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DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 38C: Scouting the Temple
Nasira quickly muttered an incantive prayer and projected a sense of clairaudience into the sanctuary hall below. She was in time to hear the ratmen deciding to summon reinforcements. She quickly informed Tee of what was happening, and Tee rushed back to the street in case the ratmen headed that way (in which case she could follow them).
But she saw nothing: The ratmen didn’t leave through the front door. Instead, Nasira heard the sound of scraping stone…
When I ‘m prepping published dungeons, I have a tendency to make them BIGGER.
Sometimes I think this might be a bad habit, but the results in actual play seem to be good.
What’s really going on is a couple of things: First, when I’m planning a campaign, I’m often pulling stuff in from a bunch of different sources. Sometimes that’s two different adventures that get linked to each other using node-based design, but sometimes I have two different “ruins of a dwarven city” adventures… and couldn’t they be the same dwarven city? I can just make one of the adventures Level 1 of the dungeon and the other adventure Level 2, and now, instead of two small dungeon cities, I have one BIG dungeon city that truly lives up to the name. Plus I can mix all the scenario hooks from both adventures and create all sorts of dynamic vectors for the PCs!
(See The Campaign Stitch for a deeper dive into this sort of thing.)
The second thing that happens is that I simply get inspired. As I’m reading through an adventure, all of the adventure’s cool ideas will start sparking off new cool ideas in my own brain: Sometimes those are ideas I can just add to the existing room key, but in other cases it’ll make more sense to pile ‘em al up and fill a new sub-level with them.
The Temple of the Rat God is a good example of what this looks like in actual practice.
This adventure exists because the Nights of Dissolution mini-campaign, which was one of the building blocks for In the Shadow of the Spire, features several of the chaos cults in Ptolus working with each other. And I basically thought, “Why not all of them?” So I went through the Ptolus and Chaositech sourcebooks and started grabbing chaos cults. Then I made a few of my own. Then I started linking them together with clues, creating a node-based campaign structure.
The Temple of the Rat God comes from the Ptolus sourcebook (p. 394), where it looks like this:
As you can see, it’s not fully keyed. So I took the map, made some modifications, and keyed it:
You can see I’ve added additional hallways leading off the edges of this map and connecting to other maps.
Elsewhere in Ptolus there’s a Ratman Nest (p. 442). This is a fully keyed adventure designed for the DM to drop it pretty much anywhere in the city sewers where the PCs might be chasing ratmen:
I decided to put it here, once again with some minor modifications. (You can see the changes on the map above, including the addition of a sinkhole and the connection to the temple.)
During my campaign prep, I’d also thumbed through my monster books for inspiration. Knowing that ratlings and the Temple of the Rat God were on the menu, I scooped up cranium rats from the 3rd Edition Fiend Folio and the rylkar (dangerous fire rats) from Monster Manual V. (I also linked the latter to ash rats from Monster Manual II.) I rekeyed the Ratman Nest map to include cranium rat nests, and then added a whole new level down the sinkhole — the Rylkar Depths:
The result is a fairly expansive example (showcasing, as it does, a wide gamut of techniques all coming together), but it’s what I enjoy about working with published adventures: When the creativity of the author and the creativity of the game master combine, you end up with richer and more varied material than you could have achieved on your own.
I’m a really big believer in the power of collaborative creation, whatever form it might take.
This is a topic we’ll also likely revisit as the PCs begin delving deeper into the Banewarrens. There, too, I took inspiration form the core concept of the adventure and then drew on a wide variety of sources to create fresh wards: What else could the Banelord have locked away down there?
Campaign Journal: Session 38D – Running the Campaign: The Secret Life of Silion
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index
SESSION 38C: SCOUTING THE TEMPLE
May 9th, 2009
The 21st Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty
“I’ve been told that you were asking questions about a woman named Silion.”
“That’s true,” Tee replied suspiciously.
Nasira’s eyes narrowed. They had a particular look of worn determination, like one who has gazed into the long, hard face of nature. “I know where she can be found,” she said. “I’ve been looking for her.”
