Advice on Campaign Mysteries from From the Sorcerer's Skull

A little while back, Trey from From the Sorcerer's Skull wrote about how he builds mysteries into his campaign settings, in response to a question I asked him. Ever since, I've been meaning to collect and share some of Trey's other advice about building a mystery-filled campaign.

I first noticed that From the Sorcerer's Skull had advice on campaign mysteries when Trey posted a list of six unknowns in his Land of Azurth campaign, and then a follow-up to check-in on how many his players had solved.

In The Cultivating and Care of Campaign Mysteries, Trey lays out five pieces of concrete advice for creating a mystery-filled campaign:

- Embed the mysteries at the time of setting creation
- Don't decide on all the answers
- Create recurring NPCs to encourage player interest
- Create treasures that connect to the mysteries
- Build on player ideas

The first bit of advice here seems obvious, but probably is worth pointing out explicitly. You need to decide on some secrets early in your setting design process, so that you'll be able to decide on hints and clues to get your players interested. "If you want the players interested in the mysterious background of your setting, it has to be there."

His second piece of advice seems to contradict the first, but I think the idea is that you should decide on questions, but shouldn't decide on all the answers. Some questions your players might never investigate, and so might never need an answer. Other questions, an answer better than what you might have originally thought of could emerge as a logical conclusion during play.

I feel like this relates to the advice to build on player ideas. By that, Trey means trying to connect the player character backstories to the campaign mysteries - giving the characters a stake in the mystery, or using elements of their backstory as clues. But I think building on player ideas can also mean building ideas that they propose while they're investigating. When they describe what they've learned so far, and what conclusion they draw from it, that might sound more correct than what you originally thought of, and that's okay.

Trey's other two recommendations here are to use NPCs and treasures to help get the players involved in the mysteries. NPCs who act suspiciously might suggest themselves as suspects. The search for a famous treasure might reveal clues that illuminate the setting's history. And both NPCs and treasures are things that players want to interact with and learn more about, making them a source for clues that players will want to learn.



This piece ties in well with some of Trey's other advice about campaign setting creation. Adventure Time and Campaign Construction is a defense and explanation of making some of it up as you go along, rather than making it all up in advance. Setting History Should Do Something is a more general discussion of what kind of setting material is most (and least!) useful to make up, regardless of when you do it.

Trey explains his reasoning for not creating too much of your setting in advance:
- The campaign should start simple to make it accessible
- Seeing what the players like and respond to can help guide your setting creation
- The setting should only be revealed a little a time, in ways that connect to the adventure

A lot of the idea here is to slow down the pace at which you invent setting details to help enforce a slower pace of revelation. You don't want to overwhelm your players with too much detail before they even start playing, and if you haven't written the details yet, then you can't over-share them.

In addition to your players proposing ideas and theories at the table, what they're interested in (and what they're not) can help guide you to only create the things they want and you need. Again, you don't want to reveal too much detail during each gaming session; leaving things undecided prevents you from revealing more than you should.

And again, Trey suggests using monsters, NPCs, and treasures as like "hooks" to try to attract player interest and to show you what they care about. When they start tugging on a string, it's time for you to start fleshing out whatever's at the end of it.

The idea here isn't that you make it all up along the way, but rather, you start with a strong foundation and build it as you go, rather than starting with the entire edifice (or starting with nothing!)

When you are writing some backstory for your campaign, Trey recommends that backstory should:
- Reinforce the themes, flavor, or mood of the setting
- Establish constraints or parameters for adventures
- Provide obstacles for players overcome or toys for them to play with
- Avoid describing events that are repetitive or don't directly impact the present day setting

One way to think about this advice is to not write setting material that isn't actually important to your setting; another is to make sure to let your players interact with whatever is important.

Eberron is a bit guilty of violating Trey's suggestions here, with its ten-thousand year backstory, its series of highly similar apocalyptic invasions by varieties of reality-warping demons, and its setting-defining war that's finished before the campaign starts. Carcosa suffers from this too - there are psychic powers you'll never roll high enough to receive, cool alien artifacts you can't use, rituals you're (supposedly) not supposed to perform, and even a titular city that isn't really even there to visit.

Even the core rulebooks of most editions of D&D are guilty of this is in a way - playing the way the rules suggest, by starting at 1st level and likely dying multiple times while trying to level up, the books are filled with class features you'll never receive, spells you'll never be high enough level to cast, monsters you'll never have enough hp to fight, and artifacts you'll never find as treasure. That's not just because there's too much stuff to include it all, but because so much of the coolest stuff is explicitly walled off where most players will never get to it without breaking the rules. (Plus NPCs who sound suspiciously like Gary and his friends - they're more powerful than any PC, and either you'll never meet them, or they'll totally overshadow you if your paths ever cross.)

The way I interpret Trey's advice here is, basically, don't do that. Whether you're laying the foundation for your setting before the first game or adding details mid-campaign, figure out what's supposed to be important, and give the players the opportunity to encounter it right away. Whether that's as clues they keep running into, rumors they keep hearing - or as monsters, treasures, NPCs, or adventuring sites they actually get to see - give them the good stuff. (Because if you don't, a corollary of this idea is that whatever you DO give them is what your campaign is actually about - no matter what you intended.)

In a mystery campaign, presumably that means foregrounding the mysteries, the hints that lead you to wonder about them, and the clues that help you solve them. If you built mysteries into the backstory of your campaign, but the players never learn about, or find any evidence to help unravel them, then they're essentially dormant, and whatever your campaign's actually about, it isn't about solving those (unknown, unrealized) mysteries.



Azurth isn't a sandbox, it's got an episodic, mission-based campaign structure that gives Trey a bit more control over which part of the setting his players are interacting with each session. But he does have some ideas for building a setting where they player are more free to wander around looking for secrets. In The Weird Town: Investigative Sandbox, he offers some ideas for creating a compact setting where almost every major site holds a mystery.

- The town has many distinct secrets to investigate
- The town itself is weird and mysterious (not just a neutral site where crime coincidentally occurs)
- The player characters might be outsiders, but have a connection to town that gives the investigation some urgency



Finally, Trey also has some concrete advice for GMs to use to keep their players' investigations moving along. In The Simple Art of Mystery, he offers seven tips for GMs so they can facilitate (rather than hindering) their players' attempts to solve mysteries:

- Make sure the players want to solve a mystery
- Have a plan but leave some things open
- Always let the players find the most important clues
- Repeated interactions with the same NPCs always reveals new information
- If the players reach an impasse, an NPC will always react to their investigation so far
- Every NPC has a secret
- The players can solve mysteries without being Sherlock Holmes

The first piece of advice here is another bit that seems obvious but bears mentioning, which seems to be Trey's hallmark for starting off these pieces. Make sure your players know they're solving mysteries, and make sure they're on board to do that.

The next piece of advice here is another hallmark, you need a strong foundation in order to leave meaningful clues, but don't fill in every single detail in advance. Your players' guesses about what's going on might supply ideas worth including in the canon, and their actions during the game might cause you to invent details you couldn't have planned to include. When this works, it creates a sense that the players have discovered something true that even the gamemaster didn't realize before. But for that to work, these discoveries probably shouldn't contradict information you planned but never revealed.

Trey places a lot of importance on NPC interactions, which feels appropriate. Your players can search a room and find all the physical objects in it (and if any of those objects are clues, Trey recommends letting them find the object, rather than risking failure with a skill check) - but figuring out the meaning of those objects is probably going to require talking to NPCs. Just like every building in the mystery town houses its own weirdness, every NPC has their own secret. In addition to solving your main mystery, you can also make progress by figuring out what each person is hiding.

You probably learn as much from a clue-object directly as you're going to learn the first time you look closely at it (at least within the game!) - but you can always learn new information by talking to NPCs, even the same NPCs you talked to last time. If you have new questions, they have new answers. If you don't have new questions, because you've hit some kind of impasse, then it's time for an NPC to do something that generates new information. The mystery shouldn't exactly solve itself with no input from the players - remember, they're supposed to want to be here doing this - but it's a classic trope of the genre that having nosy kids start poking around spooks the villain into reacting. Canny investigators sometimes do things simply to provoke a reaction that will reveal a vital clue. Arguably, in fact, those villain reactions should happen with some regularity, even before the players have exhausted all their current leads. Just make sure that however the villain reacts, it actually does generate new questions to ask, new NPCs to talk to, or new places to look for clues.

