labcats | Beginning The Shackled City

One of the few gaming stores in NYC, Neutral Ground, is closing this month. This makes me sad. It did not, of course, prevent me from taking advantage of the sales, which

jlighton refers to as "picking over the corpse". At 25% off, I finally cracked and bought Cthulhu Tech and the first supplement for it, as well as Witch Finder for Hunter: The Vigil (not to be confused with the game Witch Hunter).

And, for ten bucks, I bought The Shackled City. I need to plot out an adventure for

mnemex and

ebartley involving a crusade against slavery in the Dreamlands, growing out of ebartley's decision about one of the things her PC would do in her spare time. I can find ten bucks worth of material to steal and modify for that here.

That said, I've had a few "Okay, my suspension of disbelief is strained" moments already, and I'm not done with the first adventure. I'm not talking about stuff that's just how D&D (3.5, I believe) works, but about plot stuff.

1. The Cliche

A thought experiment, if you will: You are a noble, with wealth, power, and connections. For reasons we won't go into right now (but which make sufficient sense to my suspension of disbelief), you are interested in an orphan in a local orphanage, although you want the kid staying put. You get the local thieves' guild to hire someone to report on the kid from time to time.

But then, the kid, along with three other kids, gets kidnapped from the orphanage. The Church of St. Cuthbert "has publicly vowed to locate the missing children and bring the kidnappers to justice". The Church is, I think, lawful neutral, and if I remember my alignments correctly, lawful people place great importance on keeping their given word. This probably is even more true of lawful clerics of a lawful deity.

All right. The Church is investigating and sends a priest to the orphanage. You want your particular kid back in the orphanage, but you don't want the Church of St. Cuthbert, or anyone else, investigating the kid too closely. You had nothing whatsoever to do with the kidnappings.

What do you do?

Do you hire thugs from the thieves' guild to rough up the priest on his way home from the orphanage and warn him to stay away from the orphans and stop investigating the kidnappings?

This is what happens in the scenario. This strikes me as amazingly stupid. First of all, I can think of no surer way to keep the church investigating. It draws more attention to the kidnappings and to the child. Second, the acting head of the church, a known lawful priest of a known lawful god, has publicly promised to investigate.

The idea is to have the PCs hear the priest's cry for help and come running, getting drawn into the adventure. I understand the reason for the cliche, but I think getting the PCs involved can be handled better.

What I would do as the wealth and powerful noble is co-opt the investigation. I would send people I trusted to offer their help to the priests. This way, the odds of the kid being returned go up, and I have influence over the investigation. I can try to make sure that the particular kid I'm interested in doesn't get investigated beyond being a kidnap victim. I can still work from the shadows.

As for the PCs, the church can recruit them or someone I have influence over can recruit them. It's not that hard to find an alternative means to involve PCs who are expected to rush to someone's aid in a dark alley at night.

To be fair, once the PCs intervene, presumably successfully, the local thieves' guild decides to drop the matter, rather than risk drawing more attention to itself by continuing to target the PCs or to try to discourage an investigation. So, it is possible that their noble patron is simply an idiot, and they were following orders because the money was good and the orders didn't seem too onerous. We shall see.

2. The Law

The city of Cauldron is intended to be the setting for an entire campaign, so the PCs and players need to get a strong sense of how it works. This includes the law.

I am already unsure of how the law works in Cauldron. Okay, I know something about the way taxes work, as this is an important plot point for later. After that, it gets murky.

Remember those thugs that were sent to rough up the priest? They're actually from the city guard, moonlighting for the thieves' guild because they need the money. Presumably, the city guard is not, as a whole, corrupt? After all, the thugs will try to run away if the gm needs to invoke "The city guard unit on patrol in this area comes to the PCs' rescue." The moonlighters do not want to be identified.

But, let us suppose the PCs win and hand the thugs over to the city guard. All right, they are thrown into jail, on assault charges, where they stay for three days. After that, they are released because an anonymous source pays their fine of 50 gold pieces apiece.

