia never hurt anybody, and the resulting patchwork of understanding can have all sorts of entertaining fallout.

If a secret is worth keeping, then a secret is worth keeping.

So these early days of the campaign featured a number of sub-channels in our online chat, and later there would be any number of side conferences and the like with me and various player scurrying off to another room.

Preparing and, more importantly, disseminating the journal for In the Shadow of the Spire proved somewhat challenging under these conditions, however. I didn’t want to leave all this secret action unrecorded, so simply leaving it out of the campaign journal entirely wasn’t a viable option. In practice, it meant carefully structuring the campaign journal so that the secrets were clearly separated from the rest of the material and could be removed as a “chunk” without leaving a clear trace behind. (The section near the beginning of this journal entry headed “Tee Slips Away” is an obvious example of this.)

There was one memorable session where this meant creating a different version of the journal for every single player, although in general it meant preparing 2-3 different versions. And, eventually, only Tee was still keeping a part of her life hidden away (necessitating a “secret journal” for her every couple of sessions; or rather, vice versa, a special incomplete version of the journal created for everyone else).

SECRETS AT THE TABLE

There are, of course, many groups who would consider this entire concept of players keeping secrets from each other anathema. I’ve generally found that these groups are virtually always the ones which also prohibit any sort of intra-party strife of any kind, and many of them also abhor the concept of splitting the party.

In my experience, these sorts of prohibitions (“no secrets”, “no strife”, etc.) are almost always seeking to address a fundamental problem by targeting its symptoms. There are generally two variants of this problem.

First, you have a disruptive, immature player is just trying to ruin other people’s fun. To address this problem you create a network of Thou Shalt Not rules attempting to knock down the player’s disruptive antics. In reality, of course, the disruptive player will always be able to find some new way of disrupting the group. You need to solve the underlying problem of them being an asshat (by either getting them to stop doing that or kicking them out of the group).

Second, and often related to the former (or previous experiences with the former), the group has constructed a whole interlocking network of formal or informal rules preventing:

• PCs leaving the group.
• PCs attacking each other.
• PCs agreeing to kick another PC (not player!) who they no longer wish to associate with out of the group.
• Splitting the party.

And  so forth. The exact network of such prohibitions or “understandings” varies, but the net result is that you take a bunch of characters, thrust them into high stakes situations, and then artificially force them to continue co-habitating even after events have set them at irreconcilable loggerheads. Basically, you’ve created an RPG simulation of Sartre’s No Exit.

And then you just keep adding on more forced conventions in an effort to keep the lid on the pressure cooker you’ve created.

And what you also lose in the process is all of the cool gaming experiences that can arise from hidden player knowledge. The entirety of Paranoia, for example, or the superb Ego Hunter scenario for Eclipse Phase are a couple of pre-packaged examples, but the organic examples that rise up spontaneously at the gaming table can be even more exciting.

RUNNING SECRETS

A few best practices for handling player secrets.

First, take the initiative from the players. (Or, more accurately, from the actions of their characters.) Although it can be useful to make it explicitly clear that the option is available, since some players have been conditioned by previous tables to think that it’s not an option, generally speaking the desire to keep a secret needs to originate from the character keeping the secret; it’s not something that can be imposed from the outside.

Second, you’ll generally want to follow the same conventions as splitting the party: Make sure to balance spotlight time and switch between the groups so that neither is left loitering. (Although giving part of the group a straight-up break while you resolve what the other part of the group is doing — and then vice versa — can be an effective technique.)

Third, don’t mistake “the other characters don’t know this yet” as being the same thing as  “secret”. Nine times out of ten, when the party splits up, there’s no need to keep their activities secret from each other: If they’re not trying to keep secrets from each other, they will most likely be fully briefing each other next time they get together (so you might as well let them know as it’s happening; which will save you time on the other end and also keep the table engaged as an audience to what’s happening). There are exceptions to this — when keeping each group blind to what’s happening to the other group will enhance the enjoyment of one or both groups — but they’re relatively rare.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Session 6B: Return to the Depths

In which a sheen of blood signals terrors from beyond the grave, and numerous clothes are ruined much to Tee’s dismay…

This installment of Running the Campaign is going to discuss some specific details of The Complex of Zombies, so I’m going to throw up a

SPOILER WARNING

for that published adventure. (Although I guess if you’ve already read this week’s campaign journal, the cat is kind of out of the bag in any case.)

Interesting conundrum:

• D&D has zombies.
• D&D can’t take advantage of the current (and long ongoing) craze for zombie stuff.

Why? Because zombies in D&D were designed as the patsies of the undead world. In the early 1970’s, when Arneson and Gygax were adding undead to their games, zombies were turgid, lumbering corpses that had been yanked out of a fairly obscure film called Night of the Living Dead. (Even Romero’s sequels wouldn’t arrive until 1978, and modern zombie fiction in general wouldn’t explode until the ‘80s.) Even skeletons, backed up by awesome Harryhausen stop-motion animation, were much cooler and had more cultural cachet.

