Why Greyhawk in 2023? - grodog's Thoughts

 

 

 

 

From time to time I'll run across a discussion on Facebook, reddit, in a forum, or elsewhere, that seeks to answer the question, Why play in Greyhawk?  The question is often presented in contrast to another setting---"Why play in Greyhawk instead of the Forgotten Realms?" or Planescape, or Ravenloft, or whatever---or as part of a general poll about settings you like.  A recent reddit discussion about favorite settings prompted me to write this post. 

I have offered many responses to similar questions about how and why I love Greyhawk as a setting, and I've shared some over the years:

• Shane Plays interview podcast (October 2022):  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mN3e8_KNgxg
• Bill Silvey Greyhawk interview (August 2021):  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOHdG2j3VXI 
  
• Grogtalk podcast (July 2021):  https://www.grogcon.com/podcast/episode-87-interview-with-allan-grohe/
  
• Discussion about Iggwilv with Carlos Lising of casl Entertainment:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuZ3eOSrabE
  
• OSR Questionnarie responses:  https://grodog.blogspot.com/2018/10/osr-questionnaire.html (TLDR:  I love the fan community)
• grodog on LordGoSumba's Greyhawk Twitch streams:  https://www.youtube.com/@LordGosumba/search?query=grodog (Jay Scott's stream, and I'm often on with Anna Meyer and Mike Bridges too)
  
• grodog's Song of 7 Worlds:  https://web.archive.org/web/20200930033052/http://multiverse.world/blog/2017/04/26/grodogs-7-best/ (TLDR: I love the framework) 
  
• Ring of Five Questions: Allan Grohe: http://greyhawkery.blogspot.com/2011/11/ring-of-five-questions-allan-grohe.html (TLDR: I love it all :D )

 

The Silmarillion,
by J.R.R. Tolkien

All that said, over the holiday break while re-reading the second edition of Tolkien's The Silmarillion, in the introduction I ran across a quotation from one of Tolkien's letters that helps to explain some of what I love most about Greyhawk (page xii; my emphases):

I [JRRT] had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story---the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths...  I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched.  The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama. 

The quotation is famous among Tolkien fans and scholars, and inspired the titles for two different zines devoted to MERP gaming and Tolkien scholarship.  It also echoes in spirit and tone, if not specific language, three of the key features that I love most about the Greyhawk setting:

1. Greyhawk as a sandbox campaign setting 
2. Greyhawk as a place of adventure inspiration and expansion
3. Greyhawk's fan community helps to keep the spirit of Greyhawk alive and relevant to today's gamers 
   

Greyhawk as a Campaign Sandbox: Two Takes

A significant volume of Greyhawk-related lore has been published over the decades in official sources from TSR and WotC, and in unofficial content from both its original creators Gary Gygax, Rob Kuntz, and Lenard Lakofka (to name just a few), as well as from its many dedicated fans.  For a sampling of such 1e Greyhawk content see Adrian Newman's TSR Archive site and for a more-comprehensive listing see Echohawk's Greyhawk Collector's Guide.

All that said, Greyhawk still  offers "room to grow" in the baseline versions of the setting published over the years, particularly so in the Greyhawk Folio (1980) and 1983 Greyhawk Boxed Set versions.  By that, I mean that Greyhawk paints its details with a broad brush, that leaves room for you as the DM and the players adventuring in Oerth to finely detail the setting in your individual campaigns.  This is particularly true compared to other settings that have been heavily detailed in both gaming products and in novels, like The Forgotten Realms or Dragonlance.  Later versions of the setting of also support this mode of expansive creativity, simply with more backstory and history behind their "present day" in the setting.

