Why are you idiots in the underworld?

For the underworld megadungeon, in case one of the players makes the mistake of asking, "So, why am I here again?"

1 Grandmother is angry at you again. Your mother/spouse/roommates are fed up with all the howling and banging so you have to go figure out what you did this time and fix it.

2 Little brother's cat died. You've decided to find and trap its wandering, tortured spirit for him so he can "learn about life."

3 Accidentally killed your girl(and/or)boyfriend. You feel kind of bad about that. Go find him/her so you can properly lay them to rest, or at least say "sorry."

4 You've grown up all your life with stories about some treasure hidden by one of your ancestors. After a couple years (days) of searching, you've given up finding it on your own, and are determined to find the old coot so he can give you a map.

5 Last week your cousin showed up with some really great pearls that s/he said were from the underworld. Convinced that girl/guy you've been kind of sweet on to go with them to Moon Dance. You're going to go down there and find something better, damn it.

6 You're bored, and otherwise sort of useless.

7 You're pretty distractable, and some joker told you there were shiny things down there.

8 Your older brother stole one of your favorite possessions and says he hid it in one of the odd passageways. You're not sure you believe him.

9 One of your friends died in a freak carp accident and you're actually kind of sad about it. Go find him so you can say goodbye.

10 The cats have been acting really strange lately. Your great-aunt says that means a malevolent spirit of some kind has been bothering the halls of the family dead. You're either the oldest sibling or the stupidest, so it falls on you to go clear it out.

11 You owe money to the mob. This is the fastest way to get it without doing any real work, and even if you don't get it, maybe going down there will convince them that you're too scary to mess with anyway.

12 You want to be a mighty hero, and you're looking for ancient warriors to learn from. It hasn't occurred to you yet that it might be better to look for warriors who haven't gotten themselves killed yet.

13 The local temple needs the poison of a ancestor-touched spiny toad to complete the initiations of their latest batch of acolytes. Somehow you've been drafted into catching a few for them.

14 You want to catch a spirit for a familiar. If you're not a magic-user, you'll just catch a rat or something and call it your familiar.

15 Spirit blossom grows down there. You want some.

16 Someone owes you money and the bastard ran down into the underworld to hide from you. You're tempted to just let him get eaten by spirits, but he's owed you that money for a long time, dang it.

17 You have a question that you desperately want answered, and you haven't been able to find a solution anywhere in the surface world. The last person you talked to said a particular ancestor or spirit might have the answer.

18 Zombie outbreak got the dead all riled up. Take some rice, holy water, and the severed head of the sorcerer responsible down there and calm the lot of them down.

19 You found a skull and you don't know whose it is. Now you need to go find its owner so you can make sure it's not a restless murder victim or something.

20 You're dead, Jim. 50% chance you've noticed.

How did it get into the library?

1 Deliberately entered via a spell, such as summon library. If the creature is not of the appropriate type/level to cast the spell on its own, someone cast it for them. 25% chance in this case that the passageway is still accessible somewhere on the level.

2 Born here

3-6 Made here (1-2 recently 3-6 in ages long past, now best forgotten)

7-8 Wandered in accidentally through a spontaneous entrance from one of the usual places. (1-3 old section of a mundane library where no one's been recently 4 wizard graveyard 5 magic forest 6 anywhere constructed with or with furniture made of wood pilfered from a magic forest (or stone pilfered from a wizard graveyard)*) 10% chance the passageway is still accessible somewhere on this level.

9 It's always been here

10 The PCs are somehow responsible

*not a recommended building material

Two Offbeat Places to Die Horrible Lightless Deaths

The Underworld. Not the "mythic underworld," but the literal, place-where-dead-folks-go underworld. You might head down there to get information lost to all but the dead, make sure an ancestor's spirit has been properly appeased, or even retrieve someone who ended up there accidentally. (If the lord of the underworld is, like Pluto, also a god of wealth, you might have more traditional reasons as well.) Alternatively, character death might be the beginning of the campaign. You're trying to explore the place's geography and social structure, find old friends, relatives, and ancestors, and figure out where your place in it all is.