Which is why Sherlock Holmes is probably a poor model for mystery solving in RPGs. In the popular imagination at least, Holmes is a guy who finds some ash from pipe tobacco on the ground, tastes the ashes, then calls on his voluminous memory of varieties of tobacco and where each type is sold across town and combines that with his vast experience with licking ashtrays to produce a list of tobacconist shops the villain must be a regular at. His shtick is that stuff that you'd normally need a crime lab for, he can do in his head.

But that's not how mystery solving goes at the RPG table. For obvious reasons, the players can't analyze the clues that way in their own heads. What they can do is ask the gamemaster "hey, would my character know which shop sold the tobacco that produced this ash?" But that's not nearly as interesting as getting the same answer by finding the genius perfumer who can discern the tasting notes by sniffing the ashes, then taking their findings to the blustering and self-important tobacco sommelier who knows all the shops in the city. In both cases, the players ask the gamemaster a question and get an answer, but it's so much more interesting if the answer comes out of the mouth of a fascinating NPC than if the GM simply states "sure, your character's a chain-smoker with pica, here's the address." In a game that's not about solving mysteries, maybe it makes sense to do a skill check, get the information, and move on, but if your purpose for being there at the game table is to enjoy the process of the investigation, then I think Trey's right, Holmes isn't a very good model for how that should go.

Player Art - Two Self-Portraits - Jimbo Chirrup and Crow

I wanted to share a couple of players' portraits of their characters.

 
First, we have Jimbo Chirrup, the Grasshopperfolk Garden Wizard, drawn by Josh Burnett. Jimbo has appeared in my GLOG Wizard City campaign, which you can read about here and here.

 
Next, here's Crow, the Tabaxi Rogue, drawn by Lindsey M. Crow has appeared in my 5e Undermountain campaign. You can read about Crow's first adventure here, and an earlier adventure in the same campaign without her here. Lindsey also drew some monsters for me earlier, which you can see here.

Actual Play - GLOG Wizard City - Sophomore Year

Wizard Grad School 2nd Year Dungeon Exams

My GLOG campaign set in Goodberry Monthly's Wizard City campaign setting continues!

(I've also joined Oblidisideryptch's online GLOG game, exploring The Tomb of the Serpent Kings as a cannoneer, so I'm getting the opportunity to see these rules from both sides of the table.)

In this campaign, Josh and Peter and I are playing wizard graduate students who have yearly exams going into the dungeons Under Gallax Hall, with visits to the Wizard City Hexcrawl for "downtime" over summer break and the winter holiday.

(Josh has pointed out that a different ruleset could encourage more intra-party drama. It also occurred to me that you could set something like this up with shorter delves that happen at midterms and finals every semester, with "downtime" for drama in between.)

By coincidence, statues will be a recurring theme of these sessions. 

Jimbo Chirrup, a grasshopperfolk and 2nd level garden wizard, played by Josh
Deeringer, a deerling and 2nd level drowned wizard, played by Peter
Lunai Lovegood, a lunai and 2nd level orthodox wizard, played by me

Monica Doom was eager to recruit the team.

Session 4 : Summer Break

After attending a very lovely funeral for the beloved Arivaderchi Zeucchini (who is still alive, although trapped on the 2nd level of the dungeon), the three surviving grad students decided to follow up on the note they found hidden in Professor Klaus's office: "If you've managed to steal this, then I have need of your services. Ask the bartender at the Wandering Monster for a feline on the rocks."

On a humid summer night, the group went to the famous Wandering Monster bar near the student ghetto, where Deeringer, clearly at home in this film noir scenario, took the lead by ordering the drink, and was soon introduced to the femme fatale, a black cat in a wizard hat lapping up a Brandy Alexander from a saucer at the end of the bar.

"We found your note," Deeringer said, placing the folded slip of paper onto the bartop. The cat explained she was Monica Doom, a fellow Gallax University grad student, but she'd gotten herself into trouble gambling at the Manticore. She was a cat wizard who'd wagered her ability to turn back into her human form and lost; to buy it back, she needed the Eleventh Hourglass, which was hidden away in the vault in the southeast corner of the Old Gallax building, on the 3rd level of the dungeon.

The group agreed to help her retrieve the magic hourglass in exchange for directions to the vault, where they'd keep anything else they found. Monica also agreed to fence any more textbooks they found at a better price. They declined the chance to go gamble at the Manticore themselves.

The statues concluded their war with violent finality.

Session 4 : Winter Holiday

A semester of study and preparations passes as though in an eye blink, and soon the winter holidays were upon them. Jimbo, Deeringer, and Lunai ventured out into town again to enjoy the festivities and snow, but unfortunately, a roll on the random encounter table indicated that a civil war had erupted among the city's statues! Led by statues of the university's founders, four armies of stone and bronze figures began amassing and conducting commando raids on the edges of each other's territories. The city's wizard residents mostly stayed indoors, only popping outside long enough to literally run to their destination.

The three friends tried to intervene, with Deeringer again taking the lead. On the second day of the war, using his decrepit and badly maintained spy network, Deeringer managed to sow dissension between the statues, turning the two-on-two standoff into a four-way free-for-all.

On the third day, Gallax University's bursar's office was destroyed in the fighting! "Oh no," said Jimbo, "the student debt records. All destroyed. Whatever will we do."

On the fourth day, a statue was accused of treachery by its faction and was taken to the the Manticore to be bitten in half by the statue of St Mantis, the patron saint of grasshopperfolk in Wizard City.

On the fifth day, the Wizard Police came out and made everything worse, bludgeoning undergraduates in the streets for no reason, shooting people's familiars and daemons, tossing spell grenades through windows, and generally making a nuisance of themselves.

On the sixth day, a gang of kuo-toa from out of town arrived and declared themselves the new bosses of the Drain neighborhood that bordered the Gallax University Campus. Seeing them as representatives of the hated ocean and everything it represents, Deeringer vowed to rededicate his efforts toward kicking the kuo-toa back out of town.

On the seventh day, a week after hostilities had begun, all of Deeringer's efforts and machinations came to fruition. Three of the founder statues reached an agreement and sicced their respective armies on the fourth and all his followers. Clouds of marble dust billowed through the streets, mingling with the light falling snow, as a quarter of all the statues in the city were pulverized and shattered by their enemies. The kuo-toa were also wiped out during the fighting, and to celebrate both New Year's Day and the end of the Seven Days' Statue War, the Krill Shop gave out free fish soup to all the hungry students who could finally emerge from their dorms and ghettos.

Deeringer was prepared for even further mischief.

Sessions 5-8 : Second Year Final Exams

Spring semester passed just as quickly as the fall had. Jimbo's many visits to Student Health paid off with a cure for his travel blindness, although he still had a drinking problem and more work to do in therapy next year. Fortunately, he was sober (and thus temporarily illiterate) in his Wizard History class on the day when the professor accidentally wrote a cursed glyph on the board and drove all the other students in the class insane.

Deeringer was being harassed by student loan officers kept chasing after him trying to collect his rusty Atlantean coins. "But I'm not even a student!" he protested, but the loan officers produced a folder filled with obviously fake loan documents. It seemed that in the wake of the destruction of the bursar's office, the University was resorting falsifying and robo-signing paperwork to replenish the school's coffers.

On exam day, the three friends passed by Professor Sitch's office and left the Bones Lounge unopened. They continued up the hallway, past the lecture auditorium, until they encountered some yellow maintenance signs. Always concerned about a wet floor, Deeringer looked closer and saw that they were warning of "GRABBY FLOOR! PLEASE USE CAUTION!" No one liked the sound of that, so they entered a classroom, looking for a way around. The room appeared to have been recently cleaned. All the furniture was stacked up into three extremely precarious looking towers, which the group all tip-toed around. In the next room, they found a classroom covered in blood-spatter and gore, and a custodian carefully cleaning up one corner of the devastation. They asked for help with the hall and instead got yelled at about the mess, so they left, deliberately knocking over the furniture behind them on the way out, the sound of distant swearing just audible over the tumult of falling chairs as they shut the door behind them.

