The World's Largest Rewrite: Dungeon Is Wet, Tortoise Foreshadowing, and 30-50 Feral Hogs

Last time: The World’s Largest Rewrite: Salvaging the Core Idea From a Megadungeon Disaster

#104: Sea Serpent (Lesser). Why “lesser”? There is no “greater” sea serpent in the OSE bestiary. Regardless, it is a chance to carve out a water area separate from the giant catfish's pond. One of the big problems with the original WLD, relative to megadungeons like Arden Vul or Thracia, is its flatness; most good megadungeons are three-dimensional, and defined as much by their depth as their breadth. 

We won't worry too much about specifics just yet -- the diagram I posted at the end of the last post is for abstracted, relative positions. But lets assume the lower parts of this dungeon are flooded with seawater, and this was an Alcatraz-style island prison before it became an adventuring site. I like the idea that this part of the dungeon is a possible escape route, but made dangerous by sea creatures that have made their lairs here. The serpent is tough enough to dissuade most of the nearby prisoners from sneaking out this way. The black dragon could probably kill the serpent, but it is too big to fit through the underwater tunnels (and the seawater dilutes the acid too much for it to corrode its way out).

#24: Crab, Giant. Conveniently showing up right after Sea Serpent, we’ll build out our ocean depths a bit more here. We’ll put the crabs a little closer to the core. They scavenge what the sea serpent doesn't eat itself, and are also occasionally consumed by it.

#18: Cat, Great. Rolling randomly for the sub-types once again we get… sabre-toothed tiger. Hell yeah. “Normally only found in Lost World regions.” OK. Maybe part of the purpose of this prison isn’t just to house criminals but also to preserve lost wildlife that no longer exists out in the world. I’m going to put the tiger near the nobles and the catfish – he’s been drawn to the fresh water and stalks the area nearby. There may be a supernatural zoo sub-theme we can explore with other entries.

#81: Nixie. Yeah, nixies are going to require some more dungeon infrastructure and background to explain. I’m beginning to think that entire prison is not just an island, but also overgrown and covered in natural growth on the top, including a large body of fresh water. The nixies were washed in here when the water eroded through the dungeon's ceiling and flooded several regions. The lake where the giant catfish lives is a terminus, but the nixies control the river flowing into it. They’d like to claim control of the lake, but the giant catfish is too big for them to deal with directly. They’ve probably charmed other humanoids, including a few of the noble’s retinue, and perhaps some others we haven’t placed yet.

#62: Insect Swarm. This could go anywhere, couldn’t it? We don’t need to explain why an insect swarm is in the prison, because insects just like to show up in places where they’re not supposed to be. I like how the OSE bestiary has such extensive procedures for encountering them. I’ll draw inspiration from one of those – the rules for escaping the swarm by “diving into water.” Putting them near the water gives the PCs an “out of the frying pan, into the fire” option that might send some of them into the arms of the nixies. I don’t want more bees, so we’re going to go with beetles instead. I think they’re actually plant-eaters and just want to consume the PCs clothes and other textiles, but adventurers won't know that, and their bites through the clothes still hurt!

#133: Wight. It’s interesting that OSE says these are “Corpses of humans or demihumans, possessed by malevolent spirits.” The 2014 5E Manual suggests they are more conventional undead, i.e., the evil spirit is animating the same body it occupied before death. The Monster Overhaul, my current go-to bestiary, emphasizes that “A Wight’s un-life is tied to an oath, a strong emotion, or the simple will to endure.” It has a nice random table of wight types. I rolled on it and got “Avenger.” Perhaps these are enforcers who swore an oath to the prison builders to hunt those who escaped their cells. The oath extends into un-life (oops) and they’re now doing this forever. I think the builders of this prison may be jerks. Per OSE, wights that drain someone of all levels create more wights, so these wights may be “recruiting” more hunters.

I don’t want a whole undead zone where they’re all clustered together, so I’m going to separate these guys from the mummy-zombie zone. We’ll place them in as-yet unexplored territory south of the ochre jelly zone. Mundane acid doesn’t harm them, so they’re safe from the jellies. Presumably they roam around looking for escapees, but their barracks are down there. 

#92: Pixie. OSE treats pixies and sprites as separate things, and while the latter has a bit of a hook to it, pixies are quite boring. The Monster Overhaul lumps them together, but does include some extra flavor we can tap. They are often invisible and have a mercurial, forgetful nature. I like the idea that these invisible troublemakers were accidentally captured when some larger, more important prisoner was detained. That could place them almost anywhere, but the bigger the monster, the more plausible there presence here. I believe they are kind of Tinkerbelling or Jiminycricketing the dragon. The dragon probably finds them annoying, but hasn’t dissolved them yet, because their polymorph ability might come in handy at some point.

#36: Elemental. Picking randomly, we get fire elemental. OSE emphasizes they are summoned servants. Of the prison builder perhaps? I need more detail, so checking the Monster Overhaul, we get some excellent flavor and tables. The “who summoned this elemental?” table suggests tortoise tsar, a Monster Overhaul original, who has some fire-based powers, so fire elemental fits. The tortoise tsar isn’t part of my original conceit of using the OSE bestiary, but I can merge him with the dragon turtle entry. We’ll plan to revisit this situation when we roll up dragon turtle / tortoise tsar and figure out what is going on here.

#15: Caecilia. It’s OK, I had to look it up too. It’s an amphibian that looks like a snake or worm, although OSE’s are 30’ long. To take stock here, all of our monsters so far fit into one of the following categories:

• Prisoners or "zoo" animals
• Invasive species or other intruders
• Guardians or servants of the prison builders
• Creations of other creatures in the dungeon

I want to avoid putting all the monstrous animals in the second category. The prison should still feel prison-like, and not be completely overrun by creatures from outside. I think we’ll say these are prisoners, like our sabre-toothed tiger. Like the big cat, they’re extinct in the outside world (probably for the best – 30’ long, yikes!) but they live on here in the prison. 

#11: Boar. As I said, there’s a lot of beasts in this bestiary. I’m going to tap the Monster Overhaul for inspiration again. It has a table for “local boar crimes,” which is too good to pass up. I rolled “ransacked a granary.” And I note that the Overhaul suggests boars are “as smart as most people.” I like the idea that the prison builders decided these 30-50 feral hogs were smart enough to stand trial for their crimes, just like people would. So they’re prisoners here, recently escaped from their cells, but still trapped within the larger prison. This could go in a sort of Silent Titans direction.

Next time: The World's Largest Rewrite: Floating Heads, Mother Fungus, Cellipedes

The World’s Largest Rewrite: Salvaging the Core Idea From a Megadungeon Disaster

I recently read an exhaustive review from 2013 by oriongates of the World’s Largest Dungeon (WLD for short, hereforth), a megadungeon released for D&D in 2004, at the height of the d20 OGL publishing era.

The product’s gimmick was that it was bigger (and more expensive) than any other dungeon of the time, and that it included every type of monster in the game. This is good advertising and bad design. Reading oriongates’ exhaustive review, it is clear that much of the size is wasted on repetitive, purposeless rooms, and that many of the monsters are shoehorned in to meet the product’s central conceit, rather than appearing because they present interesting challenges and opportunities to tell the story of the place and give the PCs compelling choices for exploration. Compare this to something like Arden Vul (more modern in publication date, more old-school in approach) where the size, shape, and populace of the dungeon is very deliberately communicating something, rather than trying to hit an external, artificial objective.

