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The Boys are Back in Town
My last campaign was a travelogue in structure; that is, the characters were on a journey (though their destination changed and at times they weren't exactly sure what it was) and thus rarely visited the same place twice. They had no "home base", in campaign structure terms: a town or other location which they visited after completing major quests.
One of the many things different with my summer campaign is that I am trying to establish something of a home base, or at least let the characters stay in one location longer. But for that to matter you have to have an established setting with meaning and context, which means more than a map with a key and some brief description. I meant to reestablish (or really, establish, given the loose context in which the campaign began) the setting of the town of Winterhaven upon the characters' return, but, well, if you read these postmortems you know I mean to do a lot of things. (In retrospect, forcing the players to walk back to Winterhaven from the ruins of the Keep, and thus through the farms that surround it and through the gates and such, would have given plenty of opportunities for just this sort of thing. Oops.)
Instead, the characters found themselves in the ancient stone tower at the center of the town, which had gone unremarked their previous visit. They briefly met the tower's occupant, an ancient sage named Valen who offered some brief comedy (by pushing one of the characters off the tower's roof and then casting Feather Fall just before he hit the ground), then met with Freddy Lipton, their nominal employer (of sorts) on the expedition to the Keep, who simply directed them to convert their loot into gold at the nearby store--whereupon they were arrested by Winterhaven's guard captain, Andre de Ker, who had previously stirred trouble with the characters.
Only as Good as the Villain
Andre de Ker is, I think, one of the successes so far of the summer campaign. Villains are always interesting characters to me, in that I don't truly believe in "evil", just in the effects that fear and self-righteousness can have on people. De Ker is the kind of villain I appreciate and I think players appreciate a lot as well: not a villain with grand schemes whose opponent is the world, something that players have a hard time getting involved in, but a villain personally to the characters, whose evil is as direct antagonism against the players.
As the players realized as they worked out de Ker's past as a failed adventurer (from comments by Valen and de Ker's strange obsession with the Keep), de Ker is not so much evil as pathetic and jealous of actual successful adventurers. Making the conflict personal made the players hate him, not just the characters (leading to some hilarious moments in session 5).
You are Number Six
Not so successful was the concurrent introduction of our new fifth player. Introducing new characters is an art I have little experience with (and never on the DMing end), and the circumstances were did not help the situation: I helped the player create her character in the hours before the session, and our only discussion of how she might fit into the ongoing campaign was during the brief car ride over to our playing location.
I do think that the character creation process itself was slightly better. Since I knew for some time we'd be adding a new player, I gave some thought as to how to introduce the concept of character creation in a less haphazard way than with the first four players of this campaign. I realized that power sources, often ignored by more experienced players, are actually a very good way of presenting choices to new players: since I imagine most people unfamiliar with RPG mechanics come into the game wanting to play a magic user, a weapon wielder, a divine caster, etc., the power sources are, it seems to me, a better place to start than with classes or races, of which there are of course many. And if they do have a grasp of basic RPG mechanics--enough to grasp the class rolls, at least--then you can easily narrow down the myriad choices. In this case the player liked the sound of the Primal classes and, since she had wanted a companion similar to our ranger's beast companion, a shaman became a natural choice.
The actual character's introduction was unfortunately more-or-less nonexistant. The characters met her as a fellow prisoner arrested by de Ker but I never actually prompted an appropriate introductory dialogue. Once the players were freed (due to a zombie attack and most of de Ker's guards being slain in the initial onslaught), they simply brought the shaman along with them, since she was now a member of the party, of course.
ZOMG
There was a period of time while designing the Keep that I had no idea what would come next. I pondered various possibilities and eventually returned to one of the basics: an undead attack. It flowed naturally from the established background of the Keep (though the players have yet to figure out the exact connection) and gave an opportunity to run a series of encounters I have personally wanted to do for some time: Left 4 Dead, D&D style. I actually experienced a L4D-inspired encounter in a campaign I play in (and thus all the credit goes to that DM for the idea), but for my own I created custom versions of all the L4D zombies (minus the witch, although the imagery of the witch did come into play).
