Patreon DevBlog #11: Question Your Assumptions

This is the longest devblog I’ve written yet, and it deals with exactly one (1) arc in Curse of Strahd: Reloaded.

Why is it so big? Because it’s full of secrets—secrets about game design, narrative design, and adventure critique aplenty, all mushed together into a big ol’ pile.

Hopefully you find it interesting!

Problem: How do I fix the Mordenkainen / Arabelle questlines in Curse of Strahd?

The original Curse of Strahd module has two parallel plot lines with such atrocious narratives and gameplay that they seem to be, fundamentally, afterthoughts that the Perkins team decided to toss, half-baked into the final product. They are:

1. The quest to rescue Arabelle from Bluto at Lake Zarovich; and
2. The quest to restore the Mad Mage of Mount Baratok.

Breaking Down Arabelle’s Quest

Let’s start with Arabelle’s quest. In theory, this is a perfectly fine quest: the players visit the Vistani encampment outside of Vallaki—either to get fake “escape-through-the-mists” potions or to obtain one of the Tarokka treasures—and have to go rescue Luvash’s daughter, Arabelle, in order to get them. In practice, however, things are a lot more problematic.

Let’s start with the first problem: If the players don’t have a Tarokka treasure there, there’s really not much hooking the PCs to the Vistani camp in the first place. Now, this isn’t, by itself, an issue—it’s fine to have optional content in games!—but the module also allows the PCs to trigger the quest by encountering Bluto at Lake Zarovich.

In this latter case, however, Bluto tosses the kidnapped Arabelle—silent, unmoving, and concealed in a burlap sack—into the lake and lets her sink. There’s really nothing to let the PCs know that they have any reason to rescue this sinking burlap sack. Even if the PCs do recognize that they should do something, this entire fiasco puts the “random” into “random encounter”: There’s no broader dramatic question, and no sense of broader tension. This interaction is the essence of: “The DM had someone conspicuously throw a sack into a lake, so I guess we should go check it out!” Horrible, horrible design.

And there’s not even any meaningful gameplay! Remember our five pillars of gameplay - combat encounters, social encounters, obstacle courses, puzzles, and skill challenges? This encounter—in which each of the PCs gets to make a single Athletics check to try and save Arabelle—almost counts as the shadow of a potential skill challenge, but not much more. Why? Because a meaningful gameplay challenge, by definition, requires iterated and strategic player action in pursuit of a dramatic goal.

Unlike a real skill challenge, the PCs aren’t choosing to make an Athletics check; they’re just rolling what the DM tells them to roll; hence, there’s no strategy here. There’s obviously no iteration, either—it’s just a single check. And, as we’ve already discussed, there’s no drama here; the PCs don’t even know what’s inside the sack, even if they do already know that Arabelle is missing! You might as well make the climax of this adventure arc, “The players can try to pick a mysterious locked door; if they pick the lock successfully, Arabelle lives, and if they fail, Arabelle dies. The players have no way of suspecting that Arabelle is behind the door until and unless they successfully pick the lock.” Horrible, horrible gameplay.

And let’s take a look at the macro-level gameplay issues. How, exactly, are the PCs supposed to rescue Arabelle without even knowing where she is? This isn’t even a case where the designer has provided a single, dice-gated clue and has placed all of their hopes and dreams on the PCs rolling high enough to figure it out. This is a case where there are no clues whatsoever—nothing at all that would lead the PCs to hear “Arabelle is missing!” and eventually go, “Huh; I guess we should check the lake!”

I wouldn’t be surprised if, in 95% of cases, the players receive the quest to find Arabelle and then…never find her! This quest (again, on a macro-level) is supposed to be a puzzle gameplay challenge—like all mysteries, it’s an iterated and strategic game of doing small tasks to find clues that then must be logically pieced together to reveal a broader whole. But without any clues to find, there’s no gameplay at all—just dumb luck!

(I wonder if all those rules for wilderness random encounters in the original module were written under the assumption that the PCs would spend a lot more time off-roading away from the Svalich Road to do things like search random hexes while searching for Arabelle? Hah. That certainly didn’t happen.)

That’s, of course, without even getting into the narrative problems. Bluto Krogarov, a soulless shell of a man, feels sad that he’s not catching any fish, and so…decides to walk a half-mile outside of town away from the lake, to an encampment filled with strangers he’s presumably never met, kidnap a small child he’s presumably never seen, and then stick her in a sack and dump her in the lake? And he expects this to, somehow, get him more fish?

