The Prison Megadungeon: Designing an Escape Megafunnel

Safe at Home 

Prisoners are thrown into The Pit, but the fall does not harm them. In an earlier age, these dungeons were part of The Palace, and visitors would float down this shaft as a thrilling diversion. The same magic persists in the structure's current purpose, but it is merely a small mercy for the condemned.

The area at and around the bottom of The Pit is the sanctuary. Most of the prisoners stay very close to this location. The jailers provide food and water from above, but only enough to keep the prisoners alive. The only other provisions provided are candles. So many candles. The Sisterhood of Benevolent Abstraction receive favorable tax treatment for the production of the candles, so they send scads of them. All supplies are simply thrown into the slow-fall field of the shaft and float down to the waiting people below. The prisoners never even see their captors.

The sanctuary is safe. Just as the shaft is enchanted with Feather Fall, some ancient Sanctuary or Hallow spell shields this place from harm, and none of the monsters of the surrounding dungeon halls will enter this place. No threats from the dungeon can come here. Adventure does not happen here, experience cannot be gained here, and nothing new will be found here unless the PCs bring it there. The sanctuary follows the same principles as West Marches settlements; it is a place between adventures, not a place of adventures.

The sanctuary is a source of new PCs, hirelings, and henchmen. There are always some number of prisoners here. How many there are and who they are is a quantum aspect of the game. They only come into focus when the players need them. 

It is also a place for downtime to happen. Any downtime activity that could be done in a settlement can be done here – if the PCs can come up with a plausible plan for acquiring the necessary resources. Expertise might be available within the pool of prisoners, or might be something a shrine could offer. The people in this space are really more of a resource the PCs can leverage, rather than distinct NPCs the DM will personify (although the DM may adjudicate what these NPCs need in order to do what the players want, and what they will refuse to do, in the same way the DM would step in to control the actions of a hireling who was otherwise directed about by a PC). 

Up Above

Returning up the shaft is not a realistic option. At least, not at first. The walls of the cylinder are 200’ of smooth stone, and there is not remotely enough material at the bottom to build even makeshift platforms. The hole is set in the middle of the ceiling, not close to the walls, and covered by a heavy metal trapdoor that is winched open and closed by jailers overseeing four burly, ribbiting froxen. Beyond that aperture, several layers of protection within the prison itself stand between a would-be escapee and freedom.

All that said, it is not impossible to escape in this manner. If the PCs come up with an ingenious plan, going up the shaft and turning the tables on their jailers should be celebrated. But we presume that doing so will require at least some engagement with the megadungeon itself, to gather either the power or the resources to execute such a daring reversal.

The First Shrine

Near the sanctuary is the first shrine, the home of Carnyhollow. Carny is a “demon” in a technical sense, but lacks the willpower and can-do attitude required of an extraplanar entity to manifest a discernible moral position. It mostly just wants to accumulate wealth in exchange for junk.

At request, Carny can transform an object or objects into something else of one-tenth or less the value. For example, if 50’ of rope is valued at 10 silver coins, Jerry would require at least 100 silver coins worth of treasure to produce the rope. 

He is indifferent to the type of treasure, but absolutely will not haggle or discount his price. 

He will accept magical items, but can only produce nonmagical things in return, and will be conservative in guessing a value for a magical item without a clearly implied value. 

He can only produce generic items and cannot customize them. He can create blank paper, but not specific books. He can create a padlock and matching key, but cannot create a key for a specific door in the dungeon. 

The equipment list for the system in use is a good proxy for what Carny can create, and the DM can use common sense and liberally reject any requests that stray far from it.

Carny is most immediately useful as a supplier of basic equipment and an immediate use for treasure, but the party can consider more elaborate schemes as they acquire more riches.

Any dissatisfaction the PCs may express with Carny's terms should also motivate exploration. It is hardly the only such creature offering such services in the dungeon, and any friction the PCs experience with any particular NPC or antagonist should serve as a motivation to explore further.

Three Tiers of Maps (for the DM)

We’ll go through (at least) three tiers of planning out the dimensions of our megadungeon. 

• A diagram showing only hard and soft barriers or exploration complications; verticality and danger levels; and treasure targets.
• A very loose and sloppy map that converts this diagram into approximate rooms and overlays factions and major points of interest onto it. 
• A proper keyed map that fills in room-by-room contents. 

Three Tiers of Maps (for the PCs)

To create concordance between planning the game and executing it, we will aspire for symmetry. We’ll provide (at least) three kinds of maps that PCs can find.

We want maps to be a highly prized resource. Even the humblest map might at least indicate the position of a trap or threat. In a high lethality game, that could save a PC’s life. 

Recent and improvised. The PCs are not the first to explore these halls. Other prisoners have ventured out into the darkness, hoping to find treasure to trade at shrines, or even dreaming (foolishly) of escape. A map may be a crude series of lines on trash wedged under a door, or hurried chalk markings on a wall, or a self-applied tattoo on a corpse that didn’t make it out.

These maps are helpful for understanding recent and proximate threats and opportunities, but they won’t convey any deeper understanding of the dungeon.

Modern and carceral. Maps were required to turn this place from The Palace into The Pit. Perhaps the jailers were sloppy or indifferent to how this might aid prisoners. Perhaps they were in a hurry to leave this dangerous place and didn’t remove all signs of their work. Perhaps some of them were left behind here, buried with their plans. Perhaps that was intentional. These maps are helpful for understanding barriers and obstacles, and where the divergence between the structure's original purpose and its repurposing can create opportunities for the PCs.

Ancient and original. Beautiful blueprints made thousands of years ago. These maps are helpful for finding secrets and understanding magic, and locating particularly valuable treasures. None of these maps are perfect, because each is of its respective time and ignorant of what came before and after. But they are all useful, because they are foundational, and in many respects contain information not known anywhere else.

The Prison Megadungeon: Into the Pit

The Pit* was something else in the past, something important. But now it is a hole in the ground where The City sends those it does not want. They do not execute you because the dungeon is hungry and it must be fed. The Pit is a prison. It is a dungeon. You are here.

Funnel-First Design

Characters start as level 0 ordinary humans with no special abilities and no equipment. Lair of the Lamb does this well, and it is useful in a number of interrelated ways.

• Character creation and the rules are part of gameplay
• Problems must be solved diegetically (“the answer is not on your character sheet” is pretty obviously true if it is a blank piece of paper) 
• Adding “stuff” to your character increases complexity gradually

Diegetic Classes and Ancestries 

Most funnels work like this: The players each control several level 0 commoners. Many of those commoners die during the adventure, “funneling” the players toward a dwindling group of survivors. At some point the funnel adventure ends, and the survivors graduate into conventional level 1 PCs. 

Most of the funnels I have seen do not require that the events of the funnel relate in any way to the resulting choice. If your surviving commoner’s highest stat is intelligence, you can make them a level 1 wizard, whether or not they had any interaction with the arcane during the funnel. That’s fine, but it is an example of intrinsic growth. Our PCs are nobodies who start with nothing, so we want to feature extrinsic growth more prominently.

So we’ll make the level 0 to level 1 transition more literal. A PC who wants to become a wizard needs to find something in the world that makes them a wizard. And this is true of every step of character creation and advancement. It must be something within the dungeon, not within the character. 

Shrines

What makes our wizard a wizard? If we choose a classless system like Knave, this problem solves itself. Equipment functionally determines “class,” so we already have an extrinsic solution to this problem. 

What if we are running a system with dedicated classes? The aspiring wizard would simply need to do two things:

• Acquire at least one distinctly wizardly item
• Expend treasure at a shrine

Shrines can have different aesthetics and names, but mechanically, each shrine is a place where treasure can be exchanged for XP. And that includes the XP required to advance from level 0 to level 1.

