DF Game, Session 15 - Felltower Level 2

September 30th, 2012

Characters: (approximate net point total)
Vryce, human knight (305 points)
Borriz, dwarven knight (290 points)
Nakar, human wizard (about 295 points)
Galen Longtread, human scout (253 points)
Kullockh, human scout (250 points)
Red Raggi, human berserker (?? points, NPC)

Reserve (players couldn't make it)
Inquisitor Marco, human cleric (about 280 points)
Honus Honusson, human barbarian (283 points)


The group did the usual - sold off loot from last time, they gathered some rumors (about alternate entrances, existence of a possible 5th level, and foreign wizards looking for a "source of magic" in the dungeons), and bought up the healing potions in town. Galen also stocked up on Monster Drool to poison his arrows.

They also checked out the shield they'd found, surreptitiously. They found out it belonged to a guard in the hire of a Lord Venick. Vryce went to his townhouse - like the other nobles, it was surrounded by a wall, and there was a tower with no first floor entrances for retreating into during riots. He explained how they'd found the shield up in the dungeons in a lizards' room, and handed it over. The chamberlain, Jonal, told them he'd get back to him.

In a couple days, he did. A messenger summoned them - politely - to Lord Venick's. Nakar, Vryce, and Borriz all went. They were introduced to the Lord Venick, a thin, splotchy-skinned brown haired youngish man with a droopy mustache. He said his ancestor was, unfortunately, "caught up" in the rebellion of Lord Sterick, self-styled Baron Felltower. His men were searching for a crypt off the 2nd level where his ancestor, and the rest of Lord Sterick's bodyguards rest - "caught up" indeed. He offered 30 gold pieces (3000 silver) if they could find and return his ancestor's body to him for proper burial, along with any grave goods. His tomb (and the ancestor's goods) should be marked with the three red slashes of Lord Venick's family over the axe/sword/tower motif of Lord Sterick (and now, Stericksburg). The PCs agreed to do so if they could.

After many jokes about how they'd surely find the guy with "the other 50 wights he was buried with" they figured they might be able to get rewards from other families if they found crypts lost to living relatives.

Finally, Nakar read the book they'd found last session. It was a big book, but only a few pages were filled, in Common. It was the logbook of adventurers who'd raided the dungeon. The last entry was "We stashed what we found in the rubble under the ruined tower up here on the surface. Now we're going back for the rest."

They decided to bring Red Raggi, and headed up to the dungeons.

Once on the top of the mountain, they camped out and recovered their hastily stashed ladder from last time. Then they used Seek Earth to find the nearest source of silver while standing near the ruined towers. Nakar rolled a crit and they found it easily, in the rubble in the center of the most intact of the remaining towers. The second (and third) floors of the tower had fallen to the ground floor. Galen and Kullockh climbed up to keep an eye out, while Raggi, Vryce, and Borriz moved broken bits of rock and dug (Raggi brought a shovel just for this). They found a strongbox, opened it up, and found a lot of stuff - including 20 pounds of copper coins, 5 pounds of silver coins, a wizard's hat (turned out to magically stay clean at all times), 11 small magical spears (turned out to be one-shot throwing spears), a magical light shield, some valuable climbing gear, and some green tea and carmine in sealed pouches. Oh, and a pair of six-fingered gloves (otherwise normal). Nothing spectacular, but valuable enough to keep. They took everything but the copper into the dungeon with them.

They joked that these guys didn't die, they just went back and found so much more treasure they couldn't carry the book out with them.

They did their usual scout routine on the entrance, and headed in and put down their ladder bridge. They crossed and were dismayed to find someone had come before - the right portcullis was spiked all the way up. The door past it was equally spiked open. They briefly discussed trying to follow the path of spiked doors and "tracks" but decided they didn't want to actually find any adventurers if they were still there.

Instead they headed towards the second level stair they'd found two weeks ago. They took the same path through the secret door as last time, but this time encounter a big slime/ooze monster, nearly 20' across, eating the rotted rat corpses. Galen closed the door, and they got ready to bust in an attack it . . . but it had "seen" Galen and moved up to smash against the secret door. So Nakar dropped some spells and used Create Fire to set the area past the door on fire. After a minute they opened the (warm) secret door, and the ooze had fled, and there was nothing but burned rats. They moved on.