And he waits until the exact moment when the PCs approach him on Lake Zarovich to do this?

Here’s a major, major rule of dramatic tension: Never justify the timing of a dramatic event on the sole grounds that “it makes drama.” In order to preserve verisimilitude, you should always, always try to find at least the flimsiest excuse to answer the question: “Why now?” diagetically (i.e., with an in-universe rationale).

In Curse of Strahd, the sole answer to the question of “Why is Bluto dumping Arabelle now instead of earlier or later?” is: “Because it’s time for the players to rescue her.” There’s no diagetic reason whatsoever. Bad, bad narrative design! (It's especially egregious if it's been multiple in-game days since the PCs got the quest in the first place—are you seriously trying to tell me that Bluto had Arabelle in his possession for the past six days but only just now decided to row out and dump her?)

Oh, and let’s not forget the reward the PCs get for rescuing Arabelle. If there’s something they want in the treasure wagon (e.g., a Tarokka item), then that’s great! They get something. But if there isn’t, then, at most, they get something shiny and valuable from the treasure wagon that is basically worthless because there is nothing to buy in Barovia. (If they were hoping to get an escape-from-Barovia potion, then all they get is a rugpull too, hah.)

Breaking Down Mordenkainen’s Quest

Mordenkainen’s quest in the original module is a bit better than Arabelle’s but not by much.

There are two hooks to this adventure in RAW:

1. Madam Eva tells the PCs that the Mad Mage of Mount Baratok is their foretold ally, and they go try to find him after learning of him in Vallaki.
2. The PCs hear about a crazy wizard frying fish with lightning bolts in Vallaki, remember what they heard about the wizard who led the rebellion against Strahd, think, “huh, that sounds neat,” and go check him out.

Once again, however, we have some huge gameplay and narrative deficiencies.

Let’s start with the narrative issues this time: Why on earth did losing to Strahd drive Mordenkainen “mad”—to the point where he forgot his name and his world of origin and his entire history? (This isn’t quite as bad as Victor’s “unkind words” driving Stella Wachter to believe that she’s a cat, but it’s pretty close.)

Furthermore, there’s no dramatic tension or buildup in this entire sequence: The PCs hear about the mage, travel across Lake Zarovich to find him, meet him, and then…he immediately attacks them.

Let’s talk about gameplay now. Let’s ignore, for the moment, that there’s really nothing stopping the PCs from finding Mordy—that, aside from potential random encounters, there’s no meaningful journey or challenge to actually encounter him. Instead, let’s talk about the encounter itself.

I’ve spoken in the past about why solo boss monsters fail, so I won’t go into too much depth on that here. But the fact remains that Mordenkainen is a single (somewhat squishy) CR 12 opponent with some very powerful spells and basically no defenses to speak of. When placed up against a full party of PCs, that’s a recipe for an incredibly swingy encounter that either winds up as a TPK (if the PCs lose) or a one-round knockout (if the PCs win). That’s technically a combat encounter, but hardly a meaningful one! (There’s no strategy involved if there’s no way to win, and there’s no iteration involved if the combat ends almost as quickly as it began.)

The problem gets even worse once the PCs do defeat Mordenkainen—assuming, of course, he doesn’t successfully escape, and the PCs don’t accidentally kill him. (Remember that the only way to KO an enemy, rather than by killing them, is to use a melee attack—spells and crossbow bolts auto-kill on 0 HP! See pg. 198 of the Player’s Handbook.)

Why do things get worse? Because Mordenkainen is still the “mad” mage—and the PCs need a greater restoration spell to cure his mind! That alone would be bad enough, given that greater restoration can’t be cast until the PCs hit 9th level (long after they first arrive in Vallaki!), and given that only four classes—artificer, bard, cleric, and druid—can learn to cast greater restoration, and only two of them (cleric and druid) can swap out their spells as-needed.

But that’s not all! Mordenkainen has cast a mind blank spell on himself for some reason, and the PCs have no way of finding this out except by making a one-time only DC 18 Arcana check, or by somehow figuring out that they need to ask Mordenkainen why the spell is failing and succeeding on a DC 15 Persuasion check?

