Session 13 Planning

Breaking out Ironsworn's Delve, testing out GPT-4, and planning our attack

Welcome back to PTFO:Stonetop! I hope your July is going pleasantly, and, if you celebrate one of the many national days that land in this month, your fireworks were spectacular and didn’t terrify your pets and/or children too much.

Last session, the party scrambled to unite the disparate factions of Gordin’s Delve after learning of a planned attack by Cirl-of-the-Storms, the powerful Hillfolk sorcerer who has dogged their steps and has designs on Stonetop. In the course of their efforts, they learned that Odo Thriceborn, one of the powerful gang bosses that rule the lawless mining town, has established a dark cult in a hidden ruin beneath the town’s tangle of ramshackle tenements. Worse, it appears that Odo and his fellow travelers are carriers of a grim affliction: The Howling Curse, which whispers violent urges in the ears of those infected and gradually twists their bodies into bestial forms.

Now, the party faces a difficult challenge: Before Cirl’s forces arrive, they aid the other Delve Bosses in securing their flank by extinguishing Odo’s cult, root and branch. This episode will be prep only — no fiction, so if you’re only in it for the tale, this one is an OK one to skip — there’ll be a good amount of detail about the system we’re using, as well as some discussion of how I’ve been experimenting with using generative AI to power some of my solo play.

We’ll start by talking about Ironsworn: Delve — this session will be my first experience with that product, so it will serve as a bit of a (very) longform review.

Delving into Delve

If you haven’t heard of it, it’s worth reading a bit about Ironsworn, and its sci-fi sibling Starforged¹ (You can read a review of Starforged here on friend-of-the-newsletter Croaker’s blog) — it was my introduction to GM-less play, and its play flow is more-or-less what I use to drive the action in this project.

Another key element in Ironsworn is the incorporation of clocks — rendered in Ironsworn as 10-box progress bars — in nearly every aspect of story progression. In Ironsworm, the grand quest you embark on is represented as a progress bar, the journey you go on to achieve that quest is represented as a progress bar, and the bandits that ambush you on the way? You guessed it: Fill their progress bar to defeat them.

This is not so different from other TTRPGs — the hitpoints stat in countless games are just progress bars that you advance by doing damage, and the quest checklists that Stonetop uses to unlock Arcana, village improvements, or as part of the Make a Plan move are progress bars with careful narrative labeling. Personally, I find Ironsworn’s approach an admirable streamlining — every task in an RPG, big or small, is achieved by scoring success on some number of rolls before some number of failed rolls occurs. The rest is in the fiction.

And Delve is not an exception — in Ironsworn: Delve, progress through a dungeon² is tracked using a progress bar. The reason this is useful for our purposes is it allows us to experience a dungeon as players rather than a GM — without detailed foreknowledge of the contents of the site. Rather than navigating a pre-determined map, as you would in something like Tomb of Horrors or other classic D&D dungeon crawl, we’ll be using this move, adapted for use in Stonetop:

Source: Ironsworn Delve // Shawn Tomkin

For our purposes, this will be essentially a modified Defy Danger roll: When our heroes navigate a dungeon using haste, stealth, or trickery, they’ll be rolling +Dexterity, using observation or intuition will roll +Wisdom, and expertise will roll +Intelligence. This means that Vahid and Padrig will have a much better chance of keeping their wits about them while delving, while Anwen will have a bit more trouble, since her Dex and Int are +0, and her Wis is -1. Let’s hope they don’t get separated!

As you can see from the move text, you trigger Delve the Depths by “traversing an area,” which is flexible enough to cover something as focused as navigating a trap-filled hallway in a few seconds and something as broad as navigating a twisting, many-miles-long network of tunnels over the course of hours or even days. When we trigger it, on both a strong and weak hit, we make some progress through the site, revealing a new area that might be home to a danger or an opportunity.

One of my favorite things about Delve is the support it gives you in envisioning those areas you discover as you journey deeper into the dungeon. To create your dungeon, you select a domain that describes the physical characteristics of the place, and a theme, which represents the condition of the site and who or what might inhabit it. To envision each area, you roll once for a feature and, if relevant, a danger — you can see below that both random tables complement one another, themes are more likely to contribute dangers and domains are more likely to contribute features. For features, I also find that they play nicely together — in the below list, you might have result 57, a vast chamber, and combine it with result 4, a mystic focus or conduit, for a more layered setup to the scene.

An example theme and domain, available for download in the free preview of Delve on ironswornrpg.com

So, as an example, on the above set of tables, we might make the following roll for a feature:

73: Cavern, Natural bridge

And then roll for a danger:

27: Corrupted, Lingering effects of a dark ritual.

