Drunken one-off crawl pt. II: the revenge

So I promised either a session report or falling asleep in the comments section of last post; I delivered on the latter promise. Here's the former.

Our stalwart troupe of hastily-named adventuring-type folk entered the Catacombs of the Necromancer via the timber lift ensconced in the ever-so-aptly named Stinky Hole tavern. The lift brings one to "The Training Grounds" (AKA Level 0, AKA The Rat Warrens), an area where (according to the talk around town) a small, inexperienced group of adventurers may hone their craft without exposure to the more-terrifying terrors of the deep. (Basically, yeah, it's a rat-whomping newbie level straight out of CircleMUD - a little tribute to a huge time-waster of my youth.) One of the standard rumors concerning the Catacombs details the way to "Level 1" and the dungeon proper (first right, first left, first right) but Angus said to hell with that. (IIRC, the last Basic game anyone in our circle played was my boy Matt's, wherein they lost 30 PCs in a night, so maybe his caution is justified.)

The party (consisting of, I believe, a fighter, a dwarf, an elf, two clerics and a halfling) entered the narrow passages of The Warrens. (5' wide, here, which makes having a spear- or polearm-armed back rank fighter almost necessary, lest combat devolve into the dreaded Conga Line of Death.) They first happened on an octagonal-shaped room containing a low table and several exits. Upon entering the room, it was found to also contain a nasty recurring green slime infestation; the party was surprised, and the fighter was drip'd 'pon, but the deadly goo only struck his helmet and pauldron (flubbed the attack roll), and - quickly discarding these - the room was marked off "no entrar" with chalk and the party moved on.

(A note here about green slime, and its inclusion in the "slow-pitch" area of my dungeon. Often considered one of the deadliest low-level monsters in D&D, and unfortunately (due to hazy guidelines on how to use the stuff) a rarely-used one by many DMs. IMC, one must be surprised by the slime to be struck (assuming it's clinging to the ceiling and not filling some drinking goblet or slime-spraying death trap), and an attack roll is made to see if it hit the PC, their armor (or gear), or simply the floor. Slime striking the armor gives PCs a round or two to react, and they get a "this shit's sizzling away" cue to work off of. In other words, you have to be relatively unlucky to get "slimed" in my game unless someone's worked it into a trap. Still, it's a potential PC-melter, why include it in the "safe zone"? 'Cause new players need to get the message right of the bat that there's no "safe," just "safer," and sometimes the first PC death is the band-aid-ripping that signals to newbies that their survival depends on their wits as well as luck. Putting the slime encounter one room from the door gets this out of the way (and while any replacement PCs needed are a shout away).

From the now-shunned slime living room, and while avoiding the described route to Level 1, the only remaining way lead to a small, circular room containing an ancient stone well. Lying in wait here was a 5'-long gecko - the party sprang into action and monster-pinata'd the fuck out of this before it could take anybody's arm off. The gecko was skinned for a cloak (bright blue with orange spots is apparently in this year), and the well was investigated.

Now, this is another potential "gotcha" that could be considered unusual for a newbie level. Iron rungs lead to the bottom of the well, where there is a sandy bottom (sometimes containing a small treasure) with a fast-flowing stream running across it; the stream's channel is just tall enough for a dwarf to walk and fight, but cramped for a human. Upstream, the channel leads to other areas of the level via additional wells (introducing the idea of hidden ways and non-explicit level connections). Downstream, there is an iron grate (now broken), the floor slopes down, and the sandy bottom is replaced by algae-slimed bare rock. If you proceed downstream, you are given several warnings and chances to turn back - failing to do so results in a Dex check, and - failing that - shooting down a dark waterslide to a wholly unsavory (and un-newbie-friendly) cavern level ("The Grotto") wherein death awaits with big, nasty teeth. (The teeth are on giant shrews, if you're curious. Nasty - these are described in Basic as pretty much R.O.U.S.'s, and they're rough customers. Y'know, for a fucking shrew.) This, beyond providing an area for slightly leveled-up and trouble-seeking PCs to explore, teaches the lesson that, yes, I really will give you enough rope to hang yourself with, and that ignoring "flavor text" warnings is somewhat inadvisable. So far I'd yet to see someone actually make it down there (usually the description deters players), and this was no exception. Next time, dear ones, next time. (More on that later - someone eventually fell for it! LOL)

So the watery channel was forded upstream - past an open-ceilinged gallery to another well (this with iron rungs as well). The halfling poked his head up and spotted there skeletons as they in turn spotted (and nearly spitted) him. Quick combat later, the skellies were so much bone meal; onwards and upwards the party proceeded.