“Why?”
“You may not know this, but she’s a cultist serving chaos—“
“That doesn’t really surprise me,” Tee admitted.
“I see.” Nasira pursed her lips. “I’m not really interested in her. But she works for a man named Wuntad.”
“We should wait,” Tee said. “I have some friends. They should hear this, too.”
It wasn’t long before the others joined them, and when they did, Nasira told her story: Wuntad had killed her father and destroyed her village. She hadn’t been able to follow him, but she knew that he had worked with a woman named Silion – and she had traced Silion here to Ptolus. She hoped that Silion would be able to lead her to Wuntad.
“Wuntad is here in Ptolus, too,” Tor said.
“Really?” Nasira said. “Do you think we should just go to him directly?”
They exchanged nervous glances.
“The truth is,” Tee said. “We don’t know where he is, either. If you think Silion can lead us to him, all the better.”
“Why did Wuntad kill your father?” Ranthir asked.
(“Not that he needs any reason to do it,” Elestra muttered.)
“He was researching the lore of the Atapi,” Nasira said.
“The Atapi?”
“A nomadic desert people,” Nasira explained.
“Atapi?” Tor wondered aloud. “That sounds familiar.”
“It does?” Elestra looked surprised.
Tor nodded. “I saw it on a map in Zavere’s office. At Harvesttime.”
Ranthir put the question on the table: “Why would Zavere be interested in the Atapi?”
They had no idea. But they had been suspicious of Zavere before, and this led them only to greater suspicion. Although, in the end, Elestra summed up their thoughts: “We have to trust somebody at some point.”
“No we don’t,” Tee said.
“Even if we can’t trust him,” Tor said. “It’s not like there’s much we can do about it.”
“Who’s Zavere?” Nasira asked, wide-eyed with confusion.
“We’ll explain later,” Agnarr said.
“How long have you been in Ptolus?” Tee asked.
“Not long,” Nasira said. “A couple of weeks.”
“There’ll be lots of things to explain.”
The decision was made for Nasira to join them as they pursued her lead to Silion.
“Where is she, anyway?”
“At the Temple of the Rat God,” Nasira said. “It’s a front for the Cult of the Blooded Knife. I know that Silion controls the temple, but I’ve never seen her. I have seen Urnest – a hulking ratbrute who serves as her right hand man.”
This prompted another flurry of note-checking and memory-searching as they paired up the references they had discovered to both Silion and the Temple of the Rat God and began to weave a larger understanding of her activities. Nasira was able to confirm that the Blooded Knife was associated with various shivvel dens in the Warrens (although she hadn’t had a chance to investigate them closely), which seemed to tie in with the note they had found at Linech Cran’s.
Nasira had lacked the strength to tackle the temple directly. But with all of them working together, they felt the challenge should be manageable.
Before that could happen, however, Tor and Ranthir needed to keep their appointment with Sir Seppa at the Administration Building.
NEWS & INFORMATION
When Tor and Ranthir arrived at the Administration Building around mid-morning, they found Sir Seppa waiting for them. Tor quickly managed the introductions and then Seppa proved as good as his word: After a couple of hours digging through the appropriate boxes of musty records, they turned up an ancient survey map of the area now occupied by the Necropolis. The map indicated the location of several structures, one of which was marked with Alchestrin’s sigil.
Meanwhile, Elestra was hitting the streets. The events on Tavern Row the previous evening were dominating the headlines of the newssheets, but there were a number of other stories and rumors to be found: It was being reported that a half dozen children had disappeared from Gnarl Street in Midtown over the past three days. And the mutilated body of a woman – her skull ripped open – had been found on Flamemoth Way in Oldtown.
SCOUTING THE TEMPLE
While the others fanned out across the city, Tee and Nasira headed to the Temple District to scout out the area around the Temple of the Rat God.
