On Playing Raw: Nasty, Brutish, and Undercooked

This image has made the rounds in some RPG servers in the last few days, where it has been the subject of much clowning and gnashing of teeth.

It is, unfortunately, real, and I did look at the original site. To be sure, there was plenty to laugh at both in the entirety of the above-excerpted piece and in the rest of the site. Much of it was baffling. Other parts I didn't have any particular disagreement with. All in all, it didn't seem to merit any commentary or response. Until I saw this other bit of the home page. 

I'm pretty sure 'JC' means Jeremy Crawford
The alternative sounds impious

The fifth and third points? Good and fine. The fourth point is mixed, and I think it makes a mistake by associating DM fiat with adversarial play. It's the first and second points that draw my ire. 

Are 'the rules' (here referring by default to the rules of the Current Edition™) complex? Sure. But there's a big jump from that to 'DMing is hard.' This is the exact opposite of the message I want to send to beginner players—and especially beginner DMs.

Can DMing be hard? Sure, in the same way that playing chess can be hard when you're playing at a high level against a seasoned opponent or under strict time pressure. This does not mean it must be hard. In particular, putting these two statements together implies that DMing is difficult because the rules are complex... and that just isn't true. 

Gaining rules knowledge can take a while and benefits from focus and experience as a player, but it's far from the toughest thing about being a DM; and it's definitely not the thing which most improves the play experience. If I had to rank all the most important aspects of being a DM, rules knowledge would be well below the mid-point, because unlike many other aspects of the DM's craft it does not benefit from the DM's privileged position. 

The DM can rely on other players to know the rules inside and out and inquire with them when a ruling seems uncertain, but pacing a session cannot be offloaded onto the players, for whom a veil of ignorance must be drawn lest the events to follow lose much of their power, and maintaining order and cordial relations among the group depends on the DM's special role as a group arbitrator. These things are far more crucial to the craft of a DM than mere rules knowledge, not least because they transfer from game to game even as rules knowledge falls by the wayside. These are also, crucially, intuitive and social skills rather than regulations to be memorized and effected. I am sure there are people for whom such things come as easy as breathing but memorizing a rulebook is a horrible imposition; such people will lose little from switching to rules-lite systems. 

The sort of DMing I do is (I'd like to think) quite difficult. In my upcoming AD&D game, for example, I've gone out of my way to make things harder for myself. I've just about rewritten the PHB for my players, made custom programs to generate weather by time and location, and I'm implementing a whole bunch of homebrewed subsystems. I would never recommend that any DM begin running a game this way. A simpler game, starting from the printed rules but loose with them, is an excellent starting place which will serve both DM and player much better than an insistence upon RAW. 

I can't help but think that the prevalence of this attitude contributes, and is perhaps the primary driver, of the 'DM shortage' which is claimed to exist in the 5e space. I don't play that system anymore, yet it still matters to me; fewer DMs means fewer people, especially new players, actually playing the game, and more participating in peripheral activities like watching shows, listening to podcasts, and reading about the game. To be sure, I do all of these things, but they are no substitute for the genuine article, and their prevalence can lead to mismatched expectations about what play is actually like. 

This attitude can seep in early. I can't for the life of me remember exactly when I first heard about tabletop games. I do recall my first year of high school, when I spoke to someone who had played in a campaign the previous year. I was excited by the prospect of the game and expressed a desire to make my own world. I was told flatly that this was a bad idea; much better to learn by running published adventures. Years later, I know this to be false. Never mind that, at the onset of the hobby, one began to DM not by running pre-published scenarios but by constructing one's own town, wilderness, and dungeon. The published modules available today, by and large, vary between mediocrity and crap, both in the case of official corporate modules and those prominently displayed in online marketplaces. These are products which neither teach essential tools (like how to properly run a dungeoncrawl) nor point the DM towards some ideal of play: even if run exquisitely according to the book and rules, what emerges is a railroaded slog. 

I may have lost some readers with the last paragraph, sensible and reasonable readers, whom I might have otherwise persuaded. But... seriously. This cannot be the standard. It's an impoverished shade of what the medium can do. When I imagine playing in a game like this for an extended period of time, I get the feeling of a man drying out in the baking sun. It is the reduction of this wonderful hobby to a mercenary service and of the DM's craft to a mechanical operation perfectly poised to be replaced by a cheaper and more effective mechanism. I don't tolerate it and neither should you. 

I will take a moment to rant about the RAW attitude on display above, though it was not my original intention: the original site states, regarding the choice of a novice DM to modify an encounter in order to challenge a character with an optimized PC,

It is grotesquely unfair to the player(s) involved, who may have invested dozens of hours into building their character under the perfectly reasonable assumption that the expensive rule books that they spent their money on would be the rules that the game follows.

This one sentence is a nesting doll of terrible ideas. How, exactly, is it grotesquely unfair to make a variant guaranteed-hit lightning bolt, in a way that it would not be unfair to include an upcast magic missile, or, for that matter, simply introducing Tiamat? 

Further, these players may have invested dozens of hours into building their characters? In what world? I don't disbelieve that there are players who spend longer making characters than they do actually playing them, but why is that the assumption?

Finally, because players have purchased expensive rule books, the DM is under some obligation to conform to them? This is the assumption that the DM is providing a service for the players who, as customers, possess some rights and protections, as opposed to the assumption that the players have been invited into a group experience in which the DM possesses some special abilities and responsibilities. 

It should be no surprise that this fellow is, in fact, marketing himself as a DM-for-hire, and is moreover a former Adventurers League DM. I consider myself blessed every day that I was not introduced to the hobby through that medium. 

DMing has a very high skill ceiling, but the floor at which an enjoyable game is played is low indeed. I have, myself, run games which were quite poor on a technical level and which were hardly better paced or organized: my players still came back, and they got to see a much better game grow as a result of their trust in me. One of my close friends, who had never interacted with the game until a couple of years ago, sat in on, and then became a player in, my last campaign. They have now for many months been running their own homebrewed campaign in 5e: it's a riotous, ridiculous farce of lobster cult secret police suppressing journalistic ventures to discover the secrets underneath a vast conspiracy, and all the players there are having great fun. My cousin, nine years old, is starting to run his own homebrew campaign based loosely on 1e rules; every time we meet, it's all he wants to talk about! None of these games or DMs started smooth or proficient in the rules—players developed a loyalty to them anyway. 

This is because the act of roleplaying, the burning creativity available when people come together in this magnificent game, really is just that appealing and enjoyable, so much so that it takes serious dysfunction on a personal level to make it actively unenjoyable. But it relies on the openness and freedom that distinguishes the role-playing game from all that came before it, both on the part of the player and DM. It is exactly that freedom that a misguided, absolute appeal to RAW threatens to smother. 

The GM Is Dead, and we, Murderers of All Murderers, Have Killed Him

With apologies to Joyce: only big titles for small posts on account of the sound. 

Some time ago, I stumbled on this thread: it's a very, very detailed review of a Paizo adventure path from the 3.5 days, on a forum called the Gaming Den. I'm not in the habit of reading RPG forums, and I've never played D&D 3.5 or any of its cousins. I can't for the life of me remember how I found this or why I chose to read it, but I did. 

It is fascinating. 

Not the interminable room-by-room summaries of every single dungeon in the book, that stuff makes my eyes glaze over. It's the stuff in between, the opinions in the margins and the arguments that erupt. This thread is, in reality, a type of fantasy fiction. Reading it, I was transported into a strange and different world: a world where monsters are discussed in terms of 'beatsticks' and 'closet trolls', players are assumed to have whatever magic items they want and can afford, and characters go from level 1 to 20 in three months. 

