Low-Level Scenario Design (D&D5E)

Deerstalker Pictures

This week’s post comes courtesy of something I disliked.  

Fuss! Fume! 

I was reading an article about low-level encounters for Dungeons & Dragons groups, encounters which weren’t just ‘go kill the rats in my basement,’ and, while I appreciated the sentiment, the suggested alternatives were … dull.  

Unbearably dull.  

As in, I would leave the campaign if you tried that crap on me, dull.  

The big difficulty Dungeons and Dragons has is that it’s still dragging around Chainmail’s corpse. At heart, it’s a skirmish wargame. Its mechanics, spells, equipment and ethos is all about reducing the other fella’s hit points to zero as quickly as possible.  

Other fantasy games do this. GUMSHOE’s Swords of the Serpentine does this. But the difference between Dungeons and Dragons and Swords of the Serpentine is, Swords doesn’t start you off at level 1 and say ‘go forth, hero, and do great deeds.’ With Swords, and games like it, your character starts pretty much at the peak of their career and things can only get better. Whereas in D&D and its iterations you start with a handful of hit points and a gleam in your eye. 

A gleam which is quickly extinguished if, say, a goblin punches you in the unmentionables. Fury of the Small is not to be sneezed at. 

Other games choose other solutions. Ars Magica deals with this problem by giving you a half-dozen characters or more per player, so if one gets chewed up by a rampaging beast there’s another four or five behind them to fill the gap. Ars also focuses on story goals rather than combat goals, because it didn’t start life as a skirmish wargame with dreams of grandeur.  

But Dungeons and Dragons is a skirmish game which means the solution to any problem posed in the campaign is often ‘hit it till it falls down, then hit it again.’ It’s the wargamer mentality. Nobody asks a Civil War tabletop gamer to hug it out; Lincoln didn’t defeat Davis in a spelling bee. Though it would have saved a lot of lives if he did. 

Which is why ‘kill the rats in my basement’ is such a popular trope. Rats are small. They have almost no hit points. Their damage output is minimal.  It’s a quest that can reasonably be achieved by even the most incompe … the most inexperienced group.  

Still, there are only so many basements to go around. Eventually your band of pest controllers will run out of rats. Or get bored hitting them. What to do? 

Before I start talking about scenarios, let’s nail down some basic principles.

1)    Keep the combat to a minimum. 

Yes, there will be combat. It’s still a combat-focused game. But the characters only have so many hit points and short rests plus clerics working overtime is not going to solve that problem. Plan for one or two thrilling fight scenes, not The Game Of Death.  

It’s fine if the combat is nonlethal. Particularly in an urban setting where there’s active law enforcement and the death penalty (also known as hanging, drawing, quartering and there goes your weekend) it’s perfectly reasonable for the average ne’er-do-well to prefer nonlethal over lethal violence.  

2)    Make sure there are exciting things to do. 

This ought to be obvious but time has taught me that the obvious is anything but. These are heroes. They need to be doing heroic things. Sure, Hercules cleaned the Augean Stables, but he did it in a heroic way and it was one of his twelve heroic tasks. It wasn’t his Sunday second job.  

3)    Make it fantastic. 

This is a fantasy world where Gods, Devils and things beyond imagining walk the earth. Where physics and chemistry take a back seat to mystics in tune with the mythic forces of the universe. One of the reasons why busting rats in basements gets boring is that it’s just rats, just a basement. Where’s the drama in that? 

With all that in mind, let’s talk scenario ideas. 

The Laughing Cat 

Type: investigative; murder mystery. 

This adventure location is a burnt-out travelers’ inn on the high road. When it was still an inn, it was a popular spot for wayfarers on a well-traveled path. The reasonable thing to do would be to rebuild it but it has a bad reputation. Word is, it’s haunted. The [guild/monastery/family/noble house] which owns the land would appreciate it if someone deals with that problem before the inn gets rebuilt. Generous financial reward offered. 

Journey: 2-4 days across forest terrain to get to the Laughing Cat. The heroes may encounter a faerie dragon on the way there which, if treated with respect or properly entertained (it likes music) can provide a clue as to what might have happened at the Laughing Cat. Otherwise, combat.  

The Laughing Cat is a burnt-out shell. Preliminary investigation (DC10 investigation, history, perception) indicates arson. Someone set the main room on fire while everyone was asleep upstairs. If History is successful, the heroes remember that this happened about ten years ago and there were three survivors; everyone else perished, including the Awakened cat which gave the inn its name.  

A DC15 check remembers that the three survivors were Myria Whispermouse, a roguish Halfling who’s gone on to become a renowned hero; Aramil Caerdonel, an elf paladin (now fallen) whose whereabouts are unknown, and the innkeeper Bron, who was badly injured in the fire and now lives with family far away. Among the dead were Proserpine, a renowned Tiefling bard, and her half-orc companion Morg. 

That’s all that can be seen during the day. At night, the Laughing Cat comes back to spectral life once more. All of its people go about their business as if no time had passed – which, to them, it hasn’t. It’s always and eternally the last night of their lives. To them, the characters are just other guests at the Laughing Cat. The survivors are also there, as their dream selves; a nightmare none of them can escape. 