For example, In Darlene's 576 Common Year Greyhawk map there is not much going on near the southern mouth of the Nesser River, so when Henry and I decided to start up a solo aquatic AD&D campaign for him, we set it there, knowing that there wouldn't be too much potential for conflict with existing Greyhawk content:

 

grodog's sketch map
for Greyhawk hex L3-94

grodog's Greyhawk
hex L3-94 with labels

grodog's Relaqua regional sketch map

Relaqua materials
for aquatic AD&D campaigning

 

Relaqua materials
for aquatic AD&D campaigning

While we were a little off in our "blank canvas" assessment---since I am not as deeply familiar with many 2e Greyhawk books, and WGR4 The Marklands created a new town named Nessermouth near to where we sited our Relaqua game---we're still happy to build out our version of the region as we desire, the Marklands notwithstanding ;)

 

Ninja'd!--the Nessermouth and
Gnatmarsh region,
from WGR4 The Marklands

A multitude of these "blank canvas" areas in Greyhawk exist across eras and editions, where you can start a game and begin to explore the world, one bit at a time.  Each of Darlene's Greyhawk map hexes is scaled to 30 miles across, so each offers plenty of room to build out your own version of Greyhawk, even within "known" hexes where towns, cities, and dungeons have predefined locations. 

In this second example, I shift gears a bit into how Greyhawk has slowly evolved as a sandbox setting over its decades of development.  Gygax seeded this twice-told rumor in the 1980 Greyhawk Folio, in the entries for The Wild Coast and the Suss Forest:  

Tales relate that somewhere within the Suss there exists a lost city of the Old Suloise--from which the Jewel River gained its name.  It has never been found, and the legend is highly doubtful (Folio page 19).

and 

A lost, ruined city of of the Old Suloise is said  to be hidden somewhere in the Suss forest, but few dare to venture on such a quest, particularly today (Folio page 26).

 

Artifact of Evil,
original artwork by Clyde Caldwell

 

While the same rumors exist in the 1983 Greyhawk Boxed Set, Gary later described this lost city in his novel Artifact of Evil, although it was never detailed fully for play as a published module (and is nicely summarized by Krista Siren in her Gord's Greyhawk site).

This group was to pierce the trackless tangles of the heart of the Suss Forest, find a lost ruin there, recover a bit of some strange and occult object of eldritch origin, and carry it safely into the hands of those who fought against Evil. (page 73)

On the east bank of the Jewel, Curley Greenleaf finally broke out his secret information.  It was a reproduction of an ancient map that crudely depicted the area they were in at a time long past.  This drawing showed that there was a city just a few miles---as far as they could determine, anyway---north of their present position. 

From what they could determine, they had to be within a few miles of their goal, only the ruin of the ancient city did not seem to exist.  Many things were possible, but entire cities did not just disappear....  Perhaps the whole thing was a fable....  Perhaps, but with but with so much evidence at hand, albeit information of cryptic sort, that seemed doubtful, (pages 78-79)

Legend had said a city of the Suloise had been here, but this place was certainly of origination predating the migration of the Invoked Devestation by centuries! (page 83)

 

Versions of Greyhawk published after the Folio and Boxed Set built upon these foundations, sometimes resolving mysteries initially left for DMs to define on their own.  Later works also introduced new wonders and legends into the setting, some of which, in turn, were explored in the next generations of products.  Carl Sargent's From the Ashes (1992) seeded the idea of the Star Cairns as a collection of lost tombs within the Cairn Hills; they were later built-out as The Star Cairns adventure in "The Lost Tombs" triology of modules during the 1998 Greyhawk revival.  Tenser's castle---The Fortress of Unknown Depths, first described by Gygax in WG6 Isle of the Ape---was sketched in passing the City of Greyhawk boxed set in 1992, and further enriched by Carl Sargent in Ivid the Undying before being built-out by Roger Moore in 1998's Return of the Eight.  The Isles of Woe were first mentioned in Eldritch Wizardry in 1976 in the artifact description for The Codex of the Infinite Planes, and were visited (I think for the first time), in the "Ether Threat" series of Living Greyhawk adventures back in 2002.  Countless additional examples exist.  These successive layers of accumulating lore keep Greyhawk fresh, and offer new opportunities for adventure.  They also showcase the unique stamp that each generation of designers and fans imprint on the setting.

These changes to the setting over time keep Greyhawk alive as a vibrant, freewheeeling sandbox:  some of its lore is contradictory, while some is couched in terms to suggest that it's not accurate ("the legend is highly doubtful").  This "Greyhawk Uncertainty Principle" empower DMs with the freedom to choose the versions of a legend or story they prefer, to relocate legends and dungeons elsewhere in the Flanaess, and to disregard and hack the discrepancies in canon compeltely when it suits the demands of their campaigns.

