Felltower Restart Stockup Notes

Yesterday I posted about some VTT issues for Felltower.

Let's look at the in-game restart issues

I posted in September about some regrets about how I launched Felltower. First, one of my players suggested that now is the time to take care of these regrets. He's right about the first one, but the second is quite a bit harder. Why is that?

Making the upper levels a little more starting delver friendly is fine. It wasn't something I did back then because we wanted to start play now and I didn't have a megadungeon ready for the first few game days. But now? Sure, kind of.

By "kind of," the upper levels still need to mesh with the lower. They need to thematically fit. I can't just do some half-assed "bandits moved in!" thing that makes no sense. Or do a reboot and put old monsters back. Either would work but would feel forced in a way that the dungeon hasn't felt from the outside.

The other issue is that the players will, in my experience, always bottom feed. As long as there are weaker monsters on the upper levels with sufficient loot to take home maximum XP - or probably any XP - bottom feed on them. The delvers will want to fully "clear" the upper levels and maximize the loot taken from them. They'll take a low-risk chance at 1-2 xp over a moderate-to-high risk chance at 4-5 xp. How do I know? 12 years of people doing that, even when the actual players changed. Doing the minimum to get the maximum loot is actually even celebrated across the blogs as a real, proper, old-school thing to do. And I blame video games, as usual, which usually expect that you'll have done everything possible. Heck, in Vic's Game, we found a clear way to get to the final boss area . . . and immediately people argued to go do the side areas first. You know, because that's how it's done - clear everything up, then get the boss. So while I can and will restock appropriately, it won't stay available as a starting area. It will get cleared unless my players read this and make a concerted, universal attempt to get deep, fast instead of clear shallowly, slowly.

So there is that for 1.

What about making the bottom levels more accessible? Or adding more access between upper levels? Yes, as my player suggested, I could do non-euclidean stairs, magical modifications, and other changes to re-map the upper levels.

But damn, that's a lot of work. I've looked into it before. It's actually easier to start new levels from scratch than it is to modify existing ones. Just mechanically, I'd need to duplicate the upper level maps, then erase sections and re-draw them, and then essentially re-key them. A lot of descriptions and encounters are based on relative location to other encounters. If I move the stairs, or make the lower levels more accessible, then the encounters and traps and monsters around them need to change. They wouldn't all just be the same. Even a "magic earthquake creates a new way down!" would cause a lot of movement of dwellers, who would then displace others, which would displace others, and so on. It's quite possible, but it's not simple. And if you define "lower levels" as the area where the Masters live, then I'd need to change multiple levels above. So, sadly, no, changing Felltower from a restricted set of upper levels to a smoother path down would actually, at this point, be pretty much the same work as starting a new megadungeon. Maybe a bit less, but it would require so much cross-checking that it would be a lot more tiresome than just making a new one. At least with a new one, I could just let my idea run free without cross-checking to ensure I didn't do too much violence to existing material.*

All of that said, restocking is underway.

Monsters have moved in, moved elsewhere, or moved out. Treasures have been brought in, redistributed, or taken away. Traps set up, disarmed, or done away with. And tricks galore still abound. Much of the very special things on the upper levels have been dealt with permanently by earlier delvers, but then again some problems the earlier delvers had to cope with are long since taken care of. There have been some big changes - and a group that either expects the place to act as if no time had passed, or that so much has passed that the dungeon is "new" again, will have some trouble.

Felltower, renewed, should prove interesting. No less dangerous, but ready for a new crop of delvers to die in explore.






* Editing later: I checked the entrances. Felltower had 5 ways into the top level from the surface; the PCs sealed three of the five themselves. It had four ways to level 2 from 1; the PCs sealed off one of them and harassed the orcs until the orcs sealed two of the others off or guarded them heavily or both. It had multiple ways from level 2 to 3; the PCs sealed a couple of them off, too. So adding connections sounds nice but the PCs like to control traffic and close things . . . I can only undo so much of their own insistent damage to the complex.