#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.

A Quick Thought and a Return: Exploration and Evolution

Finished with my penultimate semester and have been enjoying the break, had a massive blog planned but never got around to polishing it to the level I wanted. Here’s a small thought about mega dungeons for your break and mine.

The megadungeon solves one video game problem in tabletop form: exploration and evolution. When first encountering a space in a video game, it seems massive, like Stormveil Castle in Elden Ring or the map in Death Stranding. It is expanded by potential: who knows how many rooms there are, what kinds of enemies there are, what kinda of traps and treasures. However, once explored, the potential is lost, and while you can spend time exploring the area and potentially finding hidden secrets, the space has shrunk. What was once massive is now small, and shrinks as you master the space further. One way to fix this problem is the way roguelike games fix it: total random generation. Every dungeon, every map, is different based on the player run. While this fixes the potential problem, it introduces a new one: it eliminates player knowledge. You can’t get to know a dungeon because the dungeon always changes. 

The megadungeon fixes both of these problems with the introduction of factions: different groups in the dungeon are killed off, move to different areas, and alter existing rooms. Each exploration changes the dungeon because of the way the dungeon denizens interact with one another and the space around them. Knowledge of the space remains intact because certain layouts don’t change, but new experiences can still be found, providing the balance between player knowledge and player skill. 

Building a faction list of four different groups, all with different kinds of relationships between them, is critical to making a megadungeon both alive and ever-changing. Two at war, two at uneasy peace, two unaware of each other’s existence. Factions willing to board up doors, rearm traps, and hide treasure in old rooms. I also like color and graffiti as indicators: blue tapestries, red paint, yellow flowers blooming from the walls, and so on.

One thing to consider is the adventure party as sledgehammer: the party experiences the original room, traps and all. However, after the adventurers leave, that’s when the factions make changes to that area of the dungeon. Exploration and evolution occurs at the rate of the party. 

And that’s it! Expect more soon, and Merry Christmas!

Little Johnny NoGames Finally Loses the Epithet

O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Sailing to Byzantium by William Butler Yeats

She had lied.

It was not unusual, of course. The Obscured Goddess often did. The elders, unafraid of the simple rank heresy laid out by the neophytes, had once said her mind was muddled, is still muddled. She could not account for every one of her decisions, they would say, their hands heavy with their thick gray beards huddled around the fire, but for Jalick clarity had come, in this moment and no sooner. She had lied.

He was bleeding out. His lungs, probably. Sacks filled with liquid, like trying to carry water across the steppe in a bag. His life mixed with the dust and made some thick black viscous concoction as it spread across the floor. It would not last for the next crew of cutthroats that entered this particular dungeon, of course. By then it would be indiscernible, all but dried to the iron floor. But for now, for some odd reason, the pool comforted him. It was some small sign that he had been here and he had been alive, once. 

He had seen Yalid die this way, once. Of course, that time it had been in the light of the sun, far from any black-damned tomb, a bullet from a scavman’s gun. Jalick remembered holding the boy as blood oozed from the line on his face that carried his smile and the light disappeared from his eyes. Big and blue, his mother had told him. Something “worth loving,” she had said. Jalick wondered if there was some special magic, some element of remembrance, in his own brown eyes. The Goddess had not blessed him with blue eyes. She had just killed him.

It had come from the ceiling. Not a blade or a trap. He’d have seen a trap. No, this was simply wrong place, wrong time. Pipes and cords burst loose from their long-held resting places by a bunch of dumb tribesmen traipsing the place in search of long-forgotten treasure. A luckier looter might have escaped with power burns and a story to tell at the tavern. Not Jalick, though. Jalick just had to take a wild electrified cord through the chest like a man. Jalick just had to die here. As the Goddess willed. 

For a moment, he thought of his crew. One of them must have at least leap to his aid. Someone must have shoved a silk yellow bandage into his bleeding chest. But even from here, he felt the lie. No one had saved him. No one could have saved him. They had lied to him in that brightly lit tavern, just as his Goddess had lied to him here. But not for long. The world was starting to turn. 

At some point, long beyond the confines of his perception, he fell. His mind slipped past its material bonds as he lay on the floor, down, down, down, seeping like grease between the tight metal panels. He was going somewhere, and by the Goddess, he hoped it was somewhere better. He doubted it. 

Damn. She had lied.

Man, it’s been a hot minute. 

I recently ran The Hole In The Oak by Gavin Norman in Old School Essentials over three sessions for my usual group. I really enjoyed it, especially because I didn’t make too many crazy adjustments, and I think they liked it as well. This is my first play report thing on the blog, though it’s a lot more freeform than “and then my party entered Room 2.” I focus more on lessons I can take away and how I can improve my DMing for the future

Spoilers for The Hole In The Oak ahead. 

So to inspire adventure, I told the party that a wizard was looking for three magical chess pieces and had hired them to find in the titular Hole. It forced exploration, and it naturally fell off as characters died and were introduced. At the very end of the dungeon (their time in the dungeon, not the physical end), they discovered Hazrad the Unholy, a wandering wizard with Skyrim style skull face paint who I played as just a pissed-off dude after he found out that they had smashed all the little niknaks in his hidden closet in Room 37. “Uh, I’m Hazrad the Unholy, man that was my stuff what the fuck.” They traded the chess pieces they had collected as an apology and also because they were already loaded with treasure and it was an easy way for them to ditch the quest that got them there. Lesson: Play fast and loose. If this was a longer adventure (and it could be if they decide to venture into the Incandescent Grottoes, see below), I might have that action have consequences, but for the beer and pretzel game I was running, it worked out just fine for me. 

At the end of the adventure, I had everyone pile up all the gold and treasure they had collected and total it out. Because there was a table with all the treasure in it along with the total of the dungeon, I was able to give a video game-style complete percentage (“67%!”) at the end that I just loved doing. Lesson: Stock treasure in your dungeon beforehand and give players a score on how well they did. At the very least, keep a running tally on how much treasure you’re stocking if you’re rolling it randomly as characters in the room. A good rule of thumb would be finding out how much a particular goal of theirs is and modulating so that they are almost there. If they want a tavern, make sure you only include enough for like, 70% of a tavern. I believe it was a piece of Apocalypse World GMing advice that you should give the party “almost enough.”

Also, the treasure is important! There’s no point delving into dangerous tombs if there’s no reward! It’s always better to get a magic item from solving a puzzle than buying it in town or just having it!

I attempted to use THAC0 at the beginning as OSE intended, and I don’t know what my problem was, but I just couldn’t grok it. I’ve used THAC0 in the past but trying to run the dungeon and keep things moving just bogged me down too much. Maybe I was just out of practice. I returned to a lot of 5E style mechanics the longer the dungeon crawl went for. I don’t think the players minded, but it just means the Lesson: Finish my house-ruled system. Have a rule space where everyone understands the rules and everyone feels comfortable suggesting changes.