Greyhawk as a Place of Inspiring and Expanding Adventures

Many adventures provide DMs and players with years of gaming inspiration and fun at the table.  In many cases, they are truly modular, and can be incorporated into any era of Greyhawk, played with any edition (with some conversion, of course), and migrated to published settings like the Forgotten Realms or into homebrew worlds unknown outside of those who dice together around its table.  The Greyhawk modules deisgned by Gary Gygax, Rob Kuntz, Lenard Lakofka, David A. Cook, Carl Sargent, Erik Mona, Roger E. Moore, and many other designers are no exception. 

But Greyhawk's best adventures, like the setting itself, intentionally build design room for the DM and players to expand upon the baseline templates provided between their covers.  I see this in particular in the Giants and Drow series of six modules (G1-3 and D1-3), the paired S4 Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth and WG4 Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun, and WG5 Mordenkainen's Fantastic Adventure, but this principle holds in many other modules as well.  These adventures sketch foundations and also provide expansion points that inspire Dungeon Masters to design further:  to build next steps, to layer in additional lore and detail, to add another level to what already exists.  To echo Tolkien's quotation above---to wield pen and ink and personal creativity within the frameworks initially shaped by other minds and by other hands.  To image and render possibility, drama, and adventure unimagined but encouraged by Greyhawk's best designs. 

G1 Steading of the Hill Giant Chief offers lost temples and collapsed corridors that beg to be cleared out to reveal new levels to plumb.  The drowic underworld of D1 Descent into the Depths of the Earth charts the narrow path that leads to Erelhei Cinlu, but sketches a wider Underoerth that can include Carl Sargent's Night Below and Wolfgang Baur's Empire of the Ghouls (Open Design 2007) as desired.  Erik Mona's "Whispering Cairn" (Dungeon Magazine #124) is revisited and later expanded in Wolfgang Baur's "A Gathering of Winds" (Dungeon #129).  The Garden of the Plantmaster (Creations Unlimited 1988) connects both to Castle Greyhawk (where it originated) and to WG5's Lost City of the Elders , which Kuntz later shared in his El Raja Key Archive (TLB Games 2016).  Roger Moore's Return of the Eight mentions a hidden moon base laboratory used by Iggwilv and Tenser.  And so on.  

The wheel turns, and the plots mature.  Endangered Greyhawk calls its defenders to muster.  

Will you answer the call?

The call to adventure.

 

The Fan Community Sustains Greyhawk

Oerth Journal #37 nears publication and its launch will mark 28 years of fan-published support for the setting.*

The Greyhawk Wiki didn't exist during the heyday of the Greytalk and Greyhawk-L email listservs in the 1990s and the Living Greyhawk era.  

Jason Zavoda's wonderful Encyclopedia Greyhawkiana Index spans both eras of fandom:  rooted in the Greytalk era, it has blossomed through a modern redeployment in both wiki and Excel forms.  (For more detail, see my Greyhawk Links page notes).  

Discord supports Greyhawk discussion and gaming across a variety of servers:

• Greyhawk Online's server at https://discord.gg/a8JycrpA
• Canonfire!'s server at https://discord.gg/a5fPWJC8
• Virtual Greyhawk Con's Greyhawk Events server at https://discord.gg/kguu3fw7

reddit has dedicated channels for both Greyhawk and AD&D.  Twitch livestreams, YouTube channels, and podcasts champion and explore Greyhawk.  Blogs and forums offer deeper dives and keep the old Greytalk Archives alive even after they vanished into the deep ethereal of Lotus Notes hell decades ago.  (For more detail, see my Greyhawk Links page notes). 

The community of Greyhawk fans have rallied around the setting and kept it alive when its corporate overlords thought they had put the final bullet between its eyes.  

Greyhawk thrives during this decentralized, Fandom Renasissance, and its fans keep Greyhawk as relevant today in 2023 at it was in 1973.   

Greyhawk fans are tenacious, curious, and always willing to lend a hand to help welcome newcomers to the setting.  

Adventure beckons.

Join us. 

Allan.

