DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 33C: Secret Doors & Sentries

But Agnarr was already scrambling back to his feet and racing down the hallways. He passed Tee easily, despite her considerable head start, and then slid down the last ten feet of the passage – right past the ratman who had scarcely finished turning to run. Before the  ratman could scamper down the hall, draw a weapon, or even turn back to face him, Agnarr had decapitated him.

The other ratman squeaked and retreated back towards a dead end. Tee rounded the corner and put an arrow through his eye.

Tee has been shooting bad guys through the eye since the first session of the campaign. Her first victim was a giant centipede, but that was quickly followed by kobolds, goblins, cultists, ratmen, demons, and all manner of beasties.

I’ve previously described this as a running gag (due to the comedic component it has for our group), but it’s also an example of an action schtick. These are themes or motifs that repeat again and again, usually in combat scenes. They may attach to specific characters in the form of a signature move (Chow Yun  Fat dual-wielding pistols, Trinity’s floating kick, etc.), but they can also have broader application. (For example, the way that John Woo used white doves as a recurring motif in his fight scenes.)

These schticks are not, it should be noted, mechanical. They might be tied to a particular ability, but even then they aren’t something that necessarily happens every single time the character uses that ability. Schticks are a little more ephemeral than that; a little more of an artistic flourish; a spice best used in moderation.

Personally, I usually let action schticks develop naturally during play. (I described Tee shooting the giant centipede through the eye, that got a big reaction, and then she kept doing it.) But you can also deliberately design them and use them for specific effect.

Action schticks can stick around for the length of an entire campaign (like Tee’s eye-shooting schtick), but they can also be a great shortcut for creating a memorable scenario or encounter: For example, the giants for Durbolg Peak wield huge warhammers. When they miss, the hammers often crash down, smashing craters into the ground.

The fact that you can prep action schticks can also make them a great crutch to fall back on if you’re struggling with effective and evocative descriptions of combat: Schticks can, to at least some extent, be plug-and-play, so if you give yourself the gift of a few schticks to play around with, you can get a lot of mileage by just dropping one or two of them into each fight. (Although you’ll want to be careful not to burn them out from overuse.)

Campaign Journal: Session 33D – Running the Campaign: NPC Spellbooks
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 33B: The Interrogation of Arveth

The man laughed. “It’s a fiction. A front for the Brotherhood of Venom.”

“Which you belong to.”

“That’s right.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Being questioned by amateurs.”

Tee wasn’t amused. She signaled Agnarr, who lowered him and began swinging the top of his head through the sewer sludge.

It’s a classic scene: Our hero has been taken prisoner by the villain. An interrogation ensues, with an exchange of witty banter. But who’s learning more? The hero or the villain? And then the denoument: “No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die!” Almost certainly most famous from Goldfinger, the trope extends back to the first James Bond movie and beyond. (You can find it in everything from Prisoner of Zenda to Shakespeare’s Hamlet to John Wick.)

Across a multitude of groups — home games, convention games, open tables, etc. — however, I have rarely seen this dynamic emerge at the gaming table. In fact, exactly the opposite seems far more common: The PCs will have taken someone prisoner and, as in the current session, be the ones coming up with Rube Goldbergian interrogation techniques.

(And, as often as not, just like a Bond villain, the PCs end up giving away more information than they gain. They’ll also do this in another Bond-ian scene which is more common at the game table: As guests at the bad guy’s big social event.)

This might just be a me thing. Maybe PCs in your campaigns are constantly getting captured and interrogated. But I think there are a few factors that cause this to happen:

First, RPGs largely default to the PCs being masters of their domain, by which I mean that they are almost always expected to physically trounce any opposition put in their way. This is in sharp contrast to the protagonists in most action movies, for example, who are almost always completely outgunned. In fact, it’s quite common for the plot of an action movie to be entire about the hero desperately running away (until, of course, the final act when they turn it all around).

