The Strata of Civilizations

Dungeons in general – and megadungeons in particular – are excellent at conveying the strata of civilization. Adventurers, like archeologists, find layers of progressively older civilizations as they dig deeper. Even the more archetypical (or stereotypical) D&D adventures – orcs in an abandoned dwarven mine, or bandits camping in the first level of an ancient tomb – fit this pattern, in a very simple way. But megadungeons have the scope to do it especially well.

Caverns of Thracia is an excellent model. Its factions tell the story of four civilizations, each different from the societies that came before them. And these civilizations are not merely window dressing; the PCs’ understanding of each group should change as they unravel the history of the dungeon (a history that no single faction understands completely). The beastmen will most likely be hostile to the PCs, and have many antagonistic individuals in their ranks; but the players may be more sympathetic to them after learning about their history of rebellion against death-worshiping slavers. Many modern dungeons trace influence directly from Thracia (the creator of Ardun Vul, for example, calls Caverns of Thracia “the greatest early (published) mega-dungeon”). Listening to the 3d6 Down the Line podcast's playthrough of Ardun Vul, it sounds like it learned those lessons well.

When a game fails to present coherent strata of civilization, it kills verisimilitude. I was immediately annoyed when I played last year's Zelda game (TotK) and it premised its action and exploration in the land of Hyrule on the discovery of an ancient lost civilization that once wielded great power (the Zonai). The previous Zelda game (BotW) had also been about a different ancient lost civilization that once wielded great power (the Sheikah).

There is no trace of the Zonai in BotW. Practically speaking, I understand that the game’s designers only created the Zonai during TotK’s development, well after BotW was complete. That’s why there’s no in-game logic to the relative ages of these civilizations, or a sense of how they might have influenced each other, or represented different eras in the world’s history. But no one forced the game’s designers to make that choice. They chose this incongruity. My immersion was broken. I didn’t believe that both of these societies had existed in the world of Hyrule, except as gamified plot devices.

It is worth noting that most previous Zelda games rebooted the world entirely with each new release, avoiding such continuity problems. The iterations of Hyrule in each game have connections and callbacks and overlapping ideas, but they avoid defining their cosmological and mythological relationships too clearly. With a few exceptions – including BotW and TotK – Zelda is a good example of loose canon. 

The Rise and Fall

When a dungeon (or other kind of adventuring site) tells the story of the strata of civilization, it is telling the story of the rise and fall of those civilizations. It is intimidating for a DM or game designer to try to communicate thousands of years of overlapping history through in-game action. I have found it helpful to avoid names and dates, and instead focus on culture, beliefs, traditions, and customs. The Fall of Civilizations podcast is an excellent source of these ideas. I get a half-dozen or more ideas for games from each episode.

There are many reasons for societal collapse, including but not limited to:

• Changing climate 
• Changes in water or soil quality or availability
• Exhaustion of finite resources
• Breakdown in internal or external commerce
• The retreat or fall of the society’s parent civilization or allied civilization
• The rise of an antagonistic civilization or civilizations

In a fantasy world, we can add others:

• The actions of gods or other supernatural entities
• The ravages of monsters, from lowly monstrous hordes to mighty dragons
• Epic magic, whether hostile action by an archwizard or misguided hubris by the society’s own high magus

These two lists can be merged quite easily. Ancient peoples often did attribute the natural to divine or supernatural boons or banes. We can simply make those connections explicit when crafting strata of civilization in a fantasy setting.

Irregular Layers

A new DM’s first go at a dungeon can be pretty simple. Their first floor is goblins, second floor is ghouls, third floor is gargoyles… and so on. Fine for a first effort, but experienced DMs and PCs will quickly begin to question why these creatures adhere to such artificial constraints. Iterating on this basic idea, the DM might spread goblins out into the surrounding countryside. Perhaps they were displaced from the second level of the dungeon when the ghouls were awakened from their tombs (with a handful of ghoul-goblins to show for it). The gargoyles, immune to the ghouls’ paralytic touch, have been herding them deeper into the dungeon to harass their enemies, the giants… and so on.

The dungeon levels, the factions that occupy them, and the strata of civilization don’t exist independently. They are spread over each other and interact.

Consider Thracia once again. While the first and second floors are dominated by its two “present day” factions, the older factions can be found quite early. Inquisitive players on the first level of the dungeon can find a hidden room – not far from the main entrance! – occupied by an ancient death priest, locked in stasis. A secret door on the second level can quickly take PCs to the abandoned temple where the Immortal King – one of the most dangerous creatures in the campaign – lies slumbering. When I ran Thracia, my players nearly stumbled right into the Immortal King’s tomb, but (wisely) retreated.