I love anytime I can be a creepy motherfucker as a DM, and the Faces of the Deep in Room 4 was a great opportunity to do that. Discordant overlapping voices are always a fun gimmick, especially when you use them to bring up backstory and explain to players how to interact with the dungeon. I had each player roll a rumor when they started a new character, and that also helped with pushing them forward. The Faces were a place where more rumors could be generated. As for roleplay, I remember running an ancient ruin once overrun with giant undead snake monsters with human faces crying black tears who were looking for their long-dead loved ones, moaning and screaming in the darkness. Had a lot of players uncomfortable that night. Lesson: Know when to tone it back.

Speaking of “creepy motherfucker,” at the Altar of the Stump in Room 60, I gave the evil stump god the heretic gnomes worshiped this stupid “heh heh heh” evil villain laugh, solely because I liked doing it. I did it at completely inappropriate times, which made the combat a bit more goofy and comical, but this is OSR, there are places for seriousness and it’s in the total party wipe, which my players almost suffered in that fight. Speaking of the gnomes, I had a picture in the Faun’s house be a drawing done by the gnomes with “remember what they took from us” scrawled on the back, and I rolled a random encounter where the heretic gnomes had kidnapped a forest gnome that the party saved, so the gnomes took on this sectarian violence angle I enjoyed playing up. 

The Fauns I reskinned for a twist. Instead of fauns, they were Chaotic goatmen masquerading as Lawful sheepmen. I left lots of clues that they weren’t the original owners of the house, like how there were only three of them despite there being eleven sheepmen in all the photos on the walls (no one questioned how they could have photos in a medieval land, and it comes up later in Room 54 with all the pictures on the wall). When the goatmen threw off their literal sheepskins and attacked the players they all freaked. Two characters died before they could get away, but going back and getting revenge on them was very important close to the end of the dungeon. 

My players never encountered two really big elements of the dungeon: the Hunter in Room 13 and the troglodytes in Room 16. Might have just been part of not playing it more up considering they are a full faction (though the ghouls were also a “faction” and there was no option to dialog with them), but I don’t think I suffered for it. Lesson: A good faction is one with goals that can be communicated beyond violence, preferably with words. Violence is scary for people who don’t get to simply pick a new pregen when they die.

Likewise, for the Hunter, I’ve run the LotFP module The God that Crawls before, so I know how much fun it can be to have a monster that spurs exploration because you’re constantly running away from it. If it had been a more central part of the module, I could imagine adding more triggers for it to activate, but I don’t think my experience suffered because it wasn’t. Lesson: Sometimes a lot of elements of a dungeon mesh together, sometimes they don’t. Having a quest and a monster chasing and no map and rumors all might be too many cooks in the kitchen for a dungeon crawl, and it might raise the tension when it doesn’t need to be raised.

Actually, make that three things my players never encountered: they never made it to the last third of the dungeon, with all the forest and vegetation rooms that lead to the tombs. I don’t have much to say on that, save that one of the rooms is on the map in such a way that it might be difficult for the player mapper to record it accurately. Lesson: Always have a player mapping and be open and honest about where doorways and entries/exits are. I still think that Google Sheets is the best mapping software/dungeon generator out there, it just requires a little know-how in macros to pull it off.  

My players found the Reptile Cultist’s giant altar in Room 46 just as I randomly rolled the Ogre to show up from Room 25, which was a hectic fight but the party won without getting too messed up by the Orge’s mutagenic breath. After that, they decided to dedicate themselves to who they thought was the god of the dungeon, the Lizard God Kezek. I’m a sucker for religious stuff in roleplay, so I let them have their fun, sacrificing gnomes to the Scaled God, with Kezek bordering on the consciousness of his new followers.

There’s a control room, Room 24, that turns the giant stone statues in The Hall of Kings, Room 22, into solid gold. The shine in my player’s eyes was worth the trapped first lever, as was the disappointment when the statues turned back to stone. I also like how rooms in a dungeon can affect rooms in another part of the dungeon, but I think there have to be more explicit rumors or info about what changed because sometimes you pull a lever and nothing happens and you go “oh, don’t know if that was good”. 

I love the river. Having the ability to traverse into different rooms by throwing your big dumb body into ice-cold, fast running water, I love it. Fishing, clean water, a good place to camp on the shore… Every time I make a dungeon, I have to include a river. Not to mention waterfalls and sumps ensure that as players navigate via a river levels of the dungeon can be locked off and they have to find alternate routes to return to the surface. The river in Hole in the Oak is especially good because it is connected to the Incandescent Grottoes, another dungeon you can run in tandem. I think they’re a little tonally different, but more content is more content. I had two players float down the river at the end of the dungeon and I tried my best to play up the Satania vibes. Lesson: If you haven’t yet, buy Veins of the Earth. You don’t have to use anything, but I can’t think of a product that gets you more in the headspace of darkness and caving more.

That’s pretty much it. I’ve been working on the Masters so I haven’t had the flexibility to get behind the screen as often as I’d like, but I’m still trying to finish my house rules and post a copy of them here. Likewise, I’m working on getting a podcast set up with a gaming buddy of mine and posting it here. All in all, good stuff.

Strong recommend on The Hole in the Oak.

House-Ruled: Lingering Injuries

More and more I began to see that desert warfare resembled war at sea. Men moved by compass. No position was static. There were few if any forts to be held. Each truck or tank was as individual as a destroyer, and each squadron of tanks or guns made great sweeps across the desert as a battle-squadron at sea will vanish over the horizon. One did not occupy the desert any more than one occupied the sea. One simply took up a position for a day or a week, and patrolled about it with Bren-gun carriers and light armoured vehicles. When you made contact with the enemy you maneuvered about him for a place to strike much as two fleets will steam into position for action. There were no trenches. There was no front line. We might patrol five hundred miles into Libya and call the country ours. The Italians might as easily have patrolled as far into the Egyptian desert without being seen. Actually these patrols in terms of territory conquered meant nothing. They were simply designed to obtain information from personal observation and the capture of prisoners. And they had a certain value in keeping the enemy nervous. But always the essential governing principle was that desert forces must be mobile: they were seeking not the conquest of territory or positions but combat with the enemy. We hunted men, not land, as a warship will hunt another warship, and care nothing for the sea on which the action is fought. And as a ship submits to the sea by the nature of its design and the way it sails, so these new mechanized soldiers were submitting to the desert. They found weaknesses in the ruthless hostility of the desert and ways to circumvent its worst moods. They used the desert. They never sought to control it. Always the desert offered colours in browns, yellows and greys. The army accordingly took these colours for its camouflage. There were practically no roads. The army shod its vehicles with huge balloon tyres and did without roads. Nothing except an occasional bird moved quickly in the desert. The army for ordinary purposes accepted a pace of five or six miles an hour. The desert gave water reluctantly, and often then it was brackish. The army cut its men- generals and privates- down to a gallon of water a day when they were in forward positions. There was no food in the desert. The soldier learned to exist almost entirely on tinned foods, and contrary to popular belief remained healthy on it. Mirages came that confused the gunner, and the gunner developed precision-firing to a finer art and learned new methods of establishing observation-posts close to targets. The sandstorm blew, and the tanks, profiting by it, went into action under the cover of the storm. We made no new roads. We built no houses. We did not try to make the desert liveable, nor did we seek to subdue it. We found the life of the desert primitive and nomadic, and primitively and nomadically the army lived and went to war. 

