So You Want to Be a Game Master has been released in a hardcover Polish edition from Black Monk Games!
I was in Poland last week to celebrate the release of the book at Pyrkon, and you can now order it from Black Monk Games directly or find it at your favorite local gaming store in Poland!
It’s an absolutely beautiful edition of the book. It was truly thrilling to be able to hold a copy in my hands for the first time!
DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 46A: Among Madmen
At the last possible moment, Zairic twisted aside so that the arrow lodged in his shoulder instead of his heart. Letting his book drop to the floor, Zairic vaulted over the high arm of his chair and jumped for cover. In mid-leap, he released a fireball through the window. Tee ducked down as the fiery inciting pellet passed over her head and avoided the brunt of it almost completely, but Elestra (standing in the open further down the alley) was caught by the edge of it.
Most of the others – clumped together across the street and still debating how they could (or would or should) use Elestra’s homunculi – missed the flash of the fireball. Fortunately, Ranthir – who was providing the daisy-chained camouflage near the mouth of the alley – recognized it for what it was. “Fireball!” he shouted, hurrying into the alley.
The fiction-mechanics cycle is arguably the heart of the roleplaying game experience: The ways in which we use mechanics to create fictional outcomes; declare fictional actions that are resolved mechanically; and use the outcome of either to feed back into the other form an intricate and interwoven dance at the gaming table.
A key component of this dance is how mechanical outcomes are explained in the fiction. For simple, straightforward intentions with unambiguous results, this is often so obvious that one can easily miss that something is actually happening: The player said they wanted to jump over the chasm; the dice said they succeeded; therefore, they land on the other side of the chasm.
Intriguingly, therefore, it is often true the failure requires more of an explanation than success: Success, after all, merely assumes that the stated intention which triggered the mechanical resolution was achieved. Failure, on the other hand, almost seems to demand an explanation for why the character wasn’t able to achieve their desired outcome.
(And this is before we even start considering advanced techniques like failing forward.)
There are a number of techniques you can use in creating these explanations, and different RPG rulesets will often help you in different ways. A universal technique I find useful is explicitly thinking about different factors in the game world that could affect outcome. It’s really useful for keeping things fresh and varied.
(One key insight from this is that you can often make the description of success more interesting by lightly spicing it with the same details and factors that we use to explain failure.)
Something else to consider is the often unexamined assumption of who at the table is responsible for providing these explanations. In my experience, this almost always falls on the GM in their role as adjudicator and world-describer. Every so often, though, the infectious spirit of communal improv will unleash itself and people all around the table will start collaborating on the answer. And another key insight is that, as the GM, you can prompt the players to get involved in explaining outcomes.
(Matthew Mercer, for example, has made, “How do you want to do this?” particularly famous.)
In fact, you can go further than that and create specific expectations for action resolution in which describing the fictional implications of mechanical results defaults to the players. (Storytelling games often do this because their mechanics revolve around determining which player is in control of a narrative outcome.)
But I digress.
What I’m particularly interested in talking about right now is a very specific slice of these table interactions: The moment where a mechanical outcome prompts a conversation between characters, which I’m going to refer to as ex post facto roleplaying. Here the character dialogue is being triggered by or being described as the key factor in an action’s resolution.
In this session, for example, most of the PCs failed a Spot check to notice the flash from a fireball spell going off around a corner.
Why call for this check at all? I mean, it’s a fireball spell, right? Shouldn’t it be really obvious? Well, to some extent this depends on how much noise you think a fireball creates — is it a huge detonation or a more ephemeral flash of flame? More importantly, what I was primarily concerned about here was how quickly they would react to the fireball: Would they be able to leap into action and immediately join the fight? Or get caught flat-footed and have to wait a round before being able to rush to Tee’s aid?
In this case, the players asked the same question in a breakdown that looked something like this:
And then they briefly acted out a few lines of that dialogue, giving Ranthir’s player (who had succeeded on his Spot check) an opportunity to interrupt by them by shouting, “Fireball!”
This is a good example of these ex post facto roleplaying moments, which are often played as kind of funny throw-away moments. But they can, of course, also be more protracted and/or take on a more serious tone, particularly if you make a more conscious effort to notice, prompt, and/or define these moments.
In fact, rather than just reacting to skill checks with dialogue, you can also deliberately frame skill checks to set up roleplaying interactions. Using mechanics as a roleplaying prompt like this is described in more detail in Rulings in Practice: Social Skills.