Leaving the classroom, they took a different hall past the auditorium, and approached a statue of a pompous looking administrator and his equally dignified cat. Unfortunately, as they approached, Jimbo and Deeringer fell into a pit trap. Jimbo was alright - and managed to find a valuable looking textbook on the body of a dead undergrad. He was able to jump up out of the pit, to where Lunai has just returned with another (different, helpful) custodian. Lunai, Jimbo, and the custodian were able to haul out Deeringer, who was badly injured.

While Lunai helped Deeringer make a sling, Jimbo inspected the cat statue, and discovered that its tail could move. Tilted in one direction, the administrator's statue rotated and pointed down the hall at a statue of a unicorn. The floor around the unicorn statue was scuffed, and Jimbo was sure it was hiding a secret door, but he couldn't figure out the mechanism ... sooo, he started chipping away at the stonework behind the statue with his spade. The noise eventually attracted the attention of a group of undergrads, who started scolding him for defacing school property. "What are you talking about?" he asked. "Destroying property is cool. What're you guys, squares? Get punk, fellow kids." Thoroughly convinced, the undergrads ran down the hall, determined to toppled the administrator's statue, and all fell down the pit trap, probably to their deaths.

Eventually, Jimbo broke through, and the three friends decided to eat lunch in the secret room. It appeared to be a hidden student lounge, with the remnants of a magic circle drawn on the floor. Fully justifying the cost of their student loans, they were easily able to identify it as a ward against authority figures. "Hey, these kids are alright," Jimbo quipped as he flopped onto one of the couches. He browsed a copy of the student newspaper, The Unveiling Eye. It was a special issue about statues. The newspaper claimed that every statue had a meaning and every one hid a secret. It also claimed that the statues sometimes came to life, walked around, and traded places. "Yep, that checks out."

After lunch, with Deeringer in particular feeling much refreshed, they returned to the statue of the administrator and the cat. Jimbo noticed a loose tile and managed to pry it up. Underneath, they found a shaft leading downward, with a ladder disappearing down into the dark. They tried turning the cat's tail the other way, and the statue rotated again, pointing at a wooden wall. Again, they found no secret door mechanism, but Lunai broke down the wall with her battering beam spell, revealing the top of the old belltower, and a terribly rickety looking scaffolding leading down too. The group briefly debated their options, and chose the safer ladder over the possibly deeper scaffolding.

Despite Jimbo's fears, the steam pipes were plant free.

The ladder led down to a dead-end hallway. The ceiling overhead was a maze of pipes. The 2nd level of the dungeon was a maze of steam tunnels! Exploring a bit, the group entered a room with a blood-stained bathtub, emblazoned with the text "Leave an Offering". Deeringer was concerned about the possibility that the sinister, murderous ocean might try to get at him via the pipes of faucets. Jimbo tried leaving a small cash offering, but when nothing happened, he was unwilling to offer anything more.

The next room they entered was so filled with steam it was difficult to see. The party tried following the billowing steam clouds to their source, and soon reached a room filled with pipes and valves, where some undergraduate sorority sisters - members of Omicron Delta Theta, who maintained a clubhouse on this level - were apparently intentionally clouding up this section of the dungeon. A highly positive reaction roll suggested that the sisters might be flirting with Jimbo and Deeringer. "Look! Grad student guys!" Jimbo seemed happy to chat the girls up, while Deeringer was more stoic.

"So what are you two doing down here?" the Deeringer asked. The ODT girls showed off their pockets filled with syringes of mutagen, and explained their plan to get people lost and confused by the mist, then inject them with diseases and mutation serums. Deeringer was aghast - "Why would you do something like that?" - but Jimbo thought this all sounded pretty normal - "What're you, kidding? C'mon. This is wizard college. That's like, a Tuesday." The girls agreed and explained that they got extra credit for every person they infected. Jimbo was able to get directions to two different routes down to level 3, and one of the sisters slipped him the address for her apartment back in town. Then the girls used special syringes to turn themselves into clouds of vapor and floated away down a hallway that they'd confessed was heavily booby-trapped behind all the steam.

The group retraced their steps, attempting to locate a path to the eastern staircase. Their first effort led them to a flooded room, which Deeringer was unwilling to enter - and Jimbo and Lunai agreed with his judgment. The retreated and tried another track, aiming for the northeaster stairs instead. This time they passed through a room with a metal grate for a floor. Deeringer was sure he saw something lurking underneath, and continued to worry about flooding.

They entered a strangely symmetrical intersection of hallways, so self-similar they worried about getting lost just walking straight through. They were attacked by a towering dungeon swan, one of ODT's many experimental mutants, and after a pitched battle, they put the beast down and retreated the way they had come. They realized that somehow 4 days had passed outside while they were in the corridor. They retreated back to the steam room to sleep the night. They awoke warm and a bit damp, but with their clothing pleasantly steam-cleaned!

The next morning, the group returned to the time-bending intersection, only to be approached by the stone statue of a horse with no rider. Fearing what might happen if they fought it, the trio retreated from the statue, observing that another 2 days passed in the brief time they'd been inside the strange halls. Trying a different path, they passed through another eerily symmetrical intersection of hallways, but fortunately passed through unharmed. They quickly passed through a room where the ceiling was covered in faucets, afraid of what might drip out if they lingered.

The next room held dozens of valves, sorted and color-coded according to some unknown logic. Jimbo pressed his luck quite far indeed, trying out over half a dozen of the valves. After one, the group heard a mechanical thump and the ambient noise level decreased slightly. (This was the heating system for the entire above-ground building shutting down. The undergrads were thrown into chaos, and eventually, a custodian would have to venture here to restart the furnaces.) After another, they heard screaming coming from somewhere overhead. (This was nerve gas being released into one of the torture laboratories on the 1st level. Mission to punk those nerds in the Torture Department? Accomplished!) Fortunately for Deeringer and Lunai, Jimbo stopped testing valves before killing them all!

Eventually, they passed down a hall into a room where a whimpering body-bag hung from the ceiling. When approached, whoever was inside the bag became inconsolable and started wailing. Jimbo's spell to calm emotions had no effect. Knocking the bag down and opening it revealed that it was stuffed with wastepaper!

In the next room, they found an angry janitor, trying to mop the rust stains out of the rusted iron floor with a wet mop. He wasn't at all happy about the noise the party had made in the other room, but cheered up slightly when offered whiskey, and pointed the way to the nearby staircase.

The final obstacle was a giant door of solid black granite. It seemed to have no handle or way to open it, but feeling along the door eventually revealed a keyhole. The group tried the unregistered key they'd found in the Bones Lounge, and the door opened! Just past the door was a stairway leading down to the 3rd level of the dungeon.

Walking the halls without a hall pass, eh?
They go tough on you for that 'round these parts.

Jimbo, Deeringer, and Lunai descended the stairs and entered the Old Gallax Building, the previous college structure that the steam tunnels, basement, and current Gallax Building had all been erected atop. The exited the stair room and entered an enormous old hall, complete with hideous carpet and outdated wallpaper. An oversized statue of a knight in armor stood across from the door, its visor began glowing with red light, and it bellowed "Present hall pass!" The group bolted back behind the door, and quickly forged a hallpass on a torn-out page of spellbook. The statue proved to be not very discerning, and the glow in its visor went out when they presented the forgery. "Hall pass accepted!"

The hall appeared to contain more statues further down its length, and Monica Doom's instructions suggested the vault would be in the southeast corner of the dungeon, so there was no good reason to follow this hall leading to the west. They found a doorway branching off to the south - inside, they found the ghost of Administrator Poe, one of the university's four founders. The ghost was busy berating his miserable zombie staff about how his expansive office suite was all crooked and would need to be redone. Naturally, Deeringer, Jimbo, and Lunai pretended to be custodians, there to perform the requested repairs. Administrator Poe was extremely pleased, and left for his other office across the hall. The group quickly searched the place, discovering a valuable crystal paperweight, and a room covered in calendars with December 6th circled on every one.

