Death in Depth Within the Mythic Underworld

One of the signature motifs of the OSR genre is that the dungeon is the mythic underworld. What if it is also the literal underworld?

If a PC dies within the dungeon, their soul is banished to the underworld… which is to say, a deeper part of the dungeon. How deep? Take the character’s current level, round down to the closest standard die size used in the game, and roll that die. That’s how many levels down they go from where they died.

For example, say a fifth-level character dies on the third level of the dungeon. The player rounds down from five to four. They roll a d4 and the result is a 3. The current level plus three means their soul is now trapped on the sixth level of the dungeon.

The soul might descend straight down, or they may be sent to some random part of the new level. The character’s soul cannot do anything about their predicament on their own. They are a shade, lacking the physicality and ego to alter their situation. They will drift endlessly down here… unless their companions decide to come rescue them.

"Babe please come back you were only 30 XP away from leveling up"

Complicating Rescue 

Exploring the dungeon is a dangerous idea. Attempting to save a soul trapped in the dungeon is much riskier. The additional danger can take a few forms.

Bargain

The rescue party has to make a deal with someone to take the rescued soul back up to the surface. The doomed soul is literally bound by high magic (ninth-level equivalent or greater) to the dungeon floor they’re on. But there’s someone on this dungeon level who can make an exception. This might be a literal lord of the afterlife, gatekeeper, or psychopomp. Or it may be some ordinary dungeon faction or monster that has been gifted this authority by the dungeon’s gestalt consciousness. Either way, this is no ordinary jailbreak. The PCs should be expected to do something difficult or give up something precious to bargain for the lost soul. 

Fade

The lost soul is fading. Shades only last so long before their consciousness dilutes into the ambient fabric of the underworld. If you want to rescue them, you’re on the clock. It is at the DM’s discretion how much time the PCs have, but it should be known to them (or discoverable), and the more powerful the lost soul, the shorter the clock. 

Exchange

The soul can be returned to the surface, but another soul must take its place. It must be a willing soul, not some innocent or random dungeon denizen kidnapped from an upper level (or at least, it can’t be without serious consequences for this crime, which is not just an ethical and moral issue, but also a violation of the rules of the afterlife). It must be a member of the party, or someone they care deeply about, and the sacrificed soul can’t later be rescued in turn; they’re gone forever.

Geas

The rescued soul can leave, but only because Death has found a greater purpose for them. Perhaps some far greater transgressor is out there in the world – a lich or another immortal whose soul, so long withheld from the reaper’s rightful grasp, has become a rich prize. The rescued soul is bound to pursue whatever quest Death gives them. As with other consequences, this is high magic, and is (almost) impossible to subvert or cheat.

Next Week: Worldbuilding Implications of the Megadungeon as Literal Underworld

Chromatic Dragon Types as Developmental Stages

We are inspired once again by one of my favorite worldbuilding blog posts. What happens if we discover that the classic colors of the chromatic dragons are not different lineages, but different stages  in the development of all such dragons?

White dragons are wyrmlings. The coloration of their scales is not so much truly “white” as it is a lack of pigmentation. Viewed up close, white dragon scales are almost translucent; although viewing a dragon up close is not advised, even at this young age. Humans refer to the white dragon as “the least intelligent” and “most animalistic,” but it is not because they are some inferior strain of dragonkind; they are simply immature dragons.

In its newborn state, the white dragon is a heat sink, literally absorbing heat from the environment around it. Its frosty cold breath weapon is not so much a matter of inducing cold as it is one of removing heat. A white dragon's tolerance for very cold temperatures is also an evolutionary adaptation that keeps it away from other, older dragons, who favor warmer climes, and might punish a white wyrmling for unwittingly trespassing on their territory.

Black dragons are young dragons. Their wyrmling scales have gradually absorbed enough light from the sun (harvesting that heat) to darken to a steel-gray or purple-black color. They are too big to continue to capture energy passively from the environment around them like wyrmlings, so they begin to take more energy from consuming ever-larger prey. Their breath no longer freezes. Instead, internal apoptosis begins to destroy the organs that drove the dragon’s early growth as a wyrmling, which they no longer need. The remains of these organs are liquified, stored in a special sac, and mixed with bile (plus any indigestible prey remains) to produce the acidic slurry breath of the black dragon stage.