After Lockmastering some re-locked doors, they reached the ogre's room. It was closed and locked (again, Lockmaster opened it), but not barred or guarded. They moved in carefully, and found some (but not all) of the signs of their fight. No corpses, no weapons, and no ogres (and only a few broken bits of armor and bloodstains). They carefully moved down the stairs.

Most of the way down the long stairs was a stair scattered with dry, broken bones. Clearly, for noise. Invisible Galen, able to see in the dark thanks to Nakar's Dark Vision spell, stepped over them and spotted some apes crouched in the corners, waiting. He retreated up and the group decided a frontal assault was the best solution. They ranked up and headed down, Borriz to their left, Vryce to their right, and Raggi right up the middle. Nakar trailed with the two scouts. They reached the bottom of the stairs and eight dire apes charged them - the same apes as last time, which they'd accidentally left off their "we make sure the following are dead" list during their hasty retreat last trip. The apes didn't do much better, a couple eating arrows and the rest getting chopped up by Raggi, disemboweled by Vryce, or their heads bashed into shards by Borriz. One managed to strike Raggi after another grabbed him, but they died a second after that. But an ape shaman was there was well, waving a multi-colored obsidian sword and accompanied by a blue-limmed, semi-translucent ape. The "ghost ape" charged, while the shaman took an arrow and dropped, unconscious.

The ghost ape proceeded to give the group a lot of trouble. Nothing they had bothered it - missile spells, a flaming sword, Dispel Magic, and even stabbing with their magical spears. Galen fetched the obsidian sword and handed it to Vryce (who got pummeled over and over, but who was so armored he could mostly ignore the ape's all-too-corporeal punches). He swung . . . nothing. Finally Galen went back around to the shaman, and took off his bone necklace. Anything? No, Nakar could see it wasn't magical. So then Galen tried to icepick the ape in the eye with his knife . . . and missed. (He rolled an 18, and not only missed but stabbed the ground and dropped his knife. Embarrassing enough, but against an unconscious ape . . . ) Galen picked his knife back up, though, and then slashed the shaman's throat, just hard enough to kill him. The ghost ape immediately disappeared.

This time they made sure of the apes, with arrows to the eyes or cutting throats open or bashing their heads in.

They searched the room and found two doors. One turned out to lead to a big room the ape shaman cleared lived in. The other to a corridor. They followed that, passed a chamber with an arrow scratched into the floor pointing out the far way (everyone specifically didn't touch it), and took the first door off of it they found up another corridor.

A chamber far up the long hallway had a hemisphere of black crystal on the ceiling. Taking no chances, they shot at it with arrows. First shot did nothing, but then Kullockh shot a crack into it with a powerful bow shot. Another shot broke off more of it, shearing off a good third of the crystal and send cracks through the rest. Glass pieces were scattered across the floor. They eventually crossed this room with much care (including a rope around Galen, and then around Borriz, in case they set off a trap).

After this room there was a T. Here they found a door to a cold room, but shut it as the odd chill came out. "No more ghosts, thanks." They moved off the other direction after using Seek Earth and locating some silver very close to the upper left as they faced the cold room door. So they moved left. They found some single doors on the left wall and a double door on the right. Listening heard nothing, and no light came from within. It was dark inside. They opened that up (it was locked, but a crowbar fixed that), and found . . . luxury.

Inside was a huge room - around 40' wide and at least twice that long, with an arched ceiling. The fall wall had a small door but was also almost half roaring fireplace fronted by rugs and plush chairs. The walls were lined floor to ceiling with bookcases full of books and sliding ladders. There was a table with burning silver candelabras. Sofas sat near the bookcases.

The fanned out an looked around. Nakar and Vryce to the right, Borriz and Kullockh to the left. Nakar found treatise after treatise on magic. Kullockh books on culture and languages. They were stunned . . . until Borriz grabbed a book ("any book with cool symbols on the spine") and his hand went through. Damn, illusion. Everything they checked was illusionary. When Borriz realized the fire was too (no heat), he decided to jump in! Hahah! Bam, wall. There wasn't even a fireplace.

