Night's Dark Terror 14: Funny Things Happen on the Way to the Horse Market

This is part of a series of posts with a scene-by-scene critique, appreciation, and improvement of the 1986 TSR module B10, Night's Dark Terror. 

After Xitaqa, the players are finally released from the chain of time-sensitive adventures leading to the rescue of Stephan Sukiskyn. It's up to you how much breathing room they get, to go on some of the side adventures mentioned earlier. But logically, the Sukiskyn family would be very eager to get their 24 white horses sold before too much time passes. Nor would they be at all happy to see the adventurers, still bound by their agreement with Stephan, march off to raid some goblin lair or haunted tomb, never to return. 

CC Public Domain 1.0 image from PickPik

The power to resist the family's pressure lies in the hands of the players, but they also have a powerful lure to make the journey. For there's easy money in it without any obvious hazards -- 50% of the sale price, if they succeeded in returning Stephan alive, and even after the recovery of his dead body they'll probably be cut in for 25%. But is the journey to the market site, the elven trading post of Rifllian, uneventful? Of course not! There are four keyed encounters along the way. All of these, in one way or another, expose the party to the ongoing plots of the Iron Ring.

1. Ambush at Misha's ferry. After the possibility of an uneventful but sentimental last encounter with Misha's bear, there's an Iron Ring attack set up at this crossing point, with a force almost identical to the very first encounter on the river.

Let's imagine what's going through the minds of these shadowy overlords as they try to put an end to your ever-so-inconvenient heroes. The river attack failed, but they can blame it on the added forces of Kalanos, his men, and the walls of the riverboat. The siege of Sukiskyn failed, but there was the whole combat-ready family in addition, and again, fortifications. It just about makes sense that the baddies would think a force totalling 13 hit dice (in Basic D&D) would have a chance against the party, alone (but for Stephan and Taras) and in the open. But by now the total party levels should number 12-18, plus 8 levels in Stephan and Taras.

This ambush should be easily winnable by the heroes. If its failure becomes known to HQ, by survivors reporting back, or by the dead being discovered, the Iron Ring as an intelligent organization should know that a bigger force is going to be needed to take the good guys down. Mostly, this logic is followed in the rest of the adventure, but never to its ultimate conclusion. Maybe that's just standard Bond-villain procedure applied to the fiction of adventure gaming. To strike from complete surprise, with numbers that cannot be defeated, would be profoundly unfair to the players.

2. Raid the Iron Ring camp. On the trail across the moors to the gnomes' ferry, the party runs into Loshad one more time, who tells them of an Iron Ring slaving camp in the hills. Attacking it would satisfy both Loshad's goals (free mistreated horses) and the party's (free mistreated people). This encounter is tougher, with 28 hit dice worth of foes, but the party might gain surprise. If you think the odds are too much, you might let the players bargain the were-horse into giving fire support. Loshad, as usual, is written well as an NPC. His pro-horse agenda makes dealing with him more prickly than your usual quest-giver.

In this and the previous encounter, it is possible that the party captures Iron Ring personnel and convinces them to talk. This is not covered in the module, which assumes a strict code of silence among this organization. But in fact, through some impressive persuasion and stagecraft of intimidation, my group succeeded in wresting some limited information out of one captive goon. You may want to have the bad guys hold their tongue no matter what. But as I'll argue below, this policy tends to frustrate the natural motivation to go on the offensive.

3. The gnomes' ferry. There's something amusingly Vancian about the gnomes' ability to sniff out a party's wealth and adjust their prices accordingly, even if the well-traveled Stephan would be in a position to warn the party. In running this place I took the opportunity to flesh out the gnomes a little, as well as introduce some more NPCs to the inn which, as they were more campaign-specific, I won't trouble to detail.

Aino Weaselbane is the leader of the gnomes, an attractive and shrewd silversmith with a nose for gold. She pours ale and cooks meals in the kitchen, and will take the lead in bargaining for passage across the river or any other goods, such as silvered weapons.

Jorma Sawleaf, a bard, plays the hurdy-gurdy in the inn. He will take requests for a tip of 2 gold, and will stop playing entirely for 10, unless outbid by someone who inexplicably appreciates his music.

Pekka Waggletop is an idler, drunk, and pub crank of the first order. If so much as looked at, he will launch into his crazy ideas about slaver conspiracies and evil wizards. By chance, he is right, but only by chance.

Vallo Gimbletooth is the waiter, a retired pit fighter with the scars and broad-bladed shortsword to show for it. Naturally, he also takes the role of security for the inn.

Symphonia, just Symphonia, is a veiled fortune-teller who uses cards for divination.  Her prophecies ("cross my palm with 20 silver") tend to be vague, but one in three is startlingly accurate.

Here, too, there's an encounter with an Iron Ring agent who is smart enough to run from this party, putting them again in the position of initiative as they decide whether to pursue him. Frustratingly, though, there's little to be gained information-wise if they do; thwarting him only slows down the Iron Ring's operation to tail the party a little bit.

