DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 41B: The Return of Arveth

At Myraeth’s, they found a bag of holding formed from links of golden chain with a dragon worked in crimson links within it. It was larger than the ones they already owned and Tee – envying the dragon design – was depressed to find it was too bulky and heavy for her to carry.

Ranthir took it instead, nesting it among his many bags and pouches.

Something you may notice throughout the campaign journal is me giving specific, unique descriptions to various items. Sometimes I’ll even go so far as to prep visual handouts for them.

This is probably even more prevalent at the actual table, since only the most notable or pertinent examples actually make it into the journal.

(I should mention that I’m not prepping all of these ahead of time. A lot of them – including the bag of holding described above – are being improvised at the table. The principles of smart prep apply here.)

Some of these descriptions end up being ephemeral – useful for a moment to conjure an image of the world before the inner eyes of the players, but otherwise largely or entirely forgotten.

Others, however, will stick.

Which ones?

Nobody knows.

Sometimes I try to predict it (“this is so cool, they’ll obviously remember it forever!”), but I’m almost certainly wrong more often than I’m right. What sticks with this sort of thing is usually a lot more situational than you might think. Attention and memory can be fickle things, and which objects sentimental value and notoriety attaches to often has at least as much to do with what’s happening to both characters and players at that precise moment as it does the object itself.

The point, though, is that for anything to stick you have to keep throwing stuff out there. Enough stuff that you can start winning the numbers game.

Although, on the other hand, you don’t want to throw out so much stuff that it overwhelms the players and becomes indistinguishable noise. Not every rusty sword the PCs find in a moldering crypt needs to be lovingly detailed. And, if you are giving an item the bespoke treatment, you don’t need to lavish it with multiple paragraphs. Usually just one or two cool details will get the job done. (Maybe three on the outside.) Even if you know that not every item you describe will ultimately stand out, you still want every object to have the opportunity to do so.

Which is why, in D&D, I’ll often focus this descriptive detail on magic items. It inherently narrows the field for me. I also want magic items to feel special. For example, it’s easy for every bag of holding to glob together into a generic nonentity, and they really shouldn’t.

(Although by no means should this dissuade you from occasionally hyping up a mundane item with a cool description. It certainly doesn’t stop me.)

This is not going to be a comprehensive discussion of all the different ways you can give objects cool descriptions, but here are a few things I like to think about.

First, what’s the utility of the object? What does it actually do? How could that be reflected in the structure of appearance of the object?

For example, a staff of fire gives its wielder resistance to fire damage and can be used to create flame-based effects (burning hands, fireball, wall of fire). Some quick brainstorming suggests various options:

• Someone attuning to the staff is limned in a flickering flame.
• The staff is topped be a large ruby, inside which is trapped an eternally burning flame (and all the various fire spells blast out from this ruby).
• The entire staff is actually made from a frozen flame.
• The staff is warm to the touch.
• When one attunes to the staff, it scorches the hand holding the staff, leaving a brand depicting the arcane sigil of the wizard who created it.
• The staff is a long shard of obsidian, split down the middle. To create one of the staff’s fire effects, pull the two ends of the staff apart, revealing the heart of flame held within.

Second, add one other purely decorative or incidental detail. If the utility hasn’t already added some flash to the item, this is a good opportunity to do so. These details might also suggest ownership, origin, or similar information. (Which may just be flavor, but could also reveal relevant information about the situation or scenario.)

Let’s do another one. A keycharm, from Eberron: Rising from the Last War, allows you to cast alarm, arcane lock, and glyph of warding spells that alert the holder of the keycharm if they’re triggered or bypassed. The item description suggests that this looks like a “small, stylized key.” If we stick that, we might still look at options like:

• The key is formed from a black stone with strange purple veins running through it.
• The key is made from taurum, the true gold and its bow bears the sigil of House Abanar.
• The key is a living “bud” sprouted from the heartwood of a dryad’s tree by druidic arts.
• A plain key of battered copper, but the bits of the key are a whirling, ever-shifting blur.

As you’re improvising these descriptions, remember that you can put your thumb on the scale of the party’s reaction by thinking about what you know the players or their characters already love (e.g., Tee’s infatuation with dragons) or hate.

(I would honestly pay good money for a book that was just a dozen different “looks” for every magic item in the Dungeon Master’s Guide.)

Campaign Journal: Session 41C – Running the Campaign: Home Bases
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 41A: Dominic’s Denunciation

“I would ask your help,” Agnarr said. He pulled the body of the boy out of his bag of holding. “Is there anything you can do?”

“Perhaps,” Aoska said, examining the boy. “The damage runs deep. It will take us time to find a cure, if one is possible at all. And we would need to keep this collar upon him, to preserve him in his current state of stasis.”

