Month: January 2023

#Dungeon23: Tripping Over the Starting Line

Outside of Targon, the forests died away again, consumed by the all-encompassing steppe. The sun shone weakly over the western mountains, illuminating the steppe in soft white light, though not hot enough to dry the mud. 

Jeol was having a bad time with the wagon. Recent rains had washed out what little trail there was, making the ground hidden behind the tall grass a muddy bog that would’ve swallowed both horse hoofs and wagon wheels if he had been a worse wagonmaster. But Jeol was an old hand at the driver’s trade: a bad back, a scarred chest, and quite a pretty penny wasting away in some bank as evidence of the fact. 

The outfit that had hired him consisted of four gunmen obsessed with some scrap of steel out close to Jawbreak Canyon. They had chittered both to him and to themselves about some great big score, some massive treasure that would pay out for lifetimes. Jeol always took payment upfront for that kind of talk. Too many fools who thought they could outsmart both the Obscured Goddess and her steppeland realm had died before paying him what they owed.

The sun tried to dry the land but failed. And the wind blows. 

Guess who slammed into the semester like driving into a wall? Is it the siren call once again? “Johnny NoGames,” she cries, the sound wafting through the air like freshly baked bread…

Okay, I’ve been a bad boy, and I haven’t done any rooms for #Dungeon23. I got distracted with worldbuilding my setting and rulecrafting my system. I’ve been thinking about really buckling down on finishing my house rules and putting everything aside until I have a system to run at the table, especially with all of The Discourse at the moment. I think that’s going to be my gaming focus instead of my super cool dungeon idea that you can read here. “But Caravaneer,” I hear you say, “isn’t this like failing your New Year’s Resolution in January?” Well, the joke’s on you, I’ve been flying by the seat of my pants for the last two years and I’m not stopping now. 

So, worldbuilding first. The Long Rim is the habitable band of an almost eyeball planet with no moon. (Maybe a moon, I’ve been thinking about that too.) The day is bright, the night is dark, and the sun both rises and sets in the sunbaked west. Following my inspiration, it’s still a steppe, though I got distracted with the idea of maybe making it a jungle, considering there is a hot and cold side of the planet and the band would be where the winds would meet so there might be a whole bunch of rain, similar to the monsoon season in India butting against the Hindu Kush and Tibet. However, I’m waved off on this by two things: first, the rivers that this would cause. If the party can travel by floating down rivers then it might trivialize the travel portion of the game. The second is the resource management element of the game. Jungles, unlike steppes, are flush with life. There’s no worry about dying from thirst on the river or running out of food. The concern shifts from finding food to the food eating you, the challenge of cutting through the jungle itself. Also, if I did go in this direction, it would be more akin to Pacific temperate rainforests or Japanese temperate rainforests, especially in the light of sawanobori from this blog post. 

However, as I think about it, a riverrun would fit a point crawl really well. There could be points on the crawl where people could pick up goods and quests, and the fact that rivers always flow in one direction could gate progression to one direction, a constant inextricable movement towards the Black City and the end of the line. I’m thinking about the Dnieper Rapids and the Siberian River Routes in particular. Vikings traveling to Constantinople would ride their longships on the river and would have to brave the rocks and rapids of the river, sometimes even having to haul their ships overland to make it to the next river. Not to mention, as an American, all the fun that folks got up to on the Mississippi. In the same vein, instead of having everyone have a character sheet and the caravan has a group sheet like UVG, the ship that the party is using has a character ship and can be improved on, and each person in the party has a role on the boat: captain, carpenter, doctor, armsman. It makes more sense, and the boat can serve as a mobile base for the players. Also, for exploring, they could take the approved and mapped rivers, facing the tolls and civilization that come along with it, or they could brave unexplored waterways and sail their boat right off a waterfall. I’m digging this more and more as I think about it.

One of the hard parts about this project is wasting energy: this is all hard worldbuilding, figuring out geography to then figure out how people might respond to life in those geographic regions which then informs the way the world works. However, there are two problems with this approach: first, it discounts soft worldbuilding, where elements are included in the setting not because it makes sense literally, but it makes sense figuratively, and second, because this is not the way developing a tabletop game setting should work.

