dungeon23 "week 2"

I continue to make a mockery of this thing by going against the spirit of it. I can't tell if this is bad or speaks to naviete of those behind it. Perhaps it's more about motivation than action?

7 rooms have been added to represent the days of 1/8-1/14. As I suspected, the dungeon generator from The Strategic Review definitely seems to favor clusters of rooms more akin to B2 that the DMG's mazes of corridors. As Gygax himself advised, liberties were taken with some room shapes.

1 square = 10 feet

Doors are presumed to be 5 feet wide, made of wood banded with metal, and opened according to normal rules

Ceilings are 10 feet high

No light sources unless otherwise stated

8. Room of doors

Each of the doors has an iron plaque with a word engraved on it, reminiscent of the pillars in room 1.

The east door (most likely the party's egress) has POWER; north has WILL; west has CHANCE; and south has DESIRE.

9. Crooked room

In the southwest corner in front of the door is a person-shaped pile of mold on the floor and upon the door itself is a crude carving that says LIBERA TE TUTEMET EX INFERIS

10. Lonely room

Empty

11. Spear trap

This masterwork of a trap is easy to avoid activating but hard to figure out. An entire 10-ft square of the passage acts as the pressure plate, with the spear in the middle. Those moving faster or slower than the normal movement rates can trigger the trap but not be struck by the spear, while those moving at normal rates risk a random spear strike. Once deployed, it takes a full round for the trap to withdraw and another to reset to readiness. Those struck are damage as though hit by a spear (no save).

 

12. Triangle room

Empty

13. Squished room

Empty

14. Bas-relief room

This room contains eight reliefs that tell a story. It starts on the south wall to the left of the door and proceeds clockwise. The scenes are as follows:

1. A younger man and an older man stand near a castle on a hill that overlooks a town. The younger man looks to the west.

2. The young man, now armed and armored along other soldiers with ankhs on their livery fight knights bearing eyes, severed hands, and/or fiery serpents on their livery

3. The young man, new disheveled, in a dungeon or torture chamber with banners of fiery serpents hanging from the wall. Fellow prisoners are depicted being sacrificed or cannibalized

4. The young man stands over the bodies of fiery serpent knights, holding a bloody sword and apparently eating

5. The man, no longer young, returns to the castle on the hill. The old man is older, bent and supported by cane, but greets him joyfully.

6. The man stands before a tombstone. The castle looms in the background.

7. The man is in a dungeon or torture chamber. Men with whips direct labor gangs of both men and monsters, some digging, some building.

8. The man kneels in a temple or church. Upon the altar is a black triangle.

dungeon23 supplemental: A brief sketch of Castle Silverlion and its sordid history

As mentioned in my first d23 post, the entrance to the dungeon leads to the lower works of Castle Silverlion. The Castle has been a vague notion I've had for a while, as Gygax exhorts (or mayhaps implores?) the DM in the DMG Appendix A to generate the upper works above the dungeon, something he often didn't do and which his successors have largely abandoned.

Castle Silverlion is the former ancestral abode of the Silverlion family, petty nobility whom claim varying authority and rights from the Free City of Silverlion. It stands on a hill overlooking the city. 

The Upper Works have fallen into ruin and rot one is hard-pressed to argue have any natural cause, overgrown with moss and often strangely fog-choked even on clear days. There is no real treasure here, and despite some overgrown vermin, the main threat is some groups of greedy villagers, bandits, and/or brigands waiting to jump exiting adventurers.

The Lower Works are in much better shape than above, and there are more vermin and less knaves. It is also long-since looted and quite mundane, with typical storage, bunk, and gaol/jail rooms. Toward the far north end is trap door, a mighty square of black iron the feels cool on hot days and warm on cold days, with two handle-rings. It requires a combined strength of 20 to lift up fully from above or push up from below and leads to room 1 of the dungeon.

There is another entrance, a shaft on the hill below the Castle called "Matilde's Folly" that leads to a lower level (3?) and at least one other rumored secret entrance.

