d100 Reasons for a New PC to Suddenly Show Up in the Dungeon

“If your character dies, you can roll another one and get back into the game in five minutes or less” is one of the key elevator pitches for OSR-style play. And yes, henchmen and hirelings can be promoted to PCs. But sometimes there aren’t enough hirelings to go around. Or the existing NPCs are just not the right fit for what the player wants to try at that moment.

This post was inspired by d4 Caltrops’ invaluable d100 lists, as well as the (relatively) high lethality and troupe-style play in the 3d6 Down the Line Arden Vul podcast, wherein new PCs sometimes need to show up deep in the dungeon, often all alone. Some of the phrasing and tone is indebted to the failed careers in Electric Bastionland.

Sometimes a new character needs to serendipitously arrive with an incentive to join the party. Who are they? Where did they come from?

Isometric Dungeon by Athena Kipen

Roll 5d20 for a result that will skew toward the middle of the list, where the (relatively) “normal” results appear. Roll 1d100 for a truly random result. If you’re wondering why the first few entries on this list are so gonzo, it is so they won’t show up at all on the more controlled 5d20 roll. Skip to the entries in the 50s for examples of the more conventional results.

1. The DMPC. You are the extension of a quasi-mythical divine omnipotence that rules us all. Take a fate point, even if (especially if) the game you’re playing doesn’t use fate points.
2. The narrator. You’ve been faithfully relating the adventure to an implied outside audience, but now the PCs have learned the fourth wall is an illusionary wall, and have decided to pull you through it. Take foreknowledge of the next three random encounter rolls (the DM tells you what the result will be before you encounter it, and you may act accordingly; for example, if you decide to confront a wandering monster, you automatically gain surprise).
3. Time traveler. A demon tore open a portal in time and flung you into the future, where their evil is law. Take a +2 bonus to reaction rolls with elderly and tradition-minded folk, who recognize something of the old ways in you.
4. Transmogrification! Randomly choose a monster of 3 HD or less. You are this monster, polymorphed into an otherwise-normal adventurer. You have no special monster powers, but monsters of a similar type will subconsciously sense there’s something about you, and will avoid conflict with you if possible. Anti-magic fields or similar effects may temporarily return you to your monstrous state, but you won’t remember your non-monstrous life during this temporary reversion.
5. Doppelganger (one-sixteenth, on your mother’s side) posing as your last character, claiming to have miraculously returned from the dead. Take the ability to mimic a humanoid’s appearance, once per day. Your appearance stays that way until you use this ability again; you can’t turn it off. You don’t remember what you originally looked like.
6. Resurrected ancient. You are one of the dungeon builders, inadvertently brought back by misdirected magic. Your memories are gone, but the remnant technology or magic of the dungeon builders still obeys you (...sometimes).
7. Dungeon jester. You play the fool, but you are as clever as they come. Factions will typically underestimate you on an initial encounter. You are skilled at flattering rulers.
8. Seen servant. The mage who conjured you never dismissed you, and your lingering essence has coalesced into a real person. Take the ability to turn incorporeal for one turn each day, but you can only carry a single slot’s worth of gear (or 25 pounds worth of encumbrance) while in this state.
9. Frozen in the ice. Moon pie… what a time to be alive. Gain a resistance or +2 save bonus to cold damage and other effects from cold temperatures.
10. Benthic backwash. The ocean found your flavor bitter, and spit you into the deep depths of the dungeon. You take twice as long to drown as a normal person, and fish respect you.
11. Aberrant survivor. The brain parasite is (probably…?) gone, and you are now on your own, for better or worse. Take a +2 to saving throws against enchantment and compulsion effects.
12. Double agent. Take a +2 to reaction rolls with two local factions of the DM's choice (but if you ever encounter members of both at the same time, you’re going to be in a lot of trouble).
13. Corpseweed dealer. You harvest and sell a powerful narcotic that only grows on corpses deep in the mythic underworld. Take 2d2 doses of dried leaves that can knock a horse on its ass when ingested or smoked.
14. Teleporter mishap. You stumbled onto a one-way teleport pad somewhere else, and you are now stranded in this dungeon. Take a +4 bonus to saving throws against magic that would transport you to another place against your will.
15. Thrill seeker. Twenty-seven dungeons in three years. Anything to execute the perfect delve! Take an adrenaline rush; whenever you are at exactly 1 HP, you receive a +4 to any rolls (including saving throws) that could mean the difference between life and death. 
