Adventure 11 - The Gauntlet

Continuing the series of (horror themed) September short adventures-

PLACEMENT
The adventure starts in the big city; the characters are requested to meet the constable in the dungeon.  This adventure hook assumes the characters are on good terms with the local law and might be hired for a delicate mission.

SETTING THE SCENE
In a dank cell, the constable is in the midst of a rough interrogation.  The guards escorted the characters into the dungeon past a side room where a beautiful woman, apparently still overcoming a difficult ordeal, is being given a hot drink by one of the guards.

The characters soon learn that the woman was kidnapped by a member of one of the local guilds (assassins or thieves, depending on campaign) and rescued by the watch before she was taken out of the city.  Apparently she was the latest in a series of kidnap victims.

From the prisoner, the constable learns how the local guild is being paid well by an eccentric patron to deliver women to him, at dungeon entrance just outside of town.

WHAT'S GOING ON?
There's a mad cleric or wizard in the center of a (hidden) gruesome trap-filled dungeon just outside of town, with a hapless maiden that needs to be rescued ("She'll only be alive another day", says the half-beaten prisoner in the constable's dungeon.  "He always kills them on Saturdays…"). There's a theme of resource pressure - limited time to clear the gauntlet before the killer ritually murders his next victim.

Holy jumping jumble of genres, batman!  A serial killer, in a D&D adventure?

Why yes! Here's a chance to mush together a bunch of traps and puzzles, put a heckling spell caster / mastermind at the end of the gauntlet, like a spider in the center of a web, and cut the player's loose.

For my part, I'd make the serial killer some demented whacko who considers himself the "flesh artist" - a worshipper of some obscure demon with a corrupted mind and twisted morals.  He's been paying the local guild well to deliver street waifs and urchins as art supplies, but the thieves' guild was sloppy and got caught.  The dungeon could borrow all sorts of dilemma-based death traps like the shticks in the Saw movies, and perhaps the caster has some kind of way to scry and heckle via magic mouths like Jigsaw, keeping the resource pressure on.  Previous victims of the traps, as well as his pieces of "art", litter the maze.  Perhaps his scrying lets him escape ahead of the characters, ensuring he's still alive for "the sequel".

RESOLUTIONS
The constable is in a panic; the last woman kidnapped was the wife of a merchant, and there's a sizeable reward for her return.  She might still be alive!  From the half-beaten thief, the constable gets the notion that the mad killer's would be beyond the skills of the constabulary.  Would the characters take the job, knowing a fat reward awaited them if the woman is still alive?

SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED
Locale:  the city, the jail, and your favorite trap-filled dungeon level
NPCs:  the mad killer, the constable, the rescued woman, and the victim
Monsters:  incidental
Artifacts: na

The Tide is High - A Review of The Red Tide Campaign Sourcebook

Red Tide is a campaign setting and sourcebook published by Sine Nomine Games; it's compatible with Labyrinth Lord, which means you can use it with just about any old school version of the world's most popular role playing game.  The sourcebook weighs in at 170 pages and the PDF can be found at the usual suspects (like RPGnow).

The world of Red Tide is post-apocalyptic D&D.  An unnatural disaster swept over the world 300 years ago, covering nearly everything in a red mist wherein followed demons and monsters.  Survivors fled across the ocean and colonized a distant island archipelago; in the intervening centuries, the mists have covered the rest of the world, but are unable to encroach on the islands; many who now live on the islands are corrupted to worshipping the powerful demons (Tidespawn) that live just beyond the horizon in the waiting mists.

Sound interesting?  Zonkers, there's a lot going on in this kind of campaign frame.  You've got a Lovecraftian apocalypse, themes of survival horror out there in the mist, island hopping, and pulp action against cultists that worship the mist.  Horrors emerging from a mist are an excellent theme - you've got great stories leading the way like John Carpenter's movie, The Fog (the original), or Stephen King's short novel, The Mist.

Let's take a look at some of the other opportunities here.  First, diverse cultures:  The ancient colonists came from various areas fleeing to the islands and settling the largest land masses, so you have cultures analogous to Imperial China next to Feudal Japan next to the Vikings and Celts and Teutons.  Don’t you want to see a Viking Axeman fighting side by side with a Samurai and an Asian Wizard?  Yeah, I love it, too.