The temple was located on the Blessed Bridge: This hefty bridge of stone, running between Midtown and the Temple District, was broad enough that a jumble of buildings had been built along both sides of its length. The entrance to the temple of the Rat God was crammed between two other buildings; in fact, it appeared as nothing more than a nondescript door leading to the half-basement level of an adjoining temple built literally over the top of it.
Asking around, Tee discovered that this other door led to the Temple of the Jade Idols, a minor Reformist cult. Since these were not the only small temples jammed together along the Blessed Bridge, there was no reason to suspect that the jade idolaters were associated with the ratmen or chaos cultists.
After mulling the matter over for awhile, Tee’s impatience eventually got the best of her. (Maybe a little Agnarr was starting to rub off on her.) She told Nasira to watch her back and then simply barged through the front door.
Inside she found a dimly lit sanctuary hall. At the far end, at the top of a short flight of stairs, was a large statue depicting an upright rat holding out its front legs like greedy hands and wearing a vicious, bloodthirsty sneer. Scrawled along the walls were several crude, graffiti-like messages (“beauty is plague”, “love is greed”, “the solace of filth”, and the like). Three hooded figures were knelt in prayer before this idol, but they were on their feet almost instantly as the door opened.
“Oh… I’m sorry,” Tee said. “This isn’t the Temple of the Jade Idols.” She backed out and shut the door.
But not before she’d seen a furry hand.
Tee had seen no doors leading out of the sanctuary, but she and Nasira both agreed that there must be some secret egress. And now that Tee had a firm visual reference for the temple, they could continue their investigations magically.
Heading into the Temple of the Jade Idols, they found a curving maze of small, incense-filled rooms. The walls were lined with various niches containing jade idols of the nine gods and forming a variety of small shrine-like areas of worship. Nasira explained that the jade idolaters believed that the idols of the nine gods, carved from nine different types of jade (the “harmonic lifestone”), captured the Song of the World.
They found one of the smaller shrines tucked back near where Tee estimated the worshipping ratmen were kneeling below them. Nasira then reached out into a higher consciousness and felt her thoughts seeking out the minds of those below them. They had hoped that Nasira would be able to detect the thoughts of other ratmen and, from that, ascertain the layout of the rest of the temple. But if there were other ratmen present, they were too far away for her to find them.
So, instead, she latched onto the mind of one of the ratmen in the sanctuary hall and pushed, looking for thoughts that would reveal the secret entrance to the temple recesses. Unfortunately, she read his panic: He had felt the strength of her connection and his suspicion was exploding.
Nasira quickly muttered an incantive prayer and projected a sense of clairaudience into the sanctuary hall below. She was in time to hear the ratmen deciding to summon reinforcements. She quickly informed Tee of what was happening, and Tee rushed back to the street in case the ratmen headed that way (in which case she could follow them).
But she saw nothing: The ratmen didn’t leave through the front door. Instead, Nasira heard the sound of scraping stone. Perhaps more importantly, she heard them decide to not warn Silion (she was quick-tempered apparently) – confirming that she was somewhere within the temple.
When Tee returned, she nodded her head. “It’s interesting that when they go for reinforcements they go farther in, not out into the street.”
They concluded that the sound of scraping stone must be some sort of secret door within the sanctuary. They suspected the temple complex was larger than it appeared, but perhaps not. “There might be a connection to the sewers,” Nasira pointed out. “They might be going through the sewers to get reinforcements.”
A little later, Nasira heard another scraping of stone and the arrival of more ratmen. Shortly thereafter, the strength of her spell gave out.
Running the Campaign: Expanding Dungeons – Campaign Journal: Session 38D
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index
How quickly can you complete a run of the Dragon Heist remix?
This is a question I get asked fairly frequently.
Personally, I like this campaign a lot, and I don’t recommend rushing it. One of the things that makes it special is how the PCs can become entwined in the fabric of the city — invested in Trollskull and its community; linked to friendly factions; becoming the nemeses of other factions. Weaving a campaign like that, though, takes time. You have to give yourself (and your players) the space to explore all of those threads. If you rush it, those connections will never get formed and will never have a chance to grow and interact with each other.