16. Medic! You came down here to help someone. You got there too late, and now you could use a hand yourself. Take a surgeon’s kit, bandages, and three draughts that heal 2d4 HP each, but also make the body numb for one hour.
17. Downtrodden translator. You seem to be made to suffer. It's your lot in life. Take fluency in a randomly chosen language, plus a background in (mostly useless) etiquette protocol.
18. Wrongfully accused. Convicted of a crime you did not commit, you have fled the authorities, taking shelter in the dungeon. Take a +4 to rolls to flee from someone or something that knows your name.
19. Rightfully accused. Convicted of a crime you actually did commit, you have fled the authorities, taking shelter in the dungeon. Take a thieves’ guild ally who can provide an ordinary service (fencing treasure, laundering money, or similar) at no cost, or an unusual service at half the normal cost, once per month.
20. Dungeon tour guide. Most of your latest group of thrill-seekers didn’t make it too far; good thing they signed the waivers. Take a terrified, wealthy noble, who is useless during delves, but will pay you a bonus of Xd50 GP, where X equals the deepest dungeon level you took them to and spent a non-negligible amount of time in.
21. Monster whisperer. Choose a random monster from the Monster Manual or most appropriate random encounter table, per DM instruction. Take a +2 bonus on reaction rolls when encountering that monster.
22. Dungeon flirt. Wouldn’t it be funny... 👉👈 ...if we kissed in the dungeon? 😳 Take a +2 bonus to reaction rolls with kissable NPCs (your DM has a list of the most kissable NPCs in your game; don’t believe them if they deny this). 
23. Dungeon merchant. Got some rare things on sale, stranger! You have plied the trade of dungeon merchant long enough, and now wish to see how the other half lives, by becoming an adventurer yourself. Take three weird trinkets or very minor magical items, as rolled on a table like this one. 
24. Mushroom hunter. Take a mushroom hat and a +2 to reaction rolls and saving throws when encountering fungal monsters.
25. Dungeon docent. You are a font of dungeon knowledge. A tiny percentage of it may even be useful. Take the ability to identify the approximate era and historical context of dungeon architecture if you have time to carefully study it.
26. Wizard’s apprentice. Until recently, you served an irascible malcontent wizard who dwells in this dungeon. Take a spell scroll with a randomly chosen spell from levels 1-3. (This may seem odd if your character is not a magic user, but that is just another reason for them to have quit the job).
27. Cast into the depths. Someone threw you into a pit, at the bottom of which was the dungeon. Whether the dispute was over love, money, magic, or madness, you can’t recall (probably because you landed on your head). Take the ability to radically forgive your enemies. If you defeat and then spare an intelligent creature with HD equal to or less than your level, it must pass a morale check to take action against you or harm you in the future.
28. Dungeon dressing. Long ago a witch turned you to stone to fill a you-sized gap in the masonry of her wall. The magic finally wore off, and now you’re ambulatory again. Take the ability to ask yes/no questions of worked stone; the stone is generally positively disposed toward you, but will quickly tire of successive questions. 
29. Dungeon heir. You are the lost heir of the dungeon who has returned to claim your birthright. Take a signet ring that anyone familiar with the circumstances of the dungeon’s founding will recognize as legitimate (no one is necessarily compelled to help you, but they at least know you're legit).
30. Trap maintenance worker. Take general knowledge of the location and mechanisms of three nearby traps in the dungeon that the party hasn’t already encountered.
31. Kidnapped. Take a rag that still has 1d4 doses of ether soaked in it.
32. Dungeon ambassador. You were sent from a megadungeon halfway around the world to make connections and facilitate dungeon cultural exchange. Take a scroll case filled with authenticated documents and a spotty book of translated phrases for the most common language that you don’t already speak on this or a neighboring dungeon level.
33. Dungeon junkie. You’re fascinated by dungeons and are happy to finally turn your hobby into an ill-advised profession as an adventurer. Take an encyclopedic knowledge of dungeon trivia (you know something of the lore of the dungeon, but your chance of answering any particular question is inversely proportional to its relevance to the party’s present situation).
34. The licker. Many come to see the dungeon. Few are brave enough to taste the dungeon. Take a +2 bonus to saves against diseases and saves related to refuse-adjacent monsters like carrion crawlers and otyughs. 
35. Ammunition runner. You were a minor cog in some long-running conflict between dungeon factions. That conflict recently ended, leaving you without a job. Take a powerful but fragile bomb that you don’t know what the hell to do with.