Dracologists are still working to understand the symbiotic dragon-princess relationship (painting by Hans Arnold)

Green and blue dragons are adult dragons. The dull black scales of the young black dragon gradually take on particularly greenish luster, influenced by chlorine production from a new organ within the dragon’s body, nestled between the lungs. Chlorine is one of a number of gasses that the dragon can now expel in place of the acidic breath it left behind with its juvenile state. 

When the gas organ is sufficiently mature, one of the most interesting stages of draconic development begins; the gas “turns itself off.” The dragon instinctively throttles its gas-breathing function, leaving it without its breath weapon for a period of weeks or months (dragons will almost always retreat to hidden lairs during this vulnerable time). The scales, deprived of trace chlorine, transition to a deep sapphire blue. While in hiding, the dragon will seek out a rocky surface incorporating diamond or some similarly hard material, using it to scrape away at a layer of keratin on the roof of its mouth, exposing a conductive spur. It emerges as a blue dragon, breathing bolts of lightning at all who oppose it.

The sequencing of the green and blue phases, and the dragon’s instinct to cease breathing gas, long mystified scholars. But it is now believed to be a very practical adaptation. A dragon both able to breath flammable gas and to provide a spark of ignition risks quite literally igniting its insides and blowing itself up (the chlorine itself isn't flammable, but can enhance the combustibility of the other expelled gasses). By separating the developments into different phases – and repressing the preceding phase during the second phase – the dragon learns to master both effects.

Once the dragon can both breathe gas and ignite it without endangering itself, it can begin its final transformation. This typically involves nesting in a large horde for decades, even centuries. During this time, the dragon undergoes a slow molting process, losing its blue scales, and drawing trace metals from the hoard around it to reinforce its underlying “true” scales, which are a brilliant ruby red. 

The dragon is now an ancient dragon, a red dragon, a true dragon. The dragon is ready to rule. The world is ready to burn.

Unfinished Business: Complicating Resources Like a Scene in a Film

Many games give players “resources” as an extension of character creation or advancement. Some of those resources are people. Family members, former colleagues, friends, and so forth.

It can be difficult to introduce these resources into the game in an evocative, dramatic, interactive way, because everyone knows that the resources are character features, and ludologically, not so different from a piece of equipment or a special ability.

How can we make these resources feel more like tangible elements of the fictional world? One way is to steal a trick from films. 

Imagine this scene in a movie; you’ve almost certainly seen it before. A character needs something to achieve their goals. Information, access, tools, whatever. They know someone who can help, but because of something that happened in their shared past, they are reluctant to reach out, and know this person will not be happy to see them.

Trainspotting 2

Why? 

The second-person subject in each result below refers to the PC in question, while the third-person object refers to the resource.

1. Unpaid debts. You owed money or wealth of some kind. They may want compensation with interest; or may have decided that money alone isn’t going to be enough to make things right.
2. You ended on bad terms. You argued, litigated, fought, or worse. Time has not healed any wounds, and they are ready to pick up the struggle where it left off.
3. Your connection was more than professional. Bodies or feelings were in play, and they were either left hanging, or punished after you left. Their reaction to you will be complicated and extreme, and they will be very interested in what personal relationships you’ve made since.
4. Respect has faded. They looked up to you, admired you, or perhaps saw you as the only "real" one. The circumstances of your departure or your long time away have dimmed that esteem. They don’t believe you still have whatever made you stand out back then. They will want you to prove it before they help you.
5. Competing obligations. Since you last met, they’ve started a family, committed themselves to a cause, or otherwise entangled themselves in obligations that rival or overshadow whatever loyalty they once had to you.
6. You’ve changed. They are disturbed by, curious about, or obsessed with how different you are since the last time they saw you. They’re going to have a lot of questions about what has happened to you and what you’ve done, and won’t take kindly to disambiguation. 
7. Old rivals. Whether you were sparring in the dojo or performing on stage, you were their only real competition. They still think they’re better than you, and want to prove it before they offer any help.
8. Left behind. You escaped. They didn’t. Maybe you thought they were as good as dead, or maybe you were just looking out for number one. They’re going to expect you to answer for leaving without them before they lift a finger.

