Alex and Rody were part of a common but not mandatory progression in DMing style. Alex was mundane, by-the-book, and serviceable but ultimately forgettable. Rody pushed boundaries and tested the system, but made mistakes as he defined his style. Neither was a bad DM, and both needed to work a bit harder and grow into something else.
The rest of the tower guardians do not fit as part of an obvious flowchart of style. I think all of them are recognizable, but there’s no guarantee that you’ve played with, been, or even met a DM that fits the remaining styles. I wasn’t about to make a global statement like “these are the seven stages of DMs”, not least because I can’t come up with styles that would fit that tree. I also didn’t want to tie the remaining floors to some indefensible notion of “these are the kinds of levels you create as you get better and better at DMing”. That’s not what the campaign was about. Though the tower guardians were a big part of the campaign the story was ultimately about the players and, as they would eventually learn, a series of tests they passed on the way to deification. It would have been a disservice to them and their narrative to restrict their adventures so I could make a statement about good DMing.
So when it came time for to to create the third tower guardian I didn’t sit and think “what would an evolved form of Rody look like?” I thought “what would be a neat antagonist, and what would be a neat series of floors, and how can I marry those into something appropriate for low paragon tier?”
Haelyn could pithily be described as “Wednesday Addams with magic powers.” Her goal was to instill emotion in the players, and the emotion she chose was dread. Her floors were desolate, dark, and foreboding, full of threats lurking just beyond the corners of the players’ eyes. Though still gave them their share of combat and triumph she really wanted them to get the sense that things were bad and were only getting worse, that they were in constant danger regardless of their actions or successes, and that the only reward they deserved was a slow, maddening fall into a mass of despair.
So it was a lot like a story game, really.
I partly chose Haelyn because I wanted somebody to contrast with the party. They were a fairly comedic and lovable group of scamps: the handsome and charming but self-important bard, the highly capable and startlingly tough sorcerer who “accidentally” caught his allies in his blast radii, the brilliant and powerful but single-minded wizard, and the unkillable but exasperated warden who tried keep them all safe from themselves and each other. The astute reader will notice a party change, as the ever-shifting dwarf left the party and was replaced by a new character from the same player:
- Thump, goliath barbarian, whose love for the world and its meats was matched only by his hate for bees. I don’t think I can describe this character any better than his player already did.
You may notice that this is not a more serious character than the dwarf.
Haelyn’s style was meant to put the party out of their element and force them to deal with a world that was more actively hostile than the previous floors. She didn’t waste any time either; as soon as they stepped onto floor 11 and saw it was a graveyard reaching to every horizon I think they understood what that section of the tower was about. The following floors were an abandoned pseudo-futuristic mining base filled with scattered machinery and mindless robots, a mazelike set of caverns on the brink of inevitable war, and a lifeless expanse of ice. All were designed to rob the party of potential allies and show them that not only were they alone but the land itself was gradually growing more dangerous with each floor.
To the party’s credit they treated each new floor with the deference the environment initially deserved (and no more). They stayed light-hearted and humorous throughout but saved the true wackiness for downtime. Any time I gave them a real threat like a high-level monster or angry terrain, they treated it like a real threat. Basically they kept the goofiness on hold for times when they could get away with it, because they were starting to see that they couldn’t blithely romp through the world like they had before.
The problem was that they had to create their own opportunities for comedy because the floors provided none. Haelyn knew how to increase dread but didn’t know when to hold back. Her pacing didn’t have the ebb and flow that it should, where the players stop to breathe only to have things escalate as soon as they think they’re safe. Because the players were never safe, they never found allies, they never caught a break unless they grabbed the world by the throat and shook it until it left them alone for five minutes (but never rewarded them for it). It didn’t build anticipation and pressure as much as it drained the players.
The only person on the players’ side was actually Haelyn herself. She would heal the party between floors, give them hints about where to go, and be generally supportive. The players didn’t seem to know whether it was out of genuine concern or as part of some elaborate plot to get them to lower their guard. Regardless it made the pacing even weirder.
After floor 14 Haelyn didn’t actually fight the players directly. She knew that she wasn’t the scariest part of her floors and any direct confrontation would remove any lingering dread because it meant any horror could be destroyed by hit point damage. I should have sent the players into some terrifying set piece to tear them apart until they barely clawed themselves free in the end. Instead I just had her throw summoned creatures at them, one a round, so they could see the escalating difficulty but knew they had the power to stop it. It worked on paper and the players did like stabbing things, but looking back I feel it was a missed opportunity.
Haelyn is a good example of why trying to run a horror campaign, or any adventure based on fear, is hard. Yes, the DM has to been good enough to manipulate emotion with a delicate enough touch that it doesn’t look heavy-handed. That’s a skill worth learning regardless of the system or even the emotion in question, and I’m not convinced I had it. But it works best when the rules work with the intent, and 4E’s combat-happy mechanics and “all problems can be solved by daily powers and trained skills” feel set the DC for running a horror adventure very high. And even with a good DM and an appropriate system, it’s all for naught if the players aren’t bought in. Horror campaigns require a certain restriction on player agency that some parties can’t or won’t accept. No matter how scary and unbeatable you make the monster it loses some mystique when the players start calling it “clownshoes” and critting it. At least movies only have one funny guy they get to kill in the second act, not five funny guys who make it to the end through the power of flexing.
The next tower guardian instead took the players’ style and ran with it, giving them incredible freedom but requiring them to continually top their own successes to advance. But that’s another post.