But, of course, there’s all kinds of reasons why you might need to speed things up: Maybe you want to run it for a D&D summer camp and you only have a limited amount of time. Or you’re midway through the campaign, a player is moving away, and you’d like to wrap things up before they leave.
Whatever the case may be, how can you make sure you reach the finish line before you run out of time?
HOW LONG IS THE REMIX?
Let’s start by establishing some baselines.
When I ran Dragon Heist, the campaign lasted for twenty-two sessions. Several of these sessions, however, were 8-hour marathons. Looking at my recordings, it appears that it took us approximately 120 hours to complete the campaign (as described in Dragon Heist: The Final Session), which would translate to roughly thirty 4-hour sessions.
I’ve talked with a number of DMs running the remix campaign, however, and its length can vary quite a bit: The longest I know of ran a 300-hour version of the campaign (with a lot of extra material). Most seem to cluster between 80 and 150 hours.
One of the biggest variables seems to be Chapter 2: From the time they get Trollskull Manor from Volo to the point where the fireball goes off and the next phase of the campaign begins is a very sandbox-y period. The PCs are repairing their inn, interacting with the NPCs of Trollskull Alley, meeting faction reps, dealing with Emmet Frewn, and going on faction missions. The number and detail of the faction missions, in particular, can vary a lot depending on how much interest the PCs have in the factions and how much effort the DM puts into the missions. The PCs might also be following up on questions they have from Chapter 1 (possibly getting a jump start on the Grand Game), and it’s also not unusual for DMs to add brand new adventures (like The Lady of Trollskull Priory, Blue Alley, The Veiled Society, or something of their own creation) here.
As a result, groups can easily spend dozens of hours in Chapter 2. I know of one group who spent over a year of biweekly sessions on just this one section of the campaign. (Personally, my group spent 20 hours here.)
On the other hand, it’s also quite trivial to speed run Chapter 2: You can skim past or even completely cut a lot of stuff here without fundamentally sabotaging the rest of the campaign. (The players will likely feel less connected to the city and the PCs will have fewer resources to call upon during the Grand Game, but these aren’t crippling problems.) I know of several groups who have rescued Floon & Renaer in one session and then triggered the fireball just one or two sessions later.
The other major variable, of course, is the heists. Each heist itself generally takes less than four hours and can be wrapped up in a single session, but you also need to consider the set-up (i.e., as described in Part 7 of the Remix, tracking faction activity to faction outposts, following the leads from the faction outposts back to the faction lairs, and planning the heist).
In practice, it looks like each heist will take 10-15 hours of playing time (including the heist itself). This generally won’t be sequential, though — i.e., 15 hours on one heist and then 15 hours on the next heist. Instead, the investigations and interactions with the various factions will weave around each other.
Although slightly different in form, this timeline also seems to roughly apply to the Gralhund Raid (with the setup time being spent on the fireball investigation). In practice, this might be a little quicker, but it’s close enough for our purposes.
Wrapping things up, Chapter 1 took my group about 5 hours to complete and the finale of the campaign after the PCs have reassembled the Stone of Golorr — i.e., breaching the vault, getting the gold, and then dealing with whatever the aftermath of getting the gold is — seems to take another 5-10 hours.
To sum that up with a conservative estimate:
To this, you’ll probably want to add another 10-20 hours of miscellaneous activities. (In my campaign, that included a romance subplot, setting up an orphanage, and running additional faction missions after Chapter 2, among other things.)
So our baseline running time for the Dragon Heist remix is roughly 120 hours, or 30 four-hour sessions.
DRAGON HEIST: THE FAST VERSION
Now, let’s speed things up. For this discussion I’m going to refer to 4-hour sessions, but the advice should hold regardless (e.g., if you have 2-hour sessions, then when I say something should take one session, it should take you two sessions).
Chapter 1: Set a tight pace here to make sure you wrap this chapter up in a single session. To make this happen, you probably want to be exiting the Yawning Portal no later than the 45-minute mark in your first session. (You may need to skip the troll fight to make this happen.)