They couldn't figure it. Vryce checked the walls by feel to ensure there were walls. And they opened the small door in the back and found 3' of floor ending in a 6-7' deep pit full of old, dry refuse. A privy.

They thought a) this was all a fake, but why? and b) "their" silver was to their right, but they couldn't get there from here. So they left and went back the way they came.

The headed past the cold room into a big hallway that smelled of sulfur, which ended with a pit (they'd look later and find a dead rat in it, nothing special). A side passage smelled more of sulfur, so invisible Galen checked it out. Oops. It was the lair of an angry chimera, which must have seen them and came out running. Galen turned and ran, but the chimera literally crashed through him and ran him down. It made it just out of its side passage and attacked. It bashed Raggi a few times with its horns and lit his clothes on fire (narrowly missing Borriz and Vryce), and the group jumped it. Vryce sliced it up, Raggi criticalled and cut down through its back into its side, Borriz whiffed on a few shots (it dodged), and Galen put arrows into it. A final arrow through its lion head and a few more sword strokes put it down for good.

After this, it was getting late real-world, so the PCs retreated up to the surface. They got almost all the way back, but it turned out 5 hobgoblins were guarding the "pillboxes." They used invisible Galen to get the drop on the three in one pillbox and kill them, but not before they yelled out "Bree Yark!" and Galen called them Losers in Goblinese. They make Galen and Kullock invisible again, and they went to the other "pillbox." They set up nose-to-nose with the ambushing hobgoblins, and shot them in the face with arrows. They then covered the trap doors while everyone beat feet across the bridge. They removed the bridge and headed up.

The gathered their remaining stashed treasure, and headed back to town.

All in all, a profitable trip, mostly due to their surface find. The only loot from underground this trip was the obsidian sword of the ape shaman, but even that was worth enough to make it profitable trip. They also have a quest with a promised reward, and made a successful foray into the 2nd level.

Notes

Forgot these earlier, but here they are.

- It's fun to watch my players discover things they'd bypassed accidentally or deliberately sessions back. That loot has been sitting in the tower since, I don't know, the first day I wrote up the dungeon. They discovered it now through magic, sure, but they didn't know to try there until they found that book.

- No one seems to mind sped-up combat. Mostly because it doesn't skew fights against them. If it made them lose (or suffer damage they'd otherwise not suffer) they'd probably, legitimately, complain about the change.

- Borriz keeps wondering how the hell apes get into a dungeon up north. Or are even in a dungeon, carnivorous apes or not. There actually is a (possibly silly) reason, it's not just because I have all of these ape minis and like using apes. Well, that's probably why I made up the reason, but in-game, there is an explanation.

- No one has any idea how to fight ghosts. The solution won't be "spend points on Hidden Lore (Spirit Lore) and keep asking Peter" or "find just the right spell to beat them." It's a little more (and less) complicated than that.

- I was amused at the reactions in the illusion room. I was mildly surprised that they specifically asked if light came out from the room, and then didn't see the giant, blazing fire as a dead giveaway something was off. It would have been clearly seen, had it been blazing for real. Part of how illusions of splendor work - you get so distracted by the details you miss the strange incongruities of them.

- The city money meter keeps going up, but I'm beginning to wonder about the buying capacity of even a big town. Should the more the PCs sell also increase the "value" of the city? They're spreading around some magical items, rare spices, nice gems, and asking to convert small coins (copper) into larger denominations (gold and silver). It keeps the pot stirring, for sure, and they sell at less than 1/2 of the theoretical market value. That leaves a lot of room for profit by the merchants when they re-sell it down the road (literally or figuratively).

Important Villains vs. Fungible Monsters

It's struck me as I populate my DF game's setting that there are really two broad types of enemies in a campaign. You have your Important Villains, and your Fungible Monsters. I mentioned this a while back, but decided I'd try to write out my ideas about this more fully to get them clear, and maybe help others populate their worlds more easily.

(You could say Fungible Villains, but I think Fungible Monsters sounds better.)

Let's look at them in reverse.