36. Claim verifier. Some foolish merchants will underwrite insurance policies on adventurers. There’s money to be made in verifying (or disproving) claimed policyholder deaths. Take a 1-in-6 chance to identify any adventurer corpse you find as a policyholder, earning you a commission back in town of 50 GP times X, where X is the level of the dungeon where the body was found. 
37. The grand tour. You set out to see the world before accepting your inheritance. You didn't realize so much of the world was dungeons. Take an ineffectual aristocrat rival (suggested names: Eustace, Pollyanna, Bianca, Archibald) who will periodically show up to confront you in ways that typically distract genuine dungeon threats or otherwise inadvertently help you.
38. Dungeon chef. 完成じゃ! Take a cookbook detailing how to safely turn monstrous ingredients into edible food. 
39. I’m not even supposed to be here today. You were a last-minute fill-in for another henchman. Take a 10% XP bonus (from overtime pay from the hirelings’ guild) on the next haul of treasure you bring back to civilization.
40. Chaperoned adventurer. After much negotiation, your parents agreed that you could enter the dungeon, as long as a loyal family retainer was there to keep an eye on you. Take an otherwise-normal hireling with a morale of 12 who will literally die for you.
41. Daredevil. No one around your parochial hometown appreciated your sick stunts; you set off to find a place dangerous enough to warrant your reckless behavior. Take a +4 to rolls to balance and tumble while in hazardous situations.
42. Cartographer, in over their head. Take paper, ink and quill, a compass, and a reasonably accurate awareness of the dimensions of the dungeon rooms near where you join the party.
43. Proselytizer. You were charged with bringing the One True Word to those most in need; who needs to hear it more than denizens of the dungeon? You can turn undead as a level 1 cleric, or – if you are already a cleric – as a cleric one level higher than your current level.
44. Dungeon native. You were born in the darkness, molded by it. Take a +1 bonus to surprise rolls in near or total darkness.
45. Thieves’ guild fence. You can sell things that are normally too strange or forbidden to put on the market: trapped undead spirits, starpeople tech that no one understands, weird cult shit. You can always find a buyer, but there may be Consequences if you close more than one weird deal per month.
46. Death’s reject. You were left for dead, but something pulled you back from the light. You won’t die again. At least not the same way. Take a one-time +4 bonus that you may decide to use before making any saving throw.
47. Treasure seeker. You are on the hunt for a particular piece of treasure. Take a (very generally) accurate map to a treasure hoard on the current floor or a neighboring one.
48. Carouser. You partied so hard that you woke up inside the dungeon. Take a result from a good carousing table, like this one, and apply it to your character. Interpret it as favorably as is reasonable for the PC. 
49. Corpse retriever. You’ve seen a lot of death while dragging corpses back to the surface to claim a reward. You can generally tell what sort of monster or weapon killed someone, unless it is really exotic or the corpse is damaged beyond recognition.  
50. Mistreated minion. You were mistreated by your monster-master. Take a minor magical item that you stole from its hoard when you decided that you had finally had enough.
51. Mercenary. You were hired by adventurers to smash a faction they didn’t like. The operation went south and you were left on your own in the dungeon. Take training in fighting in close formation, as well as the knowledge of how to beat antagonists who fight in a similarly militarized manner.
52. Town militia. In addition to your other equipment, take a spear, chain mail, or a jug of strong rum (your choice).
53. Deserter from an adventuring party. Take an amount of extra gold equal to 5d6 multiplied by X, where X is the current dungeon level. This money counts toward gold-for-XP rewards if you survive and return to civilization.
54. Lost hireling. Take a voucher good for a week’s free room and board in the nearest settlement. 
55. Deserter from the nearest faction. Take one true piece of information about that faction’s current plans and priorities.
56. Lone survivor. Take a random piece of extra starting equipment, a memento from your fallen comrades.
57. Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggarman, thief. You have done a bit of everything in life, but you never succeeded at something well enough that you didn’t end up back in the dungeon. You always have at least a 1-in-20 chance to be momentarily competent at any common profession or job.
58. Trophy hunter. Pick a monster with 5 HD or more; you won’t rest until you have its head mounted on your wall. Take an unsettlingly keen ability to recognize spoor.
59. Smuggler. Dungeon halls are a good way to move things those on the surface shouldn’t see. Take an illegal cargo of your choice (like poison, liquor, or peryton eggs).
60. Unfinished meal. You were left for dead after a monster gobbled you up, but it turned out that you were hard to swallow. Take an innate ability to make things bigger than you gag or vomit at your touch once per day.