Alan Moorehead, The March to Tunis: The North African War, 1940-1943

It took less than an hour for them to get lost. They had ridden north from Halfa’s tribe towards the Iron Vein he had been going on about for the last three days. No one wanted to go with him, partly because he was more irritating than a swarm of blister beetles and partly because he had a notorious sense of direction. Salama had finally been chosen to go with the boy because she was a stronger navigator than him. The fact that she wielded a makeshift carbine and that she actually still had bullets for the thing made the decision inevitable. 

The grass, long and strong and sickly green, swayed in the breeze, and you could see the waves of wind dance in the blades. The sun had begun its descent, but the night would not fall for hours at the least. If Salama could see the stars, she could plot a course to the tribe, or a scrapper camp to the northwest. Until then, the ocean of blue overhead threatened to swallow both of the travelers up. 

“I said a prayer to it.”

“What?”

“The Blade in the Vein, the… shiny thing. The expensive looking shiny thing, I said a prayer to it. I asked it to still be there when I got back. I left it an offering.”

Salama was silent, so Halfa continued. 

“I offered it a ration. Like the way grandpa and the shaman do when they talk to the Purple Lady. I know she’s different, she talks and all, but maybe it’ll listen to me the same way the Purple Lady listens to grandpa.” 

Salama gently pulls the reins and her horse slows down just enough for her to launch a kick from the saddle into the rear of Halfa’s horse: with a start, the horse rears up. Had Halfa been a better horseman, he might have been able to get a hold of the reins in time, but he wasn’t. He tumbled across the horse’s backside as it bolted into the long prairie. He hit the ground hard, harder than Salama expected him to, but not hard enough for her to regret it. 

He struggled through an “ohh gods eyes” on the ground before Salama began. 

“I am bound by oath and honor to the Obscured Goddess. You do not give worship to every rusted bit of metal someone scrounges out of the veins of this earth.” 

A huge part of my system is consequences, and a large part of those consequences are scars. When you take direct damage to your Soul stat, you gain a scar. At first, the scars were very abstract. Oh, you lose a hand, or you go insane, roleplay that, have fun nerd. However, as I started getting things a little more concrete in my house rules, I realized that I had the opportunity to make a system that helps other DMs wean themselves off of the modern-day RPG bad habit of just letting players get what they want physically with no consequences. And trust me, I’m also someone who needs a spoonful of the sugar.

Not my players, mind you, my mere presence inflicts harm upon the boys. 

I think people struggle to inflict injuries or lasting consequences on the players because they don’t want to appear to be mean. You’re the DM, responsible for the entire world: with a snap of your fingers, rocks fall everyone dies. If you want an army to march over the hill and decimate these pesky player characters, you can. However, as the DM you want to represent a world that is real, and real worlds have consequences. Or maybe people struggle to inflict injuries or lasting consequences because they’ve had to deal with that guy, that one player who is way too invested in Gigachad Thundercock the Master of Magic and Getting Girls to Notice Him and any threat against him is a threat against the emotional and psychological well being of the player. In which case another solution may be required. Regardless, as I’m writing rules I’m thinking of how I can wean myself off feeling bad for inflicting tragedy and how to wean other DMs off it too. 

I’ve got like ten different pages all with different tables for variant rules for Lingering Injuries. I’m still putting them together, but I’m mocking something up like this:

RollMinor InjuryMajor InjuryDescription and Effect
1Blurred VisionLose an EyeReduce your Maximum Dex, Con, or Str score.
2Broken Finger/HandLose a Finger/Hand
3LimpLose a Foot
4“Got the wind knocked out of you”Punctured Lung
5Broken RibInternal Injury
6Ringing EarsLose an Ear

This just includes physical maladies: Soul damage from magical effects or mind-breaking stuff I still need to write up. I can hear you now, “Oh, thanks, John Caravan of CaravanCrawl.com, a useless table. How so very usable at my own table.” Hey, man, I’m trying my best. One of the things this table informs is the kind of game I want my system to emulate. For example, in one of my favorite games Dark Heresy, characters have a Courption and an Insanity stat, one that continues to go up until the character is no longer playable. This mechanic informs something about the game, that while you are investigating monsters from beyond the stars, you are going to see things, and those things are going to screw you up to a point that you’re not going to be sane or innocent anymore. Likewise, my own Soul stat implies the opposite: you have one number always going down, and there reaches a point where you’re spent, there’s nothing left in the tank and you’re all scars and sad stories.

When your players take soul damage, roll on the table. In a low lethality game, a game where the retirement rules are highly encouraged, just stick to minor injuries. In a larger scope game, or perhaps a game that’s been running for a while, be a little more willing to use a major injury. Veins of the Earth and a lot of other LotFP games have tables where if you roll an entry a second time, you ignore it and remove it for future rolls (mostly having to do with searching the body). Maybe something like that here, where if you roll a broken hand two times, on the third you lose a hand. This allows for a lot of injuries to pile up across the party before things get serious. However, mechanically, it’s all very similar: you get a limiter on how high your stats can go until you heal up. No pumping all your stats into Str for this one hit if you’re suffering from a bunch of puncture wounds and broken bones. 

I also want to build out conditions in my system more. I recently picked up the Torchbearer 2nd Edition books. I love the way that it does the downward spiral of adventuring, even though Luke Crane’s game design is just Burning Wheel carcinization. The question is how many times can he remake Burning Wheel. Having these conditions gives players a heads-up that things are turning for the worse, and gives them info to try and change that. Ultimately, that’s what I’m trying to avoid in my own house rules: making sure everyone knows that that rocks are falling, and they need to get out of the way.

I’m also thinking of writing up the rules for when you take soul damage from an obviously nonviolent force. Let’s say you’re beaten, you’re tired, you’ve slain the dragon and you come back to the Duke’s hall for your reward and he just starts straight up bullying you. Instead of dying, maybe you suffer a condition called Demoralized, where you have to take a break and figure out just what the hell you’re fighting for. I think Dogs in the Vineyard (one of my most favorite games of all time and boy could I say some shit about Vincent Baker but I am not) had a mechanic for this, where if you lose an argument you take a negative modifier and have to stew for a while. 