Leaving the office, the group crossed another long hall. They could see statues of the founders, and the enormous University Seal cast in bronze, with the words "SEAL PERISH. UNIVERSITY" printed visibly along the side facing them. The declined to investigate that any further and continued deeper into the old building.

The next set of halls were almost maze-like. The group entered a fancy administrative washroom and stole the gold-embroidered towels. The heard the footsteps of someone wearing fancy shoes and walking with authority, and waited until the sound had passed. Jimbo suggested camping in the easily-fortified location, but Deeringer refused. "No! Are you kidding? With all these faucets? Where the ocean can get us?"

They peeked into a lounge that appeared to be the site of a terrible magical battle, the walls covered in scorch marks, the ground littered with corpses with bizarre injuries - but the battle must have been over a hundred years earlier, and all that was left were skeletons and dust. Another room housed two statues holding the shattered remains of a mirror, the wall graffitied with the "NO ESCAPE, HARGRAVE!" Jimbo and Deeringer felt certain this message wasn't for them. "It's a lucky thing we're in a college. Even the graffiti has excellent grammar." "I know! And that penmanship!"

Finally, closing in on the vault, they entered another ancient battlefield, this one in an old library. More devastation, a skeleton half-embedded in a wall, a perfectly motionless student in old-timey garb, several skeletons wearing pointy wizard hats. The group began peeking at the books, but most seemed to have been damaged or distorted by the spells from the battle. Deeringer found some old bronze coins that he though Monica Doom might be able to fence.

As they prepared to leave, the hats leapt off their corpses and began attacking the three wizards! The hats got the better of the group in a way that nothing else in the dungeon so far had - Deeringer was concussed, Jimbo's thorax got stress-fractures, and a hat bit Lunai Lovegood's arm so badly that she nearly died, and Jimbo and Deeringer were sure she'd need to have it amputated. Although they were close to their goal, the group chose to retreat. At one point on their way out they were accosted by the ghost of Administrator Gallax, who mistook them for wealthy donors, and thus was thrilled to see them. Somehow the ghost ended up with the bronze coins, but he did escort them all the way back to the dungeon entrance, where, a week after their exam began, the group finally exited the halls and set off for Student Health.


Gains
alliance with Monica Doom
invitation to meet ODT sorority sisters
textbook worth 15 gp
crystal paperweight worth 300 gp
bronze coins worth 57 gp

Losses
Lunai Lovegood received a fatal wound, needs a prosthetic arm, and might retire

Kills
group of undergrads who fell in a pit trap after talking to Jimbo
all occupants of Experimental Torture Laboratory B who died of nerve gas
ODT's pet dungeon swan
swarm of hungry hungry hats

In wizarding university, laundry sorts you!

Notes
The wandering encounter table in the Wizard City Hexcrawl definitely produces some wild results! I'll be honest, a war among the statue factions sound really cool, but I had no idea how to run it, no idea how to decide what happens next. I ended up using the "craps" mechanic from Martin O's The Manticore dungeon and kind of reinterpreting the results to be happening at the scale of the entire city. I think it worked out, actually, but I'm not sure what I would have done otherwise.

This felt like another occasion where the no-homework approach limited my ability to describe things well. Who are these four founding wizards and what do their statue armies look like? What are they fighting over and what are the sides? Hell, what are the neighborhoods the battle is raging across? I don't really know, because I don't really know the setting any better than my players do, so all those details are a blank. Don't ask questions, just, quick! roll 2d6 to see what happens next!

Between this and my collaborative-but-vague worldbuilding over in my 5e campaign, I really am longing for my own campaign setting to run adventures in, someplace that I'll know enough details about to answer really basic questions about history, and geography, and important people.

Having a mission and a vague sense of direction certainly transformed the experience of this particular delve. Monica Doom struck a chord of sympathy with Josh and Peter, and her offer to fence their loot helped to sweeten the deal. It makes me wonder if I've run too many dungeons with just a vague "there's probably treasure in there somewhere, go find it" or "could be a monster that needs killing somewhere inside, go find it" as the only real starting point.

That works okay if you don't have any other motivation, but it makes me think I've been missing out by not really ever putting my players on meaningful quests. If your only motive is "go explore" than any door is as good as the next, whereas here, they had good reasons to pick one path over another, and reasons to ignore some areas of the dungeon in favor of finding others. If you just want to explore, seeing one spot is just as good as seeing any other. In a larger dungeon, having different missions on different delves could really help to direct your exploration each time. I suppose a good rumor table could help with that, but I suspect that real missions, where you are doing something for someone, probably so they'll do something for you in return, are more direct.

The group definitely didn't find enough treasure this time to level up under the "gold for XP" system. Since we've been playing this fairly collaboratively, I'll have to ask Josh and Peter if they want to stick with that, or go with a "one level gained per delve" system instead.

During the next "summer break", the group will probably want to follow-up with Monica Doom, and Josh might want Jimbo to check on the sorority sisters who gave him their address. (They probably ought to have names or something, right?) If they do want a way to earn more XP, T AKW from Dreams and Fevers and Velexiraptor from A Blasted Cratered Land have put out a mini wizard school dungeon The Department of Soul Studies. This could be an above-ground part of Gallax University, or a rival wizard liberal arts college located somewhere else in the city.

Unless I keep coming up with new missions, I think this campaign is moving toward a natural conclusion, or at least a natural pausing point, probably after they burgle the vault and steal the Eleventh Hourglass, although events could surprise me. I know Josh is eager to try out the free quickstart rules from the Root RPG Kickstarter,and I'm quite interested as well. On the other hand, if some new motivations to continue the campaign due pop up, I'm not going to stifle things by calling a premature end to it - it's just that right now a possible ending is in sight.

Session Report - 5e Undermountain - Cragmaw Goblins

My 5e campaign, I think, is going to have a primarily mission-based structure. There's no real sandbox here for the players to make a lot of choices about what they're going to do next, but I do want to offer them some options.

I noticed that the Lost Mine of Phandelver campaign from the 5e Starter Kit has several small dungeons, and I thought that might be a good way to give them some choices. The Cragmaw Hideout and Redbrand Hideout are kind of introductory adventure sites, and they have the possibility to lead into Cragmaw Castle and the Ruins of Thundertree, respectively.

Session 3

Cast of characters
Raku Chihuly - dragonborn guild-artificer, 2nd level artificer, played by Emily
Willowbald Hornblower - halfling noble, 2nd level bard, played by Steve
Nehryx - centaur outlander, 2nd level fighter, played by Corey

After successfully completing their first adventure, the party was ready to level up. I walked Steve and Emily through the process, and Corey volunteered to pick a different fighting style for Nehryx that's easier to use without worrying about fictional positioning. He chose Great Weapon Fighting, which helped produce some really spectacular damage rolls later on. The group also used some of their new money to buy better armor, an antidote in case of poison, and a healing potion.

At The Laughing Halfling pub, Raku, Willowbald, and Nehryx tried to enjoy a rare treat from Aunt Dinah's cellars - a rare bottle of Chateau Hornblower, produced in the brief window before Willowbald's family's lawsuit forced him to sell all future bottles as Chateau Willowbald. The wine tasted like someone had used red-wine vinegar to steep very strong black tea, had then used the brew to douse a smoldering campfire, and then bottled whatever they managed to strain from the ashes. Willowbald claimed it was an acquired taste.

Just then, old man Bassoon Hornblower appeared in the doorway to the pub, pointing a menacing finger inside. "There they are!" he shouted to an unknown figure, silhouetted behind him. "These are the ones I told you about! They're the one ... who saved my pipeweed!" The poor old man had tears in his eyes as he showed off a new green leaf, fully restored to health by the first good rain after the volcano vanished.

