First, I will speak about what I didn’t do:  closely review the adventure. This is relevant because this encounter was brutal.   I think it was even more savage than first encounter in the Dark Sun Encounters.  Surprise round hilarity and monsters capable of doing solid damage in bursts equals  a ridiculously  strong encounter.  Had I taken a more in-depth look and passed thee encounter through my sanity filter, I could have been more prepared to deal with it, toning the encounter done or leaving other mechanisms in place to make it easier to deal with. I didn’t though, but I was forced to improv a solution in the form of a dwarf.

The “pre-encounter” involved the players meeting a dwarf mage named Rallo.  He spoke with the players when their foes interrupted with an attack, and he was still standing  near the end of the encounter.  Rallo had no powers or abilities statted out, so was really just there to get beat up by monsters.  In round two I realized the players where getting ready to go down so I executive-decisioned that rallo would have powers, specifically, a one-shot auto-heal to help the players out.  This worked really well, as in the fourth round all but one player was face down in the sand. Rallo dramatically called for the players to not give up, and spread arcane healing energies over them.  This one surge was all that the players needed, and the PCs rose from near defeat to victory.   It was a tense situation that everyone enjoyed.  I was able to do it seamlessly so that it felt like something Rallo could do.

Tip: Take Ownership of Fun

This brings me to a point:  via the magic of the internets, I saw that a lot of people were pretty sore at WotC for that encounter.  There weere a lot of TPKs off of this encounter.  To that I say….take ownership.  If you are running a game, you are the CEO of fun at that period of time, not WotC.  I understand that the encounter was a touch unbalanced, but there are ways that you can make that encounter fun for everybody.  You try a solution like mine, or what about selling the TPK?  A dramatic, mournful finish can soften the blow of character death.  I’ve seen pickup games  where the GM killed all the PCs and concluded with “Ok, that’s over. Sorry guys!”  To me that’s just a wasted opportunity.  Even a TPK has a chance to be awesome.  Have the players discuss last thoughts of the characters.  Describe the consequences of the failure; what happened to the world now that the players aren’t there?  Make their passing felt.  Even though the players died that death will still have meaning and still be dramatic and awesome.

Whatever you do, don’t just accept what’s going on around you.  Don’t say “there’s nothing I can do!”  Of course there is!  As GM, you have access to the pulleys and levers.   Pull the right ones to make the game mean something.

As always, I run Encounters at Myriad Game’s Salem Store.

This game started with one returning player (hey Bob!) and three new players.  Two are totally new to 4e and one of them is an enthutiastic newcomer to roleplaying in general. Wooo, new people!  Everyone except the one returning player is pretty new to Dark Sun; I take a second to explain what Athas is like then sketch the basics of 4e to those new to the system.

We start with the Fleeing the Wastes skill challenge. I pose the question:  ”What are you doing to survive?” I then tell them to flip over their sheets.  No looking at your skills! I won’t let anyone look at his character sheets, but talk briefly with each player about what his characters do within the bounds of class or personality.  We get some really good answers, answers that I know we wouldn’t get when players are trying to match their best skill to the challenge.  Skill challenges are boring when you think of them in terms of what skills to use; skill challenges are exciting when you think in terms of what you want to do in the story.

One of  the new players, using Castri the elven ranger, keys right in on the nature-loving aspect of the ranger, tracking birds to lead them to an oasis.  The group only acquired one failure when the Barcan the sorcerer failed to channel the stars for answers.

After surviving the wastes, the adventurers find themselves face to, uh…flame? with a flame spirit.  They of course do the adventurer threat-test. “Does this thing want to kill us?”  After vetting the creature’s

non-desire to kill or eat them, the players speak with it.  With no voice, the spirit must speak by using shooting gouts of flame to fuse sand into letter-shaped pieces of glass.

Which of course brings me to the question I asked each player:  Can your character read? This is of course completely off track and not at all asked for in the adventure, but I think this detail helps players invest in who the characters are. Polling them, they decide that the gladiator and ranger cannot read, but the sorceror and the ardent can, leaving the pair to translate these glass runes.

After learning from the flame spirit of the Green Age (a time where Athas was lush and verdant), the conversation fades off a bit. A bit of banter back and forth gives the players a little history lesson, but I think that the lack of familiarity with the format –was this the one encounter? Where is it? Should we move on? — keeps the group from pressing into anything deep withe the elemental.  They aren’t sure what to make or do with this mini-encounter, so time to move on to the fight! The flame spirit dissappears and the kanks — giant Athasian desert beetles — attack, presumably drawn by the flames.