And from that, construct a scene:

Our heroes pass through a narrow, winding tunnel into a grand, echoing cavern. The cave floor drops away and descends into darkness, and the only path across the vast gulf is a natural stone bridge, arching across the cavern. As our heroes cross the stone bridge and reach the center, they come to a grim sight — carved into the center of the bridge is a ritual circle, a whorl of strange runes that seem to squirm and crawl when they try to look at them. Offerings are scattered around the circle — brown, decaying flower garlands, chipped clay bowls stained with dark unguents and dried patches of rust-red blood. They drop a torch down into the cavern, and below is a charnel pit: A heap of bones and rot, and fresher corpses atop them, their still forms twisted in agony. When one of our heroes looks over the edge, the whispers of the cult’s god slither into his ears, and he feels a powerful urge to leap. His friend’s hand on his shoulder stops him, but the whispers persist, and as they leave, he can’t help looking over the edge at the dead below.

And then on to the next Delve the Depths roll. Each area adds progress, and once we complete the track, we reach our objective — whatever treasure, nemesis or secret has lead us to explore this dungeon in the first place.

Prepping Odo’s Lair

To prep Odo’s lair, we’ll need to think about domain and theme, too. One technique the book suggests, if you want to achieve a specific effect, is to blend multiple domains and themes, or assign different domains and themes to different segments of the progress track.

The tenements. here hides Odo’s family, and his curse. Source: Midjourney

This method works well for Odo’s Lair — it’s actually two dungeons, the first atop the second. First is the tenements — the tangle of shanties, ramshackle insula³-style apartment buildings, and wooden walkways that are built against the walls and ruins of the 6th terrace of Gordin’s Delve. The second is Odo’s sanctum — a complex of underground ruins and chambers, originally built by the Forge Lords, now occupied by Odo and his accursed family.

To represent this, we’ll split the site into 2 — five boxes for the tenements, five for the lair itself, each with a different domain. For the tenements, we’ll use the Corrupted theme and pair it with the Stronghold domain. It’s not quite a stronghold, exactly, but it’s close enough — we can imagine how these features might translate to a large, semi-communal living area like the tenements.

And for the sanctum itself, we’ll blend the Stronghold domain above with the Underkeep domain to represent the Forge Lord complex beneath the tenements.

Source: Ironsworn Delve // Shawn Tomkin

For practical purposes, this means I’ll roll on both tables and choose the result for which an interesting idea first emerges.

After selecting domains and themes, the next important step in Delve prep is to define what denizens occupy the dungeon. For this, I’ll be using stat blocks from Stonetop’s setting book, an incredibly rich resource. In the tenements, the primary denizen will be these:

Source: Stonetop // Jeremy Strandberg

This is the bulk of folk that occupy the tenements. Mixed in are laborers, who are a bit hardier and tougher to scare. For Odo’s bravos, who might appear among the desparate, we’ll use this stat block:

Source: Stonetop // Jeremy Strandberg

This is the rank-and-file bravo of Gordin’s Delve. For Odo’s special lot, however, we’ll need to add a move: Manifest a bestial sign of the Howling Curse. Deeper into the dungeon, we may see cultists who are more and more taken by the curse — potentially to the same extent as the alpha from Session 12.6. Those stats, as well as those of Odo Thriceborn and Dawa Eyegouger, I’ll keep behind the notional GM screen to preserve some of Session 13’s surprises for y’all.

So: We have our domains, our themes, and our denizens. We’re well-equipped to start envisioning our party’s journey into the dark, bloody place that Odo calls home.

Delve-GPT

I’ve been itching to use some LLMs⁴ as part of this project — as y’all have seen, I do use Midjourney for illustrations of varying quality, but so far all the narrative and text has been human-produced, with some prompting from the various random tables we make use of. But this Delve seemed like a unique opportunity to do some experiments with GPT-4 — I don’t foresee ever directly copying and pasting prose written by the model directly into our story, but I am interested in using generative AI to supercharge the random tables I often use to generate interesting and surprising directions for the story. What follows is an explanation of how I approached a Chat-GPT session to prompt the generation of dungeon areas that could be adapted for use in the story. If you’re curious about what these models can do, you might find it interesting — if you’re not big into AI (a position I can empathize with, even if I don’t entirely share it), click here to skip this section and go straight to a discussion (and reader poll!) about the party’s plan of attack.

Building the Context

To get started with prompting an LLM to create ideas for discrete areas within this dungeon, I started by writing up a contextual paragraph in the Chat-GPT interface. Here’s what I provided:

We're writing a story about three heroes in an iron-age fantasy setting. They are exploring two locations in a town called Gordin's Delve.