4. Meeting with merchants. This encounter just across the river, unlikely to end in combat, introduces two elements to be repeated later on. First, we start introducing one of several temptations to sell part of the white horse herd immediately, rather than hold out for a better deal at Rifllian. Then there's the news -- hardly surprising or worth the asking price -- that Iron Ring agents are specifically searching for the party.

After this last encounter, we end up just a day away from Rifllian, but with a contradiction hanging heavily over the adventure. Night's Dark Terror perfectly illustrates how, in the 1980's, Basic D&D was just one step ahead of its Advanced stable-mate in meeting the need for emotionally engaging adventure stories. Soon afterwards, Dragonlance (with its own, far worse railroading issues) and Ravenloft (better done, for sure) would start to fill that niche for AD&D. But meanwhile, you have the heartbreaking death of Aleena from the Mentzer Basic starter adventure. And in this module, the heartbreaking death of Mish, and after that, all sorts of human woe and destruction visibly served out by the Iron Ring and their goblin stooges. 

So, at this point, red-blooded heroes should be raring to take the battle to the enemy and root out the Iron Ring menace. But the adventure, as written, frustrates that aim. Once more, they're put onto the railroad train by one of the Sukiskyn family -- Stephan, who has no interest in seeking revenge against the conspiracy that kidnapped him, menaced his family, and murdered nearly the whole human population of the upper Volaga River. No, his only thoughts are to follow the family treasure map to that mysterious feature shown in the mountains. 

This contradiction explains why the rest of the adventure, to me, is unsatisfying. Over the next several encounters, the party will be shadowed and sniped at by Iron Ring forces, but is given no lead to take the initiative. My players weren't having it; a successful interrogation at the slavers' camp gave them the bare minimum information that the Iron Ring had a base under Kelven, and they are currently knee-deep in the first module of TSR's renowned A series, which fits the situation perfectly. The gnomes, the merchant, or documents found at the slavers' camp are also good opportunities to lay down clues for a more attack-oriented campaign.

Because of this not-unwelcome derailment, the next entry will be the last in this series for a while. I'm not going to comment on any scene I haven't played through, and Rifllian was the last scene in B10 that the party played through before getting into a more proactive adventure.

Back and Forth and Sideways in Time

Last time I offered a breakdown of all the different ways a fantasy world could be tied to our own. Commenters offered a couple of extra ways, which I'll incorporate into this next phase: further describing the plot moves available to the creative world-rigger with each arrangement. This post covers the first three of (now) 14 arrangements.

1. You are in Earth's far or mythic past. 

Clues:

• prehistoric animals are everywhere 
• important names, maybe distorted, are recognizable as legendary heroes and places (Tolkien pulled this off with the lost continent called by some "Atalante" and reverse-engineered his language so that worked and also Artur means "noble lord")
• euhemerism is in effect so the local king may be called Lord Horus and his shield is a hawk and his chief advisor is the one-eyed Wizard Odin and in the throne room hangs the Golden Fleece 
• the maps have familiar if somewhat skewed shapes
• early-civ signifiers like ziggurats, human sacrifice, eyeliner and chariots are mixed in with the magitech and rustless pillars
• sense of boundless possibilities and newness. 

Plots:

•  "The magic is drying up" as in Larry Niven's stories
• a cataclysm is impending that little of the weird stuff will survive past, paving the way for the world as we know it
• you are trapped in a stasis cell destined to disgorge you sometime in Earth's timeline. Perhaps some deep-earth miners will find you. Have fun! 

2. You are in the present world's future.

Clues:

• the creatures and peoples that you meet show signs of fanciful mutation, alien origin, genetic engineering
• your legends are of modern-day celebrities, your place names worn-down distortions, look hard enough and you can find the Statue of Liberty, beware the Belieber Cult 
• the familiar maps are all marked up by global warming and nuclear megacraters and deserts and unspecified cataclysmic events 
• artifacts of the old world are everywhere or incredibly rare, depending on how much time has passed, sometimes tended by engineers of St. Leibowitz indistinguishable from a priesthood 
• sense of late-days malaise like in Dying Earth or Riddley Walker: the minerals are all mined, every tale has been told, there are no new genres of music just unfashionable ones, the sun could go out at any moment 

Plots:

• stasis works both ways, and some 21st century people who have just unwarped/ unfrozen/ unmirrored expecting utopia are having their expectations cruelly, cruelly broken 
• they're trying to bring back the Technology of the Ancients but of course they're about to do it horribly wrong 
• those deep-space near-lightspeed astronauts from the old order's final days are baaack 

3. You are in a parallel dimension, communicable with Earth.

Clues:

• strange wanderers who talk funny, dress funny, carry weird objects and drop completely baffling pop culture references 
• doctrine and teaching of the Multiverse, every schoolchild knows 
• someone in the distant past came, saw, conquered based on superior native technology, gravity, or disbelief of magic - and disappeared conveniently when things got hot 
• ethereal creatures and travelers sing strangely familiar and catchy songs 

Plots:

• fair enough, you find the gateway in the basement of Castle Greyhawk 
• one of those strange wanderers rolls up on you and is trying to convince you to make all these mixtures and build all these weird devices and is telling you when the next eclipse is going to be and you don't have the heart to tell him about 9th level spells 
•  oh psych that other universe isn't exactly our Earth it's a parallel universe Earth where ..

