12/20/2015 Humpty Dumpty Conundrum | Dungeons & Dragons

ARTICLE
HUMPTY DUMPTY CONUNDRUM

This regular column is for Dungeon Masters who like to build worlds and
campaigns as much as I do. Here I share my experiences as a DM through
the lens of Iomandra, my Dungeons & Dragons campaign world. Even
though the campaign uses the 4th Edition rules, the topics covered here
often transcend editions. Hopefully this series of articles will give you
inspiration, ideas, and awesome new ways to menace your players in
your home campaigns.
 

MONDAY NIGHT. The heroes are trapped inside a military stronghold in Io'calioth,
capital of the Dragovar Empire. A dragonborn villainess named Zarkhrysa is
determined to annihilate them for their constant meddling in her plans. The
characters know she's part of a conspiracy to overthrow the government, but how
exactly remains a mystery.

There you have it: one plot, one NPC, and one secret. If this represented the entirety
of my campaign, my job as the DM would be relatively easy. Alas, that's not the case.
Over the past five years, I've littered the campaign with a plethora of plots, myriad
NPCs with dreams and desires, and scores of secrets scattered everywhere in little
fragments. All the king's horses and all the king's men, indeed!

Every time I run an adventure for my Monday and Wednesday night group, I'm
adding complexity to the campaign new plot details to sort through, new NPCs to
throw in the party's path, and new revelations to uncover. The longer a campaign
runs, the more pieces there are to pick up and put together into something . . .
whole. I could make the campaign shorter, include fewer NPCs, and reduce the
number of fiendish plots, but then the campaign world wouldn't feel as big, and the
players might one day find themselves out of things to do. It's a conundrum.

The three biggest contributors to campaign complexity are plots, NPCs, and secrets.
Every new plot that brews, every new NPC who shows up with an agenda, and every
secret I plant in the world has the potential to sweep the player characters away on
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secret I plant in the world has the potential to sweep the player characters away on
an adventure that lasts for hours, days, weeks, or months. The Iomandra campaign
has scores of plots, hundreds of important NPCs, and too many secrets to count. The
adventurers are not only dealing with the quest-of-the-day but also dealing with the
consequences of leaving other quests unfinished, and here I am, the not-so-
blameless DM, trying to make the most of it.

The only things that keep me sane are my notes. As I've mentioned before, I go into
every game session with a one-page printout that summarizes key beats from
previous sessions, lists the names of NPCs likely to be of importance, and spells out
what I think might happen over the course of the session. Throughout the game, I'm
scribbling notes on this page the name of an NPC who makes an unexpected
appearance, names of things I'm forced to create on the fly, reminders to myself,
strange things that happen during an encounter that might have bearing on future
events, and the occasional funny quote. Once in a while, a character will do
something crazy but memorable; I'll jot that down, too. At the end of the session, the
page goes in the back of my campaign binder, which has, over the past five years,
become a chronicle of the party's shenanigans (albeit an unpublishable one).

Here's an sample page from my campaign binder:

Life of the Party

Plots. NPCs. Secrets. These are the things I'm most interested in keeping track of.
Why? Because in order to pull the campaign together and turn it into something
more than just a string of adventures, I need to keep bringing old plots, NPCs, and
secrets back into play and finding ways to pay them off. If I can't remember them,
then I'm just littering the campaign with bits of debris plots that are never thwarted,
NPCs without destinies or arcs, and secrets lost forever. That's not the campaign I'm
trying to build.

I don't need horses or men to gather up the bits of my campaign and start piecing
things together. My campaign binder contains everything I need to assemble my
campaign: one-sheets from every single game session, in chronological order. Some
barely have a mark on them; others are covered with notes, scrawls, and half-baked
thoughts that don't really amount to much but serve to jog my memory of events
from Way Back When. When I'm worried that my campaign might be falling apart, I
open my campaign binder and start leafing through past episodes, sometimes going
all the way back to the beginning. Look! Here's a quest the characters abandoned . . .
what are the consequences of their negligence? Here's an NPC with some unfinished
business . . . I wonder if there's a way to bring her back into the story? And behold,
here's a little secret the players never figured out . . . maybe it's time they learned the
truth!

PLOTS, NPCS, AND SECRETS

A couple sessions ago, the characters knocked off a major campaign villain and the
last of his surviving clones. It was the kind of fate you wish upon super-villains in
James Bond movies: violent with a dab of poetic justice. (The last clone was made to
suffocate to death in his own cloning tank while the heroes watched.) I was
concerned because I didn't know quite where to take the campaign from there . . . or
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concerned because I didn't know quite where to take the campaign from there . . . or
how to make the next few game sessions just as thrilling. After all, once the campaign
hits a dizzying high, the natural tendency is to go down from there. It takes a lot of
thought and effort or pure delirium to keep going up. I had a few ideas (odds and
ends rattling about in my brain), but I needed to go back to my campaign binder to
find inspiration . . . or, more precisely, to find things that would resonate with my
players. As it happens, I found several.