As with any game element, these should not be punitive; if the resource is something the character earned through advancement or by virtue of their class, playbook, whatever – they need to have it. But these kinds of ideas can be useful when a mixed success or an emergent complication suggests the game needs some friction. 

In Praise of Location-Based Scenario Design

Two of the recent games I have run are “travel” games. In one, the premise is that the characters wake up on a train without their memories. The train moves from place to place, and as they explore each stop on the train’s journey, they uncover clues related to their predicament. In the other game, the players are afflicted with a mysterious magical condition that causes them to Plane Shift randomly through the multiverse, encountering dangerous and unexpected situations.

I’ve enjoyed running both of these games, and I don’t regret pitching them to the players… but they had the unexpected side-effect of making me miss location-based play.

You won’t typically see it printed on the label, but “location-based play” is important to old-school D&D and similar games. The dungeon is not just an abstraction, or the place where the monsters are, but also a literal constraint around the possible actions the characters can take. The location where the adventure takes place creates time pressure, facilitates antagonist action, and intrinsically offers a series of risks and rewards.

The traveling games I ran were more scene-based. The scope of action is less constrained, if at all. Pressure and conflict have to be induced more deliberately.

Running these scene-based games made me appreciate how much location-based play does some of the work on the GM’s behalf. Listening to 3d6 Down the Line’s excellent Adren Vul podcast also drove the point home. A fixed location like a megadungeon organically induces factions, monsters, NPCs, traps, hazards, treasure, and other “game objects” to bounce off each other. 

One of the best aspects of location-based play is that this occurs organically. The GM barely needs to think about it; these interactions intuitively descend from the character of the location itself.  

A scene-based game can and often should re-introduce known concepts periodically, yes. But it takes more work. How did they get there? Why have they shown up again in such a different context? Embracing serendipity as a law of the universe can help, but it will also tax verisimilitude more heavily than simple physical proximity.

A rich location can create its own intrigue and adventure -- illustration by Artur Skizhali-Veys

The difference between location-based and scene-based scenarios may seem obvious, but it’s quite common to see people mix them up. Take, for example, the five-room dungeon concept, created by Johnn Four. The five-room dungeon idea is a preparation shortcut for a TTRPG session. At a glance, “five-room dungeon” sounds like a location-based style of play; it’s a way to make a dungeon, right?

Not really; reading in more detail, it’s clear this is actually a scene-based approach. Four cites Joseph Campbell of “Hero With a Thousand Faces” fame and says “It's the story framework that matters most for great gaming.” That statement likely sounds fine to trad or modern gamers, but is antithetical to OSR gamers, i.e., those who most promote location-based situations. 

Four seems to recognize that the name is a misnomer, clarifying that it is not limited to fantasy games. To the degree five-room dungeons involve locations, they are essentially a way of building what old-school games would call a “lair”; a small dangerous place, perhaps waiting to be discovered while exploring a hex. The lair may have one or more monsters, and the possibility of treasure, hazards, and challenges. It’s probably enough to fill a single session of play. But it fundamentally lacks the promise of exploration that characterizes dungeons, and it is expressly linear. 

There’s enough confusion out there that I saw someone in one instance trying to create a megadungeon by clustering five-room dungeons together! Could that work? Well, maybe. But I think it would have to be done very carefully and deliberately, as it’s a matter of combining two scenario design techniques from diametrically different schools of play.

Polytheism, Belief, and Ritual in Fantasy RPGs

Consider the following scenario in a fantasy RPG. While traveling, the PCs arrive at a small village. The villagers tell them that for many generations, the people in the village have left offerings for local spirits. The spirits in turn protect the village. If the village ever fails to make the annual sacrifice, the spirits will be angry. Oral histories attest to this, but there's no other evidence. The offerings make up a significant chunk of the small village’s agricultural output and could otherwise be used to improve their practical welfare.

What will the PCs make of this? If your players are like most players I have met while gaming – basically modern material realists whose spiritual beliefs are centered on personal morality rather than community ritual – they will probably be skeptical of the villagers’ choices. Their first thought will be that this is a waste, or at best, something that preserves community cohesion at significant expense. Because players subconsciously have their ear out for an adventure hook, they may also suspect that some malevolent local creature is manipulating the villagers.

So that’s what the players probably think. But what do their characters think, in a purely in-world sense? They would have to take this situation pretty seriously! There would be room for doubt, but they couldn’t scoff at it out of hand.