The combat goes well for the players.  Being new doesn’t prevent the player using Castri the Ranger from rolling incredibly well and dealing some insane damage. The kanks definitely threaten the players, but no one drops.  The two new players have a lot of fun, and I think that we might have some newly converted 4e players!

Tip: Narrate Combat

Something I do that I believe increases fun and makes pickup style games such as Encounters incredibly “sticky” is to invest heavily in combat narration.

What’s more fun?

“You hit for 24 damage.  The kank is bloodied.”

or

“The kank grabs at you with its pincers. You weave under the attack, and catch your weapon in its soft spot,drawing blood.  24 damage and the kank is now bloodied.”

I know which I would rather hear, and I know which players like better. The latter provides texture that players want to see and in my experience enjoy.  If you’re not narrating the combat, you need to start!

Here are some tips from starting.

• Use Your Body You don’t have to improv verbally.  It can be just as exciting, sometimes more exciting, to show  the players how the enemy ducks, lunges, calls forth ancient spirits, and dies as it is to describe it.  Don’t be afraid to just act out what’s happening.
• Ask your Players Don’t be afraid to ask your players what they do, but don’t let their participation decide whether there will be description in combat.  A player may not have anything in mind, even though they delight in what you describe.  Always give players a chance and encourage them to participate in describing combat, but keep the description going no matter what. Sometimes players won’t be used to this, but by the end of the session they’ll get into it.
• Action-Reaction If you’re at a loss to describe what happens, keep in mind the basic narrative element for an action scene.  Action, then Reaction.  What does the player do?  How does the enemy react to that?  If you ask your players what happens, then you’ve already got the first half.
• Keep it Short Don’t narrate for a minute for every miss and hit. Always go for impact over detail. I would say to definitely give the least time to misses, because you can alway turn them later (see below).
• Slow it Down Give turns where something big happens more emphasis in your narration.  When a player criticals or deals a lot of damage, talk it up.  If a monster does the same, give the monster a little descriptive love.
• Turn it Around Remember how I said to downplay misses?  It’s best to downplay misses so you can turn them around when big things happen.  If a monster misses and a player then scores a critical against that monster, you can then turn that miss into an event that leads into that huge critical.  If a character misses with an attack, then spends an Action Point to hit with a daily, the former becomes a setup to latter.

What tips do you have for making exciting running narrative for your combats?

Starting a Game

How to get a game started?  Pretty easy.  There’s already a ton of gamers on wave, so the process is simple.  Find the public wave “An Index of Wave-borne RPGs” and announce your game.  After you do that, invite some people.  Encourage them to invite people. You may consider making your wave public so people can stumble into it.  The warning here is that wave has absolutely no access control.  I personally don’t think of it as a problem at this stage, but when wave goes live, you’ll definitely want to think twice before opening a wave up to the general populace.

In general though, treat a wave like a party.  Once you’ve got the “venue” set up, get people over and have them bring people.  Not everyone can play, but you’ll have a built in audience to your wave who you can involve in other ways.  Having an active audience allows you to call in for replacements of people who have likely followed along with your story and can quickly get up to speed.  It also lets you do som interesting audience participation.  More on that later.

Four Waves to Rule Them All

I talked about setting up a “venue”.  What does that entail?  Well, you want to make a folder for the game, and then you will create four waves and place them in the folder.  Keeping any and all of your games compartmentalized like this will preserve your sanity and make overall work a snap.

The four waves you want to create are:

• an OOC (Out Of Character) wave –”Name of your Game OOC”. Here is where you can handle recruitment, character creation, and table talk for your game
• a reference wave  –”Name of Your Game Reference” Here you can place more background on your world and story, any houserules you use…think of it as a “style guide” for your game.
• The main IC (In-Character) wave –”Name of your Game” This is where the meat of your story is going to live.  All in-game posts go here.
• Combat Wave –”Name of your Game Combats”.  If you are using mapboard images, I’d suggest keeping another wave to hold them all.  Just place the title of the fight and the map you are using in a wavelet for each fight, and refer to that for fights in the main wave.

Dice

Let’s get to the crunch.  Any 4e game needs  dice.  Wave allows you to insert gadgets and bots into your waves, and surprise, some intrepid geeks have already built some bots for you.  Personally, I don’t like how bots work in general on wave.  They’re slow.  I attribute this not to the bot writers themselves but to the platform itself.  Wave is sort of buggy, but that’s what beta/preview implies.

What I’m doing at the moment is using invisible castle and having players insert the link  into their posts.  It’s simple, clean and works well.

If you’re dying for a bot though…may I suggest randomleetwenty@appspot.com ?  He’s a pretty cool little bot.