Cheever vs. Plot

The stories of John Cheever are said to epitomize late 20th Century middle-class life in New York and its suburbs. But he's got much more than his contemporaries John Updike or Philip Roth achieved in that department. There is a willingness to reach into magical realism, a sense of life's capriciousness, a tendency to play it as it lays. The influence of Cheever can be found, by Matt Weiner's own admission, in Mad Men. Cheever would have hated Dragonlance or Ravenloft. If Roald Dahl had written Tomb of Horrors, Cheever might be responsible for Caverns of Thracia, and Tom Wolfe, perhaps, Rahasia.

Let Metro-North be your only railroad.

John Cheever, interview, Paris Review, published 1976, set as free verse:

I don’t work with plots.
I work with intuition, apprehension, dreams, concepts.
Characters and events come simultaneously to me.
Plot implies narrative and a lot of crap.
It is a calculated attempt to hold the reader’s interest at the sacrifice of moral conviction.
Of course, one doesn’t want to be boring . . . one needs an element of suspense.
But a good narrative is a rudimentary structure, rather like a kidney.

In an improvised game, apprehension and intuition come from the tentative advance of a concept - and then a Darwinian selection as it either becomes more elaborated or drops out of the game entirely - depending on the will of the players to pursue it and of the game master to play along - or on the will of the game master to develop it and of the players to play along.

Last time in Game of Iron I presented the players with a dragon. It attacked a place they were in -- but it wasn't a Hollywood second-act "base invasion," rather more of an illustration of the heating up of the conflict between powers that they were entering into. They chose to withdraw rather than fight it, chose to pursue their existing quest rather than go dragon hunting. The dragon had a lair in my book, from an old Dungeon magazine - had a whole plot attached, fitted into the power structure. That dragon may or may not show up again. 

Plot is what you look back on. I only started out running Tomb of the Iron God and somehow that iron statue spawned a whole conspiratorial prophetic mythology over the run of two and a half years. It spawned a gigantic iron statue in pieces and the smaller wearable pieces that control the big pieces and the revelation that this is only one possible way the coming Iron Age could turn out.

Plot is the kidney, not the heart or the brain. All you need is a number of powers, a number of places and maguffins and people that are key to that power, the revelation of the need to transport or unite or create or destroy or defend in order to shift or preserve the balance of power- and that is enough for play.

She Wields the Powers of Narrativism

Work on my megadungeon project proceeds at a snail's pace but with frequent rewards. Here's my favorite NPC from a group of scheming remnants trapped in the upper works, Castle Amber-style.

Thelma, the Perpetual Student. Age: 31.
Level 3 Wizard (Narrativist), 5 HP. INT++, CON-, CHA-

Portrait: Jeff Preston

Thelma wandered here from her studies at a great and advanced academy, having heard about the strange situation in the castle from some visitors who managed to escape. As a philosopher she became a convert to Narrativism, the idea that almost everyone in the world is a secondary character in an elaborate fiction, with memories whose fallibility and vagueness betrays their false nature.

The Narrativist obsession is to identify point-of-view characters, people whose experience seems too vivid and fortunate to be true, and who may in fact assist in making contact with the Author through self-referential and meta-textual occurrences. Thelma thinks that Myrseau may be one such character, and is certain that she herself is but a secondary character, who will cease to exist once she leaves the fiction’s main setting, the Castle.

Of course, Thelma is ultimately correct, although wrong in the particulars. The characters she seeks belong to the players, and with enough exposure to their fortunes and ambitions, Thelma will eventually realize that the work she is in is not a novel, but a game. This may even lead her to develop a Narrativist heresy: that there is a Game Master who responds to the free will of multiple, self-narrating characters rather than ordaining their fates. On making this realization, she will decide to leave the castle, and never be heard from again, her meta-textual work done.

Thelma is an aloof and enigmatic character who sometimes gives the impression of being as detached from the concerns and intrigues of the Remnants as the players are. She once thought Imogen was the point of view character, but having seen her grow through adolescence, pities her as an obvious inversion of the fictional ingénue trope. Her philosophy gives her a certain ability similar to knowledge magic, with the following “spells” that she may cast, silently and without gesture, once each per day: hear internal monologue (ESP); interpret symbolism (Know Alignment); foreshadowing (Detect Evil); predict plot (Augury).

Who Brings New Player Characters? The Plot-Copter Does

The usual way to integrate a new player-character into the party is some "hail fellow well met" cut scene at Ye Olde Tavern. But what happens if the party is on long-range recon and there isn't a tavern for miles?

Well, you can always be hardcore and require them to return to civilization before the new player can start. But that frustrates everyone.

