Continuing on the “Lost City” theme …

One of the best parts of “B4: The Lost City” was Tom Moldvay’s ingenious inclusion of factions. In the module, the city of Cynidicea fell into ruin long ago, cursed by the appearance of the strange beast Zargon. Over centuries, the descendents of the original inhabitants fell into madness, and separated into different tribes and factions, dedicated to worshipping the old gods of Cynidicea before the fall. The Brotherhood of Gorm, the Magi of Usamigaras, and the Warrior Maidens of Madarua were the three main factions (and the ones the player characters could mostly interact with, if so desired), and the Priests of Zargon were another (though they were mostly intended to be straight-up villains).

(A lot of this was probably inspired by the Conan classic “Red Nails”, but that’s fine. If you’re going to ‘borrow’, then ‘borrow’ from the best.)

Again, in very elegant and economic fashion, Tom Moldvay laid out the basic goals and characteristics of the various factions in half a page. He also laid out some quick guidelines as to what sorts of player characters might choose to ally themselves with each faction, and why. And that’s all the coverage he really gave the factions in terms of how they would interact with the player characters, apart from combat.

It’s an adventure design technique that I call layering. It’s something I learned from modules like “The Lost City” and “Castle Amber” (another Moldvay classic). If the DM wishes to ignore the faction material, and wants to treat all the Cynidiceans as bad guys that are meant to be killed by the player characters … that’s fine! The module works, and it works very well. It becomes more of a generic dungeon crawl, but there’s nothing wrong with that.

With layering, though, options get tossed on top of that base model. The factions in “The Lost City” are a great example of that. If the DM so chooses – and if the players choose to pursue the option, if presented – the factions become much more than “monsters to kill”. The players can ally themselves with one faction, and perhaps become the enemies of another. Or they can double-cross a faction to gain something better from a third. It adds a lot of roleplaying opportunities into a module that – on the surface – is a nice, neat little dungeon crawl. By roleplaying with the various factions, a short 28-page module becomes a campaign that can last a long, long time.

The nice thing about layers is that nothing happens if the layers get ignored. The DM can always work with the basic adventure structure, and just add the layers onto it like ornaments on a Christmas tree. With modules that are very complex and don’t use this technique … well, they’re structured in such a way that if you want to ignore something, the module usually suffers. If “The Lost City” required that the players needed to ally themselves with a particular faction in order to succeed at something, it potentially becomes more work for the DM if he or she wants to ignore that aspect of the module. I’ve found that it’s usually better if a module is set up in a simple way, with more optional complex features that can be added on to it, rather than in a complex way that needs to be stripped down to be more simple.

The same applies for games in general, not just adventure modules. One of the major reasons I’ve never run Exalted – though some of the players at my gaming table would love it if I did – is because aspects of the campaign metaplot are embedded in the rules themselves, and I’m not a big fan of the game’s metaplot. I have ideas for radically different I’d like to run using the Exalted rules, but that means manually stripping out those pieces of the metaplot from the rules, which is a pain. If there were a basic framework for the Exalted rules, with the metaplot stuff layered on top of that as an option, this wouldn’t be an issue.

I tried the layering effect to a certain extent when writing the Dungeon Crawl Classics module “Dreaming Caverns of the Duergar”. In that module, the player characters stumble across a small band of duergar searching for an underground tomb. The duergar are led by Itharnos Cyvorak, a half-duergar/half-dragon mercenary who has his own agenda. The rest of the duergar don’t trust Itharnos, but they need him to locate the tomb. Additionally, there’s some other duergar priests and warriors that have their own agenda in that little band.

Does all this intrigue amongst the duergar matter? It depends. It’s possible to play the entire module and never find out anything about these various agendas, or ever know that most of the duergar hate each other. “Dreaming Caverns” can be played as a simple dungeon crawl, with “duergar = bad guys”, just meant to be fought, killed, and looted. However, depending on how the DM runs the adventure, and how the players choose to react to the duergar, the characters may find themselves allying themselves with one duergar, plotting against another, making arrangements to betray a third … it’s a lot of roleplaying opportunity, should the folks playing the adventure want to use it, but if they don’t, it doesn’t affect the adventure.

And the inspiration for this, of course, came from “The Lost City”.

In a certain amount of irony, I’m currently working on a “Lost City”-styled adventure at the moment with a very gifted co-author. I’ve been consolidating a lot of rough notes and background material for the adventure over the last week or so, and one of the bullet points included in these notes is “Factions”. I don’t know if it can be done as cleanly as Tom Moldvay did it for “The Lost City”, but ideally, I’d like to include a similar sort of network inside the upcoming adventure. I'd love to feature various factions and groups in the city, each with their own plans and agendas … and then have all of it be optional. Just another layer of the adventure, to be added or thrown away as the DM wishes.

I’ll let you know how it progresses.

And someday, hopefully you’ll be able to tell me if it measures up to the original “Lost City”.

Which is a high, high standard indeed.