I'm particularly interested in a vitriolic little exchange that starts at the top of the third page of the thread. I'll summarize:

A: By the time the PCs can cast sixth level spells, they can shit gold and gems if they want! They should be spamming planar binding and getting xorns to dig priceless diamonds out of the elemental plane of earth!

B: No, if you go over the Wealth by Level in the DMG the DM is supposed to take the excess money away from you, and if you want henchmen you need a feat. Stop passing your houserules off as actual rules.

A: No, it's a character building guideline, and it's not a houserule to put together the rules for various spells and see the PCs can generate infinite wealth at this level, also there are other ways to get henchmen and hirelings. 

B: Only in that everything in the DMG is a guideline, the DMG says to take OP abilities away from PCs, and since the WBL table goes up to a million at level 20 it can't be infinite at level 9, also planar beings and wishes will screw you over.

I'll stop. 

As best I can tell, the claims are that, by combining a few vanilla spells that allow one to control or transform into beings that can create wealth (like genies) or can work for the PCs (like xorn) it is possible for the PCs to make way, way more money than the game anticipates. 

Now, I don't have a dog in this fight, rules-wise. What interest me are the norms of this discussion. Namely, this is being argued in terms of legitimacy rather than merit (my girlfriend is a constitutional law nerd, and she's insisting that this is an argument between originalist, textualist, and, on my end, judicial activist modes of interpretation). What is asked here is not "how would implementing this set of rules improve or impair the experience of the game" but "is this what the designers intended."

I needn't remind the readers of this blog that, once upon a time, the game was only house rules: the culture of kit-bashing and designing bespoke systems in the OSR sees to that. There is also a culture of interpretation: reading over the 1e DMG and OD&D, crawling through the attics of innocent Wisconsonians for scraps of old notebooks, and holding forth on initiative rules with nigh-Talmudic seriousness. I confess to having done some of these things. But I also maintain that the question there is "How did the original players think, and what can that teach us?" as opposed to "What was the intended method of play, so we can do that."

It matters not a whit whether the authors of the 3e DMG wanted you to take excess wealth away from your players, only what effect this has on the game. Your game, at your table. 

That's the crux of the issue, I think. Partly as an edition thing (with the increased focus on character-building as an aspect of gameplay), partly as a community thing (with the rise of character-optimization communities, especially on online forums), partly as a business thing (make sure everyone is playing with the published rules, in the published settings, using published adventures, so that they buy our books) the experience of the game for many players has shifted away from the experience of playing at a given table, characterized by a particular DM and players with their own faults and foibles and opinions and houserules, and towards the partly-imagined experience of playing a sort of platonic ideal D&D, where the rules always work as intended and the setting is exactly as published and the game is a regular progression of CR-appropriate combats atop masterful battlemaps. Both DMs and players do this (I know I have, especially in times when I didn't have a regular group). I can't help but think that Joseph Manola's writing about RPG books as fiction is relevant here. 

The result is the argument summarized above, appealing to the rulebooks without a thought for how this affects the experience of play or the world of the game. 

My own, possibly controversial opinion: characters in double-digit levels using magic to create vast sums of wealth, far more than they could gain through normal adventuring, is not necessarily bad. 

There are caveats. It is bad if it damages the play experience, or runs counter to the setting. The adventure path assumes a game and setting wherein getting paid thousands of gold pieces to adventure is something desirable and appropriate, in which there are many characters of this level and higher, who do not themselves have infinite planar wealth. Leaving the world-saving mission to go make a ton of money by spamming spells would indeed be destructive to this playstyle and game. 

But let's imagine, starting from this principle, what such a world might look like, where the right combination of magic spells can yield endless, untold riches. What would a PC that has done that look like?

The first thought that comes to mind for me is the sorcerer Maal Dweb, from the short stories of Clark Ashton Smith (The Maze of Maal Dweb and The Flower Women). All-powerful, surrounded by wealth and wonder, and incapable of enjoying any of it. Clearly not a character devoid of drama, or ill-fitted to appearing in an adventure game, whether as a player character or an antagonist. All it requires is recognizing what sort of game, in terms of style and genre, the rules imply we are playing. Justin Alexander made this case in an old post (actually, almost as old as the adventure under discussion in the thread), that people like to stat up their favorite fictional characters as 20th level D&D characters (this specific incarnation is more of a 3e thing, since that's when 20th level got codified as the top of the usual power curve, but Gygax was statting up Conan as a teens-level fighter/thief multiclass decades earlier, and it was just as silly then). Luke Skywalker is the bestest jedi ever, so he's 20th level, right? 

Well, no. Not just because 'levels' is a silly thing to apply to fictional characters wholly outside the framework of an RPG, but because the sorts of things a character can do is heavily dependent on the genre and the kind of story being told. Need I remind everyone, Inigo Montoya is second level (yeah, yeah, and Gandalf is 5th). 

Just because you paid for the whole speedometer doesn't mean you should use the whole thing. Just because you have a system that goes up to 20th level doesn't mean you need to put all your GMPCs at that level. A lot of settings would benefit from bringing down the power curve, stats-wise, in order to make some more sense. 

Conversely, extrapolating from the rules in any edition of the game and hypothesizing what a high level character would look like in the fiction of the game gets us high-fantasy pulp stuff, or superheroes, depending on the edition. Lean into that! The old AD&D modules topped out around 14th level, and those had you taking on the avatars of evil gods! 20th level characters should be ruling nations, leading religions, and getting into wars/negotiations with extraplanar beings over blood diamond mines on the lower planes. Recalibrate your expectations! 

After a fashion, I feel sympathetic for these guys on the thread. They've run into the contradictions between the ruleset and the explicit setting, and are flailing around to fix it. They're going about it the wrong way, but clearly they're trying to fix a problem. 

Now, am I suggesting that the approach above leads to a good game? No. But I do think it should be interpreted as an opportunity for drama and conflict instead of a bad rule in need of fixing. To any GM faced with such an issue, I must ask, where do the items conjured by, say, a genie, come from? Maybe in your setting the wish spell simply creates matter from nothing in the desired configuration. If so, you may have some setting implications to think through. But maybe it doesn't. 

In my games, items like the Everfull purse, which creates small amounts of coinage apparently from nothing, actually steal the coins from elsewhere: the coins are randomly teleported into it, the closer the more likely a given coin is to be teleported. As a result, such items are illegal, and it becomes very difficult to use them to create a stockpile of infinite wealth; you end up stealing from yourself. Some might interpret this as a mean-spirited ruling to nerf the players, but I must heartily disagree: this is keeping up the drama. If a PC uses the above methods and tries to make infinite wealth by turning into a genie, where does that come from, and what does it imply? Does it perhaps come from the coffers of some other genie? After some time, will many such beings discover they are being stolen from, and seek out the miscreant abusing their powers? When an efreet rewards a PC with money, is it perhaps coming from the efreet's own stash on its home plane, or perhaps borrowed from another, to whom it is now in debt?

A related question: if a player shapechanged into a genie can make infinite wealth... why aren't the genies also doing this? Or are they? Or does this run the risk of crashing the magic item or gold market? Are there regulatory bodies, terrestrial or planar, that come after them?

These are all questions which lead to more drama. The problem with 11th level characters using shapechange to make tons of money isn't that it breaks the wealth tables, it's that these reviewers are arguing this entirely on the plane of book rules rather than interpreting it in the context of the game world. It's assuming that the world isn't consistent, isn't interactive, that it doesn't bite back; that it exists only as a vehicle for the published adventure. 