The scope of the world is small - the encroaching red mists hang just beyond the reach of the islands, limiting the size of the initial campaign world to a manageable size.  It creates the cultural diversity and intrigues of a massive setting in a bite-sized chunk.  The smaller uninhabited islands are like dungeons (or planets, in a sci fi game) - each one is compartmentalized and can have a distinct theme; one island can have dinosaurs, the next can be overrun with cannibals, the next can have ancient ruins.

Higher level characters can actually enter the mist and survive the horrors they'll meet, wandering the post-apocalyptic ruins of the ancient cultures and battling the demons and demon lords that live out there.  Planar adventures without leaving your home!

The premise for this campaign is pretty strong.  But in addition to setting the scene, the sourcebook provides excellent support for creating a sandbox game - I posted some notes on it yesterday (Making the Sandbox, Red Tide style).  In addition to the sandbox tables, there is cultural support in the forms of tables to generate names, tables for NPV motivations, room dressing, businesses, some map geomorphs - useful stuff for any campaign.   I loved the tables on "quick cult creation".  There are Red Tide specific new classes and spells (yawn...) - house rule crunch rarely does much for me - but if you're excited about that kind stuff, it includes a half-elf race-class caster, a humanoid witch class, and a few flavors of monk - fitting for some of the Asian-themed cultures.

On the other hand, the new monster section is both crunchy and excellent.  There is an entire class of new creature called the Tidespawn - humans corrupted into mutants by the red mist - and a higher class of Dream Lords as major rulers within the red mist.  The Dream Lords are equivalent to Demon Princes or Arch Devils in terms of power.  The Tidespawn are horrific, insidious, the very stuff of nightmares - there are 7 samples listed, and this is an area where a creative DM could cut loose with their imagination to make all sorts of corrupted horrors.

The only part of the book I thought was a bit weak was the section on "Secrets" - it provides some explanations for why the red mist exists, why certain humanoids are immune to the corruption, that kind of stuff.  The by-the-book answers didn't excite me.  Thoughtfully, there's a big disclaimer about ignoring the chapter and coming up with your own explanations.

On the Beedometer, I rate this one 4.5 stars.  Red Tide is proof that excellent campaign settings can be packaged like a dungeon master's tool box.  The craft of presenting information to structure a setting is evolving; we may be using rules sets that date back 30 years or more, but the skill of today's publishers is improving.  The bar is raising!

If you're a DM that runs a sandbox game, I would highly recommend checking this out to soak up the alternate techniques for generating locations and content; there's also good value in the other DM tools and tables, and plenty of nice monsters to borrow.  Good job, Sine Nomine.

Making the Sandbox, Red Tide Style

Part 1 of a review of Red Tide, by Sine Nomine Games

One of my Gencon quests was to escape Indianapolis with plunder - valuable treasures liberated from the OSR gaming booth.  I was successful.  One such prized book is Red Tide.  While an actual content review is still forthcoming, the book offered a lot of interesting ideas on sandbox structure that warrant their own discussion.

The sandbox is both a method of structuring information about the game world, and a technique for running a free-form player-driven game.  There are tutorials out there on structuring a sandbox setting to get ready for play - most of them involve building a hex crawl map, stocking the hex crawl with settlements and lairs, creating a home base location in details (both maps and information), detailing some ruins and lairs, and then planting ideas for plot hooks for the initial game.

The Sine Nomine approach divides sandbox prep amongst four basic pieces of sandbox content - Courts, Cities, Borderland Sites, and Ruins.  The book provides random tables to generate ideas and spur creativity for creating these locations, but the DM still needs to put in creative work writing up each location.  There are lots of random tables in the blogosphere, but what I was most impressed was the way these tables are optimized for quickly generating ideas that answer this question - What makes this place different and interesting to adventurers compared to other places?