Many systems do not specify how much XP is required to go from level 0 to level 1, but we can reverse engineer it from later level progression. For example, D&D 5E.2014 requires 300 XP to advance to level 2, and 900 XP to hit level 3. We could choose 100 XP as the threshold to hit level 1. 

For a game feature that we want to be readily available to players – like reaching level 1 in a basic class – we want the price in treasure to be low, and the shrine to be close to where the PCs begin. More niche or difficult goals can require either more treasure, or visiting a more distant shrine (or both). Or a very specific type of treasure. 

Hungry Gods

Pelor will not help you. Even if he was canon, his sunlight doesn’t reach down here. If you want divine aid, you’re going to have to ask a dungeon god.

If we’re using Knave, the Knave 2 rules for relics work well as-is for this kind of thing. But what about other systems?

Gods work a lot like the shrines described above. Valuables go in, rewards come out. But gods are picky about what you tithe to them. Or they may want you to do something for them instead. They have more agency than a shrine, which is typically going to be a reactive location, versus the personality we get with a god.

The gods in Lair of the Lamb are good dungeon gods. They’re all freaks, and the worshippers of one of those gods are directly responsible for the PCs’ predicament. But they nonetheless offer power, and the PCs are not in a position to refuse that offer of power without serious consideration.

For further examples, read this post and this one. This post really centers “gods” (really, any powerful entity willing to trade power for something worldly action) in a way we want to emulate. A lot of D&D treats deities as highly intrinsic to the characters who follow them. In many modern-style games, they are really an extension of character creation, moreso than a part of worldbuilding.

Magic

Extrinsic advancement is all well and good for our fighters and thieves. But what about wizards? 

First and foremost, no spells will be learned by virtue of leveling, so any magic a PC is wielding is coming from what they’ve found in the dungeon. That means even a humble first-level scroll is a  major treasure for a low-level PC.

Intelligent monsters may possess such items. What about non-intelligent monsters? Well, a great feature of The Monster Overhaul is the frequent sidebars explaining what monsters taste like, and what magical effect (if any) can be gained by eating them. We can build on that to give wizards a Dungeon Meshi experience, deriving magical power from monstrous meals. We can also give otherwise-ordinary monsters magical abilities, with the understanding that defeating or capturing (or eating) them could be the key to learning a new spell.

Meet the Neighbors

You may have noticed that I said at the top that players begin as level 0 humans. Not elves or dwarves or thrikeen or dire molefolk. Humans. If you want to play something else, you’re going to have to find it in the dungeon. And the most ready place to find non-human PCs is amongst the dungeon factions.

Factions can offer PCs various rewards, but we have an additional one to offer in this megadungeon. Establish friendly relations with a faction, and members of that faction are available to your PCs in the same way humans were. They are a quantum resource for character creation and NPC recruitment, just as the “starting pool” of humans was at the beginning.

That also means that “recruiting” a faction creature as a potential PC can earn the enmity of any factions that opposed the friendly faction. If the rock baboons hate the gecko-kobolds, do you still want to ally with them, gaining them as a resource, but losing the kobolds? It should be difficult to recruit creatures of opposed factions, unless the factions in question no longer produce interesting conflict for the PCs.

Non-faction creatures (i.e., unique creatures) can potentially be recruited too, but there is not a quantum supply of such creatures available as PCs. If a unique creature is recruited and then dies (because, say, a PC used them as an adventurer), it is gone for good.

*We're going to throw down a lot of proper names throughout this exercise. All of these, from The Pit itself down to the lowliest NPC, are placeholders that we can always change later. 

The Prison Megadungeon: Under the Influences

Writing the (ongoing) World’s Largest Rewrite series has been fun, but I ultimately think it is better as a source of monster ideas than something that should actually be finished. But where to put those monsters? A prison megadungeon without the cumbersome "world's largest" trappings. Let's make a megadungeon.

Caverns of Thracia is the megadungeon I have run the most. Arden Vul is the megadungeon I have spent the most time thinking about recently, thanks to the 3d6 Down the Line podcast. Megadungeon guidance in the greater world of blogs is too vast and diffuse to cite fully, but I will credit a few inspirations.

Arnold K’s Lair of the Lamb. It is not a megadungeon, but it is quite strong in treating the prison not first and foremost as a place that adventurers will delve into, but as a place ordinary people will try to escape from. The very idea of doing a prison megadungeon like the WLD and not making it a prison escape scenario is a little strange, after all. I don’t think I even mentioned that in my first World’s Largest Rewrite post. We'll get into this more in future posts, but the concept of this megadungeon is that the PCs begin as prisoners.

The Two Week Megadungeon. I will not be following the steps here precisely, but like LotL, the TWM process emphasizes lean efficiency over exhaustive completeness. That will be important for, you know, actually making discernable progress. 

Designing the Dungeon with Numbers. This post is specifically about the numbers one through five and how they imply different things when used in design. We’ll want to keep this in mind as a counterbalance against the sprawl of the megadungeon. That sprawl is, of course, part of the appeal; no adventuring party is going to explore all of Arden Vul, and no two parties are going to have the same experience there. But that sheer amount of content is overwhelming if we don’t carefully curate how choices are presented.

For example, we don’t want too many areas accessible to the players at first. If the PCs have more than five choices, it is probably more than they can really conceptualize meaningfully. More than five options becomes a list that has to be studied. And a list can easily become a chore.

But a choice between three to five options – with perhaps three to five decision points within each of those initial options – is much more digestible. The PCs will eventually have many more choice points, but these will be presented fractally, as the PCs engage with the dungeon; not all at once, and not too much, too soon.

Landmark, Hidden, Secret. This is one of those great blog posts that can inform all kinds of adjudication and design. We need to make sure that LHS design is baked into the megadungeon. You know how modern-style players are always talking about how the "exploration" pillar feels underrepresented, relative to the "combat" and "social/roleplay" pillars? LHS design, in conversation with strict time records, random encounters/events, and other procedures, helps deliver that exploration aspect of fantasy dungeon games.

The Lost Art of Getting Lost. It is fine to say the dungeon will be lethal, but players are smart and good at playing conservatively. They will probe carefully and back away from the unknown. Doors that slam shut and force the PCs to find a new way back to where they started really test those skills. The same is true of dungeon features like pits, portcullises, and sliding walls. The humble iron spike becomes a lifesaver when it can guarantee a path backward. But, of course, the noise from hammering in a spike triggers a wandering monster check. And when time passes, that faction you offended before starts removing your spikes… oh crap… 

Because our PCs are prisoners, we can also address some of the obstacles noted in the post. We can control the “economy” in a way that is not possible for “open-world” adventuring, so we don’t have to worry as much about torch supply trivializing light. Our PCs will begin with plenty of candles, and no other source of light. Imagine a simple torch as an exciting “treasure."

Metroidvanias and Megadungeons and Information Architecture in the Castle Automatic. Two posts from the excellent Rise Up Comus blog. The first post creates a taxonomic framework for understanding megadungeons, and why some fantasy adventure game features and character abilities do or do not work within that context. The second is on information design. We don’t strictly need to worry about information design, as we are designing this as an experiment, and maybe to run someday, not to publish (haha… unless?) But good information design is its own reward. Every DM can get by with their own chickenscratch notes and kludged together prep process, but it’s worth interrogating how we could do better and make things clearer, even if that just transmits a clearer picture to players.

The Monster Overhaul. I have cited this so many times during the WLD series. A good monster manual is much more than stat blocks; it is a worldbuilding and session-planning tool. And the Overhaul is not a good manual, it is a great manual.

