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.

The Trouble with Traveller

Friday's session of Traveller was a little on the disappointing side. Not that it wasn't fun -- for me, and Duke Burrin's player. But the rest of them mostly sat around and watched, occasionally engineering their own antics.

This unhappy circumstance was theoretically a product of necessity: they'd misjumped at the end of last session, and were a good half a dozen parsecs away from where they wanted to be. That many jumps means a lot of trading and a lot of accounting. But I need a better way to handle these long stretches of dice rolling and calculation necessitated by so many jumps in a row. Especially since, in our current system, it takes much longer than I should because I'm constantly getting interrupted by other, more interesting things that one or two of the other players are doing -- which then just shifts the "me and one player are having fun" problem to a different part of the table.

One way to handle this would be to have some "interesting" things pop up along the way, and the last time they misjumped that's exactly what I did. But with the end of the semester fast approaching, carrying with it at the very least a significant campaign hiatus, I didn't want to distract too much from the multitude of goals they already have. More action would have been more interesting, but it also would have meant significantly delaying their arrival at the original destination (where they hope to pick up some clues as to the location of Athene's fiancé, and perhaps learn some more about the various KordCorp resistance movements they keep running into) -- perhaps even until next year.

It would also be possible to eliminate misjumps entirely, but I think it's important to have at least that possibility present. The crew has taken steps to reduce the probability of a misjump, and that's good, but I wouldn't want to eliminate them entirely. At the very least, they give them a reason to go off and see parts of the subsector, and surrounding subsectors, that they wouldn't otherwise go to, and I believe it's important to maintain an element of danger in space travel. Particularly considering that it's one of their main activities, it's helpful to have a bit of tension during that process.

Still. The current situation isn't acceptable. Burrin's player has suggested that he write an automated program to do most of the trade table stuff, which would help. I'm also thinking that next time this happens, I'll try to handle most of it by e-mail rather than taking up table time.

Game Day Rituals

One of the things I like about running a game is the demands it puts on me. Most of the time, I don't have to be at peak operational capacity. It's nice if I am all there, but when it comes to hanging out, school, and most of my other hobbies, I can get away with running at 50% or 60%. Gaming doesn't give me that luxury: I have to be 100% there as much as possible. It takes pretty close to my full mental capacity to simultaneously visualize the game environment, track player interest and involvement, easily call up important backstory details, remember where all my different notes are, roleplay NPCs properly, and think up interesting responses to player actions.

Accordingly, I've got a lot of little things that I do to get myself into the right state of mind and stay there. In no particular order:

Shower: And all my other hygiene routines. If I'm not clean, I get uncomfortable. If I'm uncomfortable, I can't run the game.

Power Shirt: At the very least my clothes have to be clean. But it helps me to get into "game mood" if I'm wearing the right clothes: jeans and t-shirt, usually black, generally geek related. My batsignal shirt is best, but I've got a bunch of other ThinkGeek type shirts that will do the trick.

Food: Need to have eaten some food. Need to have eaten the right food. If I haven't eaten, I get grouchy. If I've had too much sugar or caffeine or junk food, I either get way overstimulated or I go to sleep. I generally stick to baby carrots and cherries at the game table. Tasty, crunchy, and won't make me crazy.

Water: At the table, I drink a lot of water. Ludicrous amounts of water. I'm drinking water constantly. It keeps my voice from going out and keeps me from getting dehydration headaches. Best of all, it gives me a great excuse to leave the room and take a five minute break to think. (My players get all nervous when I do that, too.)

Books: It helps to have a big ol' stack of game books nearby, even if I'm not going to use them. I did this unconsciously for a while: when I was running a d20 system, I'd just cart out all my d20 stuff out of habit, even if I was running Arcana Evolved and so my d20 Modern books and so on weren't going to be much help. (I've got about two feet worth of books for various d20 system.) These days, I like to have my AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide close at hand, even when I'm running Traveller, so I can tap the Awesome Power contained therein. (NPC charts, mostly.) And I brought my copies of Fight On! to the last game, for pretty much the same reason.

Random Physical Description?

I'm happy with the system I've got for coming up with NPC names on the fly, but off-hand I don't know of a good random description generator. I need that more than the names, really; my physical descriptions tend to devolve into "he has, um, brown hair," whereas with names I just start naming them after people I know.

Any of you folks know of such a thing? Double-points if it includes sci-fi compatible clothes and so on, but all I really need is a basic physical description. Clothes I can manage. ("He looks fancy.")

D&D is a Grand Romance

So there's this response to the usual complaints about the Wizards of the Coast editions of D&D that goes something like: "What are you guys complaining about? You've got your own games to play. Stop talking about how you don't like ours."

And that's a perfectly legitimate position. Personally, I see a lot of value in figuring out exactly what it is you don't like about a game, especially a game that can be easily compared to a game you do like, but within the internet community those discussions often wind into less useful complaints. It's a lot better to get some enthusiasm going about the game you do play than spend all your time grousing about the game that you don't.

But it's like this: Imagine that you know a guy. (Or a girl. Adjust the pronouns to taste. Works either way.) A guy you really, really like, and who likes you back. You start dating, and it's great. He gets you, you get him, and you spend a couple of really wonderful years together. Sure, some of the time things get frustrating, neither of you is perfect, but you're able to work past that. You start seeing a future together.

But then he changes. First a little, then more and more, until suddenly that thing that you had, that perfect something between you, is gone. You break up, and he moves on to some other tart, who's younger and richer and better looking. You find a new guy yourself (if we want to take this metaphor way too far, you clone your old boyfriend and download his old memories into the clone) but even if you're glad your old boyfriend is happy, it still hurts.

Now, I can't speak for everyone who plays an older version of D&D in preference to 4e. All I've got is my own experience, of being way into 3rd Edition with a major company supporting it and being part of the dominant gaming experience, and then trying to move on to 4e and finding out that it just wasn't for me, at least as a long-term, go-to kind of game. I'm happy with the D&D I have now -- both my beloved 3rd edition and my new old school flames. But that doesn't mean that it's not a little weird to have everyone playing and discussing and caring about something else.

A Theory On Player Antics

The Zane Archer/Dave Bowman incident prompted a comment from me on the weirdness of players, and how "normal people don't do this kind of thing." The players responded with a theory of their own: that players pull bullshit stunts like that because they're trying to freak out the GM.