Well, that's all my phone browser will hold, so looks like there'll be a part III. Next time I discuss alternative mapping methods, random cave generation, and the dinner bell.

-DYA

One-off drunken one-on-one Basic dungeon crawl

Worst week ever for more or less everyone I know including me (car crashes, stabbings, internet drama and dental issues, no shit), and only one player made it for Tuesday hacking, so tonight I dusted off the Basic campaign (Zent-Mer) for a one-player, 6-character hackfest. Nice to see that I'd prepared a lovely DM's booklet with awesome on-the-fly encounters, a faction cheat sheet, and other time-savers before I mothballed this one - I was ready to go long before my player had 6 Basic characters rolled up.

Interesting tidbit I ran across browsing the New York Red Box site while waiting (Google it, I'm posting from phone so no link for you) - there are no "% in lair" figures anywhere in Basic D&D, but they are available (presumably copied from the LBBs) in the Judges Guild Ready Ref Sheets - nice to know for when I run wilderness games with this campaign. (Basic is usually my "on the road" game, and I'd much sooner cart along a printout of the inprobably-useful Ready Ref Sheets than a hardcover Monster Manual that I'll only be using for one stat.)

Drinking what I will describe as a "bomb-ass" spiced mead that a buddy of mine hooked me up with after I helped him move this past weekend; anyone in the Worcester area can enjoy the same (and the experience of brewing it for themselves) by stopping in to Deja Brew in Shrewsbury, MA on Rt. 9. (Ry works there on occasion.). It's a brewing supply store but they have equipment on-site for brewing, so if you purchase the ingredients and bottles you can have just about any kind of alcoholic goodness (beers, ales, wines and meads) you might imagine. Highly recommended.

-DYA

LYCKANTROPEN THEMES

I’ve never been entirely comfortable with mundane weapon immunity in D&D. (Silver to hit, magic to hit, etc.) I appreciate the intent, and there’s definitely something special about the palpable dread an experienced player group experiences when they realize that they can’t even scratch the things they’re fighting. However, it tends to result in cartoonish situations, especially with lycanthropes. Having these creatures be just flat immune to damage seems to conjure images of two-handed sword blows just bouncing off without messing up their fur – even if you accept the abstraction, it tends to nag a bit. For me, at least.

That said, I do want to maintain the nastiness of these creatures, and a certain degree of invulnerability is inherent in their nature. The rationalization I’ve always made for were-creatures’ immunity to mundane weapons is that the wounds simply close as fast as they’re inflicted, rendering the blow moot. This line of thinking has usually led to the conclusion that, if you get one of these creatures pinned and have a big hacking blade handy, you can still remove the head and kill it. Not strictly within the letter of the rule, but it’s always seemed like an appropriate sop to fantasy realism.

I’ve wrestled with these issues somewhat while working on my current campaign, but I didn’t expect anybody to run into a lycanthrope for a good long while, and so had put them on the back burner. Last night, sure enough, the party ran into were-rat territory and I was obliged to think about them pretty damn fast.

What I’ve come up with, as a (tentative) compromise, is this: Non-silvered weapons do only half damage to lycanthropes (well, were-rats, at least – I’ll deal with the other types individually), and the wounds from these weapons heal at 1hp a round (even past the point of “death”). Their skeletal structures are also remarkably resilient, so that a player attempting to decapitate a downed rat-man must bring it down to a full -10hp (while getting past the resistance and still regenerating) before the head can be fully removed. Otherwise, the foul creatures will continue to regain 1hp a round, regaining consciousness (and mobility) at 1hp.

In practice, this worked pretty well. A bit more book-keeping than I usually like to do with a monster, but were-creatures should be pretty rare, so it’s not like it’ll come up all the time. You end up with a 3HD monster that has (effectively) the hp of a 6HD monster, and regeneration on top of that – pretty damn survivable, but possible to overcome with a concerted effort. 3 ratmen ambushed a fighter-heavy 6-man party (all 1st level), and it was a pretty close thing – one ratman permadead, one downed but escaped, and one never below half hp, only breaking off combat once the other had fled. The party had one member incapacitated and lost better than half their total hp – they definitely learned to respect the little grey bastards. This was against only 3 of them – I’m hoping that, after this experience, they’ll know enough to run should they bumble into a full-sized patrol, but if not, their next PCs might. ; )