I didn't get to use them all as planned, unfortunately: the series of three combat encounters, always lengthy in 4E, in the back half of a session meant combat fatigue set in and the climatic battle--set in the Clue manor, standing in for the home of Winterhaven's Lord Warden, and featuring a tank, a smoker (which previously ambushed the characters while they were outside), a hunter, a boomer, and a horde, I ended up cutting the final encounter down to a brief confrontation with a horde and a boomer (which simply ran when the horde fell) and one-on-five fight with the tank, who despite his elite status (and due to my forgetting his regeneration) fell quickly.
The cliffhanger--approaching the final accessible room on the first floor to hear crying--proved quite effective, though.
Took a Level in Badass (Or At Least Not Dying)
The players returned the next session facing that the bad news that their characters would not be getting an extended rest, meaning the rogue remained at 1 HP with all healing surges used, and the good news that they reached Level 2. Leveling takes a while, but luckily many of the players, despite their relative newness to the game, had by now gotten enough of a handle on the Character Builder to do most of the leveling up on their own (an action I was initially quite wary of), with only a bit of overview on my part to ensure everything went well. Unfortunately the time won by this was offset by the extra time taken to set up a new player--time well spent, of course, but it nonetheless meant the session started much later than normal.
Leveling also reduced the rogue's problems, as to combat his constant shortage of surges he took the Durable feat (the bonus surges which I immediately granted him) and the cleric took Cure Light Wounds as his utility power, which he promptly cast on the rogue as well.
You Can't Go Over Water . . .
The players began actual play fitfully. They remained worried about a boss encounter ahead they felt ill-equipped to fight, and so it took some encouragement from me as DM to get them to venture forward to the next open room, which contained one of the most important parts of the Keep, a complex device that players figured out after some time (with the help of outbursts from the angry voice) was some sort of power generator and containment system for the planar rift that the deva's flashback had established the Keep was built to defend against.
The description of the centerpiece of the room--a group of metallic circles spinning in a spherical formation, with three large, finely carved gems set at the intersections of the circles--attracted the players, so much so that they were afraid of doing anything with it (correctly assuming that messing with whatever was containing the rift would have serious consequences). In the end I had to keep prodding the players, who eventually came up with a plan to instead cut the power lines connecting the generator to the rest of the facility (and specifically the magically locked door to the final room). But since in this case the generator's collapse was the inciting incident for the next act of the campaign, cutting the lines simply led to a feedback loop within the generator that brought the containment down just as well (and opened the door).
Something of an Anticlimax
The players entered the final room prepared for a boss battle and possibly the rescue of a prisoner (the fifth player waiting to be introduced this session). They found instead only a small but well-furnished room (everything was gnome sized, as they realized) and a ranting robot, now too confused and upset by the containment failure (I threw in a "resonance cascade" reference that no one got, unfortunately). The room also quickly began falling apart, along with the rest of the facility (the implication being that some sort of magical field or other device had been keeping the ancient ruins stabilized), but an escape quickly presented itself: one last false wall, revealed by its not shaking along with the rest of the room, behind which was hidden a teleportation circle.
Originally I imagined the finale of the Keep as a complex skill challenge involving an Indiana Jones-style escape as the ruins collapsed around the characters; I'm honestly not sure why I went with the hidden teleportation circle instead, aside from the ease of getting the players back to town. It certainly would have been a bit more exciting, though for once the skill challenge to activate the circle got everyone involved with useful skills, as the cleric and wizard used Arcana to decipher the circle itself, the ranger used Perception to search the room for useful information, and the rogue made one last attempt to get information out of the robot with Bluff--not to much use, but he did end up dragging the robot along as a man-sized trophy.
The Last of the Traps
When we returned from dinner, the characters had just recovered from a fight against themselves and discovered a way out of their illusionary prison. This short corridor led to what was originally planned to be one last illusion, more annoying than anything else--a hole in the floor of the corridor and the apparent doorway out on the other side, with the quick revelation that the "other side" was actually just a blank wall and the hole in fact led to the next level--that once again fell flat on its feet (and once again, to no detriment to the party, thankfully).
The last actual trap--the gnome's security system of pressure plates and magic crossbows (straight ouf the DMG, for once)--sparked some unintentional but welcomed humor as after detecting them each of the group managed to get across the pressure plates--except for the exceptionally agile rogue, who fell flat on his feet and activated the crossbows. Further humor ensued when the rogue asked as they fought the crossbows if the doorway was in fact still open--yes, I responded, hoping to give the party an opportunity to end the encounter quickly if they wanted to. They disabled the crossbows anyway.