I think that's a very sad way to run games. Let the players get in over their heads, and let there be consequences! Let them push the big red apocalypse button! A campaign that ends up with PCs on the run from genies because they're abusing wishes sounds awesome, and I'd much rather keep the possibility of such crazy scenarios occurring than squash them to ensure that the regularly scheduled adventure path continues as normal. 

As much as I've used published material in the past, and will continue to do so, I'm glad that my upcoming campaign is going to feature a lot more original stuff. When I read the stories from the oldest campaigns (including some that are still ongoing) I can't help but feel a white-hot energy there, a creative joy on the part of GMs that is essentially linked to their freedom in the absence of standards for what the game looked like. There's almost no published material that captures this; it is a delicate thing that emerges from the table, in actual play, and doesn't survive being pinned down and stuck to paper.  

Min-maxing Isn't a Problem, Except When It Is

I just watched this video discussing the topic 'D&D Min-Max-ers Are Valid' featuring Brennan Lee Mulligan and Jasmine Bhullar. There's less discussion of the topic than I hoped, though I disliked their treatment of the topic less than I expected. Still, I think they manage to miss the point in a very juicy topic of discussion, and since I had strong opinions on the matter I have come to inflict them upon you all. 

I must confess: I am a min-maxer. And I have a problem with min-maxing. 

Does that not make sense? Read on.

Hello, Byzantine

Before I played TTRPGs, I played videogames, including a lot of CRPGs and single-player games. I was, and remain, a compulsive save-scummer. When I played Baldur's Gate, or Thief: The Metal Age, or Morrowind, or Hitman: Blood Money, I would be constantly saving, taking an action, failing, and trying again until I could get it exactly right. 

It was not fun, but I did it anyway. 

In our neck of the woods, it's not unusual to complain about the tyranny of fun, the notion that bowing to the dictates of short-term enjoyment makes long-term satisfaction very, very difficult to cultivate in a campaign. This is a related problem, I think. The satisfaction of finally getting past that one guard in the most difficult and obvious way possible after a dozen tries is short-lived, and by committing myself to that I cut myself off from many other, much more enjoyable, approaches. How many cool assassination options did I miss in Hitman, how many side paths and schemes did I miss in Thief, because I wanted to bulldoze through the game in a straight line?

It's worse in RPGs. I recently went back to Baldur's Gate to try out an evil playthrough. The first time I played it (very recently, I assure you) the first dungeon I found was actually the Ulcaster Academy. On this playthrough I decided to make a beeline for it. I was fine until I found the vampire wolf, and realized I didn't exactly have a whole lot of magic weapons that could damage it. So I save-scummed. I tried a couple dozen different times to set the fireball just right, give the rare magic weapons to the right characters and make sure nobody died. It took me a while to remember I had a dragon sorcerer and a storm cleric whose special abilities could take it down. By that point I had failed many, many times. 

That experience was not strictly unenjoyable. I had some fun trying (and failing) to kill it with a fireball trap. But there was more frustration that satisfaction. I would like you to imagine the same thing playing out at a table, the players bulldozing into an encounter with a creature they cannot normally beat, and demanding a do-over each time someone dies until they can get the perfect outcome. If I had players like that I would quit GMing. 

By contrast, I wrote recently here about my first time playing Ultima Underworld this past year. I went in completely blind. Others might find the experience detailed there to be undesirable, but it was a blast for me. I was immersed and engaged. I was afraid and surprised. I died a miserable death, and loved it. 

The bottom line here is that many of the best experiences in gaming (video or analog) happen under conditions of sub-optimal play. Part of this is because sub-optimal play leaves space for learning and optimization, which are often enjoyable, but also because it creates room for improvisation and unexpected situations. 

Back to TTRPGs. 

I think games are at their most boring when they're optimized. This can be related to the creation of a meta (my best friend in high school was a relentless optimizer who tried to get me into TF2, MtG, and Realm of the Mad God by bashing my head with the meta first, no dice, many such cases), but just as often it's smaller bits of optimization like a character creation system that have a few, clear peaks. 

Unlike videogames or card games, TTRPGs seem uniquely situated to prevent the dominance of meta or super-optimized tactics thanks to the GM's freedom to create new challenges and issue rulings. That's why I don't regard D&D monsters like the ear piercer as something bad. These are the footprints of an ever-evolving cat and mouse game between player and GM, but one which neither side is trying to 'win.' The GM could 'win' that fight in an instant using infinite Tiamats, but it would be totally worthless, because the enjoyment is in playing the game and the goal is to keep it going. Without GM freedom, the players could 'win' by finding the local optima and crushing whatever 'level appropriate' encounters got in their way, but that too would be hollow because there would no longer be the sense of risk, surprise, and unpredictability which made it fun. Just endless CR-balanced encounters at regular intervals allowing for rest, stretching into infinity. Perhaps we must imagine Sisyphus happy, but I think players and GMs would concur with the Greeks that this would be a curse. 

But this is perhaps too harsh a treatment of optimization. It is an activity in which many people engage with enjoyment. And it should be clear that optimization and min-maxing are not quite the same behavior. Mulligan and Bhullar offer some pat responses to the issue, but it remains that min-maxing is a behavior which occurs and which many people evidently have a problem. I think they missed the subtler point, which is that min-maxing and roleplay are antagonistic to one another. This does not mean that a single player can't do both, or that a campaign cannot include both (examples to the contrary abound), but rather, that they are different activities. When one is min-maxing, one is not roleplaying. 

They come from a culture of play which takes for granted that D&D (5th, pretty much exclusively) is a storytelling game. This is not an opinion I share, but it remains that many people run story-centered games using it and show no signs of stopping. It should still be clear under these premises that when min-maxing occurs, storytelling does not occur. 

But we should not take this for granted. 

One doesn’t often find discussions of min-maxing in games of Call of Cthulhu or Paranoia. This is in part because there’s not much to optimize in either, and in Paranoia the character creation process invites other players to screw up your character and make them a gormless idiot. But it’s also partly because optimization wouldn’t contribute much to either game. Cthulhu characters are created to die or go insane, that’s the payoff, it’s fun. Being the only gormless idiot in a party would be tiresome, but a whole group of them is hilarious and fits perfectly with the game’s comedy dystopia. 

We might also consider Vampire: The Masquerade. I ran a one-shot of V5 earlier this year for my regular group, mixed results, but spent a while reading through optimizer threads about the earlier editions. Apparently the original Vampire: The Masquerade was broken in terms of character power right out of the box, with Celerity being by far the most potent physical discipline and Dominate, well, dominating pretty much everything. I get the feeling that this wasn't much of a problem during the original game's development, given that it's explicitly aimed at being a story game (before that term got more closely codified). If one is playing a game of undead ennui, I can see the horrendous balancing not coming into play much; the issue arises when people come to the game with the assumptions of tactical play and that the system exists to be optimized. Lesson: don't bolt a complex and badly balanced character creation system onto your story game. 

Early D&D is arguably in the same boat as CoC and Paranoia. Stats are random and hard to change, classes don’t give you much power, spell selection is limited and semi-random, a lot of power comes from magic items whose acquisition is uncertain, etc. 

Discussion of min-maxing really kicks off with AD&D 2nd edition: it’s no surprise that this is the edition which opened up point-based class customization, kits, and player-facing splatbooks, but also the one which enshrined the attitude that D&D is a storytelling game into the rulebooks. Two commercial interests, one to sell to players, especially optimizers and completionists, by expanding options for character creation, and the other to sell modules that could be commissioned and put out with a minimum of play testing (such as the Dragonlance modules, which began earlier under 1e but certainly reached the height of their influence in 2e, explicitly story-centered and horrendously railroaded products indistinguishable from the novels which they were adapted from/into) collided to create a play environment in which mechanics and world/narrative are at odds. 

