- The Hand of Honus comes down to Indicate Who Dies!
Actually, I think he's gesturing wildly while arguing everyone needs to gather on the dias.
You can also get a better idea of just how many corpses are stacked by the entranceway - that's like half of those 40 zombies, maybe more, in a few square yards . . .
- I passed out my first "awesome bonus", for the fight on the dias. I mean, Conan cover stuff right there.
- I ruled that it would take 30 minutes to do an Exorcism on each altar in the Temple of Evil Chaos. It should have been 3 hours who the whole lot; the PCs got off work an hour early. I guess Inquisitor Marco was really well-prepped to deal with this particular location, eh?
- I'm coming to the conclusion that the Keep isn't a good base to explore my megadungeon. I might need to put in a Mos Eisley kind of place - maybe a mid-sized river port? - near-ish to the dungeon. Probably not a major city, but close enough to one to trade with it and make it a destination for visits. I haven't decided. What I did decide was that the keep lacks fun stuff - one tavern, one inn, no brothels, no place to stick oddball business that cater to PCs. I could have a shanty town build up near the keep, but the PCs aren't pulling in that huge of a haul (they took home about 18-20K worth of loot this past time, which isn't huge, and there isn't much more out there really).
I'm not sure what I'll do. I do want city trips to happen much more often, so I can use my Citybook series and Vornheim and my various city location ideas. But a big city within easy distance of the megadungeon means it should either see a steady stream of adventurers or - if it's really wealthy and really dangerous - a concerted official effort to clear and contain it.
Big city, small town? Not sure yet. I'll probably post more on this, as it certainly bears some thought.
Greg Costikyan (old time game dood) wrote a couple of fantasy novels a long time ago wherein there was this big city that had a megadungeon nearby. The folks that graduated the various academies for the various guilds (fighter, paladin, mage, thief, cleric, etc) would band together and go off into the megadungeon as one way to get their starting capital. The local lord even had a toll booth setup, that would assess taxes on the loot brought out by the returning "heroes". If the "heroes" didn't return, then they didn't learn their lessons, properly...
ReplyDeleteI always thought that was an interesting premise.
The book was "Another Day, Another Dungeon".
Yeah, I've read that book a couple times. It's great stuff (sadly, the same can't be said about "One Quest, Hold the Dragons" though). But I don't think I quite want that setup. I already have partly mapped a dungeon, and it just won't be quite the dungeon I'd imagined if there is a major city next door with adventurers flowing back and forth freely.
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