Second, unlike Bond, players will generally resist being captured unto their last bloody breath. Many players have had bad experiences with GMs stripping them of their agency, and so they’d literally rather die than endure that again. Game design also factors in here, with the typical RPG providing concrete structures in which the players can influence the outcome of events (or, at least, feel as if they can continue influencing events) as long as they keep fighting, but no such structures for sustaining their agency in a Bond-like fashion if they allow themselves to be captured.

Third, there’s the distinct difference between the group dynamics of the typical PC group in an RPG and the dynamic of the lone protagonist in other media. Most stories in other media protagonize a single character, even if that character is operating in a group. In the comparatively rare stories where there are a gaggle of main characters (e.g., Ocean’s Eleven or Stranger Things), it’s still virtually unheard of for them to always travel together in one big pack.

(Consider the group dynamics of the The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship is quite large, but during the period where the whole group is together, the story remains pretty firmly fixed on Frodo as the main character. It’s only when the Fellowship splits up that other characters start acting as protagonists.)

Even more unusual (again, compared to other media) is the penchant for most RPG groups to almost never frame scenes around a PC vs. PC conflict. (Not necessarily in the sense of a physical confrontation; in the sense of conflicting agendas.) Usually when you have a large, central cast of characters in other media, most of the storytelling is about the relationships and conflicts between those characters, but not so in most RPG groups.

Better RPG groups will, in fact, rise above this. But it’s pervasive largely because it arises naturally from the expected dynamic of “the GM preps material for the players to experience.” This inclines the GM towards presenting their prep and causes the players to slide into a weird midpoint between passive audience and hive-mind protagonists.

Anyway, the point is that PCs often interrogate NPCs as if they were Bond villains.

Weird, huh?

Campaign Journal: Session 33C – Running the Campaign: Action Schticks
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 33A: Down the Sewer Hole

They collected their two cultist prisoners (replacing the manacles with knotted ropes firmly tied by Tor) and dragged them over to the hole in the back corner of the first floor. Climbing down the rope ladder they found themselves, as they had predicted, in the sewers. Tee came last, dragging a rug over the hole behind her to help conceal its presence, cutting the rope ladder, and then floating down using her boots of levitation.

They were standing at the intersection of four major sewer passages. Narrow walkways of beslimed stone ran along a wide, slowly flowing channel of raw sewage. Agnarr examined the ground and determined that the walkways to the north and west had recently seen a great deal of traffic. They suspected that was the direction the cultists would come…

You’ll often read that the large, walkable sewer tunnels that we see in movies, TV shows, and our D&D campaigns are complete nonsense and have no basis in reality.

But this is not entirely accurate.

It’s true that sewer systems (both today and historically) were mostly made up of pipes too small for humans to traverse. (The drain in your sink does not drop directly into a tunnel.) It’s also true that medieval European cities mostly lacked sewer systems of any kind. (Paris, for example, didn’t have an underground sewer until 1730.)

But that doesn’t mean sewer systems don’t have any walkable tunnels. (They do. Ironically, Paris now has one of the largest networks of walkable sewer tunnels.) It’s also not true that sewers are a modern invention, or that historical sewer systems lacked the larger tunnels. (As far as I can tell, they were actually more common because (a) it was more likely that humans would need access to clear out clogs and debris and (b) older sewer systems were more likely to be primarily focused on draining storm and flood water than waste disposal, and therefore needed very high capacity.)

Rome, for example, had the Cloaca Maxima, which had tunnels, walkways, the whole bit. The final act of The Third Man, Carol Reed’s classic noir film featuring Orson Welles, takes place in the sewers beneath Vienna and was filmed on location: These spacious tunnels were also constructed by the Romans in the 2^nd century. Other Roman sewers of similar design have been preserved in Herculaneum and Pompeii.

Although it appears that Romans were allowed to connect their privies to theses systems, recent archaeology suggests that they rarely did: Their toilets notably lacked traps, so nothing would stop sewer gases (and smells) from simply coming up the toilet. Animals and other pests would also use them to invade homes. (We have tales about alligators coming up from the sewers: Aelian and Pliny tell us of an octopus in Iberia that would swim up the drainage tunnels at high tide and sneak into kitchens to eat the pickled fish. On a similar note, there were Victorian tales of pigs living in the sewers of Hampstead. But I digress.)