Make RPG history and look insane while doing it. Blades of Gixa is one of the successful projects  that emerged from the Dungeon23 movement. Indexing location and history in the way this video demonstrates is an awfully interesting idea, and is something we can mess around with for bridging the ancient-lore-to-current-events gap, and avoiding the dreaded “this room used to be…” problem that plagues many dungeon products.

Various Cryptic Keyway posts and projects. Of course I can also take from things I’ve already done, whether iterating on a good idea or salvaging a half-finished thing for parts. Even before the WLD series, previous posts have suggested a similar concept to this one. This experiment will keep some of those ideas. And if it fails, it will be the fuel for something else in the future.

I’m not interested in turning the WLD posts into a dungeon itself. I ultimately think the “world’s largest” conceit is a mistake that undermines good dungeon design. But working through those posts has been useful for generating ideas, and I like (with credit and thanks to OSE and the Overhaul, of course).

I can also scrape content off of my aborted Dungeon23 project, as well as several other dungeons started and left unfinished over the years. Those could even still turn into their own things someday, but a currently active project (like this megadungeon) always gets to steal ideas from projects that are dormant.

We’ll add to this list of influences as we go.

Campaign Pitch: Dungeons Fall From the Sky, So We Delve Them

A historical account of events on Lillette A, a .85 PHI planet at 5.133 AU around Kelson 3 (stellar ref code 7833900). 

Timeline (local solar years prior to present)

• ~600,000Y: A Hivonium separatist seed-ship visits the Kelson 3 system, using illegal stochastic course-charting techniques to evade estimated pursuits. The seed-ship identifies Lillette A as the local biome most likely to support life, and distributes its payload, in direct violation of galactic propagation law.
• 110,127Y: The third in a series of sequential-path Persioxes probes passes within 16 lightyears of Kelson 3 and pings the system, calculating a 44% likelihood of an unauthorized biome. The results are relayed up the command chain for further action.
• 7088Y: Several Persioxes probes, traveling on altered courses in response to the first signal, provide triangulated scans estimating a 93% chance of an unauthorized biome. Kelson is listed for investigation, confirmation, analysis, and potential sterilization.
• 914Y: Crake, an Approxiare-class vessel, arrives at the system and establishes system perimeter control. 
• 897Y: Direct analysis across all seven Herber-Tavo categories confirms Lillette’s status as an illegal biome, with estimates suggesting over four million macroscopic species. The unusually fast evolutionary process is typical of Hivonium technology.
• 896Y: Given the speed of biome development, the crew of the Crake has no time to refer Lillette’s status back up the command chain for consensus. The crew, empowered to act on their own prerogative, vote 145.2-117.7 to sterilize the Kelson system of all life (fractions in the sum reflect the votes of clones that had not yet reached their majority, typical of ship votes from that period). The vote is unusually close, but a simple majority still prevails. System fabs are deployed and begin exponential production expansion.
• 781Y: The orbital shell is completed. The crew begins the three-stage process of recording extensive evidence of the biome, collecting samples of all unique life, and sterilizing the planet (informally, “flag, bag, and slag”).
• 531Y: The project timeline undergoes the first of dozens of extensions. Multiple proposals to either stop or delay sterilization are proposed. Revotes on the fundamental question are vetoed by Gecko, the ship AI, but disagreement among the crew inevitably slows work and spreads dissensus.
• 153Y: A severe GCR burst from outside the Kelson system hits the Crake, the orbital shell, and most of the system fabs; only a few inner-system fabs incidentally protected by Kelson’s magnetosphere are spared. Gecko institutes a red-3 alert (informally, a “Deep Ugly”) and takes priority on all systems it can still ping in the orbital belt. A deep-cover Hivonium virus, programmed to surface only in very high states of system distress, bootstraps itself into several of the most vulnerable fabs, then jumps to the orbital shell. Gecko, while attempting to quarantine the virus, descends into a runaway persona-splinter cascade. Soon over 2000 variations of Gecko are struggling for control of the orbital shell. Other Gecko splinters take control of individual fabs and quarantine them.
• 43Y: The crew aboard the Crake attempt to leave the system, but a combination of  internal dissensus, malfunctioning Geckos, and viral meddling cripples the ship in the outer reaches of the system.
• 28Y: Surviving crew aboard the orbital shell begin to abandon sections compromised by these events, desperately fleeing to Lillette’s surface.
• 0Y: A 263,000 m² chunk of the orbital shell in terminal orbital decay enters the atmosphere and streaks across the sky. Automated systems and the fragmented consciousness of the local Gecko splinter divert most remaining energy to easing the fragment’s descent, ensuring it is relatively intact as it gouges a deep ravine in a mostly unpopulated coastal region on the second-largest continent. Local feudal sapient populations immediately dispatch forces to investigate.

Dungeon is actually SPACESHIP and magic is sometimes TECHNOLOGY has a long and rich history in D&D, from Metamorphosis Alpha and Barrier Peaks all the way up to modern examples that I will not name, just so that I don't inadvertently spoil them here.

This scenario is obviously in the same vein. The principal changes are as follows:

• Instead of a long-ago secret, the arrival of space technology is a currently unfolding situation.
• Instead of something buried, hidden, and forgotten, the sci-fi aspects are obvious, unmistakable, and world-changing. 
• The arrival of sci-fi tech has direct geopolitical impacts on the world; factions and fronts care about these things.
• Humans are the aliens; the “elves,” “dwarves,” and so forth are mutations or random evolutions from human stock, but they are to their knowledge the "normal" residents of their world.

Up in space, we have a Deepness in the Sky / Children of Time / Children of Ruin situation. Down on the planet, the vibe is more like Troika or Anomalous Subsurface Environment.

Humans are aliens, but the natives of Lillette probably don’t find them naturally suspicious, once they are separated from their technology. The fantasy species on the planet may be intentionally designed, or the product of randomness, or some of both. An “elf” living on a particular part of Lillette will be accustomed to meeting sapient bipeds (“humanoids” or whatnot) who vary in relatively small ways. A “dwarf,” a “goblin,” and other such creatures are much more similar to an elf than they are different. A “human” would just seem like another variation on a common template. The now-stranded humans, on the other hand, are absolutely freaking out about all of this. But for the denizens of this fantasy world, this is a Tuesday. The humans are a bit like vault dwellers in Fallout; better tech, but lacking in survival skills.

The action of the game is driven by competition for the falling bits of tech. These are dungeons populated with weird tech, escaped experiments, hostile security systems, insane Gecko shards, the desperate surviving human crew members, and virus-corrupted robots. The local flora and fauna would also be weird and dangerous, and interact in unpredictable ways with the falling tech (add Scavenger’s Reign as an influence here too). 

There are a lot of threads for adventurers to pull on, in addition to delving dungeons and negotiating the factions:

1. Functioning Gecko shards that still want to raze the planet of all life.
2. Former crew now trapped on the planet who are aware of that plan and don’t want it to happen (at least, not until after they can escape).
3. Surviving crew still ensconced in functional sections of the orbital shell or the further-out system fabs, who are rotating through stasis, waiting for an opportunity to escape the system.
4. Maddended Gecko shards that have made contact with the planet and that natives perceive as “new gods” who have come to shake up the existing pantheon.
5. For advanced play, traveling to space is a possibility. It could be possible to explore the sections of the orbital shell still in orbit; the damaged Crake; and even the few fabs that remained functional.

The World's Largest Rewrite: Trepan Lizards, Grues, and Carving Up the Stone Theme

Last time: Grey Horse, Devil Swine, and Normal Humans

#109: Skeleton. We’ve already met our mummies, zombies, wraiths, and wights, so we have a pretty good number of undead knocking around the prison. Skeletons, like zombies, make sense as minions of more powerful undead. We placed the zombies with the mummies, but let's save the skeletons as servants of an as-yet unseen monster. I’m going to place them near the salt water aquatic monsters, to provide some variety there. The bones of failed escapees, animated by some dark magic, drifting up from the depths amidst the seaweed, to clutch at ankles, join us, join us... 