This isn't news to us. Several of them have straight out said that their goal is to get me to put my head in my hands in amused exasperation. Which I do, on a fairly regular basis. (Though only while GMing, I'm much more expressive than usual while I'm running the game.) I'm generally more entertained by their antics than annoyed, so things work out fairly well.

But it does strike me as a good theory for handling player weirdness in general. They're out to one-up or freak out tick off the GM, who tends to be fairly invested in the world and the campaign and thus responds when they do something bizarre to it. A bit of (hopefully friendly) competition.

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.

At Star's End: Session 6

So tonight's game, sadly, contained no actual frogs. I tossed in a line that would have led in that direction, but the moment wasn't right. They did, however, end up naming an NPC after him, so that was good. Next week there will be frogs, I think. And I've got plans to run my megadungeon for the first time tomorrow night, so Arneson-ian goodness still awaits.

That NPC, incidentally? The weirdest thing that I've ever had a group of players do. (Normally I don't do the whole "tell me about your campaign" thing but I have to get this out there.) He's Zane Archer, a convict and accountant who for typically complicated reasons has been tooling around with them for basically the whole campaign. Tonight, Duke Marlow Burrin (the captain) and Alice Dice (the crazy pirate who's slept with everyone) threatened his life and implied they were going to send him back to prison, on account of a "treasure" that he'd somewhat stupidly mentioned. Then Burrin (for, again, excessively complicated reasons) changed his mind, decided to hire Zane, but because he's not technically out of prison had to create a new identity for him -- which included changing his name to Dave Bowman, knighting him, and convincing him to get plastic surgery, so now he looks like Johnny Depp.

(Emily, Alice Dice's player, was very surprised later when she discovered a "David Bowman" in the copy of Fight On! she was perusing while Burrin was busy space-accounting.)

In other news, they've now got enough money that they don't have to constantly scramble for enough to pay the mortgage on their ship, and to start playing with speculative trade a little bit. Which is good, because they've now got a number of non-monetary interests developing, so it's nice that they can afford to go a little out of their way occasionally.

And this session reminded me that I really, really need to get my notes in some kind of coherent order. My NPCs in particular are a mess -- there are several that are just names on paper, and we'd been on a several week long break until last week's session so my memory can't pick up the slack. This campaign has a lot of NPCs, all doing minor but important things, and my usual system of "if they're important, I'll remember why" isn't cutting it.

Overall, this campaign is really starting to come to life. I spent the first few sessions kind of throwing things at the party, and now enough things have started to stick that it's getting really interesting.

A First Look at Fight On!

Okay, so this isn't the review to end all reviews: I haven't finished reading all four issues yet, and I haven't used any of it in play, so expect more detailed reports when that time rolls around. But even without reading every word of every issue, I've still got this to say: Score one to Fight On! for accessibility. This thing is aces for the old-school-curious.

Now, I say this as someone who knows her way around some old school blogs. I've been reading about megadungeons and OD&D and sandbox games for a while, so none of this is news to me. But I'd be surprised to see people picking up Fight On! without at having heard of the old school renaissance, so whether or not someone who didn't have that prior knowledge would understand it is neither here nor there.

For someone like me, who's got a general idea of what's going on but no real practical experience with it, Fight On! is perfect.

First off, there's the alternate rules and crazy add ons. Everything from magic items to alternate sub-systems of spell-casting to awesome combat tweaks. There's demonstrations of what you can do with random tables; I'm thinking here of "The Devil's in the Details," by Kesher, which also provides a nice familiar fantasy counterpoint to the really wacky things like "The Space Wizards," by the quite likely mad Paul Czege. It's all very easy to work into a game -- which makes me think that I really ought to be playing this, now.

Then there's the adventures. Again, there's a lot of variety: short, long, location-based, event-based, "normal" fantasy, wacky crashed-spaceship type stuff, and a few showing off some classic settings, Tekumel and Wilderlands and the like. Just like the rules add-ons, they're good demonstrations of what you can do with a good dungeon, and many of them practically beg to be dropped into a campaign immediately -- or used to start up a new one.

Finally, there's the how-to articles. "The Wilderness Architect," by Victor Raymond, was particularly eye-opening: here's a way to set up a campaign without getting bogged down in details. Just grab some dice and go. With this as your wilderness (or James Maliszewski's wilderness map), a bunch of adventures to drop in on various parts of the map, and The Darkness Beneath as your tentpole dungeon, you literally have a campaign ready to go.

It's a campaign you'd still have to put a little work into to set up, and it's a campaign that would naturally evolve as you ran it. Fight On! pretty much begs you to go out and start making up your own stuff, but if you're not ready to jump in right away, the magazine still eases you in to that kind of play.

But the main use I see myself getting out of these books is explaining this stuff to my friends. Good art, interesting to read, and explains by doing: this is something I can hand to the people who have been tolerating my crazy rants on the subject and show them what I've been telling them about. I can even leave it strategically strewn on a game table, so they think they're picking it up and thumbing through it on their own accord.

The title's pretty great for that, too. You tell someone that you're reading "Fight On!" and they listen to you.

Thank You, Dave Arneson

I still don't know what to say. Some of that is that James Maliszewski, Zachary the First, and Mike Mearls have already said most of what needs to be said. We all owe Professor Arneson an immeasurable debt.

I know what I can do: I'm adding a Blackmoor-themed sublevel to the megadungeon, and I'm dedicating this week's Traveller game to his memory. (No dungeons, but there's plenty of room for a few ravenous frog monsters.) But it still doesn't feel like enough.

Dave Arneson co-created Dungeons & Dragons. The game that got me many of my closest friends. The game that's given me countless knowledge of excitement, frustration, and joy. There are days when I feel like D&D -- Friday nights in basements with the handful of people in the world who seemed to really understand me -- got me through high school, and a lot of dark times during it.

I'm sure a lot of people have stories like this, but when I was introduced to D&D, I was a pretty lonely kid. A world where I didn't find D&D is a world I don't want to think about too hard.

So how do I do justice to that?

Maybe someday I'll find the right words. Right now, all I can do is keep gaming, and do my part to keep the flame going.

Thank you, Professor Arneson. I hope someday I'll live up to what you've given me.