The Voice in Your Head
The characters finally entered the meat of the Keep, beyond all the defenses. The first major detail I described was of a tinny voice shouting at them from somewhere distant but all-around them, a voice angry at their breach of the facility and ordering them to leave. The cleric attempted to negotiate with the voice once the players realized it could hear and respond to them, but quickly realized they would get nowhere.
I originally liked the idea of the characters being able to convince the voice that they were servants sent by the "master" it kept referring to, a bluff that the cleric in fact tried, but I was forced to discard this when I considered that a successful bluff would leave force a radical alteration for my plans for the dungeon. This was due to early plans focusing more on puzzles than combat--essentially, the players would have been helping the voice (a robot placed in charge of the facility in the gnome's absence, they would eventually find) restore the facility to functionality rather than just exploring its ruins and fighting the remnants of its production. I am still intrigued by this idea (and it would have led to far more sinister implications later on), but unfortunately I couldn't come up with ideas for puzzles that I liked enough and weren't simply following what the voice told them to do and so fell back on combat, a system which 4E of course handles much better.
Robot Factory (Minus the Machinist)
Players always grapple on to ideas you don't expect them to, hanging on even as you try to make clear that you have no plans for that eventuality--which is really your fault as a DM anyway; they should be allowed to cling onto the ideas they come up with based on what you've presented them. In this case there were two things the players grabbed on to: the ruins of the robot assembly line, which, accepting unfortunately that I was not about to deal with the players getting it running again for their own purposes, I simply had them able to start long enough for it to fall apart completely; and a "clockwork mechanism" they recovered amid rusted debris in a storage room, an item which I originally intended as simply a useless gadget to be sold (i.e., a clever way to give the players gold in a place where there would not reasonably be much gold to be found). The mechanism, a much more ambiguous item, has instead become a part of my ongoing plans.
The cleric also opted to spend the gold to use his Unseen Servant ritual and order it to search the storage room (and later the other rooms) instead of searching it themselves (although in the ten minute casting time I would have allowed them to find all available loot); I embraced this plan by having it find the mechanism immediately and wait for it to turn up the rest of the room's loot (4 healing potions) until after he returned to check up on it. Rituals are a part of 4E I feel are unfortunately under-used, and I continue to consider steps to make them easier and more useful. The PHBII classes' ritual casting features are a good start, and one that I plan on passing to my PHBI class players, allowing clerics to cast Gentle Repose once per day without components and wizards (supposedly the ultimate ritual casters after all) any ritual they know up to their level once per day without components (though this of course requires restrictions on creation levels to prevent enchanting item abuse--perhaps a limitation to only rituals with a set component cost?)
After a brief visit and raid of an armory, the players moved on to the next room, which did not come across as planned, to possible detriment. I described the room as full of mechanical equipment built around a low long metal table--intending but failing to evoke the imagery of Frankenstein's lab. This was, in fact, the "animation room", the place where the gnome's robots, after assembly in the construction room the characters already explored, were brought to "life". The players didn't figure that out (which was my fault, of course), and although this did not have negative consequences at the time, I fear it will come back to bite me in the ass later. (Of course, most of them read this, so now they know and will theorize accordingly, I suppose.)
Damned Respawns
The exit of the players from the animation room triggered the next combat encounter, the only actual one on the Keep's second level: a group of security robots (Warforged Soldiers and a Captain, leveled down) sent by the angry voice still yelling at the characters for their intrusion. The quirk to this encounter as the nearby open doors to a storage room where dozens more unactivated robots stood ready, with another activating on each turn, supposedly leading to a desperate in-combat skill challenge to close the doors before too many robots emerged.