#132: Whale. Yeah, OK, let’s do this. OSE includes a killer whale (AKA orca), narwhal, and sperm whale. Rolling randomly gives us the sperm whale. A brief aside: It is interesting to see how OSE stats suggest a different concept of the world than a modern D&D system. A sperm whale has 36 HD and 162 (!) HP. A red dragon, the strongest of the chromatic dragons, has 10 HD and 45 HP in OSE. 

Compare that to 5E.2014, where an adult red dragon has 256 HP. The 5E MM doesn’t stat whales, but the roc is similar in HD to the whale in OSE, and that is about even with the dragon in 5E. It feels like modern designers felt it was important that the dragon was not only the most dangerous monster, but also (among) the biggest monsters. No such compunction in OSE.

The sperm whale is so big that it is hard to place it in the dungeon; it is very much intended as a wilderness monster. So let’s embrace that idea and put it outside the dungeon, but strongly associated with it. The sperm whale’s signature abilities are to ram ships and to swallow creatures whole. The prison builders enchanted this creature to crush ships approaching the island prison, and swallow any survivors in the water. Their intent was to prevent both prisoner escapes and rescue attempts from the outside. The whale itself can serve as a mini-dungeon, with survivors living inside the whale; that’s a classic trope. 

#41: Gargoyle. The flow of water is already a consistent theme within this dungeon, so let's include gargoyles that honor the origin of the term. Historically gargoyles were not just statues (or “grotesques”) but specifically rainspouts on the buildings they adorned. Our gargoyles are bound by the dungeon builders to channel water through the dungeon, for hydration, drainage, and sanitation purposes. They may be cruel and twisted monsters otherwise, but their commitment to the routing of water takes priority over monstrous behavior. Two gargoyles can form a 1’ diameter “pipe” through solid stone between their locations. PCs who parley with them could use their help to bypass various hazards and obstacles. Beware their betrayal, however, as they could easily send you trouble instead.

#115: Stegosaurus. The OSE entry for the stego is minimal, but the Monster Overhaul, as usual, proves its value with supplemental random tables. Rolling on a few of those we get “fleeing a predator” as a response to the prompt “why are they charging?” and “we steal and devour their eggs” to answer “what do we use them for?” We’ll place these guys near the sabre-tooth tiger, since they also fit the lost world theme. But we also want to build up the idea that the dungeon’s divisions are breaking down, and that creatures from different regions are interacting with each other. So we’ll say these stegosauruses are frightened by the chimera, and that the noble and his retinue are stealing and eating their eggs.

#23: Cockatrice. It is interesting that cockatrices and basilisks, at 5 and 6 HD respectively, are quite a bit bulkier monsters in old-school D&D, while modern D&D presents them as relatively junior monsters, compared to the medusa and gorgon in the Family Stone. The cockatrice is described by OSE as “small,” but is about as tough as an ogre. The monster overhaul notes they are “rarely viscous, though their feeble minds and tendency to panic can lead to disasters” (this also serves as a good description of my cat). As discussed when we placed our medusa, petrification is an incredibly useful ability for the fantasy prison warden. Petrification can be a way of safely transporting a prisoner; putting them in “solitary”; managing a shortage of supplies by temporarily (unless…?) reducing the percentage of the prison population that needs to, you know, eat; and even creating statues that can fit together to build walls. You know, like in Unico in the Island of Magic.

Uh, you know, Unico in the Island of Magic? OK, maybe not everyone has seen Unico in the Island of Magic. You can watch it on Youtube! The petrified-people-used-for-building stuff starts around the 30 minute mark. I watched this when I was very, very small, and for years afterward, I had a very deep and paralyzing fear of being turned into a statue and used as building material. Fortunately, this never happened to me in real life, and I eventually got over that fear. But this probably does explain why I have written about gorgons so much on this blog. These blog posts don’t typically include processing childhood fears, but there ya go.

What were we talking about? Oh yeah, the cockatrices are here for the same reason the gorgon (medusa) is – petrification is really useful to the prison builders. For the same reason I don’t want to cluster all the undead together, I’m not going to put the cocatrices next to the other petrification creatures. I’ll drop them near the center of the map, next to the doppelgangers, who were the second-ever monster we placed during this exercise. If the cockatrices petrified the doppelgangers, they might have formed a feral colony near that area. The zombies are unaffected or indifferent to their presence, and the bull sharks are protected from the stony birds by water. 

#4: Basilisk. What a serendipitous result. We have our oops-all-rocks enemies showing up back to back. In Soviet Russia, rocks pet you. 

Combined with our gargoyle in this entry, and our gorgon (medusa) lore, I think we have some interesting ideas of how petrification played a major role in the formation and maintenance of the dungeon. I like the idea that the prison-builders started with cockatrices (relatively easy to control, insofar as they have to make physical contact to petrify). Later, as the prison grew both larger and more difficult to control, they added basilisks, in a desperation move (capable of petrifying at range, but a real double-edged sword for other sighted creatures).

Rolling randomly, I’m gonna put the basilisk on the left side of the map, and it lands right next to the… rock baboons… which feels like the dice trying to tell me something. We’ll keep our scream-oriented baboons but also make them literal rock baboons. Why not? 

#15: Bugbear. Another minimally described goblinoid in OSE. Hairy, ungainly, attacks with surprise (this also serves as a good description of my cat). Going to the Monster Overhaul directs us to the… ogre entry, surprisingly, but I respect it. The Overhaul is not afraid to create Weird Problem Creatures, and the bugbear is definitely one of them. Its abilities are as follows: “Harmed by innocence. Attacks against the [bugbear] take a penalty equal to the attacker’s HD or level. Bonuses to damage become penalties. Toy swords cut as steel ones.”

That’s kinda mental, right? Certainly more interesting than “stronk goblin with +2 to surprise, move along.” You can imagine why a creature that fundamentally subverts violence would end up in our prison. However, by imprisoning this freak amongst mostly guilty inmates, the jailers have inadvertently made him powerful. None of the twisted reprobates in the prison would be able to harm this guy. I’m not trapped in here with you, you’re trapped in here with me. This is a cool puzzle monster. Clearly our bugbear is a dungeon boss, like the dragon and the devil swine, controlling other monsters/NPCs, because they cannot harm him. We’ll drop him near the bottom of our diagram; he’s probably bossing around some combination of hobgoblins and humans. Maybe the poor cyclops too.

#69: Lizard Man. The most evocative bit from OSE is obviously “Man-eaters: Kidnap humans and demihumans, whose flesh they regard as a delicacy” (thankfully, this does not serve as a good description of my cat). 

To my surprise, there is no entry for lizardmen in The Monster Overhaul. Not even an index entry pointing to another monster. I guess lizardfolk fall somewhere between kobolds and troglodytes in the Overhaul taxonomy. We’ll use troglodytes. With four separate random tables, they have enough going on in their entry that there will be material left for the actual troglodytes when we eventually roll them up.

Rolling a few times, we get “Genetic offshoot blessed with strange powers but cursed with mind-rot” and “Trepanning drill. Improves divine access” as a treasure. These two hooks together really sell these guys. The basic OSE beastiary does not have a direct mind flayer equivalent, so for this dungeon, our lizardfolk fill that roll.

#105: Shadow. “Intelligent, incorporeal (but not undead) monsters that look like shadows. Able to slightly change their shape.” I like the non-undead shadow concept. The Overhaul’s index suggests “Grue” as an interpretation, which isn’t on our OSE list, so we’ll use that to embellish these fellows. The grue is a highly mobile, durable, deadly creature in darkness, with light as its only weakness. It is easy to imagine our prison wardens trapping a grue/shadow here with redundant “walls” of light. As the prison keepers' authority slips away, the lights begin to go out, and the grue probes its containment, restless to be free. We’ll probably create a “high security” block for creatures like this, that require special methods to imprison. 