The Infinite Library. Mortals can't come up with spells on their own. All the spells that ever have been and ever will be known are buried somewhere in a dark catacomb that follows only the twisted logic of magic. "Researching a new spell" is a matter of piecing together from surface world research what you can of the laws of the place to make your best guess of where the effect you want might be found, and then diving into that deadly maze to retrieve it. (This is, I should note, more a twist on noisms Planescape Borges thought, brought on by Jeff's latest spellbook musings, than a truly new idea. Less scholarly arguments, more deadly monsters and traps guarding the occasional cache of scrolls, but still.)

Scan of a Map

So I ran the megadungeon again last night, and Artemis drew this neat map. I've been hesitant to post scans of the main maps because (a) they're not all that interesting and (b) my players haven't seen most of them yet, but this handles both problems nicely.

Neo-Classical Is Better For New Players

On Thursday, I'll be running a six or seven person foray into my megadungeon. (Or perhaps another adventure. Not likely, but I haven't ruled it out.) I considered using 4e, because it's been on my mind a lot lately and I've pegged it as a good system for one-shots, due to its consistency. Ultimately, I decided that Swords & Wizardry would handle the group size better, and I've been looking for an opportunity to introduce this gang to neo-classical play for a while anyway.

Another consideration is that we're going to have a brand new player at the table. (The younger sister of the boyfriend of an old regular from my high school group.) I've already sworn off introducing new people to 3.5 D&D. Despite my occasional frustrations with it, I like the system, but I've been playing it on and off for nearly seven years now. I've read all the core books, cover to cover, multiple times.

New players don't have that experience, and trying to introduce them to the idea of roleplaying and actually play the game while also explaining the system to them is an exercise in frustration, even if they are interested in its intricacies. More often, they aren't. The last few times I've tried to run 3.5 with people, it's turned into tedious frustration. Boytoy had decided roleplaying "wasn't his thing" partly because of his lack of interest in dealing with that system, which I'd originally used to introduce him to gaming.

4e isn't quite as convoluted as its predecessor, but it's still a decision heavy, rules-mastery focused system. I'm comfortable running it (and, presumably, playing it) but a large part of that comfort is based on that same experience I have with 3.5, and such systems generally.

For new players, it's just too much hardware. They don't need all that stuff to "get" roleplaying, and if they're not interested in it, it just gets in the way. If I suspected she'd be a rules junky herself, and we were starting up a proper campaign, I might consider it. But for a one-shot, and a player I know basically nothing about? Much better to go with a system that gets out of the players way and puts the heavy lifting on me, rather than the book.

Megadungeon Session 2: A Learning Experience

Friday night also marked the second ever foray into the megadungeon. (Yet nameless, I'm still trying to figure out a balance between the ridiculous criteria I've come up with and keeping it from sounding like a 4e power.) Halfway through the Traveller session, two players had to leave, and rather than soldier on so shorthanded I suggested that we play this crazy dungeon I'd been working on. The idea was met with enthusiasm, and so we spent an hour making characters, and another two dungeoneering.

The party consisted of:
Din Aleboot, 1st-level Dwarf (Alice Dice in the Traveller game)
Fitz the Fantastic, 1st-level magic user (Shmiff)
Yui Fluorite, 1st-level Cleric (Nina Ka-Fai)

This party was significantly less cautious than Zane Archer was in his expedition. Still fairly cautious -- they listened at doors, looked up at the ceilings, and so on -- but they were much more willing to fiddle with things. Fitz smashed a glass gramaphone, Din dipped things into mysterious freezing pools, and Yui picked up tiny robots using acid to etch things onto the walls. ("There are robots in this dungeon?!")

They also mapped, which let them make some intelligent decisions ("this door probably just leads to that room we've already explored") and helpd them escape at the end of the night, when I declared that it was getting late, and that anyone who was still in the dungeon when I got too tired to run would be subject to a roll on "The Table of Probable Doom." That got their attention, because when I say "them," I mean "Fitz and Din," and shortly thereafter just Fitz.

See, they'd run afoul of a heat ray. You get zapped, you save vs. 3d6 damage and melting of your armor/other metal. (Which I neglected to mention at the time, but further expeditions will discover these corpses in the proper condition.) Yui got zapped and died, and then while trying to get back towards the entrance Din was also zapped, and promptly died.