The first is The Tenements, a ramshackle town that houses about 200 laborers, mostly miners and woodsmen. It is built among the ruins of an ancient civilization, ruled by extinct giants known as the Forge Lords. The tenements are where the poorest and most desperate people in Gordin's Delve live. They work deep in the mines in dangerous conditions for petty wages, and injury, addiction and starvation are common among them. The tenements are policed by a gang called Odo's Family, a strange cult which sometimes feeds and protects, and at other times abuses, the people living in the Tenements. People in the tenements often go missing, and there are superstitions about monstrosities emerging from the mines to prey on the unsuspecting.

The second location is Odo's Lair, a network of caverns and ancient chambers below the tenements, first built by the Forge Lords. In these ruins, Odo's cult practices dark rituals in reverence of a demon of hunger and cruelty. The cult revels in violence and frequently engage in pit fighting and torture of people kidnapped from the tenements above.

Then, I asked the model to generate descriptions of the entrances of these two places, but those were pretty off from what we’ve already established (particularly the entrance to the tenements), largely because the model lacks context on the broader description of Gordin’s Delve.

Next, I rolled on the Delve tables for an area, and I generated Kitchen or Larder as the feature, and Denizen lurks in the shadows as the danger. I then prompted the model this way:

Describe a location the heroes of our story might discover in Odo's Lair: It is the cult's kitchen and mess area. When the heroes arrive, they think they are alone, but a denizen of Odo's cult watches from the shadows. Describe who this character is and how they are hiding from the party.

And here was the model’s response:

The Feasting Pit

Beyond the cavernous halls and winding passages of Odo's Lair, the heroes stumble upon the Feasting Pit, the cult's communal kitchen and dining area. The Pit, a wide, circular chamber hollowed out by the Forge Lords, boasts a grotesquely ornate high ceiling, lost in a haze of soot and shadow. Carved out of the natural rock, the room carries an echo of grandeur that speaks of its ancient origins.

An immense hearth, more akin to a forge, occupies the heart of the space. The fire within it has died down to glowing embers that cast an eerie red glow around the room. Arrayed around the hearth are crude wooden tables and benches, some scarred with knife marks and dark stains, others littered with fragments of half-eaten food and chipped bowls. Stacked along the walls are rickety shelves filled with jars of preserved meat, barrels of strong ale, and crates of root vegetables. The air is heavy with the aroma of stewed meat and spices, but underneath is a lingering, coppery scent of blood.

Unbeknownst to the heroes, they are not alone. Watching them from the shadows is Eris, a lanky, ragged member of Odo's cult. Once a miner of the Tenements who fell prey to the intoxicating allure of Odo's Family, Eris now serves as a lowly cook and cleaner for the cult. Her face, obscured by a tangle of matted hair, bears the marks of subservience and fear, her eyes a haunting shade of hollow despair.

As the heroes explore the Feasting Pit, Eris hides in the cold storage, a nook carved into the side of the chamber filled with hanging slabs of salted meat and smoked fish. Using a tattered, bloody apron, she masks her scent among the strong odors of the cold storage. She peeks out through a crack in the door, her shallow breath fogging up the icy interior of her hiding spot. She watches the heroes with a mix of fear and curiosity, contemplating if they could be the long-awaited salvation or just another impending disaster.

I found this to be… decent, and potentially usable. Its specifics are all wrong — ‘preserved meat, barrels of strong ale, and crates of root vegetables,’ are a little tame for the cult we’re talking about, and some of the adjective choices are curious (how high is ‘grotesquely high?’), but the broad strokes — the circular chamber, the soot and shadow, the forge-turned-hearth, and the description of Eris are all reasonable directions to take things.

Overall, I view this as a useful experiment. I’m not interested in handing my creative judgment over to this machine, but I am interested in using it as a little virtual writers room, having it pitch me ideas for how we might envision the results of Delve’s oracle tables — a fine servant but a terrible master, as Francis Bacon might put it.

I did a few more creative exercises in this chat session to generate and flesh out some NPCs and found the results to be more or less of similar quality. If you’re curious to view the full transcript, you can do so here.

The Plan of Attack

With a good understanding of the dungeon ahead, we now turn to our PCs to make some decisions about how they’ll approach this dangerous undertaking. Vahid, by communing with whatever eldritch entity seems to be the source of the Howling Curse, has identified the path through the tenements directly to the entrance of Odo’s lair, and we want to reward him for that. So, we’ll give the party the opportunity to bypass a big chunk of the delve’s progress bar — the only question is how will they take advantage of that opportunity?

Have fun storming the castle

From a certain point of view, the party is moving from a position of strength, here. They have the support of all of Odo’s rival bosses, and could muster a large⁵ crew to move into the tenements by force — Vahid could lead them directly to the entrance to Odo’s Lair in the tunnels beneath the town, capturing or killing whatever agents Odo has within the tenements and then once the entrance to the lair below is secured, their hand-picked party⁶ could move deeper into the cult’s sanctum to confront Odo.