Agnarr readily agreed. “Send word.”

The iron collar used to preserve the horrifically transformed child in a state of gentle repose is, if I say so myself, a pretty cool magic item. The players loved it. The flavor was fun, the aesthetic was punk, and the utility was phenomenal (in both keeping them alive and conserving their healing resources).

I hadn’t actually expected it to be such a big hit when I added it to the Laboratory of the Beast, but I was equally delighted by its presence in the campaign.

So why take it away from them?

Precisely because it was important to them.

And also because saving the life of the boy was important to them.

Taking a step back, one of your fundamental goals as a GM is to get the players to care about the campaign. Almost everything else is built on top of that. If they don’t care, then nothing else matters. But if you can get them to care about something – literally anything – in the campaign, then you can use that to get them invested: Outcomes suddenly matter. Consequences have meaning. The stuff they experience at the table will stick with them and they’ll be champing at the bit to come back and play again.

Care often works like a circle: The easiest thing to get a player to care about is their own PC. They invested personal effort into making the character; it’s quite likely they were creatively engaged during character creation; and the more they play the character, the more time they’ve personally invested in it.

It’s also usually pretty easy to grow the circle a little bit and get the player to care about the other PCs in the group: They’re directly connected to real people that the player is spending time with and likely already cares about.

Expanding the circle more than that, though, can feel like a quantum leap. You’re asking the players to care about things that don’t actually exist.

Tee insisted that Tor deal with it. He had been the one to kill them; it was his problem to solve.

“You’ve forgotten your compassion,” Tee said. “This place has made you hard.”

Tor nodded. “Sometimes you need to be hard to survive. I learned that from the horses.”

If the players can make that leap, though, the payoff can be huge. Your options for motivating them (and for motivating themselves) multiply exponentially. You can run far better horror games by putting things at risk other than the PCs’ life or death. Roleplaying will become richer and, as the players become invested in the stakes, more intense.

The other great thing is that this care can be viral: Once the players start caring about one thing in the campaign world, it will naturally lead to them carrying about other things.

You can also use this to your advantage: It can be hard to get them to care directly about some abstract idea (e.g., the Duchy of Kithos trying to win its independence from the Empire), but if you can get them to start caring about a character, then you can use that get them to care about the things that character cares about. (Or, if that care takes the form of loathing the NPC, then vice versa.)

So what I’m looking at in this session is a goddamn holy grail: The players have literally never even spoken to this NPC, but they have become emotionally invested in his fate and are willing to go out of their way to help him. Jackpot! This is what winning looks like!

Naturally, of course, the PCs now go looking for a way to help this NPC. When you see something like this happen at the game table, you might think to yourself, “Well, the last thing I want to do is discourage them! So I should make it as easy as possible for them to help the boy!”

Surprisingly, though, it turns out that this is exactly the opposite of what you want to do.

Which brings us back to the collar.

The collar is a cost. The players want to accomplish something and I’m making them pay a price to do it.

Vitally, this was a choice for them. If, I dunno, an astral vulture swooped out of the Ethereal Plane, grabbed the collar, and flew off, that would be meaningless. Even if Aoska, without announcing her intentions, had just zapped the collar out of existence and used its magical power to restore the boy, the effect wouldn’t be the same.

This cost is also not capricious, obviously. It flows logically from the narrative. As the GM, though, I could have declared that the Pale Tower had their own resources for dealing with the situation and let Agnarr take the collar with him.

But by imposing a cost, I’m forcing the players to demonstrate their care. I’m asking them, “Do you care enough about this to pay this cost?” Paradoxically, this makes them care even more. By paying the cost, they’ve become invested. The thing they’re paying the cost for – and, by extension, the game world as a whole – becomes endowed with value.

It turns out that this works even if they don’t pay the cost; if they had said, “No, this cost is too high. We can’t help this boy.” (Which is something that actually did happen earlier in the campaign when Tee couldn’t bear the cost of selling her house to save Jasin. Although in that case it was Agnarr’s player who proposed the cost; I didn’t even have to get my hands dirty.) In making the decision to pay or not pay the cost, the players have made a value judgment. Just making that value judgment gets them thinking critically about the game world (and their opinions of the gme world), which is enough.

This can work if the cost is just monetary. But it works even better if the cost is something more concrete than that – a specific person, organization, ideal, or, as in this case, object.

The fact that the cost, in this case, is also something they care about only enhances the result.  This is one of the reasons that care can become viral, but it’s also where the hard choices come from.

And the harder the choice, the bigger the payoff.