The mysterious figure behind him proved to be Black Iris, who had a business proposition for them. "That diamond was worth a lot more than Bassoon could pay for, you know," she started, before explaining that if they were going into the do-gooder business, there were a number of opportunities to do some good up in the mountains, where various gangs of bandits were making it difficult to ship anything. Iris explained that supply carriers were being intercepted by a group of goblins who kept appearing out of the forest, and by some human ruffians who seemed to be operating out of an abandoned mansion. When they expressed interest in stopping the goblins, Iris offered to pay 275 if the party could stop them, then noted that the ones she'd seen might be getting instructions from somewhere higher up in the peaks.

Following Iris's instructions, the group headed up a caravan trail into the Grosseberg Mountains, where Nehryx felt quite comfortable from his time spent living off the land both before and after he was kidnapped by the traveling circus. They spotted a footpath that seemed like it must be how the goblins were reaching the main trail, Nehryx estimated at least a dozen goblins traveled it semi-regularly. The group decided to camp a little ways off in the woods, in order to surprise the goblins by arriving in the morning. Due to a well-chosen campsite, no goblin ambush patrol found them in the night.

Rising just before dawn, the group set out on the goblin footpath, with Willowbald scouting ahead. The group moved slowly, risking a greater chance of encountering patrols for a better opportunity to avoid being ambushed by any goblins they did meet. Willowbald's careful approach seemed to pay off when he spotted a snare hidden under a pile of dead leaves, and again later when he noticed a deadfall that might have been difficult for Nehryx to climb out of.

In between the two traps, Willowbald noticed a goblin patrol coming down the footpath, and managed to duck out of their sight into the woods. As the four goblins rounded a corner to encounter Raku and Nehryx, Willowbald caught them by surprise from behind, and quickly took one down with his crossbow. Raku and Nehryx won the initiative - Raku quickly eliminated one goblin with her fire breath and Nehryx ran forward to absolutely destroy another with his great sword. The last goblin surveyed the carnage and ran off into the woods, but Nehryx gave chase and prevented it from escaping with his longbow.

When the group arrived at the mouth of the goblin's hideout cave, no alarms or warnings had alerted the inhabitants of the adventurers' arrival.

Gains
200 XP for monsters (four goblins 50/each)
250 XP for traps (snare trap 100 + pit trap 150)


Session 4

Cast of characters
Willowbald Hornblower - halfling noble, 2nd level bard, played by Steve
Nehryx - centaur outlander, 2nd level fighter, played by Corey
Demic - minotaur entertainer, 2nd level paladin, played by Ben
Crow - tabaxi acolyte of Nuula, 1st level rogue, played by Lindsey

Inspecting the entrance to the goblins' cave, the adventurers realized that they'd either have to cross a small river to reach a land entrance, or walk in the cold but slow-moving water. Nehryx invited Willowbald and the cat-woman rogue, Crow, to ride on his back across the water. (Ben hadn't arrived yet, so Demic didn't participate in this part of the session.) Hurrying across, the group got the better of a pair of inattentive goblin sentries, quickly putting them down and then dragging their bodies behind the treeline.

Listening at the mouth of the cave, they still heard no alarm, although they realized the sound of the stream would mask most quiet sounds. The cave mouth led to a tunnel with a walking path beside the stream. The tunnel ran slightly uphill while curving to the right, so their visibility was limited. They passed by a staircase where they could hear growling and rattling chains, then a steep side-path across the stream.

Continuing on, they saw a wooden bridge crossing the tunnel overhead with goblins guarding the ends. Worried that they might have been seen, the group retreated, and natural-climber Crow offered to try scrambling up the steep side-path. Halfway up the loose gravel trail, she realized that the path was trapped - an avalanche of gravel slid down around her, dumping her in the stream. Just then, a rumble came from further up the tunnel. They had been seen, and the goblins had unleashed their most dangerous trap yet - floodwaters filled the tunnel, battering everyone and washing them downstream and outside!

When the group washed ashore, Crow wasn't breathing, but quick help from Willowbald and Demic got her back on her feet. The party retreated further downstream, then crossed into the woods to hide, rest, and regroup. After recuperating, they snuck back toward the cave in the woods, emerging in the clearing where goblin sentries were watching for threats emerging from a different direction. These two guards were also rapidly dispatched.

The group returned to the cave and quickly went up natural steps they'd bypassed before. The snarling and rattling came from a trio of wolves all chained to a stalactite, who worked together as a pack to attack the heroes at the front of the group. Ben was able to use Demic's new Protective fighting style to good effect, nullifying the wolves' advantage against one of his allies in melee each round. The vicious, starving creatures were soon put out of their misery.

A narrow passage at the back of this cave appeared to offer a way around traveling the main tunnel. Willowbald could fit through easily, and Demic volunteered to squeeze behind him. They arrived in a larger cavern, lit by a burning brazier. The walls were crowded with dozens of boxes and barrels stowed along the walls. A large, hulking and fur-covered goblin-type leader stood by the firepit with his pet wolf and two regular goblin henchmen. "Who dares disturb Klarg?!" the bugbear demanded.

Demic, drawing on his performance skills from his gladiatorial days, pretended to be a fellow monster. "I caught this one lurking around. I brought him to you to interrogate!" Klarg, not the brightest fellow, was convinced, and asked Demic to bring Willowbald forward. "Of course," said Demic, raising his voice so that Nehryx and Crow would hear him in the other cave, "just let me tie my shoe." He ducked down, and an arrow from Nehryx's bow flew through the passage and skewered Klarg. "What?!" Klarg was briefly furious, but from his crouching posture, Demic rushed forward and gored him with his horns, ending the bugbear's reign of terror.

The goblin lieutenants ran away screaming in fear, and behind them, the group heard the sound of a second rush of water pouring down the main tunnel. Klarg's loyal wolf leapt on Willowbald, knocking him to the ground and harrying him rather severely, but Crow appeared out of the shadows of the passage, and with Crow and Nehryx's help, Willowbald was soon safe.

In the background, the group heard more screaming and the sounds of goblins running away down the main tunnel. They inspected Klarg's hoard and saw that it was mostly stolen trade-goods, exactly the kind of thing Black Iris liked to deal in, and a treasure chest with Klarg's personal wealth. Inside the chest was a crude hand-drawn map that seemed to show a path between a castle and the current cave. After allowing the goblins a head start to escape, the party left the caves and returned to Alpenshire.

Gains
275 gp/each from Black Iris
57 gp in treasure (600 cp, 110 sp, silver statue worth 40 gp)
2 healing potions
600 XP from monsters (four goblins 50/each + four wolves 50/each + bugbear 200)
125/250 XP from traps (avalanche trap 50/100 + flood trap 75/150)


Notes
Running combat went more smoothly this time. Steve managed to think of the one other way to get advantage on an attack roll that I hadn't thought of - which was to take the enemy completely by surprise. The "Protective" fighting style seems to work fine, even in theater of the mind, since it's obviously meant to protect an ally standing right next to Demic, which means someone who's part of the same melee group. He used it to good effect, and I think it adds a nice way to incorporate some teamwork into the fights. Meanwhile "Great Weapon Fighting" gave Nehryx some really impressive hits with his great sword, and ended a couple of fights with a single blow.

The 5e Dungeon Master Guide recommends that you can give XP for non-combat challenges (like traps) using the "experience budget" for building combat encounters, with the amount of XP awarded based on the difficulty of the challenge and the character level. The main impact of that is that characters of different levels will get different amounts of XP for encountering traps.

By my count, at this point, Raku has 1100 XP, Willowbald and Nehryx both have 1950 XP, Demic has 1025 XP, and Crow has 725 XP. So we'll probably start the next session by leveling people up appropriately.

Spiritualist Miscellany - Daring Mediums, Occult Television, Mysterious Oujia, Ghost Photography, Spirit Radio

The Devices and Daring Mediums that Spoke for the Dead
Lisa Hix
Collector's Weekly

"In the earliest days, you would sit down with a medium at a table, and you would start asking questions out to the ether. And these raps would signal 'yes' or 'no' in a simple binary code. In the emerging Spiritualist movement, new mediums started calling out the alphabet, letter by letter, to the rapping ghosts and thereby, spelling out words and sentences from beyond in an excruciatingly slow manner. But ingenious Victorians quickly started looking for ways to get the message faster, coming up with all sorts of means and devices to chat with the dead.

