Describing the Future

Following up on this post ...

The players are standing amid the bodies of the slain; they've observed their treasure and are somewhat satisfied.  Whereupon they fall into discussion about the encounter and someone notes, "They didn't seem that hard to kill."

"Yeah, right," says another.  "What was all that stuff about no one coming back from this.  Surely, they could have killed a few kobalds and gone back to town to tell others about this."

"Maybe this isn't it?" suggests another.

[If our players aren't having this conversation, than we've done something wrong ... most likely, we haven't sold the myth hard enough to worm its way into the player's brains]

If you want to hide a dungeon under a dungeon, it's not that hard.  My personal favourite is to locate a door somewhere at the bottom or the rear of the upper level that's been seriously blocked off against the other side: a bar on the door, extra wooden slats nailed into the frame, an extra steel gate in front of the door, a sign that says something obscure like "Remember Froed" or "Bad."  Even rocks piled against the door so all can be seen is a little corner, overlooked because no player carefully examined the heap of rocks against said wall.

Any of these makes it clear that whatever's on the other side of that door, the kobalds definitely didn't want to let it out.  The lower lair, whatever it is, may be a quarter mile deeper.  There may be older kobald rooms and even treasure on the other side of that door, while the kobalds were forced to hold that creature off while nailing the door shut, piling rocks against it, making sure none of the next generation got curious and went to see.  Whatever's down there, it's fun to play this mind game with the party, effectively saying, here's where the real dungeon starts.

There are other ways.  The kobalds might be friendly with whatever's down there.  In all the fighting and slaughter that's gone on so far, one or two kobalds may have slipped through a "secret" passage to give warning, so that now the lower lair is aware of the party.  They may already be sending aid.  The party could sit down, thinking this is a good time to rest, only to be assaulted by tougher humanoids, or twice as many kobalds.  They may open the doors and let trained dog monsters into the upper level, letting those deal with the party.  They may throw in flasks that explode in clouds of poison gas ... assuming they already know somehow that all the kobalds in the upper lair are dead.  Anything is possible.

Another way is to let the last few kobalds attempt to give themselves up, so they can tell the player characters, "You'll get yours!  When Marfon in his chambers learns of his, he'll make bread from your bones!" or some such.  It's all kind of tropey, but this stuff works.  The players are bound to ask who Mafron is, whereupon the kobalds conveniently die or kill themselves, straight out of an early Marvel comic.  In a movie, it's quite banal, but with the players needing to know who Marfon is and what he might do, it's rather easy to build them up with a cliche like this.

If we're willing to make the kobalds literate, the players can discover writings that describe sacrifices to Marfon, complete with commentaries.  The writing would be in the kobald language — though not in my game, because most creatures speak common due to several powerful mages reversing the effects of Babel Tower — but the players might decipher it, or take it back to town to be deciphered.  "Garog went bravely to his sacrifice," the papers might say.  "We opened the shaft and he climbed down, smiling at us and telling us to be happy that we did not need to worry for another year.  He made his father proud.  We covered up the shaft again and placed blankets to mute the noises, but the horror-sound could not be completely drowned out ..."

There's a common thread that runs through these examples: each of them speaks about the future.  As a dungeon mastering skill, the ability to portend the future, to act as a prophet, is critically important.  The present, and what's going on in it, can hold the players' attention for the most part, but the future — that part of the dungeon, or the game world, that the players haven't met yet — is the true bugbear in their plan-making.

We can invest hints of the future in a great many things: the way we describe the dungeon's front door, as we discussed earlier, or any door to be sure.  The evidence that's laying around for the players to find, which evinces images of what's been here, isn't here now, but may come back ... or be met on the players' way.  Things that are written or said about the past in such a way that it says, first, "Glad I'm not that person," but then also says, "If we keep pushing this quest forward, we may become that person."

The future works best when this kind of empathy is printed in the details.  This is the fundamental, underlying trope at work when a DM says, "The myth is that no one's every come back."  It implies, obviously, that if YOU go, YOU won't come back.  And that's something the players have to contend with every step of the way.

This is an important reason why a set of monsters cannot be balanced to the strength of the party!  The exciting part of the confrontation between Bilbo and Smaug is that these two are very plainly not equals.  Bilbo is marginally protected by his ring, but he has to watch where he steps, because the ground is covered with coins that slide and ring as Bilbo walks across them.  Too, Bilbo smells, so Smaug moves his enormous nostrils about, trying to find Bilbo that way.

The best moments happen when the players struggle with their bravery to face the future: and then, all at once, find themselves in a deep, terrifying mess they can't get out of with a finger snap.  Our genius is to figure out a way, like with Bilbo, that gives them time to either extricate themselves or overcome the danger, because the danger isn't really as horrific as it appears, or the players have time to be clever.

Up front, as a warning, this is next to impossible.  Chances are you're going to find yourself giving the players some magic object that magically let's them any truly serious situation as long as they have it.  Then, in every combat, it's the object that wins, not the players.  That sort of solution ruins a game.  Whatever the circumstance, the players have to feel they've done something themselves that got them out of that terrible situation.  Bilbo's ring doesn't let him kill Smaug, or even nullify the danger presented by Smaug.  It merely allows him a chance to avoid Smaug.  Smaug then goes off to get himself killed by some other incredibly lame trope, the Achilles Arrow shot ... but it works because Bard the Bowman isn't an important character in any sense of the word.  He is, essentially, an NPC.  Moreover, the death of Smaug doesn't really solve the deeper conflict put forward by the story; it really only removes a catalyst designed to get the characters all in the same place.  By the time Smaug is killed, as a character he's no longer important.  Therefore, it doesn't matter how he dies.

But if the players are to live or die, their importance never ceases.  Their growth, their accumulation of power and wealth, therefore, must be based upon events that they feel assured came about because of their actions ... not the actions of someone else who rescued them, and not the actions of a magic item that solved all their problems.  And certainly not with the knowledge that they never had to fight anything that truly threatened them, as every combat was balanced.  Surviving, therefore, just made them lucky.  That's a terrible past to build one's future upon.

Like I said, threading your game world through these arranged moments is an enormous headache.  Most DMs get away with not doing it because they run players who are so anxious to push out their chests and lift up their noses that they're ready to believe they're the heroes they pretend to be.  Pretense, for many players, will fill plot holes and bad tropes, with last minute saves by NPCs and monsters that conveniently have heart attacks in the castle of Ahhhh.  Some players are quite able to kill a giant rat and convince themselves, in their hearts, that the rat was 10 feet tall and that village was definitely saved.

I've gotten quite off the track, however, so let me pull it back.

I encourage DMs to worry their players by describing uncomfortable futures, preferably where the players can paint themselves into the story.  I encourage the DM to go some distance towards having the more frightening monster to come actually BE legitimately dangerous to the party, enough that if the party mis-steps, they could get themselves all killed.  This requires the DM to set up that encounter in just such a way that the players have a reasonable chance of surviving, if they're smart, innovative and they use their resources wisely ... which I'd describe as recognising it IS a rainy day, right now, and not the time to save spells and other powers, in case they might be needed later.  I've seen many parties go down when the spell that could have saved them wasn't used.

It's hard to set up an encounter just so.  It takes lots of reading of good books, and thinking about those books after they're read, to figure out how the author solved this specific problem.  How did the author get the characters to walk into trouble?  How did the author arrange the situation so they could get out?  A dungeon master has to read, a lot, with this notion in mind, if he or she wishes to ever grasp the intricacies of setting up any encounter, ever.

But once this is mastered; once the players can be hooked into the next step, without that step being a death sentence or a cake walk, then a DM can produce a phenomenal set of events that players will rave about.