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Dragna's Blog: Meenlocks, Sergei & Goal-Oriented Design
🕑 Added 2024-07-03 22:55:52 +0000 UTCA Deep and Creeping Darkness is a short 5th Edition adventure for 4th-level characters by Michele Carter and Sarah Madsen from the Candlekeep Mysteries anthology. In it, the players are tasked by a mining company with investigating the abandoned mining town of Vermeillon and the nearby platinum mine in order to determine what caused the villagers to abandon it and determine whether it can be reopened safely. Along the way, the players can travel to Candlekeep to obtain the titular book (a literary documentary compiling the stories of the survivors), speak with former villagers who fled as children, and explore the overgrown ruins of the village.
The village's true backstory is simple, yet haunting. Decades ago, a cave-in at the mine trapped several dozen miners beneath the earth and killed many others. The survivors’ fear summoned a nest of meenlocks from the Feywild, which preyed upon their terror and transformed some of them into additional meenlocks. When the remaining survivors were rescued, the meenlocks continued to prey upon the town, occasionally kidnapping local villagers and tormenting the remaining residents, until the entire town packed up and left in fear. The meenlocks remain in the abandoned mine, though one - the transformed former mayor of Vermeillon - still dwells amidst the ruins of her former home.
It's a nice, tight, spooky little story. The adventure itself is a fun little one-shot as well. You get some roleplay with the former villagers, some exploration of the abandoned village, and some combat with a few meenlocks. As the Alexandrian said in his review, it's “an adventure [you can] run without making any changes.”
Except not me.
Why?
A Deep & Creeping Darkness
Let's start with the basics: There isn't really a climax to speak of. There might be an organic climax, if, as the adventure suggests, one of the players gets KO’d early and dragged into the meenlocks’ lair to be transformed (unlikely, since meenlocks punch far below their CR 2 weight and, as per their statblock, have no actual mechanism to transform someone without flat-out killing them).
But the whole adventure can basically be summarized by: “The players get lore from the ex-villagers, have some optional DM-chosen random encounters, find some lore in the mayor’s house, get attacked by the mayor's meenlock, go into the mine, have a few potential jumpscares involving bats/an ooze/fungus tentacles, and fight the rest of the meenlocks.” There is a fun little mechanic in the final fight, in which the meenlocks might try to trap the players in the cave by blowing up some old dynamite, but the whole adventure is a very bog-standard “kill the monsters” dungeon crawl that just kind of ends when all of the monsters are dead.
(Sidenote - I've recently noticed this in a lot of WotC design, and especially in Candlekeep Mysteries, and it's been driving me batty. Both times I've run adventures from the Candlekeep anthology previously, the session just sort of ended once there were no more meaningful stakes - I could have had the sessions continue once the core dramatic question was resolved, but it felt more like bonus content/epilogues than real, meaningful material.)
Now, it’s entirely possible that I’m missing something in the adventure that can give rise to real pathos and catharsis once the meenlocks are defeated. But since I couldn’t, I figured I’d take a stab at “reloading” a shorter adventure more substantially.
Let’s start with the table context. I’ve been using Candlekeep Mysteries as a vehicle to teach my (relatively new) players about roleplay - creating resonance, channeling new emotions, following personality archetypes, finding character inspirations, performing basic voice-acting, and so on. With this adventure, I wanted to try something a little more ambitious: character arcs.
In a “character arc,” a character winds up a qualitatively different person at the end of the story compared to how they were at the beginning. In an external character arc, this relates to their position in the world - they become a Jedi or the King of Gondor, for example. In an internal character arc, this relates solely to their inner self - they might become less selfish or more compassionate, for instance.
A Deep and Creeping Darkness is about fear - the miners’ fear which summoned the meenlocks, the villagers’ fear which drove them to flee Vermeillon, and the ex-villagers’ fear that prevents them from returning to the ruins today. It’s also, needless to say, something of a horror adventure, in which the players themselves face fear and tension and all that good stuff.