The WLD would be a mess in any system, but it is particularly ill-suited to D&D 3.5E, where monsters and magic have particularly detailed and complex abilities and mechanics. At least a B/X game could reduce this kind of enterprise to minimalist keys, in the style of Palace of the Vampire Queen. Anything in the D&D-3.5E world has to deal with huge stat blocks and include contingencies for super-powered characters.

Trying to fix this abomination is a fool’s errand. In their review, oriongates mentions trying to do so, but later giving up, and I think that’s the right call. If neither the map nor the lore nor the factions nor the NPCs are really anything to write home about, why would anyone think it was worthwhile to fix? 

I mean, these people somehow delude themselves into thinking it might, but ... But it might work for us.

Update (June 2025): I started writing this post (and subsequent posts about the WLD) in early 2025, and it was mostly done by the spring. It turned out to be a topical exercise, as I later learned that a crowdfunded overhaul of the the WLD is in the works, and as of writing this update, has clocked nearly $700,000. The Backerkit page is extensive, and features lavish production design and a mountain of extras. It also features a long list of contributors with extensive RPG credits. 

While the product certainly looks nice, I am suspicious of language like "Massive in Every Way That Matters." The marketing still sounds very "woooah, Guinness Book of World Records!!" rather than "here's how and why this would be a compelling roleplaying experience." Sheer page count and taxonomic exhaustiveness cannot make up for what really defines a great megadungeon: a specific, gameable concept for an intriguing adventure scenario underpinned by an evocative milieu. 

That said, perhaps the team behind this effort decided that such nuances of dungeon design were simply not right for what is basically get-hype marketing copy, and they will quietly fix the original WLD's many flaws behind the scenes. It will be interesting to monitor the reviews when this beast comes out and see how it does. End of Update.

So, if we were going to try to make our own WLD, we could make life easier by first starting with a smaller monster list. D&D’s bestiary in the 3.5E days was huge, and featured some really weird, niche monsters that could not logically be packed into a megadungeon. Go back to something more fundamental. Start with a classic and basic bestiary, like the OSE monster bestiary. There are 138 monsters here. That is pretty manageable. 

Here’s a list of all those monsters. Look at 'em go!

1. Acolyte 
2. Ape, White 
3. Bandit
4. Basilisk
5. Bat
6. Bear
7. Beetle, Giant
8. Berserker
9. Black Pudding
10. Blink Dog
11. Boar
12. Brigand
13. Buccaneer
14. Bugbear
15. Caecilia
16. Camel
17. Carcass Crawler
18. Cat, Great
19. Cave Locust
20. Centaur
21. Centipede, Giant
22. Chimera
23. Cockatrice
24. Crab, Giant
25. Crocodile
26. Cyclops
27. Dervish
28. Djinni (Lesser)
29. Doppelgänger
30. Dragon
31. Dragon Turtle
32. Driver Ant
33. Dryad
34. Dwarf (Monster)|Dwarf
35. Efreeti (Lesser)
36. Elemental
37. Elephant
38. Elf (Monster)|Elf
39. Ferret, Giant
40. Fish, Giant
41. Gargoyle
42. Gelatinous Cube
43. Ghoul
44. Giant
45. Gnoll
46. Gnome
47. Goblin
48. Golem
49. Gorgon
50. Grey Ooze
51. Green Slime
52. Griffon
53. Halfling (Monster)|Halfling
54. Harpy
55. Hawk
56. Hellhound
57. Herd Animal
58. Hippogriff
59. Hobgoblin
60. Horse
61. Hydra
62. Insect Swarm
63. Invisible Stalker (Monster)|Invisible Stalker
64. Killer Bee
65. Kobold
66. Leech, Giant
67. Living Statue
68. Lizard, Giant
69. Lizard Man
70. Lycanthrope
71. Manticore
72. Mastodon
73. Medium
74. Medusa
75. Merchant
76. Merman
77. Minotaur
78. Mule
79. Mummy
80. Neanderthal (Caveman)
81. Nixie
82. Noble
83. Nomad
84. Normal Human
85. Ochre Jelly
86. Octopus, Giant
87. Ogre
88. Orc
89. Owl Bear
90. Pegasus
91. Pirate
92. Pixie
93. Pterosaur
94. Purple Worm
95. Rat
96. Rhagodessa
97. Rhinoceros
98. Robber Fly
99. Roc
100. Rock Baboon
101. Rust Monster
102. Salamander
103. Scorpion, Giant
104. Sea Serpent (Lesser)
105. Shadow
106. Shark
107. Shrew, Giant
108. Shrieker
109. Skeleton
110. Snake
111. Spectre
112. Spider, Giant
113. Sprite
114. Squid, Giant
115. Stegosaurus
116. Stirge
117. Thoul
118. Titanothere
119. Toad, Giant
120. Trader
121. Treant
122. Triceratops
123. Troglodyte
124. Troll
125. Tyrannosaurus Rex
126. Unicorn
127. Vampire
128. Veteran
129. Warp Beast
130. Water Termite
131. Weasel, Giant
132. Whale
133. Wight
134. Wolf
135. Wraith
136. Wyvern
137. Yellow Mould
138. Zombie

I’m going to randomly pick from this list and put it together as I go. There’s no reason to do this randomly. Randomizing it just makes this exercise more interesting. I mean I certainly don’t want to do this in alphabetical order. No “A is for ape, white as the snow; B is for bandit, after your dough…” No, no, no, absolutely not. Random it is.

Droning Bee by Eric Poslinski

#64: Killer bee. Let’s keep as much of the WLD conceit as possible and assume that this place is (or at some point in the past was) a prison. The OSE killer bees “build hives underground” (interesting) so something about this place attracted them when they were seeking a nesting site. We’ll decide what that was later. But we can definitely imagine a structure of beeswax and propolis that has repurposed and displaced parts of the original dungeon structure. This will give us a good opportunity to add some texture to the dungeon, right from the start; from oriongates’ review, it’s clear that too much of the WLD was plain gray stone.

#29: Doppelganger. The doppelgangers might be prisoners. Thracia has a good encounter with doppelgangers who have been imprisoned behind a sealed-up wall for centuries, which I suppose implied that doppelgangers are immortal and can't starve to death. Perhaps doppelgangers go into a hibernation state when no other sapient bipeds are nearby. Their cells have been covered in hive structure, but they may wake up if PCs or other people get close enough.  

#82: Noble. “Powerful humans with noble titles (e.g. Count, Duke, Knight, etc.)... Squire and retainers: Accompanied by a 2nd level fighter (a squire) and up to ten 1st level fighters (retainers).” OK, I like the idea that this guy and his followers are all prisoners together. Let’s suppose our noble is a Qin Shi Huang type who has done some pretty terrible stuff. The PCs can talk to him, and he will argue that his methods were necessary to unite a kingdom that will last long after his death. 

I like the idea that rather than this being a prison of unambiguously evil creatures like demons and liches, it is more like a real prison, with degrees of culpability, moral gray areas, and judgment calls on the part of the celestial jailers. The PCs will probably not find this noble to be particularly sympathetic… but they might! Or at least they may see him as someone worthy of a temporary alliance or truce. 