Taking a cue from picaresque literature, I prefer the meeting to be on-site, and covered by the barest fig leaf of plausibility. There's always room in a fantastic universe for the party to meet up with a fellow "solo adventurer" in the ruins, or to encounter a wanderer from even stranger spaces and times who was placed in temporal stasis or thrust through a gate. A strange origin can itself be a plot hook for the new player.

In my campaign there have been three character introductions, none of them in a tavern. For the first, I took the character through a mini-game detailing his travels from south to north, before joining him to a caravan that the party had been hired to guard. For the second, two players had to be introduced, so I had it that the one (hermit) met the other (merchant agent), who had been hired by the party's current employer to follow the party, joining it if necessary, in order to make sure they were carrying out the duty they had been hired to do.

Most recently, a rogue and her wizardly henchwoman were introduced to the party in the middle of a coastal maze of cliffs and rocks. Having been shipwrecked, the new players had been huddling in a cave until the party showed up. Conveniently, this cave was a good parking place for the hermit character to go on a retreat, because her player was going to be away over the summer; another, less common real-world occurrence where an in-game solution needs to be thought up.

Regardless, I always also the new player with words such as "You take an instant liking to her for some reason" or "You all feel you can trust each other and move on." Yes, in reality, these kinds of wilderness meetings would be hedged round with suspicion, and any NPC met under those circumstances would be treated very differently.

But there's no getting around it; the players know that the new player wants to get along and become part of the band. Better to acknowledge that immediately and move on, rather than give the impression that the game is about setting the players against each other. If there's any jarring incongruity about the meeting, it will quickly be forgotten as the players create new memories of fun and adventure together.

The Die of Crazy Coincidence

Having praised the loose-ended approach to building a fictional story, I want to share a device I use in play to tie loose ends up. It is a six-sided Die of Crazy Coincidence. When I deem it possible that a crazy coincidence might happen I roll it, and the coincidence happens on a 6.

A couple of examples:

• The party is headed out to the castle to fight some bandits. By crazy coincidence is their friend the ranger just coming back from his conclave in the woods and does he run into them and offer to join their righteous expedition? (He did, and this saved the party's bacon.)
• Last week, the party was heading out of town on a caravan. I roll up some random characters along for the ride. One of them is a "Guard" and the other is an "Elf"? Is the elf the very same high-elf who had been pitching woo to one of the party members? (No.) Is the guard the very same fellow who went into the dungeon with the party, blackmailed them for a take of the treasure on account of their using illegal poison arrows, thought they were quits because he didn't testify against them in their trial, and is leaving town because his corrupt ways have come to light? (Yes - and in yesterday's session, a carousing episode in a far-away town gave him his comeuppance in a completely randomly determined yet amazingly elegant way.)

In literature, coincidence has had a long and controversial history. Aristotle thought it added greatly to  satisfaction with the story if, for example, you had a guy who murdered some dude being killed by the self-same dude's statue falling over. Early Western literary genres - romance, picaresque - thrived on scenes where characters thought left behind cropped up again, or new characters had some kind of connection with old ones. This technique was disparaged by 19th century realists and 20th century modernists, but made a comeback with postmodernism. Today's literary advice for amateurs generally warns away from coincidence, though if you read closely you'll see they take "coincidence" to mean an unexplained, deus ex machina appearance at the end - not the proper harvesting of a coincidence that is carefully developed earlier on in the story.

All this comes from my reading of an article by the literary scholar Hilary Dannenberg called A Poetics of Coincidence in Narrative Fiction (Poetics Today 25:3, Fall 2004, if you have university library access). Let's leave aside the theme of separated family members meeting by coincidence - which underpins a surprising number of classics from Oedipus Rex, to The Tempest, to Fielding's Tom Jones. A more general use of coincidence, corresponding to my use of dice, is to have characters meet again when the reader thinks they have separated from each other.

In general, Dannenberg says that such coincidences in literature demand an explanation by the author, who often complies. Sometimes coincidence is explained explicitly as a sign of the hand of Providence within the story. Other times it's done with a nod and a wink to literary contrivance; certainly it is more satisfying to pick up an old character where they left off and develop them further, than to start anew. But at still other times, particularly in realist novels, it's just explained as one of those chance meetings or an incredible happenstance. In effect, this last one is the explanation I give my players when I announce the chance for a coincidence and roll the die in plain view.

Now, if I was being a total realist about things, the coincidence die would only hit on a 1 in 100 chance or lower. Indeed, sometimes when something would be just too bizarre a coincidence, I roll 2 dice and require 2 sixes (in today's session, there were human heads on stakes by the side of the road - does anyone recognize them?) Yet even this 1 in 36 chance, or the 1 in 6 normal chance, is weighted heavily to let coincidences happen. And in this I recognize I'm telling a literary story, that sometimes could get some good mileage out of recycling and developing a character, but works best if it's seen as not completely stage-managed.