Calling All Traveller Refs

I keep hearing about how easy Traveller's combat is. For the most part, I agree -- particularly that it's fast, which is nice for someone who's used to running post-1992 editions of D&D. But tracking damage and attendant modifiers for NPC has been giving me a bit of a headache, especially when I'm handling several different NPCs, as I am wont to do in combat. There's three different bins that damage needs to go into, and all the bins do different things.

I've started using a hit-point-esque system, where End+Str or End+Dex, whichever is greater, gives me hit points and then the remaining attribute gives me how far the character can go into negative hit-points before dying. That makes it hard to keep track of changing modifiers, so I handwave it. ("Eh, he looks pretty messed up, -1 to attack.") This works out okay, but I'm worried that I'm missing a more elegant or classic solution.

Fellow Traveller refs, I seek your wisdom! How do you handle NPC damage when you're tracking it for several NPCs at once?

Quick News Blogging Go!

Dave Arneson is in the hospital, and he may not survive the next couple of days. His family asks that no flowers, cards, etc. be sent. They'd like any well-wishes to be posted at this thread so they can pass them along to him.

Wizards of the Coast has banned all sales of their products in PDF. Announced today and it goes into effect today. That includes out-of-print products and editions. Apparently they're worried about piracy. So now the only way to get PDFs is to pirate them. Good job, guys.

I've got Fight On! #1, #2, #3, #4, as well as Swords & Wizardry. (Thank you, Lulu, for not totally borking my order.) I'll be reading them over the next few weeks, and probably post something as well.

Together, this means that it's time to fire up the megadungeon again. I've got a commitment to test it out with a solo run this weekend. All I really need to do to get it expedition ready is rough out a map for Level 2; I can stock it randomly if need be. Best of all: if I print out Sham's Trap Tables, I can do it completely computer free now.

And the I am most definitely not running 4e again this summer. I don't want to be beholden to a company that I can't predict. Too bad, since I was kind of jazzed about trying out some of the stuff in PHB 2. (All divine gnome party for the win!) Most likely it'll be Arcana Evolved instead, but I'm not yet one-hundred-percent committed to the idea.

And as a final note: I'm experimenting with a MWF blogging schedule for the next couple of weeks, to try and smooth out my massive posting binges and droughts.

A Brief Session Report

Last night's game went smashingly well. They fought flaming topiaries, stole a Lamborghini, and got their Captain stuck in a hospital under heavy guard.

Two factors: one, I pushed on them hard, and they pushed back. None of this "we have five missions, how can we do as many of them at once?" nonsense. None of the wandering around, waiting for me to do things that typified some of the earlier sessions. Not that they weren't fun, but it was beginning to stress me out.

No, this time, the conference room they were in exploded, they had to fight their way out, and suddenly it's all schemes and plans. They do something, I react, they react to me, and everyone's happy. And I think I struck a good balance between "giving them stuff because it's cool" and "arbitrary challenge" -- I did a fairly good job of responding to their plans with problems, but not such serious problems as they couldn't overcome.

The second factor was the absences of the player who up until this time has dominated the game. He's a Duke, he's the Captain of the ship, he's the most experienced roleplayer, he normally GMs, and he's got a fairly forceful personality even outside the game. This was the first time the rest of the gang has been in charge of making the plans, which was a very good thing, and produced a much more balanced pattern of involvement than we've had so far. Hopefully, their newfound confidence will continue even once he's here again, but otherwise I'm going to need to talk to him about toning it down a bit.

As You May Already Be Aware . . .

Fight On! and Swords & Wizardry are both up for some kind of contest thing. (Trollsmyth has the full story.) The upshot is: both of storefronts are in the top ten bestsellers on Lulu, and if they get into the top three, there's a cash prize and some publicity. So now is a really good time to go buy yourself some old-school game crap if you've been considering it. And if you've already bought a bunch of old-school game crap, there's some new stuff on both storefronts that you'll want to check out.

EDIT: As M.gunnerQuist says below, this only applies to printed books, not PDFs. Get it right!

Minor Perils of a Combat Light Game

No Traveller on Friday, which was both fortunate and unfortunate. It's been three weeks now since we played, but we were missing two players, I wasn't totally prepped, and it was the finale of Battlestar Galactica. (I don't watch it, but one of my players does.)

I feel bad about cancelling a session like that, especially since it's been so long since we played, but I wasn't feeling totally confident about running that night, and there were enough other factors that I had a decent excuse. The fact that I was kind of glad that we didn't play worries me, but I think things should be okay once I've put my evil plan into action.

One thing that's been throwing me off is that the tempo of this game has been different from what I'm used to. Part of this is just that there's the whole trading aspect of the game, and so it's got it's own rhythm, apart from anything else that's going on, and that's taking some time for me to learn how to manage it. But I've also been noticing that the game moves a lot faster than I'm used to; they get a lot more done, and "getting things done" a lot of times means leaving for a whole other planet.

Some of this is just that I haven't (cranked up the adventure) yet, but there's also just been a lot less combat. They avoid combat, and when combat does start I tend to just wing it rather than break out the books and risk getting a bunch of bored looks because I don't have the rules totally down yet. In D&D, and in most of the games I've run so far, if things are dragging a bit or if I need time to think it's totally permissable to bust out the Monster Manual and ambush the players with a bunch of monsters to get some breathing time, or fill space until the end of the session.

Not so much in this game. Partially it's because it's Traveller, and there's a different paradigm. Partially because the game's a lot more social. Partially because we don't all know the combat rules by heart a million times over. (At one point, I even had the 3.5 grappling rules memorized. I have an unwholesome love for those grappling rules. I don't see why everyone hates them.) Whatever the reason, though, it's hard for me to adjust to not having that buffer.

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.

Campaigns I Won't Run This Summer

The rest of my group and I have different tastes. At some points, they overlap, and those are the games that we play. This leaves me with a number of games that I'd like to play, but have to put off until I find the right group; I assume it leaves them in a similiar situation occasionally. (Though it's possible that I take these things a tad more seriously than the rest of them, seeing as I'm the only one of us who blogs about games.) That's the case this summer.

Promethean: the Created. This one, I crossed of my "possibles" list almost immediately. I had a number of reasons for that, but first and foremost was that I didn't think the group would take it "seriously." When I showed a couple of them the book, their immediate response was to sit down and start designing character builds -- which is normally a tendency I like, or at least don't mind, but in this case I feel like that's missing the point. There are other games that encourage that style of play, no need to go grafting it on to a game with a different intent. Add in that my serious "character drama" players don't seem particularly enthused about the specific themes that Promethean handles, and you've got a game for another day. (And a game I'd rather play than run, anyway. But only with a perfect GM.)