He’s here with a cadre of true believers who volunteered to go with him into captivity. Since I already established that the doppelgangers were not near other humanoids, I’m going to put this noble and his retinue on the other side of the bees. The noble and his retinue have been stealing honey to supplement whatever sustenance is otherwise available (we’ll decide later how creatures are getting enough food  to survive here). The killer bee hive provides a nice risk/reward opportunity for NPCs and players alike, since the honey can heal wounds… but the bees also, uh, kill, so it is a dangerous place as well.

#30: Dragon. We’re not messing around. Let's go right to the big guns. I agree with the WLD’s decision not to include every variety within a category of monster, so when we get these monster entries with multiple sub-types, we'll just choose one. I’ll pick randomly and get a black dragon. 

This particularly rapacious dragon has been using its acid breath to slowly burrow out of its cell. The prison was designed to resist this kind of escape attempt, but its structural integrity depended in part on maintenance and monitoring from the jailers, which has since lapsed. The dragon is patient, and it has linked up a number of cells around its primary domain. Like the bees, the dragon provides a reason for the dungeon’s structure to deviate from the sensible, dull, repetitive layout one would expect of a prison. The dragon limits the killer bees’ expansion in this direction, as its scales protect it from their stings, and its acid can easily destroy their hiveworks.

#138: Zombie. There is no real reason to imprison zombies. Another complaint from oriongates' review is that there are too many monsters – particularly the undead – that celestials would just destroy, not imprison. 

So we'll say the zombies were created by something else that is imprisoned here; something more dangerous. Some or perhaps all of them are former members of the noble’s nearby entourage who were killed and then zombified. We’ll figure out later who or what caused that to happen. For now, we'll place our zombies just to the east of the killer bees. They’re indifferent to the stinging insects, so they make a good buffer. 

#16: Camel. From dragons and zombies to… camels. Not all the entries are going to be easy. The camels are not prisoners, and they’re also unlikely to have migrated here intentionally, like the bees did. Let’s say they were brought here by some group of prisoners – possibly our noble and his retinue. We’ll put them adjacent to the dragon’s territory. The dragon has been herding them to supplement whatever food it is getting elsewhere. Humans find them to be irascible, but they freeze like deer in the headlights when the dragon approaches.

#40: Fish, Giant. One of the oddities of old-school D&D is the extensive “unusual animal” entries. I hadn’t realized the OSE bestiary included five different types of giant fish. We’ll pick randomly again for our sub-type, and land on giant catfish. One of the issues with the WLD is that several areas of the dungeon are transparently excuses to cram in monsters who need a custom biome, and the WLD’s “water level” is one of the most conspicuous. We’ll instead presume a number of separate watery areas, several of which may also be connections between different parts of the dungeon, as good megadungeon design necessitates. Water can also help explain the breakdown of separations between dungeon areas. 

We’ll say that this fish was once an ordinary catfish that was sucked into the dungeon as part of a flooding event, and later grew to its abnormal size as a result of the powerful mana suffusing the water within the dungeon. Because it is submerged except when hunting, it is safe from the killer bees, so we’ll put it next to them to form another buffer area. The noble and his entourage probably come here for water; they know to avoid the catfish.

#85: Ochre Jelly. A classic dungeon denizen that can be placed just about anywhere. Since the jelly is acid-themed, we’ll place it near the black dragon’s lair. Perhaps the jellies even originated with the dragon, gradually gaining mobility through latent dungeon magic?

#79: Mummy. We’ll put the mummy near the zombies, and posit that the mummy (whether intentionally or ambiently through its aura of uneath) is what roused them. Obviously this is another prisoner – perhaps the magic that allows it to respawn is particularly pernicious, and the celestials decided to imprison it after failing to find the canopic jar that powered its resurrection cycle. We’ll learn more about the mummy after we place a few more monsters nearby.

#74: Medusa. Gorgons are a favorite of mine. It would be easy enough to just assume this one is a prisoner, but I want to subvert expectations here. Perhaps they were contracted by the builders to help build the dungeon; after all, turning living matter into stone is a good way to supplement whatever stone you’re quarrying. This gorgon was either betrayed by the builders, or trapped here by accident. The gorgon is immortal and at least as willing to negotiate as the noble, if not more so. They can’t turn off their gaze, so they’re a dangerous ally even when attempting to work with diplomatic PCs.

Next time: The World's Largest Rewrite: Dungeon Is Wet, Tortoise Foreshadowing, and Feral Hogs on Trial

Can AI Turn an Arden Vul Room Key Into Table-Ready Notes?

Last week: Use AI for Routine TTRPG Prep, Not for Creative Work

For this experiment, I’m going to use room Arden Vul’s room 4-47 (“Overseer”) as an example. You can find this entry on page 272 of volume 1. The following description includes minor spoilers about an NPC and their faction, but I wanted to use it because it is such a good example of the issues described in the previous post. I don’t think this gives away too much in the grand scheme of Arden Vul; but if you have plans to play in this campaign in the future, and are sensitive to spoilers, you can skip down to the Conclusions heading for the summary.

Here’s the text as it appears in the Arden Vul book:

4-47: Overseer

Belisarius the Overseer, the second most powerful figure in the cult of Set, lives and works in this large room. The overseer is the ranking ‘secular’ figure of the cult, and is in charge of all guardsmen, military expeditions, security, patrols, and so forth. For all that, Belisarius is a devout, even fanatical, follower of Set, and an adept politician. He is also a misogynist and dislikes High Priestess Stephania intensely. As a result he is constantly plotting her demise, and hopes to replace her with the third priest, Lacedaion. Stephania is aware of these machinations and has taken precautions; she has not acted against Belisarius yet solely because he is so good at what he does. Despite his prejudices, Belisarius would never act to undermine the cult as a whole; only if he were convinced of the motives of outsiders would he consider employing them against Stephania.

The chamber is divided into a public and private area; the latter is to the east, and is shielded by some painted wooden screens. The public area has a large tactical table on which lie (incomplete) maps of the northern and southern caves of Level 4 as well as one ancient map detailing portions of the lower levels (GM’s choice). Also in the public area are several writing desks and chairs containing roster lists, personnel reports, logistical reports, and so forth. Two aides-de-camp (from the Alpha Sept) are always present here. At the north wall, next to the door to the caves, stands a large cabinet in which may be found a sizable number of curios looted from the halls as well as 12 bound codices (on theological, military, and motivational subjects). The private area contains a simple bed, an armoire, another writing desk, a weapon and armor rack, a practice dummy, two cots for the aides, a set of four easy chairs around a coffee table, and a cabinet containing 22 bottles of excellent brandy. In addition to his administrative skills, Belisarius is a formidable warrior.

The north door leads to a narrow tunnel that provides Belisarius with private access to the cavern at 4-66 via a one-way door. He doesn’t use this door very often, and the corridor is thus thick with dust.

There is a 50% chance that Belisarius is present in his quarters. The rest of the time he is elsewhere in the complex, typically in 4-2, 4-3, 4-7, 4-43, 4-51, 4-53, or 4-61. He has a 25% chance to be in 4-48 whenever the second mystery is performed [sic]

Secret Door (east): This door is normal to find and locked, and leads to a set of secret  interrogation chambers. Only the overseer and his aides-de-camp know of the existence of the door and the interrogation chambers. The key to the door is hidden in Belisarius’s liquor cabinet.