==

* Friends of the Oerth Journal Assemble! posted by /u/ArtharntheCleric on 6 Jan 2023:

Greyhawk fans will probably be aware of the Oerth Journal, a "fan" created magazine available in print and on line since 1995 creating new content for Greyhawk. It was originally started to support Greyhawk when TSR was not, and has featured luminaries such as Len Lakofka, Gary Holian, Erik Mona, Roger E Moore, Erik Boyd, etc.

Oerth Journal during COVID migrated from Patreon to Jemi for donations to support its work, and the take up was not 100%. In fact well short of. So the Oerth Journal, with issue 37 due to come out soon (delayed due to injury and illness to editor Kristoph Nolen), needs your support. Kristoph will ensure it gets out, but we'd all prefer he wasn't putting his hand in his own pocket to ensure it does!

If you previously supported the OJ via Patreon but didn't renew when it moved to Jemi, or have enjoyed it before but never supported, or have never checked it out before and are willing, please look at providing support with a one off or regular donation via Jemi here:

https://jemi.so/greyhawkonline

The Prophecy of the Six and the Twelve

As retrieved at the behest of the Seventh Order of the Darkly Luminous from its Astral fastness in Zjelwyin Fall, the highest priests and priestesses of Celestian invoke the Mandate of Far Seering, and herald into Oerth and its sister-worlds, on this Godsday, the 11th of Goodmonth, in the 576th year of the reign of Celestial Aerdy, the nineteeth prophecy of the twins:  the Prophecy of the Six and the Twelve.

==



The Prophecy of the Six and the Twelve




Bleak communions: eldritch gardens, fallen shadows
encircle and conjure, name and bind our chorded woe.
All-Father lost amongst Fimbûl winters’ whispers—
wastelands of wishes, long-sought in mast’ries’ umbrage.
Twin daughters stand—resolute, against opening gates
as the sands’ tides rise in unchronicled secrets

found, lost, found again—the march of moments, secrets
seeking, seeking dusts drift and swallow all shadows.
Vain hope to halt the keying of myriad gates
without the Twins’ sacrosanct blessings—untold woe
will flow, filling seas, valleys, and skies with umbrage—
unbound cacophonies, loves’ unspoken whispers,

bloodlines unborn beyond Time’s unyielding whispers—
forever barred from unlocking tomorrows’ secrets.
The Twins times twice—each brightening in awed umbrage,
adroitly chime, ringed with wisdoms—chase the shadows,
unwind the Strands of Fate to reweave the worlds’ woe—
newly-spun, reborn in storms—scale the final gates.

A web of motes illumines planes, ley lines, and gates,
divines clear roots of quiet through the silences, whispers,
Susurrations, and branching forks—all paths of Woe.
To fight the future—decrypt its resounding secrets,
speak their wisdoms to the chiaroscuro shadows,
unveil the Prince of Raptors, find allies in Umbrage.

Beware!—winterlorn seekers, replete with umbrage,
assay to disjoin the Twins’ names, to fissure the gates,
rechime time, and wreath all worlds in ashen shadows.
Breach their unravelling wiles’ twisting whispers
lest—lured into Eclipse with chromatic secrets—
they unleash once more the long-sought, lost Isles of Woe!

Hearken!—black-iron wyrds weave arcs of worlds against Woe.
The Twins in issue must overcome the Twins’ umbrage—
undisputed their bedimmed, festering secrets
will spill across the spheres’ conjunctions, key the gates,
blind the Father in silence’s sibilant whispers
while the Stern Mother’s wisdoms fall into shadows.

Tides of Woe conjure and bind worlds in shadows.
Resplendent Umbrage sheathes tangs and tongues in whispers.
Gardens of secrets increase beyond the dim gates.

==

And so it begins.

Allan.