But while the players quickly recognized the panels they needed to reach to close the doors, the Captain's tactical positioning of itself in front of the panel and his high defenses made the struggle instead simply to kill the Captain. The main culprit of this was the lack of forced movement powers among the party: although the wizard has Phantom Bolt as an at-will, the Captain's high defenses made it too difficult to use. As a result, I simply stopped adding robots after a number of rounds, though I continued to describe the threat of the activating robots, and the first few rounds proved to put enough fear in the players to make them very thankful when they did manage to kill the Captain and close the doors, at which point the session ended with the characters in bad shape--the party's rogue, downed during the fight with no remaining surges, managed to roll a 20 on a death save and thus was walking with 1 HP--and the players anxious and worried about what lie ahead, presuming a looming boss fight with the voice overhead and requesting an extended rest that I informed them (following the rule of needing twelve hours between extended rests, but also knowing that there was no further combat coming) would not be coming.
"Mankind." That word should have new meaning for all of us today. We can't be consumed by our petty differences anymore. We will be united in our common interests. Perhaps it's fate that today is the Fourth of July, and you will once again be fighting for our freedom... Not from tyranny, oppression, or persecution... but from annihilation. We are fighting for our right to live. To exist. And should we win the day, the Fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day the world declared in one voice: "We will not go quietly into the night!" We will not vanish without a fight! We're going to live on! We're going to survive! Today we celebrate our Independence Day!It is my understanding that Independence Day, the 1996 summer blockbuster, was nearly universally reviled in Europe and, well, everywhere in the world that is not the United States, with many critics pointing to the speech above as the epitome of unironic American egocentrism. After all, what is a clearer statement of American arrogance and ignorance than the supreme success of a movie predicated on an asinine analogue between the American Revolution and an alien invasion?
This is not the point of this post.
American egocentrism is nothing new and to say something new about it would be difficult and, more importantly, not particularly meaningful. To attack it on the American Independence Day would also be a poor move: a nation's citizens should have the right to celebrate their nation on the anniversary of its founding if no other day, should they not? Perhaps, then, we should attack nationalism, or the positively connoted synonym patriotism, which Samuel Johnson famously declared "the last refuge of the scoundrel". After all, Americans have only recently emerged from eight years of opponents to government actions being summarily dismissed as "unpatriotic".
This, too, is not the point of this post.
Or at least, not exactly. The genesis of this post lies with a bumper sticker I saw some weeks ago: I have meant to write this since then, but the Fourth has finally given me the motivation to actually do so. The sticker's text was something along the lines of, "The PATRIOT Act is Unpatriotic". Pithy, of course, and a standard line since the infamous legislation that legalized so much dangerously unsupervised surveillance. But I argue that the line is an intrinsic contradiction; that it fails before it begins by accepting a vocabulary whose baseline assumptions already make the winner the side of centralized authority, secrecy, control, power.
It is no news that what passes for "liberal" in the United States--or rather, what is allowed to pass for liberal in the mainstream political and media spheres of the United States--would barely pass for center-right in any other modern political discourse. But even among those ostracized, "radical" members of the American Left, there are many who still suffer from a great and terrible fear of being labeled "unpatriotic". They find the PATRIOT Act offensive not just because of its contents but because of the audacity of the name, the vile contradiction between signifier and signified that they perceive from it. They rise to anger when mouthpieces denounce them or others as "unpatriotic" because they are the "real" patriots: because they support what the United States was truly founded on, the values they espouse, which are contrary to the centralized authority proffered by the "other side".
It is not simply that they fight a battle, not realizing that they have lost the war, it is that they fight a war on terrorism with terror. It is that they fight a war to end war. It is that they are arguing from a position whose central tenets, if examined closely and truthfully, can only result in the conclusion that war is peace and freedom is slavery. And thus, of course, ignorance is strength.
Their failure, their first and damning mistake, is that they accept the premise of the "nation". That the idea of the United States is a noble one, that it is a real and living entity that must be defended from those who would prey upon it, that a legitimate purpose of government and politics is the vitality and morality of the nation.
This is bullshit.
The idea of the "nation" may, in fact, be the most dangerous bullshit ever thought up by the minds of men--or perhaps not. But certainly the nation, the successor to the empire (though of course empires persisted long past the rise of nations and persist today, America's being the most notable), is one of the greatest tools of oppression ever devised.
A nation is an artificial community. People naturally group themselves by connections of family, locations, resources, anything that can connect people together. Human beings are a social species; their strength is in networks. Alone (although we are never truly alone, of course), we are weak; it is by working together, by giving and taking from each other, that human beings have accomplished what they have.