#45: Gnoll. Gnolls have a little bit more going on than some of the other humanoids, but not much; the OSE description is just a winking reference to their post-Dunsany presentation as a portmanteau of gnome and troll. The Overhaul has no gnoll entry, but refers to the hyena entry, which has a nice “legendary abilities” table. “Hyenas only eat the corpses of unholy people. The souls of those they consume stay inside the hyena.” This gives them a pretty clear reason to show up in our dungeon. The gnolls have broken into the prison in search of "unholy" souls to devour. We’ll assume they’ve entered the prison from the top and are trying to get toward the lower middle, where the humans are.

Here’s our updated diagram. Getting a little more crowded, isn’t it? Remember, this is not the dungeon map; just a very simple diagram that can eventually inform regions, which can in turn serve as the basis for an actual map.

Oops-All-Backgrounds D&D

I have written before about the underrated design of the backgrounds in D&D 5E.2014. Backgrounds in 5E include a brief description and some “suggested characteristics,” but mechanically they boil down to the following pieces: 

• Two skill proficiencies
• Usually one or two tool proficiencies (although a few backgrounds don’t get any)
• Usually one language (although again, a few backgrounds don’t receive one)
• A brief starting equipment package
• A “feature” that doesn’t have an explicit mechanical application, but exists entirely as something to be leveraged by the player and adjudicated by the DM. Usually the feature grounds the character within the game’s social milieu.

This is a solid chassis for a starting character, even without ancestry and class. The problem with backgrounds in the context of 5E is that they are quickly swallowed up by class progression. Those background details may come up in the first few sessions, but nobody bothers to use the Rustic Hospitality feature by level 5, let alone level 20. 

But… what if they weren’t competing with the classes? What if instead, the classes were designed like backgrounds? What if... the fighter class just looked like this?

1. Skill proficiencies: Choose two, just as you normally would, from the 5E fighter skill list
2. Armor proficiency: Choose one from among light armor, medium armor, or heavy armor
3. Weapon proficiencies: All simple weapons and any three martial weapons
4. Equipment: Same options as the in the 5E fighter list
5. Feature: Choose either Action Surge or Fighting Style

And what if the dwarf ancestry just did this? 

• Weapon proficiencies: Battleaxe, handaxe, throwing hammer, and warhammer
• Tool proficiencies: Artisan’s tools of your choice (smith’s tools, brewer’s supplies, or mason’s tools)
• Languages: Dwarven
• Feature: Choose either Darkvision or Dwarven Resilience

Any one of these is an MVP (minimum viable PC). Where you go from there depends on what kind of game you want. If you want to hew closer to normal 5E, layer on additional features and mechanics as class advancements, but keep it much leaner than typical 5E. Use GLOG-style progression as a model, with maybe four levels, capping characters at a low/middle power level, just like you might when using a 5E chassis to run a megadungeon.

If you want to keep it simpler, instead model the game on a system that features little or no advancement, like Troika, or one of the Into the Odd-based games. Or assume that advancement comes mostly from exogenic acquisitions, as in an equipment-focused game like Knave.

The Roadside Shrine Test

The PCs are traveling overland. Various NPCs (all controlled, of course, by the DM) tell them that it is important to donate to the shrine at the crossroads, to ensure a safe journey. The NPCs say that ignoring the shrine is sure to bring misfortune. The donation amount is a significant expenditure for the PCs.

There is a surprising amount of potential complexity beneath the surface in examples like this. In-game choices intersect with player choices via metagaming (and metagaming is good player behavior, not bad). What might the DM be doing here? The players may consider the following possibilities. 

Worldbuilding. The shrine is an opportunity for the DM to illustrate local beliefs and add some texture and life for the world. The PCs can engage with the shrine or not; it won’t have any direct bearing on future events in the game. 

Foreshadowing. The shrine decision itself has no actual stakes, but it is a theme the DM intends to iterate upon. The DM will later present a similar choice with higher stakes. The escalation of the theme may continue until the party engages with it or otherwise resolves the tension.

Consequences (direct). The shrine is literally controlled by some minor god, spirit, or genius loci, in just the way the locals expect, which will cause some explicit consequences for the PCs.

Consequences (framing). The DM does not do anything differently, but instead frames any setbacks in the subsequent journey as a consequence of skipping the shrine. In this instance there actually was no real choice, and the shrine “decision” was just a set to facilitate later spikes by the DM.

Consequences (retroactively diegetic). The shrine has no effect, but later, someone may cast Zone of Truth or a similar truth-seeking spell on the PCs, and ask them what choice they made. Their answer has social consequences.

Consequences (factions and fronts). Factions or fronts in society care about the shrine. They may even be forces the PCs haven’t yet seen. Refusing to donate to the shrine may escalate a clock or decrement a reputation ranking. 

This is by no means an exhaustive list! Players could be considering literally dozens of overlapping agendas and incentives when assessing this choice, although they are surely not consciously enumerating most of these points. None of these are strictly right or wrong (although some can certainly lead to an r/rpghorrorstories post with the wrong execution). 

The Book Club RPG

A novel TTRPG.

Everyone brings a book to the game. It must be a physical copy that you own and are willing to mark up.

You will need a random number generator set to the number of pages in your book. You may be able to do this with dice, but an online random number generator is easiest, as you can set a range that directly corresponds to the number of pages. Follow the book’s pagination and ignore introductions, appendices, or anything else outside the normal page number range. 

Character creation

Name

“Roll” a random page. Start from the top of the page and grab the first name you find. You can use your own judgment if something “counts” as a name, but generally, err in the direction of choosing the first word that seems reasonably name-like. This is your character’s name.

Mark the word so that you remember that you already used it. A highlighter may help, if you want to keep the book readable. But blacking it out with a sharpie has a powerful energy to it.

Try to stick with this character name, even if you don’t like it, or it isn’t the sort of name you would normally choose for a character (especially if it isn’t the sort of name you typically choose). If you really want to change it, you can reroll, but you must mark one “dogear” on your character sheet. More on that later.

Appearance

Roll three random pages. For each result, choose the first adjective that appears on that page. When you have three adjectives, that’s the description of your character. 

You may get an adjective that doesn’t really make sense for describing a person. Try to use it anyway, even if you think of it as more of a figurative description than a literal one. Mark each word in the same fashion as you did the name.

If you genuinely can’t find any way to make the adjective work, or just dislike the adjective so much that you don’t want it associated with your character, reroll and mark a dogear on your character sheet.

Skills

Roll three random pages. For each result, choose the first verb that appears on that page. These three verbs are your character’s skills.

Some of these will be easy to interpret as player skills, like running or fighting. Others will require some interpretation. What does it mean to have a skill at “representing,” “isolating,” or “facilitating.” Or a verb that is not normally associated with a person, say, “flooding”? You will have to employ some lateral thinking. 

As before, mark the words you use. Basically you’re going to mark a word every time you roll for a word. If you forget every once and a while, that’s fine, but try to do it when you can.

If you really can’t make a verb work, that’s OK, but you know the drill; take a dogear.

Equipment

Roll for three more pages. For each one, take the first concrete noun that refers to a physical object that a person could carry in one hand. It doesn’t have to be something that a person would ordinarily carry. Use common sense.

Ethos

This one is optional, but may be useful to your game if your character still feels fuzzy. You don’t need this for a one-shot, but it may come in handy for a longer game. 