Inhabitants:

 1. Belisarius the Overseer, 7th-level male Archontean fighter: SZ M; AL LE; AC 2; MV 120’; HD 7; HP 70; #AT 3/2; Dmg 3-8 (javelin +2) or 4-11 (long sword +2). Abilities: STR 17, INT 13, WIS 16, DEX 11, CON 16, CHA 15. Possessions: chain mail +3; returning javelin +2 (see new magic items), long sword +2; potion of extra healing (x2); potion of fly; and a key-ring with keys to SL8-1 and 4-106. 

2. 2 aides-de-camp, 3rd-level female Archontean fighters: SZ M; AL NE; AC 5; MV 120’; HD 3; HP 25, 22; #AT 1; Dmg 1-8 (mace), 1-6 (spear) or 1-4 (light crossbow). Possessions: Set armor (see Arden Vul items); spear; mace, and light crossbow.

Stop and think for a moment about how this information is organized. It’s not random. The most important information is up top (who Belisarius is and what his motivations are). It is followed by the physical contents of the room, then more conditionally relevant information, like how the room connects to other spaces. It ends with the stats for the potential occupants. For purposes of the DM reading the text in advance of running the dungeon, this is basically fine.

But for use at the table? This could be much better.

The first paragraph is all about Belisarius’s motives and (implicitly) how he will act and react if the PCs become involved in the politics of the cult of Set. This is the most important information in a narrative sense, but the least important information in the context of dungeon exploration. This paragraph is actively hampering the product’s usefulness at the table, where speed of adjudication would be the DM’s priority. If the PCs are engaging diplomatically with members of the cult of Set, the DM will probably need this information long before the characters wander into Belisarius’s bedroom.

The second paragraph begins to lay out the practical details of the room. Halfway through this paragraph, we learn that “two aides-de-camp are always present here.” It’s easy to imagine a DM describing this room, with its tables and maps, and then suddenly, in a surprised voice, saying “Oh! Uh, and… there are two fighters here?” At minimum, some kind of bolding should indicate the presence of monsters and NPCs. The paragraph goes on to list more contents of the room, and the final sentence states that “In addition to his administrative skills, Belisarius is a formidable warrior.” This would be more at home in the first paragraph explaining who he is, or omitted entirely (his formidability in combat is clearly telegraphed by his stat block).

The third paragraph addresses the northern exit and is almost entirely redundant with information that can be intuited from looking at the map (another common point of complaint in Ten Foot Pole reviews). The fourth paragraph provides context for the secret door in the east wall. The key that unlocks this secret door is first mentioned here, not earlier, when its actual hiding place is described. So a DM could easily adjudicate the PCs searching the liquor cabinet without realizing they should find the key that is hidden there.

So, how good of a job can AI do unpacking this information? Let’s find out.

Here’s the prompt I gave ChatGPT: “Can you improve the organization and formatting of the following text? This is a room description for a roleplaying game, but the text needs to be reformatted so the person running the game can more quickly find the most important information. Details about people, creatures, or other things adventurers might interact with when exploring this space are most important and should be emphasized. Use bolding, bullets, and any other formatting tools you want to make the text easier to reference on the fly.”

The output was as follows: 

Key NPCs and Creatures

1. Belisarius the Overseer

• Role: Second most powerful figure in the cult of Set; Overseer of guardsmen, military expeditions, and security.
• Personality: Devout, fanatical follower of Set; adept politician; misogynist; intensely dislikes High Priestess Stephania and plots her demise but remains loyal to the cult as a whole.
• Combat Stats:
• Class/Level: 7th-level male Archontean fighter
• Alignment: Lawful Evil (LE)
• Armor Class (AC): 2
• Movement (MV): 120’
• Hit Dice (HD): 7
• Hit Points (HP): 70
• Attacks (#AT): 3/2
• Damage (Dmg): 3-8 (javelin +2) or 4-11 (long sword +2)
• Abilities: STR 17, INT 13, WIS 16, DEX 11, CON 16, CHA 15
• Possessions: Chain mail +3, returning javelin +2, long sword +2, two potions of extra healing, potion of fly, key-ring (keys to SL8-1 and 4-106).

2. Aides-de-Camp (2)

• Role: Assist Belisarius with administrative tasks; always present in the public area.
• Combat Stats:
• Class/Level: 3rd-level female Archontean fighters
• Alignment: Neutral Evil (NE)
• Armor Class (AC): 5
• Movement (MV): 120’
• Hit Dice (HD): 3
• Hit Points (HP): 25, 22
• Attacks (#AT): 1
• Damage (Dmg): 1-8 (mace), 1-6 (spear), or 1-4 (light crossbow)
• Possessions: Set armor (unique to Arden Vul), spear, mace, light crossbow.

 

Room Layout and Features

Public Area

• Tactical Table:
• Contains incomplete maps of the northern and southern caves of Level 4.
• Includes an ancient map detailing portions of the lower levels (GM’s choice).
• Writing Desks:
• Hold roster lists, personnel reports, logistical data, and similar documents.
• Cabinet (North Wall):
• Contains curios looted from the halls and 12 bound codices (topics: theological, military, motivational).

Private Area

• Sleeping Quarters:
• Simple bed, armoire, writing desk, and cots for the aides.
• Recreational Area:
• Four easy chairs, coffee table, and a cabinet with 22 bottles of excellent brandy.
• Training Equipment:
• Weapon and armor rack, practice dummy.

Secret Features:

• Secret Door (East):
• Leads to interrogation chambers.
• Lock Details: Normal to find and locked.
• Key Location: Hidden in Belisarius’s liquor cabinet.
• Knowledge of this door’s existence is limited to Belisarius and his aides.

Exits

• North Door:
• Leads to a dusty, narrow tunnel providing private access to cavern 4-66 (via one-way door).
• Rarely used; thick with dust.

NPC Presence and Movement

Belisarius:

• Chance of Presence: 50% in his quarters.
• Typical Locations: 4-2, 4-3, 4-7, 4-43, 4-51, 4-53, or 4-61.
• Special Event: 25% chance to be in 4-48 during the second mystery.

GM Notes

• Belisarius's Plotting: Actively plots against High Priestess Stephania, intending to replace her with Lacedaion.
• Stephania’s Awareness: Aware of his schemes but tolerates him due to his efficiency.
• Interrogation Chambers: These are secret and only accessible through the locked door in the private area.
• Maps and Codices: Could provide adventurers with valuable intelligence if accessed.

This is already significantly improved. It’s overkill on the bullets, particularly in giving many bullets only a single sub-bullet (from an information design perspective, a single sub-bullet should never  rarely appear alone, as it defeats the whole purpose of bullets, i.e., parsing out a list in a scannable format). But everything is much more clear than the original text, and the machine didn’t even need much coaching to reorganize the information in order of occupants → features → exits → miscellaneous.