Networks, however, can be difficult to build. Beyond the blood ties of family, human connections can be notoriously tenuous--barring childish "friendship bracelets" and the like (though they of course are similar symptoms of the same desire for signification), there are no permanent marks of friendship. Friendship is a connection based on trust, but trust, of course, is something that is difficult for many people to give. And so we create visible signs and symbols of our connections, to make sure they are based not simply on trust (as if a physical embodiment gives a connection more strength--though of course often it does, in that a person who defies a signified connection becomes known as a betrayer): we have contracts, and laws, and titles, and business cards, and in the process the network solidifies and becomes an institution.
The essence of a network is its fluidity: it is flexible, mobile, easily redefined--in fact, it exists in a sort of quantum uncertainty at all times, so that it has no definition at any particular moment except when one is asked for. It is the strength of networks: they cannot be tied down, or destroyed by one link in a chain being destroyed, for there are no necessary parts. Everything is replaceable. But this is also the danger of networks, for humans: we are replaceable, and so the only thing we can rely on to keep us from being replaced is the goodness of the other parts of the network.
An institution is a network without fluidity, a network frozen in a moment of time, so that all the connections that existed then become a permanent structure, never to be in danger of being replaced, and never to be added to. It is a structure: a tribe and a chieftain, a fief and a lord, a kingdom and a king. The titles of nobility, the levels of the church, every hierarchy, every artificial social construction designed to give rigidity to social networks, the epitome of which, of course, is the nation: a social institution so vast it can contain 300 million people (or over a billion), manifest as a bureaucracy with such vast reams of legislation and levels of governance that no individual could ever conceive of the entirety at once, so that instead it is reduced to one or two words, a bite-size vocal meme to be repeated in lieu of any real understanding of the vast complexity of the social sphere the institution superficially encompasses, a golden idol to bow before in lieu of any real conception of the nature of God (which is, of course, simply another idol. But that, too, is not what this post is about.)
Besides churches or other organized religion, there is no other institution that has acquired as much legitimacy as the nation--and in the postsecular world of today, even religion's supremacy is arguable. In the years after the beginning of the Iraq War, the "Support the Troops" ribbons became a tired punchline of ignorant consumerism; but the criticism, of course, was always simply that those who purchased such ribbons had not actually done anything to "support the troops". It was and remains and unquestioned assumption that everyone should, in fact, support the troops.
I do not mean to suggest that American soldiers deserve to die--but I do believe that no one deserves to die. And thus it is without qualms that I can say, I do not support the troops. I do not say, I merely criticize the administration that sent them there, or even the new administration that keeps them there. I criticize the cultural worship of the nation that leads people to accept that it is a noble thing to kill or even to die for an artificial construct with as much real impact on the average person's life as, well, any major Western power. It is easier to see the lack of influence of the nation when considering another: there are many nations in which the American government has more influence than the local national government, most obviously, but the people living in those nations do not pledge their lives to the cause of the United States.
The nation's success, I think, lies in its coopting of the notion of "citizenship". You may be members of a club, employees of a company, or followers of a church, but you are a citizen of a nation, and that word enjoys many special connotations that the others do not. While again there are similarities with religion, for most people, citizenship implies far more duty, loyalty, and responsibility than membership in any church. This is because citizenship is at its core a word for the type of give-and-take interaction that is the nature of every real, nonartificial community.
Citizenship is not a bad word--it is, in fact, I think a very good word, and a very important word, deserving of respect. Citizenship means being an asset to your community and not a burden--the problem is in the definition of "community", which has of course expanded far beyond any rational borders (though such borders would of course be nebulous, as any true network is) to include the entirety of modern states.
In such a context the values of citizenship becomes impossible to follow because there is no way to ascertain what benefits the "community" of the nation and what does not--beyond, of course, what the national government says. Which is the entire point of the nation, its great danger and its great promise to those desiring power: when a person can no longer contextualize their community, when the network of people they know and rely on becomes too vast for them to even begin to understand, they turn to institutions and structures to provide simple labels for them to use instead, and simple values for them to use instead of true evaluations of benefit.
And thus young men willingly fly hundreds of thousands of miles around the world to kill and be killed by people they know nothing about and believe that they are being good citizens.