Mad Men Story Lessons

My wife and I are currently deep into season 2 of Mad Men. Apart from its amazing period detail we're finding it to be a very deep and fascinating show. Nothing could be further from Dungeons and Dragons than Mad Men's Papers and Paychecks. And yet in commentary on a Mad Men blog I ran across an insight that made me feel tons better about the way I run my game.

They report an interview with series creator Matt Weiner where he says:

There’s a mystery being unraveled and pieces are not connected and sometimes they are. Some things go nowhere. If there wasn’t stuff that went nowhere, you wouldn’t be excited about the things that go somewhere. When you’re telling a story where you don’t want people to know the end it’s very important that you keep them on their toes.

Later on, one of the blog owners, Roberta Lipp, posts this comment:

This ain’t Harry Potter. Like Harry Potter (sorry, it’s all I had), everything is carefully planted. But unlike it, not everything is some seed for the future. And not knowing which is which does create incredible tension.

This removes my last possible regret about running a campaign where events get improvised week to week and sometimes at the actual table. Once a writer or DM gets serious about running a mature, multilayered game - call it the "Second Edition of the mind" - there is a temptation to take it too far in the scripted direction, and make everything have a point and a purpose. But then you get a life that looks like a story, rather than a story that more realistically is a thread running through life.

Here's how the mind works: it takes the chaos of right now and imposes order on it, connects the dots and tells a Rorschach story. The more things recede into the past, the more the story gets smoothed out. Dream researcher J. Allan Hobson found that people awoken in the middle of REM sleep, when they actually dream, give very incoherent reports. The smoother if still surreal stories we tell to psychiatrists and friends are the product of processing in non-REM sleep and waking life.

Although loose ends can get edited out of memory, their existence can also create suspense, as Weiner reveals. Working in the non-interactive form of TV, Weiner's loose ends can illustrate character points or something about the world. Our medium as gamemasters, though, requires players' active collaboration.

So, maybe we can say that a gaming session becomes relevant to the larger picture the more it holds opportunities for the players to define their characters and to find out about the world. All that's needed are a few overarching structures - the kind provided by the Law vs. Chaos conflict, for example - that doom-laden events and prophecies without a plan can hang from.

Iron God: Should All Dungeons Have a Climax?

To close out my play report/review of Matt Finch's Tomb of the Iron God, here are some of the changes I made in actual play, in line with my last post about dungeon story. Spoilers follow.

The goblins had smart leadership, and I played it that way. After their group took about 50% casualties  in one epic battle, I had them leave the dungeon. In a later session they snuck back while the party was in the dungeon and blocked their exit with a large rock. Although the party eventually moved the rock by chipping away at the doorway (soft limestone), the tactical situation they walked into, fighting up on a stair surrounded by enemies, was almost suicidal for the party. They only prevailed by  luring the overly enthusiastic goblin troops back downstairs into a much less favorable position while their leaders were still under a sleep spell.

I also thought it wasn't realistic to have the animated iron statue of Ardarus just stomping around the same area as the goblins. I decided that the goblins had confined him to his room by stopping the door with an iron brace, but that when they left the dungeon they threw the bar into the storage room. The clues were the notches still carved into the wood of the door and the stone of the ground. The party picked up on the clues and found the abandoned brace. So they approached the room with extreme caution and were able to block the door again when the statue came to life.

The second level raises the question: should all dungeons have a climax? Tomb of the Iron God is interesting that way.  Its "goal" area - the caverns of the Iron God -  comes on the first level. The second level is a series of strongly themed rooms, where undead stalk, and treasures and other things are hidden in the burial niches carved in almost every wall. In hindsight this arrangement was fine, because it helped preserve naturalism by defying the conventional expectations.

Also, in play it turned out there were a couple of strong concentrations of dangers and treasure on the second level which created climaxes of their own.

The climax I helped to juice up was the three-sarcophagi room. Here, I added a lone ghast living in the secret chamber under the middle tomb. The ghast, it turned out, while still human, had been a mastermind behind the priests' turn to necromancy, and left a diary behind for the players to puzzle out. The poison gas trap in that room, I moved to the left tomb (realism again - if the middle tomb had been disturbed, why was the gas trap still working?), and signaled it with the effigy on the tomb: an alchemist surrounded by toads, snakes and spiders.

The other was the room with an army of skeletons. This proved a tactical challenge on par with the goblins, and this time everything came from the module, which explicitly details their maneuvers. To their credit, the party saw groups of skeletons peeling off into the side corridors, and decided to fight a retreating battle rather than be outflanked. Eventually they found a strong position behind an opened pit and emerged victorious.

All the same, more could have been done with the story behind the undead. Having skeletons and zombies detailed into guard duty and menial tasks ... finding the necromancy lab where they were raised ... having some clue of why the decision was made to raise them (from town and some documents in the dungeon, I let the party conclude that it was part of the extortion of funeral customers ... pay up more or your loved ones are consigned to a walking hell) ... and how the much more evil switch was decided on from mindless undead to creating actual ghouls (this, I revealed through the ghast's diary, was his doing,  connected to the cult of Orcus.)