Brief history of Castle Silverlion and Silverlion Family

~250 years ago: Henri Elf-blood is created Lord of the Manor by King Njall III for his service on the borderlands. He adopts a silver lion passant on a blue field as his coat of arms, and a town of uncertain name is rechristened "Silverlion's Town"

~230 years ago: Castle Silverlion's Upper and Lower Works are completed and remain largely unchanged for almost a century.

~180 years ago: Rivalry between brothers sees Claude Silverlion abandon the Castle and town (by now simply called "Silverlion"), leaving his brother Pierre Silverlion as the unquestioned authority of the locale

~130 years ago: Sole heir Luc Silverlion answers the call by many churches for a Lawful crusade into the Chaotic realms of the west.

~125 years ago: Luc returns home, his quiet and thoughtful demeanor turned aloof and cold. Pierre, already in bad health, dies a few month later.

~124-120 years ago: Luc becomes withdrawn. Slaves, both human and other, are brought in to perform mysterious labor in the castle. The villagers are worried but otherwise hands off, as Luc requests very little labor from them and channels much of his tax rights back into food and raw materials. Most family servants leave or are dismissed

~119-118 years ago: After two years without sight or sound of Luc or any of his remianing servants, the mayor and other local grandees reach out to Claude's branch of the family.

~117 years ago: Jean-Claude Silverlion, a man of staunch piety and healthy superstition, arrives with his wife and child. He assembles a posse to investigate the abandoned Castle, and upon venturing beneath the black iron trapdoor and seeing the pillars below, tells his men to grab all valuables they can carry and flee to town. He warns the village that there is something Evil beneath the Castle and to avoid it. He and his family relocate to a manor in town.

~100 years ago: The Castle begins to rapidly, and almost supernaturally, fall into disrepair. An unexplainable fog often shrouds it.

~50 years ago: Headstrong and independently wealthy from past expeditions in the borderlands, Matilde Silverlion and various mercenaries begin excavating a shaft on the side of the hill for not-understood reasons. After local miners refused to continue due to strange illness, foreign laborers and slaves were brought in. She and her party spoke of  discovering a structure beneath and mounted an expedition but never returned.

dungeon23 week 1: Nothing good will come of this

I'm jumping on the dungeon23 bandwagon, although it is doubtful I'll stay on it long. I feel the format will lead to a lot of overdone setpiece funhouses.

Tools:

"Solo Dungeon Adventures" from The Strategic Review - a prototype of the 1e DMG Appendix A. So far seems to generate room clusters as opposed to 1e's corridor webs

Monster Tables from Fiend Folio - to add a bit of weirdness to the vanilla

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition Dungeon Master's Guide

Dice

Pencil

Notebooks (2)

Imagination

2 hours (not counting the time writing this post)

1 square = 10 feet

Doors are presumed to be 5 feet wide, made of wood banded with metal, and opened according to normal rules

Ceilings are 10 feet high

No light sources unless otherwise stated

 

1. Entrance

Stairs lead up to the lower works of Castle Silverlion. The black stone pillars have vertical script on each of them:

D                               P                         C                          W  

E faces south            O faces east        H faces west        I faces north

S                               W                         A                          L

I                                E                          N                          L

R                              R                          C

E                                                           E

The pillars detect as evil but have no other special features.

 

2. Room of Secret Doors

Otherwise empty.

3. Piles and Parasite

There's a messy pile of 1000 sp in the center of the room, along with a (probably) human skeleton. Closer examination: The skeleton's skull has scratches/gouges on top and its fingers are dulled/cracked/split. Hidden within the pile is a Cerebral Parasite if the party has psionics or a Vital Parasite otherwise. It will take four people a full turn to gather all the SP and there is a cumulative 10% chance per round that a random person gathering the coinage will be infected.

Cerebral Parasites drain psionic power points when the host uses psionic powers and can only be removed via Cure Disease. cf.  Monster Manual 1e p 14

Vital Parasites are similar but drain vital energy, reducing all healing by 1. This means that a host using RAW recovery rules regains no hp. A Cure Disease destroys the parasite.

4. Empty

Unidentifiable scraps of fabric and some bones.

5. Empty

But cramped.