This is the major complaint. The issue is not, as Mulligan and Bhullar seem to think, that novice GMs have difficulty challenging powerful characters, but that when I am recruiting players I have to deal with people who ask me if I know about the 'coffeelock' (this seriously happened, I blacklisted the guy there and then). Is it not right to respond to such things with wailing and gnashing of teeth?

To be clear, the problem is not that min-maxers seek to optimize, but that they view the game mechanically first and as a world second. My job as a GM is first and foremost to present a world in which my players can act. The rules are an aid to that end. I would rather have players who understand this, and recognize that disjoints and exploits in the rules are the result of mortal error, not the nature of the fantasy world. 

The problem of min-maxing is twofold. First, there are players who engage with the game primarily on the basis of system optimization. Second, the world of the game is one in which this optimization leads to dissonant outcomes. 

For examples of games which both allow optimization and have a world consonant with it, we might consider superhero games. I shall neglect to expand on this point. 

To ground this a bit more in the text, Bhullar makes reference to the 5th edition paladin/warlock multiclass, which is widely understood to be very powerful. It is taken for granted that this is an example of min-maxing, rather than one driven by roleplay. It is not impossible for this to be a roleplay-driven decision: I can easily imagine a paladin who loses their faith and turns to the patronage of some other being. But I would assume that this was not the case. 

Does this matter? Only insomuch as character classes are something other than bundles of mechanics. If paladins are only martial characters who can cast some spells and do big damage against some creatures, and warlocks are only short-rest based casters, nothing objectionable occurs. But hopefully, a GM and their player would want these things to mean more than that. This is a fantasy roleplaying game, and perhaps the paladin class exists to facilitate the fantasy of being an oathbound knight and the warlock exists to facilitate the fantasy of being a magician bound by a pact. Both of these are excellent fantasy archetypes. It would not even be difficult to combine them. Perhaps the paladin's oath and the warlock's pact are guaranteed by the same being, who grants its servant gifts from different 'packages' as needed. Perhaps this is a fallen paladin in a world where paladin powers cannot be revoked who seeks a new benefactor. But this would be unique to a given table, and this runs contrary to the assumptions of this culture of play: because a GM who grounds this choice in flavor might, say, require a quest to obtain the favor of the patron, or may even declare that in their world, this would not make sense and hence is off limits. I can just imagine the fire, fury, and r/rpghorrorstories posts that would result. 

Matt Colville has made a version of this point before, so I will reiterate it only briefly. The game design choice to separate character creation options from the flavor of the game is one which I would characterize as a failure to make mechanics and roleplay consonant. The result is a game in which the two are effectively independent, and thus a game which is not 'about' anything in particular. I have great sympathy for the GMs who complain of min-maxers, though they may not understand the root of their complaint. 

An example: I've run a short Legend of the 5 Rings 4th edition campaign a couple of times now. This is a game which comes with a detailed default setting and character options which are firmly grounded within it. If I were running that game instead, and a player wished to, say, take a dip in another clan's school for a powerful synergy, my response as a GM would be immediate and clear: this does not make sense. I might permit a player to effectively betray their clan and court another to learn their techniques, which would take quite a lot of time and effort and have serious ramifications for the campaign. If they wanted to keep learning their original clan's techniques, they might have to seek out a teacher and bribe or blackmail them, or find one in exile, if one such even exists. I suspect very few players would object to my placing these obstacles in the path of the player's optimized character, since it is clear within the norms of L5R that these mechanical decisions are closely linked both to flavor and to the character's place in the world. It is one in which mechanics and roleplay are consonant.

That is the sort of game I like to run, and I think it's the sort of game many other people would like to run, if they knew it existed. To dismiss complaints of min-maxing without seriously considering their origins does a great disservice.

Running the Campaign: The Stinger

A 'stinger' is a post-credits scene in a film or tv series. During my ongoing Ptolus campaign (we just had our 11th session and will be on break in a few weeks to come back in April, I just haven't kept up with session reports) I stumbled on a use for this in RPGs. I don't recall where I picked it up, but the idea is simple enough. At the end of a session, pull away from the PCs to show a short scene elsewhere, something the PCs do not know about. It is entirely meta-knowledge. 

An example: a few weeks ago, after the party defeated a district boss of the Killraven Crime League, Durant the Stink Man, I pulled away to crimelord Kevris Killraven's secret lair, where the remaining boss the party had let go was begging for his life. I wrote the whole thing out.

A woman sits on a majestic throne before a roaring fire, in a secret keep deep below the city of Ptolus. A portly dwarf, Dollin Ebonhome, the head of the Killraven operation in North Market, kneels at her side, bloody and beaten. 

"It was all Durant's idea! Please!"

The woman contemplates the fire, and sips mead from a goblet. "North Market was your turf, Dollin. Why was Durant acting as he pleased there, without you doing anything?" The goblet is made from a dwarven skull. 

"I just needed help making collections, he- he just got out of contro-" The snout of a gold-plated dragon pistol presses to his forehead.

"Tell me again how things got out of your control."

"MISTRESS KILLRAVEN!"

A bang fills the chamber. The dwarf's brains coat the rug. 

Behind the throne, something, something tall, with the long arms of an ape and the eyes of a goat and the teeth of a wood chipper leans down and slurps out the remains. 

"Get this to Korben in South Market. I'm sure he could use the ... motivation. Then convene the Pactlords for tomorrow night, and make an example of Durant's worms. We make our move on Godsday. And see to it that these mice don't make any more trouble."

The thing's shape melts and reforms like water, into a young woman with red hair and an impish smile—Tellith Herdsman. Then into a diminutive, wiry gnome—Anageo Quigg—and again into an elderly woman, the Administration building requisitions officer. On the table before them are four dossiers.

Jaiden Cunningham: ELIMINATION

Miranir: ELIMINATION

Dmitree: ELIMINATION

Lucien Chenier: ELIMINATION

This is much longer than I would recommend making a stinger, and now I no longer plan them out very much or write them out. Still, it worked. It gave the players some meta-information, namely that the other boss was dead, that the captured gangsters would be executed (as they found out the next morning from the newspapers) that the plot they'd been told about was ongoing, and they got a look at a secretive villain. Plus, it set up a new intermediate villain, the ogre mage mercenary KILLBOSS, who the party actually dealt with and defeated not long later, but at a high price. Without that setup, he would have just come out of nowhere, but with it, his sudden appearance in the middle of a dungeon made more sense; not to the PCs, but to the players.

This information was largely non-actionable, and I trust my players well enough not to go trying to pass this off as in-character knowledge. This allows me to build dread and tension without having to worry immediately about PC reaction. In last session's stinger, I told the party how, the very same night they were living it up in Castle Shard, rubbing shoulders with high society, a young, ragged woman in the slums was hunted and eaten by a black dragon. This is setting up yet another intermediate villain. I think that's where this technique shines best, like in the teaser at the end of a thriller series episode, taking the POV to the villain to set up the next challenge. 

Have you used anything like this? Do let me know below. 

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Principles of RPG Narration

Over on the OSR Discord, user Sahh vented about her experiences with an unsatisfying DM, apparently running Hoard of the Dragon Queen in 5e. Near the end of that conversation, she asked, "anyone here got any good resources on how to condense Tolkienese into a few simple sentences to set a scene?"