Campaign Journal: Session 41B – Running the Campaign: What the Magic Looks Like
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 40E: A Final Questioning

Tor was able to quickly explain the situation and turn the children over to the custody of the watchmen. He decided, however, to claim that he had rescued them from the Temple of the Rat God instead of the Temple of Ebon Hand. (He was already concerned about them delving into the dangerous depths of the former; he didn’t think adding the dangers of the latter was a good idea.)

Meanwhile, the others were loading up the carts. Tee and Nasira drove those over to the Ghostly Minstrel, where they met with Tor and presented the paving stones to Tellith. She was delighted when they showed her how they worked, and they quickly made arrangements to get them installed as the front steps of the inn.

These magical paving stones are a pretty minor detail in the campaign journal here, and you won’t see them suddenly play some huge and significant role later on.

But I love them so much.

I originally added the paving stones to the Temple of the Ebon Hand because I had the idle thought that people arriving via sewer tunnel would be kinda gross. A prestidigitation spell would solve the problem, and the form factor — schlupping the sewer waste back down into the sewers — just made sense.

The others quieted and Tee walked through the wall. As she passed onto the white marble, the floor suddenly glowed brightly and the filth of the sewer was drawn away from her body, down through the illusionary wall, and into the sewer channel beyond.

“That’s handy.” Tee smiled, pleased that her clothes weren’t going to be ruined by the sewer after all. But she was concerned about the light, so she levitated up (with one last schlurping noise) and worked her way along the ceiling.

I never imagined that the PCs would be interested in looting the paving stones. It was, after all, a minor magical effect packaged into a huge form factor. But when the players had the idea of gifting the stones to the Ghostly Minstrel, it was a truly inspired thought.

(I don’t actually recall exactly which player first had the idea. In fact, I didn’t even remember it a few hours after the session, which is why it’s not recorded in the journal.)

The stones were, in fact, installed in front of the inn. And almost every single time the PCs comes home, they make a point of standing on the stones so that the blood and gore and sludge can all be whisked away. I also make a point of occasionally mentioning other delvers arriving at the Ghostly Minstrel and taking advantage of the stones.

As such, these stones have become an ever-present memorial to their accomplishments. They’re also a permanent feature in Ptolus now; a constant reminder, albeit a minor one, that the PCs actions have meaning and can transform the world around them.

Which goes a long way towards explaining why I love it when the PCs loot infrastructure — not for its monetary value, but because it can be repurposed. It shows that the players have become invested in the setting. I love seeing what they build, and I also love the tangible trophies of their exploits being a living part of the campaign.

Of course, not all of this infrastructure needs to be magical or even structural. Looting décor is also a common variant: In my first D&D 3^rd Edition campaign, an elemental cleric named Talbar (played by the same player who created Agnarr) had a bag of holding dedicated exclusively to beautiful antique furniture he was collecting to furnish the temple he was planning to build.

When the players start laying down roots, all kinds of interesting things can grow.

Campaign Journal: Session 41A – Running the Campaign: Make It Cost Them
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 40D: Children of the Hand

The blood trail ended abruptly (Tee guessed that Malleck had magically healed himself), but Tee’s sharp nose caught the passing of his scent. With something of a wild guess, she directed Elestra to send a burst of lightning in that direction—

And struck the invisible Malleck!

Malleck howled with pain. He was still invisible, but Tor followed his voice and caught him in another spray of blood.

“May the Galchutt consume you!” Malleck appeared, his hand outstretched towards them. A pillar of fire erupted around Tor.

Back in Session 38, we talked about the Secret Life of Silion: A major villain who, in accordance with the Principles of RPG Villainy, got shot in the back of the head before the PCs ever saw her face.

I follow the Principles in moments like that because, first, the players love that sort of well-earned victory: They put in the work to take Silion by surprise, and they were rewarded.

But I also do it because it sets up moments like the one you see in this session:

The grey-skinned man turned to one of the priests, “Give me your potion! Now!”

“Yes, Malleck.”

“It’s Malleck!” Tee cried with triumph.

Malleck swallowed the potion and disappeared.

“Dammit!”

The villain Malleck is trying to escape! Will he succeed?!

If the players thought I was just trying to gimmick Malleck’s escape — that it was a preordained conclusion — this would be the moment when they would check out of the session. At best I might get a few perfunctory (or extremely frustrated) attempts to “find” him, but the writing would be on the wall and they’d just be going through the motions.

But because I played fair with Silion, they know that I’m playing fair now: Malleck might escape. But if he does, it will be because they failed to stop him; not because I prohibited them from interrupting the cutscene.

And so, instead of the players checking out, the stakes were instead ratcheted to a whole new high. The table was electrified, and every player’s attention was laser focused on the game, bending their wits and pulling out every trick they could think of to figure out where Malleck had gone to and how they might force him out of invisibility.