Why? When thinking about fantasy worldbuilding, it is helpful to remember how ancient people interpreted gods, spirits, magic, and the unknown. They were not ignorant or backward or “superstitious” in an abstract sense. They were making sense of the world in a way that was pragmatic and sensible within the context of what they knew.

I was thinking about this question in part because of a series of posts on the excellent A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry blog on how ritual works in a polytheistic world. The author, Bret Devereaux, makes an important point that more games should factor into their worldbuilding:

"The most important thing to understand about most polytheistic belief systems is that they are fundamentally practical. They are not about moral belief, but about practical knowledge."

Why does this matter for RPGs? Well, he begins the first post on ancient polytheistic beliefs with a few screenshots from the Pillars of Eternity and Pathfinder video games. He points out how the fantasy RPG adoption of religion – for ethical or philosophical reasons – differs greatly from the real-world adoption of religion.

East God by Ching Yeh. The gods are not your friends! They do offer power tho...

Clerics, paladins, and other believers in modern D&D basically act like monotheistic thinkers in a polytheistic world. They choose one system, and the stronger their belief, the greater the power granted by that god. 

"Because many gods can produce practical results for you – both good and bad! – you cannot pick and choose, but must venerate many of the relevant gods."

A cleric or paladin in a polytheistic world shouldn’t be a one-true-god diehard. Instead, they should have multiple, flexible arrangements with various gods, balancing the power they offer with their contrasting goals and powers. The fact that fantasy gods are proven to exist and not an article of faith actually makes this more true in a fantasy world than it already is in the real world. A cleric’s advancement should be a careful accumulation of bonds and credits with various relevant gods, uncovering the mysteries of their desires and actions, rather than a linear escalation in the ranks of a single institution of the true faithful.

It is interesting that the original cleric of D&D in 1974 was closer to this ideal than later iterations. They were defined more by their alignment than commitments to particular gods. In contrast, modern D&D presupposes that a single god grants all of a cleric’s spells. Some editions played around with spheres, allowing clerics to tailor their focus, but modern D&D mostly gives some bonuses for the spells closest to the deity’s heart, and then calls it a day. 

In the second post in the series, Devereaux notes that the “core of religious practice is thus a sort of bargain, where the human offers or promises something and (hopefully) the god responds in kind, in order to effect a specific outcome on the world.”  

Imagine being a cleric in a world that works like this. What if you want to cast Spiritual Weapon? If you are lucky, perhaps you have a choice to pray to Athena or Ares. Perhaps praying to one will make it harder to seek the aid of the other in the future. Perhaps only Hades can grant the spell Raise Dead, and that’s a big commitment. In such a system, the variety of spells available is constrained not so much by spheres and lists as it is constrained by how many deals the cleric can balance without fatally angering any particular god.

In this way I am a fan of how relics in Knave 2 are so clearly framed as exchanges with particular gods. Compared to modern D&D, this magic is very distinct from arcane spells. It's a form of extrinsic advancement. And it really delivers on the idea of a world with living, active gods, rather than remote, abstract philosophical concepts.

When Is a Nerf Actually a Buff?

When is reducing the power of a character’s ability (“nerfing” it) actually making it stronger, in the context of a specific campaign or game concept? When the original character ability solves a challenge so completely that GMs simply stop including that challenge in the game. A nerf to such an ability returns that ability to relevance.

I ran a multi-year D&D 5E game from first level to well beyond 20th level. D&D 5E uses banded accuracy to control the runaway escalation of bonuses and modifiers that plagued previous editions. Banded accuracy works pretty well through the first 10 levels, but D&D 5E kinda falls apart beyond that point (although that can actually make the game more interesting). The following examples are all based on the 2014 version of 5E; the principle is less likely to occur in OSR or story games, where there’s less of a presumption of power balance. But the underlying idea is worth keeping in mind for all games.

For example, rogues at 11th level get an ability called Reliable Talent, which effectively puts a floor on their proficient skills. With Reliable Talent, the Expertise ability, a pair of thieves’ gloves, and a maxed-out Dexterity score, the party rogue in this game rolled dexterity-based skill checks ranging from the high teens to the mid-30s. 