At which point the Cat enters the picture. Peridot is the only one out of all of them who knows that they’re all dead, and Peridot has a proposition: if the heroes can find out which of the three survivors did it and why, the haunting will stop.  

Was it Myria, whose greed for the party’s loot got the better of her? 

Was it Aramil, whose unrequited love for Morg tempted him to do something catastrophic? 

Was it Bron, whose drunkenness finally had disastrous consequences?  

By talking to those present, finding out what they saw and how they died, the heroes can gather the clues needed to reveal the killer. 

Potential combat encounters: 

Skeletal rats in the cellar (they guard a clue to the villain’s identity, a fossilized memory that will only reveal itself once they are destroyed) 

Bar-room brawl with the dead (nonlethal, but Morg has a punch like a mule’s kick). 

The imp Pazzu, whose temptations pushed the killer over the edge. Pazzu has a stake in the game; if it can drag the killer’s soul back to the infernal regions, it gets the soul coin that the villain’s misdeeds will mint. But until the killer dies, Pazzu is trapped at the Laughing Cat with the rest of them. If the heroes reveal who did it, the killer will die that night of a heart attack and Pazzu will be free to collect the coin. If the heroes squash Pazzu before that happens then Pazzu won’t have time to collect. Pazzu is a ‘hide-in-the-shadows, rely on invisibility’ kind of miscreant, but Pazzu can’t resist boasting about their clever scheme. This may trip them up in the end. 

Immortal With A Kiss 

Type: social, romance, urban 

The heroes are hired as extra guards at a rich man’s villa, one week only. The eldest daughter Olympia is getting married and valuable wedding presents are arriving every day. It’s the heroes’ job to make sure those presents don’t go missing and that Olympia’s privacy is respected before the big event. No visitors, no scandal; everything’s being coordinated to create the big event of the social season and there cannot be even the slightest hint of hijinks.  

This is particularly important to the family because Olympia is magically Blessed; all her life she’s had the Bless spell effect as a permanent, but according to fortunetellers and prognosticators that Bless effect will pass to her true love, when she kisses them for the first time. This story is well known; how true it is, is anyone’s guess.  

The villa is besieged by wedding tourists daily. Bards looking to try out their latest ballads; dressmakers wanting Olympia to wear their designs; cake-makers and confectioners who want Olympia to choose their treats for her wedding; ‘friends of the family’ who haven’t been seen in decades who turn up unexpectedly looking for a place to stay, or a short-term loan, or just a quick word with the bride-to-be. The heroes have to manage all of this discreetly.

Among the wedding tourists are a peculiar band of warlocks and astrologers who, day in, day out, prognosticate the wedding based on Olympia’s birthday and that of her husband, Kairon, the handsome and famous Ranger whose exploits and treasure retrieval bought him instant access to high society. These guys just won’t go away; they fulminate and gibber in the street, producing alarming magical effects, incense, smoke, dancing mice – you name it, they’ve got it. Their omens and portents cover the entire wedding from break of day to the last breath of nightfall. 

The heroes soon realize (DC10 insight, perception, deception) that Olympia’s younger sister Callistra is up to something, but it’s not clear what. She’s seen chatting with the astrologers and passing them insider information – but to what end? 

Further investigation (DC15, and this can involve bribing Callistra’s cat familiar with treats) reveals that wizard Callistra plans to use Disguise Self and Friends on the day in question to pass as her sister on the wedding day. She figures she can get away with it because she physically resembles her sister (size, bodyweight) and most of the day the bride will be wrapped up in veils and dresses. The heroes may work this out when they realize that she’s feeding the astrologers her own date of birth and personal information, not her sister’s.  

She thinks she’ll get away with this because Olympia’s planning on skipping the wedding and embarking on her own heroic career as a Thief. Her lover is an important member of the local Thieves Guild who taught her a few tricks. [The guild member may or may not be her true love; they may just be a seducing scoundrel.] The family would be appalled if they knew, and it’s exactly this kind of hijinks that the heroes were hired to stop – if they want to stop it, of course … 

Olympia intends to make her getaway on the wedding day, as that’s when there’ll be the most confusion. 

What nobody appreciates (except possibly the heroes, if they’ve been paying attention to those astrologers) is that the prognosticators are actually burglars. They’ve been casing the joint all week under cover of magical hoodoo. They know how to get in and how to get out without getting caught, which is exactly what will happen if the heroes don’t intervene. 

Potential combat moments: 

Brawl with drunken aristocratic youth who think it’s funny to sing romance ballads under Olympia’s window every day up until the wedding. 

Chase/combat with the astrologer-thieves as they make their getaway. They prefer nonviolence, ball-bearings and tanglefoot bags to cover their retreat, but they may confuse things by running through a rough tavern hoping that the ensuing bar brawl will help them escape. 