Combat

This is the elephant in the room, isn’t it?  For 4e in particular, where the game assumes a battlemat of some kind, you need to have something to use.  One of my buddies and players, Dan over at Save vs Geek, is working on an incredible gadget, Fighty.  Fighty will let you use Google Maps technology to make a “live” battlemap right in your wave.  We’ll be testing it out in at least one of the games we’re running, but until it is ready for public consumption, let’s assume the following options:

Gridless, pure narrative. I actually have something written up for this, but I cannot disseminate it to you quite yet.  Yes, I am annoying in that way, but please be patient.  You can certainly do this on your own though.  Just make sure the players are cool with it since you can  change the behavior of the rules dramtically. Certain powers can become very good and others, not so much. To keep confusion to a minimum concerning placement and positioning, use the napkin gadget that comes default with wave to draw quick diagrams. Until Fighty is ready for use, this is what I’ll likely be doing.

Numbered grids in Combat Waves. You could insert this into your main wave, but I suggest that you have a separate wave in which you keep all of your battlemaps. Numbers across, letters running down, and you’ve got something you can use.  If you put the map in your IC wave, you will have to keep scrolling up and down to move the combat along.  That is irritating.  If you have a seperate combat wave, you can have two waves up simultaneously (tip: Ctl-click on a wave to open multiples) and then you can track the positions on one wave while tracking the combat narrative in another wave.  Much easier and much less irritating.

At any rate, assume that after combat you are going to clean up all the mechanical “mess”, leaving only story behind.  Feel free to ask whatever is needed to run the combat because it’s easy to clear it out of the way.  No matter which method you use, you should have a narrative thread full of spells cast and swords clashed.  If you use action tags, it will be even easier.

Action Tags

There’s a lot more to post about how to maintain your game, but first I want to mention action tags.  This is a great way to reference mechanical, rules bit of your games in a way that’s easy to transfer into narrative.  Think of an action tag as  embedded “game talk”. Use an action tag by inserting the mechanic bit in a pair of square brackets like so: [Perception:26].

What does this do for you?  Well, it lets you turn that reference from game speak to narrative.  I used this example previously, but I’ll use again in its full context. In “Revenge of the Waves” we had the following:

Primus leaps astride the nearest giant and shifts back into his humanoid form. The warforged picks through the giant’s clothes with care, looking for any sign of anything strange or out of the ordinary. [Perception 26]

Which became:

Primus leaps astride the nearest giant and shifts back into his humanoid form. The warforged picks through the giant’s clothes with care, looking for any sign of anything strange or out of the ordinary. He sees some unusual markings along the neck of the leader, a strange glyph branded into the flesh. Primus also makes note of the scraps of metal plate adorning his shoulder and intended to be armor of some kind. It is the same brand of metal that the blade is made of.

There’s no need for a seperate post telling the player what they saw — just edit the post in-line!

Returning to combat, action tags are useful as well.

Khalil roars, then releases his frostbreath on the goblins [I'm hitting the goblins in b3, b4, and c4...roll 15,20, and 21 respectively, 10 damage].  He raises his spear and prepares for his next assault.

This becomes:

Khalil roars, then releases his frostbreath on the goblins. Two of the wretches freeze mid-warcry, while the last uses his comrades as shields.  The goblin snarls and brandishes his sword with renewed relish as Khalil raises his spear and prepares for his next assault.

Magical.

Color-coding

Another tip to help you manage the chaos that is wave:  Color code your players text and your own.  Choose a (non-black) color for your DM text, and have each player choose a color for their character.  Whenever you are posting in the in-game wave, each participant uses that color.  Black is the default, non-game color so you can make your action tags black, or people in your audience can quickly comment.  When you go back for maintenance later, you can pretty much eradicate everything in black as soon as you see it.

Pruning

This is the most important thing.  Your game is not going to look great and read well the first time through!  Set aside a time, whether it’s once a scene, once a day, or once a week, and edit out any non-story text.  You can also use this time to clean up grammar or spelling.  Snip snip.

Don’t give any thought to your OOC wave.  That is general gabber and is meant to be noisy.  Focus all your energy on keeping you IC wave nice and free of mechanics cruft.

Schedule

Because a wave is non-linear, setting a posting schedule that works for everyone is much easier.  If someone gets busy and falls behind, you can always leave him in the background in a scene.  He can catch up and insert his posts later.

If you are a late-comer to a scene though, don’t make everything warp around what you’re doing.  It’s your job to fit what you are writing into what is already there.  You need to fit yourself into what everyone else already did, not change what happened entirely.

Since a wave can run like a chatroom as well with it’s live updates, consider scheduling times with the players to chat in realtime to resolve combats or handle dialogues.  That will keep the game moving at a pretty brisk pace.