Here are some pieces I have to work with:

1. When last we left the PCs, they were nearly out of resources. Our sly villainess,
Zarkhrysa, allowed them 10 minutes to craft a teleportation circle, but with no
intention of letting them escape. She and her wizards have been secretly
scrying on the party and casting a ritual to disrupt their circle once activated. It
seemed like a surefire way to get rid of the whole party at once, once and for
all.
2. The players suspected something was amiss when Zarkhrysa held her forces
back instead of steamrolling over them. Only one of the characters (a
warforged artificer named Triage, played by Nick DiPetrillo) actually ended up
using the teleportation circle, and now he's separated from the rest of the
group. The party's attempt to reach him via sending stone didn't work,
suggesting that he might be dead. (Triage's sending stone is embedded in his
brain, making it unlikely that the item was simply lost.)

3. Speaking of missing party members, when Michele Carter moved to Baltimore,

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3. Speaking of missing party members, when Michele Carter moved to Baltimore,

her character (an eladrin warlord named Andraste) left the party to become an
NPC. The last time the PCs spoke with her, she was trying to get Alethia, her
aunt, out of prison. Aunt Alethia is a member of the Knights of Ardyn, a good-
aligned terrorist group dedicated to destroying corrupt elements within the
Dragovar Empire. The party thinks she's being held in Zardkarath, an
underground Dragovar prison on the island of Mheletros (ruled by an
adamantine dragon overlord).
4. Speaking of the Dragovar Empire, it's been without an emperor since the start
of the campaign (hence the never-ending upheaval). The party's human wizard,
Alex (played by Jeremy Crawford), recently captured a purple dragon because
he needed her heart as a ritual component. In a bid to save her own life, the
dragon informed Alex that the emperor was alive but refused to divulge his
location.

5. Zarkhrysa was a high-ranking member of the martial caste, which, in the

absence of an emperor, has imposed martial law throughout the empire.
Recently ousted from the Vost Miraj (the imperial spy agency) after a botched
operation, she now wants to install a dragonborn noble on the imperial throne
who shares her political ideology. However, no noble can claim the throne
without the approval of the Council of Viziers, all members of the divine caste
who are painfully fastidious when it comes to scrutinizing a candidate's royal
bloodline. However, with the aid of a dragonborn archmage named Hahrzan,
Zarkhrysa recently imbued a secret squad of dragonborn assassins with
doppelganger-like shapechanging abilities. She plans to command this squad
to assassinate the viziers, lay the blame on her replacement in the Vost Miraj,
and use the resulting anarchy to push the Dragovar nobility into acting quickly
to restore order with a new emperor on the throne.
6. Zarkhrysa's choice for emperor is a terrifyingly evil member of the noble caste,
a Tiamat-worshiping dragonborn named Menes Narakhty. Shielded by his
equally vile mother, he seeks an alliance through marriage with the popular
and influential House Irizaxes. Menes plans to marry Lord Irizaxes's eldest
daughter, Taishan. She's the opposite of Menes caring, giving, and passionate
about her faith in Bahamut. It's a disaster waiting to happen.
7. Amid my campaign notes is an idea that never actually got used: a dragonborn
masquerade. As a prelude to the wedding of Menes Narakhty and Taishan
Irizaxes, I thought it might be fun to have the heroes crash the masquerade.
Unfortunately, the PCs were always too distracted with other things to get
involved in the political machinations of the Dragovar nobility, and so the
masquerade idea fell by the wayside.
8. At present, Peter Schaefer and Stan! both have secondary characters who were
written out of the campaign at different times in the past year. You could say
that both succumbed to "misadventure." As noted in my campaign binder,
Metis (Peter's morose changeling warlock) was knocked unconscious and taken
prisoner by Vost Miraj agents several months ago, and the players quickly gave
up on trying to rescue him. (At the time he went missing, he'd managed to
place his companions in great peril and wasn't very well liked.) Stan!'s previous
character, Baharoosh (a dragonborn assassin) was a member of the Vost Miraj
sent to spy on the party. The party never trusted him (not surprisingly), even
though he sided with them against the Vost Miraj multiple times. When
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12/20/2015 sent to spy on the party. The party
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though he sided with them against the Vost Miraj multiple times. When
Zarkhrysa realized he'd gone rogue, she separated Baharoosh from the other
PCs and promptly made him disappear. The other characters, unaware of the
risks he'd taken to help them, weren't sad to see him go.