Pilgrim’s Passage 

Type: Negotiation/Problem Solving, Insight, Perception, Animal Handling 

Near the village of Three Hills there is a magical well that has become a popular spot for those on pilgrimage. (Life, Light, Nature). The village is within the fief of [noble/church/monastery] and its patron rakes in a small but not insignificant amount of tolls from those on the pilgrim trail. A nice extra comes from the sale of trinkets and medals organized by a small hermit community near Three Hills. It’s also a well-known fact that horses bred near the well have special properties, and the sale of those horses is a nice earner for the family that breeds them which in turn pays the fief holder a tidy sum for the benefice. In short, there’s a fair amount of cash at stake, which becomes a problem when the pilgrim trail is shut down by druids. Angry pilgrims complain to the fief holder, and the fief holder reaches out to reliable third parties to investigate and (hopefully) solve the problem. Enter our heroes, stage right. 

The druids, a trio of halflings, (Garth, Morrin, Gynnie, all novice members of a far-off circle), say that they have the right to shut down the trail when it is clear that the balance is negatively affected, and further that this right is in writing. Three generations back the fief holder agreed to this is negotiation with the druids’ circle, when a blight threatened the land. The druids cleansed the blight and extracted this promise as payment. 

The druids say that the horses bred near the well do not have special properties; quite the reverse, in fact, which hasn’t stopped the breeders from selling them at inflated prices based on reputation alone. Animal Handling DC10 shows this to be true; DC15 shows that this condition is being disguised by the breeders who use magical feed mash to pep up the stock before sale. The feed makes the horses seem great for a week or so; after that, not so much. The DC15 also shows that the older horses, which the family keep for breeding stock, are still as magical as ever; it’s only the current sale stock that is affected. 

The druids say that this shows the well is being over-used, threatening the balance. They demand that the well be given time to recover – perhaps a year or more. This proposal will not please the fief holder, which conveniently lost the paperwork on that druid deal as soon as possible after it was signed. The fief holder isn’t pleased to hear that the druids kept a copy. 

What nobody realizes is that the source of the problem is the hermits, who have become warlocks, tempted to more-than-mortal power by a devil who wanted access to the well for its own purposes. The hermits knew how to bypass the magical wards put there by the druids and they let the devil in. The devil did what it wanted and then left a few infernal serpents behind to watch over ‘its’ property. The serpents allow the devil to come and go as it pleases, bypassing the wards. The serpents can be defeated in combat but can also be instantly defeated by one of the magical horses, if that horse is brought to the well (Religion, Insight).  

If this is revealed then the druids can restore the protective wards and, after the serpents are dealt with, the well will recover.  If the devil is left in place then the well will become permanently affected within a year.  

Potential combat moments:  

A fight against infernal, poisonous snakes. 

A nonlethal brawl with the horse breeding family, or angry pilgrims.  

A potentially lethal scrimmage with the druids, or the warlock-hermits. The warlocks are likely to take to their heels if discovered; they got into this for power, not to get stabbed.  

The devil, if encountered, will insist on a battle of wits (Arcana) – a riddle challenge. If the heroes win, the devil promises to leave. If the devil wins it will remain at the well for a month. This challenge can be attempted more than once; the devil likes playing games.   

Stuck for an Idea? (RPG All)

Designing a campaign, a scenario, even a scene, can be very difficult. You want it to be memorable, granted. You want the players to have fun. You want something unique, or at least reasonably unique - not a bunch of easily spotted tropes. At the same time you don't want to bust your head open searching when the game's on in a day or so and you really haven't the time to mess about.

I've said before that folklore's the best resource for a Director in search of inspiration, say for cults or creatures. It's also very helpful to know your history, so you can pick out details that will be useful later. Say you want to put something interesting and mysterious in your steampunk fantasy city. You might spend an hour scratching your head and crossing out dud ideas, or you could insert the Crystal Palace. Stolen from history, reborn as - well, whatever you fancy.

But there's one other thing you can try, and that's to look at the very ordinary events and things around you, and play with them.

You already know, as Director, that the players are going to come into contact with certain things just in the course of their day-to-day. Exactly what those things are will depend on the circumstances of the game and the setting, but there are some assumptions that can be made. The characters will need to travel from place to place. They will need to eat and sleep. They may commit crimes, or protect people from them, in which case they will come into contact with the police, other criminals, and victims. Possibly also vigilantes, depending on the nature of the setting - and so on, and on.

The initial assumption is the basis for all the rest of the work, but underlying that initial assumption is another, more basic layer. So say this is a game about investigating mystic mysteries, everything from Templar treasures to the Bermuda Triangle. That initial assumption immediately suggests several things that you know the characters will encounter all the time: occultists, skeptics, believers, sites of mystic significance like haunted houses and stone circles. That in turn suggests that you, as Director, need to make some notes about all those things, for use in those moments when the characters need direction and you haven't got something more significant planned. Are the players at a loss? Maybe it's time to follow up on that tip they heard about the Winchester House. None of this has to be in-depth; it just has to have enough depth to occupy attention.

However that's the initial assumption, not the basic layer. The basic layer is simply this: the things the characters encounter all the time, whether they want to or not.  The characters will always want to eat, to sleep, to move around. They'll buy clothing, toys, game consoles. They will have needs and they'll want to fill them. At the same time there will be events happening around them regardless of whether or not the players are directly involved, because everyone else in the game world has needs to satisfy too. This is at the heart of every system, regardless of setting or mechanics, and you can play with this layer in many different ways - so long as you establish it first.