Audience Participation

Two great things about having extra people that are not playing in your wave are:

• You have possible replacements if a player no longer wants to participate.
• You can illicit comments and votes on story decisions from the audience.

If you want to get crazy, you can let the audience decide an NPC’s reaction to the player’s plea for help, or what’s behind that rock.  The possibilities are endless.

Can I Has Waves?

Those are the tips I have for you now.  I’ll have more for sure.  Tomorrow, I will tell you how you can get a wave invite of your very own. Stay tuned!

Want to speak to me on wave?  quinn (dot) murphy (at) googlewave (dot) com.  I’m mostly harmless.

Special Thanks to the PCs in my “Revenge of the Waves” game, as a game without good players, err…sucks. You’ve kept it fun, and I expect more of the same.

Aaron Broder (Allgeektout)

Asmor (Encounter-a-Day)

Dan Clery (Save vs Geek)

Ethan Duty(At-Will )

Wyatt Salazar (Spirits of Eden)

I’m not here to tell you that it will change everything (it will) or that you should get on immediately (you should).  I’m here to tell you that wave can let you play the most incredible play by post style games you can think of.  Unable to keep a schedule for face to face games, or having difficulties with getting people together in the first place?  Wave is your friend.  Like the thought of a play-by-post or play-by-email 4e game, but can’t reconcile the implementation of such games?  Wave is also your friend in this.  It’s going to change everything (didn’t I say I wasn’t going to say that?)including the way we play.

What’s a Wave?

Let’s start with the most fundamental bit.  What’s a wave?  Is it chat? Is it e-mail?  Is it a wiki?  Is it a forum?

Yes.

Really, if you’re not tuned into the exact nature of what a wave is, do yourself a favor and check this out. I’ll wait.

This is a gaming blog, so let’s fast forward and talk about what a wave can do for your game.  Why is it better than doing a play-by-post game?  What makes it so special?  Why is gamefiend frothing at the mouth?

I’ve no answers for you on the frothing, though last I checked it was some sort of condition.  What makes wave so damn special? That, I can tackle.

I’m running one wave game now (“Revenge of the Waves” if you’re on wave), and looking to start another soon.  Here is what I’ve learned from a few weeks of pretty heavy immersion.

A Wave is Non-Linear, but Sequential

You know how a play-by-post (PbP) runs.  The GM posts something, then players post,  the GM responds, players post.  Even though stories are sequential, a linear medium like a forum or an e-mail or even a chatroom fits like a poorly-tailored jacket on your story’s sequence.  It works, but the shoulders droop, the sleeves are a little too long.  The logistics always involve some basic form of time travel unless you are stalking your thread/game with utmost vigilance. You either have to write in micro clips to let other people hop in, or write large blocks of text to cover every. fricken. contingency.  It makes the process of telling the story a non-fluid affair.  I’m not saying that PbP is bad –I’ve done it and enjoyed it — but it does have its limitations.

Now imagine that when the GM posts, you can post a comment from your character within the scene.  Or when your character talks, the GM can interleave the NPC’s response in shape to your dialog.  The shape of the game is completely different.  You’re no longer looking at call and response.  You have a persistent yet fluid gaming experience.  GMs and PCs can put their responses and actions where it is appropriate instead of where it has to be by the nature of the medium.

It looks something like this:

The blue text is the GM.  The players wrote their posts earlier that day, and I came in and inserting my posts in later.  Imagine that in a play by post.  I would have to do some wrangling of text just to reply, and I could never really get that naturalistic flow that wave allows me so easily to have.

When you tear down the scaffolding and read it later, it reads just like the story you were trying to create.

A Wave is Story Scaffolding

As excited as I get about the non-linear nature of a wave, what really revs me up is this:  A wave is easy to edit. Wonderfully, spectacularly easy.  Double click in a post and select edit, and there you are.  Why is this important?  well, for starters, never forget that the prime goal (past having fun) for a game is to tell a story.  What gets in the way of a story? The rules.  What do we need often to tell a good story?   The rules. A typical PbP is littered with the artifacts of the rules, interspersed between otherwise compelling bits of character dialogue and storytelling.  Wouldn’t it be nice if that could just…disappear?

It can.  I’m going to cover conventions for running your own wave game later, but for now take a look at this:

Primus leaps astride the nearest giant and shifts back into his humanoid form. The warforged picks through the giant’s clothes with care, looking for any sign of anything strange or out of the ordinary. [Perception:26]

Standard example of what you might expect to see, correct? But ten seconds in google wave turns that into:

Primus leaps astride the nearest giant and shifts back into his humanoid form. The warforged picks through the giant’s clothes with care, looking for any sign of anything strange or out of the ordinary. He sees some unusual markings along the neck of the leader, a strange glyph branded into the flesh. Primus also makes note of the scraps of metal plate adorning his shoulder and intended to be armor of some kind. It is the same brand of metal that the blade is made of.