The obvious path forward to me, then, was designing an adventure that would implicitly require and encourage each player character to conquer some deep, meaningful fear - not a phobia, but something more ephemeral, such as “fear of failure” or “fear of vulnerability.” These fears would originate from, or in relation to, the mine itself (i.e., because the players themselves were ex-villagers), such that returning to Vermeillon would serve as a cathartic experience that allowed them to face their fears in the place those fears were first born.
To scaffold this, I felt it important to increase the salience of fear in the original adventure’s backstory, such as by (1) adding a group of wandering merchants/tinkers that the original villagers attacked out of a misplaced and xenophobic belief that they had conducted the kidnappings, and (2) modifying the Vermeillon mayor’s history such that, due to growing paranoid fears of abandonment/cheating/etc., she caused the deaths of her spouse and child before becoming a meenlock herself. This allowed me to contrast the town’s downfall with the players’ efforts to “redeem” their lineage through conquering their fears via the destruction of the mine.
Because, yes, while this is still a story about the players taking on a contract from a mining company to investigate whether the platinum mine could still be reopened, I felt it important that, for symbolic and cathartic reasons, the mine could not be allowed to survive to the end of the story - it had to be buried, as a physical signifier of the burial of the players’ fears.
So here’s what I sent my players:
For our next adventure, anyone who wants to can claim a fear and flaw from the following table. Your internal arc, should you choose to accept it, will be about your character overcoming their fear and therefore overcoming their flaw. The list of suggested fears and flaws is below, but you're free to propose your own if you'd prefer:
ear of Rejection. Emotionally withdrawn, excessively self-reliant, defensive, perfectionistic.
Fear of Poverty. Greedy, ruthlessly ambitious, miserly, status-obsessed
Fear of Death. Cowardly, obsessed with youth/vanity, existentially anxious
Fear of Failure. Perfectionistic, procrastinating, overcompensating, self-sabotaging
Fear of Powerlessness. Controlling, aggressive, paranoid, prone to learned helplessness
Fear of Self. Self-loathing, prone to imposter syndrome, avoidant of introspection, prone to projection
Fear of Insignificance. Attention-seeking, overachieving, narcissistic, cynical
Fear of Attachment. Avoidant of commitment, emotionally unavailable, fickle, prone to lone-wolf mentality
Note that you're not making "evil" characters so much as flawed characters - they should still, at the end of the day, want to work with the other members of the party to get the job done. Importantly, they shouldn't be irredeemable - they should be capable of overcoming their flaws and conquering their fears under sufficient pressure (i.e., by or before the climax of the adventure). You're free to create your own backstory reasons for the source of your fear. However, all of you share the same basic backstory, which is as follows:
wenty-six years ago, your families fled the mountain mining village of Vermeillon, once famed for its rich veins of platinum ore. You don't know the full story of why they fled, but you've gleaned that, following a cave-in in the nearby Silverstone Mine, numerous residents went missing over the course of several weeks, leading to fears that the village might be cursed. An exodus followed soon after, leaving Vermeillon - and its mine - abandoned.
Many families who fled Vermeillon found new work with Bedrock Boring Co., a regional mining enterprise, and you - their children - found work there as well when you came of age. Recent financial troubles, however, have driven Bedrock to seek out new sources of revenue, and the company is currently hoping to expand into the platinum market. After obtaining evidence of a rich untapped platinum vein in the mountain, Bedrock has elected to send a new mining expedition to Silverstone Mine, hoping to clear away the rubble from the decades-old cave-in and resume operations as soon as possible.
Due to your own familiarities with the area, Bedrock has sent you - a group of surveyors, scouts, naturalists, and guards - as an advance team ahead of the main group. Your job: to assess the terrain, inspect existing infrastructure in the village, establish a base camp, map out access points to the mine, and remove any hazards that might obstruct the miners' excavation efforts.
I had my overall adventure planned. Now, it was time to buckle down and write the damn thing.