They took it pretty well, since they'd been kind of expecting something like that to happen based on my brief descriptions of the enterprise, but I'm entirely happy with how it went. The triggering mechanism wasn't completely clear, even in my mind, and then once I did come up with a decent mechanism a few seconds later, it was still something that was going to be pretty close to undecipherable to the players, without some serious investigation and perhaps a stroke of luck.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. But this particular trap only gets set off some of the time, even when the triggering mechanism is met, and what I learned is that this actually can make a trap more deadly, not less. Because, for instance, you can end up with a character on the wrong side of potential death. And you can get PCs thinking they know something that doesn't trigger it, when really what's happened is they got lucky on a die roll.

So, learning experience. The players aren't bothered by it, and they've got a map so they know to avoid that room from now on. But I now I've got some things to do differently in the future.

A First Foray Into the Underworld

Last night I ran my megadungeon for the first time. We got off to a later start than I wanted (it was midnight by the time the game actually got going) but we spent a solid three hours playing, and a got a good chunk of the first level explored.

This was a solo game. I'm playing with my boyfriend, whom I've tried to introduce to roleplaying a couple of times before (he played Tim the Barbarian, who became the Mayor of Gnometown) but it's never quite stuck. He's not completely comfortable "pretending to be someone else," and I suspected that both the more player-challenging nature of dungeon and not having other people around to look stupid in front of would help. It did: he's been bugging me to play again today, and I have high hopes that this will become a regular campaign.

Solo gaming makes it a great third campaign, (you'll recall I'm already running Traveller and playing Labyrinth Lord online) because we don't really have to worry about scheduling it. When we've got a couple of hours, we can play. At some point, I'd like to run more players through it, but the nice thing about the dungeon is that I can have different groups of characters who don't necessarily all delve together, or even know about each other. So long as everyone picks up out of the dungeon and heads back to town by the end of the session, it's all good.

We're running Swords & Wizardry, with only a few rules tweaks at the moment (concerning shields, mostly) but I'm planning to add more as we go along, in response to both my own mad whims and actual campaign needs. We've already got a few changes that need to be made to the equipment list: he wants to buy jars, and finds the weapon weights woefully inaccurate. (That'll teach me to play D&D with a medieval re-enactor.)

He's running Zane Archer, fighting-man. (I told him about the Traveller game, and he likes the name.) So far, we've been running pretty light on background. I know the name of the small town where he's based, and I have a rough sketch of the terrain between it and the dungeon, but that's about the extent of my world information so far. We didn't determine much more about Zane, either; I suggested he was a follower of "the moon goddess," owing to the silver holy symbol he'd picked up while buying equipment (in case of werewolves) but beyond that he's just a guy who does crazy things like wander around in monster-infested labyrinths because he thinks there might be treasure.

I was impressed at how he handled himself in the dungeon -- apparently, he's been paying attention when I talk about how dangerous and weird dungeons are. He listened at doors, backed off from fights that didn't have to happen, brought a ten-foot-pole (which he used to carry his lantern and sack on, so he could easily set them down in a fight, as well as to push open doors) and generally dungeoneered. He was sort of annoyed that being "nice" to the monsters in the dungeon didn't always make him friends (trying to help down what I described as "a giant demon-frog" hanging on hooks got him attacked by said frog) but overall his approach of "talk first, stab later" kept him from getting killed.

Unfortunately, he's not mapping (yet) and he didn't bring any henchmen. I'm hoping the dungeon will convince him of the value of the two practices; he's already gotten a bit lost, and missed a couple of semi-important features that would have been obvious if he'd had a map in front of him. If a wandering monster check (brought on by his use of a signal whistle to taunt some goblins into following him out of the room they were looting) hadn't brought the intelligent white ape he'd bothered earlier and who was more than happy to lead him out of the dungeon, the session would have taken quite a while to end. As it was, we were both tired, and I was happy for a convenient excuse to get Zane back to town.

The main thing I'm not happy with about the dungeon is that it doesn't yet have a name. Zane knows it as "those weird ruins off in the hills" which is enough to get a game going, but at some point I really need to get around to naming the dang thing. I want to give it a color+noun name, and I think the first part of that will be either "jade" or "jet," but I've yet to think of a good noun that starts with "b" and isn't "blood."

Overall, though, a good session. It'll be interesting to see how things develop from here.