I saw the skill the character was trying to use (Hi Asmor) and transformed that into the results of the roll. As a GM, I can go back and interpolate the results of a skill check and transform it into narrative. With active pruning of your scenes, there is no trace of a game, even though you used a game to get to the story.

You can use this “scaffolding” around the structure of your story and tear it away so all that’s left is for people to witness the beauty of your story.

And it gets better.  “What if I want to see something that gets deleted later?”  Wave has a nifty playback feature that lets you examine the history of a wave from beginning to end.  Every wave is a miniature Wayback Machine.

I hate to mash metaphors together, but if you really want to make a strong use of waves, you also need to understand that a wave is a draft.

A Wave is a Draft

How self-referential is that?  Writing a wave is like the writing process itself?  It’s a touch strange but it’s really true. A wave is never “done”.  While you may go back and add an extra e-mail or post on a forum to clarify or add detail, you can’t change what you put out there.  What’s sent was sent, so you better do all your fact-checking and response totally up front, because you cannot change what you did once you hit “send” or “submit”.  If you’ve got a blip, you can change it at any time.  If you can change it at any time, why not make it the best it can be?  If you don’t make it perfect at first, go back and make it better.  If you have all this game rule jargon cluttering up your nice scene, chop it out.

The way that your wave starts is most certainly not the way your wave has to end.  The final product should be a fine piece of story that you and your players created.  You can expect to go through a revision process and strip what doesn’t need to be there.  My players and I refer to the process as pruning, and is basically a semi-regular maintenance.  Waves can get messy, so you must maintain a basic vigilance in making sure they are what you want.  Revise, revise, revise.

Running a Wave Game

“Blah blah blah, gamefiend.  How do I run a game in wave?”

First you have to be on wave. Once you’ve conquered that, it’s pretty easy…and also something I’m going to cover in Part 2.

If time is not important enough to the quest, or the players of the game can’t grasp the differences, you’ve not only made time irrelevant to your campaign, the players wont ever really know how to discuss the topic. You’ve made that aspect of the game into a new vocabulary that, until the players learn it, actually hurts communication in the game. The same can be said for names of places. Is the town called “Oak Creek” or is it called “Shalimar.” Too many names like the later, and players are likely to lose track of the vocabulary.

For the campaigns I run, I decided to start with a pantheon of twelve gods and to give each month a name based on the diety. I chose six day weeks with each day having some cultural name, mostly based on the creation myths of the world. The result? Unless I have a custom calendar in front of me, even I have trouble using the vocabulary of time in my game – and the players never use it at all.

The best solution, I think, is to take things you think are important enough to learn and build plot and conflict around them. Add some flavor to the world by inserting holidays and showing your players that the world has a life of its own. Or better yet, if you want them to understand and remember some bit of culture in the world you’ve built, tie it into the treasure/rewards you’ve given them. That is the Mace of the Barbarian King, and its powers are strongest during the days/months/holidays/etc tied to the dark god worshiped by the barbarian tribes.

How important is this fluency to you? Do you like having cultural naming of people, places, time, etc? Do you stick to the vocabulary we all already know? Or do you gloss over those details and play a game of high fantasy in a world that is always spring or summer, where it rarely ever rains, and where you only know the names of the closest trading villiage to the dungeon?

The big news from the land of the Wizards this week was an announced change to D&D Insider.  You may recall that just a few weeks ago they announced the official separation of player content and DM content, into Dragon and Dungeon respectively.  This week the big announcement is that starting July 7th, they will be debuting complete, playable sections from the Player’s Handbook 3 each month until the book is released next March.  Oh, and they will be raising the rates for DDI subscriptions to $9.95 a month ($71.40 for a year, 40% off).

In other news two new products released this week, Monster Manual 2 and the new set of D&D Minis, Dangerous Delves. Tomorrow, May 23rd is the second World Wide D&D Game Day celebrating the release of these two products.  I have volunteered to DM for my Friendly Local Game Store, how about you?  To find locations near you hosting Game Day events head over to the Store & Event Locator.

Episode 41 from the Brilliant Gameologists was released earlier this week.  This was the last episode from their second season and discussed the topic of organizing a gaming group.  As always I found some good advice within this episode.

Warning: The Brilliant Gameologists are NOT safe for work.  They can’t even tell you that they are not safe for work without it having offended people at your work.  You have been warned.  And yes, you should go listen to them anyway.

Uncle Bear was recently listed in Wired.com’s 100 Geeks You Should be Following on Twitter.  In response to that list he created his own, the 101 RPG geeks you should follow on Twitter.  Congrats to gamefiend for making the second list.  I am not on the list, but you can find me @Milambus.