6. Secretary Room
The remains of a brittle skeleton with a rusted manacle shackled to totally rotted and collapsed desk/table

-edit-

7. Hidden Hexagonal Room

This room is filled with various (harmless fungi) but there is a Shrieker (HD 3, 8hp, MV 1, AC 7, Al N; light with 30' or movement within 10' causes shrieking, 50% chance of additional encounter per turn) in a clump of foot-tall fungi at the approximate spot of the "7"

DOUBLE FEATURE POST: FRONTLOADED VS BACKLOADED SETTINGS, PLAYER AGENCY VS SETTING INTEGRITY, ONE NIGHT ONLY

 

Frontloaded vs Backloaded settings

There is, in my opinion, a mild schism (among the major schisms) in the OSR regarding setting construction: Greyhawk and Blackmoor get shat upon for being “vanilla D&D” or “generic” while a revolving cast of flavor-of-the-month settings that describe themselves as “weird” or “gonzo” are held up as masterpieces. I care not for your reviews of published settings but rather wish to extrapolate on my own meditations.

First, “frontloaded settings” must be defined, as their existence is dualistic with backloaded settings. These are settings that are strange and outre from the very outset, possibly even from character creation or even the introduction: McKinney’s Carcosa, noisms’ Yoon-Suin, or Gibbons’ Bx Mars are what I consider to be good examples of such types of settings. The worlds are alien; cultures are weird; demi-humans are either replaced or deleted; science, pseudo-science, and science fiction cast a shadow over them. They are testaments to creative genii, yet their own alien novelty forms a barrier to play: Of what use dungeon delves and GP when most of Carcosa languishes at a neolithic level?  What of crab-man’s inhumanity to man? What if I don’t want to play someone who’s naked all the time?

The solution is pretty obvious: “Just change it.” Or rather “(you, the referee, can) just change it.” Which is true, but this puts all the burden on the referee AND undermines the whole reason for using a published setting in the first place (so the referee doesn’t have to do the hard work).

Now, there are “backloaded settings”, sometimes called “generic” settings: The ones with the kings and knights and castles and orcs and dragons and not-quite-medieval civilizations. This is where Gygax’s Greyhawk and Arneson’s Blackmoor started. But they didn’t end there: They changed, they EVOLVED based on player decisions (some of those players even being the creators themselves!). Those historical timelines have some referee-created trivia but the important parts are all because of player actions.

But even then, Blackmoor and Greyhawk weren’t as vanilla as claimed, there were aliens and magic apocalypses and weird shit. To go full D&Dcore, turning everything into the same diluted and flavorless melange, is something you can do with WOTC D&D or a host of other alleged competitors, and should be avoided. The balance is between the two, I think, vanilla enough to facilitate immediate player engagement but with sufficient indelible weirdness from the referee’s own mind to add excitement. But above all, the referee must be willing to allow the EVOLUTION of his setting based on player actions.

 

Player Agency vs Setting Integrity

The previous point rolls into this one. I recall many years ago, WOTC had a regular online advice column called Jedi Counseling for their Star Wars RPG (at the time, the Revised edition, which was also technically my first RPG), written by one Sarli. A flustered GM laid out the situation: The game was set at roughly the same time as A New Hope (0 BBY or Space Year 1977) and his party had decided to punch in the coordinates for Yavin IV (the big Rebel base in the climax) for unspecified reasons. Sarli’s solution was to have them wind up at the fake Rebel base named early in the film or arrive at the actual base after the Death Star had been blown up and the Rebels fled. Why did this GM even need to ask what to do? Why did Sarli reply with that? Because if the party got there and killed Luke or seduced Leia or jumped in X-Wing and blown up the Death Star or awakened Sith ghosts (press F for the pre-Disney EU) then they wouldn’t be playing a Star Wars game anymore, they’d be playing a Star Wars AU fanfic game because the setting changed irreversibly (if/until time travel became canon). It’s the tightrope you walk with established settings, especially those derived from media: The group wants to play in the setting but if changes are allowed then, sooner or later, they will no longer being playing in the setting.