This is where I got pinged in to the channel, with another user referring her to my previous post, Module Doctor: Oni Mother Okawa. I read through the conversation background and figured this would be a good subject for a blog post. Today we'll be looking resources, advice and processes for both improved narration at the table and improved writing for modules. 

Tiamat flies down from the skies, shimmering with
infernal energy, her five glorious heads roaring as one...

Before getting into the nitty-gritty, best to address the claim that boring, stuffy narration, or having to listen to NPCs talk to each other, is a '5e thing'.

On the one hand, there's nothing about the D&D 5e system that requires bad narration that overstays its welcome. If that's happening at your table, it's because the GM is choosing to do so, not because the rulebook says so. Whether this is an informed choice on the GM's part is another story.

However, this trend is most certainly a part of the expectations and culture surrounding the system. The published materials from WOTC tend to have blunt boxed text, as I complained in Stop Writing Lazy Quest Intros. I haven't read Hoard of the Dragon Queen, but I know by reputation that it's a boring and railroady module, so I wouldn't be surprised if this trend was even worse there. But official WOTC materials are heaven-sent next to some of the 3rd party products I've seen. 

More than anything, it strikes me as cargo-cult thinking. Many GMs, for a variety of reasons, don't fully understand the purpose and nature of narration, and so engage in imitation instead of deliberate problem-solving based on a situation, what Robert Pirsig called 'original seeing' in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. This is a phenomenon with roots in the surrounding culture of 5e, though the same may be said of other systems, perhaps to a greater degree. 

So now we come to the object-level question: how does one condense Tolkienese into a few simple sentences to set a scene?

Breaking Down the Object-Level Question

We have a problem: Tolkienese narration at a D&D table. We have a desired state: a few simple sentences. We have a known process to achieve it: condensation. And this is all in the service of a known goal: setting a scene. 

Breaking down the question in more detail will help us clarify what we need and ground our conclusions. 

First off, what is Tolkienese? In this context, it's referring to bloated and fanciful narration. It may be related to the 'High Gygaxian' dialect. Tolkienese is undesirable because it is at odds with the needs of the table, at least for Sahh, who wants to engage with the game world instead of listening to the GM drone on. 

As a sidenote, while Tolkien's actual prose of famously long-winded, it is also very economical, with little bloat. As one commentator once said, economy of language and getting to the damn point are two different skills, and it is possible to have one without the other. The GM in question lacks both. 

Rather than Tolkienese, we want a few simple sentences. That is to say, we want our narration to be short and easy to parse. We can get there by condensing existing prose to a more desirable state. And let us never forget our purpose: to set a scene at the table. Any tools, principles, rules and advice we make here are in service to this, and if they do not accomplish the goal, they should not be followed. 

More on Condensation: Joseph Manola

OSR blogger Joseph Manola has an excellent post which I revisit frequently: Conceptual Density (Or, What are RPG books *for*, anyway?'). Manola's thesis is that a good RPG book is dense with unusual, detailed, creative or otherwise inspiring material, while a bad one will endlessly detail an orc tribe with the exact tropes one would expect from an orc tribe. This claim is made at the macro-level of adventure design, but a symmetrical argument can be made at the micro-level of description and sentence creation.

Only give details the players wouldn't imagine for themselves upon hearing the base description, or which deserve emphasis. If my players encounter a troll (assuming they're familiar with trolls) I'm not going to ramble on about how it has bad breath, warts and a leathery green hide. 

However, if I really want to play up those aspects, I may give them more attention and really infuse them with detail, describing how the troll's hide cracks open with every movement, how pustules across its body pop and spill their sticky lymph with every step, only to coalesce and regenerate the next moment. 

I didn't add new information per se, but I made the perception which was already there more vivid. Alternately, I can add unusual details. Is this troll draped in the heraldry of knights it has killed and eaten? Are there half-formed screaming faces bubbling out of its skin, the beginning buds of another troll which must be routinely scraped off? These are things that players don't immediately think of when they hear 'troll' and so can be used to great effect. 

You'll know you succeed when, instead of following up your narration with, 'does anyone have fire damage?' they instead scream, 'HOOOOLEEEE SHIT KILL IT WITH FIRE!'

If you aren't doing either of those things, don't bother with detailed description of the troll. Your players have already imagined what you are about to say. Spend your narration budget on other elements. 

Objectives of Narration

Skerples, of the Coins and Scrolls blog, writes 3 Types of Modules, in which he lays out three approaches to the design of modules, namely, modules as manuals, as art, and as novels. Once again we can shrink this down to a micro-level point. There is no single goal to optimize for when narrating a scene. 

While Sahh and I both endorse terse and straightforward narration, this isn't because it's the One True Way, but for the results it achieves, namely, it gets the players back into the driver's seat as quickly as possible. There may be times when you want to lavish more detail on a scene, or build a particular impression or emotion. In those cases, economy of language falls by the wayside. 

Always keep in mind the goal of the narration and use the tools for the job, instead of mindlessly swinging around a hammer because an internet blogger wrote something about nails.

And what is the goal of narration? Well.

Elements of Narration

The Angry GM writes How to Talk to Players: The Art of Narration, and stresses for us that narration is not about 'painting with words' or 'immersing the players.' Those are (largely) desirable things, but they do not spring from narration alone, and they are not the goal. The goal is to impart information, and do so concisely. 

As we've pointed out before, players will create a mental image even with minimal detail from you. You don't need to paint a whole scene with words. You can take advantage of player imagination to fill in scenes for you, and focus your narration on relevant images. 

Product Examples: Narration in Print

Narration is made easier when you have material to reference, in the case of both read-aloud and DM text. Two products come to mind for this. One is Gabor 'Melan' Lux's Castle Xyntillan, a megadungeon which I will continue to shill until I take my final breath. The second are the modules of Joseph R Lewis.

(Incidentally, Lewis was party to that same Discord conversation referenced above)

Both exemplify terse, economical, and evocative text which can be translated easily into narration, in addition to possessing other sundry virtues. Your narration will improve with your ability to recognize and write effective text. 

The Limits of Narration

Xavier Lastra writes The Limits of Description part 2, and points out that descriptions in narration don't do what you think they do. Contrary to the above, painting an image with words is not nearly so desirable as one may think, because the ability of human language to describe sensory experiences is not as expansive as one would hope. Of the seven categories of descriptions, size, age, shape, color, origin, material and quality, few can be used effectively to do so effectively, and fewer still in RPG narration.

Size adjectives are narrow and mostly inadequate unless you reach for comparisons, and likewise for age. Words to describe non-geometrical shapes are particularly lacking, unless you are a mathematician or, again, reach for comparisons, 'leaf-shaped,' 'saddle-shaped,' and many natural shapes are so particular that the only point of comparison is itself. Color is rarely imprtant, and requires reference to existing objects unless you're sticking to ROYGBIV. 

Origin is an odd duck here, as its worth depends entirely on contextual knowledge. If I'm running a group that knows FR lore, then I can talk about Ostorian or Netherese ruins, and that will communicate a great deal. For games set in our own world, I can likewise appeal to history if my group is sufficiently cultured to know the implications of an Achamaenid saber. But if we're running in a brand new homebrew world, or a setting that most don't know too well, the origins of an object are a very weak descriptor. Material is in a similar predicament, especially if you're trying to appeal to the obscure or strange. 

What does effective description look like then? Again, don't try to paint a picture with words, you haven't the time. Describe relevant attributes and focus on a smaller number of effective descriptors. An NPC's eye color doesn't matter unless it matters. If an assassin had blue eyes and there's only a small group fo blue-eyed people, that's relevant, but not otherwise.