Encounter Critical. I threw this one out as a possible game, but they all seem to hate it. Apparently it's too silly for a "real campaign." Even though we've had a lot of fun with our goofy-ass one-shots, they want (or claim to want) something more serious for an on-going game. Ah, well. I have high hopes for my college group, some of whom have shown signs of understanding that stupid and awesome go together like peanut butter and jelly.

Feng Shui. This is one that my group would like to play again, but that I have no interest in GMing. I'm the de-facto GM this summer, for various reasons, so it's off the list. We've had fun with it in the past, but once my initial excitement wore off I realized that I really dislike the shots sytem, and a couple of the other more fiddly elements it contains. There's another guy who does still like it but who's out of town this summer, so I'll leave it up to him to run when it's his turn.

There are a couple of games that are still on the "possibles" list, but just barely. Superheroes and Megadungeon in particular both face heavy resistance from a couple of the other people playing this summer. I suspect that resistance is based on prejudice more than experience, and that I could convince the objectors to at least give it a try, but I've got other games in the line-up that wouldn't require such efforts.

A Little Case of Concept Trouble

The other day, as I was writing up the list of campaigns I've played, it occurred to me that I've had a shift in my thinking about campaigns over the past seven-odd years I've been gaming. With all the games I'm thinking about running now, I consider the system first, and then think about what I'd actually run with it. When I came up with my first couple of games, that order was reversed: concept first, then a system to match. I don't think this is a good trend.

There's a certain degree of inevitability to the shift. I know about a lot more systems than I did when I first started playing, I own a lot more systems, and I have a lot more interest in trying systems just to see what they're like. Back in the day, I couldn't think up a campaign system-first, because while I knew there were other systems out there, I didn't have any idea what they were like. I pretty much had to come up with a concept, and then go looking for a system.

But still, I don't like it, especially since my last few campaigns have been a bit thin in the concept department. They picked up more character over time -- Traveller got a big ol' burst of concept during character creation, and Is This Fair ended up with some honest-to-Gygax nuance in the end -- but the danger there is that they get defined by the loudest player's character. Next time around, I want to see if I can make the setting and concept itself a bit more vivid.

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.

Pirate + Rum + 20 Years = Instant Troupe Play!

As previously discussed, I'm considering running a sequel to a campaign I ran a few years ago as this year's summer game. I haven't fully committed to it (and likely won't until late April) but it's one of the possibilities I've been turning over in my mind.

The idea presents some significant advantages. First and foremost, I'd get a huge level of buy-in from my two most active players, who have wanted me to run this ever since the first campaign ended. A secondary consideration to that is that this may be the last time for a while that one of them is here for the summer, so this summer may be my last chance to do this. On a different note, I've been thinking about running d20 again for a while now, and Arcana Evolved in particular is a ruleset I'd like to go back to.

Leaving aside outright disadvantages (i.e., the campaign might implode under the weight of player expectation) which I've given careful and sufficient thought to, the campaign also presents some significant challenges. One of the reason the players are interested in the idea is that they'd like to play, at least briefly, their old characters at high level. The last campaign ended around 10th level, and there's been a sufficient span of time in between to more than justify them now being 15th, or even 20th level. However, for various reasons those characters are now largely restricted to the city that they dredged up from the bottom of the ocean: in addition to some mystical business with an NPC they're strongly involved with, they're trying to found their own country/empire/thing, and managing and defending it keeps them busy.

I don't want to run "let's defend this crazy city." Not exclusively, anyway. I think that game could be interesting for a while, but the group has enough power there that I want to be able to force them out of it occasionally, to go deal with some problem or another that's still relevant to the city, but outside the range of their various massive advantages. I've considered putting a weird underground complex of some kind underneath the city, for exploration and as a source of danger, but I don't think it's a particularly good fit for the ruleset, and I don't think it can fully support the rest of the ideas I have in mind.

Oh, and I also don't want to have to deal with high level characters all the time. Even if their capabilities prove more interesting than frustrating, I don't want to be wedded to the math, and the attendent hours-long combats. I'm curious about what such a game would be like, but I've heard enough about it to be wary.

The rather obvious solution to all this is to give the players each at least one additional character, lower in level than the original group and likely tied to the main characters in some way. Create a group of lieutenants, essentially, as a strike team to handle any off-island problems that may arise, and to deal with things that the main group just doesn't have time for. Furthermore, if this secondary group are really the main actors in the game, with the old characters coming on for occasional cameos, I have a lot more freedom to add new players to the game, which I'll probably have to do. Much more reasonable to add a new lieutenant than a new 20th level master of the city. (Though I have some ideas in that area, if it comes to that.)

To make things more interesting, I'm considering a twist: each player has to run the protege of a different character. So if, say, a long-lost illegitimate kid of Blank's shows up, Blank's player doesn't run him and the kid. Someone else runs the kid, and then they can have heartfelt family conversations without descending into schizophrenia.

I like this idea, since I think it'll mix things up a bit, but my players may have other ideas. I still haven't ironed out the details yet; still need to figure out how involved the old characters will really be, and I haven't ruled out true troupe play, with more than just two characters per player. (Especially as my current scheme will leave the new players who will undoubtedly join the campaign with just one character. Maybe I'll figure out something special for them.) For the most part, though, I'm trying to avoid any too serious planning until closer to launch time, in the hopes that I won't lose all interest in the idea before then.

Running a Game in New York or Something Like It

Back at school now, so we're back to more intermittent posting, now that I'm not spending nine hours a day on the internet. (Extra Bonus Public Service Announcement: Bad idea. Way, way too much internet.)

The weekend in New York has me keen to run an urban campaign, as New York always does. It's organization strikes me as a very reasonable way to write a city for roleplaying purposes. There's a large scale division of the boroughs: Manhattan, Brooklyn, The Bronx, Queens, and Staten. Each of these is a practically a city in its own right, to the point where when I say "New York," what I mean is "Manhattan," because that's where we always go, and that's the part I know. I'm vaguely aware that the other boroughs exist, but I don't have any experience with them, and even a lifelong resident can exist in roughly the same state.