In this version of the campaign, the PCs will only be aligned with a single friendly faction. Pre-select that faction and use them as the contact who hooks the group up with Volo.
Chapter 2: You’ll also want to wrap this chapter up in a single session. For me, that probably looks like this:
Miscellaneous Activities: Eliminate as much of this stuff as possible. After Chapter 2, I’d recommend bringing in just one additional faction mission. Keep the Trollskull-related roleplaying to a minimum. If the PCs are getting distracted by non-essential activities, try to frame hard, resolve it quickly/decisively, and redirect them away from it.
Heists: Try to keep the faction investigations as tight as possible. Frame aggressively and don’t let the players dither too much in their planning. If they’re in any way confused or suffering analysis paralysis, bring in a faction response team with a bunch of explicit clues in their pockets. You don’t need to pare things down to the bone here; just keep it tight.
Vault Keys: For the finale, eliminate the vault keys. Once the PCs know where the Vault is, they can just go there and enter.
Doing all of this should result in a campaign that looks more like this:
So we can run a fast version of the Dragon Heist remix in roughly 80 hours, or 20 four-hour sessions.
DRAGON HEIST: THE SPEED RUN
But that’s not good enough! Suzie just got a new job in a different country and we need to wrap things up ASAP!
This is the point where we’re going to make some very deep cuts and even fundamentally alter the dynamic of the campaign.
Fast Version: Start, of course, by implementing everything from the fast version of the campaign described above.
Goodbye Gralhunds: We’re going to get rid of the Gralhunds by replacing them with the Cassalanters.
Fast Heists: To speed up the heists as much as possible, we’re going to run each heist in a single session. This means that we need to eliminate the faction investigations and most or all of the groundwork. We have a couple options for this.
First, we can give the Cassalanters have much more actionable and comprehensive intelligence about the Grand Game: They know that Xanathar has one Eye and Manshoon the other. They also have blueprints and locations for both lairs.
The PCs can now go directly from the Cassalanter Raid to performing the other two heists back-to-back.
If the PCs miss the Cassalanters’ Grand Game report (and, therefore, all this heist-related intelligence they need), you can backstop this by having a friendly faction — e.g., Force Grey — sweep the Cassalanter Villa after the raid, discover the intel, and then bring it to the PCs.
Alternatively, you can use the PCs’ friendly faction to frame up these heists as faction mission assignments. I prefer the Cassalanter intel solution because it keeps the players in the driver’s seat of the campaign, but if all else fails having someone show up and say, “We know you’re looking for the Eyes, and we think we’ve identified the location for one of them…” will certainly cut to the chase.
Option – Simultaneous Heist: You could speed things up even more by having an allied faction do one of the two final Eye heists at the same time the PCs are doing the other. This could be the Cassalanters, if the PCs have decided to help them, or it should be whatever friendly faction the PCs have allied with.
Option — The Final Eye: Eliminate the final Eye Heist entirely by having the faction holding the Eye come to the PCs with the Eye to negotiate. They can make whatever offer seems reasonable and makes sense given the circumstances.
Whatever the offer may be, either:
Mix-and-Match: You do not, of course, have to use all of these options at the same time. Depending on just how breakneck you need the pace to be, you can mix-and-match whichever options make the most sense.
If you were to use all of these options, however, your campaign would likely look something like this:
This gives you a lightning-fast 32 hour version of the Dragon Heist remix, which can be played in 8 four-hour sessions.
TRANSITIONING MID-CAMPAIGN
If you’re midway through a run of the Dragon Heist remix, there are any number of reasons why you might need to transition to a high-speed wrap-up. The options above should give you the tools to figure out how best to tighten things up and focus on what’s essential for a satisfying conclusion, but a lot of the specifics will depend on exactly what’s going on in your campaign.
For example, if you’re in the middle of Chapter 2, then it’s probably best to trigger the fireball at the beginning of your next session and then chart a course from there.