But I believe this problem extends beyond published settings into homebrew settings. This is, I think, the root of the old “you shouldn’t stat gods because the PCs will kill them” mindset, not some true ideological take on the nature of divinity but a pre-emptive petulance about the players not appreciating the hard work that the GM making these (unnecessarily) complex characters.

Player agency, the ability for the players to freely act, goes hand-in-hand with consequences. Yes, the party can jump to Yavin IV and TRY murk Luke, but how will they cope with both the Rebels and Papa Vader seeking vengeance? They can storm Olympus and TRY kill every god in the place while stealing all the loot, but how do they deal with the things the Olympians were keeping under control? Give the players a rope and see if they tangle (or hang) themselves . . . or someone else.

My dog died

 

 It sucks to lose the only person who loved you unconditionally and never betrayed me. He fought to the bitter end, he was so brave and strong. He was in my arms when he gave up his spirit.

R.I.P. Spider

 

What I would like to run

 It's been a while. I've been through some exciting stuff since I last posted. The woman I though loved me and my money turned out just to love my money, my family has gone from wanting me to get a job and move out to not get a job and stay, I quit work twice, and my dog is dying of cancer. I probably should euthanize him but he's fighting; I'd rather respect his struggles and help him against the inevitable. Of course, once he dies (which should only be a few more months now), I have no real reason to live with my family anymore so I plan on becoming a drifter/homeless. 

So, if I were not about to become an American Nomad, I would start an open table D&D game at my LGS.

· The ruleset would be either Holmes or Moldvay Basic D&D. Retroclones may be easier to access and "readable" but from an advert perspective, any version of D&D is going to draw more interest than a knock-off of Old D&D.

· The setting would be built around B2 and Geoff McKinney's Mikeverse (Mike's Dungeons, Mike's Dungeons: The Deep Levels, Mike's Wilderness: The Forsaken Wilderness Beyond).

· About 6 1st-level pregens (for dungeons) and 6 5th-level pregens (for wilderness) who would be reserved for drop-in/new/first-timer players. New ones would be created as the pregens get killed off or level up.

· Taking a page from Mutants & Magic, both characters and players gain XP, although this is tracked separately. This rewards people who tend to drop in a lot but want to make their own characters later. 

I'm seriously considering running even with my gloomy future looming. At least it'd kill some time, right?

What I did for Gygax Day: B1 Stocking Notes

July 27th is recognized as Gygax Day in some circles so I figured I'd run a session of D&D using B1 to celebrate. It just took me a while to get around to writing a post about it.

The deadliest encounter of the session

Stocking the Dungeon: Instead of the normal B1 lists I used the 1e DMG and Fiend Folio, checking for room contents while altering and ignoring results that seemed whack. The stocking process took me about 4 non-continuous hours. The results are found below:

1. 1 Bullywug with a sword

Notes: The deadliest encounter of the whole night, the high AC + surprise chance + hopping is a lot stronger than you would think

 

3. 8 Giant rats

 

4. 1 Cerebral Parasite

Notes: Since there were no psionic chracters in the party, the parasite would have drained 1 point of Charisma per turn if it had been encountered.

 

7. 1 Anhkeg

Silver ring with 6 opals worth 6000 gp

825 gp

Notes: The DMG has a fairly robust jewelry generator, the only problem is that its separated into three or four section fair from each other.

 

9. 1000 cp

 

10. 100 pp

 

12. 3 Bullywugs

2 aquamarines worth 550 gp each

1100cp

13. 5 kobolds

1100 cp

825 sp

14. 4 fire beetles

20. 250 gp

26. 750 cp

28. 1 Tween

Notes: Fiend Folio is based.

30. 250 gp

31. 1000 sp

32. 1000 sp

36. 3 Troglodytes

275 gp

825 ep

Notes: A randomly generated encounter supported by the pre-written rumor table? More likely than you think.

38. 500 gp

39. 3 Gnolls

42. 2000 sp

46. 4 giant centipedes

47. 2000 cp

48. 1 Forlarren

49. 2 giant frogs

53. 4 volts

Notes: I could not see this encounter ending any way other than a TPK.

 

55. 200 pp

Here ends my key for B1 - In Search of The Unknown

 

The party ended up TPKing after 3 real life hours/55 in-game minutes.