Fungible Monsters are just NPCs placed for opposition. How tough they are or aren't, or how important they become or don't become, isn't critical. The idea behind fungible monsters is, you can swap them in or out. It doesn't really matter if they turn out to be easier or harder to kill than you expected. You can always deploy more or less next time. Or the PCs can relax and fight them more casually, or drill down and fight more ruthlessly, the next time. If those monsters turn out to drop dead like flies from a simple spell or are utterly harmless against the PC's front rank fighters, well, it happens. If you’re playing a game with an acceptance of high lethality, then even a TPK isn't really a problem. The next bunch of PCs will know not to mess with those monsters.

The monsters in and of themselves aren't very important as individuals. This is decidedly not the case with Important Villains.

Important Villains are NPCs that, in and of themselves, are important as individuals or as groups. They cannot easily be swapped out for another NPC within the setting, and what they can and can't do is important. They are important and useful for a sandbox game, and critical for a story-driven game.* These are the opposition which are inherently interesting and touch. They aren't random, and the GM needs to know how tough they are from the word go.

If the PCs decide they want to overthrow the Mad Wizard of Wu Tang, he's an important villain (primarily player driven). If the GM sets the Mad Wizard of Wu Tang after the PCs, he's an important villain (primarily GM driven). If the whole game is "Guys, we're going to play The Quest to Overthrow the Mad Wizard of Wu Tang," he's an important villain (story driven - pre-game decision driven).

If that aforementioned Mad Wizard of Wu Tang goes down to a simple spell you didn't plan for, or his Killer Kung Fu skills don't actually work that well, you're going to ruin the verisimilitude of the story. It just strikes a bad note if you didn't forsee some elementary defense he'd need to have survived long enough to be the Mad Wizard of Wu Tang. The more stuff the Bad Guy is supposed to be able to do, the more thought you have to put into it. It's totally lame if the whole quest is to fight an important NPC and he's taken down in a single second because you didn't build in the right defenses. It's a letdown if the "greatest swordsman in all the lands" is less of a challenge to a PC swordsman than that wandering group of goblins was. While these things can happen in reality, fiction and gaming isn't meant to be real. Conan doesn't have an easier time with the Big Scary than with the Big Scary's Henchmen.

I personally find it nice to run a game where the vast majority of critters are Fungible Monsters. It greatly simplifies my game prep. But the idea that some monsters really do need to be important and need to be crafted to explain their in-game position and reputation is still one I need to keep in mind. It's amusing if the trolls die in a few seconds while the goblins put up a real war of a fight. But it's lame if the Dragon of Felltower is a one-shot kill . . .

I also think these divisions help you to not over-think some encounters. If the monsters really are Fungible Monsters, and could really be anything, just relax and stat them up and see what happens. Save the worry for guys who legitimately need to be Important Villains.



* Note that story-driven does not imply a railroad. It merely implies that there is some over-arching plot or story, whether setting-, GM-, or player-driven, that provides the backbone for the campaign. Railroading is a way of running a game, not a game style. You can railroad in a non-story based game ("We go to that dungeon over there." "Suddenly, a teleport trap sends you to the dungeon I wanted you to go to!") as easily in a story based game ("We kill the important NPC!" "He miraculously survives and uses his alter reality action to undo your mistakes!"). It's a question of freedom of choice and action, not of story.

How the Kickstarters Have Gone

To jump on the Kickstarter hand-wringing bandwagon, here are the Kickstarters I've backed and how they've gone.

I've pledged at least a token amount for all of Jeff Dee's various Kickstarters to re-create his TSR art. While not everything has been exactly on time, I always get my pledge reward pretty soon after it ends, and it's exactly as described. The postcards are cool, too.

Order of the Stick: I got my book, my Roy magnet, and my coloring books. For less than I'd have paid to just get my book used on the secondary market. I'm good with The Giant.

Diesel was on time and on target.

Reaper is on schedule so far, although their pledge manager hasn't been so far, they haven't suggested a delay for delivery. But I can look at my minis and see the quality of Reaper products, and I know their customer service is top-notch and extremely customer friendly. I trust them to get me my giant box of minis very close to, if not exactly during, the promised month.

SJG will be late with Ogre, but it's much bigger and more awesome-seeming than the game I pledged for. I know and trust SJG - if anyone would bend over backward to fulfill his promises, it's SJ.