Laypeople experimented with these devices at home, others turned to Spiritualist mediums, a job that eventually gave young women - who were thought to be so receptive to the divine they would come to embody the spirits themselves - power they couldn’t have dreamed of before. For a working-class woman who becomes a medium and ends up hanging out in wealthy people’s living rooms her entire career, it was an opportunity for another kind of life.

It was also an opportunity for women to speak in fora that they usually didn’t have the opportunity to speak in. These mediums were able to flagrantly violate strict Victorian social taboos and speak unpopular or radical opinions. Saying their ideas came from a higher power gave mediums substantial influence over social and political beliefs: They could inject ideas about poverty, women’s suffrage, domestic violence, or the abolition of slavery into the public consciousness."

An Occult History of the Television Set
Geoff Manaugh
Gizmodo

"The origin of the television set was heavily shrouded in both spiritualism and the occult. The television was first conceived as a technical device for seeing at a distance: like the telephone (speaking at a distance) and telescope (viewing at a distance), the television was intended as an almost magical box through which we could watch distant events unfold, a kind of technological crystal ball.

TV in a long line of other optical media go back at least as far as weird Renaissance experiments involving technologically-induced illusions, such as concave mirrors, magic lanterns, disorienting walls of smoke, and other ghostly apparitions and phantasmagoric projections created by speciality devices.

These devices included instruments specifically designed for pursuing supernatural research - for visualizing the invisible and showing the subtle forces at work in everyday life. So, while the television itself might not be a supernatural mechanism, it nonetheless descends from a strange and convoluted line of esoteric experimentation, including early attempts at controlling electromagnetic transmissions, radio waves, and even experiencing various forms of so-called remote viewing."
 
 

The Strange and Mysterious History of the Ouija Board
Linda Rodriguez McRobbie
Smithsonian

The Mysterious Origins of Ouija Boards
Lisa Hix
Collector's Weekly

"The Ouija board came straight out of the American 19th century obsession with spiritualism, the belief that the dead are able to communicate with the living. Spiritualism reached millions of adherents at its peak in the second half of the 19th century. It was compatible with Christian dogma, meaning one could hold a séance on Saturday night and have no qualms about going to church the next day. It was an acceptable, even wholesome activity to contact spirits at séances, through automatic writing, or table turning parties, in which participants would place their hands on a small table and watch it begin shake and rattle, while they all declared that they weren’t moving it.

As spiritualism had grown in American culture, so too did frustration with how long it took to get any meaningful message out of the spirits. Calling out the alphabet and waiting for a knock at the right letter was deeply boring. After all, rapid communication with breathing humans at far distances was a possibility - the telegraph had been around for decades - why shouldn’t spirits be as easy to reach? People were desperate for methods of communication that would be quicker - and while several entrepreneurs realized that, it was the Kennard Novelty Company that really nailed it."

When Cameras Took Pictures of Ghosts
Megan Garber
Atlantic

"For Mumler photo manipulation was also good business. While he was ultimately selling nostalgia and comfort, what was he technically selling were portraits of clients posed alongside the "spirits" of their deceased loved ones. He sold those for between $5 and $10 apiece, a huge fee at the time. He grew wealthy producing spirit photos for grief-stricken clients who had lost relatives in the Civil War.

Which was ingenious and cruel at the same time. Visual memories, even those of loved ones, fade. Images blur. Lines soften. Mumler took advantage of this. If a customer shared enough information with the photographer, and if the selected face was faint and blurry enough, the resulting 'spirit' could convince a person who wanted to be convinced.

The mid-19th century in the U.S. coincided with the rise of Spiritualism, the religious movement that posited, among other things, the possibility that a soul could exist without a body to contain it. Technologies like the telegraph and the camera gave cultural aid to the Spiritualist movement by effectively separating messages from the bodies of their senders. Images were disentangled from their subjects; information was disentangled from its sources. Ghosts were, in their way, everywhere."

Build the Spirit Radio that Creeped Out Tesla Himself
Sean Fallon
Gizmodo

Spooky Tesla Spirit Radio
mrfixitrick
Instructables

"My first observations positively terrified me as there was present in them something mysterious, not to say supernatural, and I was alone in my laboratory at night.

The sounds I am listening to every night at first appear to be human voices conversing back and forth in a language I cannot understand. I find it difficult to imagine that I am actually hearing real voices from people not of this planet. There must be a more simple explanation that has so far eluded me."

Session Report - 5e Undermountain - Temple of the Azur Volcano

Life under quarantine continues, and I'm continuing to use D&D as a form of escapism to deal with the stress and isolation of staying home all day, every day, both for my own safety and to help protect the safety of "the herd" (which has got to be one of the least flattering metaphors for human society).

Some players I've run in-person games for asked me to run an online game, and one of them requested that we use D&D 5e, so I'm game-mastering my first ever Fifth Edition game. My plan was just to default to the Undermountain megadungeon from Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage, but it turns out that the first dungeon level there is for 5th level characters, so I've been improvising a little to get the party up to 5th level so they can enter the Undermountain.

Their first adventure was in the Temple of the Azur Volcano, which I've adapted with very light re-skinning from "The Candy Island!" adventure from the Azurth Adventure Digest.

SESSION 1

Cast of characters:
Raku Chilhuly - dragonborn guild-artificer, 1st level artificer - played by Emily
Willowbald Hornblower - halfling noble, 1st level bard - played by Steve
Nehryx - centaur outlander, 1st level fighter - played by Corey

I started by asking the players to introduce their characters to me. I had helped Emily and Steve a bit with 5e's character generation process, but I let each player come up with their own backstory however they wanted.

Raku Chihuly is a glazier and glassblower who was raised by the Glassblower's Guild. She's spent her left so far making beautiful glass objects, but wants to find rarer materials and learn to make magic items.

Willowbald Hornblower is the black sheep of his family. The Hornblowers are synonymous with their successful pipeweed mercantile house. They grow it, bundle it, dry it, and sell it, making a fortune along the way. Willowbald tried to chart his own course in life, and attempted to become a vintner, but winery failed, and now he lives on a ramshackle estate at the edge of town. He hopes to learn some new techniques for running a vineyard, or find some new merchandise to sell to try to get back in his family's good graces.

Nehryx is from far away, from a plains that's dominated by centaurs and their ancient rivals, the minotaurs. Nehryx wanted to explore up in the mountains where the giants live. He was kidnapped and enslaved by a traveling circus, variously shackled, humiliated, and physically abused, until his will was nearly broken and he was ready to die. Eventually, the circus owners wanted Nehryx to stage gladiatorial combat with an enslaved minotaur. Somehow, this final indignity rekindled some spark of vitality in both of them, they set aside their ancient enmity, slaughtered their oppressors, and escaped, eventually arriving in town with the others.

Based on details the characters provided, I decided that they're starting out in Alpenshire, a halfling town at the foothills of a great mountain range, known locally as the Grosse Bergen. (Remember, the Undermountain's got to be nearby somewhere!) That same mountain range is home to numerous giants, and apparently a deplorable traveling circus, and on the other side is the Taurean Plains, where the centaurs and minotaurs live. Alpenshire is home to one branch of the Hornblower family, who grow vast fields of pipeweed in the shade of the Bergs.

The most exciting thing to happen in the Shire in quite some time was the appearance, overnight, of a black volcano to the southwest of town (the opposite side from the mountain range). Most Alpenshire residents are a bit parochial and uninterested in things happening outside, but Willowbald, Raku, and Nehyrx decided to investigate this mysterious appearance.
 

After walking for a few hours, the friends arrived at a point where the grass began to give way to shiny green sand. Upon closer inspection, Raku determined that the "sand" was actually minute pebbles of green glass. The group assumed this was an effect of the volcano's arrival, but weren't sure if it had been dredged up to the surface from below, or if the grass itself had somehow been transformed into glass.