I asked it to make a few changes, moving the NPCs presence to the top; merging the secret door info with the exit info; and condensing some of the bullets to shorten the overall vertical “height” of the entry. It produced this:

Key NPCs and Creatures

1. Belisarius the Overseer

• Role: Second most powerful figure in the cult of Set; Overseer of guardsmen, military expeditions, and security.
• Personality: Devout, fanatical follower of Set; adept politician; misogynist; intensely dislikes High Priestess Stephania and plots her demise but remains loyal to the cult as a whole.
• Chance of Presence: 50% in his quarters. Otherwise, typically in 4-2, 4-3, 4-7, 4-43, 4-51, 4-53, or 4-61. Special Event: 25% chance to be in 4-48 during the second mystery.
• Combat Stats:
• Class/Level: 7th-level male Archontean fighter; Alignment: Lawful Evil (LE); Armor Class (AC): 2
• Movement (MV): 120’; Hit Dice (HD): 7; Hit Points (HP): 70
• Attacks (#AT): 3/2; Damage (Dmg): 3-8 (javelin +2) or 4-11 (long sword +2)
• Abilities: STR 17, INT 13, WIS 16, DEX 11, CON 16, CHA 15
• Possessions: Chain mail +3, returning javelin +2, long sword +2, two potions of extra healing, potion of fly, key-ring (keys to SL8-1 and 4-106).

2. Aides-de-Camp (2)

• Role: Assist Belisarius with administrative tasks; always present in the public area.
• Combat Stats:
• Class/Level: 3rd-level female Archontean fighters; Alignment: Neutral Evil (NE)
• Armor Class (AC): 5; Movement (MV): 120’; Hit Dice (HD): 3; Hit Points (HP): 25, 22
• Attacks (#AT): 1; Damage (Dmg): 1-8 (mace), 1-6 (spear), or 1-4 (light crossbow)
• Possessions: Set armor (unique to Arden Vul), spear, mace, light crossbow.

Room Layout and Features

• Public Area:
• Tactical Table: Incomplete maps of the northern/southern caves of Level 4; ancient map detailing portions of lower levels (GM’s choice).
• Writing Desks: Roster lists, personnel reports, logistical data.
• Cabinet (North Wall): Contains curios looted from the halls and 12 bound codices (topics: theological, military, motivational).
• Private Area:
• Sleeping Quarters: Simple bed, armoire, writing desk, and cots for the aides.
• Recreational Area: Four easy chairs, coffee table, and a cabinet with 22 bottles of excellent brandy.
• Training Equipment: Weapon and armor rack, practice dummy.

Exits

• North Door:
• Leads to a dusty, narrow tunnel providing private access to cavern 4-66 (via one-way door). Rarely used; thick with dust.
• Secret Door (East):
• Leads to interrogation chambers. Lock is normal to find and locked.
• Key Location: Hidden in Belisarius’s liquor cabinet.
• Only Belisarius and his aides know of its existence

GM Notes

• Belisarius's Plotting: Actively plots against High Priestess Stephania, intending to replace her with Lacedaion.
• Stephania’s Awareness: Aware of his schemes but tolerates him due to his efficiency.
• Interrogation Chambers: These are secret and only accessible through the locked door in the private area.
• Maps and Codices: Could provide adventurers with valuable intelligence if accessed.

This is pretty close to how I would organize this information if I had converted this room key into table notes by hand.

Finally, I asked it to add a table of contents at the top with a hyperlink to each section, and it provided blue-colored text that looked right… but didn’t appear to form an actual hyperlink, and didn’t work when I copied it into other programs. So there are limits to what it can do, but I think some combination of better prompting and using a more advanced AI could get there.

Conclusions

This is really only scratching the surface. If you gave an AI the entire text of an adventure you were going to run, you could ask it to create cross-references and summaries. It could generate random encounter tables based on dungeon denizens. It could provide a treasure index. 

Yes, all of these tasks are things the GM can do themselves. But they are time-consuming. AI helps in the same way that conventional word processing software saves time, which can be reallocated to the more creative parts of session prep.

There are some issues to navigate before using this more broadly. Some AIs might introduce external information, hallucinate, or garble details (although this is less of an issue when asking it to rearrange or summarize content, versus creating new content). And we should be mindful of any stipulations that creators put on the use of their work vis-a-vis AI, particularly concerns over training data. ChatGPT does not use submitted content to train its model, but other AIs might. If a creator includes stipulations about using their content in this way, err on the side of caution and keep it away from the AI.

But GMs should absolutely continue to explore AI as a prep assistant. The world has a finite number of highlighters, and your wrist is probably going to give out before you get halfway through marking up a beast like Arden Vul. Don't let something as simple as organization and formatting stand between you and running an epic megadungeon like this.

Use AI for Routine TTRPG Prep, Not for Creative Work

The Halls of Arden Vul by Richard Barton is a truly massive megadungeon. It’s a love letter to AD&D and the classic megadungeons of the 1980s.

The good part of the classic feel is obvious. Listening to the 3d6 DTL podcast’s long-running Arden Vul campaign, it’s impressive to see the density of factions, the depth of the dungeon’s history, and the opportunities for interactivity. I would love to run it someday. 

The bad part comes down to formatting and at-the-table ease of use. I wouldn’t say it doesn't do anything to incorporate the advances TTRPG usability over the last 40 years; it includes expansive overviews and aggressive cross-referencing, an improvement from the “figure it out yourself” opacity of a lot of ‘80s D&D products. 

But it doesn’t go nearly far enough. The text is dense, written for casual reading rather than for quick reference. Ancient history is intermingled with recent events. There’s little use of bullets, bolding, or sidebars. Even little things reflect a retrograde formatting mentality; listing damage as “2-7” rather than “1d6+1” is a small detail, but it is a pointlessly archaic Gygaxism that can trip people up; particularly new DMs, or those who don’t easily intuit die increments from numerical ranges. Compare this to a modern product, like Necrotic Gnome’s OSE releases, with their signature house style, carefully calibrated for use at the table. Arden Vul is old school not just in play culture, but also in formatting and presentation.

Don’t take my word for it. Read Bryce’s review on Tenfootpole. He obviously has high praise for the amount of evocative detail and interactivity on display in Arden Vul. But his reviews also place a premium on ease of use at the table, and many of his criticisms of Arden Vul land here. See the “Jhentis the Ghoul” section of the linked review for an apt summary of the problem.

Browsing my own copy of Arden Vul, I have to agree with him. It is frustrating that such a massive, fascinating work should be held back by mere formatting and organization issues. Implicitly, the DM running this is expected to make up the difference. As Bryce puts it in the review: “Highlighters out! Actually, better buy a gross of them, you’ve got 1122 pages to read, absorb, and highlight.”

But it’s 2025. We aren’t limited to highlighters, right? Can’t we use… technology? Can we get the AI to do it for us?

On the Use and Misuse of Generative AI in TTRPGs

Generative AI is a hot topic in many spaces, including indie creative scenes like TTRPGs. While some indie and OSR creators have dabbled in using generative AI, there's a lot of ire directed at these tools as well, particularly from artists who object to Midjourney and similar image-generation software.

I’m sympathetic to concerns about AI content replacing human-made content. In the past, I used AI images on this blog, just to add some color to my posts. But recently, I’ve been losing interest in those image-generation tools. While my use of them did not displace any work that would have been commissioned to a human artist, I’ve nonetheless found that as AI-generated images have gotten “better,” they’ve lost some of the weirdness they had just a few years ago, and are turning into professional-but-bland tools, better suited for workplace PowerPoint presentations than TTRPG content. There’s much more to say on this topic, but that’s a whole post of its own, for another time.