It's been a long time since I've played, but I loved Cyberpunk 2020 way back when, because it spent time on little details like that. The splatbooks told you what guns and chipware were for sale, but they also gave you a little nugget of information about the game world along with it. Jeweldecks are manufactured to order by Faberge of Switzerland. The customer collaborates with the company's designers on the design of the jewelry that the deck will be built into ... Survivable, capable and powerful - when the going gets tough, turn to Spinelli Autotech ... Leisurewear isn't about sports, it's about feeling like you're into sports. Our goal is to make everyone feel authentic, even if they're just sitting at home in front of the Netbox, knocking back Smash.

Look at those flavor comments. They establish the setting quickly and give context for what's going on, more clearly and more succinctly than any data dump. It's all about worldbuilding in the end, and the sooner you establish your world the better it will be for your campaign. Everything you do to make your world yours will encourage the players to explore and inhabit it. BioShock's a classic example; that undersea city wouldn't feel the same without its personalized vending machines, its peppy little sentry bots, its gloomy interiors split by flickering neon lights, the New Year's masks everyone wears, and those mournful, lethal Big Daddies in their diving suits. It's that world more than anything else that draws the player forward, to interact with the setting.

I started this by talking about inspiration, and how the basic layer can be a vital source of inspiration for the Director. By that I mean this: by considering what's in the basic layer, you can design upward and create something for the players to interact with. That's exactly what Cyberpunk did, exactly what BioShock did - they shaped everything in their worlds by playing with that basic layer, by considering the things the characters encounter all the time and then building on those things. The characters have needs and want to fill them. As Director, how you provide fulfilment for those needs shapes everything else in the game going forward.

Say this is a fantasy setting with Gods and their clerics, or similar. The basic layer is this: the trappings and dogmas of that religion. Its shrines may be everywhere - are they decorated with flowers, candles, incense, something else? Do its worshippers leave offerings, and if so of what? How are the dead treated? These are the questions you need to answer, and you need to pepper the game world with that answer as often as possible. After all, the characters would see these shrines every day; they've probably made offerings at them many times. But by ensuring these shrines have just a little bit of detail, you help to build the world.

Don't feel as if you have to kill yourself with detail. Grim Fandango, for example, never tells you a great deal about the world of the dead; its worldbuilding is established in a few little details, such as how florists become insane weaponsmiths because floral bullets are the way the dead are killed. A few little tricks like this make the world seem developed, perhaps more so than it actually is. Brief but informative should be your watchword, not unlike the one sentence description I've recommended for character archetypes.

However there's one other use for the basic layer, and to cover this final point I'm going to draw your attention to something I swiped from the magnificent garbage fire that is the internet:

Six thousand cell phones, lost each year. Over three thousand digital cameras, eighteen thousand hats, seven thousand five hundred autograph books, lost and gone in one theme park. Think about that for a moment, then go to the basic layer and ask yourself: in my campaign world, what happens to the lost and found?

Say this is a pre-industrial revolution setting, where much of it probably gets re-used, not because they were all eco-warriors back in the days of Camelot, but because they didn't have many resources to begin with so they had to stretch what they had. This is why we often find lost manuscripts and forgotten artworks hidden on the canvases and pages of classic paintings and old books; someone scraped the original clean, and started fresh. Absolutely everything gets used, which is why you could make a living in a medieval setting by scouring the streets for animal dung, and why even up to the Victorian period there'd be someone willing to cart off your 'night soil' - also known as feces.

So if this is a fantasy setting, and your character loses, say, a notebook - or worse yet, a wizard's spellbook - then now would be a good time to track down whoever it is that collects all this stuff for resale. Somewhere out there is a man with a cart and a vision, and he's got your spellbook in his pile. Alternatively, what happens if you scrape down a spellbook so you can write new spells in it? Who knows - but I bet you could have fun finding out.

There's also magical consequences to consider. In Japanese folklore there's an entity called the Tsukumo-gami, a wraith made up of the things we leave behind. Shoes, pots, chairs, umbrellas, telephones - everything has a spirit, and if slighted these items can become furious, stalking the night, attacking people. Guy de Maupassant once wrote of a very similar thing, in his short story Who Knows? in which a sinister, enormously fat furniture dealer may, or may not, have persuaded a man's entire house, beds, chairs, cabinets and all, to walk out the front door and into his shop.

When a thing becomes lost, is it really lost, or has it walked away? In Esoterrorists it may be possible for a notebook, a tablet, a camera to have a soul, and to express its disgust by escaping from its owner. In Bookhounds it's quite possible a grimoire might be alive. Or, if this is a Disney situation and all those items are lost each year in one place, what happens next to all that magical energy, bound up with nowhere to go? Are those sunglasses, cameras, cell phones used in some ritual, extracting mana from the lost and found to power - what, exactly? A ride? The lights in the Magic Castle? The ritual keeping Disney's frozen head viable?

With all that in mind, consider this scenario seed:

Let the player pick something valuable, which the character has lost. The character goes looking for it, and finds it - but before the character can pick it up, it's whisked away by something small, fast, and almost silent. What happened, and where is the item now?