Reworking D&D's Races

One of the things that I have always, ever since I first started playing, wanted to do with D&D was to redo the races and classes. Not because I was particularly dissatisfied with them; I just think it would be a fun project. This is one of the reasons why OD&D and its derivatives appeal to me. The simplicity of the rules, and particular the open-ended way that racial and class abilities can be detailed, makes this kind of project a lot more realistic.

Note that I've never actually gotten around to doing anything like this. I've made a few half-hearted notes, here and there. But mostly, it's just been on my "someday" list. For years.

Partly this is because I've run mostly various flavors of 3.5 D&D, and while that's the DMG that gave me the idea in the first place, it'd still be a bear to do. But mostly it's that I never had much of an idea of what I would do if I redid the class lists. My vague thought was that this would be part of some serious setting project, but that's never quite gotten done, either.

Lately, though, I've been thinking that this might make an interesting side-project for my megadungeon game. (Which I am still working on; my hope is to have it ready for at least a few hours of play by next weekend.) I'm already turning over ideas for replacing dwarves with some kind of "mechanical men," sentient, humanoid versions of the caretaker robots that occasional escape the dungeon, or that the dungeon sends out for its own mysterious purposes; they would obviously have certain advanced knowledge of the various dangers of the facility.

The nice thing about doing it this way is that I know I won't be running the megadungeon as a continuing campaign for a while. So I have a fair amount of room to mess around with things, even if I'm running it every so often. The important stuff is what's going on inside the dungeon, anyway. So far, I haven't given much thought to the larger world outside the dungeon, but my plan is to generate the world outwards from it as it pleases me. I don't have to worry for now about detailing even the region around the dungeon, because any "test drives" over the next few months can easily get away with being dungeon-exclusive.

Other Campaigns I Might Run This Summer

High-level 4e D&D. At the very least mid-Paragon tier; I'd consider going all the way to Epic. I wouldn't mind giving the system another spin, and a lot of my players like it, but I don't want to fiddle around with the first four levels again. I want to see what the system can really do. I'd like to try out my old "world ruled by rival factions of giants" idea, possibly with the players as freedom fighters against the giant oppression. But if I were to use as many kinds of giants as I imagine, and if any kind of combat came up with them, there'd be a lot of custom monster making, since there's only three kinds in the MM and one is kind of oddball. Not bad, just more work. I might end up just going with the "team of reckless archaeologists" idea; Indiana Jones seems like a good fit for the game's style. Either way, the real problem with this is that it'd awaken the temptation to buy more 4e crap, which is an urge I don't need.

Megadungeon. This should be ready for play by that time, so this'd probably be the lowest work option out of the things I'm considering. Some of the players are surprisingly enthusiastic about it, too. Unfortunately, a couple of them are flatly uninterested, and though I could probably convince them to try it I'd rather do something that everyone's excited about from the get-go. I'll probably break it out a couple of times over the summer for testing purposes; that's the nice thing about the megadungeon set-up, it's fairly accomodating of occasional but connected expeditions.

Vampire. Either Rockstar or Lawyers, Guns and Money, depending on what kinds of characters wanted to run. This is another option with a surprisingly high amount of player interest, even from the people who haven't wanted to play this for years. On the other hand, I'd really rather play Vampire than run it, and I'm not too sure about my groups willingness to "take it seriously."

Superheroes. Most likely Mutants & Masterminds, though one guy I know has HERO and likes it, so I'd be open to that option. I've had a game like this in the back of my mind for a long time, and it'd be nice to give the genre a shot for once. Unfortunately, though the group has several major superhero enthusiasts, it's got several people who actively dislike superheroes.

3.5 D&D Supplement Extravaganza. I have a bunch of d20 crap. My players have a bunch of d20 crap. We've never gotten to use all that d20 crap. I don't know if I'd want to go so far as to use absolutely everything the group owns, but I'd like to get a chance to use a lot of the material in Sandstorm, Tome of Magic, Book of Nine Swords, Expanded Psionics Handbook, Spell Compendium, and Magic Item Compendium that never quite saw play. So probably a weird fantasy/ancient world game, with a bunch of different competing orders -- Jedi-analogues/Bene Gesserit-types, ninjas, a bunch of different martial arts monks/sages -- and the players hook up because they all want to get the same cosmic doo-dad, and they figure they're better off working together until they get the chance to grab the thing for their order and run. Hilarity ensues.