On the other hand, if you’re in the middle of the Eye heists and now running out of time, you might be best served considering an option like having a friendly faction run one of the remaining heists for the PCs. Or put a twist on that idea by having whichever faction the PCs are targeting next carry out a successful heist on one of the OTHER factions, resulting in them having two Eyes onsite when the PCs arrive.
Whatever form your campaign takes, I hope it has an epic conclusion for you and your players!
DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 38B: Nasira’s Story
The next morning, as was her familiar custom, Tee arose a few hours before the others and went down to the common room to break her fast. While she picked at pieces of cold mutton, a young woman approached her table. She was a wiry thing — rather plain, and generally brown: tanned skin, light brown eyes, brown hair, and with a dress of pale brown.
“Is your name Tithenmamiwen?”
Tee nodded.
“My name is Nasira. I’ve been told that you were asking questions about a woman named Silion.”
Tee palmed a dagger.
Back in Session 8, we added a new player to our group.
In Session 37, we sadly lost a player.
Now we’re adding a new player to replace the one we lost. The basic procedure we’re following hasn’t changed much, but there are a few twists that I think are worth mentioning.
First, for the reasons we looked at during the last session, the group wasn’t just looking to add any new character: They were specifically interested in filling the gap left by Dominic’s departure. They wanted a healer.
Generally, I don’t like putting any limits on what characters a new player can play. I also don’t put a lot of stock in the idea that every group needs to conform to some “standard” set of roles. (See our previous discussion about non-standard groups.) But this was a very specific circumstance and, as I’ve noted, it was being driven by the group’s desire to fill a very specific need.
With that being said, I didn’t want this new character to just be a carbon copy of Dominic with the name scratched out and a new one written in: That would be boring. It also wouldn’t be fair to the new player.
To make sure she felt creatively free to make the character she wanted to play, (a) I made sure the remit was as broad as possible and (b) I also tapped my own system expertise to offer her a wide variety of build concepts that could potentially deliver the healing the group was looking for.
If I recall correctly, there was a point where we considered making “let’s find a replacement” diegetic — i.e., the PCs would actually go looking for a new compatriot. As I began exploring Nasira’s background with the new player, however, it was clear that this character wasn’t a “healer for hire” or anyone else who could be logically recruited by an adventuring party.
So how could Nasira be introduced to the campaign?
I used a combination of the collaborative methods for creating campaign characters described here, taking the background Nasira’s player had given me, fleshing it out with additional lore, and tweaking elements to provide hooks (including the big, obvious hook featured in this session) that would not only bring Nasira to the current PCs, but also naturally align her goals with theirs.
As described in GM Don’t List #19: Ignoring PC Backstories, this went both ways: I harvested elements introduced by Nasira’s player in her backstory and seized the opportunity to flesh out my campaign notes.
During this back-and-forth process, I also took the opportunity to seed some stuff into Nasira’s background that wouldn’t turn up in campaign until later. (As it turned out, much later: It wasn’t until around Session 100 that some of this stuff started paying off.)
OPEN TABLE RECRUITMENT
The other big twist was that this was the first time I’d recruited a new player to a long-term campaign since I’d started running my first open table.
Holy shirtforks! It was amazing!
Not only had I been running games for this new player for several months, but the other players in the Ptolus campaign had been playing games with her. So when we asked the question, “Who should be the new player?”, not only did we all know exactly who we wanted, we were also absolutely sure she’d be the perfect fit for the group (and vice versa).
I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: Running an open table would be worth it even if the only thing you liked about it was recruiting new players to your dedicated campaigns.
Not only have I repeated this process of adding a new player from my open table to an ongoing campaign several times since this inaugural example, it’s also the primary method I use for recruiting players to brand new campaigns too (like Eternal Lies, Dragon Heist, Blades in the Dark, Night’s Black Agents, and so forth).
The results are exemplary every single time.
Campaign Journal: Session 38C – Running the Campaign: Expanding Dungeons
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index