Campaign Journal: Session 46B – Running the Campaign: Speak with Dead SFX
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index
SESSION 46A: AMONG MADMEN
December 22nd, 2009
The 25th Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty
It was mid-afternoon when they left the Necropolis.
“Should we head back to the Ghostly Minstrel or go straight to Mahdoth’s?” Elestra asked.
“Ghostly Minstrel,” Ranthir said. “We need to clean up. Besides, we still have several hours. And the Minstrel is on the way in any case.”
Agnarr grunted. “You need to clean up?”
Ranthir rolled his eyes. “Yes. I seem to be covered in some sort of black ooze. I wonder where it came from? Oh, right! My eyes and my mouth!”
THE BIG PLAN
Once they reached the Ghostly Minstrel they spent a few minutes cleaning up and then gathered back up for a planning session.
Their biggest concern was Mahdoth himself. They knew he was connected with both Wuntad and the Pactlords, which made him an obvious threat. And Ranthir knew enough about beholders from his studies in Isiltur to make them all worried: Eyestalks causing paralysis, searing pain, and even death, combined with a massive antimagic field emanating from its central eye that could unknit their strongest offensive weapons.
They laid out extensive contingency plans for dealing with the various eyestalks – restorative magicks, scrolls to re-enervate their flesh, various potions and enchantments to boost their natural resistances against its powers, and much more of the like. It would be expensive, but it was obviously a necessary expense.
“The ultimate problem, though,” Tor said, “Is that all of these precautions are magical. As soon as he puts the big eye on us, it all becomes useless.”
“We do have some non-magical solutions,” Ranthir said, pulling out the alchemical potions of questionable provenance they’d recovered from Ghul’s Labyrinth. “Who wants to go blind?”
“Do we know if his eyestalks will work in his own antimagic field?” Nasira asked.
“I don’t know,” Ranthir confessed.
“Then we should assume they do.” Tee grimaced.
“It doesn’t seem fair,” Elestra said.
From memory they sketched out a small map of the areas they had seen last time they had been at Mahdoth’s. But the truth was they had no idea how extensive the asylum complex was or how deep it might go beneath the streets of Ptolus.
To supplement their limited knowledge they considered using clairvoyance spells again, but they were concerned that defensive measures at the asylum might be triggered by their use.
Elestra tried to figure out how they could use her homunculi’s ability to pass seamlessly through earth and stone to scout out the complex, but since it was incapable of communicating anything of detail back to her that seemed for naught. Nasira, on the other hand, mentioned the possibility of scrying, but the limitations of the techniques available to her made it seem of little use, as well, until Ranthir combined the two plans: By affixing the scrying sensor to Elestra’s homunculi, Nasira would be able to watch the homunculi’s progress.
INFILTRATION BY FIRE
Eventually, feeling as prepared as they could perhaps hope for, they headed for Mahdoth’s around 9 pm.
On the way, however, they had time for further debate: Did they want to wait for the shipment to arrive and then ambush it? Or should they assault the compound immediately so that they wouldn’t have to fight both the asylum personnel and whoever came for the shipment at the same time?
“I think it’s six of one or half a dozen of the other,” Elestra said.
“I’ll take the six to one,” Agnarr said. “I like those odds.”
They all stared at him for a long moment.
“What?”
They settled on the immediate attack, which naturally opened the question of what their specific approach should be. They considered drilling down from street level into the staircase they knew led to the lower level (and which passed beneath the street). They also reopened the practicality of sending Elestra’s homunculi to scout (and, if so, where and when and how he should carry out the scouting).
Keeping the homunculi as an option, Elestra wrapped them in the camouflage of the city’s spirit. Keeping this camouflage-connection through physical proximity, they strung themselves out in a daisy-chain to allow Tee to get close enough to the building to scout the perimeter.
Through the simple expedient of looking through the windows, Tee confirmed that the street-level portion of the asylum (like the tip of the iceberg above its lower levels) was largely abandoned: Only Zairic – the halfling who had ratted them out to Mahdoth when they had come here at Danneth’s invitation – was to be found there, reading a book in a salon-like area towards the rear of the building.
Zairic looked like an easy target. Tee eased open a window at the opposite end of the room, carefully lowered her longbow into place, and… FIRED!
At the last possible moment, Zairic twisted aside so that the arrow lodged in his shoulder instead of his heart. Letting his book drop to the floor, Zairic vaulted over the high arm of his chair and jumped for cover. In mid-leap, he released a fireball through the window. Tee ducked down as the fiery inciting pellet passed over her head and avoided the brunt of it almost completely, but Elestra (standing in the open further down the alley) was caught by the edge of it.