The Hall of Tombs

So I've got this room, the Hall of Tombs. And in it are a bunch of statues and frescoes and stuff, depicting "mighty heroes and great kings of old." The idea is to foreshadow some of the tomb sub-levels that I've got planned, and to play on that whole "connection to the Netherworld" idea, which otherwise hasn't seen a lot of play in this part of the dungeon.

Trouble is, I'm not sure who to put there. Zagyg (or some variation) is a given, and suggests a lot of ideas for said sub-level. Ozymandius is, for various reasons, another natural fit, and lets me do an Egyptian/classical world themed sub-level. I'm thinking some kind of Snake-related Sorcerer-Priest would be good, too, for ye olde snake-filled temple to an evil god, though I don't have a name picked out just yet. I've also considered doing one for Dave Arneson, but considering that he's not actually dead, it might be more tasteful to find another way to honor him in this project.

But I'd like at least a couple more, even just as red-herrings, to throw off players who work out the idea. Any real-world megadungeon contributors who deserve a spot? Or interesting historical or fictional references to make? Who would you put in something like this?

How I'm Writing the Dungeon

At least for now. This'll probably change, as I get better at it.

First, spend a couple days working on the map. Usually in class, because my teachers don't care if I "doodle."

Once I've got the map, I break out some lined paper and start keying, ten rooms to a page. Sometimes I just put stuff in the rooms that I think would be cool. Other times, I use Sham's Restock Tables to populate them, usually with a second die rolled for a 1 in 6 chance of a trap.

If I roll a monster, I roll on the Swords & Wizardry tables to figure its CL, and either invent one or pick one out of the S&W bestiary. Then I add it to the Wandering Monster table for the level, along with its stats, and roll number appearing for the room in question.

For traps, I either come up with something on my own (not great about that yet, but I'm learning) or a roll on Sham's Trap Tables. In either event, I spend some time thinking about a triggering method and warning signs. I'm trying to break out of my "traps are abstract, random damage" habits that kept me from using them in my 3.5 days.

Rooms with treasure often just get something I think would be cool. Otherwise, I roll on the S&W tables, or stick cash somewhere. I'm not real great about hidden treasures yet, mostly I stick things under loose bits of flooring. (Or on the ceiling.)

Empty rooms are rarely completely empty, and even rooms with something mechanically noteworthy in them get some bit of flair or dressing. So far I've got a bunch of mosaics on the floor, a room with poetry all over the walls, and spawning pools. So far I've only got one "trick," a dungeon feature that isn't strictly a trap, but still might be dangerous and takes some figuring out, but I'm going to add more as the mood strikes.

Oh, and all of the rooms have names, to help me remember them. Most of these are strictly utilitarian ("Music Hall" "Control Panels" "Beehives") but a few are whimsical or referential ("Fiery Doom" "It Has a Sense of Humor") because I enjoy amusing myself with that sort of thing while I prep. (I once named a monster "The Thing What Lurks in the Swamp" and nearly collapsed laughing as one player explained to another player their plan regarding said creature. Poor form, I know.)

The Labyrinth

Level one is coming along. There was this moment today, when I first started filling the map I've been working on, when I just didn't know what to put down, but once I started working on it ideas flowed a lot easier. Even if it was just stuff like "this room fills with poison gas," getting something down got me thinking of more interesting things as I went.

This level doesn't have a whole lot of active interference by the fortress mind. It's largely not hooked up to the main machinery of the deeper levels, and what is here is relatively simple, since it wasn't intended for much more than harassing travelers in the first place. That goal has mutated over the centuries: now, instead of keeping people out, the fortress tries to lure them towards the deeper levels. But it does that mostly with occasionally changing inscriptions on the walls, one-way doors, and simple traps, and there are places in the level where the brave and the lucky can tinker with its workings.

The main goal I have with this level, beyond getting the hang of dungeon design myself, is to introduce a lot of ideas that I want to use in more complex form either deeper into the first level itself, or on level two. Some of this is puzzle related -- rooms divided by walls of force, but where there's a fairly simple detour to the other side, so the PCs will get the idea when they discover similar, but much more difficult set-ups. But mostly it's thematic stuff: Ranines in one room and giant porcupines in stables the next room over, the tiny robots that do (among other things) dungeon maintenance, messages from the dungeon itself.