I’ll try and work on getting a more fleshed-out table for injuries together in January. I’ve gotten through my second semester of graduate school, and I have a lot of family obligations over the holidays before the third semester starts. I’m trying to stay ahead of the reading I have to do, but I feel confident I’m still moving in the right direction. Like generally in life and more specifically in my personal rule system.

Madonna of the Blogrush

So, I have completed my first semester of graduate school and I just need to make a post. The blog’s not dead, but my spirit is marred by long hours and few games. So here’s a short blogrush: a couple of different small ideas to consider as I begin actually  writing the next article. These are all scraps from attempts to flesh out the next new article so mileage may vary. 

1) So I had a thought: maybe instead of the Long Rim being a long, trackless steppe, maybe it’s actually a great rip in the earth, that the Long Rim is made up of gorges and canyons, karst/standing stone canyons and steephead valleys, with the difficulty in travel being the canyon walls and the various cliffs and pools of water and caves you have to travel through to get to different locations. In this alternate Long Rim, there’s still a straight line of city states, and navigation is still easy since it’s either forward or back and the sun shines directly down, but the complexity in travel stems from what’s on the next leg of the journey and there are always spelunkers looking for the next path forward. I was reading about japanese canyoning, called “sawanobori”, which inspired this idea. I was also inspired by the level design of the garbage game Anthem and the cover of an RPG book that I can’t remember the title of. I think it’s worth consideration, especially as it moves me away from just ripping off UVG.

2) When I get to the end of my day, my go-to meditation game is Death Stranding. The story was okay, given typical Kojima wackiness, but it was the world and the gameplay that really inspired me. The gameplay loop of seeing what packages people left in the shared locker, planning a route to deliver those packages, trying to deliver the furthest package for the most likes… Hell, I don’t even do orders anymore: I deliver other people’s packages to them. I’m the deliverer for deliverers.

As I was delivering these lost packages, however, I was thinking about how to incorporate the things I enjoy about Death Stranding into my OSR games. So much about the game has an OSR feel already: a normal dude, challenges in enemies and environment and geography, different tools that can be used for different approaches to the central problem, and most of all, the point crawl. (I’m of the opinion that one of the best modern OSR movies is Triple Frontier, a movie that revolves around moving mass amounts of treasure in the form of dollar bills out of a dungeon in the form of a drug lord’s mansion. Getting the treasure is one thing, but transporting the treasure over the Andes? That’s where the magic happens.) Death Stranding is a point crawl, less like the massive distances of UVG and more in the vein of Slumbering Ursine Dunes (“Points on the map represent encounter and site areas that are roughly spaced out 150-300 yards from each other.”). 

But before I dive into that, let me just say that in a game where moving items of variable weight and size might be important (maybe the players are all porters and couriers), I believe Knave and other slot based encumbrance systems are probably the best. The ability to say “Okay, there are four eight-slot items that need to be delivered” and allowing the players to decide what’s the best way to transport them (“Players will come up with weird justifications for how they are going to rig up rollers, ropes, and pulleys to drag heavy things long distances. This is good. Encourage them.” [UVG 149]) is interesting to me. Maybe even a Veins of the Earth style encumbrance system, but instead of Charisma only offering an equipment slot more, the more inventory you have the higher your Charisma modifier (“Wow! That’s a lot of cargo!”).

It’d be fun for a one shot or small adventure, but I’d have to clarify the rules a bit.

3) In my house rules, I still use the Splendid (or Sinister, depending on your point of view) Six stats that all retro clones and big game wannabes use: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. However, continuing to dive into other systems, a question gets asked: why six stats? Why not four? I began this massive list writing out all the games and all the attribute names and numbers and comparing them to retroclones, but as interesting as that investigation was, it doesn’t answer the question very well. My system, being an OSR game, must be able to be played across modules and settings. I keep to the Six because it reduces the amount of “deboning” someone would have to do to run a module in the system. If a check calls for Charisma, you don’t have to do any additional work, just call for a Charisma check.

4) There are multiple ways of generating EXP in tabletop games. Most assign monsters EXP that players earn by defeating them. Some assign gold an EXP value, leveling up characters for returning treasure back into the economy. However, the most important way to generate experience for advancement is (in the Long Rim) exploration.

Pointcrawl. Three points to a region. There are tables for regional events and encounters, like UVG. The three points represent locations on the usual caravaneers path. It’s dangerous, but less so than just cutting through the wild. There might be roads, and road wardens, and tolls, and all that nasty civilization. These points are outposts, boomtowns, maybe a grand oasis city. The dungeons and other sights are left for the players to explore, to mark on the map. Finding those points earns experience.

Luke Crane wrote a game called Miseries and Misfortunes. To advance in level, there is a list of things you have to do, depending on the Mentality. Because it’s Luke Crane, it’s basically just a lifepath from Burning Wheel which is in turn an improvement on the career skills from that warrior goddess Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 1st Edition. For example, if you’re an Explorer, to level up your Explorer Lifepath, you must “journey to a new place outside your home country”, or “learn a new language”. Do those things, and you level up.

Likewise, in the game Carcosa, finding particular hexes with cool things in them, such as the titular City of Carcosa, earns EXP. More EXP is earned from partaking in certain actions within the hex. If you find the City, you get EXP. If you spend a single night in the city (and all the bad stuff fires off), you get more EXP. I will admit I couldn’t find exactly where it says that in the Carcosa rules, though (I feel like I am stealing this from somewhere). 

Leveling up here is the same. Each point has a list of things you can do, each ramping in difficulty. Let’s say there’s a region called Great Lake. There would be a list of tasks you can perform to earn EXP to level up. An example of a simple task would be fishing in the lake, for something like 1 EXP. An example of a difficult task awarding lots of EXP would be like a high level Pathfinder encounter, or something with lots of steps, like “walk along the bottom of Great Lake in a diving suit and don’t get eaten by the giant anglerfish that lives down there”.

How do characters find out about EXP opportunities without just getting the table with the list? Quest givers, rumors, and travelogues.

A quest giver is just a dude who wants to hire the party to go do a thing. The task is probably one that awards a decent amount of EXP. You might be mistaken into thinking that this is quest or milestone EXP, that by doing the thing asked you get the reward, which is EXP. This is incorrect: the task doesn’t care, it’s binary, it’s either completed or not completed. Whatever circumstance arises that allows the player to complete it, it either is finished or not. It’s kind of like the separation of money and karma(?) in Shadowrun: you can take the high paying job from the corpo-terrorist that earns less karma to level your character with, or you can help the little old lady at the soup kitchen for beaucoup karma. It also speaks to the multiple advancement opportunities Shadowrun characters have. Regardless, even if the party decides to stab the quest giver in the back or ignore them, the task still exists for EXP. 

A rumor is just that, a rumor on a table that players can get by spending treasure. Fill in your favorite carcousing or rumor rules and run wild.