Then there's the mid-scale organization of the named neighborhoods: Soho, Chinatown, Greenwich Village, Midtown, Hell's Kitchen. Each of them has its own character, its own architectural style, it's own mix of businesses. Finally, there's a street-level, small-scale neighborhood level of organization within the named neighborhood, which reflects the character of the larger unit but can vary significantly from street to street. Different people, different buildings, differently particulars of architecture, but still part of the larger whole. On the borders, things can blend together a bit, or the divisions might be sharp and unmixed.

The point is: New York lends itself very handily to random generation. Write up a set of tables for each neighborhood to generate the buildings on a given street and the people you're likely to meet, (with a sub-table for the qualities of the local subway station) and your players can wander wherever they want without running out of city. You'd want to define the major buildings by hand -- pick out spots for things like the Statue of Liberty, Central Park, and the Metropolitan ahead of time -- but the rest of it could be done on the fly.

In New York

Visiting The Compleat Strategist!

Top Five D&D Classes of the Moment

Never one to pass up a decent meme, I've compiled a list of my own top five D&D classes. I'm pulling from 3.5 (and related third party supplements) because that's the edition I've got the most experience with, as a player and a DM. These are more or less in low-to-high order, though the specifics would likely shift if I did this again in a couple days.

5. Cleric For nostalgia's sake, more than anything else. I've played a lot of clerics; it was kind of my spot in the first group, and I still tend to pick them, just out of habit. I tend to play them slightly loopy -- my crowning achievement being the Unitarian Universalist cleric (dedicated to a cause, of course) who had a nervous terror of pitchforks and torches.

4. Oathsworn And now, we get into the territory of "things I've never played, but would like to some day." I don't play much. But if I did, Oathsworn (from Arcana Evolved) would be close to the top of my list. I dig the whole oath/loyalty thing, and while that's not enough to hang a character on (as I learned in a short-lived Risus campaign) combined with some actually functional unarmed combat mechanics, you've got yourself a fun time.

3. Shadowcaster I'm mostly just all over the flavor on this one. Dark, shadowy, and creepy, without descending into the angst-fest that is the Warlock. These guys chose their powers. Add in all the extra goodness in the shadow magic section of the Tome of Magic, and you've got a class that I'd seriously consider using on the other side of the screen, as a villain or unreliable ally.

2. Psychic Warrior I dearly love the 3.5 psionics system, so much so that I'd consider running a campaign with it as the major power source, little or no magic. And I particularly dig the psychic feat trees -- they open up a whole bunch of fighter-type powers, but with a supernatural flair.

1. Champion I like Arcana Evolved. A lot. Champions, in particular, always struck me as an interesting and playable twist on the paladin -- a class I dearly love, but that has caused me more headaches than anything else. Champions are not one class, but several, each devoted to a different cause. ("Freedom," "Life," "Justice," "Death" and so on.) Lots of room for new material, and lots of room to tweak a concept that's not quite working, since switching causes is fairly easy, up to a point. (Like if you're running a Champion of Justice, and the rest of the group decides they want to be pirates . . .) Add in a lot of really interesting different powers for each cause, and no requirements for your companions behavior besides "help me fight these people who don't like my cause," and you've got a class that's great in theory and in execution.

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.)

Questions Regarding Sequel Campaigns

One of the possibilities for the summer campaign is a sequel to an Arcana Evolved game I ran two years ago. (Others top contenders include high level 4th Edition D&D and Vampire: the Requiem. I'm not running the megadungeon, mostly for player compatibility reasons, but I plan on running it on an ad hoc basis both before then and during that time.) We've been talking about it for a while; two of the players have desperately wanted to play it again pretty much since the thing ended. I decided against running it last summer because one of those two players was out of town, and because I was too psyched about 4e to want to run something d20-derived.

This year, both of those problems have been have been (more or less) resolved. Both players will be here for the whole summer -- and this might be the last summer that this is true. And while I'm not as off of 4th Edition as I was six months ago (and my interests of late have been turned towards the old ways) I'd be more than happy to spend a few months back in the d20 world. Especially with Arcana Evolved, one of my favorite books from that era.

But I'm wary. That game was good, yeah, but it was also a product of a very specific set of influences. We'll have at least two players who weren't in the original game, and we'll be missing one or two who were. I won't have the same over-riding desire to "fix" the Oblivion ending that gave me a very strong but flexible structure to hang the plot of the game on. We might have the same characters (I'm considering a couple of different approaches to that) but we'll also all be two years older, with different concerns than produced that particular party.

The setting won't even be the same. One of the things we've established, in our post-game discussions, is that the end of that campaign produced some serious changes to the status quo of the setting. And I've never been completely happy with a lot of the details, both geographical and historical, that I established for that game, so I'd probably go back and clean some of that up, if I was going to spend another four months with it.

My players must know this. I've mentioned it to them, they agree, and it's all fairly obvious anyway. Which leaves me wondering why it is that they want to play this sequel game so badly. There wasn't anything magical about that campaign; the only substantial difference, in my perspective, between a sequel and wholely new endeavor would be that the sequel would invite a lot of comparisons with the old game, most of them unfavorable.

But I have to admit, I'm intrigued. It'd need to be shaken up a little bit, but the new status quo is certainly interesting -- they're in charge of the ancient, recently un-sunken city that housed the nexus of its fallen empire's magical power. I could do something with that set-up.

Hence, the post. Has anyone else out there run a sequel like this? Or considered it? How'd it go? Any overwhelming arguments against such an endeavor that I'm missing? Or are there any benefits that I haven't considered? And those players of mine who read the blog, why does the idea attract you so powerfully?

Tweaking the Campaign

So I'm thinking about doing a reboot of the Traveller game. The last session was kind of painful and stressful in places, and I still haven't done the session re-cap for it. I don't want to make any serious changes, mind. I'm just not quite happy with the pattern that we're settling into, and I need to do something about it before running the game becomes a major drag.

The problem I've identified, in my thinking about this over the last week, is that I'm not putting enough pressure on the crew. Traveller itself provides pressure, in the mortgage payments they have to make, and the potential for mis-jump and all the trouble that causes. But all that's lead to so far is "we go out looking for leads," or, "we ask the passengers we picked up if they have any problems." Which is something that I want to change how I'm handling; in the next session I'm going to see if I can make them work a little harder for that. I'd rather that they actually go out to specific places and talk to specific people, rather than just getting a list.