Dwimmermount is running a bit behind. I think James M. just set a bit too aggressive of a deadline - a "if everything goes well" instead of "I can make this date even if disaster strikes." My opinion, only - I don't know his situation well enough. I'm confident I'll get it eventually, though, and I'm willing to wait. I don't feel disappointed, I was happy to back his work to make sure it got published since it was inspirational in getting me to make my own megadungeon. I can honestly say I didn't really pay much attention to the "when" and more to the "what I'd get eventually" part.

So that's the roundup. Would I pledge again? Sure, if I feel like the cost is reasonable for what I get out of it, and if I think what's being promised can be delivered. The person making the promises matters. And I'll say that getting mail from Jeff Dee every month or two is pretty damn cool, because I used to sit and stare at his pictures when I was running game back in 4th grade, and that picture of Lloth in Q1 scared the hell out of everyone.

Not Realism - Consistency, Believability, and Logic

So all the cool kids are writing about realism in fantasy gaming (such as faoladh and FrDave, who links to still more posts by other cool kids.) Why should I be left out?

My thoughts on it are pretty simple: Realism isn't the goal in fantasy gaming (or indeed, most other RPGs, even hyper-realistic ones!)

It's verisimilitude. That is, the seeming of truth. ("Truthiness" works, too.) The world, the results of actions, and the logical leaps must feel true, feel consistent, be believable, and seem logical.

Consistency. Stuff that's true now in the game world should generally remain true unless acted on by an outside force. Spells might allow you ridiculous control over forces that don't even make sense realistically ("I'm an Earth Mage." Er, 4 elements? Or needing "Charm Monster" vs. "Charm Person.") There may be orcs, griffons, and demons who come from another plane to wreak evil because they're evil. You might be able to chop up robots with your magic sword without dulling its edge or shoot a personal disintegrater at guys who can fly and punch out tanks. These aren't deeply realistic things. But they should pretty much act the same game session to session. If they do, they're easier to accept.

Believability. Seems crazy, but the results of your actions and actions of others in the game world must be believable. Not real-world believable. Just that they shouldn't snap you out of your suspension of disbelief and your acceptance of a world with color-coded dragons and guys who can shape rock with command of magical forces hunting treasure in a dungeon instead of mining. Once you've set your ground rules and made them consistent, the results of those ground rules must be something that flows from those rules. If you have A and then B, players will expect C. If you have magical items (A), and people willing to buy them for money (B), then it's reasonable to say some people might be selling magical items, too (C). If you stop at B and say, no, there is no C, it's going to take some explanation and that explanation is probably costing you game time you could spend killing owlbears.

Logic. The game world and its rules should be logical, even if based on purely spurious logic ("Since there are dragons that breathe fire there must be dragons that breathe lightning!") Following the logic of your game world and game rules lets players follow it, too, and invent their own consistent details and come up with inventive solutions to problems.

If you hand players A and C, they should be able to guess the existence of B and act on it. If it's actually Q, you're not only going to snap them out of willing suspension of disbelief but also destroy the value of their own logical thinking. Why puzzle out the solution, or look for connections, or try to extend the logic of your powers to accomplish something new if the result is going to be illogical and inconsistent and random? This can be fun, but it'll cost one of the really cool things about RPGs - getting to say "If I was my guy, I'd do this . . . " and have an understanding of what can happen. If you basically say, there are dragons and spells so anything goes and I don't need logic, consistency, or believability of results, I think you're selling your game short.

That's what I think my players mean when they say "This seems pretty realistic." It doesn't matter if it's dwarven weaponmasters bashing skeletons or Delta Force taking down a building. What matters is that it feels real, it feels consistent, and that players get to feel like their actions have results that make sense within the imagined reality you play in. Break that, and you get an "unrealistic" game not matter how real or unreal your subject matter is.

In my opinion.

Somali Pirates vs. Delvers

I couldn't help but think, after reading this article, that delvers and pirates are a lot alike. And towns near dungeons, borderlands, uncleared hexes, etc. in a gaming world are a lot like those Somali coastal towns.

Not to make light of either the lethal pirates or the suffering they cause, or the suffering of the townsfolk, but there are similarities worth considering for gaming.