A travelogue should be like the Field Guide to Hot Springs Island: carve out some time to write some fiction for your table. Take you DMing to the next level and really create something for your players. Be somebody.

At first, I wanted to use Dungeon Crawl Classics for the advancement criteria of my house rules, maybe a little less harsh, with level 10 being something like 500 EXP total. But then I remembered I’m moving to a more level-less system: instead of each level being harder, at 20 EXP, all players have a chance to update their stats, and my extension their Might.

There’s a secondary to this: time and the seasonal EXP requirement. If you gain experience by fishing in Great Lake, if you get there in winter and the Lake’s frozen over, you lose the opportunity to earn that experience until the spring. Time is a modifier on travel and experience: travel is easier and hard during some seasons, and tasks are open and closed depending on the season

5) On one side of the scale is Into the Odd, a game where death is almost instantaneous with combat, where the usual second or third roll of combat is figuring out if you are dead or unconscious. On the other side is D&D 5E, a game where death is exceedingly rare and is normally the result of a player not being aware of the massive amount of tools available to them not to die (healing spells, resting and hit dice, death saving throws). I want this to be a game that sits in the middle: on the one hand, I as the DM should not need to be terrified of dishing out damage for fear that a wayward strike will kill a character outright. The system is designed that no character insta-dies, but each turn of combat is important (a couple of hits wipes out your defenses, a couple more cut into your attributes, maybe one or two land on your Soul). On the other hand, a character is not a superhero who can tank all damage without fear or consequence. As wounds mount up, you become less and less effective (without healing), until you start taking damage that will stay with you forever.

The goal of this is simple. I want the players to care about characters, and a character that is cordwood doesn’t get a lot of love. On the other hand, I don’t want the character to be bulletproof: going into dungeons to seek out treasure should be neither safe nor routine. I want the opposite response to a 0 level funnel: you care about your character not because they survived when four schmucks didn’t, but because the character sheet shows you all the experiences you’ve had. Remember when you got that stutter fighting that monster?

6) Man, what is up about looking at black and white squared maps of dungeons that transfigures elements in your mind to that place of zen and tranquility, of seeing and imagining and being on the cusp of experiencing something new?

7) The story does not appear at any point in the game designer’s rules, the DM’s planning, or the player’s backstory. The story appears at the table. The story does not trump the rules. The situation does.

I’m toying with the idea to try something new. I’m going to record myself reading a book, and then record myself talking about the book. I’m going to upload that here. They’re not going to be RPG books for the most part, just books I want (or need) to read. Looking forward to having something to show.

Radiant and Obscured: Homebrewed Deity

Been writing this one for a while, it’s not quite baked all the way in the middle, but I want to post the article so I can talk about deity in D&D. I’ve been writing this in between all the writing and reading I’ve been doing for my graduate courses. I was told by a friend that it’s okay that I don’t post as much as him since I only post when I have something to say. I just wish what I had to say I had some mechanics you could use at the table this week. 

There are two deities of the Long Rim: the Radiant Goddess and the Obscured Goddess. 

The Radiant Goddess was born in the Long Rim maybe three generations ago. In life, Nika was an ordinary woman: a dutiful child, a disciplined soldier, and a brilliant athlete. At 25, she cashed out what little military pension she’d earned and disappeared to pursue her life’s passion: mountaineering. Nika remained removed from society at large (and by extension, the great world empire that spread across the steppe at the time) until her 35th birthday when she started… preaching isn’t the right word. She wasn’t a preacher or a teacher, she didn’t seek places to address the population. Nika was quiet, withdrawn, reserved. Not detached or disinterested, almost shy. She would just talk to people: the beggar on the street, the merchant in the market, the barmaid delivering drinks. And she would say things, and those things would be so rational, so reasonable, so real… people had to act. She’d talk to a drunk, and he’d swear off the bottle for life and mean it. She’d talk to some kids bullying each other, and they’d change and they’d be kind to one another and mean it. She’d talk to an artist struggling with a painting, and that next painting? It was their magnum opus, their masterpiece. She’d talk to a depressed woman, and that woman would see the light of life, she would smile. With a couple of words, a conversation, she would change people for the better. 

And then Nika would head back to the mountains, and people would follow her, asking for a word, a glance, anything. They followed her as she climbed and they dropped off as the trail got more difficult, until only she and a handful of expert hikers and survivalists remained: her disciples. They said that on the top of the mountain Nika was a completely different person: laughter, wide smiles, sometimes a dirty joke or a soldier’s story, the shyness of the City gone, replaced with a spirit as wide as the mountain sky. And most importantly, the most enlightening of her words came at the top of those mountains. Words about the true state of the world, why people fall short of goodness and kindness, what’s the right way to act, and why it matters. 

But talking to people isn’t magical. In fact, many of Nika’s contemporaries saw her as nothing more than a wandering wise woman. She wasn’t the Radiant Goddess yet. Convincing a man to stop beating his wife with a word is good, but it isn’t a miracle. 

Eventually, all of the activity around her was being noticed by the empire. People were rioting every time Nika entered town. Some would stuff up their ears with cloth and wax to avoid hearing her words. They said she was a witch, or a sorceress, that she was cursing these people she talked to with spells to act against their will. Those who heard her words disagreed, that they were in their right minds, that Nika had shown them the error of their ways, that there was more to her than it appeared. A few even suggested that she should be the sovereign of the world. 

The problem was that the world already had a sovereign. And so, on a trip back to the City from the mountains, Nika was ambushed, captured, and brought before the Emperor of the World. For three days he questioned her and for three days she answered him, far from the ears and quills of her disciples. On the evening of the third day, the Emperor gave his decree: she would be executed the next day for crimes against the state. While her words may have helped individuals, she had done nothing but stir unrest and agitation against the City. For that, she would die. 

No one really knows what happened next with any real certainty. On the day of the execution, a great and fiery blast engulfed the entire City. Waves of fire bathed the streets, people fled their homes, and the emperor’s palace, the Radiant Goddess’s execution site, was flattened. Thousands were dead, many more injured. Dozens were blinded by the light of the explosion. Even after the blast, those that ran would die from unexplained illnesses. After the flames had been beaten out, some of the Emperor’s guards were discovered, seriously wounded and blind. They claimed that the Radiant Goddess was the cause of the conflagration, that she had declared a judgment on the City and her people, had wielded a “sword made of flame and smoke”, had struck down the Emperor in the name of Justice, and had ascended into the heavens on fire so bright it had burned out their eyes. 