NewbieDM is offering an excellent FREE DM Starter Kit to assist new DMs run the Kobold Hall adventure that comes in the back of the Forth Edition’s Dungeon Master’s Guide.  The kit includes battle maps for all 5 encounters, tokens for each of the enemies, tokens to track conditions, and an initiative tracker.

While I’m discussing battle maps and tokens, I want to share with you a series of articles posted over on theIcosahedrophilia blog.  (Listen to their podcasts to find out how to pronounce it.)  This series of articles, titled Nanotechnology, covers a wide range of topics all dealing with D&D Minis.  From storing D&D minis, to distingusing identical minis, to tracking conditions on your minis.  They also have reviews of the Player’s Handbook Heros line of minis and the just released Dangerous Delves minis.  (Yes, that is a lot of links… you can thank me later.)

Finally, to round out our week The Game posted his Lessons from the Heroic Tier over at Critical Hits.  He discusses several of the problems that he and his players have discovered while playing through the Heroic Tier of 4e. In the end he states that despite all the problems, 4e is his favorite version of Dungeons & Dragons.

If you wish to see more of my writing, you can head on over to Milambus.com.  There I write about various game mechanics, house rules that I may implement and whatever else that comes to my mind.

• The Well Intentioned Villain
• The Nihilist Villain
• The Faustian Villain

The Road to Hell…

Humankind must be forced to serve the planet instead of its own appetites. Ra’s -Al Gul, “The Demon’s Quest”

The well-intentioned villains motives are on the surface altruistic. This sort of villain proclaims to fight for high-minded concepts such as truth or justice. The claim to fight for the environment. Somewhere along the way, the implementation of their goals becomes twisted. Proclaiming to fight for one thing in theory, in practice they become powerful forces of destruction and tyranny.

What truly motivates these villains is hubris and megalomania. They become convinced that they are the only ones who can see the world as it truly is and truly needs to be. They believe the world starved of integrity. The well-intentioned villain starts admirably but ends monstrously. Whether he/she gets closer of farther from their goals, the initial motivation fades into their megalomania more and more, until only a monster remains.

In your campaign, the well-intentioned villain can start out as an ally of the players. He and the players share a common goal. It doesn’t take too long however, for the PCs to see where they and the villain diverge. When the final moment of divergence is revealed, the previous bond of shared goals mutates into a bond of loathing. The villain will see that the players do not have the guts to “do what must really be done”, and will seek to destroy them.

Song of Flame : Savis Rayn

The Heart of Chaos

Don’t talk like one of them, you’re not! Even if you’d like to be. To them, you’re just a freak–like me. They need you right now. When they don’t…they’ll cast you out. Like a leper. See, their morals, their code: it’s a bad joke. They’re dropped at the first sign of trouble. They’re only as good as the world allows them to be. You’ll see, when the chips are down these civilized people will eat each other. –The Joker, “The Dark Knight”

The nihilist doesn’t want to rule the world; he wants to destroy it. But even destruction is not enough –this villain wants the veil of civilization ripped away. The nihilist believes that the world is naught but power and savagery. All else is pretense, deluded artifice that stains all life. If this villain weren’t so crazy, he’d almost be well-intentioned. Trying to explore this villain’s inner world is as futile as it is hazardous to one’s health.

The nihilist’s madness is infectious. He has a wide array of minions and henchmen, unified only in their belief in this madman’s ideals. the nihilist works to break the world down from the inside as well as the outside, so his agents can be found in all stratums of civilized society, putting up a facade of normalcy until they they are beckoned by the call of their chaos siren.

In your campaign, the nihilist brings madness and corruption. The nihiilist allows you as a GM to be equally crazy in hatching his plots and schemes –the crazier, the more in line they are with this villain’s goals.

Heart of Chaos: Grebs Follyfoot

A Pact By Any Other Name…

In the end, you are exactly–what you are.

Put on a wig with a million curls,

put the highest heeled boots on your feet,

yet you remain in the end just what you are.

–Mephisptopheles, Faust

The Faustian villain is not a bad person. Well, they didn’t start out bad. But there was something that this person wanted –power, love, fame, talent –that he/she wasn’t likely to get on their own. Despair weighed upon our villain’s soul.

A creature from another world approached him and offered a deal. The faustian villain got at long last what he desired, but to keep it, he must serve the ends of this strange visitor. What does the visitor want? Access. It wants into this realm, full of juicy , weak mortal beings to devour and enslave, cities to raze…is that drool? It gets so excited sometimes.