Boom! Goes the Dynamite
My first problem was an annoying one. Like I noted earlier, the original adventure has some dynamite in the meenlocks’ lair that the players need to stop the meenlocks from blowing up (otherwise the players will be buried alive). This seemed very silly to me. Meenlocks are spooky Feywild creatures; they don’t use dynamite! And surely, if I wanted the players to bury their fears in the tomb of the mine, the players needed to be the ones blowing up the mine to bury the meenlocks and their horrors?
So this meant I needed to contrive a situation in which the players had good reason to want to blow up the mine at the end, despite their company contract asking them to figure out how to restart operations. To make it more impactful, I thought it’d be a good idea to make it a choice - the players can choose whether to blow up the mine at the end, or to let it linger and risk something bad happening again in the future.
This seemed like a fun idea in theory. But in practice, I had no idea how to make it work.
Let’s start with the stakes - why do the players want to blow up the mine (and destroy the meenlock lair)? My initial thought was simple: the rest of the mining team is arriving tomorrow, and once they get here, the meenlocks will slaughter half of them and turn the rest into more meenlocks, which will, in turn, endanger a nearby (non-abandoned) town.
This felt pretty weak - why can’t the players just run out onto the road and warn the miners before they arrive? - and basically forced me to write a “suicide” ending where the players get trapped in the mine (and so can’t warn the incoming miners) and then have to blow up the mine while they’re still inside of it to prevent the meenlocks from escaping. No me gusta.
What else did I have? Well, there was always the option to kidnap someone - a villager, a companion NPC, or a player themselves. (I actually DM’d one of my players on Discord to ask if they’d be willing to play along with a “conspiracy” where they let themselves get kidnapped and then brought in a backup character to take their place instead.) Bring that person down into the mine, tie them up with some evil moss, and let the players fight it out with the meenlocks to bring them out alive again. It even emulated the backstory of Vermeillon, except instead of running away from the village, the players had the chance to rescue the kidnapped victim. Symmetry!
. . . But while that gave the players a really good reason to go down into the mine and fight the meenlocks, it didn’t really answer the question: “Why are the players blowing up the mine?” I just wound up leading myself right back to the tired old “the meenlocks present some Generic Threat to people who Aren’t Here Right Now and they should get blown up Because I Said So.”
Sergei's Invitation
Fortunately, at the time that I was struggling through this, I was also helping a patron in the Patreon Discord’s #campaign-help server figure out how to rework the Madam Eva invitation to Tser Pool in Reloaded (something I’ve been pondering doing anyway for the past few months). The goal was to give players a reason to (1) treat the Tarokka reading as the campaign-defining Quest that it is, and (2) actually remember it.
Here’s a fun little psychological trick: Players intrinsically value things that they’ve earned over things that they’re given. So here was the new plan: Have Sergei appear to the players in their dreams, tell them that they’re totally doomed but Madam Eva can change/read their fortunes if they convince her to, then let the players go on a mini-quest at Tser Pool where Madam Eva will only do the Tarokka readings if the players retrieve Lugdana’s circlet from Tser Falls first.
This was, in all likelihood, a stronger approach than the original version. In the current Reloaded draft, Madam Eva just sort of shows up in the players’ dreams, delivers a short and cryptic warning of “doom,” and insists that they come visit her, whereupon she promptly delivers a spooky and cryptic foretelling that doesn’t really feel relevant to any of the players’ current long-term or short-term goals.
This version was better! But this new approach had a big flaw as well.
Here’s another psychological trick: Players place a higher value on goals that they’ve chosen to pursue over goals that they’ve been told to pursue. Put differently, the most powerful way to make your players care about a Quest isn’t to tell them to go on the Quest; instead, the most powerful way to do so is to incentivize the players to seek out the quest, giving them all of the pieces necessary to figure out that the quest needs to get done, but letting them put those pieces together instead of telling them about it.
