Patreon DevBlog #7: Pushing the Envelope

This week, I kept up my efforts to create backstory hooks for players in Curse of Strahd: Reloaded, plus finalized my plans for the upcoming necromancer’s dungeon adventure in my homebrew campaign. Let’s take a look!

Problem #1: How do I create thematic backstory hooks for Curse of Strahd PCs?

Last week, I talked about my efforts (re: agonizing struggles) to create concrete backstory hooks that certain DMs could use to tie their players’ backstories directly to Barovia, giving them clear and personal questlines to pursue over the course of the module.

With that said, there are many DMs who don’t want to use this approach (e.g., because they want to maximize Barovia’s sense of alienation and isolation), but who still want to ensure their players become emotionally invested in Barovia. Even DMs who do use personal direct hooks are likely to want to make sure that their players are emotionally engaged with NPCs beyond those directly relevant to their own hooks.

That need inspired me to create what I like to call “thematic” backstory hooks: hooks in which Barovia is not the only place where the PCs can self-actualize, but is still a place where the PCs can do so—largely due to the presence of one or more NPCs whose characters “resonate” with the PCs’ traits, flaws, bonds, and ideals.

I started by listing every NPC in the Curse of Strahd module. Then, I cut out every NPC that I didn’t expect the PCs to develop a meaningful relationship with, be it friendly or antagonistic (e.g., Ernst Larnak).

At first, I wasn’t entirely sure where to take this and how far to go. I knew that I wanted the NPCs to resonate with and support the characters’ arcs toward self-actualization, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to turn the NPCs into reflections of the characters or archetypes that the PCs needed to grow toward or beyond. For example, Vargas Vallakovich could be a great way to engage with a PC who comes from a town ruled by a petty noble tyrant, but he could also be a great way to engage with a PC who allows their paranoia and fear to dominate their decision-making. Which way to choose?

Trick question. I split the baby and took the easy way out: both.

Here, then, was my task: I would boil each major Barovian NPC (yes, including Strahd) down into two aspects: a “flaw” (and associated character arc) and a “bond” (and associated character history) that PCs could adopt. For example, in Vargas’s case, a player could choose during character creation to adopt (from among a long list) the flaw and arc “Paranoia. I must learn to stop using my fears as an excuse to harm others,” and/or the bond and history “Oppression.  A cruel lord once ruled my community. I'll never forgive the harms he caused to my people.”

The goal, then, would be to have each player choose two unique bonds and flaws from the table (without, of course, knowing which NPC they were tied to), which the DM could then use to engage them with the corresponding NPC later on.

If you’re interested in reading them, you can see the current drafts of the Flaws and Bonds table in the Re-Reloaded working draft here. I haven’t had a chance to see this in action yet, of course, but I’m optimistic about the way it’ll turn out in practice!

Problem #2: How do I give my homebrew dungeon strong internal dramatic questions?

Two weeks ago, I discussed my efforts to build out the concept for a new dungeon arc I’m running for my homebrew campaign. When it came to the big-picture, I was pretty happy with what I had going on. But when it came to execution, of course, the devil—as always—was in the details.

Specifically: I had a good high-level overarching dramatic question: the PCs want to recover a magic ancestral heirloom necklace (plus loot) from the inner sanctum of the necromancer’s lair. But that’s not enough; I needed room-level dramatic questions to fill out the actual interior narrative of the dungeon. It wasn’t enough to just toss in a phase spider, some talking rats, a berbalang, and a few shadows; I needed to actually give the players something to do with these encounters. They needed impact and real stakes.

I started with the berbalang, which was the most isolated encounter in the original concept, thereby making it easy to workshop alone. Berbalangs can speak to the dead, so I needed some way to make this unique ability useful to the players.

As I pondered all this, I started to wonder: what if the final room to the dungeon is not at the end, but at the beginning? Specifically, the door to the necromancer’s lair is right there in the entrance intersection, but it’s locked and the PCs need to obtain certain artifacts to open it. I’d already decided that the necromancer had had some kind of relationship with Vecna, so I figured that the door would have a carving of the necromancer in Vecna’s likeness: a missing eye and a missing hand. To open the door, the PCs would need to enter a bloodstone into the carving’s eye, a (literal) skeleton bone key beside the carving’s missing hand, and read an incantation torn from the necromancer’s spellbook.

In that case, I suddenly had a good use for the berbalang! It can use speak with dead on the PCs’ behalf to glean information from a dead skull to learn how to open the door. Significantly, this would tell the PCs not only what else might lie further in the dungeon, but also tip them off about the need for the incantation, which the door wouldn’t tell them about. So now this berbalang encounter is both a social encounter (persuade the berbalang to help you) a bit of a puzzle encounter (figure out the right words to ask the skull), and even a combat encounter (go find an item somewhere else in the dungeon to bribe the berbalang to help you, which requires defeating some boneless first).