In service to his patron, the faustian villain must do his biddings, making progress towards these alien ends to keep what he has gained. This character is in many ways to sympathize with, and sometimes he can even be a friend. In many ways the villain is unwilling, andi f he can subvert his patron’s wishes without arousing his anger, he will. But in the end, the faustian villain can no more refuse the visitor’s will than she can refuse the gifts she has been given.

In your campaign, it is important to show the players both sides of this villain. He can chat quite eagerly with them, and engage them as friends and comrades…but in the end he is simply going to have to place them in soul crucible to be eaten by monsters of the Far Realm. Sorry! The faustian villain is one of the easiest villains to build empathy/sympathy for, even as he works towards the destruction of the world.

Looking for more villainy? Check out these great posts from The Core Mechanic and Mad Brew Labs.

The session starts down one Bobrick . It’s the aftermath of the party’s defense of themselves versus a group of angry specters in the Ivory Library. They go through the books to find items of interest and find several.  I had props for each book printed out, but an accident involving my cat and water ruined them quick, and I’m saving printer ink for my maps.

The players learn more about the Grey Guard, the Baron’s forces, and about the Shadowfell version of Greyharbour (named coincidentally, Blackharbour), as well as a bit about the dragonborn city Iovanthar.

The players then go to the next level looking for the relevant information they need.  They need to find a book on how to burn a special magical book.

They reach the divination room and find themselves attacked by more ghosts.  This combat got pretty rough.  I used a vortex wraith along with some toned-down servile ghosts and phantom warriors.  Things started well, with Quimmel managing to freeze about half the battlefield for many, many turns –I couldn’t roll a save to err, save my life?  Once the vortex wraith got in though, the fight got interesting.  The vortex wraith’s aura deals 5 and pulls the players within 3 squares towards it. Combined with its attack versus Ref, and it was smacking the players around for a good bit. The players were able to clear its foes, and then it was elementary it was going to drop as all blades turned to it.

The players found more books and this time they struck gold.  They found a book called “Disenchanted Thoughts”. It tells them that there are only two places in the region where disenchantment of artifacts could be done.  The first is in the ruins of Iovanthar.  The second is in Thom itself –the Incendarium.  Thom actually built itself up as a city through the Incendarium.  Peopl would come to break down their magical items into raw residuum and for ritual use or for the creation of magic items, and adventurers would often sell their items here to smelt merchants who then sold their goods to arcane ritualists.  But centuries ago there was some incident, which few people know about.  The Incendarium was quickly shut down, with the price for re-entry being death.

The PCs mulled this over a bit.  Khalil was eager to go to Iovanthar, but proximity won the day.  Now the players just had to find out where in the city it was, and how to get in.

Skill Challenge time!  The way I broke this down was to keep it open in terms of failures.  The more failures the players had, the more likely it was that they would attract some sort of attention.  They moved around town researching and speaking with people.  They found out that the Incendarium is actually right under the High Council building, and that only members of the High Council can open that door.

The party then started researching the Council members and seeing who would be most amenable to their cause or willing to take some sort of bribe.

It was at this point where they gathered enough successes to attract a little attention.  This attention was from a member of the council, a halfling wizard by the name of Pobers Milkstein.  He sneaks up on Quimmel and Arctana as they discuss the warding on the doors and possible ways to circumvent it.  Pobers tells them it’s come to his attention that the players have been snooping around town and he is interested in helping them….if they’ll help him.  He tells the mage and the warlock to bring their friends to Sellie’s after nightfall so that they may discuss.

Sinking Feeling.

The players have scavenged the site of the Black Pond after vanquishing Felmad the Ill-humored and his band of exiled satyrs. They know that there quest must take them through the fey crossing locating in the depths of the pond, but, after asking them, we realize that none of the characters can really swim. After the characters sheepishly look at the water, they decide that you actually don’t have to swim well to get to the bottom, so Samson, Bradis and Hrung each grab some rocks and, well, sink to the bottom.

Sinking becomes rising as the approach the bottom of the pond. They scrabble now upwards, clawing for air as they break surface and arrive in the Feyvale. Almost blinded by the luscious colors, they catch their breath on the shore.

Bitterswarm

The Feywild would give them scant time to take in the scenery. hovering above them are what at first seem to be thousands of orange pulsing lights making a high pitched keen. As the orbs descend, though, they see that this a huge swarm of very small faeries. The cleric and the wizard each recognize the faeries as bitterswarm fey…just before the group descends upon Samson. They aren’t very strong, doing a touch of damage here and there, covering him almost completely. The bite, pull his hair, poke him, full of diminutive rage.