Sentence Level Examples: Oni Mother Okawa

'Alright, Mr Big Shot,' asks the hypothetical reader in my head, 'this is all well and good, but how do I actually do it?' To wit, some more examples are in order.

I'll take from my own previous post, linked up top, and show how I condensed the opening readaloud of Oni Mother Okawa, in even more detail than before. 

‘Trudging through the snow, the trip to Okawa’s Bathhouse is by no means easy. Whether it be for experienced travellers (sic), weary adventurers or just determined traders, this trail is by no means easy. Even less so due to the noises that accompany it. Out of fear that a demon might hide at every step, every rush of wind is cause for concern. One can never be too careful around these parts. But that is now all in the past. Not long ago, you found yourself at the entrance to a beautiful wooden building, with shining lights all around. And there you are now, inside the warm interior of the bathhouse, taking off your large winter coats and scarves and finally revealing your faces once more.’

Let's color code this

‘Trudging through the snow, the trip to Okawa’s Bathhouse is by no means easy. Whether it be for experienced travellers (sic), weary adventurers or just determined traders, this trail is by no means easy. Even less so due to the noises that accompany it. Out of fear that a demon might hide at every step, every rush of wind is cause for concern. One can never be too careful around these parts. But that is now all in the past. Not long ago, you found yourself at the entrance to a beautiful wooden building, with shining lights all around. And there you are now, inside the warm interior of the bathhouse, taking off your large winter coats and scarves and finally revealing your faces once more.’

Red is outright repetition, blue is unnecessary prose, orange is redundant/overwrought, and green is the stuff we actually want, the bits describing the actual scene or setting the tone. They're not good here, but they are what we want to focus on and polish.

So we cut out everything else.

‘Trudging through the snow the trip to Okawa’s Bathhouse is by no means easy experienced travellers (sic), weary adventurers or just determined traders fear that a demon might hide at every step every rush of wind is cause for concern beautiful wooden building, with shining lights all around inside the warm interior of the bathhouse, taking off your large winter coats and scarves and finally revealing your faces once more.’

Now that your read-aloud looks like it's been de-fnorded, we can get to work. We've identified the parts of description doing actual work, and need to put them together.

'Trudging through the snow'

'the trip to Okawa’s Bathhouse is by no means easy'

A contrast between 'experienced travelers, weary adventurers and determined traders'

The fear of demons

The paranoia created by the wind in conjunction with the above

Arrival at a beautiful, well lit wooden building

Warmth, comfort, relief

[Reader exercise: Before reading further, try to take the above and rewrite it yourself. The exact way you do it will depend on your own style and ability.]

[Done? Read ahead.]

In the end, I wound up reversing and joining points 2 and 3, condensed 4 and 5, 

'Trudging through the snow, neither experienced travelers, weary adventurers nor determined traders find the trail to Okawa's Bathhouse easy. Even worse is the rushing wind that might cover a demon's approach at every step. But now you find yourself in a beautiful wooden building hung with shining lights, where you cast off heavy winter coats and scarves and reveal your faces once more.'

If you want to cut it down further, remove 'trudging through the snow,' which confuses the scene a bit, and let the 'heavy winter coats' communicate the season and weather. That, and consider exchanging or removing 'weary adventurers' which doesn't quite fit in the set.

This will look different for you, and the goal should not be to imitate any one style. Still, I get a lot of mileage out of rearranging clauses and joining them together. 

Fully General Speech Advice

I joined a new RPG server at the start of lockdown, which has profited me two solid campaigns which are just now coming to a close, as well as several one-shots. Like a good online citizen, I keep my personal information locked up tight, and the image my fellow players and GMs form of me are created entirely by my speech. 

On several occasions, that image has been 'college professor,' which I find hilarious. The reason for this is the way I speak. I will now give my #1 piece of advice for public speaking

Eliminate filler words from your vocabulary. I'm speaking primarily about hesitation markers, exclamations like 'um', 'ah,' 'like,' 'I mean.' This same advice applies, to a lesser extent, to hedge words, such as 'just' or 'really.' Hedge words can serve a purpose, though they must be purposeful instead of reflexive, but the hesitation markers must go. Start practicing today. When you notice yourself using them, take a moment to collect your thoughts and say your piece fluently.

"But what if I can't figure out everything I want to say and need a little time?"

What do you mean, 'what if?' It's not a matter of if. You will have moments where your sentence gets away from you, where you need to clarify, or just need a spare moment to consider your next words. In those cases, which happen to everyone, don't try to replace those filler words with anything. Use silence.

Silence is very effective when used as part of a speech, or even a conversation, so long as you can maintain the floor during that silence. This is much easier in person where you can use body language to indicate you're still speaking. 

"But won't it be awkward?" 

Only if you make it awkward. I've gotten immense mileage out of randomly stopping in the middle of sentences, looking pensive for a span of no more than three seconds, and then continuing as if there had been no pause. 

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Towards Seasonal Campaigns

[Epistemic Status: Speculative. I haven't tried out anything I'm writing below, though I intend to test it out soon.]

With the conclusion of my long-running Castle Xyntillan campaign, I allow myself to breathe a sigh of relief and take a break for a short while. I'm still running my Icewind Dale game, but that's compatible with a break.

Still, I know it won't be long before I'm back to running another campaign. I've got too many ideas on the brain. I'll make a post listing those soon enough, but before I commit to a new campaign, I need to think of my future schedule.

I started the CX campaign in April of 2020, a couple months after the breakout of the pandemic and my return home. I was starved for play, the summer stretched out before me and the end of lockdown was nowhere in sight. I didn't know how long the campaign would go, and didn't much mind.

Now, my schedule is a good deal more concrete. With multiple vaccines out, I hope to return to my old schedule later this year, and if I'm still playing TTRPGs at all then, I will be prioritizing in-person games. So whatever I start in the next month, I want it to conclude, not just fizzle, but properly conclude, before September. And even if it's good, I don't necessarily want to stick to the same campaign all that time. I might want some variety.

What sort of campaign could give me flexibility, the opportunity to conclude solidly, and do so in a set window of time? The seasonal campaign.

The Seasonal Campaign

This is a concept I picked up a little while ago, though I completely forget from where. It's not original to me! 

The seasonal campaign is modeled on the structure of serial television. You're only guaranteed the first season (so long as the pilot gets picked up). You could get cancelled for any number of reasons after that. So you've got to deliver a satisfying story in a set number of episodes, while leaving threads for a subsequent season to build on if you're fortunate enough to get renewed. 

The application to TTRPGs is clear. Set a duration of play; thirteen sessions, give or take one, seems right, it covers about three months real time, enough to get attached but doesn't overstay its welcome. The duration of a modern-day TV season. 

Make it clear from session 0 that this is the duration of the campaign. If the players and GM enjoy it, it can be renewed for another season. The most obvious way is to continue the same plot and setting with the same characters; but the new season offers other opportunities. Make your game an anthology, moving to another part of the setting, or a new plot, or switch out characters.

The benefits we outlined above; the short and concrete term of the campaign allows for campaigns to conclude more often and avoid fizzling out, set expectations for short-term play, and allow flexibility in switching between groups, setting, characters and even systems. 

What are the downsides? If you're running seasonal campaigns, switching periodically, you can't have the experience of building a single setting or campaign over the long term. I'm talking really long-term, like Rick Stump's campaigns with his kids which have been going for decades. If you take the seasonal path, then that sort of play is forever closed to you.

You'll probably have a hard time adapting campaign books to your purpose. Short modules are fine, but whole campaign books spill over multiple tiers and (due to Wizards) don't split their chapters in complementary ways.