And did I mention that the greater restoration spell’s description doesn’t actually mention that it cures insanity, and that it’s perfectly reasonable for the PCs to never even try to use it in the first place?

And of course, if the PCs do somehow manage to cure Mordenkainen, he refuses to assist them in their quest to kill Strahd unless he’s their foretold ally, despite the fact that…he has every possible reason to do so? For god’s sake, if they have the Sunsword, that alone should convince him to stop whatever he’s doing and try to help out. He’s out of other options!

Gah. Bad design! Bad design everywhere!

Putting the Pieces Together

Admittedly, criticizing something is a lot easier than fixing it. So let’s start by confirming exactly what we’re trying to fix:

• We need to give both adventures meaningful setup and tension.
• We need to give both adventures a sense of progression and at least one meaningful gameplay challenge.
• We need to make both adventures tie meaningfully into the broader campaign narrative.
• We need to justify or replace any nonsensical adventure elements (e.g., Bluto’s kidnapping, Mordenkainen’s madness).

A lot of this is, obviously, bound up in two key questions:

1. For the first quest, why was Arabelle kidnapped?
2. For the second quest, what is Mordenkainen doing here?

As I was speaking with a friend about these adventures a few months ago (back when Re-Reloaded was more of a concept than an actual product) we came to the realization that—as you’ve probably guessed by now—these two questions can actually tie directly into each other: Mordenkainen, not Bluto, kidnapped Arabelle, and is keeping her prisoner in his Mordenkainen’s magnificent mansion demiplane.

Why? Because Mordenkainen isn’t insane; he’s just frantic to escape Barovia, and wants to know how to bypass the mists. How is he doing that? By experimenting on Vistani test subjects to try and distill the arcane “essence” of what allows them to traverse the mists. Why does he need Arabelle? Because she’s a seer, and he believes that he can use her precognitive abilities to “speedrun” his experiments—after all, it’s a lot easier to do lots of tests very quickly if you don’t even need to finish—let alone start—half of those experiments in the first place!

Oh—and why is Mordenkainen, the “hero” who led the rebellion against Strahd, doing this? Because, by his own classic D&D backstory, he’s not Good; he’s True Neutral, to the point where he’s the kind of guy to start murdering angels if things start going too well. He’s a self-obsessed narcissist who believes that he’s doing work of Cosmic Importance, and, well, if he needs to exsanguinate a few hapless Vistani to get out of Barovia and get back to his Great Work, what’s the harm in that?

(Quick sidenote: It’s very popular in the Curse of Strahd community to try and “bulk up” Mordenkainen’s sidequest by adding in some “journey-to-the-center-of-the-mind” ritual that lets the PCs restore him. This solves the issue of lack-of-gameplay, but addresses approximately zero narrative concerns (why did Mordenkainen go mad in the first place? why doesn’t he just go with the PCs to help them kill Strahd?) and even introduces some new ones (why does Mordenkainen specifically have this kind of weird mind-restoration ritual available to him?). It becomes very clear very quickly that, for all their good intentions, these gameplay additions are just that—gameplay for the sake of gameplay—with basically no grounding in the diagetic world of Barovia.)

Back on topic. This was a good start, but we still had a major question to resolve: Is Mordenkainen still an active, hostile antagonist here? That is, do the players need to mano a mano him in a combat showdown to rescue Arabelle and bring her back home? Let’s weigh the pros and cons:

• Pros: We get a cool climactic finish to end the adventure.
• Cons: Given that this is meant to be a 4th-level quest, it’s kind of depressing that friggin’ Mordenkainen can be defeated by a party of 4th-level PCs—whether he’s missing his staff and spellbook or not.

As it turned out, the Cons had it—we weren’t about to let ol’ Mordy get his face shoved in by a bunch of Tier-1 heroes, especially if he didn’t even have the excuse of being Literally Insane.

But that created a really big dilemma: How do you create an adventure in which the finale doesn’t involve Beating The Bad Dude To a Pulp?

After some additional thinking, we dared to ask: Do we even need a finale?

Why not just…have Mordenkainen let Arabelle go?

After all, Vistani seers can’t see their own futures. By kidnapping Arabelle, Mordenkainen has unintentionally intertwined their futures together, making it impossible for her to foresee any of the outcomes of his work. However, even though Mordenkainen knows that she’s useless to him, he’s too busy with his Very Important Work to bother taking her home…and has therefore basically left her in a dark corner of his demiplane laboratory to quietly cry.