From a mechanical standpoint, the biggest problem zombies have is their slow speed. In AD&D this rule was, “Zombies are slow, always striking last.” (Although in 1^st Edition they were probably better than they would ever be otherwise, as their immunity to morale loss was significant.) The 3^rd Edition modeling of this slow speed, however, was absolutely crippling: “Single Actions Only (Ex): Zombies have poor reflexes and can perform only a single move action or attack action each round.”

They were further hurt by a glitch in the 3^rd Edition CR/EL system: The challenge ratings for undead creatures were calculated using the same guidelines as for all other creatures. But unlike all other creatures, undead (and only undead) could be pulverized en masse by the cleric’s turn ability. This meant that undead in general were already pushovers compared to any comparable opponent, and zombies (which were pushovers compared to other undead) were a complete joke.

(The general problem with undead was, in my opinion, so limiting for scenario design in 3^rd Edition that I created a set of house rules for turning to fix the problem. There’s some evidence that these house rules are actually closer to how turning originally worked at Arneson’s table.)

In short, you could have a shambling horde of zombies (as long as the horde wasn’t too big), but it wouldn’t be frightening in any way.

Which is kind of a problem, since “horror” is literally what the whole zombie shtick is supposed to be about.

REINVENTING ZOMBIES

My primary design goal with The Complex of Zombies scenario was, in fact, to reinvent the D&D zombie into something which would legitimately strike terror into the hearts of PCs. James Hargrove described the result as, “… more or less Resident Evil in fantasy. Which rocks. And it rocks because it’s not just zombies but zombie-like things. Bad things. Bad things that eat people. Bad things that are just different enough from bog standard zombies to scare the crap out of players when they first encounter them.” Which I absolutely thrilled at seeing, because that’s exactly what I was shooting for.

One could, of course, simply have gone with a souped up “fast zombie, add turn resistance”. But I wanted to do more than that. I wanted to create a zombie-like creature that would actually instill panic at the gaming table. And the key to that was the bloodwight and its bloodsheen ability:

Bloodsheen (Su): A living creature within 30 feet of a dessicated bloodwight must succeed at a Fortitude save (DC 13) or begin sweating blood (covering their skin in a sheen of blood). Characters affected by bloodsheen suffer 1d4 points of damage, plus 1 point of damage for each bloodwight within 30 feet. A character is only affected by bloodsheen once per round, regardless of how many bloodwights are present. (The save DC is Charisma-based.)

Because the bloodsheen was coupled to a health soak ability that slowly transformed desiccated bloodwights into lesser bloodwights, the resulting creature combined both slow and fast zombies into a single package. The bloodsheen itself was not only extremely creepy, but also presented a terrifying mystery (since it would often manifest before the PCs had actually seen the bloodwight causing it).

Eventually, of course, the players should be able to figure out what’s happening and be able to put a plan of action in place to deal with it. (“Cleric in front, preemptive turning.” will cover most of your bases here.) But the design of The Complex of Zombies is designed to occasionally baffle or complicate these tactics.

Which, in closing, also brings me to another important point about using scenario design advice: I’ve had a couple different people who purchased The Complex of Zombies contact me and say, “Hey! Why isn’t this dungeon heavily xandered? Isn’t that your thing?”

Well, no. My thing is designing effective dungeons.

The Complex of Zombies uses a claustrophobic, branching design in order to amp up the terror. Multiple doors create “airlocks” that prevent you from seeing what’s ahead, but also cause you to lose sight of what’s behind you. Its largely symmetrical design creates familiarity and allows the PCs to benefit from “unearned” geographic knowledge, but that familiarity is subverted with terrible, hidden mysteries so that the familiar becomes dangerous. The progressive, three-layered depth of the complex meant that every step forward felt like a deeper and deeper commitment to the horrific situation. Finally, virtually every navigational decision meant turning your back on a door. (And the myriad number of doors became daunting in and of itself when the bloodsheen could be coming from behind any one of them.)

There was one stage in design where I considered linking Area 4 and Area 11 with some form of secret passage. But there are only three possible uses of such a passage:

• The players use it to “skip ahead”, which wouldn’t really give them any significant geographical advantage due to the nature of the scenario, but would disrupt the “pushing deeper, committing more” theme of the scenario. (I wanted depth in the dungeon’s design and this would have flattened the topography.)
• The players miss the first instance of the passage, but find the second. After a moment of excitement, they end up backtracking to an earlier part of the dungeon, which in most instances is going to be accompanied by the “wah-wah” of a sad trombone sounding the anti-climax as they trudge back to where they were and continue on.
• The bloodwights could use it to circle around behind the PCs and ambush them. The bloodwights were so deadly, however, that a clear line of retreat was really kind of essential for the whole scenario not to become a TPK. (There’s still a risk of this happening if the PCs don’t play smart, but that’s on the players.)

To sum up: Design guidelines are rules of thumb. Following them blindly or religiously is not always for the best. In this case, minimal xandering was the right choice to highlight the terrors of the bloodwights.