AI image generation in action. Technically, yes, this delivers on the prompt request of "robot rearranging things in a dungeon room." But everything in it is either sharp-but-derivative (the very generic robot); blurred to the point of abstraction (the figures, the chest (?) on the left); or failing on a basic level to model a coherent 3D space (the archway, the candles, the stairs, the robot's lower body). Image generation like this is not a good replacement for human-made creative work. 

But this skepticism of generative AI as a replacement for creative work shouldn’t blind us to the usefulness of AI as an assistant for routine tasks. AI tools in their current form are best at handling the least-interesting and dullest parts of the process, freeing up creators to focus on the really creative stuff. And one of the places AI can help the most is in session prep.

Next Week: Can AI Turn an Arden Vul Room Key Into Table-Ready Notes?

Worldbuilding Implications of the Megadungeon as Literal Underworld

Last Week: Death in Depth Within the Mythic Underworld

Last week we explored how to make the mythic underworld a literal one as well. This adds a risk/reward mechanism without defanging death, and rescuing an ally from death provides a reason to delve deeper into the dungeon than the party otherwise would.

Does this concept mean that the dungeon is loaded with ghosts? Well, yes, but not the undead wraiths and banshees the PCs are accustomed to. The typical shade is an invisible, barely perceptible presence. 

But they can subtly influence the dungeon. A door slams shut when no monsters are nearby? A shade, agitated to a brief moment of corporality. A new torch goes out in a dungeon hall without so much as a gentle breeze? Snuffed by a shade.

But otherwise, shades are unseen and undetectable, even by magic that finds the invisible and the undead. The lost soul the PCs search for is the exception. Because of their personal connection to the dead adventurer, the PCs can spot a soul they know, once they are close.

"But my gear! But my loot!"

What if a PC dies, and the die roll indicates a result deeper than the deepest level of the dungeon? That means, at minimum, that the soul cannot be rescued until the DM decides to expand the dungeon. Indeed, in a meta sense, the deaths of powerful adventurers may be the genesis of many deep layers of megadungeons. Perhaps the newly created levels reflect the soulscape of the doomed PC that was banished there. The DM should create new levels at their leisure, and notify the players when a rescue is possible.

This works best in megadungeons where the dungeon becomes strange and inscrutable in its lower levels. Not just “very old tombs” or “entrance to the underdark” strange. Strange like ancient mythological beliefs that deep caves were literally the access point to the afterlife. The idea that the underworld is a physical space connected to the normal world, where one can go, and – at great risk – attempt to rescue someone is, of course, part of Greek myth, as well as various other mythologies. This idea could work best in a setting that folds the planes into the “real” world, rather than treating them as alternate dimensions or foreign planets, the way some of D&D’s settings have in the past.

Death in Depth Within the Mythic Underworld

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

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

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

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

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

Complicating Rescue 

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

Bargain

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

Fade

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

Exchange

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

Geas

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

Next Week: Worldbuilding Implications of the Megadungeon as Literal Underworld

Underland: A Deep Dungeon Delve

I’m partway through "Underland: A Deep Time Journey," a 2019 book by Robert Macfarlane. The book is broadly about underground spaces, and the fascination they engender in us. The book’s potential application to fantasy TTRPGs and dungeons is so obvious that I have to imagine someone has written about Underland in the context of RPGs. But googling “RPG Underland” and similar terms didn’t produce any results, so on the off chance that I’m the first to notice this, I will share some interesting quotes from the book that are readily applicable to D&D-style RPG games.

On Walter Benjamin's unfinished Arcades Project:

It is clear that [Walter] Benjamin’s imagination was strongly drawn to enclosed and underground spaces: the warren of the covered ‘arcades’ themselves, as well as the caverns, crypts, wells and cells that existed beneath Paris. Taken together, these sunken spaces comprise what Benjamin called a ‘subterranean city’, shadow twin to the ‘upper world’, and dream-zone to its conscious mind. ‘Our waking existence is a land which, at certain hidden points, leads down into the underworld,’ he wrote, memorably: the realm from which dreams arise. All day long, suspecting nothing, we pass by these inconspicuous places, but no sooner has sleep come than we are eagerly groping our way back to lose ourselves in the dark corridors.

This is right down the middle of the lane for classic dungeon construction. The shadow twin? The dream-zone? Sounds like the mythic underworld to me. I’ve added the Arcades Project to my reading list to see how much more the source text supports classic RPG exploration.

On the quarries underneath Paris:

For centuries, quarrying was ill-regulated and largely unmapped. Then in the mid eighteenth century, the extensive undermining began to have consequences for the upper city, causing subsidence sinkholes known as fontis that were reputed to be of diabolic origin. The quarry voids had begun to migrate to the surface; the under-city had begun to consume its twin. In 1774 a fonti engulfed, in a matter of seconds, pavements, houses, horses, carts and people. The site of the sinkhole was, of all places, the Rue d’Enfer – the Street of Hell. Several minor cave-ins followed, and panic spread in the city at the unknown extent of the invisible danger. Louis XVI responded shortly after his accession by creating an inspection unit for the ‘Quarries Below Paris and Surrounding Plains’, headed by a general inspector called Charles-Axel Guillaumot, and tasked with regulating the quarries for the purposes of public safety. It was Guillaumot who initiated the first mapping of the void network, with a view to consolidating existing spaces and regulating further quarrying activities.

If you showed me this excerpt without context, I would assume it was fictional content for a novel, RPG, or video game. It already sounds like a scenario that might show up in, say, Miseries & Misfortunes. Just consider how many gameable elements we can draw from the above paragraph alone: 

• Sinkholes, a fascinating, scary, and under-utilized phenomena.
• The sudden immersion of the surface/normal/waking world into the subsurface/abnormal/dreaming world (“a city block has sunk, can you lead people to safety?”)
• “Reputed to be of diabolic origin.” Great ambiguity. We can either treat this literally (malevolent intervention in the surface city) or figuratively (peoples’ misunderstanding of what causes the sinkholes leads them to attribute it to the supernatural).
• “The Street of Hell” and “the invisible danger.” No elaboration needed.
• An inspection unit. This is another great hook to adventure. The PCs are explicitly assigned the duty of mapping the “void network.”
• Yes, it is that Louis XVI, so on top of everything else, this is an urban scenario percolating within the prelude to the most famous revolution in world history. 

The book goes on to detail the various uses of the catacombs over time:

The deposition of bones into the catacombs continued over the course of the nineteenth century, but quarrying dwindled away as the best limestone deposits became worked out. From the 1820s the quarry voids were put to a new use as mushroom fields: damp and dark, they provided the perfect growing spaces for fungi, which sprouted from rows of horse manure. Adaptable quarrymen made a career move into mushroom farming, and a subterranean Horticultural Society of Paris was founded, its first president being a former general inspector of the mines. By 1940 there were some 2,000 mushroom farmers working underneath Paris. During the Second World War the French Resistance retreated into sections of the tunnels in the months following occupation. So did civilians during air raids – and so, too, did Vichy and Wehrmacht officers, who constructed bombproof bunkers in the maze under the sixth arrondissement.