Within a couple hundred yards of the volcano, they reached a point where the green sand gave way to black sand, also made of tiny bits of smooth glass. They could see a ziggurat built into the side of the volcano, and a crowd of humanoid figures gathered around outside. The figures seemed to be roughly human-sized, but made entirely of grey stone. (Like Korg, from the Thor movies!) The three adventurers crouched behind what appeared to be either a strange looking boulder or a crystalized bush.

As the three friends watched, they were able to discern that a handful of the figures were carrying stone spears, and that occasionally these guards would drag off someone who'd been standing around. There appeared to be a few more stone figures on top level of the ziggurat, but they kept moving in and out of an entryway, so they were hard to make out. Watching the ground level again, they saw that individuals were drawing stones from a box. Most drew a black stone and went back to milling, but drawing a red stone meant being carried away.

At one point while their backs were turned, a large snake made of glass or rock crystal slithered up behind them, its eyes set on swallowing Willowbald whole. Nehyrx managed to engage the monster with his spear, and prevented it from getting past him, fairly quickly subduing it.

Resuming their vantage point, the group debated what to do. Nehryx thought about his travails with the circus, and worried that the rock people who were being led off were unwilling victims, and wondered what fate might befall them. Willowbald suggested trying to talk to some of the stone creatures, and pointed out that he knew magic that would allow them to communicate, even if they didn't speak the same language.

The group approached the edge of the gathering, trying to find someone who was standing somewhat apart from the others. They tried talking to one, but it didn't appear to recognize their language, or show any interest in them at all. Willowbald tried casting his spell to comprehend languages and asked the creature what was going on. When it spoke back, Raku and Nehryx just heard unintelligible growling, but Willowbald translated for his friends.

Upon questioning, the stone figure revealed that their home had unexpectedly risen to the surface. No one seemed to know why this had happened, but the head priest had a plan to return them home. Unfortunately, this plan would involve sacrifices. The figure wasn't happy about the situation, but understood the sacrifices to be necessary. Likewise, it assumed that while no one wanted to die, the lottery system was fair, and the ones who were sacrificed would be doing their part to save the others.

When Willowbald offered "But what if no one had to die? What if we could help you?" The stone creature perked up. It called over to a group of nearby guards. "They volunteer as tribute! They volunteer to help us by being sacrifices, so none of us has to die!" Willowbald tried to correct the misunderstanding, "No that's not what I meant-" but the guards didn't seem to be listening to anything else he had to say.

A brief combat followed. Raku's fiery dragon breath seemed to fuse two of the guards into lifeless stone. Willowbald distracted another with an illusion of the crystalline snake. Nehryx interposed himself bodily between the living guards and his friends. He was speared once and decided to run for it, helping the two onto his back to gallop away. The stone guardian threw its spear but declined to give chase. Nehryx was felled and had to spend an hour out in the field coming to, but the guards returned to their posts and their people. After Nehryx recovered, he, Willowbald, and Raku returned to town.


Gains:
125 XP (snake 50 + three guards 25/each)

SESSION 2

Characters:
Raku Chihuly - dragonborn guild-artisan, 1st level artificer - played by Emily
Willibald Hornblower - halfling noble, 1st level bard - played by Steve
Nehryx - centaur outlander, 1st level fighter - played by Corey
Demic - minotaur entertainer, 1st level paladin - played by Ben

After Nehryx healed up from his injury, and the volcano did not disappear back down into the earth, the three friends were joined by Nehryx's old companion, Demic. Demic had been enslaved by the traveling circus even longer than Nerhyx, and had already fought in countless gladiatorial matches by the time the two first met. The two maintained a campsite together, just outside of town. They were both larger than human-sized, while everything in Alpenshire was built for halflings, so they were more comfortable outside and on their own.

The group marched back out to the volcano and circled it warily from a distance, not wanting to get close enough to attract the guards' attention. Raku used of the empty wine bottles from Willowbald's run-down estate to collect samples of the interesting sand, believing that she might be able to melt it down and make glasswork out of it. The group watched the ziggurat for some time, but it seemed significantly less active than before. Not entirely deserted, but with only a handful of stone guards and other stone humanoids around. Miraculously, they weren't disturbed by any more strange wildlife during their scouting trip.

(At this point, I reminded the players that if they weren't interested in the ziggurat, that there was probably some adventure to be had up in the mountains.)

Although worried about the guards' spears, Nehryx and Demic reasoned that there must be someone in town who would pay them to investigate the temple, and thus no reason to risk their lives for free until they found that person. Willowbald and Raku also wondered if anyone in town had ever heard of something like this happening before anywhere else.

Their first stop was to see Willowbald's favorite aunt, Dinah Hornblower. Although he was not on great terms with the rest of the family, Aunt Dinah still had a soft spot in her heart for her wee nephew. The group went to her public house, The Laughing Halfling, where Willowbald was able to determine that nothing like was part of the town's collective memory. He did get a couple leads though. Old Man Bassoon had been complaining about the volcano's effect on his soil, and Black Iris, who spent a lot of time up in the mountain sourcing implausibly-discounted goods, was very worldly and might know rumors from distant lands.

The next day, they traipsed out to the edge of town, to the furthest out farm, which belonged to the constantly complaining Old Man Bassoon. "Just look at these leaves! They're all withered and sickly!" Old Man Bassoon was convinced that the volcano had ruined his soil, and that his pipeweed crop was in trouble. Reluctantly, he was offering up his rainy-day fund of 500 gp to anyone who could send the volcano back underground and rescue his crop.

Later they found Black Iris, named for her dark hair and the flower she tucked behind each ear, enjoying an afternoon drink. She was a very successful businesswoman, known for finding merchandise that fell off the back of a supply caravan through the mountains and reselling it in Alpenshire. She knew that the stone people were called Azurs, that they're mostly simple rock farmers, and that they typically lived underground. She'd heard of one of their communities accidentally surfacing before. "Every Azur community has a diamond as big as your fist," Black Iris told them. "You could use it to send them back. Or you could bring it to me. I'm sure I could find you a buyer. It would be worth a king's ransom."

Satisfied that they knew enough, and had enough financial opportunities, to justify the trip to temple, arriving just before dawn and coming from the north this time, where they could see dozens of small caves dug into the side of the volcano, and a small number of Azurs sleeping individually out in the sand. They decided to wait until one woke up and use Willowbald's magic to speak to it. While they waited, a cloud of glass mosquitoes descended on them, but Raku quickly dispatched the insects with a blast of dragon fire.

As the sun rose, an early-rising Azur awoke and began rubbing its arms for warmth. Willowbald approached it to speak, and learned that Garblegrox was a rock farmer and found the weather up here a bit cold for its liking. Willowbald asked about the sacrifices and learned that they hadn't worked yet, but the high priest was calling for more. Willowbald asked about the guards and learned that there were about a dozen, working in shifts, and none of them had been chosen as sacrifices, which Garblegrox hadn't previously considered suspicious until just that moment. Finally Willowbald asked about the diamond, and learned that the high priest would probably never part with it, that it belonged to the dead king. The priest would never give up the diamond or the body of the king, so the sacrifices would continue. Willowbald thanked Garblegrox and returned to the group. They decided that the Azurs were probably suffering under corrupt leadership.

The four adventurers inspected the ziggurat again. The only visible entrance was on the top level, where a couple guards stood totally motionless. But they remembered that the other day, they hadn't seen anyone climbing the stairs, and so went to look for a hidden chamber. They found a door, and Raku was able to pick the lock. Inside were two more guards standing over a group of sleeping Azur farmers. Nehryx and Demic rushed forward to attack the guards while Raku and Willowbald helped wake the prisoners and return them to freedom.

There was no obvious way out of the room, but Nehryx and Demic both thought there must be a secret door, and soon found one along the far wall. Inside was a giant Azur lying still on a raised platform, holding a large uncut diamond. As the adventurers entered the room, the figure sat up and bellowed its name "GOORRR-GAAARRRRR!" It tosses the diamond into the air where it hovered overhead. The fight that followed was brutal. Demic leapt onto the table to strike at GORGAR from above. Nehryx first had his glaive get stuck in GORGAR's hide like wet cement, and then was trapped by tentacles that sprang from the monster's side. Willowbald tried viciously mocking the king to no effect, then assailed it with shots from his crossbow Raku rushed forward to help free Nehryx, who was able to escape with her help before delivering the killing blow.