This also helped solve a problem I had with the other rooms of the dungeon—assigning dramatic questions to the other three factions within the area. This suddenly became easy! The phase spider nest has the bloodstone, the shadow hive has the skeleton key, and the rat colony has the page with the incantation on it. The PCs can obtain these items by either persuading each faction to give them up (in the case of the shadows and rats), or by slaying those factions and taking those items directly (in the case of the shadows and phase spider).

Problem #3: How can I add more combat to my upcoming homebrew adventure?

The players in my homebrew campaign recently leveled up to 2nd level, marking not only a new milestone, but the first time that they’d learned to use a real character sheet and make actual choices for their characters. They seemed really excited about their new features, so I wanted to make sure they had as many chances to show them off as possible, and as early as possible.

The necromancer’s dungeon, unfortunately, only really has four, maybe five combats—the skeletons at the door, the phase spider(s), the nothic/wight, the boneless, and maybe the shadows. I know that’s already a lot, but I also realized that this was a great opportunity to teach my players about taking long rests over the course of a multi-day adventure. Given that the main wandering threat in the dungeon here is the phase spider(s), I figured this would be a great lesson to the players about how to turn an unsafe environment into a safe one for resting. But first, I needed to add more combat somewhere.

After thinking on it, I realized that my homebrew world currently felt somewhat dimensionless—shapeless, really. I’d spent some time recently workshopping a very basic region map, and I wanted to put it to use to give that sense of place when traveling. I also wanted to start using foreshadowing to set up adventure arcs that might come later on. Those two things together made clear that it was time to build a random encounter.

I still had those orc miniatures I’ve previously mentioned, and I was already en route to the session at the time that I had this idea, so I figured I’d find a way to use those miniatures. They’d certainly be much better-suited to a random encounter than to a more drawn-out quest, at least at this point!

With that said, I was still a bit uncomfortable with using the Lord of the Rings “orcs are savage evil brutes” trope, especially because I’d already inserted an orc mage NPC that my players loved and got lots of information from. However, I still wanted to have a reason for my players to fight these orcs—without falling into the racial tropes that they’re so often painted with.

So I made them French.

Napoleonic French, to be exact.

And then I made them the forerunners of a Nilfgardian Empire-esque army that was slowly moving north to conquer new lands.

After running the combat this past Saturday, I can confidently say that my players hated these cruel, rude, and generally unpleasant militaristic French orcs, and I’m very excited to do more to advance this plotline in future adventures.

Campaign Advice Roundup | February 27, 2023

• When deciding whether to pass hidden information to a player in private (e.g., via text-message) or in public (e.g., with the other players sitting at the table), figure out your OOC goals first—if you want the other players to actively enjoy the “mystery” of what’s going on (and think that they’ll actually enjoy it), then it’s probably better to share the message privately. However, if your players will enjoy the dramatic irony of knowing the information OOC but their characters not knowing that information, then it might be best to share that information publicly. In either case, if you think your players might metagame and feel anxious about one PC’s private agenda, talk with them out-of-game to reestablish expectations regarding PvP and intra-party relations, reassuring them that you won’t leverage one PC’s actions in a way that actively harms the other players’ enjoyment.
• RAW CoS, like most 5e modules, is built for the intersection of D&D players who both enjoy tactical play and optimization and don’t mind losing their PCs. This is a holdover from older editions, in which those players were a majority. In most 5e campaigns, WotC has balanced combat encounters (especially early encounters) for these types of players (e.g., Old Bonegrinder), creating NPCs and monsters that fit the aesthetic of the world and then placing the onus entirely on the players to decide how they want to approach those problems—and whether combat is necessary or even advisable. However, nowadays, modern D&D players don’t enjoy thinking tactically and are emotionally invested in individual PCs, which renders this kind of “challenge-focused” design obsolete and problematic. This is why balancing encounters is important for most modern groups, and why it’s important to use an encounter-building system that actually accounts for the underlying math.
• You can give “filler” side-tracked areas narrative meaning by allowing them to advance or progress the main dramatic question by exploring them. For example, if the PCs want to go from Point A to Point B, but Point C lies halfway along the route, you can encourage the PCs to explore Point C by placing someone in Point C who needs to be rescued and encouraging the PCs to rescue them from there.
• Sometimes, you might accidentally create a dramatic question when you didn’t intend to—for example, if you make an NPC clearly monstrous and evil, your players might want to kill them even if a combat encounter wasn’t your intent. In this case, you can “defuse” the dramatic question by either removing the stakes (i.e., making the players believe that they can’t accomplish what they originally expected by pursuing this goal) or by creating a consequence for pursuing this goal (i.e., giving the players a strong disincentive to do so). This might make players feel dissatisfied, though, so while these can be powerful narrative techniques, try to avoid needing to use them in the first place by staying in-tune with your players’ expectations and only creating dramatic questions where intended.