Systems and Leveling

This, incidentally, touches on a point I forgot to include in my CX Post-Mortem. The expected speed of advancement between groups and systems. In modern 5e games, the expectations seems to be levelling once every few sessions (five or six on the upper bound, at least that's how I interpret the milestone leveling advice from the campaign books). In CX, the pace was dramatically less predictable. They leveled, on average, once every six or seven sessions, but at one point jumped one or two levels from a single discovery, and went for a while without leveling after that. It ended at level 6.

That unpredictability is key. Old-school games, especially those where gold-for-XP reins supreme, are bound to have uneven progression, if only on the micro-level. Plus, many old-school systems have characters level at different rates anyway!

In contrast, 5e usually focuses on XP-for-combat (which appears to me much less unpredictable) or milestone XP (you level when I tell you!). This lends itself very well to campaigns with predetermined plots (Icewind Dale uses it) but also to seasonal campaigns. 

But first, a caveat.

I'm not into the full 1-20 level progression, the upper tiers of play just seem ridiculous. But it strikes me that even if you go for all of it, the typical pace of leveling will lead to campaigns that can't possibly last more than a couple years, even if you stretch out the levels. Much less if leveling is faster, and less than that if the campaign doesn't go to level 20. I mean, my Icewind Dale campaign is supposed to go from 1-12 or 13, and I expect it will last roughly as long as my CX campaign, if not less. 

This is all assuming low mortality and a coherent group of characters from start to finish. Old-school games aren't limited to that, but 5e is very strongly influenced by that assumption.

My conclusion is that this sort of seasonal play is probably quite good for 5e and similar systems. Old-school systems and campaigns benefit from longer term play and less discrete divisions. 

This also dovetails nicely with the concept of tiers of play built into 5e's level system. No, I'm not talking about the tiers described in the DMG, which don't make very much sense in light of level progression. I'm talking about the AngryGM's tiered encounter design system. The tiers go as follows: Apprentice (1st and 2nd level), Journeyman (3rd to 5th level), Adventurer (6th to 8th level), Veteran (9th to 11th level), Champion (12th to 14th level), Heroic (15th to 17th level), and Legendary (18th level +).

Behold! The table upon which all my hopes rest!

The synergy between seasonal play and tiered play is the entire reason I got interested in the concept to begin with. Angry's Division of Tiers is structured such that the end of each tier coincides with a major jump in character power, as opposed to the WOTC Division, which starts each tier after the first with a power jump. 

Angry uses the tier system to build his encounters, targeting the center of the appropriate tier. So long as you're in the 3-5 tier, you'll be facing encounters tuned for level 4. At the start of the tier, you'll be struggling. Then, you'll start turning the tables. Finally, when characters get a massive power boost, they start tearing encounters apart, and feel like badasses. 

So you tie each tier of play to a season. At the start, the party is dealing with tough new threats. They're on the run, reacting instead of acting. Then they get their feet back under them, figure out what's going on, and finally get powerful enough to trounce the encounters which gave them a hard time a few sessions ago. They get the opportunity to test their new and improved abilities against threats they already have a frame of reference for, and get to feel dominant. 

The season ends, and if the game is renewed, the next season begins at the start of the next tier. On paper, they're even more powerful than where they ended, but they're now facing even greater threats than before, and the cycle begins anew.

I'm really, really tempted to test this theory out, not in the least because Angry's encounter-building table in the linked page is very easy to use, and without it I wouldn't be doing any 5e homebrew at all. It'll also be a palate cleanser, a short-term plot driven 5e campaign. Everything the miniature Alexis Smolensk on my shoulder despises. I'll probably do Age of Sail pirates. Do Apprentice Tier in the first few sessions, then Journeyman Tier with the rest. 

Avast me hearties!

Castle Xyntillan: Epilogue and Post-Mortem

So it ends! My first real campaign, stretching nearly a year and comprising 36 near-weekly sessions. 36, incidentally, is half of 72, the kabbalistic number of completion and wholeness. So... we got halway there. If the campaign had lasted a little longer, I would also have accepted 40 sessions, the common biblical shorthand for 'a long time.'

I didn't include any Takeaways at the end of the last post, because I wanted to concentrate everything here.

Ask and ye shall receive!

Epilogue

These last two sessions, the last expedition, were shorter than usual. In the first, they finally acquired the Holy Grayl, having already destroyed the defenses protecting it, requiring only an artifact which they finally figured out where to find. I could have ended the campaign there. The party was immensely powerful, now had the greatest treasure in the castle, and had expressed no desire to defeat the Beast and Aristide, the only remaining enemies who posed a real threat. I decided that would be  bit anticlimactic, and I had already prepared for this eventuality by introducing Serpentina's control of the castle and the demons she brought with her.

I had also given Corby, the fallen cleric, an unholy artifact, effectively as a blank cheque to make use of later. So I maneuvered to ensure that Corby did an evil ritual, with the result that the party would be dropped temporarily into Hell, for a climactic escape to cap off the campaign. 

Their mastery of the castle made the escape much quicker and less deadly than I had anticipated. That might be the biggest compliment I can offer the adventure. Only in a dungeon this large, with such a long term of play and a gradual understanding of the structure, would it be possible for the GM to be surprised in this way. Hats off to Melan!

I feel that the campaign was at its best when it was absurd. If I tried to get into melodrama it usually bounced off the party, with the exception of Giacomo and Adelaide's relationship. And though they joked around a lot, the party took some things very seriously: namely, Aristide and the Beast, since I built them up as unassailable badasses from the start.

In the end, the campaign's death toll amounted to the following:

Fideaux (dog), slain by the Gristle Knight

Aymeric, slain by the Gristle Knight

Willemot, slain by the Gristle Knight

Regis, slain by the Gristle Knight

Bruno, treacherously slain by Rel/Ysabeau

Herman, slain by the arrow of Hubert the Huntsman

Clovis, pecked to death by a giant stuffed owl, accidentally reanimated by Corby, then eaten by a cyclops

Raymond (talking mule), heroically sacrificed itself to save the party from the marilith

Longo, 6th level halfling thief, struck by lightning after the campaign ended

I still can't believe Idred escaped Charon in such a manner. I expect that if I remember one story from the whole campaign, it will be that one. All for a boat.

Changes to the Adventure

The single largest change I made to the dungeon was in accommodating the wedding plot, which culminated in session 12. It all developed in a gradual and unexpected way. First, the party encountered Adelaide Malevol in their first session. Then she had a sudden mood change, and I quickly improvised a task for her to blackmail the party into doing, and settled on creating Giacomo and ordering the party to return him to her. This wound up resonating with their allegiance to the Cherry Crow. When they finally met Giacomo in Tours-en-Savoy, I had thought it over more, and decided that Giacomo would have his own (possibly ill-conceived) plot to screw over the Malevols with a wedding. 

I then had to figure out how to run such a session, and how to make Xyntillan work with that. I made it a sort of special event, where the typical dungeoneering rules were deemphasized, and the party instead got a chance to do some intrigue, got tricked by Maltricia and Serpentina's machinations, and won anyway. It was satisfying. Some parts of it may have been awkward and clumsy, but on the whole I'm happy with how it turned out.

At the end of the campaign I made some cosmetic changes to the dungeon to emphasize Serpentina's rule, and put some threatening demons in there where the party would see them. The short term of that expedition meant that the interactions with these changes were fewer, but that's fine.