They Don’t Make Them Like This Anymore

The ruins of these civilizations are not interesting only for their archeological or anthropological value. Understanding who these people were could be one motivation for dungeon exploration, but it usually won’t be the primary one. 

Instead, it is the temptation of treasure and magic that brings adventurers to the dungeons of those ancient societies. Key to this idea is that there are things down beneath the ground that the modern world outside the dungeon no longer knows how to create. Magic and technology that has been lost or forgotten.

I have never enjoyed the style of D&D that developed in 2nd edition and hit its stride in 3rd edition, where magic items were neatly quantified tools that PCs could churn out during downtime (or, more likely, purchase from well-stocked shops). The very idea of a “magic shop” is anathema to me, except in specifically high fantasy settings. And high fantasy games have a proportionately weaker connection to the dungeon anyway; why go to the trouble of delving deep into a pit full of monsters when you can buy what you need from fantasy Walmart?

Standing in a store aisle, counting coins, and weighing the benefits of a Belt of Battle versus an Ioun Stone is not an interesting fictional scenario to me. The foolish and brave venturing deep into the depths to recover the lost arts of a forgotten age is more interesting.

Next Week: Cyclopean Masonry and Making Civilizations Feel Forgotten and Ancient

Grading Against Gremlin Game Design

I am a game designer! The great thing about TTRPGs is that anyone who has ever had to adjudicate something or make a ruling is essentially a game designer, even to a small degree. I have run games, hacked games, and even made some stuff that people I don’t personally know have used in their own games. Indeed, I think many people become game designers long before they name what they’re doing in that way.

So it was with interest that I read the Gremlin Game Designer's Creed, via the Indie RPG Newsletter featuring it. I found the 10 rules thought-provoking, so I went through each one in turn.

Rules are toys, and the process of rules-mediated play consists of smashing their faces together like little girls making their Barbies make out. Unless a rules module is explicitly intended to be enacted solo, it should present a generous surface area for other rules to bite into. The most elegantly self-contained piece of rules design is, collaboratively speaking, also the most useless.

This sounds sensible to me, but I would need to see a positive and negative example to really judge the worth of this rule.

The principal function of "player characters" as discrete collections of mechanical traits is to furnish each player with an assemblage of shiny things to show off to other players. Mechanical abstraction is well and good, but if you abstract away the act of curating one's collection of shinies, player engagement will suffer.

I’m less sure of this one. My rules-light brain gets suspicious whenever mechanical traits are in the spotlight, rather than the interactions they facilitate. At minimum, this obviously would not apply to solo games. Even in multiplayer GM-player-interaction games, I question how much to center something like this – what if others simply fail to notice or appreciate someone’s “shinies”? Is that a gameplay fail? 

All that said, I do agree that excessive abstraction is something to watch out for.

The GM, if present, is a fellow player. Ensure that they have their own toys and shinies to play with. The failure of a game to provide these is often a major contributor to why nobody wants to run it!

Seems fair, with the same caveat that we shouldn’t lose the forest for the trees.

The most effective way of encouraging players to do what you want is to make a number go up. This applies to both to rewards and to misfortunes; a number counting up to disaster a much more visceral motivator than a number counting down to zero.

This is the first one that really conflicts with my own experience. I have always favored countdowns, particularly for misfortunes. It’s so much easier to say “when it hits zero something bad happens” rather than having some moving target of a top number, different for each situation, even if I prominently display that number for players.

Crunch is good. The defining feature of tabletop roleplaying is that rules produce stories. The act of interpreting the outputs of the rules and the act of telling the game's story are the same activity. Be mindful of what kinds of stories your rules want to tell; you may find that their opinion on the matter differs from your own!

This again immediately raises questions. This would not be true of FKR games or matrix games. Are these less capable of “producing stories” than games with more crunch? And certainly I’ve played games where the amount of crunch was an obstacle to the telling of stories. 

Beyond that it seems fine – I agree that a lot of failed games seem to boil down to the GM and the players trying to tell a story that doesn’t fit with the ruleset employed.

Actually assembling your game's rules is as much a process of discovery as it is of invention. In the course of designing and playtesting, you may find that your own game has rules that you didn't know about. Where did they come from? It is a mystery.

This seems uncontroversial and correct. 

Randomised outcomes should be made mandatory with care and restraint; randomised outcomes should be made available with delirious abandon. As far as is practicable, players should always have the option of asking the dice what unhinged bullshit should happen next. Corollary: lookup tables are your friend.