Another realistic consideration I added: what the families who buried their dead in the catacombs would have done once they found out that corpses were walking around in there. This created a number of missions for the party, where long-dead loved ones identified by particular personal items were sitting in one niche or other, and a bounty would be paid for the return of their bones. This kind of issue marked a larger opportunity for dungeon-story development that I mostly missed this time around. Are there haves and have-nots in the burial places? Did one group of people get singled out to be turned into skeletons and zombies? Is there a special section where the monks themselves are buried?

If you're running the module, I found that the second level tends to drag on a bit. I would recommend you trim anywhere from 4 to 8 of the rooms, or replace them with a different styled area ... perhaps a necromancy lab and makeshift shrine to darker gods.

And again, just because I'm pointing out how the module could have been better, doesn't mean I'm slamming it. It is a great setup, and it's probably more fun to work out these details yourself than to get them store-bought. If I run the Tomb of the Iron God again I will certainly take some of these ideas into account and make it a dungeon with a much stronger story behind it. Not a story with an artificial climax like the level boss of a computer game, but one that's woven all through the dungeon. I want to leave players with the impression that their exploration has been about more than filling in a sheet of graph paper.

D&D is a Story Game ...

But the DM isn't telling the players' story, but the dungeon's.

This is the best way I know to set up the last chunk of my comments and improvements-through-play for Tomb of the Iron God. Because in addition to making the dungeon's features more suitable for analog play, I also needed to thread a more coherent story through the adventure.

Like exploration or roleplaying, figuring out the dungeon's story doesn't need an explicit in-game reward, because it carries its own reward. All the same, story-delving can pass clues back to the adventure game. Insights from the dungeon's story help the players figure out where its treasure is, how to defeat a monster or bypass a hazard.

The dungeon's story also informs the larger campaign. What if the builders or occupiers are a faction in the wider world? Might there be secrets they don't want known? Stories they don't want told? A back-and-forth begins between the story of the dungeon and the story of the wider campaign. The most meaningful adventures get themselves embedded in this way.

Whose history is it?

Take all the advice and dialogue about how gamemasters should handle the party's story, and turn it into how they should handle the dungeon's story. It's different, of course; the history of the dungeon is set already, while the story of the party spools into the future. And yet ...a "railroaded" revelation of history is instantly recognizable, as clue follows on clue in a linear fashion. Histories are more interesting if their parts are not all equally discoverable, and seem a little incomplete even when totally revealed. Even more compelling, though difficult to pull off, is the Rashomon history - where different parts of the environment reveal different perspectives on events, and each group that goes through is likely to get a different story.

Part of old-school revivalism among the more experimental games set has involved just such a focus on generating adventure backstory through play - whether How to Host a Dungeon or Microscope.
If not generated by play of its own, then a story is hard to improvise. It can be done - I'll show you how, next post in this series - but it won't click as well.

So if I would urge one thing on module designers, it's this: Give the adventure a story of its own. Lay some initial clues down, make the structure of it interesting. Everything else I can handle - the mixed dwarven and Imperial coins in the hoard, the doors of stone because they couldn't be bothered to haul wood so far, the way the kobolds fall down and worship the party when cornered because they believe that the Architects will come again.

Oh, and who's telling the party's story? Why the party, the dice, and the DM, in one big contested collaboration. But the dungeon's story rests on one pair of shoulders only.

This Is the Story of a Thing That Is Not a Story

Here's the difference between an immersive game and a story:

The persons in a story don't know they are in a story.  The persons reading it do.

So the person playing an immersive game shouldn't be aware of a story structure to his or her experience, either. The player should be focused on the play within the world, not consciously waiting for the big twist, the climax moment, or any of the other screenwriting-class crutches. ("Hey, GM, is this the part where they invade my safe space?")

Just like the experience of playing a tactical miniatures game, i've found the experience of playing a "story game" with mechanics aimed directly at narrative elements can be enjoyable, but is ultimately somewhat "cool" in all senses of the word. It sticks a critical, self-aware distance between the players and the characters. Perhaps this is what some people want ... but to me it comes off a tad insecure.

Embrace character identification! It's our hobby's dark, dorky secret. Hell, I'll even let you wear elf ears to the table if that helps.

These thoughts have come up as I preside over the wrapping up of our Tomb of the Iron God game. Instead of a big, climactic mastermind fight, there have been a number of tense moments, revealing areas, and epic battles, and the party is currently debating how many loose ends to tie up in the dungeon before moving on. C'mon ... you know you want to fight the Eater of the Dead ...

Railroad in the Sandbox

Before I leave the ruins of Undermountain there's one more lesson to be had.