The abundance of gameable options here is comical:

• “The deposition of bones.” Yes. Catacombs and necropolises are obviously fruitful places for RPGs for any number of reasons, including the undead. All the more when they have multiple overlapping/conflicting uses.
• Mushroom fields. Again, this creates room for both classic monsters and unconventional “treasure” (be sure to have a “so you ate a random mushroom” table to roll on).
• “...its first president being a former general inspector of the mines.” Sounds like an adventurer who graduated to domain play.
• Factions in the dungeon. The resistance, civilians, Vichy, and Wehrmacht officers all going underground. If I had read this in the pages of a WW2 RPG, I would have thought it was cool, but a little unrealistic. Knowing that it is real provides some great fuel for games of all kind (and this wasn’t even the only urban space where this kind of thing happened during World War 2).

I’ve been reading bits of Underland between time with other books, so I haven’t finished it yet. I’ll follow up this post with another one if I find other interesting excerpts.

Cyclopean Masonry and Making Civilizations Feel Forgotten and Ancient

Last week: The Strata of Civilizations

Many fantasy games do a poor job of suggesting the passage of time. They merely assert it, or give it the thinnest coat of narrative veneer. The “present” of the fantasy world already feels “old” to the modern-day player; how can we better communicate that the “present” of the game world sits on top of a much older past?

Think about cyclopean masonry. To a modern observer, without some specific training, these ancient walls do not look much different from other ancient walls. But to the classical Greeks, they were so strange and different that they were attributed to mythological forces, rather than the humans who built them. What can we add to games to inspire similar wonder?

The Walled City of Rosargy

No one who lives in Rosargy today knows who built its incredible walls. No other city has walls like them. They show no sign of wear from the elements and require no maintenance. Powerful monsters and terrible magics have left them unscathed. 

The city’s four perfect, imposing gates stand at the points of the compass rose. There are no handles, knobs, or keyholes. Bas reliefs on the doors plainly show supplicants speaking before the doors, and the doors opening in response. But no one today speaks the language they spoke, or knows the words they said.

So getting into and out of Rosargy is difficult. Massive dirt ramps allow carts to trundle up and over, while pulleys and lifts and ladders of all shapes and sizes allow access for individual travelers. In peaceful times, the walls are more of a nuisance than a benefit. But the occupants are reminded of their value when peaceful times end.

Torsten the Thresher

It’s still possible to find remnants of the ancient war golems who served Archmage Aristaios in the Patient War. Buried underneath layers of undergrowth or sunken into the seabed, huge ancient granite monstrosities, still as any other stone. But once upon a time they walked the earth and fought great battles. We know this is true because we can observe Torsten the Thresher.

Torsten can be found near the village of Ukaleq, in a secluded river valley full of stitch-weed and gabble groves. Scholars theorize that a great fortress must have once been here. There are no ruins of this fortress. There is quite the opposite, no trace of civilization. For Torsten is still here, smashing his enormous stone club into a huge crater in the ground. Scholars believe that Torsten was ordered to attack a structure at this location, but never ordered to stand down. The scholars speculate that Archmage Aristaios died while Torsten carried out his assault, and with no command to cease, Torsten simply continued to follow through on this final orders into perpetuity.

Visitors are understandably terrified of Torsten, but the people of Ukaleq village love him. For countless generations, they have dragged the tough stalks of the gabble trees to “Torsten the Thresher,” as they call him. The slow and methodical rise and fall of his club, powered by magic, is far more productive than any conventional threshing method. The villages do not fear this weapon of war, for his presence has been as consistent and indifferent as anything in the world, since long before their ancestors came to this place. If the villagers have any concern at all when it comes to Torsten, it is the worry that the hole he has dug with his massive blows will eventually destabilize the ground on which he stands, and tip him over. They seek the help of dwarven architects to reinforce Torsten’s footing and ensure he can continue his vital work for generations to come.

The Pleasure Palace of Queen Léontine

There were elves once, in this land. Perhaps there still are, but no person who walks these roads has met them in person. Their ancient works remain, although time and circumstance have changed them to such a degree that the humans here scarcely recognize the purposes they once served.

Take, for example, the Pleasure Palace of Queen Léontine. What no person today knows or understands is that this elven queen once called this place her home, many centuries before men set foot here. Her magic was great, and the barriers between worlds were thinner and more porous in that age. She traveled back and forth between this world and the fey realm of the fairie courts, which in that long-ago time were friendly to the elves.

To ensure she could readily attend the social season of the fey lands and rulership of her domain in this world, she worked powerful magicks on her pleasure palace, allowing it to phase between worlds on a timely schedule, without the need to cast the spells each time herself. Would-be suitors – whether magically compelled or completely willing – guarded the palace from intrusion in both realms. For many human generations, she reigned and reveled in this way, living in both worlds.

Exactly when and how is lost to history, but at some point Queen Léontine died, or disappeared, and her palace fell into disuse. The guardian suitors left or died, and the first humans to wander this land attempted to settle in the disused palace. But its strange travel between worlds made it dangerous to these intruders, who unexpectedly disappeared with the palace's transition. Folklore stories sprung up about the cursed place and the people who disappeared after lingering too long in its glamoured halls. Over time, without servants to maintain its beautiful gardens, it fell to ruin; the delicate glasswork structures collapsed; and eventually everything was so overgrown that the structure of the palace itself was no longer  even visible.

But the magic remained, and the palace and the land it resided on continued to shift between worlds, albeit more slowly with each passing millennia. The palace phases into the real world approximately once each century. In three out of four of its appearances, the ruin’s arrival is barely noticeable; a heavily overgrown mound that appears in the wilderness, swapping places with largely similar terrain, then disappears again months later. But in one out four appearances, it phases back to our world from a fey court with a dangerously severe difference in air pressure, relative to the modern world. In these instances, the arrival produces a tremendous booming noise, audible for miles around, followed by terrible storms and tornadoes. The guardians are gone, the splendor faded and overgrown, and Queen Léontine no longer walks those fabled halls; but its magic still dominates the lands she once ruled.

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

Themes, Thesauruses, Mysteries, and Megadungeons

Last Week: Premises, Themes, Genre Hacking, and Shower Thoughts

Last week I wrote about turning a premise into tangible themes. This week, let’s get into a crunchy, digestible example.

The premise of our Knave game involves a mystery train that stops at various locations for the players to explore. But neither the premise itself nor the ensuing session zero discussion really defined what kind of locations the PCs would explore. It was an open question. 

So I made a list of words that either came directly out of conversations with the players, or were a step or two removed from those conversations. 

1. Brutalist
2. Cyclopean 
3. Alien
4. Oracular 
5. Innervative
6. Biomechanical
7. Hypnagogic 
8. Demoniacal 
9. Entropic
10. Stellar 
11. Temporal 
12. Apocalyptic
13. Resurrectionist 

I decided to go with all adjectives for a feeling of internal consistency. It’s OK to flex the dictionary and thesaurus a bit here, as long as the words are evocative and interesting.

Because Strangers on a Train is a mystery game, information is revealed gradually. The words at the top of the list are close to the surface, things that might come through within the first few sessions. The second location the PCs visited had very literal brutalist and cyclopean design characteristics.

The terms further down the list may only be perceptible after many sessions. Many megadungeons essentially contain a mystery in the same manner. The first level might be full of sundry bandits and cultists, but the lowest level is the hollow earth / portal to hell / crashed spaceship part of the dungeon, secret from all but the most accomplished adventurers.