Planar Architecture for grodog's Current Greyhawk Campaigns

Part of what I'm working toward, by defining and incorporating the forgotten Folio forest into my current Greyhawk campaigns, is to play a more gates-oriented game.  This is one of several campaign concepts on my DMing bucket list, and in this case they appear excerpted here as a cluster of related ideas:

Games/campaigns I'd most like to run, in rough order of my desire:

• gates-driven AD&D campaign starting out at fresh at low level (1st-3rd-ish), where gates are sufficiently common that they drive the entire campaign:  economy, weather, culture, travel, etc. (think The Primal Order meets Stargate meets World of Tiers meets Moorcock's multiverse meets Greyhawk)
• AD&D "Treasure of the Dragon Queen"; I'll have to write it first, of course:  http://www.greyhawkonline.com/grodog/gh_tourneys_dragon_queen.html
• AD&D Greyhawk drowic adaptation of MERP 1e Courts of Ardor campaign (could be played as an evil campaign by drowic PCs or traditional good-ish PCs; could merge with previous gates-driven entry)
• AD&D Abyssal campaign (PCs are a new generation of demons, vying for power amidst the chaos; could combine with gates or drowic ones above); I've slowly been building the framework for an AD&D game where the PCs run demons and explore the mythic geography of the multiverse

In order to play a gates-oriented game, I need to design elements that specifically introduce gates and related magics into the game.  Some of that is easier, some harder.  We'll see how it goes as the games continue, but here's the framework that I've been working up for Oerth's immediate multiversal neighborhood.  I wrote the bulk of this post in response to some discussion in the Greyhawk sub-reddit, in which the user u/P4TR10T_96 asked A Question About the Planes:

Are [the planes] connected to all prime material planes, with the exception of worlds that are explicitly stated to be separated from the rest (Eberron for example)?

but I'd drafted the bulk of the content below in my design journal back on New Year's Day:

This is in your purview to define as the DM. There's not a lot of explicit guidelines on defining your own multiverse(s), but I do list a bunch of resources you can dig into in my two gates/planar articles from Knockspell Magazine:

• https://grodog.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-theory-and-use-of-gates-in-campaign-dungeons.html
• https://grodog.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-theory-and-use-of-gates-in-campaigndungeons-part-2.html

Greenwood's seminal article "Theory and Use of Gates" and the bibliography at the end of part 1 should both be particularly useful for your purposes, I think.

In my current Greyhawk campaigns, I'm boosting the gates/planar aspect of play through a few different methods:

1. I'm leveraging alternate Prime Material Planes to Oerth, in a Norse-like model with some known/planarly "nearby" worlds as "sister worlds." *
2. Adding more gates, magical pools, free-standing portals, and such into the mix early in the campaign, so that the PCs grow in power with these as baseline "givens" in the game world/setting and in their campaign adventures. NPCs dwarves will be encountered that are from "Nidavellier" for example (or whatever name I settle on for that place).
3. Adding some more spells (see my 2nd KS article above) into the mix, along with some planar-related magic items that will make planar-related "stuff" more accessible for the PCs

* The list of sister worlds is not fully-baked yet, but will likely end up looking something like this:

1. Oerth/Greyhawk - home plane for the current batch of PCs
2. Mendenein - my homebrew campaign that is interleaved with Greyhawk and is its "closest" sister world: many permanent portals exist between the two planes, including some that are always open and allow cross-planar trade, for example; if you're curious, you can see some of my maps in on Dragonsfoot at https://www.dragonsfoot.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=2025364#p2025364
3. Hyperborea - the plane for Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea, from my friend Jeff Talanian's publishing company Northwind Adventures: https://www.hyperborea.tv/store/c1/Featured_Products.html
4. "Jotunheim" - in some form or other: the homeland of giants, which will likely have multiple layers/sub-planes associated with it (Muspelheim, for example)
5. "Faerie" - in some form or other - the homeland of elves and fey; probably won't be an alternate Prime, but more like the Shadow Plane or Ethereal, in that it's accessible from many Primes (via regio-like zones from Ars Magica/Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood)
6. "Nidavellier" - in some form or other: the homeland for dwarves; connects to Oerth in the Underdark
7. Arabian Nights desert plane: more Dune, The Eight, Rodney Matthews, Thieves World and Tattooine than Dark Sun or Al-Qadim
8. Archipelagos and Islands watery plane: Blue Planet meets the Greek Aegean; a likely homeworld for the Oeridians, perhaps
9. Other: various other settings will be linked and in the mix, but not as "close" and therefore not as easily accessible as these planes. The other settings will include Avremier (from Mothshade Concepts), Helveczia (from u/GaborLux), Averoigne (from CAS, and perhaps other of his worlds like Zothique), the Old World (from 1e Warhammer FRPG), perhaps the Known World (from B/X), and the usual smorgasbord from fiction (Moorock, Leiber, REH, etc.)