Mostly, I want to give the sense that there's a lot going on in this place, and that there are things to figure out. My earlier attempts at dungeoneering suffered greatly for the lack of that sense, and some of my potential players are suspicious of the idea of megadungeons (I suspect) because they don't think of the things in those terms. This dungeon is a learning experience for me, but it's also going to be a learning experience for whoever runs through it; none of my gaming buddies have had much more experience than I have with megadungeons, or dungeons generally. So I'm keeping that in mind.

The Rules of the Dungeon

As usual, as soon as I start seriously working on this megadungeon project, I start getting bogged down in process. Should I use the one page dungeon template? Should I ink the maps? Should I map first, then figure out what's in it, or should I work out what's on the level and then map?

Fie, I say. I'm building this thing in the spirit of being fifteen, before I knew that there was a right way to do things, when I just scrawled my notes on graph paper during French and stuffed them into colored folder's depending on whether they were this week's adventure or the next's. I'm giving myself a few basic rules, and beyond that, I'm going to do my best to stay out of my own way.

#1. It must be delve-ready by July 27th. I'm doing this, among other reasons, to honor Gary Gygax, so I pretty much have to run it on his birthday. (Or at the very least, on the Sunday before.) I ideally want to have the first three levels done by then, but I need at least the first level finished and the second started. I figure I can't screw this one up, unless it turns out I have some weird dungeon-related disability.

#2. Don't get it right. Get it done. I'm supporting this by giving myself some leeway to change things if I decide I don't like them. Mostly, though, I'm adopting this as a mantra. It's a dungeon, for crying out loud. There's no way to do a twisting cavern of madness right, and at any rate, this is a learning exercise. As much as I like the idea of having one dungeon that I use for twenty years and run hundreds of people through, I'm not stuck with this thing if I outgrow it.

#3. It must be hand-written. I've run my last few campaigns entirely on the computer, but while it's incredibly convenient and I'm happy with how those campaigns turned out (or are turning out, since that's how I'm running At Star's End), I need to get back to writing notes by hand. It's what right for this project.

#4. It had better be weird. Otherwise known as "Stop worrying and love the dungeon." This one I don't think I'll be forgetting, because dang it, it's (one of the many reasons) why I'm taking on this project in the first place. To get a taste of that otherwordly underground weirdness that I hear all the serious dungeon-istas talking about. It's worth keeping in mind, because one of the problems I always had when I tried to run dungeons in the past was that they weren't weird; there was nary a dollop of fantastic illogic to be found.This is the rule I'll refer to when deciding whether the President Cave should make an appearance, or whether there really needs to be a cupcake sub-level.

And that's pretty much it. A few basic principles, but no need to bog myself down with more rules than I need.

Getting It Done

The first level of the megadungeon, which I'm mapping now, is The Labyrinth. As I mentioned yesterday, it's essentially just the first line of defense for the fortress that the dungeon used to be. It's mostly just an opportunity to get some practice with a very basic, very simple kind of dungeon design, with goblins and traps and not much over-arching theme to the place other than "it's dangerous." As I get more confident in dungeon-design, I may go back and retrofit a more interesting set of early levels onto the place.

It's a principle that I'm trying to extend to all aspects of this project: I want to give myself room to screw up. The place is semi-sentient, supernaturally empowered, and malevolent, so every so often it shifts itself around a bit, just to make life hard for any adventurers who have wandered into it recently. If I decide I don't like a section, I can ditch it, or shunt it off into a less important location.

I've been putting this off for over a year now, partly because I was worried about "getting it right." But "getting it right" doesn't matter. Getting it done does. Getting it played does. I can always change it later -- though I'll add that I'm not letting myself start over from scratch, at least until it gets a couple sessions of play time. If I start hitting the reset button every time I don't like something, it'll never get done.

Work Begins on the Megadungeon

Anyone else been reading Girl Genius lately? I've been thinking that Castle Heterodyne would make for a pretty good megadungeon. In particular, the idea of the place itself as sentient and semi-mobile appeals to me, since it gives me a great excuse to change things up and add in new areas as needed. The details of the castle's personality are pretty good, too -- mechanical malevolence is as good a reason as any to have tons of death traps littered about the place, and the fractured nature of its mind means that even if you make friends with one part of the place, the rest is still out to kill you.