What does this mean about law in the city? Do the authorities truly not care who paid the fine? Are they truly viewing city guards working as thugs for the thieves' guild to assault a priest so lightly that this is a mere fineable offense? Are the guards reinstated after their fine is paid?

I would expect the authors to have given some thought to these questions and to explain whatever answers they chose to the reader. Alas, this is not the case.

The acting head of the Church of St. Cuthbert will probably talk with the PCs, and, we are told, it may well come out in conversation that she is in favor of the death penalty for particularly despicable crimes. She considers kidnapping children to be a particularly despicable crime.

All right. But, what does the law say on the subject? What is the penalty for kidnapping children? For kidnapping adults? What crimes carry the death penalty in Cauldron? It may be that there will be something on this later in the chapter, or later in the book, but I am dubious.

Next, there is a man who has been aiding and abetting the kidnappers, making it possible for them to do their despicable deeds. He helped them because they threatened his life and the life of his familiar, whom they kidnapped. We are told that his actions and his silence about them are understandable, but not excusable, and, if word of what he is done is brought to the town guard, he "pleads guilty and begs for leniency. His eventual fate is left for you to decide", although the gm is advised that certain evil individuals behind the despicable deeds might act if they feel that their former victim / accomplice is now a threat.

All well and good, but I want to know what the default position of the law is. The entire feel of the campaign and the reactions of the PCs to events is determined in no small part by this. For ten bucks, this is annoying sloppiness. But, boy, if I'd paid the asking price of $60, I'd be much, much more annoyed. I'm getting a complete city, and there's no section on how the law works?

3. The Prophecy

Well, minor divination. So, your PCs want to rescue the kids, but have no idea where to start. Not to worry! The acting head of the Church of St. Cuthbert has cast a divination for cryptic clues. This is good use of magic technology. I think the clues work, more or less. I'm not sure. But, there is one line that bugs me: "Beware the doors with teeth."

The PCs will probably figure out to what that refers, which is good. It refers to gear shaped doors in the dungeon crawl section of the adventure, and these doors are booby trapped. But, the text says, "none of [these doors] need be opened to reach the children".

Okay. I see what the authors are trying to do. They are trying to say, "There is this dangerous path, but you don't need to take it." And, from what I've read thus far, it's all right if the PCs do play with doors and run into trouble. That's what PCs do.

But, they sure as heck do it a lot more if you draw their attention to it. In other words, I would expect the players to interpret the line "Beware the doors with teeth" not as the authors intended, but as "These doors are dangerous, and we are going to have to deal with them. We won't be able to avoid them."

Anyone think I'm wrong here? I'd like to know.

4, The Race Thing

Half-orcs seem to be stand-ins for bad guys because they're instantly recognizable, and as they're fantasy races, it's not like we're really being racist, oh no. This is something that makes me uneasy, and it makes many gamers, authors, and designers uneasy, as well it should. It's something many of us fell into, and many of us climbed out of.

So, I was uneasy when I read about later chapters and growing numbers of half-orc mercenaries. I'm withholding judgment on that for now. But, I was absolutely delighted to read that one of the staff at the orphanage was a half-orc, and that he was a particular favorite of the halfling woman who ran the orphanage.

But, as it turns out, the half-orc is the one who reports to the local thieves' guild about the particular kid in whom the noble is interested. Sigh.

I know the half-orc hasn't done anything specifically evil, and he certainly has done nothing, directly or indirectly, to aid the kidnappers. But, couldn't the agent of the thieves' guild (which sure isn't a good guy organization an works for a person who sure as heck is evil) have been someone else? The dwarf? One of the humans? The half-elf? Does it always have to be the half-orc? I may be making too much of this. But, I want stuff like this to make me uneasy. Also, racist overtones aside, too much of this is just bad writing.