First, the work I’ve done on the Goddesses is kind of in the middle of this hard and soft worldbuilding. There are reasons people believe in the Radiant Goddess, but the reason I included it was that I love religion, especially the way people interact with religion. It’s one of the reasons that rolling what sect you’re a part of is part of the character creation. I haven’t been obsessed over religion in the same way. Or maybe I have. On the one hand, focusing too much on hard worldbuilding is a waste of energy because it’s not like players are going to ask why there’s a river here, they just see a river. On the other hand, as the DM and the arbiter of the setting, you have to make sure it makes sense to you unless you simply wash your hands of the work altogether which is arguably the better way of doing this.

Second, part of the joy of tabletop games is discovering the game together with friends. People make suggestions about the way things work and the arbitrator of the setting, the DM, says yes or no. I remember an OSR game where as a player the party discovered a desert of black sand where there were diamonds and obsidian in the dunes. I asked the DM if I could fashion rakes to make searching the dunes easier and with a smile, he said “Yes, that’s how it works, the orcs used these large rakes to sift the dunes.” With a question, the world was created. That’s the best part of OSR games: exploration that even the DM isn’t aware of. 

So, game thoughts, how to begin to apply this: maybe start with a “short rim.” Find a random hex generator online that lists hexes by a single type of terrain (for this example I’m thinking desert planet), and then print off six pages of hex paper. Make sure the hexes are flush with the top and bottom of the page. Explain to the players that these pages are actually the bands on a planet, the west and east sides of the pages are inhospitable to life (too hot in this example). There are no landmarks on the pages, not yet. Then, just have a party just explore. As they find things, they mark them on the map. If they reach the top and bottom of the pages, move them to the next sheet. The top of sheet one links to the bottom of sheet six. When they’re done exploring, staple the top of the sheets to the bottoms: that’s the band, that’s how big the planet is. It would make a good exercise to see if what I’m thinking of for the Long Rim is fun. 

As for rulescrafting, I wrote something about emphasizing culture over race in B/X classes, so that instead of dwarves and elves you have different groups of humans who partake in different roles of dungeon crawling because of what they value, but it kind of fell apart and I wasn’t sure where I was going with it, so this comment serves as its headstone. RIP in peace. 

So yeah, week one of #Dungeon23 done! And I think that’s it. I’ve always been bad at internet challenges, I remember the days I could delude myself into thinking I could write a novel in a month, but I think my time is better spent elsewhere. And by “elsewhere,” I mean actually running games.

#Dungeon23 Scratchbook and Ideas

A couple of months back the boys all got really into Project Zomboid. 

For me, the thing I liked most was the potential of post-apocalyptic feudalism. Living in the woods, using only what you can make with your own hands, eating only what you can grow and catch, forging your own nails and hinges from burned-out cars, the ruins of the past on the periphery… I love that shit. I’ll probably return to it for a couple of weeks when they add animals and basic AI again, just me and some sheep at the end of that one highway that the developers just stopped adding stuff, a car as the one thing that gives away the fact that I’m not simply a Welsh peasant in the 800s.

Games like Rimworld and Caves of Qud also scratch that itch, that potential for a cozy post-apocalypse. CoQ has more of a Gamma World gonzo feel to its world and as such is a lot more frantic at times, and Rimworld is more of a grounded “Dwarf Fortress in space” feel with its systems but has a lot more potential to just create a version of rugged Space Islam and grow opium in the mountains with your two wives. These games fit into the theme and style of the Long Rim well: humanity has suffered a massive cataclysm but has survived and moved on with only the scars of metallic dungeons and megadungeons as memory. 

As I prepare to embark on #Dungeon23 alongside the always more productive Ploog and Plover, I have some initial ideas about what I want to make. On the one hand, I kind of want to use it as an excuse to flesh out the Long Rim itself: 365 unique locations in 52 discrete areas in a caravan-style map would be based, 262 unique locations (working only weekdays) divided among 12 regions would be a much more likely and workable project. However, part of me also wants to keep to the dungeon format. That part of me knows that I’m garbage at this NaNoWriMo shit and that if it’s not easy and inspiring I’ll spiral off into other things. I’m a busy man (finishing the Master’s and starting Ph.D. applications) and if it isn’t helping me roll dice with the boys it’s not worth it. 

A long time ago, the /tg/ board of 4chan embarked on a rewrite of the Warhammer 40k Horus Heresy, called the Hektor Heresy. This was back in the Silver Age of TG, the good old days when Heresy rewrites were all the rage, the quest threads were good and not spamming the board, and /pol/ actually served its purpose as a containment board. The Hektor Heresy shares a little in common with the Dornian Heresy but goes further than simply palette-swapping the existing Space Marine Legions. People created new Primarchs, new conflicts, and new lore, some of which was better written than the Black Library stuff. One of those new Primarchs was “Inferox the Burned King” who had been blasted off as a Primarch babe to a planet of frozen night that only survived because of a geothermic power station from the age of human exploration in the system. Inferox grew up around a bunch of primitive techno-cults who kept the heat flowing in an icy world. (I also think there’s another megadungeon with this concept of an “ancient geothermic power station” as well, I want to say Anomalous Subsurface Environment for Labyrinth Lord?)

