DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Chaos Lorebook: Lore of the Demon Court

Its face was like the mirror nothingness. Its gaze a river of fire that touched thought but not earth.

Above all Those Who Slumber was the power of the One Who Was Born of Destruction, the Song Render, the Ender of Souls, the Dweller in Darkness. And among those who would speak his name, his name was Shallamoth Kindred – the act of desolation given life and mutilation given flesh.

And he did move with the quickness of a razor.

In the palace of the Kindred of Shallamoth, the eyes of the Galchutt are shut.

In the Temple of the Ebon Hand, the PCs discovered a cache of lore books.

These are specifically part of what I refer to as the chaos lorebooks, a collection of roughly fifty different lore books in the campaign dealing with:

• chaos cults
• chaositech
• the demon court
• servitors of the Galchutt
• the elder brood
• Wuntad’s plans for the Night of Dissolution

The root of this collection is the Book of Faceless Hate, which looks like this in my version of the lore book:

THE BOOK OF FACELESS HATE

No title marks the tattered, dark brown cover of this book. Its contents are written in a nearly illegible scrawl that could only have been born of hopeless madness. The first several pages of the book are covered in repetitions and variations of a single phrase: FACELESS HATE. (They wait in faceless hate. We shall burn in their faceless hate. The faceless hate has consumed me. And so forth…)

CHAOS: True chaos, or “deep chaos”, is a religion based on the fundamental aspects of hate, destruction, death, and dissolution. The philosophy of chaos is one of constant and endless change. It teaches that the current world is a creation of order and structure, but that it was flawed from the dawn of time due to the lack of foresight into what living sentience truly wants and need. The gods of creation – the gods of order – are untouchable and unknowable. They are aloof and uncaring, says the teaching of true chaos.

THE LORDS OF CHAOS: According to the book, the Lords of Chaos – or “Galchutt” – are gods of unimaginable power. But they are “mere servants of the true gods of change, the Demon Princes”. It is written that the Galchutt came to serve the Princes during the “War of Demons”, but while the Princes have “left this world behind”, the Galchutt still “whisper the words of chaos”.

VESTED OF THE GALCHUTT: Although they sleep, the Galchutt still exert some influence upon the world. This influence can be felt by the faithful through the “touch of chaos” and the “mark of madness”, but it can also be made manifest in one of the “Vested of the Galchutt” – powerful avatars of their dark demi-gods’ strength.

CHAOS CULTS: The book goes on to describe (but only in the vaguest of terms) many historical and/or fanciful “cults of chaos” which have risen up in veneration of either the Galchutt, the Vested of the Galchutt, or both. These cults seem to share nothing in common except, perhaps, the search for the “true path for the awakening of chaos”. The book would leave one with the impression that the history of the world has been spotted with the continual and never-ending presence of these cults – always operating in the shadows, save when bloody massacres and destruction bring them into the open.

As originally presented in Monte Cook’s Night of Dissolution (p. 93), the Book of Faceless Hate was a much more comprehensive player briefing of the entire cosmology of chaos in the Ptolus setting. I knew that I would need to create my own version of the book because I had moved Ptolus to my campaign world, and was therefore adapting this cosmology and melding it to my cosmology.

But I also knew that I wanted to make the Book of Faceless Hate more enigmatic, creating a much larger conspiracy and mystery that the PCs would need to unravel: How many cults were working with Wuntad? What were their true intentions? What was the true nature and secret history of the “gods” they worshipped?

My motivation was partly aesthetic: I just thought the chaos cults would be a lot cooler if they were drenched in mystery.

But it was also practical. Doing a big data dump to orient the players in the opening scenario of the published Night of Dissolution makes sense, because it was a mini-campaign with five scenarios, but I was planning a much larger exploration of the chaos cults that would involve a couple dozen scenarios. If I gave the players a comprehensive overview of who the cults were and everything they were doing, then the rest of the campaign would just become a rote checklist. It would be difficult to maintain a sense of narrative interest and momentum, and things would likely decay into “been there, done that.”

I also knew that if the players were forced to piece together disparate lore, slowly collecting different pieces of evidence to eagerly weave together while collecting the leads they need to continue pursuing their investigation and pasting all of it onto a literal or figurative conspiracy board, that it would get them deeply invested in the chaos cults. It would make them care.

(And when the players started holding lore book meetings and discussing the chaos cults even when we weren’t playing the game, I knew I’d pulled it off.)

DISTRIBUTING THE BOOKS

So I broke up The Book of Faceless Hate into a bunch of pieces, adapted the content to my campaign world, and reframed everything using lore book techniques so that the players would feel like they were “really” reading these strange tomes and oddly moist pages. Then I started adding even more lore books to flesh things out more, ending up with, as I mentioned, roughly fifty different books.