Speaking of were-creatures (and RE: this post’s title), this morning I found myself sick to death of the Slough Feg CD I’ve been OD’ing on, and all the other metal stuff in my car besides. I randomly dug out the one mellow CD in the car at the moment: Ulver’s “Lyckantropen Themes.” Laughed at the appropriateness considering last night's session, and gave it another spin. Without going too much into Ulver’s career-long musical self-reinvention (check them out on Wikipedophile if you’re curious), this is the original soundtrack to Lyckantropen, a Swedish werewolf movie. It’s 10 tracks of dreary, dreamlike atmosphere based around a single 3-note piano riff, and (since it’s an Ulver release) it’s damn near perfect. In addition to being a good listen on its own merits, this CD makes an amazing dungeon soundtrack – it’s alternately laid-back and tense, with lots of barely-heard background sound. I use it on the regular.



Give it a listen, why don'cha?

DYA

POST-GAME REPORT: WHICH WAY JUMPS THE FROG

It should be no revelation to anyone who’s GM’ed more than a game or two that you can’t predict what players are going to do (or where they’re going to go). The best (and only) way to guide their movements short of laying down the rails is to selectively skimp on prep-work. If you’ve left a corner of your dungeon level bare of detail, they’re going to zoom in on it with player sonar and start digging around in it. They’re like fucking ferrets – they get into EVERYTHING (and tend to smell weird).

Accordingly, when I lovingly re-drew, detailed and re-stocked two sheets’ worth of dungeon levels last night, I practically FORCED my guys to flee the area like so many suspiciously-well-armed refugees. They got through a door I didn’t expect them to get through (and which may be replaced with a stronger version in the near future by a pissed-off landlord), wandered down several hundred yards of unpleasant, single-file (and barely sketched) corridor, whomping vermin and deftly avoiding every potentially gainful distraction I put in their path until they finally wandered into a real fight (and got banged up enough that it was time to make for the surface). No hard feelings, though – I can improv when I need to. It’s like jazz – it’s dungeon scat. (Actually, no, that sounds horrible, it’s nothing like that. Don’t Google that term, either.)

FWIW, I actually like having areas that were developed during play. I do stuff I wouldn’t normally do when I’m pressed for time, and let things get into the game that otherwise (were I sitting at home, unharried by bloodthirsty players), I’d overthink and try to rationalize. Frankly, I tend towards the realistic, the well-reasoned, and the explainable in my designs, and this isn’t always a good thing. The weird, random, unexplainable shit is where a lot of the wonder of the dungeon comes from, and going “off the map” tends to draw some of that into the overall fabric. Can’t be a bad thing.

Next time, though, I’m gonna be ready. My goal, as of late, has been to provide myself with a handy “DM pack” to run Zent-Mer with – something that, along with a red book and the map, will be all the material I need for a long session. Inspired largely by Kellri’s Old School Encounters Reference, I’ve been distilling any number of charts and lists into an information-dense 8.5”x11” booklet. Next addition: A selection of small dungeon “nodes,” straight outta Appendix A (1e DMG), ready to plug in and stock when the ferrets get loose.

DYA

PS: Oh, yeah, they got into a fight. More on that in a few – I’m still tossing around an on-the-fly rules hack I stumbled into last night, we’ll see if it sticks.

PPS: Another thing, going back one more link in the inspiration chain from Kellri’s book: No DM running Classic D&D should be without a copy of Monster & Treasure Assortment. Such a simple idea, such pure DM gold when you’re running on the fly (or stocking in a hurry).

Rescaling the map - to redraw or not to redraw?

So, as mentioned earlier, I've been in the process of transferring my dungeon levels from 5' scale full-sheet (8.5"x11") graph paper to 10' scale, 30x30 square One Page Dungeon Template sheets. And I'm finding a million places where, had I drawn these maps to a 10' scale in the first place, they would've "snapped" to the 10' grid. I'm on the fence, here - on the one hand, this is the dungeon as I drew it, a few player characters have already wandered through and mapped some areas, and there's no good reason for everything to conform to a 10' grid that isn't there. One could make the argument that to do so is to coddle PC mappers. On the other hand, redrawing it would make things easier on me as a GM in describing distances, and possibly make the whole thing a little easier to read.

In the end, I suspect I'll end up redrawing - as I've gotten away from the need to describe every twist and turn with surveyor-like precision (and in fact started impressing the impossibility of such a task on my players), the need for a micrometer-tight dungeon map lessens. What's more, I've made it a design feature that dungeon levels are subject to periodic re-routing by the Construction Crew (or just regular old magic), so I may as well put my money where my mouth is. I'm willing to bet that players using pre-revision maps will never notice the difference, anyway.