(There’s a cynically and darkly funny example of this from the song Dancing Through Life in the musical Wicked. While planning a dance party, the character Galinda - who’s found her suitor Boq to be annoying all day - sings to him regarding the handicapped character Nessa, who’s sitting nearby: “See that tragically beautiful girl / The one in the chair / It seems so unfair / We should go on a spree / And not she, gee / I know someone would be my hero / If that someone were to go invite her.” Boq responds: “Well, maybe I could invite her?” And Galinda promptly responds with false surprise: “Oh, [Boq], really? You would do that for me?” Boq’s determination to invite Nessa is made all the more powerful because Galinda implied that it would be good if some generic person did it, rather than asking him directly; by volunteering himself, Boq has entwined this “quest” with a part of his personality; he is now “the guy who wants to invite Nessa” rather than “the guy who Galinda told to invite Nessa.”)
But how do you manufacture a situation in which the players volunteer themselves for a quest, without any overt prompting by the DM? The key lies in understanding player goals - and, more importantly, something I’ve recently been calling “goal-oriented design.”
While working on Sergei’s dream invitation to Tser Pool, I quickly got stuck on a minor design problem. The idea, in theory, was that the players would wake up somewhere in a post-apocalyptic dream version of Barovia, fight off some zombies, and then get cornered by a bunch of overpowered zombie clots. Sergei would then wave them over into a nearby building, hide them there while the zombie clots passed by, and proceed to Explain The Plot (and tell them to go visit Madam Eva).
This is a very traditional, classic approach to Plot Explaining in a lot of D&D adventure design. But as much as it seemed functional, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the vibes were off. It felt wrong. It felt - dare I say it - railroady.
But how should we even define the term “railroady”? Some people take the word “railroad” to mean “the DM offers the players a choice and then retroactively nullifies the choice they make.” Others define the word to mean “the DM deprives the players of a choice in a situation where they feel entitled to a choice.” Others just use it to mean “the DM runs a linear adventure with no meaningful plot-level choices to make.” I’m probably missing dozens of other definitions, too. What’s the use of a word where nobody can agree on what it actually means?
Goal-Oriented Design
I decided to try and interrogate what, precisely, felt wrong to me about this Sergei scene. Eventually, I honed in on this: In my mind, upon encountering Sergei, the players would have the goal “get inside the building Sergei is in.” But this wasn't quite accurate. The players' true goal, more precisely stated, was “escape the zombie clots”; Sergei's invitation was one way of achieving that. This disjunction between assumed goals and real goals was the source of this “railroad.”
Put differently: Any time a player does anything in the game, they're either making a choice or they're not. In this scene, the players had a choice - specifically, a method choice. They had many other reasonable ways to escape the zombie clots (e.g., hiding in an alleyway, breaking into another building, climbing to the top of a house, or simply attempting to outrun the horde). I'd offered the players a potentially attractive option (Sergei's invitation), but (1) had done nothing to make it more attractive than the others, and (2) had scaffolded the scene such that any other choice would break the narrative, to the point where, no matter what the players did, I'd have to gently shepherd them back toward Sergei anyway.
These are the two heads of railroading: confusing choices with non-choices and treating those non-choices as necessary. It's easy to see why we might fall into these traps! When we DM, we're largely pulling from our experience with passive media: books, television, and movies. Even when a protagonist makes a (reasonable) choice we wouldn't have made, we rarely second-guess them, simply accepting that this is the way the story goes. Even when we play active media, like video games, our choices are forced by non-diegetic tools (such as quest markers and dialogue trees) that artificially limit our options and place the designer's thumb on the scales.
In video games, this works because we don't play video games to make macro-level choices; we predominantly play video games for the micro-level gameplay, be it shooting, swordfighting, or puzzle-solving. Video games, unlike D&D, ask us to make use of our hands, our eyes, and our ears; they are tactile, sensory experiences.
But D&D lacks a visual display or hand-held inputs; communication, not controllers, serves as its sole interface. In D&D, our choices are the gameplay - and so our instincts, honed from years of consuming other media, almost inevitably tend to lead us astray.
This lens - of examining game design and player behavior through the paradigm of goals and choices - is what I've taken to calling “goal-oriented design.” At a superficial level, it aligns with the common wisdom to “prep situations, not plots.” But in reality, it provides a much more powerful toolset than that.