This would involve a few rolls: A Muster roll to gather their forces — Ffransis, Jahalim and Mutra all seem to have ready muscle for the task. Then a Deploy roll for the action itself, with the party taking part in the fight before breaking off to enter Odo’s Lair (and making the first Delve the Depths roll, with the progress track roughly half filled).

This approach is a bit high-handed — some of the folks in the tenements are likely Odo’s zealous partisans, whereas others are just trying to get by or terrorized into cooperation. Trying to root out Odo’s supporters could get messy, and if things turn ugly with the hundreds of people who live in the tenements, it could turn into a massacre on one side or the other, neither of which would be desirable, especially with the hdour lurking in the Foothills, preparing to attack. On the other hand, it may be a bit safer for the PCs themselves, since they’ll have more muscle around them for the first half of their journey, and they may draw off some of Odo’s strength from his sanctum before they move in.

Night moves

The other approach is a stealthier one — even though Odo controls the tenements, not every person there is his loyal footsoldier, and people come and go as they please. A few small groups, moving through the alleyways and corridors discretely, might be able to reach the entrance to Odo’s lair undetected.

If they take this route, they will have to split up — their handpicked party is too large to move through the tenements without attracting notice, and each group will have to roll Defy Danger to navigate the tenements without issue. If we go these routes, the three groups will be:

1. Padrig, Jens⁷, Lucky Finbar⁸

2. Anwen, Baraz⁹, Vahid

3. Mutra the Teeth, Cerdic Snake-Eye¹⁰, +1 bravo to be named later

This approach sidesteps any risk of widespread violence in the tenements, in exchange for a more serious risk to the individual PCs. The stakes are high, and a miss result could lead to them being ambushed and taken by the cult. And if Mutra were to fall, her faction will be in turmoil as Cirl-of-the-Storms moves to attack.

Leveling up Vahid, and making our choice

Both of these plans require a bit of secrecy (particularly the second one), you may have noticed, and Odo seems to have an uncanny ability to sniff out plots against him. What is the party to do about that?

Vahid has a plan: One of the advancements available to him, now that he’s reaching level 6, is Proof Against Detection, which upgrades his existing move, Safety First. Now, when Vahid performs ritual preparations, in addition to the benefits of Safety First (halve the effects of hostile magic, twice), he is also unable to be scried, and has advantage on Defy Danger when sneaking about.

Normally, the Level Up move requires the PC have a week or so of downtime to train, but in this case, I decided to handwave it a bit. One, there’s an immediate use for the move that lets Vahid use his abilities to counter a powerful adversary and save the day, and that’s always fun. Second, Vahid could point to some interesting fictional positioning — in his vision quest during Session 7.6, he shared a body and mind with Cirl-of-the-Storms, and while in that state, he used the Blessed move Veil, a spell that allows the recipient to be cloaked by the spirits. In Session 12.5, we established that it wasn’t merely an out-of-body vision — Vahid actually experienced the world as Cirl, sharing his thoughts and memories for a short time, so Vahid in a very literal sense has used that magical ability before and therefore might be able to reverse-engineer its mechanics.

So, as the party makes its plan, Vahid will conceal the proceedings from Odo and his dark patron’s prying eyes. All that remains is to decide how the party will strike. Thanks as always for reading, click below to cast your vote, and I’ll see you in your inboxes next week!

1. Ironsworn is great, but Starforged was more recently released and has some innovations to its mechanics that the older system would benefit from.

2. I’m going to use the word ‘dungeon’ throughout this episode, even though it’s a bit of a misnomer. Ironsworn: Delve calls them ‘sites,’ which is much more appropriate. A twisted patch of dark forest, an ocean strait wracked by storms and raiders, a haunted battlefield — these could all be ‘dungeons,’ in this context.

3. Insulae, or ‘islands,’ were a dominant design for apartment buildings in classical Rome.

4. Large Language Models, also known as spicy autocorrect.

5. Dozens of bravos, perhaps — the Delve Bosses don’t command armies.

6. Recall that the Howling Curse can take hold of people who revel in violence and cruelty, which might include quite a few of the bravos in the service of the Delve Bosses

7. This is the caravan guard who helped the party save the emigres from the hdour’s raiding party in Session 10.4. He seemed a relatively decent sort, and the party is short-handed for this mission, Padrig will likely recruit him, regardless of what approach the party takes.

8. Mutra’s Keep that oversees one of her lumber crews — an even-keeled and canny veteran, if not the most deadly fighter.

9. Madam Parvati’s bouncer, who became fast friends with Anwen

10. Mutra’s right-hand bravo, who at least doesn’t seem to be a mad-dog killer.