I love this idea, coupled with the forgotten past and the Long Rim, and I think it would make an awesome #Dungeon23 project because at its heart it’s a puzzle dungeon. 

The rooms the players interact with in this dungeon would have three condition states: frozen, normal, and furnace. Think the light and dark, normal-sized and factory-sized conditions for rooms from Mothership’s Gradient Descent. These states would change the properties of the rooms: some might have traps that deactivate the freeze over or burn away, and some might have treasure that’s accessible only at the right temperature. The players would be able to explore a section of the dungeon, and then find a switch or mechanism that pumps heat into the area, making for an entirely new experience traversing back. Rooms that were a simple jaunt are now a deathtrap, and treasure that was easily carried in frozen rooms burns up when the rooms heat up. It opens up new sections and new ways of interacting with the existing rooms they’ve just explored, rewarding exploration and player knowledge. 

Likewise, this system helps with gating. Players should not be able to encounter every obstacle right out the gate, that’s one of the central elements of the megadungeon: there should be some backtracking as new rooms become accessible as the players change the temperature. For example, one set of rooms might be locked off unless the furnace condition is activated because the room that allows access to that area is like an air vent, it doesn’t open unless the ambient temperature gets too hot. Likewise, entering the facility dungeon from the onset will lock all the rooms in the cold condition until the players figure out how to close the doors that let them into the facility in the first place, locking them in the dungeon. As heat returns, power turns on, but too hot and the equipment overheats. Freezing rooms allows for quick access out of the dungeon entirely.

(I just realized this is just another variation on the Icehell. I really am a one-trick pony.)

If this is set in my world-setting, the Long Rim, then it’s probably sunward on the Blue Mountains, the mountains that frame the steppe and sit between the cold icy hell of the dark side of the planet. When the cataclysm I’m calling the Boar Spear happened (the people on the Long Rim know something happened, but not what, and I think the word is just starting to get around about the hyperdense skyscraper-sized spear of black iron at the near heart of the side of a planet locked in eternal winter with no light and no day), this was one of the many settlements that survived, with people huddling in the dark illuminated by geothermal power relays. This group would probably be unaware that the tragedy is in some ways over because the harsh climate of the mountain they find themselves in would make it hard for them to contact the outside world. “Hell is up, where it’s cold and there’s nothing above but an uncaring sky; heaven is below, where there is heat and community and life.” 

(If I was going to do this whole dungeon completely alone, I would also include a mission for the players from the Obscured Goddess. Perhaps some element of her psyche is trapped in the ancient facility, and by restoring power to the whole thing while avoiding the fire spears, faulty wiring, and security traps of a long-dead cybertomb, they could be rewarded handsomely.)

I think a more modest fourteen rooms across six levels would be a good scope for this project since each room would need three temperature conditions, with the sixth level being the base of the main faction, but there should be three or four factions total. Maybe a group of academics seeking to make contact with this lost tribe from one of the universities in the Long Rim, or a splinter sect of fire worshipers upset with the current orthodox establishment. By the way, yes, I have been playing Elden Ring, and yes, I did farm all the fire monk armor and the fire spells and have been riding my horse around yelling “O Flame!” and throwing fire at all the enemies. (I have some comments about Elden Ring, but for now, let’s just say I’ve suffered an “Elden Ringout” and I’m kind of tired of the “swingyness” of the game.)

There’s a good chance that this might be all I write about this dungeon because I might rework a lot of my ideas so I can work in tandem with Ploog and Plover. One of the things I want to do is make a collection of tables to help quickly generate ideas for traps and treasures and how to make the place seem like a living, breathing thing. Anything by the talented Courtney Campbell I can’t recommend enough. The goal before anything is making something that can be used to play the game at the table, and any prep that doesn’t make it to the table is wasted prep.

A new year dawns, one that I hope brings with it many new opportunities for me to pursue new studies, new paths, new employment, a new home, and a new way of life, one that I hope burns brighter than the previous ones with the light of God’s grace. I hope that your new year is filled with that same hope. Amen.