And here's how all the pieces are coming together:

Shapechanging dragonborn assassins: The idea began to germinate in my brain

when Metis, Peter's changeling warlock, was captured by the Vost Miraj. I made a
note to myself: The Vost Miraj turns Metis over to Hahrzan for experimentation. By
experimenting on the changeling, Hahrzan learned how to imbue Zarkhrysa's
dragonborn assassins with doppelganger-like traits. Now we have the "doppelborn,"
whose Vost Miraj training enables them to infiltrate the divine caste, worm their way
into the Tower of Law, and assassinate the Council of Viziers. The fact that they
believe they're working for the Vost Miraj exonerates Zarkhrysa, who no longer leads
the organization. The blame falls squarely on her oblivious replacement, who will
surely be branded a traitor and a fool.

The conspiracy to overthrow the government: I decided to keep the changeling

alive and imprisoned in Hahrzan's cloning lab. Last week, while scrambling to escape
the villain's stronghold, Peter's new character, Oleander, found his previous
character, Metis, trapped inside a cloning vat and unable to change his form. But
here's the fun part: as a doppelganger, Metis is really good at reading minds and
reading lips. He knows a secret, which Peter is told by me in confidence: Zarkhrysa is
planning to assassinate the Council of Viziers to expedite the coronation of a new
emperor, while simultaneously placing her best candidate front and center.
Moreover, as a prelude to the marriage of House Irizaxes and House Narakhty, a
dragonborn masquerade is set to take place concurrent with the assassinations.
Everyone in attendance, including Zarkhrysa and Menes Narakhty, will have an
ironclad alibi. Metis also knows that the masquerade is taking place aboard a ship,
and the only way to reach it is via teleportation circle. Zarkhrysa carries an invitation
with the circle's arcane address printed on it.

The Dragovar Empire's missing emperor: Having just killed the last of Hahrzan's
clones, Jeremy hit upon the idea of using Hahrzan's research to create a clone of the
imprisoned purple dragon. If he's successful, he'll get the heart he needs for his ritual
from the purple dragon's clone, and the real purple dragon can be set free. Were this
to happen, the characters might suddenly learn the whereabouts of Emperor
Azunkhan IX. I won't divulge that secret here, for the sake of keeping the Monday
night group in suspense, but as a point of fact, it is the single oldest unresolved
secret in the entire campaign. The question then becomes: what happens if the
characters return the real emperor to the throne before Zarkhrysa can install Menes
Narakhty in his place? There we have the makings of a campaign-ender, don't you
think?

The other missing party members: Poor Triage. Zapped into oblivion by a
sabotaged teleportation circle! What the heck do I do with him? Is there some way I
can connect his latest misfortune to some other unresolved piece of the campaign?
Why yes, there is: The prison of Zardkarath. Interestingly, the location has never been
explored but has come up many times in the campaign (the name first appears on
page 5 in my campaign binder, which must be at least 500 pages thick). It occurred to
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page 5 in my campaign binder, which must be at least 500 pages thick). It occurred to
me that the Vost Miraj would probably have a secret level of the prison where they
keep captives who are too important to kill and too dangerous to mingle with the
"rank and file." No doubt the level would be scry-proof and sending-proof, its cells
teleportation-proof. If you want to dispose of an epic-level party without the risk of
them being brought back from the dead, there's no better place than prison,
particularly if they show up sans gear. (Naturally their precious stuff would be
teleported elsewhere. Thank you, Tomb of Horrors, for teaching me that old trick!) The
only good news is that Triage is not alone he has Stan!'s former character,
Baharoosh, to keep him company. Two characters who never really liked each other .
. . reunited at last! Surely it doesn't get any sweeter than that.

Au contraire.

LESSONS LEARNED
Obviously, I can't have Triage locked up in an escape-proof penitentiary for the rest of
the campaign. As a player, poor Nick would be bored to tears! (And based on the
party's track record, there's a 97.1 percent chance that Triage's companions wouldn't
bother mounting a rescue.) However, it stands to reason that the Vost Miraj would
keep other important prisoners there as well, including Andraste's aunt, Alethia. It
doesn't take a genius to imagine what might happen next.

By scouring my campaign notes and piecing together various unresolved fragments,

I've stumbled upon a way to put Humpty Dumpty back together again by having
Andraste and the Knights of Ardyn infiltrate Zardkarath and attack the Vost Miraj-
controlled prison level in a desperate attempt to free Alethia from captivity. What
better way to liberate Triage and Baharoosh as well? Since neither Triage nor
Baharoosh are in any condition to "duke it out" with the prison's ardent defenders, I
imagine it playing out more as a roleplaying opportunity than a combat encounter.
Coincidentally, Andraste never liked Triage or Baharoosh because she always
doubted their motives; it's a laughable bit of irony to have her show up and
accidentally rescue them.

In the end, managing a D&D campaign is about knowing what you have to play with
and fitting the pieces together as best you can. That's where the campaign binder (or
whatever device you need to capture your notes) comes in. If you can't see all the
pieces, you can't put the campaign back together again.

Until the next encounter!

Dungeon Master for Life,

Chris Perkins

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