Boom vs. bust While the ships are there and pickings are good, money flows into town. Creditors extend loans. Prices rise tenfold or more ($0.05 tea going for $0.50). When the ships aren't there, or it's too risky to extend money to the risk-takers, it all dries up.

Delvers are like that, too. Dangerous job, and they go into the teeth of danger because the payoff for the few is great. Sure, the guys who buy the treasures from them and purchase the magic items might make even more of a profit. But for a brave soul who is willing to risk death (and has little skill besides smacking monsters), there is the lure of fortune.

Notice how the townspeople feel about the pirates - nothing good comes of them. It's likely they didn't say that out loud when pirates were dropping $1000 a night on prostitutes and paying 10x the going rate for food, snapping up luxury cars and bidding up housing prices. But as soon as they can't make their payments, it's over.

Delvers probably should get the same treatment. The Ruins of Razelgar are turning up scads of silver coins, handfuls of gold, gemstones by the score, and magical items worth more than the local town? Great, welcome! They can throw parties and celebrate and the inn is packed. All hail the brave adventurers! Welcome back from your dangerous and oh-so-brave descent into danger!

But then . . . the dungeon is empty, and you come back empty handed and can't afford a new round of rations and 10' poles? Take a hike, you economy-wreckers. We never liked you. All you brought was disease, death, and massive inflation. And in a fantasy world, likely strange hangers-on, monstrous intrusions, and blowback from the annoyed goblinoids at the Caves of Chaos. Oh, but you saved the town from a dragon/zombie horde/menace of fungi-men? Think of the reaction of the villagers at the end of The Seven Samurai - okay, thanks, but now you are a hindrance, not a help, and you can go now.

One can only hope that in reality, the days of the Horn of Africa being a pirate haven are over. But keep the lessons of the coastal towns in mind when adventurers show up, cash in hand . . .

Random Memories of the Very Old Days

So I started playing in 1981 with (more-or-less) a mix of Basic Set D&D and AD&D. I say more-or-less because sometimes we'd look stuff up in a Holmes Basic Set, my uncle used the Rolemaster Arms Law critical hit tables sometimes, and we used the DMG alongside the Basic Set. If this sounds like a mess, man, you should have tried settling rules arguments.

If this stuff sounds crazy or infantile or juvenile or stupid, remember we were in 4th grade (and then 5th, and 6th) during most of this. Think South Park - foul-mouthed argumentative kids playing pretend. By the end of 7th grade most of the groups had long fragmented and only a hard core of gamers still played.

The dead stayed dead. Our games were often extremely lethal, and Raise Dead/Resurrection were totally unheard of. If you didn't have a friend with a high-level cleric, you died and stayed dead. Since almost no one had a high-level cleric, that meant all fatalities were permanent. The idea you could run to town with gold and get raised was sheer craziness. The example in the DMG of how miserably hard it was to convince someone to even un-petrify your friend meant there wasn't any swaying us. Sometimes someone would die in my game and then bring that guy, or someone with mysteriously identical stats and magic items, to another game. Yeah, that happened.

But in general, there was no network of NPCs in the world. Just the PCs and that's that.

People would level up on their own. Guys would buy a module and then run their own parties through it and come back with higher levels and more magic items. Arguing this would get ugly, and resulted in parents calling other parents to scold the complainer.

Actually, that's another point - the GM's word wasn't law. The book's word was law. Period. Any appeal of the wording was to a handy parent or teacher, and usually you'd get stuck with that interpretation forever. This is also why we played with what the rules said you could do. If the rules didn't say "a 10' pole can detect pits" then it couldn't. If it said thieves can climb and didn't say anyone else could, they couldn't.

We named all of our guys. Sometimes "you didn't even the name the guy until 2nd level" is held up as a hallmark of Old-School Play. Not for us. You had to name your guy. Not naming your guy meant you couldn't play him. You could just add "II" or "III" to the end of a prior name - I remember Dru the Druid XIV at some point, years in - but you had to name your guy.

We had actual arguments over names, about who named which guy and could use the name again, or if that name went with this class, etc.