GORGAR collapsed into a puddle of wet mud, and the diamond tumbled to the ground. Willowbald rushed forward to catch it. The group briefly debated how to destroy the diamond, including climbing up the side of the volcano to toss it inside. Demic checked the large ceremonial doors and found a room where a curtain of lava flowed behind an altar. Willowbald entered the room and prepared to throw the diamond. For a second, he felt tempted by thoughts that the diamond might be worth much more than Old Man Bassoon could pay, but rejected those thoughts and tossed the diamond into the lava. The whole temple began to rumble and shake and sink into the ground. The altar crumbled, the platform where GORGAR had lain split in half, the stairs rocked from side to side as they ran back up to the surface.

Outside they heard cheering and watched Azurs running from their rudimentary rock farming efforts to jump back onto the sinking volcano. A few remained on the surface, seemingly by choice. One approached the party and spoke to Willowbald. It was Garblegrox! "It's cold up here, but my rocks grow well, and there are friendly neighbors nearby."

Back at the village, Old Man Bassoon was still grumbling and complaining. "Yeah, the volcano's gone, but it hasn't helped my pipeweed has it?" He paid the agreed upon fee with no difficulty, but he wanted them to know that he remained troubled and put upon. Reward in hand, the group retired to the Laughing Halfling.

Gains:
500 gp reward
525 XP (mosquitoes 25 + two guards 25/each + GORGAR 450)



GAME MASTER'S COMMENTARY

As I said, I agreed to run this campaign shortly before we got started, and only picked out this adventure because the one I'd planned on was too high-level. That said, I think this worked pretty well. In retrospect, maybe I should have gone with the hook Trey built into the adventure, of the party spotting a meteorite landing, finding the strange people at the crater, and then discovering the people's temple and their new-found meteorite worship. But my slimmed-down version did result in a new, friendly Azur settlement near their starting town, so that's not bad either.

The collaborative world-building with the players seems to be working out too, although there are some tonal differences between their various backstories. Part of me wishes I had my own bespoke campaign setting, ready to go, able to be picked up whenever I'm running a game on short notice like this.

I've seen other GMs complain online that their players just rush into the dungeon without gathering any information first. I came close to having the opposite problem! The group's search for actionable intel resulted in them earning a reward and making three new contacts, to say nothing of the way it benefited their path through the temple.

5e appears to have a lot of interesting support for earning renown within your community, joining factions and attaining favor, and I haven't done anything with those rules so far, although if I feel like I have time I might look into them. So far, I find myself playing catch-up on the combat rules.

A couple of my players are clearly quite experienced with tactical combat in 5e, probably either with miniatures, or with a digital tabletop like Roll20. My main concern is that, whatever the rules seem to say, no, you can't get advantage on every single attack roll just because you said you were flanking, and no, the Tunnel Fighter fighting style and use of a polearm still don't mean that you get an attack of opportunity every single round. I don't think this is really want the 5e designers intended, and more to the point, I don't care, because it's not what I want a game I'm GMing to be like.

Flanking is an optional rule, and furthermore, its an optional rule within the already-optional rules for using miniature figures in combat, which we aren't. So currently, there are five ways to get advantage on an attack roll - spend a point of Inspiration, have an ally spend their point of Inspiration on you, use your action to "Hide", have an ally use their action to "Help" you ... or do something cool that interacts with the environment for a one-time situational advantage.

Interacting with the environment might not be possible in every fight. Maneuvering into position can be done as an action (treat this like "Disengage" basically), or as a movement that might provoke an attack of opportunity (I don't love this, but there should be some cost for doing it faster), or by attempting a relevant skill check. If the check succeeds, you get the advantage without giving your opponent an opportunity, but if the check fails, then you don't gain advantage and your opponent gets the bonus attack. This was how we handled Demic jumping up on the platform, and I thought it worked well.

The 5e DMG also has some advice for "improvising damage" directly from interacting with the environment, (ranging from like 1d10 for making a bookshelf fall on them to like 4d10 for having a ceiling collapse on them) so depending on what you do, you might just damage your opponent directly instead of getting advantage on your attack roll.

As for attacks of opportunity, this isn't a mechanic I like at all, although I admit it's probably just a personal preference. They feel like they both force people (like me) who prefer "theater of the mind" combat to have to care about the fictional positioning of the combatants, while preventing people who do care about tactical miniatures from being able to move around as freely as they might. And its another thing that makes retreating from combat harder. Not impossible, you can "Disengage" after all, but harder.

Nehryx being a Tunnel Fighter means that intelligent enemies aren't going to risk his glaive to try to pass him to get at anyone using ranged weapons, which is really good protection for Willowbald and Raku. Unintelligent enemies, like the crystal snake, might still try it, and face his prowess. Nehryx also doesn't get an opportunity attack against someone approaching him, especially not someone he's already attacked, although he could gain that opportunity by taking the Polearm Master feat when he reaches 4th level. As a 2nd level fighter, he'll already get an extra attack every combat, because fighters are cool like that. But combat should never just be one or two player rolling all the dice while everyone else sits on their hands, even if it is a chance for the more martial characters to show off what they're good at.

All the characters have earned enough XP to go up to 2nd level. And I haven't been paying attention to the rules for Inspiration, but they've all done something to earn a point, so they'll all start the next session with that available.

When You Come at the King, You Best Not Miss

In D&D it can sometimes seem like your only two options for enemy royalty are the chess king model - where the king is realistically weak and helpless compared to the knights and castles defending him - or what we might call the Into the Badlands baron model - where the reason he has become and remained the king is because he is the single greatest fighter in his own army.

We could probably also call this the "chess queen" model

A third model occurred to me when thinking about character classes like The Extras, The Financier, and The Crew - that is, royal villains and their retinue of loyal bodyguards are represented within the game mechanics as a single enemy creature. So royal monsters get higher HD as their rank goes up, not because they become better fighters, but because they become better protected by a larger staff of intermediaries.

The king is always surrounded by his most loyal bodyguards, and initially, any damage is dealt to the guards. The figure of the king, in this model, represents the last Hit Dice, perhaps even the last hit point - you don't get to touch him until all the guards are down. With apologies to both Omar Little and Ralph Waldo Emerson, when you strike at the king, you won't kill him, at least not until all his guards are out of the way.

The question of whether the king escapes and returns later with a new retinue, gets captured, gets executed, or is simply thrown out of the palace and exiled - this is a question the players can answer outside of combat. And except for possibility of daring escape, these are all questions that can be answered simply by the players coming to a consensus. Once the king is at their mercy, they no longer need to roll any dice to determine what happens to him.

I believe it was also Emerson who asked
"Is you taking notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy?"

I was reminded of this idea during a conversation with Trey of From the Sorcerer's Skull, who suggested "A mechanic wherein Underbosses were like the ablative armor of the Big Boss would be interesting. The heroes don't get a chance to confront them until they've taken down enough "points" of Underbosses."

Mechanically, Trey thought you could borrow rules from the 2nd edition of Robin Laws's HeroQuest rules: "You could encounter a Boss without going through the Underbosses, but at that point the Boss is really high on the challenge curve and you're likely to get beat." 

Richard from Richard's Dystopian Pokeverse thought this was similar to the "onion skin campaign model" that's used in Sandy Peterson's Masks of Nyarlathotep. He adds that Patrick from False Machine is already using a rule like this in one of his current games where Richard's a player: "Having reduced a rival to 0, the attacker has to state they specifically want to kill/capture the king and use their forces against the remaining 1hp point."

And finally, Steve from Kaijuville thought this reminded him of a mechanic that sometimes shows up in Warhammer 40K: "Characters joined units that basically meant the unit became a Wound sink for the character. In hand-to-hand combat, enemies couldn't wound the character until they dealt with all the unit models."