Anyway. Beyond "we need to make some money," they don't have any serious problems. The money motivation still just brings everything back to me; I still have to drive events in the session, or nothing happens. One of the players is a Duke, and as cool as that is in some ways, it's meant that they kind of ignore a lot of the "problems with the law" that the Traveller book seems to assume they'll have. That generates a certain amount of adventure in and of itself ("Hey! Let's negotiate a peace settlement between these two warring nations! They'll listen to us!") but it removes a default problem, and thus makes my life harder.

Oh, and the group has a tendency to split up. Which so far I've been sort of encouraging, but it really needs to stop, or at least get scaled way back. There's a lot of "I'm going to sit around and watch the other players doing stuff," and that's not good. So part of my motivation in making their lives harder is to give them a reason to stick together, and stop making me manage three different scenes at once.

None of this is to say that I'm not enjoying the game. The players are (for the most part) enthusiastic and involved, and while last session was rough in spots it also featured a religion based on Marvel Comic books and the cult of Wolverine, "the religion of what I was going to do anyway." It's still fun. But it's a brand new group, and it's a much more picaresque style of game than I'm used to, so I'm still tweaking the mix.

I have a pretty specific plan for what I'm going to do next session; I'd say more, but a few of my players read this blog, if only sporadically, so I'll wait until I've seen how it goes down. I'm not going to back off from the "no particular plot, just sutff happening on different planets" thing that I've got going in the game, but they have pissed off several people without really paying attention to it. So I'm going to cash in on that.

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.

The Problems I Noticed Are Surely Outnumbered By Those I Didn't

Game night tonight, but I thought I'd squeeze in a little blog time in just the same, since I don't want to break the short little streak I've built up. I've been trying very hard to avoid the mistakes I made in my last long-running campaign (at least, the ones I noticed). This isn't a long list, but they were major enough to bug me.

First, the map and the history were both kind of incoherent. If I ever get around to running that sequel that some of the players keep bugging me about (which I am considering) I'm going to have to go back, redraw the maps, and rewrite the history, so it all conforms to my specifications. This is mostly a peeve; the players never noticed, so I'm not too worried about it if it happens again. I'm mostly dealing with it by avoiding detailed references to ancient history, which isn't too tough in a space game where the secret backstory mostly amounts to "some bad stuff happened, and then there was an empire." And Traveller has built in controls on maps. (The ones that matter, anyway. My planetary maps are still a mess.)

Second, and a much larger problem in theory but again, in execution, something that bothered me much more than the players, my last campaign fell prey to a bit of the ol' GMPC. I had one character who I put more thought into than strictly necessary, and had this whole "lost heir of an ancient empire" plot attached to him. In that specific case, it worked out okay because he spent most of his time getting kidnapped and rescued, one of the other (female) players really liked him, and tagging that plot to an NPC let me avoid playing favorites amongst the PCs. But still -- I'm avoiding world-saving plots in general this time around, just to bypass that whole issue.

Lastly, the largest actual problem with the previous game was that almost all of the plot revolved around two characters. The two active characters, with the most complete and hook-filled backstories, and the ones who really went around doing things, but still. I could have put more attention on the quieter characters, even if it would have been more work. Which is exactly what I'm doing this time around. Mongoose Traveller helps some; the two quietest characters both have hook-laden NPC relationships from character creation. (One of them is of the "secret mission" type, which honestly bugs the heck out of me but which I'll leave off complaining about for another day; it's something I can work with.)

The only problem with the way I've been handling things so far is that I've been leaving my two most active characters sub-plot and personal-villain-less, even though they do have those things in their backstories, because my attention has been on the quieter people. Which is okay, since they give themselves things to do on their own, but I'm still working on the details of the balance.

Anyhow. Should be a fun session tonight; I've done something mildly ridiculous with one of the planets they'll be hopping off to, so if they figure that out (and don't strangle me for it) I'll definitely have to post about it here. And I still don't think I've done justice to Trollsmyth's game, yet. But these are matters for another post. It's Friday! Go game!

Ten Monsters of a Dubious Fascination

Jumping on the monster band wagon here; I'm probably missing a few, since I don't actually have my Monster Manuals around to flip through.

1. Yak Folk. Shapes-shifting sorcerers who can summon genies and like to capture slaves? Sign me up. Motive, modus operandi, and a sense of style. Pity I never got to actually use one in a game -- I had plans, but the campaign ended.

2. Yuan-ti. Used them once, in the same campaign that was going to host Yak Folk. I'd dropped hints that there was this psionic Yuan-ti empire off in the distance, scheming schemes and causing trouble, but then the campaign ended, as previously mentioned. At any rate, I've got this thing for the darkest reaches of the jungle, and ancient temples built by degenerate civilizations, and Yuan-ti fit that bill nicely.

3. Ochre Jelly. I almost used these, once, in the session that became Gnome Town. That was originally going to be sort of a horror scenario, and I thought it'd be great if they started dropping from the ceiling and dissolving people. Someday.

4. Gelatinous Cube. Never used this one in a game, either. Noticing a pattern, yet? My D&D games in high school were never long on monsters, I guess. But gelatinous cubes are just cool. I don't know how you can't like a gelatinous cube. If I ever run 3rd edition again, I'm going to be sorely tempted to engage in some template foolishness -- you can give one an Int score high enough to take a class with the Fiendish Creature template, and then you're only a few levels of Monk away from a cube with a speed of +35 ft. and the ability to deflect arrows.

5. Naga. Mostly because of Nagathas, from the Monster Manual IV -- humanoids that spirit nagas have kidnapped, to twist into dark servants. (I always thought it'd be neat for that to happen to some NPCs the party knew.) But the whole guardians-of-ancient-magic thing rocks pretty hard, just on its own.

6. Werewolf. Mostly for the classic monster mojo; who doesn't like to play "guess the werewolf?" as peasants get slaughtered? I've also had some fun with them in campaigns past, using tribes of them as the "semi-hostile humanoids living uncomfortably close to town." They're a good mix of civilized and crazy monster, which makes them very versatile.

7. Golems. I've always loved robots and created beings in general, and I like the particular aesthetics that golems have. Unfortunately, I've never had a group get high enough level to really deal with a golem -- but next time I run D&D, I'm not going to let that stop me.