1) Future tech: a cleaning robot assigned to this building grabbed the unattended item, and took it away to 'lost and found.' Except someone has reprogrammed this robot - and all the others like it - to bring lost items to a secret room hidden away in the building. The question is, who did it? Is there an actual person behind this, or have the robots developed a peculiar hive mind, and bring these items here in some form of religious worship?

2) 20th Century/Supernatural setting: the item was grabbed by a gremlin or similar, that wants to make a nest for its prospective mate. Getting it back means delving into the forgotten supernatural underbelly of the city, possibly even a pocket dimension in which everything seems like, yet is not like, the world in which we live. In a Cthulhu-esque setting, the gremlin could be an extension of a Great Old One, say the Brood of Elihort, and its reasons for wanting to collect the lost and found are bound to be malevolent.

3) Fantasy/Swords and Sorcery setting: a magical entity, possibly an archwizard, created a spell intended to help it find things it has lost. It wrote the spell down on a scroll and forgot about it, and now that scroll lies in a monastery, library or other archive. However spells have a way of reminding the world that they exist, and when this scroll realized it was due to be scraped clean so other things could be scribed on it, the spell began 'finding' things other people had 'lost' and moving them to the archive, so they could be scraped clean in its place. Of course, not all the items it 'finds' are scrolls, but it has no good way of picking the useful from the useless, so everything it gets ends up in the same place. Which would puzzle the monks/librarians no end, except the junior member meant to be cleaning up the archive each night has worked out, at least in part, what's going on, and is selling these 'lost' items at a premium discount, at the local tavern. All of which ticks off the local thieves' guild no end; after all, the guild's not getting its cut from all this unsanctioned thievery.

That's it for this week. Enjoy!

Mussolini's Underground Car Graveyard (Night's Black Agents, Esoterrorists)

Here's a scenario seed involving Mussolini, abandoned vehicles, Naples, and an escape tunnel built by a King.

In 2005 a government geologist rediscovered an ancient Neapolitan secret: The Bourbon Tunnel. Ferdinand II built it in the 19th Century as an escape route in the event of an attack or assassination attempt. The tunnel was supposed to connect the palace to a military compound but it remained unfinished at the time of Ferdinand II's death.

The escape route connects with old Roman mines and the underground aqueduct, so the Bourbon tunnels aren't of one piece. You can take a water tour, if you care to, or go spelunking as an adventure tourist. Or you can go on one of the more sedate, handicap-accessible tours through the main line.

The main line's unique in its own right. When Ferdinand II died the tunnels were lost to history, until rediscovered and reactivated by Mussolini. During the war he dumped cars, bikes and other vehicles that had been seized by his government as contraband, and later the tunnels were used as emergency shelter during bomb raids and as a military hospital. After the war old Fascist statues and other Mussolini-era ephemera were dumped down there, and it was used as an impound lot until the 1970s. Then the tunnels were lost again, until their 2005 rediscovery.  The tunnels are the subject of a recent BBC documentary that's worth watching.

So in one fell swoop we have: mysterious tunnels whose history, at least in part, go back to ancient Rome. A Bourbon escape plan that was never used. An unintentional Fascist memorial. A car graveyard. Where to begin?

All kinds of threads could spool off from there. The 1970s angle potentially admits late-stage Edom activity, even an Operation Gladio connection. The 1970s are the Years of Lead, with any number of anarchist and Communist plots unfolding, perfect material either for a present day hunt-the-legend or a 1970's shooting war. Or an Esoterror twist might say that the old Fascist statuary down there walk around at night, or the cars can be heard to mutter and groan. One or two missing tourists would liven up that story for Esoterror purposes. Even without anything living (unliving?) down there the tunnels are still an excellent hiding place for spies on the run, or a place for squirrelling away a cache of useful items. Is the Vatican using it as some kind of interrogation chamber for the evil dead? Do some of the smaller branch tunnels lead to forgotten Roman temples? Is it true that some attempts to create a complete 3D map of all the tunnels under Naples have been frustrated by the sudden psychological collapse of the mapmakers? Is Dracula's Tomb really in Naples after all, and if so has the old bloodsucker been using the Bourbon Tunnel as a means of passing unseen under the streets of Naples?

As is traditional, a seed, with three options.

The Pitch: A tour guide has found old papers stuffed in one of one of the abandoned cars. She wasn't supposed to be poking around down there, but curiosity got the better of her. She posted pictures of her find on Reddit hoping to track down the descendants of the person named in the papers, and perhaps put a face to the name of the presumed owner of the abandoned vehicle. However things take a turn for the worse when she winds up dead, in a murder the less responsible news sources are calling 'The Vampire Killing' after the sanguinary nature of her wounds and the stake through her heart.

One: This is a disinformation campaign spread by an Esoterror cell (or non-Esoterror related cult) determined to get the Bourbon tunnels shut down. The next step is to kill a few tourists in much the same way and have their bodies found in memorable circumstances. Once shut, the cell can create something really nasty down there with a ritual obtained from a text stolen from the Vatican's secret successor to the Sacred Order of the Index, still going despite official disbandment in 1966. They can only do this in the Bourbon tunnels thanks to special preparations made by Ferdinand II's architect, who had his own use for the King's escape route. The characters are Ordo agents, or independent occult investigators - possibly clerical investigators - chasing down the stolen Vatican text.