Great stuff! Now, Mordenkainen is an optional boss—if the players get really mad at him, they can choose to throw the first punch; otherwise, though, he’ll just be happy for them to take this little brat out of his hair. This, in turn, lets me buff him up significantly compared to RAW—keeping him weak enough to have lost to the new three-phase Strahd, but making him powerful enough that it’s a little easier for legacy players to buy that this is, in fact, Mordenkainen—or, at least, a younger, less experienced version of him.

So I sat with this for a while, and was pretty happy with it. But over time, a little nagging feeling started to grow inside of me—a sneaking suspicion that, while I’d made these two quests a whole lot neater, I hadn’t actually filled in their hollow centers.

After all, what’s the dramatic question of this new quest? “When Arabelle is kidnapped by a mysterious giant eagle, can the PCs use their influence to rescue her from Mordenkainen’s clutches before she’s lost forever?”

Except—no, wait; that’s not quite right. The PCs don’t need to do anything to persuade Mordy to give her up; they just have to walk up to the front door and ask.

We could take a route similar to The Odyssey and make the journey (i.e., getting to the demiplane) more dramatic than the destination, but Barovia’s far too small for that, and it’s not entirely clear why Mordenkainen would have a big labyrinth or something at the front door to his demiplane when he could close the portal to stop anyone from getting in. So that’s not gonna work.

Oh, and Arabelle won’t be lost forever—she’s just kinda sitting around and vibing. Luvash is obviously worried about her, but in truth, she’s in no danger at all. So the whole thing feels like a big shaggy dog story by the end.

So the dramatic question is now just: “When Arabelle is kidnapped by a mysterious giant eagle, can the PCs rescue her from Mordenkainen’s clutches?” Yes. The answer is yes. There’s no meaningful challenge to it; as soon as they put the pieces together to figure out where she is (which is pretty easy, especially with the three-clue rule applied), there’s not much left to do but play Barovia Walking Simulator and make snide passive-aggressive comments at Mordenkainen.

I tried, valiantly, to try and add in a climactic finale so that—and I quote myself—the adventure wouldn’t end “with the energy of a wet fart.” I brainstormed on my own, and I brainstormed with my ChatGPT Council of Adventure. I tried to figure out ways to use Arrigal as a potential antagonist—I really wanted to get some mileage out of his status as one of Stahd’s spies—and ChatGPT actually gave me the great idea of having him join the party in an effort to help them save Arabelle. (I’m already doing something similar for other adventures—Victor and Stella join the PCs for the raid on Old Bonegrinder, and Muriel joins the PCs for the assault on the Wizard of Wines—so this just seemed to make perfect sense to really develop Arrigal’s character a bit more deeply.)

But I still needed a climax. Eventually, I settled on the idea that Mordenkainen had hopped Arabelle up on prophecy-juice, and that someone—Arrigal, probably—was going to release her from her safety cage, which would have the end result of unleashing a storm of chaotic energies—a byproduct of her nature as a descendant of the Seeker, a goddess of storms?—and which in turn would release a bunch of monsters from Mordy’s mansion and threaten to collapse the demiplane, killing everyone inside.

This was a neat idea! But I realized that I wasn’t willing to accept the possibility of an actual TPK here, which meant that the demiplane couldn’t actually be at a real risk of collapsing. And I also realized that I’d created new problems with this proposed solution: Presumably, Mordenkainen had been able to contain Arabelle’s dangerous energies in the first place, so why would he struggle now? Also, assuming he struggled to do so, what help would the PCs even be able to provide? Why would a seer with basic precognitive abilities start unleashing a crazy barrage of lightning bolts, anyway? And why wouldn’t Mordenkainen try and lock Arabelle up the second he saw her outside of containment, rather than allowing her to go through a full power-up sequence? (It felt a little silly to have Arabelle’s destructive wave start the second her cell was unlocked, but it felt even sillier to have it randomly start when Mordenkainen showed up later.)

This all started feeling a little bit too contrived. And to make matters worse, it was basically on rails: If the PCs didn’t let Arrigal break Arabelle out of her containment cell (or if they didn’t allow Arrigal to accompany them at all!), then the adventure had no climax whatsoever. The whole thing was a house of cards built upon an artifice of railroaded misunderstanding.