For skills like stealth, this was manageable, because there was always room for enemy countermeasures. The highest stealth roll in the world won’t negate the effect of Alarm, a first-level spell that can be cast as a ritual. And an individual character with very high stealth tends to separate themselves from the group in ways that create interesting situations. 

But what about skills that have less prominent counter-play? What about picking locks? When designing locations for the party, I struggled with how to lock the damn doors in a way that was ludologically meaningful. This was the theme of several of my earliest posts, about how quickly a mundane locked door ceases to be a meaningful barrier in D&D.

Lockpicking in Hillsfar (1989) 

I had the following options, none of them great.

1. I could leave locked doors out of the game entirely. Not realistic, and would negate the ability the rogue had invested in building up.
2. I could inflate the DCs, preserving the challenge. But it would be transparently obvious that I was doing so artificially to “counter” the unbounded scaling of this particular ability.
3. I could leave locked doors in the game, but bypass the wasted time of rolling, and just say the rogue succeeds unless there is a trap or other complicating element. 
4. I could nerf the rogue’s skill to bring it back into line with the bounded accuracy system.

At the time, I went with a combination of options 1 and 3. I was never entirely satisfied with how those played out. I think option 2 is simply wrong. Option 4 was hard to consider for an ongoing game, but was… interesting.

Let’s consider another example. Paladins in 5E can easily cure non-magical diseases. On paper, this is evocative and makes sense. In practice, this means that most 5E games don’t bother to include non-magical diseases in their scenarios. I had a paladin in that 1-20+ 5E game as well, and the ability to cure non-magical diseases came up… two or three times? Not nothing, but it was very rare.

So what if we nerfed the paladin’s ability? How could that possibly be a buff?

Because if the nerf allows disease to matter in the game, the paladin will actually have opportunities to use the ability.

Imagine a campaign setting dominated and defined by a widespread, highly contagious plague. Even if the GM nerfed the paladin’s ability to cure diseases, relative to the 5E base rules, a player might get a lot more use out of that ability in a situation where the challenges include the presence of disease everywhere. 

There are more possible examples. The 2014 5E ranger famously has exploration- and survival-oriented abilities that, uh, basically trivialize traditional RPG exploration and survival. Getting lost and getting hungry are uninteresting challenges in a 5E group that includes a ranger (or to some degree, a character with the outlander background). Weaken that ability… and the ranger, counter-intuitively, becomes more useful and interesting, because navigation and survival are real dangers in a game where the ranger doesn't trivialize these challenges.

There are probably other examples, but this is enough to say – consider instances where nerfing an ability will actually make it more relevant to gameplay. If this is session zero, discuss it with the players. If you’re hacking a game in progress, talk to the players and see what abilities they have that they rarely use. You might be surprised how readily players will sacrifice a bit of on-paper power to ensure the DM can actually create opportunities for them to use those unique abilities.

Heist Logic: Why the Guards Stand Down in a TTRPG

False Machine had a nice post about the Thief video game series, its emphasis on stealth, and what aspects of the game can (and cannot) be applied to TTRPGs.

A useful comment by Kyana focuses on a particular issue for TTRPGs; how and why does security “reset” after an incursion? 

Thief (1981) Michael Mann

I haven’t played the Thief games, but I’ve certainly seen the same problem in other video games, like Metal Gear Solid. You’re spotted in a secure area by multiple antagonists, the whole place goes on high alert, you’re caught in a firefight, grenades are exploding, soldiers are dying. But after 90 seconds spent hiding in a locker, the game reverts to its baseline state, and the guards resume normal patrols, as if nothing happened.

Video game players accept this artifice because it facilitates good gameplay. It would certainly be realistic if you had to wait hours (or days, or indefinitely) for the guards to stand down from high alert, but it would also certainly be boring. So the game speeds past the boring part and gets back to the fun part.

TTRPGs also endeavor to speed past the boring part and get to the good stuff, but they also have a generally higher expectation of verisimilitude than video games do. This is, in part, because players in a GM-led game expect the GM to dynamically react to PC action in a way that is impossible (thus far, at least) for a video game to match. 