Roll for three more pages and choose the first three abstract nouns you see. Your character has strong feelings about these ideas, but they don’t have to be affirmative. For example, if you get a word like “slavery,” the character could simply be an anti-slavery advocate. Same rule as above with dogears. 

Content

If you ever roll a word that violates the table’s agreed-upon content and vibe for the game, you can reroll such results without taking a dogear. For example, if you use lines and veils, a word that is strongly associated with a subject covered by a line or veil can be rerolled for “free.”  

Action Resolution 

Whenever you do something uncertain, roll a random number and flip to that page. The first letter of the first complete word determines the nature of the outcome.

• A-B: Yes, and 
• C-F: Yes
• G-L: Yes, but 
• M-P: No, and
• Q-S: No
• T-Z: No, but

If you have a relevant skill or piece of equipment, you can look at the first two words with different letters and choose an outcome from between them (for example, if the first series of words on a page was “all actionable attributes have been accounted for,” you would choose “A” and “H”). Mark any words that you “use” in this way. 

The math doesn’t work out perfectly with these letter divisions, but it doesn’t need to; if anything, I kinda like flat “no” as the smallest category and “no, but” as the largest one.

Dogears

You may acquire a few dogears during character creation or play. This is a metacurrency that a player can spend to compel the player with a dogear to roll in a situation that otherwise wouldn't require a roll; or to make that player reroll a result that they just rolled.

When you call in someone's dogear, the affected player erases it from their sheet and you add it to your sheet. If a player cashes one of your dogears during a session, you can’t cash one on them until the next session. So only a few dogears should change hands each session, and they should always be circulating among the players.

Focus and Genre

While you can do this game with very different books, if you want to concentrate the tone a bit more, have everyone select books from the same genre. For an even more focused experience, have everyone use the exact same book. Novels are an obvious choice, but remember that anything full of text made up of full sentences can work pretty well. There's no reason this game wouldn't work for a group all using copies of an air conditioning unit's operation manual.

Dynamic Domains: Four Options for Proactive Pantheons

The worst thing about TTRPG deities is the certainty of it all. The mystery and myth of a terrible, powerful, ultimately unknowable divine consciousness, boiled down to entries on a table in the cleric class description.

I understand why. As a mechanical element of a fantasy TTRPG, deities are essentially an extension of character creation. A deity needs to be immediately grokable, and it helps if it makes some kinda sense within the presumed universal vanilla fantasy milieu. 

But I think there is room to make our deities more interesting without losing players. That's why I've written about how to improve pantheons quite a few times before. 

So consider the following twists for fantasy deities. Assume in each case that we're talking about deities who possess three spheres, or domains, or whatever you like to call them. Death, weather, the hunt, commerce, the stars, the sea, that sort of thing. Then alter it juuust a bit from what you would see in your bog-standard fantasy setting.

Two Truths and a Lie

Each deity is well-known for three domains. What is not well-known is that two of them are real and the third is a lie. 

The deity claims power over that third domain – or at least their followers do – but the deity doesn’t have cosmological influence over it. Maybe they once did, and hope to again. Maybe they can kinda fake it. Maybe their followers’ belief is patching the hole, or their followers are unknowingly drawing power from elsewhere. But it is ultimately a lie, and discovering that, or hiding it, or leveraging it, could play a major role in a campaign.

The Public and the Secret

Each deity has three domains. Two are commonly known, and what the deity is famous for. The third is secret, and is only known to a select few.

Those who know could be clerics and paladins, particularly past a certain level. Or it could be scholars and spies who have come across this information on their own. Or perhaps even the warlocks who draw power from that deity secretly.

Again, a secret can be a powerful motivation for adventure and for deity action as a front or antagonist. And it just raises intriguing questions. A god who is the deity of life and the sun… but also (secretly) the god of the underworld… is a bit more interesting, yes?

Rising and Falling

Each deity has three domains. In one domain the deity is rising, in another they are stable, and in a third they are falling.

This lends itself to change over time, particularly in a campaign on a longer time frame. Imagine that the game begins, and a dozen deities are each rising, stable, or falling in three respective domains out of a total count of 24. They overlap on many of these domains. 

Whenever a god achieves a goal associated with a domain, they can improve “falling” to “stable,” or “stable” to “rising.” If they are already at rising, they can force one other god to decrement their status in an overlapping domain from “rising” to “stable,” or from “stable” to “falling.”

Regional Competition

Most modern fantasy pantheons are by implication global (pan-prime-material?) This is serviceable, but also takes away one of the most interesting sources of conflict and competition that we see amongst real-world religions, as belief systems intermingle with geopolitical and national/social forces. 

Assign domains to regions of the game world. Some of these could have a symbolic relation (the sea to coastal regions, for example), but it is not required for each one. Gods have power in domains based on how much of the population within the domain-attuned area follow them. In this view, gods have quite a strong incentive to evangelize, and much of the conflict in the game world could reflect this struggle for power. Imagine that a rival army conquering your lands means not just a new ruler, but also that an entirely new god will take possession of the domain of the afterlife, and consequently the fate of everyone’s ancestors. Those are compelling stakes that can drive in-game action.

Review: Nightmare Over Ragged Hollow

Last year I ran Nightmare Over Ragged Hollow (also known in a different iteration as Ragged Hollow Nightmare). I will refer to it as NORH going forward. I previously discussed part of this adventure in my rats-in-the-basement post. 

This review is intended for DMs who might run the adventure. I would recommend readers skip this post if they think there’s any chance they’ll see this adventure from the player perspective, as the review will definitely spoil some aspects of the book. 

What It Is

NORH is an Old-School Essentials adventure for low-level characters. It exists in the same space as The Black Wyrm of Brandesford or Blackapple Burgh; a small rural region, compliant with D&D tropes, but with some classic fairy tale energy. A brief introduction explains some of the tenets of old-school play for the uninitiated. 

What Works

Fast start. The premise of the adventure is that a golden dome has mysteriously sealed much of the titular town’s populace in the local temple. The people who would typically deal with such problems are among those trapped inside. The adventurers are the most capable people left outside. This is your call to adventure. 

Grounded PCs. The PCs are locals who have returned from a local tradition akin to a rumspringa. They’re from Ragged Hollow, so they’re invested in what is happening, but they also have adventurer skills they presumably picked up on their travels. It strikes a good balance between believable PCs and player discretion in creating characters.

Good NPCs. The NPCs have nice little bits of detail, but are open-ended enough to run. Favorites of mine included the goblin Croaker, Beatrix, and Master Neven the satyr (fun to do with a Matt Berry-style voice). The NPC adventuring party has a lot of personality and was a hit with the players. They also attached themselves to Joanna, Keegan, and several other town NPCs, who are easy to personify based on the concise details provided. The goblins are particularly well-done as a troublemaking faction who can be fought or befriended, as the PCs see fit.

Complications and opportunities among the survivors. NPCs rescued from the temple present a range of opportunities and threats. Some are likely to get in the party’s way, while others could be good hirelings. You could imagine turning this adventure upside down, letting the players play the people trapped inside, and running it as a funnel.

Escalation. Things get worse as more time passes and the adventure’s McGuffin ratchets up the titular nightmare. The temple bell sounds each night at midnight, indicating the number of survivors trapped in the temple. This provides a nice player-facing clock, and provides that Strict Time Records energy without requiring the DM to explicitly signpost it. 

Presentation. The editing and language is clear and concise, with only a few minor formatting issues. I found one or two incorrect room references, but those appear to be the only content (versus formatting) mistakes in an otherwise very clean product.

What Needs Some DM Work

Every TTRPG product needs at least a little work to bring to table. The following is intended less as criticism per se, and more as guidance on where to best spend prep time tailoring the product to your table. It is longer than the above section not because there is more to "complain" about, but simply because explaining criticisms and areas of possible improvement is more word-intensive than praise.  