Okay, but what did I actually do with all of these lore books?

The short answer is that I seeded them into all the adventures in the campaign, spreading them around so that the PCs would collect them book by book.

I had about twenty chaos-related adventures where these books could be found, so this meant that many of them would be stocked with multiple lore books. Sometimes they were clustered together in a secret library; other times they would be scattered throughout the adventure.

In practice, I had even more options (and was adding even more chaos lorebooks) because most of these books weren’t unique volumes. They were books and religious scriptures. Secretive, yes, but still meant to be copied and disseminated. Thus, for example, the PCs could find a copy of The Touch of the Ebon Hand in Pythoness House in Session 22, but also, unsurprisingly, later find a bunch of them in the Temple of the Ebon Hand.

Note: And because I wasn’t worried about duplicating them, the PCs went off into an unexpected direction and I ended up adding new scenarios, I could easily reach into my stock of chaos lorebooks, grab a few, and sprinkle them around.

I was also able to add them to other scenarios, unrelated to the chaos cults, to make the entire campaign world feel like a unified whole and create the impression that the chaos cults were a pervasive, ever-present influence.

Along these same lines, I realized it was generally ideal if a cult’s primary lorebook could be found OUTSIDE the cult’s headquarters. In other words, if it was possible for the PCs to learn about a cult (setup) and then later discover where they were operating (payoff).

Consider, also, this diagram, also found in Pythoness  House in Session 22:

It depicts the symbols for a variety of chaos cults working with Wuntad, giving a default structure of:

• Who does this symbol belong to?
• It belongs to X!
• We found where X is / what X is doing!

You can see the simple progression of setups and payoffs that lead to a satisfying conclusion, and in this case we’ve complicated things through the simple expedient of having seven iterations of this progression happening simultaneously and overlapping with each other.

In actual practice, though, I muddied things up a bit more by

• including a couple symbols on the diagram that the PCs would never actually encounter in the campaign (where are they?!); and
• writing up lorebooks describing several additional chaos cults that weren’t part of Wuntad’s scheme at all (how many of them are there?!).

But I digress. Let’s get back to how the lorebooks were distributed.

What I quickly realized was that I needed a plan. You need to remember that I wasn’t prepping the entire campaign ahead of time: I had created an adventure track that indicated what the individual adventures were and how they were linked to each other, but I was prepping the keys for those adventures as they became relevant. Although I started off by simply adding whatever chaos lorebooks made sense in a particular adventure, it became clear that

• there was a bias towards some of the lorebook topics, causing them to be over-represented; and
• with so many lorebooks in play, there was a real risk that I would lose track and fail to place some of the lorebooks.

I started by putting together a simple checklist (i.e,. Have I placed this lorebook yet?), but realized I could still end up writing myself into a corner. (Where the PCs would get to the end of Act II and I would realize I still had way too many lorebooks to place and not enough adventure to place them in!) So I swapped to a spreadsheet with a list of all the lorebooks and a list of all the adventure cross-referenced.

This let me see and shape the totality of the chaos lorebooks: Where were they concentrated? Which books still needed to be placed and where could they go for best effect? Was it possible to find the book outside of the cult’s own lair?

Note: On this worksheet, I also made a point of distinguishing between which lorebooks had actually been placed – i.e., I’d keyed the adventure and they were in the adventure key—as opposed to which lorebook locations were only planned and had not yet been executed.

While doing this work, I also realized that there was a principle similar to the Three Clue Rule: Most of these lorebooks weren’t structurally essential, but they were — if I do say so myself — really cool, and I’d also put a lot of prep work into them. So for most of the books, I made a point of including them in at least three different adventures. (And if, for some reason, it wouldn’t make sense for a lorebook to be so widely disseminated, I would try to include multiple copies in the adventures where it could logically be found.)

As seen in the current session, this obviously resulted in the PCs often finding copies of chaos lorebooks that they already had. You might think this to be repetitive, pointless, or even disappointing, like a someone saying, “Aw, man… I already have this one!” when opening a pack of baseball cards. In practice, though, that really wasn’t the case.

First, the primary effect was fare more along the lines of, “Oh no… The cult has been here, too.”

Second, because it did, in fact, make diegetic sense for multiple copies of these books to exist, the presence of multiples made the world feel like a real place. It made the books “real,” rather than being a collectibles achievement in a video game.

Finally, because the campaign was being played out over months and even years of real time, the second or third encounter with a chaos lorebook would simply remind the players of what they have, often prompting them to pull out their copy of the handout and review it. Thus, the lore of the campaign was being constantly and organically reinforced until the players knew it in their bones.

Which was, of course, the point of the chaos lorebooks in the first place.

Campaign Journal: The Bloated Lords – Running the Campaign: All Your Zaug Belong to Us
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

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