Ed Greenwood provides a great variety of hooks and plots that will take the adventurers into his mega-dungeon by one entrance or another. One of the hooks depends on the players seeing a ghostly knight. I mean, this is hardly a spoiler because it's so bleeding obvious what you're supposed to do. But after the apparition is described, we read:

If the players elect to do nothing about the Ghost Knight, they will soon be unable to sleep - whenever they close their eyes, they will see his angry-faced, shining image coming toward them with sword drawn.
This vision continues regardless of spells, magical barriers or cures, planar travels, and so on, until the sleepless, exhausted PCs lay the Ghost Knight to rest by revisiting the alleyway in which he disappeared. (Undermountain Adventures, Greenwood, p. 2)

That last sentence is particularly rich. It conjures up a scene of human defiance and petty authority worthy of Kafka. Or Looney Tunes.

Players: "Okay, well, we're pretty sick of these hauntings, so we're going to burn this plane shift scroll and travel to the Happy Hunting Grounds."
DM: "You spend the day marveling at the abundance of buffalo and opossum. But when you lay down your head to rest in a stand of pawpaw trees ... yes, this low-level knight ghost, this one-shot clue to a secret alley entrance, relentlessly reaches across the gulfs of space, time and probability to wail 'Whyyyy wonnnnt yoooou plaaay with meeee?' all night long!"

Well, OK, this was 20 years ago, in TSR's golden age of plot railroading. It's a sign of how pervasive the one-track adventure mentality was in those days that Greenwood feels compelled to screw over the players' free will even when there is absolutely no need. It's not like the players are following the hook to an adventure that took their DM two months to prepare, or even to a one-track purchased module. No, this is a boxed set that details at least a dozen entrances to the sprawling Undermountain complex. In modern terms, it's a sandbox ... with a railroad running right through it.

And did I mention the Ghost Knight is bleeding obvious? If your players turn down the hook of their own free will, it's like they're telling you, "Nah, we don't really want a dungeon adventure today, do you have something more in the line of a ship's chandlery economic simulation?"

There's a larger lesson here. It's inconceivable today that one of the top RPG designers could manhandle players with a design choice like this. The reason? Language. Over the course of the last two decades, writing about RPGs has reached a high critical level, spurred on by the emergence of White Wolf as a challenger to the hegemony and outlook of D&D, and by the spread of independent criticism over the Internet. Sure, the language sometimes collapses into jargon. But it also gives us powerful tools to articulate what wasn't obvious twenty years ago, let us spot the railroad in a sandbox, and figure out why it's not just an asshat move by the DM but actually unnecessary.

Role-Playing Futures

There's been a conversation going on at the RPGsite forum about the possibility of adapting social mechanics from other games into D&D. This suggestion spun off from another, rambling discussion about what if anything can save D&D 4th edition from its less than stellar sales figures. Based on a Wizards market survey from 1999 that segments the tabletop RPG market, Ryan Dancey (architect of the Open Game License) thinks that the players who just want to hack and slash or play cool characters have been lost to MMOs, and games need to focus their rules on the other motivations, like story play.

Well, I have bad news for the tabletop RPG market. You can do a perfectly good story and character driven game without selling a single rulebook, die or figurine. Thousands of fans have been doing this for years now online. Their "sourcebooks" are popular anime/manga or fantasy fiction series. I hope to soon have a guest article or two about this interesting scene that may be one future of roleplaying.

Really, what we know as a role-playing game wraps an unstructured character interaction and problem-solving system around a quite structured combat and adventure game core. I'll say it again: you don't need to structure the social game with rules for it to happen. Thinking you that do, as a tabletop game publisher ... turning to the dark and clever arts of the Forge school of social mechanic design, in hope of breaching the mass market ... sorry guys, that's like being a ragtime piano roll publisher in the 1920's and thinking that you can overcome the wireless and phonograph by getting more into Stravinsky and Schoenberg.

(I mean, I handle live theory for a living, as an academic. I know the temptation to believe that by having the coolest theory you can master praxis. But it ain't necessarily so.)

I like the hybrid of improv and rules because it lets people participate on different levels. I think Zak intuits this too, in his recent must-read post about creativity in rock bands and gaming groups. I realize other people may lean more toward pure rules, or pure improv, and that's fine. Imagine if the previous generation of Fletcher Pratt naval wargame players had butted in on the D&D generation, demanding Wellsian skill-fire procedures and ballroom-sized dungeons, dammit! I don't want to be that dead hand of the past.

From the industry side, the money is obviously to be made from selling an "official" structure of rules and paraphernalia; people are not going to pay a red cent for something they can just do with their friends on line using shared canon knowledge from media they have already consumed. The real question is not market segmentation, but how you adapt a game to the new generation of users, where people spend a lot of time on-line just because it's convenient, and want their face-to-face activities to be short, well-defined and conclusive.

That's my opinion, anyway. But now I put it to you: What would you do if you were running Wizards of the Coast right now?

Is the Underground a Railroad?

Jason@Wasted Lands implies that the classic dungeon can be seen as a railroad, because it is pre-scripted and offers limited choices. I disagree. Here's how to make it one, though.

"Oh, don't go down those stairs. I haven't drawn the third level yet."

"You have to pull the lever, or there's no more adventure. Trust me."

"You can't turn back to the town. You haven't cleared enough rooms this session yet. OK, if you insist - A Mysterious Force Blocks You."