Too many “Huh, that was weird. Anyway…” moments. The adventure includes nightmarish events that manifest in the area due to the influence of the McGuffin at the heart of the adventure. I appreciate that these are not combat encounters, but most of them don’t “mean” anything, and vanish before the PCs can engage with them. “Thousands of white worms wriggle up through the dark soil. They hum a deep resonant chord, swaying in the starlight, before burrowing back down into the ground.” “A severed hand crawls toward the party and dissolves into red foam.”

This stuff is mostly non-interactive by design. Perhaps at some tables these work just as mobile bits of set dressing. But my players (and I suspect a lot of other players) engaged with the first few instances of these events by obsessively focusing on "what they meant.” By the fourth or fifth event, they (pragmatically and correctly) concluded that these are random, dissociated, spooky events with no inherent meaning, and just ignored them. In my game, I mostly replaced them with echoes and omens tied to interactive elements of the adventure.

The main dungeon is (kinda) linear, and presumes one method of ingress. I don’t dock points for NORH’s small regional dungeons; these are basically lairs, not true dungeons, so it is OK that the kobold caves have only one entrance and lack much exploratory complexity. The temple that is at the heart of the adventure only has one intended entrance: the belltower, the highest point of the temple, exposed after time passes and the golden dome begins to shrink. 

I don’t think this is bad, per se. It is a neat inversion of the standard bottom-to-top tower adventure. And the conceit of the adventure kinda requires it. But the game definitely presumes the PCs will quickly focus on “how to get up to the belltower” as their main goal, and the region around the adventure is geared toward facilitating that. For a number of reasons, my players did not immediately focus on the belltower, because the adventure premise and telegraphed course of action depends on several assumptions that the players may not make.

For example, it was not initially obvious to my players that the outside walls "block" the dome (i.e., that once inside one part of the building, they could move freely throughout, and that the dome would not continue to block access inside as it shrunk). I essentially had to have an NPC tell them this, so they wouldn’t completely base their plans around the presumption that the dome would continue to slow progress once they were inside.

The players also considered digging underground. Through some investigation they learned that the dome was really the upper part of a sphere (I improvised this detail), but they still considered the merits of digging. The adventure does not provide a clear indication of how far the basement levels of the temple are from the edges of the dome, so there is potentially a lot of work for the DM if a group goes in this direction. 

Eventually my group found one of the magical items that is intended to facilitate access to the tower, and did eventually get on the "right" course of action. But some support here would have been a nice addition, as it would in turn support the PCs engaging in some outside-the-box problem solving. 

The monsters attack! The adventure has a few too many encounters that only make sense as fights. There’s an overabundance of ambush attackers, some with an X-in-6 chance, others simply stating they “immediately attack.” Ambushers have their place, but too many of them train the PCs to expect every adversary to be a fight. This is especially relevant for a product that assumes at least some players will be new to old-school play, as this one clearly does, since it includes a brief primer for this purpose. I would recommend DMs running NORH spend some time developing goals and desires for some of the NPCs and monsters to facilitate more varied interaction.

The kobolds, for example, occupy one of the regional lairs, and possess one of the magical items that can be used to enter the temple. They have no named members, no connections with other creatures in the region, and no agenda. They’re just... mining. All the notes about their lair treat it as a trap-laden combat encounter. My players ultimately did decide to ambush the kobolds, and I couldn’t really blame them – the module wasn't really suggesting any other purpose for these creatures besides a fight. 

I liked the idea that the monsters in the region were affected by the titular nightmare, just like the townsfolk. I decided that the kobolds were mining crystals to trade to the bandits for stimulants, so they could avoid sleeping, and escape their nightmares. The bugbears were in turmoil because terrible dreams from the adventure's McGuffin drove their shaman to the brink of madness. I replaced the ogre with an ettin who was quite literally fighting with himself over which head would sleep next.

The temple itself is populated by monsters that are the products of nightmares. These make a bit more sense as combat encounters, since they are inherently hostile and have no instinct for self-preservation. And a few of them have neat hooks. When a nursery rhyme wolf emerged from a magical storybook, the PCs blockaded it behind a door, allowing me the unique DM pleasure of doing the whole “I’ll huff and I'll puff…” act in-game.

But several of the others are weird-for-the-sake-of-weird. Acknowledging it would swell the page count, tying particular nightmares to particular villagers would allow for some fun interactions. Rescue the appropriate villager, or understand their fears, and gain an edge over the monsters. If I were to run this a second time, I would probably embellish this aspect of the product, as the players generally liked interacting with the townsfolk, and would have appreciated some more Nightmare on Elm Street flavoring to the dangers.

All that said, I do want to again give credit to the monsters and NPCs that break the "they attack!" pattern. The goblins are the faction that shines the most in this respect, as many of them will show up in situations where they are helpless or in danger, which does a better job of opening the door to PC discretion in defining the interaction. 

This adventure could be a lot shorter than intended. My group explored two of the three regions outside the town, and we got about a dozen sessions total out of this book, which is a good return for the price and page count. But it could have been much shorter if the players made different choices! One of the three magic items that could facilitate entrance to the temple is located immediately outside of town. A group could grab that item and then wait until the temple is accessible. Sure, they would be underleveled, but that is not inherently an obstacle in OSR play. 

This isn't inherently bad. It is not a scripted adventure path, where the players are punished for not following the designer's intended path. But speedrunning this product would not be much fun, and would involve missing out on some of the best bits (like the goblins, satyr, and witch in the woods). 

Final Thoughts

We had an overall positive experience with this adventure, and I would recommend it. “Regional classic fantasy for low levels” is a very well-served niche, and there are other competing options that you may want to consider. But the inciting incident of the townsfolk trapped in the temple is a genuinely distinguishing selling point, and the organic clock it puts on events really brings the "time matters" energy to the proceedings. 

Ultimately, the adventure provides a lot of good stuff to work with, and the areas of potential improvement are a reasonable ask for the DM's tailoring and prep time. 

I give it four out of five spider-rats. Praise Halcyon!

You can buy NORH here.

RPG Scheduling: Making Peace Between the Anchors and the Corks

Scheduling is one of the most common subjects of complaints, memes, jokes, and Reddit rants in  the TTRPG world. A familiar lament: Players did not show up, game was canceled. 

I don’t typically write about the logistics of running RPGs. But I have not had a game canceled for anything short of illness or emergency in years. So just in case it is useful to anyone out there struggling with game attendance and player commitment – here are my thoughts, beginning with some simple psychographics.

Anchors Versus Corks

There are two types of schedulers in the world: Anchors and corks.

Anchors commit to participate in things and, barring emergency or unusual circumstances, it becomes a fixed part of their plans. They scope other commitments around that plan. It is solid. Their schedule is a world of anchored things among the shifting currents of life.

Corks bob and drift from engagement to engagement as the tides and winds carry them. For a cork, every event and social engagement is more aspirational than actual until it happens. They will certainly be doing something on a given evening, but they don’t quite know what it will be until that day arrives. 

No Judgment Zone

The definitions above may make it sound like I’m praising anchors and criticizing corks, but that’s not my intent. Well, maybe a little, because I myself am an anchor, as are most GMs (and more on that in a bit). I find anchors easier to understand, and I struggled for a long time to figure out the corks. They just seemed… unreliable, even sketchy people.

But I have grown to appreciate corks more over time. When corks do show up, they usually bring their best selves. An anchor will sometimes grit their teeth through a game they didn’t really have the energy or patience to participate in (I myself have occasionally been guilty of this). The cork won’t make that mistake. When they do show up, they are there because they unambiguously want to be there. 

And anchors need some corks in their game sessions to mix things up some of the time. Some of my all-time favorite sessions have featured rare appearances from corks who brought wild card energy to a table otherwise dominated by familiar anchor vibes.