This seems right and basically in keeping with an old-school approach, where dice might not be rolled for an entire session’s worth of traps and social negotiations, but will certainly come into play when the party drinks from the magic fountain. A lot of this comes down to maximum transparency about which courses of action will require a roll of the dice, and which ones won’t. The games I played didn’t state this specifically, but once I figure it out myself, I was struck by how many other issues it helped resolve.

Players don't need your permission to depart from the rules as written; granting it is arrogant. By the same token, however, it should never be unclear to players whether they're departing from the rules as written. Let the thought process behind what you're writing hang out for all the world to see; folks will be rummaging in the game's guts anyway, so give them easy access.

This seems fine as well, with the corollary that everyone should try to run every game as close to rules-as-written at least once, before departing from those rules. In other words, don’t start hacking a game before you’ve even played it (something I’ve been guilty of doing, oops).

If your game has a default setting, explain it as little as possible, but always let the rules and presentation reflect it. Seeing an entry for "poorly made dwarf" in a table of player character backgrounds will fire a group's imagination more strongly in three words than a chapter stuffed with worldbuilding lore could in ten thousand.

This is right, and I don’t think it’s an accident that they use the poorly made dwarf from Troika as an example. Troika lacks any kind of section explaining the world and the lore; it’s all implied through indirect references in various parts of the rules. The experience I first had reading the rules was just like what’s described above.

You don't need to be good at naming things as long as you're good at puns. Wordplay, alliteration and rhyme may also serve in this capacity, as, in a pinch, may a well placed dick joke.

I am one of those terrible people who professes to hate pun-based humor, then hypocritically uses it myself. My games are loaded with alliterative NPCs (Timothy Tyranny) and dumb homonyms (like an NPC who identified themself as “the trader/traitor,” intentionally pronouncing it ambiguously between the two words). I even put a Combination Pita Hutch and Tonic Well in the last one-shot I ran. A player’s offhand description of a giant parade float rat as “Icky Mouse” inspired an entire theme park parody arc. I am ashamed of this kind of thing but will probably never stop.

Knowledge Is Power, France Is Bacon

What do you think of the “Know Your Enemy” ability in D&D 5E.2014? If you are familiar with the game, and yet still respond to the question by saying some variation of “the what ability?” I don’t blame you. 

“Know Your Enemy” is the 7th level fighter (battle master) ability, allowing a character to observe or interact with a creature to learn if that creature is better or worse than the fighter across several statistics and other criteria.

Know Your Enemy: Starting at 7th level, if you spend at least 1 minute observing or interacting with another creature outside combat, you can learn certain information about its capabilities compared to your own. The DM tells you if the creature is your equal, superior, or inferior in regard to two of the following characteristics of your choice:

• Strength score
• Dexterity score
• Constitution score
• Armor Class
• Current hit points
• Total class levels (if any)
• Fighter class levels (if any)

This ability stands out from 5E’s heavy emphasis on combat and ability checks. While the parameters of the information feel overly prescribed, its focus on transparently delivering information without requiring a roll of the dice could almost work in OSR.

I have run thousands of hours of 5E, including a player taking a battlemaster character to 10th level, and this ability came up… maybe once? If even that?

I did hack a version of it for a rogue (thief) character, as a bonus “feat” based on in-game achievements and training. That worked out like this:

Superior Case: If you spend at least 1 minute observing or interacting with another creature outside combat, you can learn certain information about its resources compared to your own. The DM tells you if the creature is your equal, superior, or inferior in regard to two of the following characteristics of your choice: 

• Dexterity score
• Intelligence score
• Charisma score
• Perception skill modifier
• Wealth currently on their person
• Total wealth

I thought this was a neat fiction-forward ability… but it got about as much airtime as Know Your Enemy did. Players in 5E only have so much mental capacity to remember all the things their characters can do, and the rhythm of the game tends to push them toward combat and ability check-relevant class features.

What You Don't Know Can Hurt You

In another system, abilities that allow PCs to learn about antagonists before fighting them could be extremely powerful. In a game where knowledge is power – and going into a fight blind can be a death sentence – such abilities would be used all the time. But D&D 5E’s predominant play culture implicitly assumes that PCs can go into almost any fight cold, with no planning or prior information, and expect a winnable, level-appropriate challenge. 

I recently ran an Electric Bastionland one-shot, and while prepping, I noted that the Bastionland book goes to great lengths to emphasize that gathering information about antagonists is one of the most important things the players can be doing. If you start fights without a good sense of what you’re facing, you’ll get pasted.