As you can see from the journal, the PCs ultimately pull it off. Malleck wasn’t able to escape. It was a very different victory than the one they had with Silion, but it was just as well-earned and just as satisfying.

Just as Silion’s death had set up this sequence with Malleck, so, too, did Malleck’s death set things up for the next villain. She’ll arrive — or, rather, return — in the next session. And unlike Silion and Malleck, the PCs won’t be so lucky in preventing her escape.

But the great thing is that when she does escape, they won’t blame me. They won’t dismiss her slipping through their grasp by thinking that it was foreordained. Just like they own their successes, they also have to own their failures. And that makes those failures — and the consequences of those failures — even more powerful.

No one in this campaign doubts that I play fair with my villains, because I do, in fact, play fair with my villains. The proof is in the pudding.

When you establish the honesty and integrity of the game world, everything lands harder, victories and setbacks and the consequences of both. So when you’ve established that kind of trust with your players, you’ll ALL reap the benefits for years to come.

Campaign Journal: Session 40E – Running the Campaign: Looting Infrastructure
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 40C: Malleck’s Last Stand

Nasira had turned her attention to the boy. She found that his heart was failing him. The process that was transforming him was obviously botched and incomplete and now it was killing him.

Hearing this, Agnarr couldn’t contain his rage. He was furious over the boy. With a grim look of determination he charged back out through the secret door.

Magic is cool because it brings a lot of flashy bling to the table: Balls of fire. Personal aerobatics. Magic missiles.

But what I think makes magic awesome is that it lets you explore unique and impossible situations, and some of the most powerful of these are moral dilemmas, because they provide a really powerful crucible for character to express itself. Who are you? What do you value? When put between a rock and a hard place, what will you choose to do?

What makes magical moral dilemmas special is their novelty. Most of us are probably familiar with the trolley problem, and we’ve each literally spent a lifetime figuring out our moral and ethical compass when it comes to the situations we encounter in our lives. We likely even have long-settled opinions on big issues, even though it’s unlikely we’ve ever personally had to, for example, make the decision to declare or not declare war.

There are nevertheless, of course, ways that we could challenge and explore these moral issues through play. (And, of course, our characters will not necessarily share our moral or ethical outlooks.) But we’ll be walking through familiar territory either way.

With a fantastical dilemma, on the other hand, the fantastical element immediately confronts us with a parameter we’ve never had to deal within our own lives, and likely have never thought about before. Even when there’s a fairly obvious and direct parallel between the fantastical dilemma and a set of real world ethics, the mismatched edges will often crop up and challenge our trite, preconceived answers in the most surprising ways.

For example: Is it ethical to use an invisibility spell to eavesdrop on a private conversation? And, if so, under what circumstances?

Here we could probably draw a fairly direct connection to wiretapping. But what if you’re just coincidentally invisible and people walk into the room you’re in? Do you have an ethical obligation to reveal your presence?

And consider the moral situation the PCs find themselves in with the Children of the Hand. What moral obligation do they have to children who have been fully transformed in monsters? Does the same hold true a child that has only partially been transformed? What if that child is in agonizing pain and no longer able to communicate?

To see how the PCs dealt with this, here are some minor spoilers from the beginning of the next campaign journal:

They regrouped in the laboratory. The boy, whimpering in pain, was fading fast.

“Is there anything we can do for him?” Tee asked. Nasira shook her head. Tee, wanting to spare him the pain, slid a dagger through the boy’s ribs and into his heart.

Even as Tee’s dagger was coming free, Agnarr was dumping Silion’s body out of the bag of holding, removing the iron collar from around her neck, and placing it on the boy. A debate immediately broke out: Some wanted to preserve Silion for a second round of questioning. Others wanted to do the same for Malleck.

“We need Malleck to tell us what he’s done with the missing children,” Elestra said.

“We know what he did with them,” Agnarr said. He was adamant that they keep the boy alive, and it looked like the iron collar was the only way to do it.

Here we see another magical element — the iron collar that preserves dead bodies so that they can be raised at a later time — add new facets to the dilemma.

You can draw some parallels to medical ethics, of course, but they’re not straight lines. Is this more like a medically induced coma, temporarily stopping someone’s heart when they have tachycardia, or illegal medical experimentation?

And while we’re here: What, exactly, are the ethics of keeping a bunch of dead corpses in a magical netherspace between dimensions so that you can periodically yank them out and question them under compulsive sorceries?

Asking for a friend.

Campaign Journal: Session 40D – Running the Campaign: The Villain Who Doesn’t Escape
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index