So I simmered on this problem for a few more days. Finally, I tried to get to the root of the problem by going back to a few very basic questions.

Question One: Do I want a climactic ending to this adventure? Yes; of course I do.

Question Two: Which gameplay challenge do I want to use to end this adventure? I don’t want it to be a social encounter (they’re not gonna negotiate with Mordenkainen), nor an obstacle course, nor a skill challenge, nor a puzzle (why would any of those things happen inside of or around Mordenkainen’s demiplane?). That left a combat encounter.

Question Three: Is Mordenkainen a protagonist or an antagonist? That is: is he opposing the PCs in this combat encounter, or is he aiding them? He can’t be opposing them—he’s too strong for that—so I guessed he had to be aiding them.

But what would Mordenkainen be fighting against? I didn’t want to put, say, Rahadin or Strahd as an enemy here, and I couldn’t really figure out how to involve the PCs in a meaningful way. But that made me realize something:

All of my problems were based on a single fact: the fact that the Mage of Mount Baratok was Mordenkainen.

What if…he wasn’t?

Surprise! This Was an Aesop About Questioning Your Assumptions the Whole Time

Okay, but hear me out.

Mordenkainen is too powerful for the PCs to fight. He’s too powerful for the PCs to help. So that means he can neither oppose the PCs nor join them for this final climactic battle.

So what if we changed his identity? What if he wasn’t Mordenkainen, but a different (somewhat weaker) archmage who had kidnapped Arabelle for other reasons?

I was aided in this respect by a mentoring session that I’d recently had—one in which my mentee’s campaign had swapped out Mordenkainen for an alternate antagonist: a twilight cleric who’d kidnapped Arabelle for nefarious reasons as-yet undecided.

In that session, we’d eventually decided that Arabelle had been kidnapped because she was the seer who would one day deliver the equivalent of Hysoska’s Hexad, a prophecy from classic Ravenloft lore that led to an event called the “Grand Conjunction,” in which the walls of the Demiplanes of Dread would fall, allowing the Darklords (like Strahd) to reach out into the Material Plane once more.

Back to Re-Reloaded. Why had Arabelle been kidnapped? Because her kidnapped knew that she was about to deliver a prophecy, and he wanted to make sure he heard and controlled that prophecy. Now we just needed an archmage to do the kidnapping.

As it turns out, Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft has an archmage revved-up and ready to go: Firan Zal’honen, the not-too-secret human alter-ego of the former lich-king Azalin (sshh).

Firan’s a mist wanderer—someone who travels through the mists of the Domains of Dread. In his case, he’s trying to find an exit—a way out of the mists, to freedom. So here’s what I came up with:

Firan comes to Barovia, despite his hatred for Strahd, to seek the counsel of Madam Eva. He wants to escape the mists, and asks her how. She tells him that two things must happen before he can escape: (1) Strahd must awaken from his slumber and reach his hand out across Barovia, and (2) a young seer amongst the Vistani must deliver a prophecy to a particular group of individuals; this prophecy, if Firan hears it, will deliver him the key to his freedom.

So Firan starts out by waking Strahd up, provoking him by gathering a mob of Barovian rebels and then goading him with a good-ol’ fashiong wizards’ duel. Firan fakes his death over Tser Falls, and—cunning schemer that he is—secretly reestablishes his base by Lake Zarovich a few days later.

Not long after that, Firan goes out and finds Arabelle and confirms she’s a seer. He doesn’t want to risk not hearing the prophecy—or, worse, allowing Strahd’s servants to hear it. So he disguises himself as a giant eagle and kidnaps her, spiriting her away to his demiplane laboratory.

Suddenly, Arabelle isn’t ambiently waiting to be rescued. She’s now bait: Firan doesn’t know who the foretold figures are, but he’s pretty confident that, if he keeps Arabelle around, they’ll eventually show up.

So the PCs go to the Vistani camp, find the clues leading to Firan’s demiplane, and go on a little adventure through the Svalich Woods and across Lake Zarovich to get there. They get inside, and Firan greets them, and introduces Arabelle—and as soon as she sees the PCs, her eyes glow, she starts levitating, and she starts speaking the prophecy.