8. Blue Dragon. Why I didn't use these in the desert game I ran (the one that was going to have Yuan-ti and Yak Folk) I'll never know. Never got around to it, I guess. These are my dragon of choice, because I like the idea of dragons who think of themselves as lords of their domain, but are still more interested in dragon-y things -- eating sheep, collecting treasure -- than actual politics.

9. Storm Giant. Giants in general are a big list of creatures I never used because I never ran a high enough level game. At some point, I'm going to run a very giant-centered game, where most of the known world is ruled by different clans of giants. The players would be the members of the oppressed tiny folk small enough to fit into those weird catacombs that the giants don't know about.

10. Constrictor Snake, Giant. Um. Yes. Every campaign I've run for the past, oh, five years, all except the first two, have featured, at some point, a giant snake that tried to crush and eat the party. I don't quite know why, except that it's fun. Who doesn't like it when a giant snake tries to crush and eat the party?

Post-Apocalyptic Settlement Generation

Crazy idea I had the other day in class: hack the Traveller world development system for settlements in a post-apocalyptic game. (This isn't entirely an original idea; there was an idea going around a while back for Wanderer, a fantasy version of Traveller.) It doesn't track exactly, but with a couple of adjustments I think it'd work pretty well.

The categories include:
Environment -- How livable the wasteland is around the settlement
Mutation -- How amusingly messed up the flora, fauna, and residents are
Population -- How many people live here
Territory -- How large a territory outside the settlement they patrol and control
Government -- The kind of government they have
Law -- How likely they are to shoot you on sight for various offenses
Tech Level -- How cool their toys are
Fuel Station -- How good their local gas station and repair shop is

They'd affect each other in much the same way Traveller world stats do. Currently I'd think Mutation is worse the less livable the Environment is, Population is higher in better Environments, Territory and Government both key off of population, Law is based on Government, and Tech Level is affected by a bunch of different factors. I'm also considering a "Religion" stat, because of the importance of bizarre degenerate belief systems in post-apocalyptic stories, but it would also damage the six numbers plus TL and Fuel code Traveller resemblance.

It Took Me Eight Years To Figure This Out!

Last night's game (Trollsmyth's Labyrinth Lord chat game) triggered a minor epiphany for me. Nothing earth-shatteringly major, but it was a bit of a "where have you been all my life!" kind of moment.

Most of the session involved exploring a crumbling elven villa, the sort of standard ruined structure dungeoncrawl that forms a large part of the basic D&D experience. Which I had never, ever done before, to my great sadness. Those closest I've ever come was playing some of those early 3rd edition adventures -- the Sunless Citadel, something about an evil coin, and a few of those free adventures they used to have on the wizards website -- or rather, attempting to play them, since we very rarely ever got to the dungeon itself, and always abandoned the ones we did get to after the first few rooms. And those weren't even really dungeons; I don't know that the word quite applies to small, linear complexes designed specifically to support a single story.

At any rate, we quickly got it into our heads that "dungeon" meant "hack 'n slash," a static complex full of monsters, treasures, and traps, that didn't move around, didn't interact with each other, and didn't suggest any interesting decisions. Monsters were there to be fought, and traps meant rolling dice to see if you'd taken damage. So I spent my first couple years of gaming without any dungeons. Without a whole lot of D&D, even -- we were just as likely to play d20 Modern, or d20 Star Wars -- but when we did play D&D, we were messing around with Drow politics and getting sucked into inexplicable planes of ultimate evil intended as some kind of commentary on typical fantasy tropes. I finally ran a dungeon of my own, but it was just as uninspiring as my early concept would suggest. Fun, sure, since it was a light popcorn game, but ultimately unsatisfying.

Cue the Old School Renaissance. Suddenly, you've got a bunch of people writing about dungeons, not as story-filled lairs (how a lot of the online GMing advice I obsessively read in my early years treated such underground complexes) but as strange places full of mystery, ready to be explored. The idea of a dungeon as fundamentally weird place, that expected the players to explore, move around areas that were too dangerous for them, and solve problems using their own resources rather than in-game ones, was absolutely electrifying. I haven't, despite several bursts of enthusiasm and a few scattered attempts, run something like this of my own, and that's largely because the idea was so completely, deliciously alien to anything I'd gamed before that it's taken me two years to completely understand it.

Through all this, I never gave much thought to playing through a dungeon myself. Most of the other GMs I know aren't interested in them, and at any rate, I don't play much. (I have this weird idea that I don't like it, at least when compared to how much I enjoy DMing. More on that soon.) When the opportunity came up in Trollsmyth's game, I was certainly intrigued, but mostly thought of it as a way to get a better feel for dungeon design -- to see the beast in actual play, as it were.

Which I did. I've now got a much better sense for exactly why certain dungeon features ought to be arranged in the ways they usually are -- the values of interconnectivity, for instance -- and a much better idea of what a typical bought of dungeon exploration is supposed to look like. But all that, while important, is also missing the point a bit.

Dungeons are fun. Exploring dungeons is fun. I've tended to fixate on the gonzo/weird/inexplicable aspect of a traditional megadungeon, but they're fun for reasons even more basic than that. Mapping out a place, learning about it and how it was built, finding neat things in it, figuring out where the danger points are and trying to deal with them -- fun.

And I've been missing it, my entire gaming life.

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.

How Much to Tell?

Sometimes I wonder just how much I should let the players in on my process. I tend to make up a lot of stuff on the spot. I've run whole session's pretty much off the top of my head -- both one shots and sessions in a continuing campaign. And I have a habit of just throwing things out into the ether, without a whole lot of explanation, and defining them only when they need an explanation or if the player's come up with something interesting.

And it works. I've run some good games this way. But I've gone back and forth on whether it's a good thing for my player's to know exactly how much I'm making stuff up on the spot. On the one hand, I want them to know that they can pretty much do whatever they want. I might need a minute to think, but I can handle a new direction, if it sparks their fancy.

But then I feel like talking about "oh, yeah, that was totally on the spot" undermines the sense that the world is real, and exists regardless of their actions. That's a sense that's largely created by making it true -- for instance, if and when they get back to Zalcrat and discover that a bunch of things have gone wrong since their last visit -- but there's a certain amount of sleight of hand involved, too.