Arcana checks reveal that the bitterswarm thrive on the misery of non-fey creatures. Their blood, or what passes for it, is said to be dangerous as well. Hrung confirms this by taking a close peek at the fey and see that they have translucent skin and are almost completely full of some fluid. They move Samson into the pond which diverts some but not all of the swarm from him. Bradis attempts to use icy terrain as an airburst over the pond, which I rule to be a power trick (more on this later). He fails the Arcana roll, preventing the trick from going off.

Hrung and Bradis examine the area for help. They both see some tickleroot bushes. Hrung ignores the find, but Bradis makes a connection…if the bitterswarm fey love anguish, they must hate laughter. The mage rubs the tickleroot on his skin. Uncontrollable laughter spills forth. Hrung looks at him oddly, then grabs some and rubs it on him and Samson. The bitterswarm angrily flitter off.

Trespass

The group hears clapping. “Well met, clever ones! I’ve seen the bitterswarm melt more than a few unlucky souls at this very pond!”

The clapping and the laughter belong to Inosel. She asks why the PCs are not at CommonHome, breaking the Treaty of Khitosa knowing that their lives are now forfeit if they are found. Inosel is not threatening them, but warns them that her superiors will not believe their story that they are not from CommonHome, and will most likely destroy them on sight.

The party tells Inosel of their quest, withholding mention of the Unicorn’s Horn, which they think is an actual Unicorn that they must trick or kill. Inosel tells them precisely where it is, and Grimshenko (played by me) tells the players that the Unicorn’s horn is actually a statue. She tells the players to hurry and leave before they are found out. They leave the bitterswarm and the pond behind them, and begin travelling.

Desecration Angels

The players decide to stealth as much as possible to their destination. Eventually they come to a grove. Some of the trees are completely defoliated and withered. There are two female humans crying next to each other, and several man-sized tree creatures stumbling aimlessly about the grove.

“Sister! What have we done? All we wanted were brothers, and now we have despoiled our land! We will be slain!”

At that point, Hrung sees their faces, which are human in skin tone, but etched with barklines like a tree, and does a sharp, reflexive inhale.

“You!” The dryads spot him instantly. “You will be the ones we say desecrated the grove!”

The dryads commence the attack, but after a few solid hits on the Rogue, the PCs make short work of their minions. A few times Bradis attempts to reason with them, and when it’s down to just the two dryads versus the PCs, he finally gets through:

“Look, you can attempt to blame us for your actions, or you can attempt to flee.”

“But they will find us and destroy us for our crimes!”

“Well, look at your brothers lying on the ground. Your death here is almost certainly assured.”

The sisters look at each other, consider, and flee, teleporting into the trees.

This encounter everyone enjoyed, but I maintained that it was the players that really made it awesome. I hadn’t expected Bradis to parlay with the sisters. They will return later.

Checking out the area of the grove the dryads ruined, Hrung almost gets homesick. This one small patch of land looks almost like something from the blasted landscape of thee Slaughtervale. The players wonder what sort of foul magic this is, then they make camp.

At the heart of the convergence campaign is the notion of a shared world for multiple campaigns. It sounds like Living Forgotten Realms at first, doesn’t it? Here’s the difference in what I’m thinking, though: LFR and other Living campaigns offer a meta-plot continuity and individual player continuity. My adventurer could travel with any number of adventurers through any number of adventures. My character has a history, the world has a story, but there’s no campaign contintuity. I can’t say “our group was doing this” necessarily. I can run RPGA in my home games and provide it there of course, but that’s not really the point of a Living world. Nothing wrong with this style of campaign, and there is a lot cool stuff you can do within that framework. If I could ever get an RPGA number (a very long, boring story) I would be pretty hardcore about participating in LFR.

But what if the model for a shared world campaign consisted of multiple campaigns in different parts of the world, that come together at scheduled times? If each campaign represents a seperate faction, these times of convergence can be times of cooperation or conflict.

Let’s build this up a little bit. Staying simple, we’ve got two kingdoms at war. One is a human kingdom, and the other is a dragonborn kingdom. The two kingdoms are in conflict over some resources. We have two campaigns, one in each kingdom. Each campaign’s central progression is set to put the players deeper and deeper into this conflict, until there is a session when both player groups encounter each other. What can happen here are that they must unite to fight against a powerful for that has been pulling the strings all along, or the dragonborns and humans must fight each other.

Either way, this blending of the campaigns represents a break from the usual campaign high points, and offers potential for mega-fights (how often is your BBEG a group of other PCs?) and intense roleplaying with the classic scenario of two groups from different worlds learning that they have more alike than they are different. The two groups of players could clash at first, but join forcees to face the lich lord or the black dragon who is attempting to reach godhood.

There’s a lot to say about this, but in the meantime, have you ever done anything like this? What did you think of it?