The Great Tower of Oldechi: Jay

I kind of assume everybody is familiar with some version of the Rule of Three because it’s so ubiquitous, but in case you’re not familiar with it, in general it means that audiences like it when things come in threes. Movies come in trilogies, books have three-act structures, jokes and fairy tales repeat lines and setups three times, and so on. There are enough examples online that I won’t bore you by repeating them.

I lean on this every once in a while in campaigns, and I try to split campaigns into three acts: understanding the world and the central conflict, escalation of the conflict through the actions of the antagonist, reaction from and resolution by the players. Given the nature of a medium where the designer is only responsible for some of the storyline the length and content of a given arc is subject to change. The Monster Campaign followed the rule well, with enemies that were at their strongest in Disc 2 but passive for most of Disc 3. The Eight Arms and the Empire Sin sin was also very good, as the players chased an unrelated plot in Act 1, dealt with immediate problems in Act 2, and spent Act 3 chasing the bad guy and invading his home. The Eight Arms and the Memento Mori wasn’t quite as perfect because the third act ended up heavily rushed, but it was there.

Given this eye on the Great Tower of Oldechi, The first fourteen floors were Act 1. They got the players together and functioning as a unit, introduced many of the major players, and gave the party a feel for how the tower itself worked. Arithmetically-inclined readers may note that this is half of the way to Level 30, so Act 1 was half the campaign. Well, sort of. I expected the early levels to be simple while the later levels were complex, so I designed for each floor in heroic tier to take two sessions, paragon three, and epic four. When all was said and done the party beat Haelyn in session thirty-four of a 108-session campaign, so we were right on.

For the fourth section of the tower I wanted the conflict to ramp up. I wanted to force the players’ hands and have them decide whether to ally with or fight against a looming organization that may or may not have been evil, either setting them up as campaign villains or the party’s only lifeline. I wanted the floors to get to the point where players really felt like they could die, which in this campaign was a permanent death and a new character. And I wanted a tower guardian who moved the campaign at a right angle to where the players thought it had been heading, who knew he was in charge and leveraged it instead of letting them go about their business, and who could in the right light be seen as a legitimate threat instead of just a rough-around-the-edges moderator.

Jay made it clear from minute one that he was messing with the party. One of the first things he said was that “Jay” wasn’t his real name to get across that his reality was exactly as he intended it. He also actively trolled the players, some more than others, with lies and jokes. He was an active participant in his floors, not taking up arms as such against the party but certainly willing to step in to make their lives a little more interesting.

But what really set Jay apart from his predecessors was his advancement mechanics. Alex said, “Beat this guy and you level”. Rody said, “Beat one of these guys and you level”. Haelyn said, “Find the guy to beat, then beat him, and you level”. But this was all too concrete for Jay. Jay said, “Impress me.”

He went on to explain that sometimes all it takes to impress him was finding a big guy and killing him. But that was because Jay cheated wholeheartedly. The most powerful guy on each floor was ten levels above the party; killing something like that was legitimately impressive and merited a reward. But killing a guy who merely looked powerful was not sufficient. Nor was steamrolling a bunch of enemies with the raw power of an excellent character build. Jay didn’t want to see the party strong-arm an equivalent-level solo, he wanted to see something that made him sit up and take notice. And except for “feel free to get yourselves killed fighting a demigod or something” he provided no further direction.

For the first time the players were on their own. They had to explore the floor, think of something to do, try it, and look at the sky expectantly to see if that was enough to make Jay happy. Often it wasn’t. Jay wasn’t treating the tower like a gamist system any more. He was more narrativist: “Get yourself in a ton of trouble, find a way to get yourself out, and do it in an emotionally satisfying way”. Combat still happened on his floors but was no longer encouraged or required. When the party did kill a scary guy, it was only after that guy harassed them for the better part of three sessions by virtue of being largely unstoppable. Instead the party looked to other options, like stealing artifacts, ending ancient rituals, and collapsing entire societies.

The floors themselves weren’t that impressive. Jay based them on the four classical elements, so the party dealt with lava floes, an ancient jungle, incredibly windy cliffs, and undersea ruins. But the story wasn’t about the floors. Jay didn’t put them out and say “and now you will love them”, he put them out and said “find a way to wreck these for me.” In Act 2 the campaign started being more about the players and less about the world they inhabited.

Speaking of the players, there was a fairly radical shift in party makeup midway through Jay’s floors. I’ll mention some of the changes in a future post, but there’s one new character I won’t get another chance to mention:

• Cletus Hightower, redneck ranger, and his animal companion The President, squig, which is a pretty weird confluence of words for a character in what until that point was mostly a high-fantasy campaign. Cletus was only with the party for two floors, so there’s not a lot I can say about him.

I think the characters don’t have many good memroies about Jay, but the players really liked him. He kept things light, he gave them some agency to decide their own path, he hit them with some hard and some fun challenges, and he seemed more like a regular person than a standoffish arbiter. Running Jay reinforced a few things I wanted to confirm about DMing: players like present opponents more than absent ones, good worlds can stand up to a little meddling without falling apart, and players are happiest when they can make their own way, especially when that way allows them to do things they think the DM hadn’t planned for. It made for a good transition between the serviceable but uninspiring tower guardians of the Act 1 and the challenge-the-player, more freeform floors of Act 3 where the guardians would start really coming down on the players for the first time.

Of course, a lot of Act 2 only worked as Act 2 because of a side-arc that happened between floors 16 and 17. This not only lengthened the campaign but also explained some of the mysteries of the tower itself, letting the campaign focus more on the people in it than its own ontological mystery. But that’s another post.