In addition to what I'd posted in the reddit, there are some other planar decisions that I'm still working through, too:

• The Rhenne home plane of Rhôp will be in the mix as well many of Greyhawk's famous and infamous demi-planes and Fading Lands.  I don't plan to place Rhôp planarly "close" to Oerth, and am pondering that it may have been destroyed (or presumed destroyed, with the Rhenee always holding out hope that it survives still---a way to reverse-exploit their chicanery against them, perhaps:  Rhôp being the one thing you can reliably gull the Rhenne with), making the Rhenee into planar refugees/expats of a sort.  I sort of envision them having fled a planar rift, so portions of Rhôp may survive as fragments in the Ethereal, Astral, Shadow/etc. planes....
• I've sketched out a simple planar relationship diagram over Memorial Day weekend:
   
  

  

  Oerth and Mendenein Prime-Planar Environs

  
  I'm not sure that it really reflects the planar relationships that I want I to define yet, and since I'm still thinking of a Tree of Life structure for the planes too, that may necessitate bumping one or more up to the level of "primary Primes" perhaps.
• I have another similar diagram and/or notes that take the planar concepts from Dragon #73 and leverage 2d4 joined into a pointier six-sider as the basis for that planar structure (no doubt inspired by Steve Marsh's d4 structure proposed in Dragon #73), but haven't refound them yet.  That's more important for the Inner vs. Prime planes, so not super-necessary, yet.

More to come as it percolates into play! :D

Allan.

Greyhawk - Setting the Wichita Campaign in Motion

Last Sunday, 26 January 2020, we created characters (some both of two, some just one of two since they had create PCs at TsunamiCon in October) and began to adventure in our local Wichita Greyhawk campaign. 

The players created the following first-level characters---two each, since I wanted them to have backups in case PCs are turned to stone, killed, or otherwise out-of-action for awhile:

• Brad - one new PC:  Verdure, a female half-elf druid; 2nd PC TBD
• Brian - one new PC:  Varis, a half-elf mercenary for hire (assassin), who is being played in preference to Melisor, a human magic-user (who delved my Castle Greyhawk at TsunamiCon)
• Henry - one PC:  Vilador, male human magic-user, who also delved Castle Greyhawk at TsunamiCon; 2nd PC TBD after I figure out if we're doing children in the game or not (I'm leaning toward yes)
• Jeff - one new PC:  Hagrid, male dwarf fighter/thief; 2nd PC is Oberon Canorbe, human cleric of St. Cuthbert; Hagrid and Verdure split the costs for Fang, a wardog
• Jon - two new PCs:  Danger Ranger II, male human ranger; 2nd PC is Slim Bandicoot, human thief
• Vince - one new PC:  Lugh, male human ranger; 2nd PC is Seriat, human cleric of Obah-Hai

Several other players participated in the TsunamiCon events, but weren't able to attend on Sunday's kickoff, so I'm still waiting to see where the mix of regular and semi-players settles out.

After creating PCs, the players opted to explore through the ruined monastery dungeons from the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide, which I've set on the southern verge of the western side of the Gnarley Forest:

Darlene's Greyhawk map
from the 1980 Greyhawk Folio

The PCs began in Ellorn, a small mining thorp north of Narwell, on 26 Fireseek 576 Common Year (CY).  (I'm using Clay Luther's Greyhawk calendar, if you're curious).  They heard rumor of the old monastery of Wee Jas, with its fabled fire opal never discovered during the siege that laid the site low in ages past.  More-recently, the lands around the monastery were caught up in some of the elemental chaos from the Cathedral of Elemental Evil on the western side of the Gnarley---some of the land around the monastery subsided, and a fen now surrounds much of the tor that the monastery ruins sit atop. 

