This much loot was always in Felltower.

Loot recently has had a big uptick in Felltower. It had a rep for being a stingy place, and I always argued this was because of how it was explored, not stocked.*

These last few delves are proving my point. The issue was often the PCs being risk averse - how can we find just enough loot to make our loot thresholds for XP with the minimum risk? They didn't go in saying, how can we find the most net loot, even if the risk means we spend some of it on healing and resurrection and replacing gear and potions? I understand the very old-school ideal of performing executions not fighting battles, but it made for a less adventurous grind.

The PCs ground down everything in every area, in Felltower and in the attached areas - Caves of Chaos, the Brotherhood Complex, the Lost City, and the Cold Fens - until not a coin that could be found was left behind. Only now are they putting on their big boy pants and wading into the hellscale of death and unfair wandering damage that are the lower levels.

And they're winning fights, even when they show up without a cleric and foolishly leave their wizard near someone with skill enough to take out a DX-boosted DX-monster with Great Haste. The loot? It's practically obscene.

People have tens of thousands of dollars sitting around. They're running out of things to buy. Why?

Because the loot down there is very, very good. Yeah, you might have to face a beholder and a packed of gargoyles. Or ranks of trorkers, norker brutes, Gith, golden swordsmen, rat-men, and constructs in a low sanctity zone. But then you walk out with multiple pieces of jewelry that each would meet your loot threshold for the group, and multiple magical items, and rare potions that you cannot purchase, and so on.

The danger multiplies as you delve deeper but the loot multiplies, too.

So does the fun. It's been a long time since anyone griped about wasting a Sunday doing basically nothing. They walk out of fights saying, "Whew!" and gleefully pouring over the loot.

It's high-risk high-reward. The low-risk low-reward won't do it, won't matter, and won't be fun.

So yeah, the look has spiked up with the risk. It was there the whole time. I'd been behind my screen watching people tiptoe around a winnable but brutal fight with $20K per person in loot behind it saying how they needed to find some place to make loot and it was too dangerous here.

Now they're taking their guys into the real Felltower. The top was the preliminaries. The gate level was a lot of fun and still a lot of fun. But more than half of what I wrote for Felltower is down below . . . along with a lot of the answers to questions that came up all the way back in 2011-12 during the Caves of Chaos.


I'm enjoying the reveals. And I'm glad people are willing to bet their paper men that they can win the fights, take the loot, and find out the answers.


* Well, as initially stocked, it was too low. But I corrected that quickly and did not add to but rather multiplied the amount of loot to what it is now. But that's for the top levels. These loot piles down here? Some of them were always that big . . .