So say you’re running a heist or infiltration in D&D or a similar game – basically, any game that isn’t like Blades in the Dark, which has built-in procedure for heist complications and failure states. You need a plan for how and why the guards are going to stand down or otherwise redirect attention in a reasonable amount of time, because you don’t want a single guard sighting to botch the entire enterprise. What kind of circumstances and conditions can we add to prolong the heist without resorting to video game-level suspension of disbelief?

1. Misdirected response. The guards react, but deploy their resources in the wrong place. Perhaps they cut off exits while the players are still delving deeper into the facility, or move to protect the big boss when the players are really after the MacGuffin. 
2. Expecting someone else. A twist on the above. The defenders suspect a completely different adversary is behind the incursion. Either directly (if they didn’t get a good look at the PCs) or indirectly (they presume the PC party is a decoy, or merely an illusion, or similar). It might be a faction or NPC that the PCs know, or even a group they weren’t already aware of. Either way, the defenders’ reaction to the perceived “true” threat wastes time or resources that give the PCs a renewed opportunity.
3. Multiple infiltrators. Twisting the above in a different direction, there actually are other infiltrators, unconnected to the party, whether here for the same prize, or something unrelated. The defenders catch one of the other individuals or groups infiltrating, taking some heat off the PCs. 
4. They don’t appreciate what they have. Most of these options presume that the defenders have a good idea of what they’re protecting. But if they don’t – if they’re unaware of the value of what they have, or don’t even realize it is within their area of control – the nature of the heist changes, and it’s more plausible that their reaction would be delayed, misdirected, or ineffectual.
5. A crisis is also an opportunity. There’s some internal conflict within the defenders’ ranks. Maybe a second-in-command wants a shot at leadership, or a sub-faction wants to leverage the situation against a rival sub-faction. Resources are spent primarily to advance this goal, rather than respond in full to the threat presented by the PCs.
6. Environmental distraction or complication. “Environmental” in this instance is just shorthand for something happening independent of any faction action. Something in the scenario outside the defenders’ control hinders their response. It could be bad weather, wild animals, invasive plants, stellar emissions, localized tremors, or even some supernatural effect of the MacGuffin itself. 
7. The heist is counterintuitively helpful in some way to the defenders of the location, and tacitly allowed to proceed. The aforementioned Metal Gear Solid game does this. The antagonist actually needs the protagonist to succeed, at least in part, to advance their overall plan, so some suboptimal efforts by the guards can be interpreted as an intentional ploy. But be careful with this one, as it can stray into gotcha-style GMing. The antagonists’ goal should probably be orthogonal to whatever the PCs are trying to do, rather than a direct negation of their success, so that circumstances out of their control or awareness can’t rob them of a win if they complete the heist.
8. Dumb but dangerous. This is essentially what Patrick recommended in the False Machine post with his ogre guards. Aggressive, loyal servants with goldfish memories are good antagonists during a heist. 
9. Programmed guards. Some or all of the guards act programmatically. They are undead, golems, trained animals, robots, mind-controlled servants, or similar. They can patrol, pursue, and attack, but they don’t have the capacity to react in complex, adaptive ways to PC action. The PCs can take advantage of this to continue the heist even if they’ve been spotted once.
10. A wizard did it. Similar to the above, but more open-ended. Perhaps the wizard or other magical antagonist is so paranoid that they dose their guards with amnesia-inducing chemicals. Perhaps the guards are all charmed, and some of the enchantments breaking (due to accident or PC intervention) disrupt an organized response to an alarm.
11. Magical passage of time. Remember how we said it would be realistic but boring to wait a really long time for the guards to stand down from a high alert? In a fantasy world with magic, that’s not a hard limitation on PC solutions. Some kind of magical item that allows them to do a duration-extended Rope Trick or similar effect could go a long way here. In this instance, the heist goes on, but every failure requires waiting some long period of (in-game) time, with possible complications in the outside world. This trick is the twist to a certain heist movie, where the protagonist waits out the guards for an implausibly long time. Hiding for spoiler purposes, but I'm talking about Inside Man (2006).
12. Life is complicated and mistakes happen. The simplest explanation of all. If you read accounts of real-world revolutions, battles, and other pivotal historical moments, it’s amazing how often the fate of nations and peoples hinges on situations where people simply make a lot of mistakes, fail to communicate, or organize suboptimally, and those errors domino out of control. Defending a secure location is quite complex, and some security failures are going to boil down to this kind of thing.