We ran modules. You played B1 or B2 or B3 (generally B2), and then graduated to X1, and then eventually the A-series and/or G-series. Everyone tried S1, S2, S3, and/or S4 as soon as possible, usually at too low a level (I remember playing a 4th level elf in White Plume Mountain. He was level 3 after fighting some wights.) We played D1-2 and then Q1, skipping D3 because no one had it and it was expensive to get it.

We often skipped whole sections of adventures because they were complicated or uninteresting. I don't ever remember anyone getting through D2, or getting to use it. By the time they got there, everyone was eager to get to the Abyss (and we all knew it was at the other end of the tunnels).

Why did we know that Q1 was at the other end? Often, the players also owned, and read, the adventures. Getting your hands on ones they hadn't read was hard.

You didn't make up your own stuff that often, because the only way to avoid a fight was to have a module to point at. Plus the modules were cool. The guys who made the game up made them, and they were the exemplars of adventure design. Finishing them gave you some status. "I beat Peter's dungeon." Big deal. "I beat White Plume Mountain." Wow, cool!

(Which makes me amused when I hear even older gamers and/or early game designers say we were slaves to modules. Yeah, you guys wrote them and sold them to us.)

We played every day. Or close enough to it. We'd play anywhere and everywhere. I remember running the opening fight of S3 while sitting on a bench on the playground near my Elementary School at lunchtime. We didn't finish it that day, lunchtime was too short.

No character backstory. Or frontstory. Or story. Or description. At all. So much so that I can rarely conjure up any memories of specific characters, other than a few who survived so long that they did spectacular things (like Blackstar the thief surviving the Tomb of Horrors, and Hana the mage breaking his Staff of the Magi on Lloth's back at the end of Q1 after luring her out of her anti-magic zone, and then making his "shifted to another plane" roll.) Characters weren't characters, just game pieces. I only remember Blackstar, really, because years later I found the Adventure Log for his second trip to the Tomb of Horrors! I mean, we played almost daily for years, and I can't remember more than a few names and nothing about the characters attached to them.

On the other hand, my high school AD&D game had PCs with a short backstory and real personalities. I can remember almost every one of them and cool stuff they did. The short-run "my guy is just some guy" players didn't last and I don't remember much about their characters. I don't think this is coincidence.

No Dragon. Not until 6th grade, when someone got Dragon #55 (I now own that exact copy, as his collection was passed to my cousin and then to me over the years). I got Dragon #78 in 7th grade, and then I eventually subscribed. Once we did, what it said was law.

We had a lot of fun, but it was different fun than I sometimes hear about. I miss the sensawonder of my first sessions, but I don't miss much else about those days. Just some random memories of playing back in the day, with tween-age DMs and tween-age gamers.

Four mistakes to avoid when making a megadungeon

In a discussion about megadungeons (in a link now lost to me), someone pointed out the advice in this WOTC blog:

Adventure Builder: Writing Your First Adventure by Wolfgang Baur
He's got four complaints about adventures submitted for publication:

"1) too much useless backstory
2) slow starts
3) random encounters
4) too many encounters"

Although in the thread I read, this was all shot down, I actually think it's generally very sound advice for an old-school game, especially a megadungeon. I'll explain why point by point.

"1) too much useless backstory"

Basically: Write enough for the game, don't write a novel.

Why it's true for old school games:
The key word is "useless." Not "too much backstory" but "useless" backstory. Details you just don't need, and players will never get to learn (or benefit from, if they do).

If the backstory is valuable, and if learning it is both interesting and useful to the players, it's a benefit to the game.

The idea of "Gary's got this cool new game called Greyhawk. You're a bunch of guys exploring an old abandoned wizard's castle full of monsters and treasure and stuff." launched an entire hobby. How much backstory is that? Not much. Just enough to get started.

It's probably not enough to sustain a game, though. You need some backstory. But you don't need more than the players will encounter, or than the players will be able to find out and utilize. Think of those tantalizing tastes of the history of Greyhawk and the madness of Zagyg and the vague hints you get about Blackmoor. Why are they tantalizing? Because you have just enough to go on, but not so much that your imagination has no gaps to fill. That's the middle ground you want for your players. Some backstory, but loose enough that when they imagine something cooler, you can run with it. Not so little that you don't have an answer or your megadungeon doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Just enough.