With the help of a local guide, A'zor'an (a Balklunish hunter/trapper/furrier), the PCs found the ruins.  While advancing across the fen on the raised causeway, Hagrid the dwarf slipped and fell into a pool sufficiently deep to submerge him completely as an edge of the track crumbled; this also attracted the attention of a fast-moving fen spider, that rushed the PCs in an attempt to find its next meal.  They were not surprised, but were somewhat divided between those above on the causeway, and Danger Ranger and the guide below attempting to help pull the dwarf from the mire.  The characters were able to wound the spider and drive it off without it causing any significant harm to them, although they were a bit surprised at its ability to skim quickly across the water's surface, as well as when it dove underwater and swim away out of sight. 

After driving off the spider, the party began to explore, finding a pair of intact structures in the center of the pile:  a well-building, partially open to the elements (in its construction, not due to it being ruined), with a large stone well-cover intact atop the well-shaft.  Lowering Hagrid the dwarf into the shaft via ropes revealed that it a strongly-flowing stream about 40-50' below, rushing with cold water and no significant space for breathable air to allow PCs follow its course.  The players returned the cap to the well, and marked it carefully with chalk to show whether anyone else moved it in the future.

The other building contained a stairwell down into the dungeons below.  Lhou the ranger determined that tracks showed some booted traffic going in and out of the second building, and Verdure the druidess employed speak with animals to learn from a mouse on site that other "giants" would move into/out of the ruins with some regularity. 

Dusk fell, and while preparing to camp, the PCs saw a large group of figures moving across the fen, along its edge and parallel to the ruins.  Hiding themselves, they were able to observe a large body of humans (more than 50), from which a smaller group of 10-20 split off and crossed the causeway.  They marched right up to the ruins, and met with a group that emerged from the stairwell building; the leaders of the two groups conferred for several minutes while 8 of the motley crew (seemingly bandits) went below and did not return.  The characters were not able to overhear much of the conversation, and chose not to engage either group, given the larger force just across the causeway.  

And that is where play concluded for the day.   The next session should be next week!

Allan.

The Starless Sea---Campaign Structures vs. Adventure Structures

How much thought have we collectively given to game elements/structures that are part of a campaign's flow and evolution, independent of the structure of the individual adventures that make it up? 

I've been reading Erin Morgenstern's new book _The Starless Sea_, which is a fairy-tale-like novel told through nested stories like the 1001 Arabian Nights; the book explores the stories' structures, some of which are meta-fictionally self-reflective/-reflexive, a la Borges or Robert Coover.  It's a bit like a mega-dungeon of a book, really.

So, it got me thinking about elements and structures that drive campaigns over the medium- to long haul, like:

• active foreshadowing through backgound/history/sage advice, spies/spying, divination and research spells, prophecies and divine/infernal guidance, etc.
• hidden foreshadowing through returning to earlier locations/NPCs/items/prophecies/etc. that have a newly-realized meaning or significance in retrospect after learning D after A, B, and C ("we should never have sold that wand at 3rd level so we could pay our training costs---it's the X"; "whoa!:  we need to head back to that well in level 6 and open that unopenable door with this key now"; etc.); this works best, of course, when specific items, content, histories, etc. have layers of additional meaning/mystery to them to be found
• assembling pieces and parts of multi-part magic items (Rod of Seven Parts, Eye and Hand of Vecna, etc.), maps, information/lore, paintings, etc.; Anthony Huso's Black Journal falls into this category, I think, in addition to being an awesome prop
• red herrings, false trails/false alarms, and misinterpretations:  player agency means that they'll get distracted by the fake ghost's tricks rather than unmasking the fake ghost, sometimes; this is possible through their own misinterpretations, as well as through being distracted by false trails/fake news clues intentionally created by NPCs---I'm thinking of  Urgaan of Angarngi's map from Leiber's "Jewels in the Forest" here, or Eclavdra's false trail luring the classic GDQ players to assault Lolth as the root of all of their woes.
• independent actors with their own agendas that drive their goals, priorities, relationships, etc.---this is the whole "putting it all in motion" to create verisimilitude

What other kinds of tools like these do we use to structure long-term campaign play?

In response to that original question, Anthony Huso offered several comments, and suggested a pair of additions to my list above:

• an actual calendar with slow-moving but time-critical plot points
• real consequences to player choices

and to which I replied:

Great points, Anthony!  I definitely use the Greyhawk calendar---my favorite version is the one created by Clay Luther, since it's a great tracking calendar---and I find that Greyhawk's alternative dating systems (along with my own in Mendenein) are very useful in-game to help ground the players (and their PCs) in Greyhawk's history.