Most of the others – clumped together across the street and still debating how they could (or would or should) use Elestra’s homunculi – missed the flash of the fireball. Fortunately, Ranthir – who was providing the daisy-chained camouflage near the mouth of the alley – recognized it for what it was. “Fireball!” he shouted, hurrying into the alley.
Zairic called out from behind the chair. “Who are you? Do you know who you anger tonight?!”
Tee didn’t bother to answer him. She vaulted herself through the window and skipped across the room, loosing another arrow that thumped into the high back of the chair.
Zairic wrenched her first arrow out of his shoulder, gulped down a healing potion, and made a break for the door. Elestra, cursing the burns from the fireball, threw open another window to the room and fired her dragon rifle at him. The blast missed narrowly, scorching the wall.
Zairic, in mid-stride, ripped a scroll from an inside pocket of his cloak and gestured through the window towards Elestra. The others were just arriving at her side, and they were all caught in a pounding, painful hail of dagger-like ice that plunged down from the sky.
Tee, deciding to fight ice with fire, dipped her hand into her bag of flames and hurled a fire elemental at the Halfling. Distracted by the fiery sprite, Zairic made an easy target for her as she plunged her dagger into his shoulder and re-opened the magically healed wound from her arrow.
Zairic cursed loudly. Wrenching himself free from her blade he cast another spell, sending his body into a rapid, cascading shift between reality and the Ethereal Plane. “You’ll die tonight!”
“You’re the only one dying tonight!” Tee shouted. “We’re happy to speak with the dead!” Her expert eyes were tracking his skittering, shifting, flickering form.
“I’ll speak with your corp—“
The halfling gurgled and collapsed. Tee’s arcing blade had ripped through half his neck. As his body fell forward, his head fell back upon a flap of flesh and landed upright on his back.
“That’s disgusting,” Elestra said, climbing through the window.
Running the Campaign: Ex Post Facto Roleplaying – Campaign Journal: Session 46B
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index
The Gates of Firestorm Peak is one of those would-be classics which slips through the cracks because no one was paying attention when it was released.
Review Originally Published May 21st, 2001
Like many of the people drawn back to the D&D for the first time in years by the advent of 3rd Edition, I was initially turned off of the game by the exceptionally poor quality of the 2nd Edition products which were being turned out during the early and mid-‘90s. Sure, there were occasional high points (the original Planescape boxed set comes to mind), but these were overwhelmed by a plethora of crap.
When Wizards of the Coast bought out TSR, the steady degradation of the D&D game was almost immediately turned around. Unfortunately, people like me were still overwhelmed with a healthy dose of skepticism when it came to the D&D product line – plus, we were turned off by the rule system (which was not only the anemic rules of the 2nd edition, but meaninglessly complicated beyond the bounds of sanity by the Player’s Options books).
So a module like The Gates of Firestorm Peak easily fell through the cracks. In no small part because TSR was so eager to advertise it as “the first adventure designed especially for use with the new rules presented in the three Player’s Options books” with “full-color poster maps” and “a sheet of 56 counters”. (Can you see the bright red warning lights twirling about with an accompanying siren?) It looked gimmicky, it looked silly, it looked overproduced.
Which, to a certain extent, it is. Overproduced and gimmicky, that is. (Not so much silly.)
So why did I pick it up? Well, I’ve been taking a greater interest in some of these “latter day 2nd edition” books – produced in the interim between WotC’s acquisition of the game and the release of 3rd edition. Furthermore, my local game store had put a 25% off sticker on it. And, finally, it’s written by Bruce Cordell – and I had been extremely impressed by his work on The Sunless Citadel.
And I’m glad I did, because The Gates of Firestorm Peak is one of those would-be classics which slips through the cracks because no one was paying attention when it was released.
PLOT
Warning: This review will contain spoilers for The Gates of Firestorm Peak. Players who may find themselves playing in this adventure should not read beyond this point.