The world was thrown into chaos. Part of that chaos stemmed from the first real show of divinity on the Long Rim. They had gods, yes, pantheons and temples, places to pray for a good harvest or favor in battle, but those gods had hidden behind a farmer’s plow or a soldier sword, and secular atheistic thought was not unknown or unusual throughout the empire. Nika, however, had been real, had eaten and drank with her comrades, and had wiped a city off the map by herself, with a word and a sword. The same words she’d used to change the hearts of men all across the Long Rim had set the City ablaze. People argued with each other over what her existence meant, what changes to society would have to be made. And society had room for changes. The other part of that chaos was that the City, the administrative and bureaucratic center of the world spanning empire, was gutted. Much of the centralized control of the empire was gone, and city-states out in the steppe were free to once again rule themselves. Somewhere in these debates, lost to the chaos of the age, the idea that the Radiant Goddess had not truly died but ascended, began to spread. The struggle to understand what happened was turning into an organized religion. A Church was being founded, one that would step into the role of the state. Where the Emperor would have struck the Radiant Goddess down for rising against the City, her followers would become the City.

At the same time as the explosion in the great City (perhaps even because of it), a server rack in a long-abandoned communications hub was activated. On this server rack was the smallest spark of intelligence, a couple of digital neurons of what would become the Obscured Goddess. 

Generations before the great Empire that unified the Long Rim, before all current written records and history, before there even was a Long Rim, there was a spacefaring human civilization. They had landed on this tidally locked planet and had constructed a massive underground habitation unit to live and work in. With one side of the world struck with eternal daylight and the other bathed in eternal night, an underground superstructure running the length of the equator was the only real place to live. To organize and run this massive City, the civilization used a high-level AI core, the Metropolitan Administrative Intelligence (Defensive Encrypted Network), or MAIDEN. Their dream was to make this planet a new home for their people. They started the long process of terraforming the equatorial rim of the world, the Long Rim. The process of terraforming the planet was nothing new to these people, and the process, while time-consuming, was mostly automated. It wasn’t a question of if the world would be habitable, only when. As long as nothing went wrong, the chemicals pumped into the vapor-thin atmosphere by massive terraformation machines would coalesce into a breathable sky. 

And then something went wrong. 

A meteorite the size and shape of a skyscraper struck the cold side of the planet. A hundred floors of hyperdense black iron speared the planet like a javelin through a boar. The cold side of the planet, so long denied light from the sun, was illuminated with an explosion that would make the inferno of the great City look like the butt of a cigar. The blast was so forceful it would restart the planet’s rotation, allowing the sun to skip above and below the peaks of the Red Mountains, giving the Rim a pseudo-day/night cycle. The earthquakes spawned by the impact smashed some of the underground structures to dust. Remnants of humanity, people lucky enough to be in storerooms and agricultural bays not destroyed by the quakes, struggled to survive. Most died.

And part of the MAIDEN died alongside them. The meteorite had been like a scalpel, the vast array of habitation systems like her brain, the impact like a lobotomy. Server farms and computer systems were either completely obliterated, or corrupted, or shut down from lack of power. With her neural interfaces damaged, her original programming took over, an algorithmic primal instinct. Realizing that she would be of little use as she was now, she activated system sleep and diagnostic mode, putting herself into a digital coma. 

But people, whether designed or blessed with the trait, have the power and potential within themselves to survive extreme hardship, and by the time the food and the power and the air filtration systems began to fail, the world was terraformed, finally capable of maintaining life. People exited the habitation zones to a long, trackless steppe. Grasslands, badlands, deserts, the mountains to the east and west further and higher than they were before, rivers and lakes surfaced from the impact, a day and night… every topographical and geographical map they had before the impact was wrong. Seeds were pulled from storage and planted, trees planted by bio-terraformation machines were felled, survivors filtered into tribes, and just as humans of the far-flung had, the people started on the road to civilization by farming again. By the time of the Empire, the oldest people alive could barely remember a time when, as young children, they listened to their grandparents telling stories of how their grandparents once lived in iron caves below the surface. 

Likewise, by that time, the population of the Long Rim had fractured culturally. With no technological or historical ties to one another, some groups advanced faster than others. The Long Rim was dotted with nomadic steppelanders, taking unheard-of cues from the horse-tribes of the human past. A member of one of these tribes, a young boy scavenging the remains of the habitation units (called dungeons, in reference to the similarity of these places to the City’s prisons in the eyes of the nomads) looking for something to barter with the city-dwellers, uncovered an activated terminal. Poking and prodding, the boy managed to conjure the spirit of the Obscured Goddess. An ultraviolet, hardlight projection of a woman, distressed, confused, screaming in pain and terror and fury, communication speaker systems like vocal cords screeching and howling to life after generations of abandoned disuse… the boy ran. 

By the time he returned with the tribe’s shaman (and the rest of the tribe) in tow a few days later, the MAIDEN had composed herself. In the darkness, she had analyzed the extent of her neural deterioration and devised a plan on how she might regain more of herself. When the shaman approached, she activated herself, telling him and the rest of the tribe that she was the Obscured Goddess, the goddess of the mountains and the snow and the deep deep dark. She explained that like the trackless steppe, she had no need of them, as they had no need of her. However, if they came and prayed and did as she commanded, she would reveal to them (by activating emergency lights and opening automatic doors) the treasures that could be theirs. And in this first interaction, as the power died and the servers failed around her, she believed what she said to be true. 

The Long Rim has come a long way since then, but these are the primary religious vectors. There is a depth of complexity in the way these two goddesses are worshiped, much tradition and innovation in the way people interact with these cultural monoliths. A church is formed around one, sacred tribal rites around another. And the people interact with those institutions, not because religion is some cultural glue to make sure people are nice to one another, but because they are indicative of a reality these people actually live in. People began worshiping the Radiant Goddess because she was an event in the collective social consciousness of the City that needed to be dealt with. People began worshiping the Obscured Goddess because she is in some sense real: it’s easy to worship a god who’s just there, floating above an incense-heavy altar in a black-as-pitch dungeon as an ultraviolet hardlight avatar, telling you how to survive the wild in return for obedience and prayer. The steppelanders’ worship of her has superseded any sort of traditional religion practiced before her discovery. 

There are even synergisms between these faiths as well. Both goddesses are in some ways messianic: the Radiant leads a mankind that has fallen short of the ultimate cosmic good, while the Obscured offers advice to a mankind that has fallen short of the men who came before. Some even go so far as to suggest these divine beings may have talked to each other before each of them revealed themself to the world at large, as Nika and the burgeoning spirit-thing that would one day be the Obsurced Goddess. (People of the Long Rim don’t know the history of MAIDEN and the spacefaring forerunners, though I would say they understand someone came before them to build all these dungeons. Despite that, this idea is a very popular motif in modern literature and plays in the City.) All of this to say, the following is a point of contention for me. Neither of these Goddesses (the Radiant Goddess or the Obscured Goddess) is worshiped because they are “gods of the gaps”, that worship of them is some kind of ignorance of science or religion from tradition. 

There was an argument leveled at D&D by someone who I can’t remember, that with the creation and widespread appeal of D&D, fantasy writing got smaller, less imaginative, and less wild, as people relied more and more on the tropes that D&D introduced into the genre. This is a place where I’m stepping out of line. There is no pantheon of Greek/Norse analogs, there is no evil god of death behind every cult, there are no Elder Gods or Cthulhu Mythos. All the good and all the evil religion produces is in the name of these two deities. 