DYA

LAST MINUTE PREP... AGAIN

Oh yeah, I am running a game tomorrow. LOL Suppose I should at least pretend to get ready...

A big part of the design philosophy with Zent-Mer is doing some design work on the front end (lots of customized random charts, cheat-sheets, etc.) to let me run on the fly with next-to-no prep. There's still a ton to do in that department, but let's look at what I actually did do so far.

- Master encounter table, encompassing encounters with nearby monsters (i.e., "LOOK AT THE MAP, DUMMY"), encounters with "cleanup crew"-type monsters (vermin/nuisance encounters), and references to the level-specific tables, as well as calls to "event/dungeon dressing" tables.
- Level-specific wandering monster tables (with a B/X-modified version of the "DUNGEON RANDOM MONSTER LEVEL DETERMINATION MATRIX" table from the 1e DMG attached). Most intelligent entries here have at least one possible faction listed, common encounters(like goblins) have more than one.
- Compiled dungeon dressing tables (mostly C+P'ed out of the DMG). The tables here encompass lost items, inscriptions/graffiti (big nod to Nethack, here), sounds, air, and "weirdness".
- Master rumor table and example rumors. (These are in an extremely embrionic state, but there's enough there I could run a few sessions before using them all.)
- Faction "cheat sheet" done up in Excel. This contains any and all human, demihuman, and intelligent monster factions, and their relationships to each other. Knowing from the get-go that goblin tribe A hates goblin tribe B but pays tribute to Bugbear gang C while hiding from Gnoll band D can be super hella mega useful. Also helps immeasurably with city intrigue adventures. This sheet is also where I flesh out a lot of my random encounters - a nameless group of thieves has a guild to belong to, a group of acolytes becomes cultists of [EXPUNGED BY THE INQUISITION], etc.
- Random leftover stuff, like the "quest/geas" generator from JG's Ready Ref Sheets - great little mission generator, there.

And, of course,

- Dungeon levels. Originally drawn up in 5' scale (because I apparently hate trees and slim binders), now being transferred to "One Page Dungeon Template" format (see the link on the right side of this page) in 10' scale. Big props to everyone involved in this project, BTW - it's really helped me boil down my dungeons to what needs to be on the page.

I actually only have the "rat-whomping newbie level" and a few pages' worth of levels 1 and 2 mapped out so far, but there's enough there to occupy tomorrow's group (nobody who'll be there has been past Level 0 yet). Anybody falls down a chute, I'll pull out Appendix A from the DMG, no worries. The nice part is that the upper levels are nice and familiar to me, now (I've run several parties through them at this point), so they run pretty smooth in my head. Not having to refer to the key when describing a room is a cool feeling - I haven't been able to do that since I was a kid, when I used to run the example dungeon from the 1e Realms set again and again. (I still know the Halls of the Beast-Tamers pretty much by heart.)

So what I'll do in my spare time over the next day or so is to organize what I've got into a "DM's packet" where it's all in one place, and (in theory) that, the B/X booklets and my map binder should be all we need. I'll have a post-game up at some point on Wednesday. (Probably.)

- DYA

MY WORK IN PROGRESS IS A WORK IN PROGRESS

Now that I've abandoned the Known World map as a home for Zent-Mer, I have the happy task of creating a new wilderness map.  I'm weighing how much I want to plan out now, and how much I want to leave to random chance and/or development during play.

On the one hand, planning in advance lets me do an awful lot of "stocking" ahead of time.  Starting play with a fully-detailed wilderness area is certainly an attractive proposition.

On the other, it's a lot of work up front.  It's possible that a more organic approach, like generating "unlocated" hex contents and assigning them as the party travels, could be a good compromise.  Maybe with a few large hand-placed landmarks (like oceans, the big mountain ranges and forests, etc.).

I'm also trolling around trying to round up as many random terrain / hex contents / inhabitation generation methods as I can, in order to compare them and arrive at a solution for my campaign.  So far, the 1e DMG, Kellri's (completely indispensable) CDD#4 Old School Encounters Reference, the JG Wilderlands of High Fantasy and Dave Arneson's First Fantasy Campaign are the main sources.  (If you know of any others, hook it up!)  I also have a copy of the 2e-era "Worldbuilder's Guidebook", which takes a slightly more "top-down" approach than I had initially planned, but still could be worth another look.  (One of the better supplements from this era, for my money.)

Once I come up with an overall system I like, the real fun of actually generating this sucker comes in.  Me and the Ravaged Ruins tables are gonna get very cozy for a few minutes.

DYA