"Your Hold Person mysteriously fails - that 1 I rolled is actually a 16. The sorcerer drinks a potion, cackles 'I'll see you on Level 6', turns gaseous and disappears down the grate."

(reading mind-molesting boxed text) "Seeing the skeletal lovers' embrace, you cannot help but sigh, shed a tear, blow your nose, and think of lost loves of your past. Then the lovers stir and turn their bony skulls towards you, and you scream in bowel-loosening terror!"

See the point? The issue is not the linearity of an adventure (though branching adventures are more fun, it's true) but about DM vs. player input into the action. Within the confines of even a linear dungeon, the players control the action, tactics, and pace. It's the intruding hand of the DM, not the passive confines of dungeon walls, that grows irksome.

At the same time, I join with Jason in toasting the story DM who stays on his or her own side of the net - setting up NPCs and organizations with their own unfolding stories and agendas, but letting the PCs interact with them as they please, and enjoying the surprises that grow from the mutual interaction.

More passive dungeon DM vs. more active story DM? It's really a matter of taste, preparation, and comfort level with winging it. It's not uncommon for a DM to start a campaign as a fairly passive adventure referee, and grow step by step into an interactive story teller, as little details of the world outside Adventureland grow and build on each other.

My World, Your World

I have recently been looking over some of the online material about the World of Greyhawk setting, inspired by Grendelwulf's compilation of the army lists for most of the eastern map, and contemplating bringing back to life the campaign system I used in high school to game out the Herzog's invasion of the Iron League.

But what struck me about the history of Greyhawk is how similar some of the issues are to the Legend of the Five Rings setting.

There is a tension in every setting between "My World" (the company's) and "Your World" (the customer's). Setting-neutral games like D&D, of course, avoid this to a large degree by letting gamemasters play god to the full extent and shape the continents, religions and kings of their own little realm. But for others, there's the attraction of letting someone else do all the grunt work of fleshing out a setting. What's more, if the setting becomes popular enough or derives from an already popular fictional world, you have the coolness factor of gaming in THE Middle-Earth, THE Star Wars Galaxy, THE Forgotten Realms.

Or is it really cool? I never really got the appeal of big franchise settings. There's nothing less interesting to me than gaming where the jobs of world savers and earth shakers have already been filled. OK, Frodo is taking the Ring to Mount Doom, but we're fighting wolves and investigating a haunted tower over here in west Eriador. Whoopee.

Setting the game in the past or the future of the fantasy world doesn't quite work, either. In the past, you're still conscious of continuity. You really need a setting where history is cheerfully rewritten and stability is the norm, so a campaign set in the past won't cause too many time-ripples. John Wick used this to good advantage in setting his L5R role playing game in a peaceful era before the events of the Big Storyline. Many gamemasters took this opportunity to present their own alternative versions of those great events, to keep the players guessing and maybe even able to alter history.

In a future campaign set after the big story events, the temptation is to replay the Apocalypse over and over again or risk anticlimax. Then even the Apocalypse becomes an anticlimax no matter how many times the stakes are raised, former enemies become allies, and so on. Legend of the Five Rings fans and Star Wars novel readers know this all too well.

See, what roleplayers need is a setting sufficiently fleshed out to spare the GM hard labor, but sufficiently skeletal to develop with a free hand. The original World of Greyhawk and even the 1983 reissue were perfect for this. Big blank expanses of minty green hexes, generic medieval backdrop with a wide range of realms and terrains, enough quirkiness to be memorable.

But inevitably sclerosis sets in. Game companies, like academics, must publish or perish. So in come the sourcebooks, splatbooks and supplements, filling in the blank expanses. Novels have to be sold, too. Someone decides that what this world needs is more drama, and an Apocalypse shows up. The iron weight of Canon is lowered, and your games are no longer free; they have to bend to the megaplot.

There are rumors that TSR unleashed the Greyhawk Wars to ruin Gygax's creation after he had left the company. While there may have been some spite to the proceedings, there was no such rupture with Ed Greenwood, and yet the Realms fell to much the same temptation.

It's a natural process brought on by the business model of the industry. L5R roleplayers continually grouse about the apocalyptic canon being forced on them, story arc after story arc of a collectible card game that advances its story through tournament results and, like the shark, will die without constant movement. They may complain, but the card game funds the role playing game, not the other way around. In fact, the latest edition of the roleplaying game has wisely gone back to being timeline-neutral, so that sourcebooks can still be sold without forcing the action to happen in the current era.

When all is said and done, in any given living room you, the GM, are sovereign. It's your responsibility to bring surprise to whatever the players do. If they want to play in Middle Earth, OK, but all bets are off. Build an alternate story where the Ring is a red herring, the shards of Anduril are the real McGuffin, and if the players screw up all of Middle-Earth goes to hell.

There are reasons why published material has to stick to canon. It's the long fingers of copyright lawyers and estate guardians, and the rabid hordes of Internet fan-sticklers. But they can't see into your living room. Use that freedom.