Two: It really was a Vampire killing. The owner of the abandoned vehicle is still alive - if alive is the right term - and was most upset to discover that, thanks to a mistake made decades ago, her identity was about to be revealed by a tour guide, of all people. The vampire moved quickly to make the tour guide a vampiric vassal, but some independent slayers moved even more quickly. Now there's amateur vampire hunters swarming over Naples and the tunnels, and one very annoyed bloodsucker doesn't know where to turn. The characters are among the independent vampire hunters, or perhaps represent a recruitment team - Edom? - eager to make the SBA an offer she can't refuse.

Three. It's bad luck fooling around with those old cars. Vicious spirits from Italy's Fascist past are down there, content to be forgotten, but now all kinds of people are pawing through what's left of their dusty lives. The tour guide's boyfriend, possessed, did the deed and was promptly sent down into the tunnels to die. His body will turn up eventually, drowned in the aqueduct. Fear Itself could be used here, with the characters being fellow tour guides and tourists wandering the tunnels. Getting lost in the tunnels. Never finding their way out of the tunnels ...

That's it for now. Enjoy!

So what's in this room?

I managed to fracture my wrist while painting my brother's apartment, which was very clever of me. I oughtn't to have been doing it and I doubt he'll be pleased with the result, but it had to get done. He's away for a month in Thailand (far, far away) and he asked me to look after his place (and his cat) while he was gone.

The man lives like a troll. I had no idea it was as bad as this. He hadn't cleaned the floor, or anything else, in five years. Piles of crap were everywhere. You had to pick your way through to the bedroom with a ten foot pole, for fear of traps. He left me four day's washing up in the sink. Roaches roamed wild and free throughout the kitchen, even during the day. The fridge was a biological weapons testing zone. All his clothes were on the floor in the bedroom, and by the look of things had been there for some time. Every cupboard, nook and cranny was crammed with tat, and he kept four or five suitcases (remember he flew to Thailand, so he has at least two other bags) to put more stuff in. Some of it was valuable; he had a preorder special edition of Battlefield 3 worth about $600, and a boxed set of Lost Girls going to mould under a pile of clothes in the bedroom. Some of it was worthless, like the Stephen King that had turned to black sludge after months if not years of sitting in a small, damp space, or the plastic bags with old candy bars in them that he'd probably bought at an airport somewhere and never eaten, lying under the clothing mountain in the bedroom.

I've spent the last few weeks getting the place in order, which is code for throwing out a lot of shit and cleaning the rest, as well as repainting. Pity about the fall, but c'est la vie; at least it happened at the end of the job and not the beginning.

I realized, as I set fire to the rubble, that if someone was interested they could put together a pretty accurate history of my brother if they analyzed the debris. He kept everything. His PC from college (with the 3 1/2 inch floppy drive) gathered dust in one of the cupboards. His old military gear was bundled up in several seperate piles throughout the house, as was his collection of knives and cigarette lighters. Every single shirt he ever bought or had bought for him, old presents that he'd lost in the confusion still in their wrapping paper. The list goes on, but you get the point: if he had it, it was there.

Which brings me to roleplay material, and a thought about NPCs.

As a player you may have noticed (or as a Keeper you may have dreaded) the natural impulse to poke your nose around every in-game location. For some reason as soon as a player character enters the room the need to search every nook and cranny is overwhelming. Even so, there's very little there. Most scenarios don't go into great detail; 'it's a laboratory/dining room/old stately home/ghetto flophouse' covers a lot of ground, but doesn't say much about the contents. It's as though, as with so many computer games, the background can't be interacted with and therefore doesn't exist. Rather like the mounds of gold coins in the map room of Uldaman, they're there to be looked at, not looted.

Yet that hardly seems reasonable, so I offer this suggestion to Keepers who want a little set dressing but don't want to go overboard.

Look at your NPC first. That person has a backstory. It may not be much, but it could be interesting. Then, from that backstory, pick four elements that will be useful.

Say the NPC is Stanley David Fentiman. Well, we know from his plot function what his goals are, and we know a little about his previous history. He's an ex-Oxford don, which suggests a conventional middle class upbringing and years of dedicated scholarship. It also suggests a certain amount of travel abroad, because to do the kind of work he would have done requires first-hand research, and that can't be done without going to museums, archives, possibly archaelogical sites (depending on his subject) and so on. As he's ex-Oxford there must have been a scandal of some kind. I don't know quite what you have to do in order to get chucked out of an academic post, but I'm betting it's nothing so trivial as pinching the spoons.

So the four things are: middle class background, years of scholarship, travel, and scandal.

For each point you can come up with ideas for items related to that point, things Fentiman might own and which might be found in his apartment, things that will add a bit of colour to the furnishings. The players are free to make as much or as little of them as they like.