Remember that in the last post, we talked about the value of compounded our terms. Words on their own might not get us very far in developing something unusual. They are instead more valuable when we combine them to create something really novel. So oracular-stellar becomes “a structure for studying the stars to predict the future.” Brutalist-hypnogogic becomes “a vast dreaming amphitheater for sleeping explorers.” And so on.

Dungeon 23: The Grind

I have enough writing experience in different contexts – from professional settings to blogging to tabletop games – that I’m confident saying that editing is the most criminally underrated part of writing.

I understand why. Writing itself is enjoyable. Turning ideas into words. That’s the fun part. Editing is work.

But it’s valuable work. Removing a single bad idea is as useful as adding 10 good ones. Excising an unnecessary sentence is as helpful as writing a brand new paragraph. Scrapping an entire section that wasn’t pulling its weight could save an entire project. 

So, Dungeon 23.

Cut from the Bottom

Spending five minutes a day on Dungeon 23 produces some fast, zany, madcap results. They look pretty good fresh out of the oven. But in the cold light of February, some of those January dungeon rooms looked pretty bad.

So, we edit. At the end of every month, find the least-interesting ideas and cut them. For example…

Move the robots off the surface. Several of our rooms suggested that the reptile ancien regime fled from a surface society inhabited by robots. But these robots were incongruous; they didn’t really make sense. And they strictly limited how the dungeon could be incorporated in a game. Let’s move the robots deeper into the dungeon, rather than implying a surface setting we’re not interested in building. Our surface world can now be any normal, nominally human-settled civilization in a fantasy world.

Scrub out fixed scenarios. One of our rooms described a painted person examining the decapitated head of a robot from a nearby mechanical corpse. It was less a room, and more of a frozen tableau, a flash-frozen scene ready to play out when the players walk in on it. This kind of event fits better on a random encounter table than as a dungeon room.

Room to Breathe

I crafted my dungeon day-to-day, drawing heavily on the generator. Drawing on a 5.5’ by 3.5’ notebook, the rooms inevitably were tightly packed together. 

The reptilian ancien regime, the petrogeists, the surface-dwelling robots humans, the painted people and their summoned angel of light, and the sundry unaligned monsters were squeezed into relatively tight proximity. This is a known issue with otherwise excellent dungeons that try to compress an intriguing scenario into a too-small space of tightly keyed rooms.

Fortunately – because this particular Dungeon 23 project is merely a very rough draft – I can go back through these rooms and stretch out the proceedings, adding longer hallways, additional rooms, and obstructions and blockages to suggest a more believable shared dungeonscape between the factions.

The First Culling of Many 

To return to the subject of writing versus editing… how many editing passes does it take to turn draft writing into a finished product? 

“It depends,” but something like…

• A single editing pass for a text message or a DM to a friend.
• Two or three passes for a Discord post or a tweet.
• Four to six thorough reviews for a blog post (I will concede I sometimes fall short, and regret it when I re-read something later and see something I need to fix).
• Ten? More? Could it ever be too many? For something you will put your name on and publish for strangers to read.

In a way, a published module (adventure, whatever you like to call it) is the hardest thing to sufficiently edit. A TTRPG product is attempting to do double duty as not just an interesting fictional scenario, but also a practical tool for use at the table. Imagine combining the writing tasks of “short story” and “furniture assembly instruction manual” into one job.

I suspect a lot of creative people hate editing. Writing itself is the fun part, right? Encountering the ideas themselves in the wild and shaping them into tangible things others can enjoy.

Maybe you hate editing. That’s fine if you are a successful writer with a dedicated editor who can take on that work for you. But most people don’t have that luxury. Not bloggers, not independent publishers, certainly not homebrewing DMs. You are your own best editor. So embrace the value of editing. Even if it feels like work. Especially if it feels like work. Because it will pay off. 

Dungeon23: Too Many Monsters, When Empty is Not Empty, and the Fast Lane to Danger

Monsters, Monsters, Monsters

Our Dungeon23 generator spat out monsters consecutively for the first three days. Hey, I just work here. Without some empty rooms to space out creatures, we had to get creative with explaining their proximity. Day one was the chained interrogator, day two the kleptoplasm (separated from the interrogator by a secret door), and day three was a tentacle snaking out from the crevasse, which leads down deeper into the dungeon.

Each monster is doing a different job. The interrogator establishes a faction, the fallen ancien regime of the reptilefolk. The kleptoplasm is a solitary, unintelligent/unaligned lair monster. The tentacle is nominally a monster, but is also something of a trap, and really an excuse to draw the characters deeper into the dungeon (it’s literally part of Something Bigger on a lower level). It foreshadows the deeper parts of the dungeon.

For statistics, I am using the following scheme: 

NAME (1-3 adjectives) AC X HD X Attack XdY (descriptor) ML SV x/y/z

AC, HD, Attack, and ML are bog-standard for rules-light games in the tradition of B/X D&D. With a little finagling, these could scale up to 5E-level complexity, although damage would need to be increased to keep up with 5E’s resilient characters.

The adjectives are inspired by Ultraviolet Grasslands’ method of presenting monsters, as I talked about previously. The three-part save numbers are inspired by Andrew Kolb’s Oz and Neverland, also addressed in that post. If a monster needs to make a save or ability check, the DM merely has to decide if the monster is good, average, or bad in the relevant area.

Environmental Storytelling

Day four was our first “empty” room. As detailed in Courtney Campbell’s Tricks, Empty Rooms, & Basic Trap Design, one of our sources of inspiration, an empty room is not really empty:

The first and most important thing to remember is that empty rooms aren’t. “Empty” refers to the fact that they lack an antagonist, threat, reward, or something ‘unusual’. The purpose of an empty room is to insure [sic] the players never know which one of these options they are going to face - all rooms devoid of antagonists should appear empty, so that the players never know when a trap, trick or treasure is hidden in front of them.

Empty rooms do a lot of the heavy lifting in establishing the history of the dungeon (what it once was) the current milieu or situation of the dungeon (what it now is) and opportunities for the players to leverage it to achieve their goals (what it may soon be).

Our room four is a dead-end, collapsed inward from a bomb-blast above. We’re still close to the surface, so we want a lot of our rooms to reinforce the revolution that happened up there recently (as implied by our ancien regime). Rooms five and six (also “empty”) include paint from revolutionary graffiti dripping down through cracks and the remains of an anarchist book stash, respectively. 

Entrances and Exits

We very intentionally decided that our day one room would not be an entrance to the dungeon. Days five and six provide us with our first entrance and our first point of access to a lower level.

That means that access to level two is quite close to an initial entry point to the dungeon. This serves two purposes. First, it allows the characters to get in over their heads. Yes, day six’s room includes a ladder downward, allowing PCs to very quickly "skip" the first level and get deeper into the dungeon; but that ladder goes down into the same chasm from which the tentacle in room three emerged, so it is certainly not the safest way to get to level two! Second, it provides a fast way for the party to move deeper into the dungeon on repeat visits, after level one itself is no longer of much interest for exploration (and, presumably, after the source of the tentacles is dealt with in some way).

The First Three Pages

Comparing the below image to the one in my previous Dungeon23 post, we can see how the first page has been retroactively filled in with more detail as the subsequent days were completed. As of time of writing, I am (almost) caught up to the present day; but I will hold off on photos of the next few pages, until this kind of retroactive embellishment is complete.