What else? There was the Gristle Knight, which I'll mention in the following section. A couple enemies didn't have names, like Angela the succubus, so I named them and gave them some character. I made the mummy in the tower into Aurora Malevol, a sleeping beauty, sister to Adelaide and possible threat to the stability of the castle if released. If I run the castle again, I'll keep that element.

The invasion and occupation of Tours-en-Savoy was all me, and the dungeon underneath the prefecture was a small Dyson map. There's no information in the book about the town of Wolkmarstal which the party sheltered in, so I just made stuff up, little detail was actually needed in the end. 

Oh, and there was Raymond the Talking Mule. There's not too much to tell about that. When the party bought a mule, I decided it would be funny to roll quirks for it as if it was a regular hireling. Turns out, it was pursuing a vendetta against a resident of the castle. I never determined which one, nor did I have any idea how to implement this. When the campaign was at its end, I decided to crown a very serious session with a moment of absurdity, and so had the talking mule reveal itself immediately before sacrificing itself to save the party. Not quite a deus ex machina. 

GM Secrets and Screwups

The time has arrived! Let the hidden arcana be shown to all!

So, there's a few places where I just didn't keep up with bookkeeping and rolling as well as I should have. For one, locked doors. One in six doors in the main castle should have been locked, and twice as many in the dungeon! Yet, for the most part, this wasn't the case. I forgot the rule in the first few sessions, and felt weird about reintroducing it. I also wasn't sure how to implement it. Roll right when the party tries to open a door? Try to assign which doors are locked ahead of time? 

I eventually applied locked doors, but not all that consistently. In the later stages of the campaign, the party were no longer moving room by room, but traveling from one section of the castle to another, and I just wasn't willing to make them sketch out an exact path, then roll for every door in their way. 

Also, any commitment I had to letting the dice fall was broken in the first session with the very first random encounter.

The first time I rolled for a random encounter, I rolled Countess Maltricia Malevol, vampire. I took one look at that, and rerolled it. I wasn't going to throw a vampire at the party right at the start, not in the least because they were outdoors in the sun at the time. So they encountered Adelaide Malevol instead, which kicked off the whole wedding 'arc' which is probably my favorite part of the whole campaign.

That fight with the Gristle Knight in the armory, the one that left most of the party's hirelings dead or missing and nearly killed a couple players?

So, ummmm, that was kinda-sorta a screwup on my part. The animated armor was listed as HD 4+4, which at the time I thought applied to to-hot rolls as well. Sooooo it attacked as an 8HD creature. If not for that error, it likely would have been destroyed in that combat, though it likely would have taken at least a couple hirelings with it. I conferred with Melan after this happened, and realized my error, but he advised me to use that error and turn it into something cool. So I retconned that animated armor as a unique monster, and the next time the party encountered it, it was wearing the bones and ligaments of their fallen hirelings. Also, it had infrared vision. The party swiftly destroyed it, but it was cool nonetheless.

Maybe my biggest recurring screwup was with hirelings. For one, late in the campaign we ran into a snafu in that we couldn't figure out which hirelings were which. One that I thought had died was still in the party. This was my mistake in not doing good public bookkeeping. 

More generally, I wasn't sure when and how to impose morale checks. In instances like the death of Herman, I wasn't willing to roll morale in the midst of combat and after the fact didn't know how to play the hirelings. I generally described them as shaken, but didn't have them take actions to subvert the party or desert. The only time that happened was in the fight with the Gristle Knight, the closest the party ever got to a TPK.

In general, the hirelings faded into the background, especially as the campaign matured. I didn't have distinct characters for any of them. 

In future campaigns, I will make a point of creating a standard format for hirelings in the campaign document, so I can easily see who is whose, their morale score, and so each player can quickly roll morale for each. 

While it's not an explicit screwup per se, I get the definite feeling that the campaign lost flavor towards the end. Maybe it was my burnout, or the players acquiring lots of power, or maybe it had been going so long that I had forgotten the way I initially visualized everything.

Perhaps that's related to my taking fewer notes. In the early session reports, I reproduce detailed exchanges between players, mostly for comedic purposes. As the campaign wound on, I did much less of that, and found it harder to take detailed notes. Maybe I didn't need them? Certainly I couldn't remember funny quotes without writing them down, but I could more easily recall the general events of a session.

I still can't get over the fact that the party never even saw Aristide. There's a lot of characters the party never met, but the lich cast such a shadow over the campaign that never meeting him is a bit of a shame. Or maybe it's for the best, as he will be remembered as the shadowy threat the players were always too scared to face. Even now, diregrizzlybear has gotten the book and has shown the other players the maps and statblocks. The Beast's is a doozy.

Shrines and Saints

I started the campaign with a new development on the Shrines and Saints system, and three saints made specifically for the campaign. The party selected the Cherry Crow, which quite unpredictably was a major reason for the development of the wedding subplot.

However, I never used the other two saints, nor did I work the Cherry Crow into the world at all. I could have added some more flavor to the towns with the saints and their respective worshippers, but the party spent very little time in towns. 

It was modestly successful. The party really took to being worshippers of a saint like this, and the spell it granted them was useful, though they never sacrificed to get extra uses. Still, as the campaign matured the Cherry Crow became less and less of a consideration, until it appeared only once every few sessions as an offhanded remark.

I expect to be reworking the Saints and Shrines system sometime soon (say such six times swiftly) with lessons gained from using this in actual play. Also, I recall seeing someone else doing some really good work on that subject, and I believe I commented on that post, but can't remember! If you recall what that was, please comment below. I believe it related to regional deities and the conflicts between them.

Leftovers

Stuff from the last couple sessions that didn't see play, plus other plots that never came up:

The two statues outside the south entrance were replaced by statues of Maltricia and Giscard Malevol, the vampires (I intended for them to come alive and attack the party)

The cloaker, man-eating hat, and other accoutrements in the southern vestibule were going to form up into a single humanoid creature, which would come apart and be revealed as a collection of animated objects. Imma recycle that one for another campaign.

Rel/Ysabeau entered a pact with Angela the succubus, and if the party found and confronted them, he would have been dragged into Hell. In my headcanon, I assume as much happened in order to escape Claude's army. 

Adelaide and Giacomo... yeah I wasn't sure what to do about those. I toyed with making Giacomo an antagonist later on, maybe a rival for a certain treasure, but never went through with it. Later, after the party rescued Giacomo from imprisonment, he effectively dropped out of the campaign. 

Going Forward

When next I return to old-school play, maybe with S&W, maybe OSE, which I hear many good things about, I expect to run a campaign with a 'stable' of characters, so I'm less tempted to cut down on PC mortality. Get fully into the old-school mindset. I've been considering a Black Company-inspired campaign along those lines, though I should actually finish the book first. Stay tuned. 

I expect to return to Xyntillan with other parties in the future. Actually, I already have: I ran a session of 5e Hardcore Mode in the castle for a 5e party (most of the same people as the Icewind Dale campaign, which is ongoing, I just haven't been taking extensive notes). They slew some skeletons, met a friendly ghost, found the Gristle Knight in the armory and barely escaped with one downed party member, which they abandoned to be eaten by crows. Good times.

I do expect to make session reports of future campaigns, but I doubt they will be as detailed as these. These session reports take a good deal of time, even once I got a good system in place for them. 

What remains now? A Megapost. I will be going back through all the Castle Xyntillan posts, linking them up properly and placing them all into a single Megapost for ease of reference. Thus I will pay homage to my first great campaign, which I will look back on years from now, and be able to see exactly what happened. 

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So it ends! Whether you've been following this series since the beginning or just joined us now, thank you! Be sure to comment below and subscribe to the blog to see where we go from here. Until the next post, have an excellent week!