Long ago, before the races walked the earth as they do today, the Elder Elves were possessed of arcane arts far beyond the ken of the spellcasters of the latter days. One of their projects was the Vast Gate: An immense gateway to distant dimensions, mystically powered every 27 years by the arrival of the Dragon’s Tear comet. Unfortunately for the Elder Elves, their hubris was destined to get the better of them: As they pushed the limits of the Vast Gate further and further beyond this world, they eventually opened a gateway into a dimension so utterly alien to our own that the Elder Elves could comprehend it only in terms of insanity. (Those of you with Cthulhu experience, plug it in here.) The creatures who lived there, like the dimension itself, were vastly beyond the comprehension of the mortals of this world – and when one of the most powerful of those creatures became interested in the Vast Gate and crossed over into our world, its merest thought eradicated nearly all of the Elder Elves in the area before it became bored again and departed.
The Elder Elves who remained alive fled, attempting to seal the Vast Gate and the horrors onto which it opened through an inversion of their own gate technology. Unfortunately, they made a horrible mistake: Instead of permanently sealing the Outer Gates which led into their complex, the Elder Elves had linked them to the Vast Gate itself (in an attempt to draw power from it and shut it down forever). Instead, the Outer Gates became dependent upon the Vast Gate – just as the Vast Gate was dependent upon the power of the Dragon’s Tear. Now, every twenty-seven years, when the Dragon’s Tear appears in the sky, both the Outer Gates and the Vast Gate open once more.
Fast forward several millennia to 81 years ago: The mountain has become known as Firestorm Peak, due to the fact that the top of the mountain literally bursts into flame during the month when the Dragon’s Tear appears (a side-effect of the Elder Elves’ ancient technology). A mad mage by the name of Madreus enters the mountain and discovers the secret of the Vast Gate. He has been working ever since on harnessing the power of the Far Realm to which the Vast Gate links.
Fast forward again to 27 years ago (the last time the Gates opened): An adventuring party (including the father of one of the PCs) ventured into Firestorm Peak to shut down the Vast Gate forever. They failed – thwarted by Madreus and either killed or transformed into his thralls.
Finally, fast forward to today: The gates have opened once more, and Firestorm Peak lays open for 28 days before they will close once more. For the past five years, the area around Firestorm Peak has seemingly suffered from a strange curse – a result of Madreus’ experiments, which will most likely reach fruition during this opening of the gate. If they do, then Madreus will be able to keep the gate open permanently – unleashing the horrors of the Far Realm upon our own dimension, and destroying the world as we know it.
Toss in a tribe of duergar who wandered into the area several decades ago as they followed a vein of nephelium (a rare ore), demonic entities from beyond the gate, goblin slaves, mutated trolls, and a mammoth dungeon complex and you’ve got The Gates of Firestorm Peak.
WEAKNESSES
My biggest disappoint with The Gates of Firestorm Peak is that I can’t find anyway to include it in my current campaign. I’ve got a big round hole I’d love to drop it into, but – unfortunately – there’s just a few too many corners here for me to make it fit. That being said, I’m still going to be able to use it as a massive (and invaluable) idea mine for filling that hole.
But that is, in no way, the fault of the module itself (which is actually extremely easy to include in any generic fantasy campaign with a mountain range). So, let’s move onto some actual weaknesses.
First off, I’m pretty leery of the fact that Cordell expects one of the PCs to have a father who ventured into Firestorm Peak 27 years ago. It seems a trifle presumptuous, and too intrusive. That being said, if you can make it work (i.e., convince one of your players to go along with it), then it works out really well – adding some nice areas of pathos to the adventure.
Moving on: There are a couple of places in the text where Cordell gets a little too casual with his reader. It doesn’t intrude upon the boxed text (which is copious and excellent – you can trust Cordell to produce boxed text which you can read without doubt to your players), but its still distracting.
My biggest problem with The Gates of Firestorm Peak is that a group of 4-6 characters of 5th to 8th level (the group the adventure is advertised for) is simply not going to survive. There is, for example, the encounter where the PCs are expected to take on 28 duergar, 12 steeders, four 3rd-level duergar clerics, a 9th-level duergar cleric, and a 9th-level dwarf fighter. Or there’s the fight with 27 trolls (albeit at half strength). Or the final confrontation with a 10th-level wizard, a 6th-level wizard, five duergar, two gibberlings, two myconids, and three trolls. Admittedly, the PCs are supposed to run away from the encounter with 100 gibberlings.
Fortunately, as problems go, that’s the easiest one to fix: Send the PCs through this one at a higher level than advertised and they shouldn’t have any problems.
STRENGTHS
All other things being equal, bigger is better. And The Gates of Firestorm Peak is big. Very big. The dungeon fills an entire poster map and 123 individually keyed encounter areas.