Anyway, the upshot is that I'm smashing this idea into my "physical manifestation of the netherworld" idea to get the general outline of the dungeon I've started. Essentially my idea is that the place was built as a fortress by a family of Mad Scientists (or possibly, y'know, wizards) but that over the years, said family's vile and debauched behavior built up a malign aura about the place. Over time, the already-bizarre complex became intertwined with the Netherworld . . . and perhaps other, much darker places.

What this means in actual practice, I'm not quite sure yet. I know that at least a few sublevels will be tombs, possibly with surface works attached. (And by "are going to be" I mean, "unless I get a better idea/distracted." At the very least, I'll have "The Tomb of Zagyg," full of death traps and weird random effects.) The initial first level -- what I'm working on right now -- is The Labyrinth, originally intended as a defense system for the fortress. (And amusement for its owners.) And at some point I'm going to have a section that is very much The Netherworld, all skulls and ghosts and stuff. But beyond that, I don't have any specific plans. I figure I'll kick down that door when I come to it.

A Declaration of Intent

I couldn't think of anything to write when Gary Gygax died. Still can't. The man changed my life, but you know that. That's why you're here. He did the same thing for you.

So instead, I'm going to do something. Yesterday, I started mapping the first level of a dungeon. I'll have at least three levels finished by July 27th, so I can celebrate that day with a small expedition.

With any luck, it'll be ready for play long before that. I'm still committed to the Traveller game for the remainder of the semester, but I'm hoping I'll get a chance to do some solo gaming on the side.

Because somewhere in this yet unmade dungeon is a room, with a plaque, or an engraving, or something else of that sort, and it reads, "In memory of Gary Gygax, Dungeon Master." It's not enough, but it'll have to do.

Lost Temple of the Laser Snakes

This whole dungeon kick I've been on lately culminated on Friday when I got my gang of Traveller characters to steal "the Jeweled Bird of Zi Amon" from a temple full of snake people. Good times.

I got to test out a bit of dungeon running in a situation where the entire campaign didn't hinge on it being interesting, and I thought it went rather well. Not something I'm going to make the focus of the campaign, but at least one player seemed to like it a lot, so I'll probably throw in similar activities from time to time. Perhaps not as straight up dungeon as this one, since he seemed more keen on the pulpy wackiness of it all, but definitely more artifact snatch 'n grab, as an occasional alternative to their political shenanigans.

It's strengthened my interest in running a dungeon as a full campaign, because I'm beginning to be more confidant that I can pull it off. I've had bad experiences running dungeoncrawls in the past, but I think I've gotten past the "a dungeon is a room full of things to fight" idea that caused most of my problems. With interesting rooms, and interesting reasons to head into the dungeon, it could work.

Just throwing another idea out here --

I've only got one concrete room idea for this megadungeon I keep writing about. I came up with it about a year ago, when I was working on my that first strange hex map, and decided to stick a dungeon in that a couple of cultists were looting. If I'd ever actually run that thing, I think the dungeon in question would have become a sort of megadungeon -- I had the idea that it would turn out to be a much larger complex than the single level I had detailed at first.

The room in question was the reason I suspected it would be a much larger complex; it was intended as a room that the PCs could not beat at the early levels, and would have to come back to much later if they wanted to find out what was going on with it. Similarly, it was my explanation for why the cultists had camped out in the hex; they were trying to figure out a way past the room, because they wanted something that was in the deeper part of the complex.

I assumed the PCs wouldn't get past the room because it was inhabited by an iron golem -- CR 13 in an area otherwise populated by first and second level threats. It was inside a circle drawn on the floor, and would not move unless someone, or something, entered that circle, at which point it would attack until they left the circle again. I calculated the size of the circle precisely to allow the PCs to spend a round in it before the golem reached them, so they had a decent chance to figure out what was going on before they got killed.

In the center of the circle, where the golem stood unless disturbed, was a trap door, which they would notice upon investigation or if they provoked the golem into stepping onto it. The idea being that they would enter this room, discover the trap door, realize that there was no way they could get past the golem at their current level, and wonder about it for another ten levels, or until they acquired some other bit of equipment or knowledge that would let them get past it.