On the gripping hand, it would nevertheless be quite unusual to find a sewer system like this–

–with twenty-foot-wide passages kept surprisingly tidy and flanked on both sides by walkways. (The entrances to weird, subterranean caverns are actually slightly more plausible: It wasn’t unusual for ancient sewer construction to piggyback or unexpectedly run into preexisting underground structures. In fact, many ancient sewers, including possibly the earliest version of the Cloaca Maxima, were just rivers that had been bricked over.)

But all of this, of course, begins to rub up against the fantastical architecture at the heart of D&D. If the cities of D&D were meant to be strictly modeled on the cities of medieval Europe, we could sagely nod our heads, stroke out chins, and pronounce that it’s just silly for them to have sewers like this.

But D&D cities aren’t medieval European cities, are they?

First, there’s no reason that a completely alternative history wouldn’t see your D&D civilizations preserve the hydrological knowledge of the Romans.

Second, as we’ve seen, some medieval cities DID have sewers like this because they preserved Roman ones. (And it’s not like D&D-land isn’t peppered with ancient civilizations.)

Third, even our declaration of “medieval European city” is pretty biased. The Byzantines were still building large waterworks during this time, as did the Ottomans after the fall of Constantinople.

Fourth, the construction capacity and resources of a typical D&D setting far outstretch those of medieval Europe due to the presence of ubiquitous magic (whether arcane or divine).

So if I want to feature something like this in a D&D campaign, instead of reaching for reasons why it can’t exist, I instead reach for the reasons that it can and then apply them.

In doing so, of course, I don’t necessarily need to achieve absolute realism — just plausibility. Because, sewers aside, fantastical construction is a concept that D&D’s worldbuilding inherently holds in tension. The entire game is fundamentally based on architecture which is simultaneously fantastical and irrational: To what possible purpose could the tunnels beneath Castle Blackmoor have been constructed?

(There’s a reason that both Gygax’s Greyhawk and Greenwood’s Undermountain are justified by the whims of a Mad Mage, Zagyg and Halaster respectively.)

We don’t want to abandon logic entirely — because then the PCs are simply trapped in a madhouse of random noise, unable to meaningfully apply thought or problem solving — but the skein of verisimilitude can be pulled very tight when it comes to D&D and a milieu which often operates only on laws of convention.

Campaign Journal: Session 33B – Running the Campaign: Bond. The Opposite of Bond.
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 32C: Enter Arveth

Tor had barely reached the rope on the second floor when an axe thrown from below thunked into the windowsill next to him. He ducked back… and the former prisoners panicked, scattering through the upper level – some cowering in corners, another getting ambushed by a patch of violent slime that fell from the ceiling, a third trying to climb out of a different window only to fall with a scream into the cobbled alley below.

The default goal of a dungeon in D&D is to win fights: You go into the dungeon. You encounter monsters. You kill the monsters. You take their treasure. You leave the dungeon. Hurrah!

But defaults are boring.

This particular default, though, can be pretty sneaky. You can usually spot it, though, if you keep your eye out for “clear the dungeon” scenario goals.

For example: “My scenario isn’t just some crude, kick-down-the-door dungeon crawl! The PCs need to stop an eldritch rite which threatens to sever the connection between the Material Plane the Feywild!”

Okay, sure. And how do they stop it?

“They have to find the corrupted grove and journey into the liminal realm which connects all dryad trees!”

Awesome. And how do they actually stop the ritual?

“… they have to hunt down all the cultists in the dryad-realm and kill them.”

There’s nothing wrong with a good fight, nor with a pulp scenario where you solve your problems with fists and/or swords and/or blasters. (That adventure through a corrupted dryad-grove sounds amazing.)

But as I think the current session demonstrates, having non-combat goals — whether for a full scenario or just an individual encounter — makes the combat more interesting.

The raid on this abandoned apartment building was, if I do say so myself, a thrilling scenario. Both I and the players were fully engaged, grappling with a complex, multi-level environment filled with a variety of opponents and treacherous environments.