Mostly I just never feel mysterious enough, as a GM. I was into the "evil secret plans! evil laugh!" thing for a while, and while these days I'm much happier responding to (and complicating) the weird hijinks my players get up to rather than thinking up ways to screw them over, I do kind of miss the mystique of it.

My Ideal Player Mix

Over the last couple of campaigns I've run, I've started putting together a theory about player types, and the mix of them that works for me. It's inspired by the Robin Laws theory, which I snagged a bunch of names from, but I've focused in on the specific types that interest me, and tweaked a couple of the definitions.

First, there's instigators. I need at least one in a four or five person group, and if they're capable of working together it's okay to have two. These are the schemers, people who stir things up because they're going after their own fun. They crash weddings, assassinate NPCs, and generally keep the game going and energy high. They don't have to be off-the-wall wacky; the Duke Marlow Burrin in my current Traveller game is one, and he's a fairly low key personality, who just happens to keep himself busy directing the team and finding new jobs for them to do.

Then there's character actors. I like to have one or two of them in a game; they're not as vital as an instigator, but they also don't have quite the same destructive potentional. Not nearly as highly charged as instigators, they won't just run off and do things because they seem interesting; they need to have a reason to do things. Luckily, they tend to be pretty good at supplying those reasons, and give me a lot of material to throw interesting events at them. They also tend to provide a lot of fuel for instigators, providing events and ideas for instigators to plan around and interfere with. Sigrid Halstead was the main character actor in Is This Fair; she wasn't always coming up with crazy schemes, like Blank, but she acted as a foil for his antics, and her own dependable motivations drove the heart of the game.

Another important type are lurkers. These might have a touch of the character actor in them, and often give me long backstories, and come up with strange goals for their characters to work towards. But at the table, they're not nearly as active as the first two types -- they tend to go along with whatever the instigators or character actors have planned. If they do have their own goals, they tend to let the instigators in the party come up with avenues to attack them. This makes them vital as a glue for a party, and my best games have all had at least one.

Then, finally, there's power gamers. They're in it for the numbers. Easy to motivate, easy to please, and as long as they don't badger me about how they "should" be allowed to use this or that power combination, easy to manage. I don't consider them vital to a game, but I don't mind having a couple along for the ride; they often use the game system to come up with creative strategies, and if they get along with the instigators can provide valuable "jam partners."

The important thing about my ideal player mix is that it is a mix. I've had trouble with games that were all instigators; they tend to get into fights over who's mad scheme gets enacted first. A too-lurker heavy game would have obvious difficulties; too many character actors, and there's just too much material for me to completely incorporate into the game, if it doesn't turn into one big talk-fest where no one ever does anything. A power gamer heavy game could work, but I don't think it'd be all that interesting; that type is best in a support role.

But an instigator, a couple of character actors, a lurker, and a power gamer make for a great game. Just the right mix of random chaos, story-building motivation, and "there for the ride" resources. I don't know just how universal this combination is, but it's worked for me.

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.

Running A Few Short Campaigns

So here's the plan. Over the next to years, I'm going to run between four and six campaigns. One per semester (not counting the one I'm running now) and maybe one this summer and one the next, depending on whether the other GMs in my home group decide to run anything, and whether I need a break at that point. If one of the semester campaigns really takes off, and most of the group involved will still be at school the following semester, I'll consider extending it for another half a year or so. But barring that, I'm going to indulge my "gamer ADD" a little, since it's fairly convenient to do it this way right now.

I've got a lot of different games to run. I'm running Traveller now, so that's off the list, but sometime in the next two years I'd like to run (or play) Vampire or Mage, futz around with Encounter Critical, start up a OD&D/S&W megadungeon, and maybe even give 4e D&D another try. A couple of my players have been bugging me about running a sequel to my Arcana Evolved game, so that might get dropped into the lineup, and part of me wants to see what I can do with GURPS, now that I'm a little older and a little wiser. And that's just games I've already got -- nevermind the countless new obsessions I'll likely accumulate over the next two years.

I've spent a lot of time grousing about how I'd like to run long, epic campaigns, but really, I've had a lot of success with short, focused games. The players like the sense of accomplishment, and I like being able to move on to the next project. And right now is a pretty convenient time to be running a lot of short campaigns -- the semester structure encourages it, lots of turnover in the player base, fairly easy to find new possible players. So for now, that's what I plan to do.

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.

Players Love to Fail

The Traveller game I ran Friday was a smashing success. Lots of mad hijinks, and everyone's jazzed to play next time. They even managed to pay off the costs of their first jump, and are well on their way to making their monthly mortgage payment. (I mentioned that the game really ought to be called "Space Accountant," because we've never had so much fun keeping track of money.) The interested will find detailed descriptions of the game at the campaign website.

The game reminded me of one of the first things I learned about game mastering; one of the "secrets to my success," if you will. Players love to fail. Not consistently, not exclusively, and not crushingly, but the most memorable sessions I've run were when the villain got away. (Closely followed by sessions where they finally got the villain that kept getting away, but the point still stands.)

The key is making failure interesting. Having the villain escape is a pretty interesting outcome for a combat, since it gives the players a fun, straightforward goal -- get the villain! (Barring bullshit GM shenanigans, but most decent GMs know not to set up invincible super-villains. That's not cool.) Generally, players will accept any failure that opens up an obvious avenue for adventure, or that makes their situation dramatically and entertainingly worse.

Mine weren't, for example, super pleased when Nina botched her Medic rolls and let an at the time nameless NPC die, but later they found out that the NPC had been the daughter of the Warden of the planet, prompting a small "oh, nice," moment. Later, when Alice Dice failed her streetwise roll to find out where some escaped prisoners were hiding out, she was told that, "Arr, there are some prisoners hanging out in the woods! They'll probably be eaten by dragons!" instead of a simple declaration of failure.

And there are the usual reasons why failure is a good addition to a campaign. Failure gives PCs a sense of consequence to their actions. Their successes are meaningful because they work for them, not because the GM hands them out. But players also like failing; it's not just that their successes are sweeter once they finally do achieve them. (Assuming they have some hope of success -- there's no faster way to destroy a players interest in the game than to convince them that the GM is arbitrarily out to get them.)

Sure, they'll groan and throw their hands up when the villain gets away, or one of their best NPC buddies dies, or their character gets eaten by a dragon -- but those are moments when they're involved in the game, and those are the sessions that they leave ready for the next one.