Take the concept of a dramatic question: “When (inciting incident), can the protagonist (overcome obstacle) to (achieve goal) in order to (stakes)?” You might note that “overcoming an obstacle” is itself a goal: a sub-goal, if you will, that is auxiliary to its parent goal.
Obstacles, in other words, are not components of dramatic questions at all - they are other, smaller dramatic questions whose stakes are the progression or resolution of their parent dramatic questions. And these obstacles can, in turn, have obstacles of their own (“I need to run my D&D session, but I can't do that unless I prep the session first, but I can't do that unless I figure out the main scenes first, which I can't do unless I review my notes first . . .”). Goals are fractal - it's goals all the way down.
But how do the players achieve these goals? We can allow them to do so with choice, or with no choice at all. If, to defeat the dragon, the players need only walk to the Temple of Dragonslaying, take the elevator to the tenth floor, buy a Dragonslaying Blade for 10gp, then walk back to the dragon's den and wiggle the sword around for a bit, there's no choice - and therefore no gameplay. (After all, what is gameplay in D&D but the choices we make as we navigate the narrative and its constituent encounters?) But the players have, nonetheless, achieved the goal.
To introduce choice, we must introduce obstacles - auxiliary goals to the goals we have created - that present meaningful choice of their own. The players must obtain a Dragonslaying Blade, yes, but what if the priests don't want them to have it? This small change introduces a method choice: will the players try to reason with the priests, try to suck up to them, or just try to steal the blade without permission? We suddenly have gameplay!
This method descends even further into the nitty-gritty of gameplay. Perhaps the players need to walk to the Temple of Dragonslaying, but it's hidden somewhere on a mountain; “find the temple” becomes our new auxiliary goal. However, “Look around a mountain for a few hours” doesn't offer much gameplay (since it's the only possible choice), so we need to offer an additional goal that's auxiliary to that goal and actually offers gameplay. (Perhaps that goal is “convince the local ranger to take you there” (method choice) or “navigate the Dragonscale Caves” (method choice) or simply “decide which guide you trust to show you the way” (option choice).)
Reworking the Dream
This meant, for Sergei’s dream sequence, that I had to take a step back and fundamentally reframe my entire perspective on how this narrative fit together. I wasn't outlining a sequence of scenes; I was stringing together a series of goals. Because I wanted each of these goals to include meaningful choices (i.e., gameplay), I couldn't make assumptions about how the players would achieve them. However, because I had the power to dictate which goals the players would have reason to pursue, I could structure the sequence such that achieving one goal naturally led to the next, which naturally led to the next, and so on.
The final goal, of course, had to be: “Seek out Madam Eva and get her to read your fortunes.” But how could I get there?
This goal could only come when the players met and spoke with Sergei. To make sure the players valued the information they received, I had to make sure they earned it - i.e., had to use gameplay to extract it. I settled on the goal “convince Sergei to speak with you” (method choice).
From there, it was just a matter of working backwards. Why do the players want Sergei to speak with them? They're trapped in a spooky dream and he's the only living creature they've seen. How do they learn they're trapped in a spooky dream? They find themselves in a nightmare version of the Barovia graveyard, surrounded by the Mists. How do they learn that these Mists are the deadly kind? They're buried in coffins in separate shallow graves and have to break out before the Mists flood the coffins and exhaust them to death (method choice).
But even once all this was established, how could I ensure the players cared about the goal “talk to Madam Eva”? This was clearly meant to be an auxiliary goal to “kill Strahd.” But even “kill Strahd” was itself an auxiliary goal at this point (i.e., not something the players intrinsically desired). What, then, was the core, parent goal that Strahd's death was necessary to serve? What, ultimately, were the stakes?
It couldn't be “escape from Barovia” (the players might have Barovian Relics and quests they still wanted to complete). It couldn't be “rescue Ireena” (there are other apparently reasonable ways to keep her safe). It could be “don't let Strahd kill you” (as Madam Eva vaguely suggested in the original version of this dream). But the players hadn't even met him yet, and Strahd, at least at this point, had no specific designs on killing them in particular.