Except there’s something Firan didn’t realize: Arabelle is a far more powerful seer than she should be. That’s because, at the time of her birth, Madam Eva—in a long-plotted scheme—implanated a shard of the Seeker’s divinity within her, fueling Arabelle’s powers of precognition far beyond what an ordinary Vistana could accomplish. And so, as Arabelle starts delivering her prophecy, she also unintentionally invokes the Seeker’s other powers in her trance: hurricane-style winds, flashing lightning, the works. And this, in addition to threatening to collapse the demiplane, also unleashes a few nasties that Firan had been researching, and which the PCs must now fight off.

So now we’ve got a real trigger for the climax—Arabelle meeting the PCs and delivering her prophecy—and a meaningful challenge to end it (a combat encounter/puzzle/skill challenge mishmash involving a rescue mission, a monster fight, and a flight to the exit). And since Firan is far less powerful than Mordenkainen, he can actually meaningfully assist the PCs in defeating this challenge without trivializing it!

Oh, and what’s the prophecy? It’s the key to unlocking the real knowledge of the Tome of Strahd: the schematics of Strahd’s plan to link the Heart of Sorrow to the Fanes of Barovia (including sketches of each Fane), which sets up the Fanes plotline and creates a mystery that the PCs will be eager to solve as they delve further into it.

Now, I haven’t written this arc up in full yet (I'll probably change a bunch of details in the implementation)—but I’m already feeling a whole lot better about it. Everything just clicks in a way that it didn’t come close to before; instead of feeling like the adventure is fighting against me, I feel like we’re working together to achieve a common goal.

And all it took was questioning my base assumptions and getting back to basics (who’s the antagonist? what’s the dramatic question? what’s the gameplay challenge?).

That’s the power of understanding and applying your fundamentals. Everything beyond that is just window dressing.

Campaign Advice Roundup | April 12, 2023

• When playing an NPC that you intend to command respect—and/or any NPC who may be challenging or complex to roleplay—speak slowly and deliberately, taking frequent pauses to consider and enunciate your words, and making sure to emulating the NPC’s tone, body language, and facial expressions as you go. If you need a moment to consider a response, take it! Don’t let yourself get thrown off-balance or feel rushed. (You’d be surprised at how non-ridiculous you sound when you make a conscious effort to speak ridiculously slowly. Savor your words!)
• Some rules for fires (e.g., those created by fireball): Treat each group of ignited squares as a single “fire.” At initiative count 20 of each round, check to see if at least half of the squares next to each individual wall are on fire; if so, that wall is now on fire. Also at initiative count 20 of each round, roll 1d4; the result is the number of squares adjacent to the fire that ignites (you choose). (You can roll with advantage if the PCs are in a particularly arid or flammable area, or with disadvantage if they’re in a damp and misty area.) A creature that enters the fire or begins its turn there for the first time on a turn takes 1d8 fire damage.
• Some rules for smoke created by fires (tweaked from ChatGPT): Burning terrain and objects create smoke, which can obscure vision and cause breathing difficulties. After the fire has been burning for two rounds, all creatures within 30 feet of a burning area or object are considered to be in light obscuration. After five rounds, the area becomes heavily obscured. Creatures that start their turn within a heavily obscured area due to smoke must succeed on a DC 10 Constitution saving throw or be poisoned until the start of their next turn. (The smoke doesn't affect undead or constructs.)
• If you’re spending too much time on prep time, apply the concepts of “render distance” and “occlusion culling.” In a video game, a “render distance” limit directs your computer to only use its processing power toward things that are in the player’s immediate proximity. Meanwhile, “occlusion culling” further directs your computer to only use its processing power toward things that the player is actually currently looking at—if the player isn’t looking at something, that thing functionally doesn’t exist, even if it’s a mere three inches away from the player’s left foot. In D&D, you can apply these concepts by asking: are the players currently (1) in close narrative and/or geographical proximity to X, and (2) currently focused on and/or thinking about X? If the answer to either question is “no,” then you don’t need to prep X unless you voluntarily choose to have more stuff happen offscreen for the sole purpose of increasing verisimilitude.
• When planning random encounters for a travel sequence, start by making a list of all of the plot points, locations, factions, and themes that you'd like to use this travel sequence to explore, foreshadow, or introduce. Then, use that list to begin connecting ideas together and generate some encounter concepts.