Corks particularly shine in one-shots or GM-less games, where the lack of long-term commitment really lets them go crazy. Corks are usually extroverts and anchors are often introverts, although these categories don’t completely line up.

The Anchor DM versus the Cork PCs

Anchors and corks can misunderstand each other in many parts of life, but RPGs present a special challenge.

An anchor planning a party can get by on bulk alone, even if most of their corks don’t show up. Expecting 60 people, but only 45 actually come? It will probably still be a fun party, because a typical party doesn’t really depend on any particular participant being present, nor does the fun scale neatly with the number of people. And the anchor’s plans don’t change dramatically, aside from practical considerations, many of which can be controlled by common sense methods (e.g., asking people bring food and beverages means supplies will naturally line up with attendance).

But RPGs introduce a unique problem. They often pit a single anchor (in the GM role) against a group composed mostly or entirely of corks (the players). I think this is the most common source of the all-to-familiar “I had to cancel the game AGAIN ;_;” laments.

Because RPGs are really good at attracting cork players! Corks love anticipating an RPG session, even if they don't join it. The idea of creating a character and dreaming about the adventures they might have is exciting. Many corks look at your D&D night invitation the way someone in a hot air balloon might look at an impressive mountain; something exciting to admire from afar, but not something you think deeply about until the wind starts blowing you closer to its position.

GM-less, prep-less games can often be a good fit for a social group filled with corks, since they logistically work more like board games, versus the prep of the conventional TTRPG. But assume you are running a traditional GM plus players system. How can you make it work?

Knights of the Open Table 

Once we’ve accepted the differences between corks and anchors, it becomes easier to schedule with both of them in mind. And one of the best ways to do that is to run an open table.

When I hear stories about canceled sessions and failing campaigns, the most common theme is that the GM expected almost all or all of their players to be there for all or almost all of the sessions. The GM expected the players to be anchors, essentially. But some of them – or all of them – turned out to be corks. 

At a closed table, that immediately becomes a problem, because every instance of cork-like behavior disrupts the game for everyone else. The anchors are annoyed that the corks aren’t taking the game seriously and respecting others’ time. And the corks feel like the anchors are sucking all the fun out of what is supposed to be a game.

An open table avoids this issue by ensuring that no single player is essential to a particular session. Instead, the total number of players collectively provide enough “coverage” to ensure the session can happen.

My minimum quorum is usually three players (not counting myself as GM). To ensure at least three people show up, I typically invite 6-10 players to such games. People have sometimes asked me, what will I do if all 10 people show up? 

After I finish laughing, I explain that if that extremely unlikely scenario actually did happen, it would be fine. I have, on very rare occasions, run for very large groups, and while those sessions were noisier and more chaotic than normal, they were fine. The minor inconvenience of a (very unlikely) oversized session is not a big deal compared to the (much more likely) threat of an undersized one.

The Game Is Afoot, Statistically Speaking

If you are thinking that a binary of anchor versus cork is an oversimplification, you are correct. A more nuanced way to understand player attendance is to assign a predicted likelihood of attendance to each player. 

Don’t worry, you do not need to do risk-buffered forecasting via Bernoulli trials to get the answer. Back-of-the-envelope math is fine. If I were to invite six players to a game, I would feel pretty comfortable if at least two were 90% likely to attend (strong anchors); one was 60% likely to attend (anchor-leaning); and three were 25% likely to attend (corks). The specific composition might vary from session to session, but you’re almost always going to get at least three players (again, not counting the GM) out of that group.

Reassess When You Greenlight a New “Season”

While I love open tables, I will also acknowledge their biggest drawback: attendance tends to taper over time.

A new open table will draw a broad range of players, excited by the newness of the game. As time passes, the players who stick with the game will become more invested; you might even see some corks turn into anchors. But at the same time, the number of interested new players will fall off. Even if a game continues to advertise its open table status, many players will be reluctant to join if they learn that others have already been playing the game for months.

I get it. Even apart from any question of rules fluency or knowledge of the shared fiction, it just feels different to join an established group with dozens of sessions under their belt. Most open tables will eventually feature a lot of regulars, and no matter how welcoming they are, some number of new players will bounce off their established vibe.

When a game reaches that point, you probably want to talk to the players and decide how to proceed. The table may remain nominally open, but for all intents and purposes look like a closed table. It’s a good time to have a conversation about what the end of the game would look like, and to institute “seasons” that are up for renewal, with a satisfying end-point in mind.

Be Willing to Walk Away

You can do all of the above, and the same problems can occur. Too many cancelations, not enough games. You need to be able to walk away.

Your D&D group is composed of the people who show up. It doesn’t necessarily include the person who knows the rules best. Or the person who first convinced you to run the game. Or the best roleplayer. Or your sister or your spouse or your best friend. It is made up of the people who show up. 

If the game is struggling, the game is not happening. Do something else socially with those people that requires less commitment. Like a lot of things in life, a willingness to walk away when things aren't working is an important backstop for the health of the game.

Studying Noita to Build Deadly Dungeons

I have played 137 hours of Noita, because apparently I enjoy suffering. Noita is a roguelike videogame in which you explore randomly generated biomes, find customizable magic wands, and use them to kill enemies. Watch a few minutes of any video on YouTube and you’ll pretty quickly get a sense of the vibe. Like many videogames, it can be mined for TTRPG ideas.

Danger from Above

Like D&D, Noita is (mostly) a game about going down, down, down into the depths of what is essentially a dungeon. Many (but not all) enemies attack more effectively downward than they do upward. You can clear them as you descend, but both enemy behavior and level architecture become more complex and challenging. Many deaths begin when an enemy attacks laterally or unexpectedly from above, or when multiple enemies apply pressure from different directions. 

And it is not just the enemies. Noita is also famous for simulating liquids pixel by pixel. A lot of this liquid is pretty dangerous. That looks like this.

A stray shot, trap, or an enemy-induced explosion can send liquid pouring down on your character. And enemies who have the high ground will often knock your character into toxic, acidic, or flammable substances. Many Noita runs end not exclusively through enemy attacks, but through some combination of enemy action, environmental hazard, and player error. 

So ask yourself, what materials or substances are abundant in the dungeon, and how could they be exploited by the dungeon denizens (and, in turn, the PCs)? Baking this question into the dungeon’s design means that players are rewarded for understanding and anticipating what the dungeon is about.

Danger from Below

Again as in D&D, Noita monsters get stronger and hazards grow more dangerous with each level you descend. But the deeper you go, the better the loot you find.

Dropping an explosive on an enemy's head can be a relatively safe way to defeat it. But if that enemy is near some fragile treasure, like a potion, you might easily destroy it (and flood the area with the potion's potentially dangerous contents). And good luck getting the gold the enemy dropped if you also set fire to their surroundings.

Some monsters will fight other types of monsters, and it’s pretty typical to hear combat well below your character, out of sight. Listening carefully will alert you to the presence of something that can kill you on sight.

An attentive DM will often telegraph noises from another room on the dungeon level. But how often do you telegraph sounds from another floor? When can you give PCs a clue (or warning) about what is going on under their feet?

Danger from Yourself

Noita’s customizable wand system makes it quite easy to build wands that are as dangerous to the player as to the enemies, and you won’t have to play the game for long before ending a run with “Minä” listed as the cause of death; which is to say, you accidentally took yourself out.

I find this to be a particularly rich vein to tap for magic items in roleplaying games. Some of my favorite items of all time have been things that my players were too scared (too wise?) to actually use them as much as I would like. I can't exactly blame them. They can’t respawn and start a new run as easily as I can in Noita. But taking the safeties off the magical items really sells the danger and opportunity of the game's world.