I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve had problems with similarly mammoth dungeons in the past. There is a common flaw to such things: At some point the desire to achieve the size outweighs the need to justify such a size. Fortunately, with The Gates of Firestorm Peak we are in the hands of Bruce Cordell, who doesn’t seem able to design a dungeon which doesn’t make sense.
Admittedly, he has to strain my credulity somewhat in justifying the semi-linear nature of the dungeon – but I’ll swallow the pill that Madreus wants his inner sanctum to be as difficult to reach as possible, and there’s enough branching going on that I don’t think there’s actually a serious problem here.
In short, The Gates of Firestorm Peak delivers exactly what it’s supposed to: A massive dungeon complex, painstakingly designed and detailed, which will provide hours and hours of entertainment for you and your gaming group.
Style: 4
Substance: 5
Authors: Bruce Cordell
Company: Wizards of the Coast
Line: AD&D
Price: $20.00
ISBN: 0-7869-0435-6
Production Code: 9533
Pages: 96
Back in 2001, I described Gates of Firestorm Peak as a would-be classic that everyone was sleeping on because it was published at a time when D&D was probably at its nadir. (But also, paradoxically, flooding the market with product.) In the years since then, I’m happy to say that it’s achieved the reputation and legacy it deserves, regularly appearing on lists of the Best D&D Adventures of All Time and the like.
Also in the years since writing this review, I have thrice laid the groundwork to plug Gates into a D&D campaign. But in each case the campaign has either ended prematurely or the players have steered it in a different direction. I do hope to have the opportunity to run the adventure in full some day.
For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.
In Shadowdark, the dark dangers of the dungeon are infamously made tangible at the gaming table by linking the duration of light sources to real time: Have you been playing for an hour? Then your torches, lanterns, and light spells burn out and you’ll need to ready new light sources.
This is a mechanic that streamlines bookkeeping, centers expedition-based play, and encourages fast-paced action. (If you sit around dithering, then you’re literally burning the candle at both ends!) It can also be a controversial mechanic due to its lightly dissociated nature, so it’s ultimately up to you whether the visceral immersion of the real-world time pressure is worth the tradeoff.
DARKER DEPTHS
But we can take this concept even further by embracing the ideal of the Mythic Underworld. Within those strange depths, the darkness does not flee the light, but rather turns upon it. Crawling through those tunnels you can feel it pressing in — little eddies of shadow testing the flickering weakness of your torch until finally the stygian murk literally snuffs out any source of light.
And the deeper you dare? The stronger the darkness becomes.
If you’re on the first level of the dungeon, then torches, lanterns, light spells, and other sources of illumination have a duration of 1 hour. But as you descend to lower levels of the dungeon, light source duration decreases as shown on the table below:
| Dungeon Level | Light |
|---|---|
| 1 | 1 hour |
| 2 | 50 minutes |
| 3 | 40 minutes |
| 4 | 30 minutes |
| 5 | 25 minutes |
| 6 | 20 minutes |
| 7 | 15 minutes |
| 8+ | 10 minutes |
If the PCs switch dungeon levels in the middle of a duration, increase or decrease the end time of the light source appropriately. For example, if a torch was going to burn out at 8:50 pm and the PCs descend from Level 1 to Level 2, the torch should now burn out at 8:40 pm. (Going up a level should always relieve pressure; going down should always increase it, and could even cause a torch to immediately go out!)
Sublevels can be treated as a level of equivalent depth (e.g., Level 3A would have the same light duration as Level 3).
DESIGN NOTES
The rules for darker depths are, obviously, designed to increase the stakes and costs of mounting expeditions to lower (and, in classic megadungeon play, more profitable) levels of the dungeon. In more narrative-driven dungeons (e.g., we must follow the dragon into the depths to recover our comrade’s body!) where the logistics of torch management may not be a primary focus, it will nevertheless push a sense of rising dread and danger.
Big, ten-minute chunks are taken out of the time initially so that the players can immediately feel the difference from one dungeon level to the next. Once the timer reaches 30 minutes, this pace is reduced to five minutes per level in order to sustain the effect for larger dungeons.
Similarly, the progression is ultimately capped at 10 minutes per light source because shorter durations (e.g., 5 minutes or 1 minute) simply become too much of a hassle to implement, serving as more of an annoying distraction than a terrifying reality.
You could experiment with the idea that, beyond Level 8, the stygian depths actually prevent any light source from being ignited, but this would obviously represent a fundamental shift in the paradigm of play rather than simply putting pressure on the existing forms of play.