I finished reading _The Starless Sea_ last night, which got me thinking further about the pacing of stories and their endings, and about their differences in application to campaigns and to games vs. to literature.  Foreshadowing is a literary technique, and not all literary tropes and techniques will be as applicably useful in an RPG.  In addition, stories have endings, but RPG campaigns don't necessarily have endings (although they do have a natural rising/falling pacing of action in play).  So what techniques and tropes (and other tools) exist uniquely in RPG campaigns that aren't literary in nature, and how do they impact the structure of campaign play?

That's an open question that I don't have a definite answer to, but here are a few mulled thoughts.
 
There's a lot of overlap in literary and cinematic techniques with RPGs, but I think that's in part due to the still-nascent nature of RPGs as a form of play, art, and creative expression: we know drama, literature, and movies since they've been around longer, so we naturally incorporate the terminology, structures, and tools from those genres into RPGs; Justin Alexander has written several sets of posts on his blog The Alexandrian about dramatic and cinematic structures in RPGs, for example. But RPGs are distinct from these forms, on several key fronts:

• RPGs are creative ensembles, not performing ensembles (Critical Role, et al, aside): the players and the DM build the campaign together, one encounter, one adventure at a time, and it is through their interplay that the campaign flourishes
• the DM is not the author: this follows logically from the previous point, but it's worth being explicit about it, I think; the DM doesn't own the story of the campaign---the DM is more like the director of an orchestra, since without the other players' PC activities as participation in the game, the DM's actions are silently meaningless (the DM's behind-the-scenes design work is far from meaningless, but you get my point still, I hope; note to self: ponder the DM as architect vs. director)
• RPGs are games, so their primary motivation is to entertain and to have fun, and that "fun" piece colors the RPG genre distinctly from drama, literature, and movies---which set out to entertain, but are not in and of themselves expected to "be fun" in the way that games are
• As long-term games, RPGs are expected to have "replay value"---that secret sauce which keeps players returning to the table week after week, year after year, to explore the game that they're building together. One-shots, asides, and classic reruns (playing modules from our youth?) are certainly part of the pacing model of the campaign, but without that continuous draw to re-engage, a campaign will probably stagnate (this is probably one of the best reasons to have a stable of recurring villains as an organization vs. single-figures---if the PCs are pitted against The Cult of Vecna, even when they take out the EHP at some point, there are still other foes standing who need to be dealt with)
• RPGs are games with systems, so random events can and do significantly impact the play of the game and the outcomes of actions in the campaign, within the scope of the systems used. When the key villain rolls a 1 on a saving throw and is charmed, or disintegrated, or plane shifted away to the Seven Heavens---or whatever!---that's probably not a result that the players (and their PCs) or the DM (and the NPCs, monsters, etc.) have necessarily prepared for. So the nature of random results inject random outcomes into gameplay which the players and the DM have to run with, respond to, and manage as complication during each and every session.

The flow and pace of these many random events play out in retrospect as the sense-making stories that we tell ourselves to summarize the encounters, interactions, combats, and explorations of adventures in the context of the campaign, but that's still a literary layer thrown over and summarizing the action of the gameplay. 

What more falls into this bucket?

Please share your thoughts, analyses, speculations, ideas, and inspirations in the comments!

Allan.


P.S.  There's also something in the zone here worth considering on processes vs. outcomes. See https://seths.blog/2019/11/the-process-vs-the-outcome/ for a kick-off point, but an RPG needs to be fun in the process of playing it, which will reinforce the longer-term replay value ideas above. Milestones and outcomes are important too, in particular for longer-term campaign play; not just the in-the-moment process of playing. So this starts to get into sub-processes building into processes into workflows of processes into complex systems of processes*---which is why system selection is an important factor in campaign viability: if the system for your game is designed to product disposable one-year-long campaigns, as the 3.x and later editions of D&D are, then you shouldn't be surprised that the game design doesn't scale to support epic-level play over three or more years.

ATGj

*I'm also not jumping down the rabbit hole of Rob Kuntz's "open forms" book concept yet, but that is a quite possibly an ending point for this analysis, I suppose.