So, for example, middle class background: good quality clothes, photographs, jewelry (cuff links, watch), cricket ball, bat, old jersey (from his days on the team when he was at prep school), letters to relatives, bank statements. Or years of scholarship: battered notebooks filled with crabbed handwriting and sketches, expensively bound published monographs, letters to colleagues, tickets to various archives and libraries.  Travel:  battered suitcases, ticket stubs, odd foreign coins, clothes obviously meant for a radically different climate, photographs. Scandal: odd notations or withdrawals recorded on his bank statements, blackmail letters, photographs, newspaper clippings.

Naturally you don't have to chuck all this in every room, but if the players search around they should be allowed to find them. None of this has to be plot relevant. What matters is they speak to character; they give the players a better idea of who this NPC is. They may even get so caught up in the NPCs backstory (so who's blackmailing Fentiman and does he know something useful?) that they lead themselves astray. That's no bad thing in itself. Let them chase false leads, or even create genuine leads from their speculation. The room furnishings can be part of the ongoing plot, with some preparation.

So long as it doesn't get like my brother's place . . .

Scenario Ideas, Bookhounds of London

This time out I'm going to talk about scenario seeds. Most Keepers, whatever the system, are going to need at least a scattering of these to keep their players occupied in between major events. Some Keepers opt for a more freestyle form of play and provide nothing but seeds, allowing the players to pick and choose the ones they want to follow up. Others prefer more scripted campaigns, but still need to keep some unscripted events in their arsenal for those times when the players go off-book. Perhaps a key player couldn't make the session, or perhaps they need to account for a period of downtime while someone heals or reads the all-important grimoire. After all, the other characters don't just sit on their backsides while Protagonist X rests in bed eating grapes.

Scenario seeds are very useful. They allow the players a chance to indulge their personal whimsies, without departing too much from whatever the Keeper has planned as the overarching story. They also provide the protagonists a chance to gain new skills, abilities, items or even just an amusing anecdote or two. Finally, they help establish the consistent reality of the game world by introducing the characters to new and interesting bits of it.

There's no set length for this sort of thing, but I find that if I've gone on for longer than a page A4, I've gone too far. After all, this is meant to be a seed, not a full-blown story.

With that in mind, let's talk about the Midland Grand Hotel, at St Pancras, London, and its mysterious room 113.

This room does not officially exist. It is not on any hotel layout map, and none of the servants acknowledge its existence. Inquirers after it are told that Room 113 is ‘booked’; ‘for the foreseeable future’ is added for the benefit of those persistent enough to enquire further. The only official record of it can be found amongst the plans and papers of Sir George Gilbert Scott, the architect. The plans don’t seem to indicate anything unusual about 113; it’s a midsize East Wing room, not particularly luxurious, but with all the standard accoutrements of the Midland Grand, including a fireplace. It also lacks a bathroom and toilet, in common with the rest of the hotel. Chamber pots and copper baths are carried to and from all the rooms by a small army of servants, without whom the Midland Grand would not function.

Tracking down room 113 is a difficult task, almost as if the room itself doesn’t want to be found. Naturally seekers after it will not be encouraged by the hotel staff, and as there are so very many of them circulating at all times throughout the hotel, those with low Credit Rating may find it difficult to pass unnoticed. Those determined enough to wander the halls armed with a map of some sort soon discover that 113 simply does not exist during the day, though it can be found at night. It is much easier to find when the moon is waxing crescent, and more difficult when the moon is waning crescent.

Room 113 is, like the rest of the Midland Grand, the absolute last word in Victorian comfort, including gold leaf walls, elaborately carved wainscoting, and expensive furnishings and artwork, none of which have so much as a speck of dust. The main reception room has as its centrepiece a fascinating and somewhat disturbing pre-Raphaelite painting of a medieval hawking scene. The subject is conventional enough, but the brilliant and somewhat over-vivid colouring gives it a feverish quality, as though the viewer were seeing the scene through a heat haze.

Unlike the other rooms of the Midland Grand, 113 has a copper tub permanently installed; or at least, it is there, and nobody has ever tried to take it away. During a waxing crescent the tub is filled with a liquid very like blood, while when waning crescent there is only a very shallow pool of the same substance.

Staying the night there may awaken Magic potential in susceptible persons, or grant an increased Magic pool, though nobody is on record as having slept there or, braver still, having a bath. That might grant further power, of course, but the price might be more than most are willing to pay.

Now, let's talk about this from a Keeper's perspective.

First, the section is rules-lite. Only one investigative ability, Credit Rating, is mentioned, and even then there's no question of Difficulty numbers or potential tests. That sort of detail ought to be left up to the Keeper, to be elaborated at the the time the detail becomes relevant. There's no point scattering dozens of potential tests in a seed when the players may only ever use two or three of them. This isn't meant to be a dungeon, with traps around every corner. This is a hotel. People live and work there. A general description is useful, a sense of who might be there is handy, but anything beyond that is a waste of your time.

It does help that the Midland Grand is wiki-able, as is its architect. You can't expect the players not to look up historical background. Some of them may have iPads or laptops at the ready during the game session. This way, they'll naturally gravitate to information that might be as useful to you as it will be to them, and the pictures provided with the description is an added bonus.