The solution, I realized, had been under my nose the entire time: the March of the Dead. Every adventurer that had ever entered Barovia - trapped for eternity, and dead long before their time.
“If you do not defeat Strahd,” Sergei would warn them, “this will be you: a ghostly, imprisoned apparition bearing the wounds that killed you for all eternity. You will win neither glory nor peace. You will be forgotten. Every outsider, like you, has had this same dream - and every outsider, for over four centuries, has perished. You are no different than them now - but you can be different, if you go to Madam Eva and plead for her to show you how to avoid this inevitable fate.”
So that settled Sergei. But what about the meenlocks?
Earning Your Ending
I wanted A Deep & Creeping Darkness to end with the players detonating the dynamite and blowing up the mine. First question: would this be a core goal (an end) or an auxiliary goal (a means to an end)? It seemed pretty clearly to be a means to an end - eliminating the meenlock threat for good.
But the players' only reason for killing all the meenlocks was "so we can reopen the mine and get paid." The dynamite ending was expressly contrary to that goal, which meant I had three options: (1) make the players choose between blowing up the mine and reopening the mine (option choice); (2) make the players choose between total failure (we escape safely without reopening the mine) and partial failure (we take on a big risk in order to destroy the meenlocks, but still don't reopen the mine) (action choice); or (3) rig the game so that the players' only chance of survival is blowing up the mine (no choice).
#3 wasn't satisfying to me, largely because I felt it diminished the players' moral agency and deprived them of an outcome they'd reasonably expected (reopening the mine) without providing any opportunity to choose a different outcome.
#2 was definitely more of a bittersweet possibility, which mapped well onto the horror genre and the focus on character arcs.
#1 at first glance seemed to offer a more traditional heroic ending, but since the two options had to be meaningfully competitive, "reopening the mine" had to have some real and meaningful downside (e.g., "there are still meenlocks down there and we might be sentencing more miners to death"). Since the players' entire starting goal was "make the mine safe," this didn't really work for me.
So that left #2: the two possible endings are (1) the players players rescue their friend, find the hive, then flee in fear, or (2) the players blow up the mine and kill all the meenlocks, with the hope that someday, the rock might be excavated again. (I'd have to add something in there to make sure the meenlocks didn't just teleport out of the mine, but that would be easy enough - fey have to follow all sorts of rules, so I could easily add in mechanics like "meenlocks can't cross a line of salt" or somesuch.)
This felt better, but still not entirely satisfying - I was offering my players a Good Ending with one hand ("restore the mine" at the start of the adventure) and taking it away with the other ("blow up the mine and escape"). That didn't feel fair to my players, and I could see it hurting their morale. I realized I needed a way for the players to achieve a best ending. It didn't need to be mandatory, and it didn't even need to be likely - it just needed to be possible.
And that meant turning to another kind of gameplay: challenge.
There are two basic types of challenge: outcome challenge (the players' skill allows them to achieve different degrees of success) and path challenge (the players' skill allows them to use different methods of achieving the goal). Here, I was looking for a path challenge - a way for the players to destroy the meenlock lair without using the dynamite. If the players figured it out, great - they'd earned the Good Ending. If not, then they'd at least made the choice to proceed without digging deeper, and I wouldn't have to feel guilty about depriving them of that Good Ending.
Interestingly enough, the original module tells us how the meenlocks first arrived: there's a shallow lake on the mountainside immediately above the meenlock lair. "When the full moon hangs in the night sky, the lake becomes a fey crossing. Anyone who completely submerges in the icy waters during this time surfaces in the Feywild."
That immediately made me think: What if the players could achieve the Good Ending by going to the Feywild? And that immediately made me wonder: What could the players find in the Feywild that could help them drive out the meenlocks? And I immediately thought:
Unicorn.
Lawful Good, CR 5 celestial with strong Fey associations. Intelligent, capable of speech, and more than able to give our PCs some artifact or ritual capable of driving the meenlocks back to the Feywild for good - which the players could only use by symbolically conquering their fears while in the depths of the mine.
And that felt right.