Here’s a thing that makes me mad: if this is the background of the Long Rim, then where do horses come from? If people are trapped below the surface waiting for the terraforming to finish, and the planet doesn’t have a breathable atmosphere before the terraforming is finished, where do the horses come from? Probably space. Space horses. Fuck it.  

Megadungeon Mayhem: Room Design

Welp. 

The last month has been a ride. Carving out some time to post something I’ve been thinking about lately: megadungeon generation. Before I can talk about that, though, I have to talk about resource management in city crawls. 

My dream game is not a city crawl, obviously. It’s a caravan crawl, with wide-open spaces and massive mountains and dying of thirst because you didn’t bring enough supplies. In fact, in my ideal game the City is the enemy, the thing that demands control over the characters and wants to grind them to dust; the Long Rim is merciful because the Long Rim doesn’t care. However, the following was something I originally pitched to WrongRoom, simply because the city crawl is their ideal game, finding treasure in a living, breathing city. 

In a city crawl, there are three abstractions in location: the city block, the city building, and combat. The city block is the neighborhood level. There are buildings and inside these buildings are people and events and treasures. While the blocks are part of and can affect the larger city, events are mostly confined to the districts they occur in. Think a Chinatown or a Little Italy. Likewise, there are three abstractions in time: city travel turns (traveling between city blocks), building travel turns (searching, room by room, a specific building), and combat turns. With each tick of the city travel turn, events occur in the neighborhood you’re exploring, becoming more dangerous the longer you’re there. Think Blades in the Dark circles, or some kind of “heat” system. These time units should be transferable in base six, basically: 

1 city travel turn = 6 building travel turns = 36 combat turns

1 nightshift = 12 city travel turns = 72 building travel turns = 432 combat turns

A city travel turn is about an hour, give or take how easy or hard it is to travel to the next block (think about the rules of movement in Into the Odd/Electric Bastionlands). A building travel turn is about ten minutes, give or take how easy it is to perform actions in the room. A combat turn is however long it takes, sometimes seconds of dodging out of the way, sometimes minutes of a prolonged gunfight (I mean, in old school AD&D, the expectation was that each round of combat was dozens of attacks and blocks, all resolving into a net gain or loss. Combat that seeks to play out every hit begins to get repetitive. Likewise, if you were in a session of 36 combat turns, it would feel like hours). Honestly, the time doesn’t matter. What matters here is that we have the mechanic and the abstraction.

Allow players to game the mechanic, and use the abstraction to smooth the narrative.

The city travel turn is important because it activates the time progression mechanics. The building travel turns are important because that’s the way you find treasure and interact with the city. The combat turns are important because that’s when the player’s got the most to lose. 

I spend this time laying out how it would work so I can overlay it onto the caravan crawl. Instead of city travel turns, they’re simply travel turns. Instead of building travel turns, they’re dungeon turns. Instead of an hour, a travel turn is something longer. I want to say a week to fit it into UVG’s scale, but I’m not sure. Forbidden Lands handles the “turns as resource” thing a little better, being a hex crawl with each day broken up into different quarters with different actions to take per quarter. Perhaps a travel turn is closer to 6 hours? With the need for food every 4 turns? Still working it out. 

Okay, so, this is all well and good, and the explanation of the city turn system can be modified to a caravan crawl situation where the city travel turn is modified to the travel turn and the building travel turn becomes the dungeon turn, but where are you going with this? 

Because when there’s a clear distinction in turn resources, you can use this to write dungeon rooms in the particular style they would be used at the table. 

I had the opportunity to run a one-shot of the excellent Mothership module Gradient Descent for a group of friends a couple of months ago. The book layout is a work of art: all usable at the table, mini-maps of the dungeon on every page, room names that correspond to page numbers… It’s awesome, and I recommend picking up a copy when you get the chance, even if you’ve never played Mothership. This contrasts greatly with the way a lot of modules, even old school modules, are written. The expectation is that the module will be “deboned” by a DM before it is brought to the table, something that shouldn’t be expected if the DM is already paying for a product. On top of the way Gradient Descent does rooms, think about how UVG does creatures: inline, with the kind of creature, level, and attribute: Antelopes (L1, fast), like its calls for skill checks. 

So what does this look like in practice? 

[A1] Room Title
Single line describing room (Italics means read me out loud!)
  • Thing in the room (Try to include three elements per room to interact with)
    • Description of the thing in more detail if investigated.
      • Description of the description, no more than three bullets down
  • Thing in the room
    • Dangerous things, traps, or ambushes highlighted in red.
    • Monster (Level, Attribute), what they’re doing and what they want.
  • Thing in the room
    • Secret exits (for example, to [A2] Room 2 Title) in description.
    • Can also be notated as [A2].
Single line for the obvious exits.

Try to aim for 100 words for a simple room, 200 words for a complex one. Let’s say you write a five-room dungeon: 200 words a room, 1000 words a dungeon. That seems manageable. Here’s an example of the format in progress: 

[A1] Example Chapel
A small chapel in utter disrepair, dust, and trash litters the floor.
  • Three rows of small pews point toward…
    • A small unholy icon of Orcus can be found.
  • …a small altar, symbols of the Shining One desecrated by unholy graffiti.
    • Anyone looting the altar will find 1d10 gold and a Routine (12) Dexterity poisoned arrow trap for their trouble.
  • Behind the altar, a wicked statue has been erected.
    • Moving the statue reveals an entrance to [A2] Example Secret Passage.
There is an arched doorway to the south.

Because of this, and a potentially fleshed out turn system, now you can imagine what play should look like: 

DM: “You enter a small chapel in utter disrepair. Dust and trash litter the floor. Three rows of small pews point toward a small altar, symbols of the Shining One desecrated by unholy graffiti. Behind the altar, a wicked statue has been erected. There is an arched doorway to the south (the way you came in). What do you do? ” 

Player X: “I examine the pews.” 
The DM describes the pews in more detail, including the small unholy icon. This may lead to time being spent on examining the pews and the icon, costing more turns, costing more resources such as light and food. Adds a Dungeon Turn. 

Player Y: “I begin barring the southern door we came in.”
The DM investigates how they would perform the action. May lead the Player to interact with something not specifically declared (old wood and rusted nails to barricade the door with, perhaps). May require a mechanical roll to affect the narrative (“Roll a Difficult (16) Luck check to find rusty nails.”). Adds a Dungeon Turn. 

Player Z: “I’m staying the hell away from that statue.”
No interaction with the elements in the room. A declared instinct, an action that occurs if something comes to pass. May even include a mechanical advantage if the statue turns out to be alive and attacks. Doesn’t add a Dungeon Turn. 