Courts, for instance, are social locations.  Each settlement where there's the potential for social interaction might have a court site - it could be the local temple, seat of government, powerful merchant interests, and so on.  Generating a court is about relationship dynamics and the conflicts amongst the important people - details on who are the movers and shakers, where do they get their power, who are their important allies.  I can't rightly recall seeing a D&D supplement with a simple approach to quickly generating the social side of a sandbox.

Cities and Borderlands are both settlements that rely on the "tag system".  A tag is a quick label that describes one of the settlement's defining elements.  Examples are places defined by a malignant slum, corrupt officials, ethnic unrest, or a slave uprising.  The tags further describe ideas for friendly and enemy NPCs related to the tag, items and objects, twists and complications, and the types of locations implied by the tag.

It's not to say the DM can't take the traditional approach to building out a settlement - drawing a map, laboriously keying and stocking all the streets and naming the buildings - but the tag system efficiently and economically lets the DM generate those key factors that differentiate this settlement and make it interesting and unique to adventurers.

Ruins are also addressed, with tables to generate the type of ruin, how it was destroyed, and the primary inhabitants.  Since ruins will likely see tactical use in play, its likely a map will be needed, and there are ideas for using reusable and conceptual maps to ease the need for a detailed, stocked map.  The stocking section is loaded with value, providing time-saving sample encounters that provide a range of difficulty levels for each encounter type, and a series of ready-made twists to differentiate standard encounters.

The Sine Nomine approach to structuring the sandbox excels in campaigns that are a bit more wide open.  In a typical D&D "points of light" micro setting, where the group will return frequently to a single home base, laboriously clearing the nearby dungeon, the traditional sand box approach of highly detailed town maps and a carefully stocked local hex crawl is probably fine.

Where the Sine Nomine Red Tide approach shines is in a free-wheeling campaign that covers a lot of ground.  If you have a sprawling hex map with lots of places to go, this type of approach quickly generates the important characteristics of a location and provides practical advice on what's important to run adventures without wasting time on trivialities.  Similar to how Vornheim has provided simple tools for running adventures in a large, unmapped city, Red Tide offers tools for a loosely defined wide area sandbox.  Actually, the two products would be complementary; the DM could sketch out a distant city with Red Tide, using the tags to generate the idea behind some interesting city neighborhoods, and courts to generate the social centers of power.  Once the party gets there, Vornheim has lots of ideas for narrating travel, crossing neighborhoods, and managing spatial relations in a large unmapped city.

To provide a sense of sandbox scale, consider that the roots of the system come from the predecessor product, Stars Without Number, which details sandboxing in entire sectors of space.  The Red Tide setting involves a sprawling hex crawl across island chains and an archipelago - much larger than a points of light homebrew.  The Red Tide approach excels any time there's a lot of ground to cover.  I'd love to work on something similar for Gamma World or Mutant Future.  A post-apocalyptic world, where lucky characters might plunder ancient vehicles and start zooming around the landscape, is ideal for the Sine Nomine approach.

There's a fair amount of useful advice in the book on how to get started building the sandbox for the first game, managing it, and keeping track of information at the table - it's prosaic, but the advice on manila folders and sheets of paper and note keeping is down to earth and effective.  I've got a soft spot for improving information architecture, and could see myself adapting the Sine Nomine paper folder structure.  When creating a geographically diverse environment and allowing free travel, its invariable the group will head off the map; there's advice on content re-use and reskinning as well (some of which inspired recent discussions about Sandbox Triangles, and Quantum Ogres and Shell Games).

If you have a huge hex map, run a free wheeling campaign that includes lots of travel and covers a wide area - this is a resource you need to check out.  Even if you're running a standard sandbox, you might find these techniques enhance the quality of your designs by focusing your time.

I'll post an actual review of the Red Tide setting in the next day or so - the chapters on sandbox design are secondary to the fact that this is a published campaign setting, with maps, history, races, classes, new monsters, et al.  What is the Red Tide?  Tune in shortly.

Adventure 10 - A Ghost Story

Continuing the September of Short Adventures

A Ghost Story
PLACEMENT
A border march where the hill folk are in rebellion.  After many years of peace, the aging lord of the realm needs to go on campaign again to pacify the border march.  The army returns to the scene of a decades old crime.