Second, there's just enough creepy here to keep the players intrigued, and not so much that they avoid the place altogether. You don't want them thinking that this is beyond their ability. There's an obvious mystery here, but it's solveable. Also, it's not a dragon's cave: there are no bones scattered everywhere, warning them that a very painful death awaits. True, the seed might be fatal. There are facts the players don't know. That said, there's no need to hang a sign over the seed that reads Abandon Hope All Who Enter Here. The players ought to believe, at least to begin with, that the place isn't a deathtrap.

Third, there's a reward; the potential Magic increase. Magic is an ability introduced in Rough Magicks, a sourcebook that I personally find indispensible. Magic is a pool that would-be occultists use to power spells; in the main book, this function is covered by Stability. A Keeper who didn't use Rough Magicks would have to find another reward, but that shouldn't be too difficult. There's always something the players want badly enough to put themselves at risk, so long as the risk is survivable.

Now I'm going to elaborate a little further on the seed:

Potential clues:   Architecture, Art History. While strolling through the halls, an experienced architect may be able to deduce the whereabouts of 113 by noting where things have not happened. Everything suffers wear and tear, particularly over fifty-odd years (the Grand opened in 1876), yet there are portions of the Grand that seem as fresh as the day they were built. A student of art history may notice the same thing, or work out the approximate position by the odd lack of proportion that a particular corridor has, when compared with other corridors in the same wing.

                                Library Use, Occult. Sir George Gilbert Scott wrote his Personal and Professional Recollections, published 1879 by Sampson Low & Co. Though there isn’t a great deal on the Midland Grand, there’s supposed to be a mention of room 113 in the very first printing, which was cut from all subsequent editions. Occultists claim that a few drops of blood, smeared on the cover during a waxing crescent moon, can reveal the missing section in all extant copies of the Recollections. According to Sir George, ‘demands occasioned by the cemetery works forced an unpleasant compromise, which I solved by dedicating one of the rooms to private use. Naturally this meant that the room in question had to be kept effectively in quarantine, since to allow it to be used by an unsuspecting guest would be callous in the extreme. Fortunately soon after construction completed the room in question solved the problem in its own way, since which time I have not been made aware of any difficulties. Nodens will have his due.’ There is a sketch of a Green Man next to this paragraph, which sketch has also been cut from all but the very first printing.

Potential antagonist: Nightgaunt, which is only present during a waxing crescent. It tries to carry intruders out through the window and drop them to their deaths several hundred feet below. It can be dissuaded by occultists who can somehow prove their fealty to Nodens. Abilities: Athletics 6/12, Health 7, Scuffling 10. Hit Threshold: 4. Alertness: +1. Stealth: +2 (flying) +3 (flying in darkness). Weapon: success in Scuffling contest means victim is immobilized by unpleasant tickling attack. Armour: +2 vs Any (skin). Stability: +0

A Keeper is never going to be able to cover all the bases, particularly in a seed. The players will always have more ideas than the Keeper can account for. Many of those ideas will stink, but that's the nature of the beast: players are inventive, but not always sensible.

That said, there's no excuse for not covering some of the bases. The Keeper ought to have a few clues pre-written, if only to account for the most obvious contingencies. The above lists four potential abilities: Architecture, Art History, Occult and Library Use, as well as introducing a book, written by the architect. Now, the book is deliberately included; this is Bookhounds of London, after all. The protagonists are expected to be looking for books. It wouldn't be in the spirit of the campaign setting to not have the characters bury themselves in antiquarian bookshops seeking clues. The other abilities are more general, things that anyone might do in order to plumb the depths of the mystery. Architecture and Art History cover the two most obvious bases. Yes, there are other abilities that could be used, but some are more likely than others. Very few players are going to want to use Law or Chemistry to solve this one. Naturally if I knew in advance the skill list that the players had access to, I'd write the seed with them in mind. However it's probably more useful to talk in generalities at this point. Apart from anything else I might use a seed like this again and again, with several different groups of players. I can't know which skills they'll all have.

The antagonist is included to throw a little danger into the mix. Nightgaunts are creatures of Nodens, and that particular entity has been mentioned in the clue list. The protagonists ought to be taking some precautions anyway; there's been enough hints that this mystery might have an element of danger in it. If they choose not to, that's their look-out. A nightgaunt is a fairly scary antagonist, but it's not a lethal killing machine, and it won't necessarily be encountered all of the time. Moreover as noted in the text this one is special. The protagonists may be able to talk themselves out of trouble by proving their fealty to Nodens. This could be bluff or it could be the real deal. That's up to the player and the Keeper at the moment of truth.

Note that, even now, the section is rules-lite. I haven't included a list of potential Stability tests, or elaborated on the potential benefits. Those are things that ought to be determined during play, not written in stone beforehand. After all, the players may surprise you. Rather than take a bath in that fluid, they may drink it, or try to take it with them out of the room. Or they may fixate on that painting as the important item. Or they may try to move in to room 113 permanently, using it as a base of operations. Or, or, or . . . and so on. Best to leave that sort of thing up to chance. You could try to list every possibility and its consequences, but that would be a backbreaking labour, and nobody would thank you for it, or even know that you'd ever done it. Better to spend your time on the things your players will appreciate, than waste it on long lists that nobody will ever read.

I hope you've found this useful! Best of luck to all you Keepers out there.