"2) slow starts"

Basically: Start off with a bang, not a whimper.

Why it's true for old school games:
Nothing sucks more than camping in front of a gigantic dungeon full of monsters, puzzles, traps, and unimaginable treasures and having nothing to do. Or worse, have a lot of boring crap to do. Room 1 can be empty (and usually is), but there better be stuff to do immediately. Decisions to make ("Do we go left, right, or straight?") and things to worry about ("Where do those obviously steep stairs go? What is that odd smell? Who is making that groaning noise?") are really important.

Like the man said, people want to show up and roll dice. This is especially true the less often you play. Make sure there is stuff to do right way in your megadungeon. Make sure entering the place or going down a level or pulling the elevator lever has some kind of effect. You'll never regret starting off with a bang, and that goes equally for sessions, levels (it shouldn't be safe to "just go down to level 4 real quick and look around"), and whole dungeons. Vary what you use, but make it exciting from the word go.

I'm guilty of this - although my upper works had a ghost and some other (as yet unknown) encounters, my megadungeon started with a whimper. I should have had a bang-zoom start and I didn't. We had a "let's mine our own entrance!" thing going for half the session. That's my fault, not theirs.

3) random encounters

Basically: They can be fun, but they don't advance the adventure.

Why it's true for old school games:
This is the one I agree with the least. But I don't think it's totally wrong or without value.

Take this from someone who loves them: Wandering Monsters are a time-use tax. Dawdle? Fight some random monsters that show up to hassle you. You can't just sit around or take your time. They generally advance the adventure indirectly, by forcing players to make decisions and to move. That's what they are for. You don't exactly speed up the session by throwing a random monster at the party, nor do you speed up their exploration. You're punishing them for taking too much time.

Not that this is bad. It's reasonable in the game of dungeon crawling that there is a tax for sitting around. You'll suffer now but keep the pace up more later.

But the author also has a point - they don't need to be random per se. You don't necessarily need a table. You could just say that on a 1 in 6 every X amount of time, there is a chance that monsters that live nearby the disturbance (aka the party) come to investigate. Dumb monsters might wander up and attack. Smart ones might organize an ambush, or provoke dumb monsters to go after you, or use magic to confuse your approach so you can't find them, or another clever response. Hell, they might come and negotiate from a position of strength as you sit bandaging the cleric up enough that he'll wake up and heal your unconscious fighters. This changes them from "a carrion crawler appears from nowhere 10-60' away and attacks you; had you moved faster, it might not have existed" to "a carrion crawler from the room you rested to close to has heard the moans of your wounded and wandered over; too bad you didn't surprise it while it was sleeping."

While I love tables and I use them myself, you really can just make the "random" in encounter just randomly determining if you fight them in their keyed area or outside of it. Keep the roll, but you can ditch the table if you want. It won't break the megadungeon, and it might even make it seem more alive.

"4) too many encounters"

Basically, too many encounters slows down progress.

Why it's true for old school games:
If you fill every room in your megadungeon, no one will get anywhere. You'll be bogged down clearing room after room. Why make it "mega" if you intend to cram it tight with monsters and traps and treasure? You could do that with a smaller dungeon. Part of the fun of megadungeons is that they can contain anything and maybe everything, because they are so big. How do you get across the idea that it's so huge? Leave empty space. Put in hallways that take 20 minutes to cross and stairs that wind down for miles. But if every room has an encounter, you never get to explore all that stuff. So don't feel like you need to fill the whole dungeon. The fact that old-school stocking tables leave anywhere from 1/3 (D&D Basic Set p. B52) to 60% empty (DMG, pg. 170) to 2/3 empty (Monsters & Treasures, p. 6) are a good guideline to this. The dungeon is as big as you need it to be - so don't put in so many encounters it takes too much real-world time to get to the cool stuff.

Make sure there is a lot to do - and yes, this means encounters - but not so many that every session is a slog of room clearing or trap detection. Make sure they can go look around, not get bogged down with too much in too small of a spot.


So that's what I take away from that article. It goes on to expand on appropriate encounter levels, and adventure paths, and stuff I don't care about for my current game. But that first bit, those four mistakes, I really feel like I took away some clarity about the good and the bad. I hope it helps you, too.