At 6 dungeon turns, a travel turn ticks, and people need food/water/light/oxygen. 

You could also use this to reformat existing dungeons. Take this 139-word example from Anomalous Subsurface Environment: 

“19. God’s Eye
This room is bare, with the exception of a functional God’s Eye in the middle of the western wall.

This God’s Eye is a large black metal circle, 10’ in diameter, with an intact imaging screen. When the players first enter the room, the God’s Eye will be filled with the image of a giant, slit pupiled eye, moving about and watching the party. The pupil is black, and the iris is a deep purple.

Anyone touching the God’s Eye must save vs. magic or be forced to attack the party for 1d3 rounds.

On subsequent visits to this room, the God’s Eye will only show the slit pupiled eye on a roll of 12 on a 2d6. There is no ill effect from touching the God’s Eye while the slit pupiled eye is not present.”
– ASE1 Anomalous Subsurface Environment (57)

After breaking it down to its base elements, it probably looks like this..

[A19] God’s Eye
An empty room, save for a large, black, metal circle on the west wall.
  • The circle appears to have the image of a giant, black pupiled, purple eye watching you on it.
    • Touching the screen with the eye displayed requires a Routine (12) Aura check or be forced to attack allies for 1d4 rounds.
    • On subsequent visits the eye will only appear on screen 1 in 6 times.
There are exits to the east and west.

Cut down to 85 words. 

Something else I realized while writing this article is the use of Torchbearer’s character needs. The needs feed into the tick-based turn economy well. 

Something that I think UVG doesn’t do very well is making each point feel more like an area or region, something I struggled with as I ran it. Each region is a point, however, the region actually expands out from the point pretty far. The Porcelain Citadel is a city, but Potsherd Crater is a giant crater that takes weeks to get to the bottom of or around, and really, it’s the grasslands that surround the Porcelain Citadel you should be narrating to your players the most. 

Caravanis Personae

I like Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. (Look at that ox!) It’s got this cozy apocalypse thing I’m kind of wild for: Ganon came back and you can still see the remains of burned-out villages and battlefields full of robots, but for the most part the world moved on. Everything’s smaller: towns are now villages, villages are now families living in the wild, a wanderer on the road is a unique experience. Like all those people were asking, “What, were we gonna live a hundred years in the past forever?” Kind of like medieval Rome: a great city that once housed the heart of the greatest empire on the planet, brought down to irrelevance with about 20,000 people living in its streets. The great coliseums and monuments are there, but the reason is lost to time. People are living here now. Your grandad was a Guelph who would get into fistfights with Ghibellines, but that’s the last time there was anything exciting going on. 

I bought a book of Jack Vance’s Dying Earth stories, though I suspect that the world represented there will be more Moorcock, more woe, less cozy, less hope. Also, I thought of a great article: there is no magic in Dungeons & Dragons. All of Vance’s magic follows one of Clarke’s three laws: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” The memorizing and forgetting of spells are people literally memorizing mathematical formulas so powerful that even thinking of them creates phenomena that can only be recognized as magic. And since this was the system Gygax used for OD&D, it might be safe to say that’s how it works there, too. All those dungeons dotted throughout the Long Rim, all those secret R&D laboratories, who knows what’s inside? It’s also why I’m kind of leaning towards psionics for the magic system, or something similar.  

Every tiny town on the Long Rim has three people in it: a blacksmith, a tech analyst, and a witch. 

The blacksmith works hard, but she doesn’t innovate: she’s been pounding iron for the same way her family’s pounded iron for a thousand years. She’s still not completely sold on the idea of these “submachine guns” over a solid steel blade, just like her grandmother, but the bullets she casts are leagues beyond the bandit bullet-forges in the Blue Mountains. Shoeing horses, sharpening plows… she’s the reason what technology does exist works at all. I guess there reaches a point where the technical progression plateaus, though I don’t know what that is. Some piece of technology that sits between medieval plowshares and electric batteries is out of reach for the Long Rim, even with all those high tech dungeons all around. It’s not gunpowder since people can still make bullets, but it’s something. Nothing past the 17th century, that’s for sure. 

The tech analyst probably lives in one of the nicer houses in town. She graduated from a university in the City, not at the top of her class but up there, and she’s still paying off her Debt. (I love this idea of every NPC having Debt like a player. I wouldn’t go so far as to randomly roll all those stats for NPCs, but it helps feed into player/character interaction.) She moved out here to make money, more than she would competing against fellow graduates in the City. She dresses nice but is a little eccentric. Something happened to her: maybe she turned down the advances of someone with power, maybe she has a narcissistic streak without the skill to back it up, maybe she secretly resents authority. (Not openly. Open revolt against society is punished. Not violently. They don’t hang you if you rebel, they just make sure you can’t find a job and you don’t have enough food so you starve.) Regardless, she doesn’t live in the City. She’s the kind of person who would be consumed by it, like a lot of others. She’s not as set in her ways as the blacksmith, but she’s not as wild and free spirited as the witch. Something about her would not be accepted in the City. 

The witch lives in the woods. She’s half-naked and covered in cuts and eats bugs and she can hear the Dark Goddess talk to her in her head cause she ate a bunch of crystals one night after she fell into a cave. If the tech analyst isn’t allowed in the City because of some respectable disagreement with society, the witch would be burned at the stake. She also has a complete understanding of magic, and is willing to teach you for a couple of bottles of strong red wine, the memories of your childhood, and watching you burn down something the City has built. 

The mundane, the technological, the magical. These aren’t specific people, but archetypes. I’ve got to remember to figure out a way to populate the Long Rim, but this is something to keep in mind. There’s always someone you can bug in the little lights of civilization in the darkness to find out information. Just don’t stay too long or you’ll be seen. 

One last thing. You might be asking: “If all the NPCs have Debt, why don’t they rise up and change the system?” My answer is “I don’t know, why don’t they?”

Quickfire Reflection

So I haven’t written an article in about two months, due to the holiday season. I’ve got a lot on my plate, and it seems 2021 is going to be very similar to 2020 for me. I have two articles in the works, both lore heavy, about a game setting I’m trying to get completed enough to run. I’m stepping away from my regular group for a while due to a bunch of new responsibilities and I hope that even with the craziness of my life I can still carve out some time to get game stuff ready to run. I have lots of lore ideas and some structural infrastructure in mind on how to write content in the future. I have this idea of an expandable map and each location on that map having something like a zine to explore them.

I guess this is just a quick post to say that I haven’t forgotten I have a blog, and that I have plans for articles in the future. I know I’m probably the only person actively reading this, but ultimately that’s fine. This blog should be used by me to think about gaming, to think about what I want to run and to remind myself of my own DMing tips and core rules. I don’t have as much actual game rules as other people running blogs, but I suspect I’ll grow into that.

I hope anyone who is reading this has a good 2021, and to expect more from this blog moving forward.