SETTING THE SCENE
The hill folk are always in rebellion; it's a theme that echoes through history; the civilized power of the lowlands has trouble exerting power over the independent folk that live in the wild hills.   It could be Charlemagne and the Saxons, the Picts and the Romans, the Welsh and the English… even Afghanistan and the US in the modern day.

The characters have the opportunity to go on the campaign.  If they're lower or mid-levels, perhaps they have the opportunity to hire on as irregulars and scouts; someone needs to head into the hills, find enemy encampments so the army can follow through with infantry.  Higher level characters might be champions or peers of the realm.

The aging lord has always avoided the border march; it was here, twenty years ago, where his young wife was murdered by the hill folk when she joined him on campaign.  A monument was built for her memory; the army camps in a river glade not far from the Queen's Rock (or whatever you call the monument in your game).

Unfortunately, the sprawling bivouac is visited by a nocturnal haunt, a spirit that steals into the camp at night and slays a soldier each evening; the bodies are found in the morning, contorted grimaces of fear on their face.  The camp is unsettled by the growing stories of "The Grey Lady".

WHAT'S GOING ON
20 years ago, the lord's wife was murdered, but it wasn't the hill folk.  The lord's own trusted advisor murdered the wife when he was escorting her to the front.  She rebuffed his advances and threatened to reveal his disloyalty to her husband; in a rage, her murdered her and dumped her body in the woods.  The advisor faked a hill folk attack and concocted a story of rape and abduction.  The hill folk were crushed, and the lord eventually erected a monument to his lost wife.

Where her body was planted in a shallow grave, a curse took root in the forest, and the blighted grove still stands a few miles from the camp, a cold and evil place.  The proximity of the betrayer has drawn the ghost forth, and each night it enters the camp, seeking out the lord's adviser and destroying any it encounters.
That's the situation; themes implicit here are standard ghost story fare:  old crimes from the past seeing the light of day once again; we can't change the past and no crime should go unpunished.  Will the group learn the story of the ghost and see that justice, delayed 20 years, is delivered?  To give the scenario a "Japanese horror" twist, the ghost might be implacable; delivering justice only releases its fetter to the grove, and now the ghost wanders the wider land, continuing to exact revenge on any it encounters.

RESOLUTIONS
While the characters are crossing the river into the wild hills scouting for hill folk war camps each day, fear escalates in the camp.  Eventually, the group might get involved into trying to intercept the nightly visitor.
It's also likely the group will learn the tragic story of the young queen and get a glimpse into the lord's tragic past - the story behind the monument is common knowledge.  It's a chance for foreshadowing, and perhaps revealing the advisor's discomfort and evasion around any mention of the dead queen.

This is a fluid scenario and I could see leaving it open ended to account for player actions - common spells might get to the root of the problem, find lost facts, ESP can read minds and hidden intentions, Detect Lie, and similar magics, until enough of the story is pieced together for a dramatic confrontation.

In the meantime, the prospects of a nightly visit from the ghost is quite terrible, particularly with the ghost's horrible gaze (which I'd consider supplementing with a death gaze attack similar to a hag or bodak).

SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED
Locale:  the border march, the queen's rock, the cursed grove
NPCs:  the lord, the wicked advisor
Monsters:  ghost of the queen - The Grey Lady
Artifacts:  the murder weapon - a dagger, lost in the river?

OTHER PLACES POSTING SHORT ADVENTURES:
Here's a handy link to all the OSR blogs taking part in the challenge - 25 adventures in September:

Adventure 9 - To Slay A God

Continuing the September series of short adventures

Horror Adventure 9 - To Slay A God

PLACEMENT
The borderlands domain of a high level fighter, the jaded lord.

SETTING THE SCENE
The jaded lord has declared an upcoming holiday and a grand feast at the castle.  Hundreds are invited to the feast, and the inner bailey will be opened for a grand ceremony after dinner.

The characters could be passing through, delivering valuable goods, retainers of the jaded lord, or tipped off by a patron to do an investigation.  All is not as it seems in the borderland's domain.  Exotic foreigners from the desert lands have traveled at the lord's expense, bearing many sealed boxes, crates of arcane scrolls, and similar suspicious accoutrements.  They are seen around town gathering supplies, and seem to be involved in secretive preparations around the upcoming holiday.