But the instant “save the prisoners” was introduced as an additional, non-combat goal everything was ratcheted up to another level. It added layers of complexity to the tactical situation, and by virtue of inherently creating a set-up with multiple goals (the default combat goal of “take them all out” plus the new goal), it turn calculations into choices.

The example in this session also demonstrates that these non-combat goals don’t always need to come from the GM. If you create a rich environment that responds dynamically to the players’ choices and actions, they’ll merrily set their own goals and complicate their own lives.

Campaign Journal: Session 33A – Running the Campaign: Fantasy Campaigns
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 32B: Shaped by Venom

A beam of scintillating energy shot out from a second door – only slightly cracked – and struck the barbarian in the chest, paralyzing him completely. Agnarr was completely defenseless as one of the thralls thrust its lance-like claw through his chin and up into his skull, killing him instantly.

Oh no! Agnarr! I can’t believe this! How will his death reshape the campaign? What will be the emotional fallout? What new character will his player create?

With the entryway cleared, Dominic came around the corner, looked at Agnarr’s grievous wound, and sighed heavily.

(…)

As Tee came back inside, she saw that Agnarr was shaking his head gingerly – Dominic had resealed the bond between his soul and body.

Oh. Never mind.

For the In the Shadow of the Spire campaign, and other 3^rd Edition games, I used a set of house rules for death and dying designed to narratively smooth out the “you’re dead, you’re back, you’re dead, you’re back, you’re dead” up-and-down cycle that can emerge in D&D, but it’s nevertheless true that once you start hitting the upper range of what we’d now call Tier 2 the PCs’ relationship to death shifts.

Raise dead really is a game changer.

This used to be less true. In AD&D, for example, a character could only be returned to life with raise dead or resurrection effects a number of times equal to their Constitution score. (This could eventually be surpassed with a wish spell, but obviously only at a much later point in the campaign.)

(At least in theory. The fact that 3^rd Edition began eliminating such consequences because they weren’t fun is largely because a wide swath of people were already ignoring them because they weren’t fun. But I digress.)

Regardless, most D&D protagonists will reach a point where their relationship is largely unique in storytelling. Superheroes often experience a revolving door of death, but it’s rarely seen that way by the character except for comical asides or fourth-wall breaks. Video games will have stuff like phoenix down that will “revive” companions who are “dead,” but this is usually ludonarrative dissonance with these games nevertheless featuring actual death in their cutscenes.

The same sort of ludonarrative dissonance — a disconnect between the story of the game and the mechanics of the game — is something that will often crop up in D&D campaigns: You instinctively want death to have the same meaning that it does in stories or real life, but the reality is that it doesn’t. Dominic’s reaction to seeing Agnarr’s impaled corpse may be distress, but it really shouldn’t be the same emotional reaction that someone in the real world seeing their companion’s corpse would have. Because the reality Dominic and Agnarr are living in is just fundamentally not the same.

And, in my opinion, that’s OK. It’s fascinating, even.

I think there’s kind of two ways to deal with this.

First, you can try to treat death in a mid- or high-level D&D game as if it were emotionally and factually the same as death in the real world. If you take this approach, though, I think you’ll be best served if you actually house rule the game to match the vision of what you want (and sustain ludonarrative harmony). That would mean getting rid of spells like raise dead, and if you do that, you’ll probably also want to modify the mechanics around dying, your scenario design, or both.

Second, lean into it. Death doesn’t have the same meaning. So what meaning DOES it have, both emotionally and factually? And what are the unique stories that you can tell with that meaning?

A sentiment I often see in a variety of places (discussions of prequel movies, for example) is that if a character can’t die, then there’s nothing at stake. This can be a particularly alluring belief when it comes to a D&D because, other than the outcomes of specific die rolls, death IS the only mechanically defined thing at stake in the game.

But it’s not really true, of course, because the experience of playing D&D is much more than just the sum of its mechanics. And, particularly in fiction, life-or-death is often the least interesting thing at stake.

Campaign Journal: Session 32C – Running the Campaign: Non-Combat Goals
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index