And it was true! Trespassing near Hog Hall without much sense of who their antagonists could be, my players took some heavy hits from Musty the Mock Badger. But when they fought Abyss, they lured the robotic monstrosity into a trap, and prevailed. Some of the other monsters in the adventure drive this point home even more explicitly; the Ash Wraith (which my players wisely fled from) simply can’t be harmed by normal weapon attacks. The game does not bake in a mechanical solution to the Ash Wraith, as a 5E module would. The players have to figure it out. And the more information they have in advance, the better their chances.

Knowing Is Half the Battle

A different kind of game could put knowledge incentives at the center of its mechanical execution.

Consider a game where the level of danger in each situation is opaque. Sure, anyone can tell that the dragon is more dangerous than the goblin. But if all (or almost all) of the antagonists are humans or human-like creatures, with relatively few obvious indicators of their combat ability, it's less clear. And  moreso if the PCs themselves are relatively weak. A game focused on one-on-one duels between essentially normal mortal warriors would be a good example. 

You enter combat with a finite pool of dice. You can use them all at once, or one at a time, to execute attacks and actions. Combat is measured not in rounds, but in dice. It ends when your dice pool is empty. The antagonist attacks in response to each use of the dice, no matter how many or how few the PC rolls.

If the PC has little or no knowledge of their opponent, they may need to use these dice one at a time, in a series of probing strikes, to figure out what works and what doesn’t. This gives their opponent a lot of opportunities to hit back. But if the PC knows exactly what works on their opponent, they can use all the dice at once, potentially ending the fight before it really begins.

In such a system, it would be difficult for players to miss the value of learning about their opponents before fighting them.

Life at the Bottom

The Shaft

The shaft is a smooth-bored hexagonal hole, precisely 111 meters in diameter and 333 meters deep. No one knows how it was created or who made it, but its sides are unblemished and nothing grows upon it, or around its edges on the surface. 

Life at the Top

The shaft is strange and unusual. Occasionally, dwarven miners will travel from far-off lands to study its strange features. On very rare occasions, wizards will arrive, floating down from the sky or stepping sidewise through a tear in reality. They will pace its edges and mutter cryptically, then leave unsatisfied. 

The rest of the time, the shaft is just a big hole in the ground, and to normal folk, a simple curiosity. Children dare each other to step close to the edge. Lovers inscribe secret vows on stones and toss them into the depths. Criminals disposing of evidence heave their victims into its unquestioning darkness.

Life at the Bottom

But people live down there, in an expansive natural cavern at the terminus of the shaft. They are humans, or human-like, or people that were once human generations ago, but have turned into something else, something rich and strange. 

Light, Precious Light

Natural light is at a premium down there. Much more than space, or water, or soil. The sun is only an abstract idea to these denizens. The photosynthesizing plants that grow down here are carefully nurtured so that each receives enough light to grow, corresponding with its usefulness to the bottom-dwellers as food, or medicine, or something else. The walls of the shaft allow no purchase for growing things, but around the bottom, scaffolding has been erected from bone, metal, and stone, to ensure that whatever hardy plants can live on the thin, distant light are able to grow in abundance.

Beyond the scaffolding, throughout the cavern, there are mirrors. The mirrors are ancient, impossibly polished, seemingly perfect, perhaps left over from the same forgotten entity or civilization that carved the shaft itself. Placed carefully around the perimeter of the shaft-bottom, they expand the reach of the sun’s light.

Treasures from Above

Things fall down from above all the time. Most of it would be viewed by surface-dwellers as random, stupid, useless. But it is precious to the people at the bottom. Detritus is compost. Metal can be repurposed. Dead animals are like aliens from another world.

Venturing Forth 

The shaft is light and light is life. The first rule of the people at the bottom is to stay near the light, because it offers something that no one else underground has. Even with the scaffolding, even with the mirrors, even with mushrooms and deep-rooted geophytes; there is only so much food down here. The population must be strictly, mercilessly, sometimes cruelly controlled.

Some people don’t like it. Some people think there must be a better way. To go up. Not up the shaft, which is impossible to climb by any known means. Instead out, horizontally, and then up through the tunnels and caves and ancient dungeon hallways that spread out around the shaft.

Or… and this idea is only whispered by the most heterodox of the shaft-bottom-dwellers… go not up, or out, but down, further into the depths. The true heresy.

This is you. You are a level 1 adventurer. You are leaving the shaft bottom forever. Where will you go?