Obviously, in a true megadungeon, conceived from the start for that purpose, the golem wouldn't be sitting on top of the only entrance to the next level. Most likely, it guard an entrance to a strange sub-level, or a shortcut to a much deeper level. And I'd stay open to the idea that the players would find some tricky way around the guardian -- I'd draw up at least the basics of whatever was behind the door, just in case. But I like the idea of areas that the players just can't get to at the current moment, that they can come back to much later, if they remember. And I also just like the idea aesthetically, the lone statue guarding some dark secret.

More Thoughts on a Megadungeon

Another idea that I've been toying with, for megadungeon purposes, is making something that connects to a lot of different places. Maybe even a lot of different times. Either there are portals within it, or there are alternate stairs up that lead to different places than the one you went down, but the basic idea is, you can go into the megadungeon, come out in a different place, and have some wilderness/city adventure wherever it is you've come up.

Like my sewer/city ideas, I'm wary about creating way too much work for myself. If I'm running a megadungeon, why should I be spending my prep time working up a bunch of different wilderness areas? I'd risk creating a game that mostly takes place above ground, with the megadungeon itself used for travel or side tracks.

But then I start thinking about the possibilities. What if, either by design or natural occurrence, the large, well-appointed tombs of powerful people physical connect to the Netherworld? What if the megadungeon is the structure of the world, and connects to the normal world at key anchor points? What if those anchor points are a set of artifacts, which the players can remove for their own use, at the risk of seriously futzing with the structure of the universe?

Ultimately, the idea is just an attempt to avoid "limiting" myself. Which is ridiculous, but it's an urge I get some time. "I can't decide which setting to use, so I'll just use all of them!" Bad idea, but I keep having it.

I'll probably just keep the idea up my sleeve for when I need an interesting sublevel or something. Make the secondary entrance a source of weirdness entering the dungeon, rather than primarily a location in itself.

A Few Thoughts on a Megadungeon

Since I started the Traveller campaign (which will have its own blog in a day or two) I have, naturally, started planning other campaigns I might run in the future instead of working on it. In particular, I've started thinking seriously about running a megadungeon again. I've been going off and on the idea for a while now, particularly since Swords & Wizardry came out. Every time I read about a great megadungeon campaign on Sham's Grog 'n Blog or Grognardia or The Society of Torch, Pole, and Rope, I get really excited about running my own -- and then I get distracted and wander off to plan and run something else.

I haven't managed to get much done during the enthusiasm phase of these cycles, but a few things are starting to stick. No maps, no room descriptions, not even a general idea of what the levels are, just a few vague notions.

First, I'm thinking the first level or two is going to be the sewers/catacombs of a city. Non-sensical fantasy sewers, with goblins and bandits hiding out in them and little shrines to evil gods, but sewers the same. Below that, things start to get weird, but the first few levels are relatively normal, though they don't make good civic sense.

The trouble with this notion, and the thing that keeps me from embracing it wholeheartedly, is that it seems to suggest that I'd have the whole city above it mapped out in similar detail, which I'm not really up to doing. And if I did that, I'd start thinking about whether said sewer conformed to medieval standards, and then I'd be spending my time on wikipedia rather than working on the dungeon. I suspect I can solve my problems by going "pfsh, there are entrances where I want there to be entrances, and the PCs are never going to map out the dungeon and the city accurately enough to figure out whether they match up" and leave it at that.

And, as much as I like the idea of urban adventure, on any given day I'm just as likely to think it'd be better for the main home base to be some little village out in the middle of nowhere. Or at most a medium sized town, something more manageable than a city, since I'll already be spending a lot of time working out the dungeon proper.

The other major idea I've had is that the dungeon, or at least part of it, is not just an underworld in the usual dungeon-y, it is The Underworld, the realm of the dead. This makes a pretty decent explanation for why everything down there is so weird, in case my players start asking pesky questions, and would make for an interesting series of sub-levels. And it gives me an excuse to make the entrance to the dungeon or some of the doors within it great gaping stone demon maws, whose teeth you must walk under to enter it.

So. Now I've got that out of my head, and I can go work on my Traveller game.