A dangerous reputation precedes the foreigners.  Rumors of an incident from the sea port follows them, where a man that crossed the strangers was cursed by the evil eye and stricken dead on the spot.  Fears of black magic abound.

WHAT'S GOING ON
The jaded lord is a self-made ruler; he started as an adventurer, became a mercenary captain, and eventually gained enough wealth and fame to earn a dominion.  His trophy hall is littered with mementos of the fearsome creatures he's fought and the treasure's he's recovered.  In younger days, his campaigns took him to distant desert lands to fight for gold and god, and there he learned of the desert sorcerers and their summoning techniques.  He returned with a storied artifact called the Crown of Solomon, whispered about in hushed tales where it was used to summon angels and djinn and used to wrest powerful boons from them by a king of old.  After many years, he now seeks to use the crown himself.

At great expense he has brought scribes, ritualists, and ancient texts back from the desert lands, to prepare for the calling forth of a great power.  Perhaps he hopes to wrest the secrets of immortality from a fiery angel; perhaps he wishes to prove he can slay a god.  Pick a motivation appropriate for your campaign.  The holiday and feast are ruses to get enough people together at one place, focused on the great ritual.
Unfortunately, the ritualists are all members of a secret cult of desert fire worshippers; they plan to betray the jaded lord.  (It makes me chuckle to call the cultists Servants of the Secret Fire).

Note:  Once the stage is set, and the players have a little bit of information about the ritualists and their bad reputation, leave it up to the players decide if they wish to investigate and snoop further, or do something else.  Treat this like an event-based scenario where the holiday events are going to happen as planned, unless interrupted.  Lots of fantasy fiction involves the protagonists stopping the cultists from summoning the eldritch horror in the nick of time; it's perfectly fine if the characters choose not to intervene, and then have to run away or get stomped by said eldritch horror when it "goes all Godzilla" on the castle and town.  Themes implicit here include meddling with powers beyond the ken of men, the chance for a big monster stomping around and smashing things, and the xenophobia often seen in early pulp fantasy.

INVESTIGATION
If the players choose to investigate the jaded lord and are able to use stealth and other techniques to snoop around the castle, they'll come across implements of arcane ritual, discover the secretive foreigners pouring over astrological star charts, and even find pens of animals set aside for ritual sacrifice.  This is more than a simple feast.  The crown itself will always be heavily guarded, but it's certainly possible that determined characters could steal it.

For the feast night, fires are set around the castle, bonfires on the towers, torches on the battlements, and a central fire pit in the middle of the bailey.  The gathering crowd has been given rhythm sticks and instructions on creating a beat.  As the din in the courtyard builds, the lord appears on the balcony, wearing the crown;  he's accompanied by his shroud-clad ritualists from the distant desert lands.

RESOLUTIONS
If the ritual goes off as planned, a comet of flame streaks downward from the cold depths of space and lands in the bonfire in a shower of sparks, sending hot coals into the crowd and generating screams of panic as people get seared.  A soaring pillar of flame rises up from the bonfire, towering above the balcony of the keep.  The jaded lord proudly steps forward to command the thing he calls "the great angel of fire".  He's the first one immolated.  After the crown falls off his charred head, the fiery space devil starts lashing out and burning the cultists and the other people congregated in the courtyard.

If the characters are simple attendees at the holiday, hopefully they're smart enough to flee for their lives, and the challenge is about putting enough ground or fire proof barriers between themselves and the monster as the gargantuan horror starts stomping the settlement.  The angel of fire is an alien thing from the skies; after roasting everyone in the castle, it will step over the walls and start blasting the village.  It will then start some wildfires in the surrounding area before streaking back to the cold depths of space - it can only be here while its home star moves across the night sky.

For the angel of fire's stats, the simple approach is to use something like a titanic 48HD fire elemental, and give it a flame strike ability (as the spell) to shoot gouts of flame at range.

SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED
Locale:  domain of the jaded lord
NPCs:  the jaded lord, a group of fire cultists from the desert lands
Monsters:   the angel of fire (alien horror)
Items:  crown of solomon, a new spell - the evil eye

OTHER OSR BLOGS:
Here's a handy link to all the OSR blogs taking part in the challenge - 25 adventures in September:

Adventure 8 - As the Worm Turns

Continuing the series of September short adventures.

Horror Adventure 8 - As the Worm Turns
How many purple worms does it take to destroy a kingdom?

PLACEMENT
Place this adventure in a settled area with a major city and town, several outlying villages, and a borderlands or march.  Outlying settlements in the kingdom are being devastated in the night; buildings are destroyed, trees knocked down, and the ground is torn up.  No one has survived the attacks yet.

SETTING THE SCENE
Rumors of the destroyed settlements begin to trickle into the interior of the kingdom.  Engagement with this adventure depends on the level of the characters.  For higher level characters, this might be their own domain, or they might be considered peers or champions of the realm.  Lower level characters might respond to rewards or requests for information; they could be trackers themselves or accompany scouts and trackers into the wilds as escorts.

As the characters leave the civilized interior, one of their first destinations is a borderlands village that will act as a base.  A half day before reaching the village, refugees are met on the road, fleeing more destruction - the borderlands village has been destroyed as well.  "It happened last night", the refugees will explain.  "They were giant, they came from beneath the ground…"    They won't have a detailed description, but had the impression of large things, bursting out of the ground, smashing through the village with speed and power, before disappearing again beneath the ground.

After the latest attacks, there will be enough data points to plot the attacks on the map and see that they are following a spiral pattern towards the center of the kingdom; if the attacks aren't stopped, the largest town or city will be right in the path of the rampage!

WHAT'S GOING ON
Not far from the main settlement is an isolated wizard's tower.  Concerned primarily with research and magical experimentation, the wizard has built a deep shaft in the dungeons below the tower.  The shaft leads all the way to the underdark, where he meets merchants and peddlers from some of the deep dwelling races and gains access to rare components.  Recently, he purchased a sack of spherical rocks from a shady group of goblin scavengers.  He eagerly returned the spheres to his lab for study, to identify them and see what value could be wrested from these underworld oddities.

The spheres are purple worm eggs, and now a large pod of purple worms are ravaging their way across the kingdom tracking down the stolen eggs.  There should be enough worms to make them a threat to even a high level party - like a dozen purple worms.

The goblins had stumbled upon one of the rare nesting grounds of the underworld's purple worms and escaped with a clutch of eggs.  The worms breed infrequently and often leave the eggs in remote places; they have an innate ability to track the eggs across great distances.

The theme of this adventure is resource pressure, and the resource is time.  Once the group realizes there is a pattern to the mysterious attacks, there is only a short amount of time to develop a solution before the underground monsters reach the main settlement, and the group is probably a fair distance away.  The DM will have to calibrate the velocity of the worms and the remaining time based on distances on the map.

A secondary theme is information scarcity.  At first, secondary reports of destroyed settlements are heard.  Next, they hear the story of a survivor, but still no definitive monster description.  Ideally, the players would get into position to see a fleeting glimpse of one of the monsters from a distance, and the next encounter would be at one of the settlements where the PCs might be attacked directly.  (And then hopefully they'd be smart enough to run).  Slowly reducing the narrative distance is a good literary technique that translates well to RPGs in just about any type of horror scenario.

RESOLUTIONS
Once the problem is identified, the solution is open-ended.  It could involve evacuating as many people as possible from out of the path of destruction path before the main settlement is destroyed, or mobilizing the army and militia.  It could involve using auguries and divination to gather information about the attacks and possibly identifying the reason behind the attacks.  It seems unlikely the characters would be able to figure out the connection with the eggs and the wizard in time to put the eggs somewhere that would avoid the destruction, but you never know - players are resourceful and magic is powerful.  If they're not stopped earlier, the worms will continue until they destroy the wizard's dungeons and tower, although the wizard himself should easily get to a safe distance.

SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED
Locales:  the kingdom
NPCs:  varies
Monsters:  a dozen purple worms
Key Item: a sack of purple worm eggs

MORE SEPTEMBER ADVENTURES:
Here's a handy link to all the OSR blogs taking part in the challenge - 25 adventures in September:

Fixing the Quantum Ogre

I've been working through Sine Nomine's Labyrinth Lord setting, Red Tide, and how it presents an unorthodox approach to structuring a sandbox.  In Red Tide, it's suggested the DM builds some prebuilt content to deploy in the sandbox when the group moves into a new area.  It's compelling to me because it purports to provide a way of cheating the sandbox triangle (in the absence of unlimited prep time, there are trade offs between detail and scope).

The problem, of course, is whether dropping prebuilt stuff in front of the players is foul play?  The discussion - here at my place - The Shell Game in the Sandbox - and over at Hack & Slash - How an Illusion Can Ruin Your Game - has focused a lot on a slippery concept we refer to as "agency" - do the players have freedom of choice, and are their choices meaningful?

The problem I keep coming back to, when determining whether the DM is running a game that supports player agency, is that player agency is subjective.  On the player's side of the screen, they don't know if the DM is being a malefactor; their ability to judge is based on the information they have and whether the world is behaving within expectations.

There is a more objective standard that can be applied to the problem of agency, and it's similar to the definition of railroading - is the DM predetermining the game's outcomes?  It's an objective measure when viewed from the DM's perspective.  We can say with certainty that when the DM is predetermining the outcomes, player choice is rendered meaningless because the DM is railroading, even if the players don't know it.

So using the railroad language gives a simple test to determine whether using the Quantum Ogre is a bad thing, and if there are circumstances when it's okay to employ it.  I'll start by revisiting the shell game.

The Shell Game
The shell game goes like this - the party is looking for a MacGuffin in the woods - it could be in woods A, B and C.  No matter what woods the players enter, the DM puts the MacGuffin into the last wood.  We'd all agree this DM is being a bad actor.  It's harder to frame an argument that he's not supporting player agency.  But objectively, the DM has predetermined the outcome; playing  hide the MacGuffin is a railroad.

The Quantum Ogre
The problem of the quantum ogre is this:  assuming the party has no additional information, there may or may not be an ogre in the woods.  Once again, he's not necessarily violating agency from the player's perspective when the ogre is dropped in front of them; the player choice was to enter the woods and search for the MacGuffin, and it's a reasonable expectation there could be an ogre in there.  From their viewpoint, there's no difference between these scenarios: walking into the woods and running into a scripted ogre they failed to learn about; a randomly generated ogre via an encounter table; or the ogre the DM dropped on them through sheer fiat.

But when the DM *always* places his ogre encounter in front of the players, he's predetermining an outcome and perpetrating a railroad.  We can always identify the bad behavior from the DM's side of the screen, even if the current state of player knowledge doesn't allow them to see it.

In Defense of Dice
Over on Hack & Slash, I pointed out that there are numerous ways to stock a dungeon or wilderness area - a spectrum that extends from pre-stocking everything (no variable encounters), to mixing pre-stocked with random, to purely random, to purely improvised.

It's part of the agreed foundation of the game (the social contract, as the cool kids say) that certain game results will be determined by dice.  Dice are a neutral arbiter; it's why never fudging the dice is such a powerful maxim.  Dice protect the DM from himself.  The dice also provide an answer to the problem of the quantum ogre.

I know this seems really self-evident - it's why we've used random encounters in this hobby for so long.  They're inherited wisdom.  The random encounter probabilities provide a way for the DM to introduce a degree of variation in the game results at the table, in a matter agreed upon by all participants, while limiting the DM from pushing predetermined outcomes (ie, there's a thin line between improvisation, making shit up, and outright elimination of player choice).

In the case of the DM's cool ogre encounter, incorporating the ogre encounter for a result on a random encounter table is a way to seed the encounter in the  setting at run-time fairly, by relying on the dice as neutral arbiters.  The side benefit is that this typically ends up being a better table experience than a scripted game.  It's also the reason I encourage reaction rolls and morale rolls to help determine how NPCs respond to player actions; the DM is within his rights to mandate NPC reactions, but keeping the door open for an unexpected result via the dice ensures that predetermined outcomes are avoided.