61. Inspection unit. Take an ability to detect construction tricks as if you were a dwarf. If you are already a dwarf, take a browbeaten dwarven intern (hireling working at half normal rate) who can do this for you while you “supervise.” 
62. Deserter from a faction on a different dungeon floor. Randomly choose the floor above or the floor below. Take a simple map to the nearest connection between this level and that level.
63. Esoteric contractor. A faction or power in the dungeon hired you because of your hyper-specific expertise in some weird niche field of your choice. Take an exhaustive book of lore which answers every question about this subject.
64. Spelunker. You are good at squirming through tight spots. Take a jar of grease, a climbing pick, and the ability to move through tight spaces as well as a creature half your size could.
65. Rag-and-bone man. You show up at the site of dungeon battles, after the victors have grabbed the obvious treasure, and scavenge from what is left over. When searching a corpse, you can almost always find something that you can repurpose or sell for a modest sum, even if other adventurers would dismiss it as junk. 
66. Attenborougher. This is a story of our changing dungeon, and what we can do to help it thrive. You know what any animal or animal-like monsters’ favorite food is.
67. Dungeon angler. You’ve barely adventured at all, but you have already maxed out the entire fishing minigame. Take a week’s worth of rations (salted fish) and a mounted trophy bass with the Magic Mouth spell cast upon it (your choice what phrase it speaks when activated). 
68. Goo-ologist. You stumbled into the study of oozes, and ever since you’ve been unable to unstick yourself. Take a +2 to bonus to saves against the effects of slimes, oozes, and acids.
69. Chimney sweep. You didn’t think the air in the dungeon stays breathable on its own, did you? Ventilation is important. Take the knowledge of one chimney on this level that leads to the surface. It’s a secret known only to the sweeps. It is difficult to traverse unless very lightly encumbered. You can't put your finger on what lies in store, but you feel what's to happen all happened before.
70. Subterranean prospector. Gold, I tell you, gold! Or silver, or oil, or aarakocra guano, or whatever. The point is, you found something that could make you rich and you’re determined to make good on your claim. Take a crude map to a valuable (but difficult-to-move) natural resource that local factions don’t (yet) know about.
71. Secret stonemason. You are an esteemed member of a highly secretive fraternal organization. At least one creature in every faction is also secretly a member, and will know you by a signature handshake. They will attempt to aid you as long as it doesn’t expose their position to their faction.
72. Adventuresome archeologist. You came down to find the origins of the dungeon. Take a whip and a mysterious idol worth 1000 GP that belongs in a museum.
73. Orphaned sidekick. You shaped your whole identity around the epic hero who led you into this dungeon; now they’re dead, and you’re on your own. Take a randomly chosen minor magical weapon that you’re not (yet?) proficient with.
74. Bounty hunter. You won't stop until you bring your quarry back to civilization, dead or alive. Take a wanted poster featuring a local NPC with a reward of 100 GP times X, where X is the dungeon level where that NPC resides or has spent the most time.
75. Chthonic chameleon. You’ve survived alone down here by learning to camouflage yourself. Take pigments and paints made from mushrooms and moss, capable of concealing you against natural surfaces as long as you remain motionless.
76. Busting out. Tonight there’s gonna be a jailbreak, somewhere in this dungeon. Take thieves' tools and a 15% chance to pick locks (or a +5% or approximate equivalent increase to your chance to pick locks, if you already have this skill).
77. Sinkhole survivor. You were coming home with groceries when the earth opened its dark maw beneath your feet. Now you’re an adventurer. Take an ample supply of a household substance of your choice (like cooking ingredients or cleaning chemicals).
78. Charmbreaker. A bewitching spirit, fey trickster, or other diverting being brought you into the dungeon. You broke the spell and are happy to be free again. You can tell if someone is under the effect of Charm Person or similar magic when you are in physical contact with them. 
79. Amnesiac. You genuinely have no idea how you got here. Take a one-time ability to recover a memory about your prior life at an opportune moment. 
80. Vengeful sibling. You are the previously unmentioned relation of your last character. The two of you were so close that perhaps only a single letter in your respective first names distinguishes you from each other. The monster or faction that killed your last character gets a -2 to morale as long as you are in the thick of any fight with them.
81. Art student. How can you ever hope to equal the old masters unless you study the ancient friezes and sculptures deep within the dungeon? Take the ability to improvise crude but usable paint out of moss, fungus, bones, and other dungeon detritus.
82. Keymaker. Where there are locks, there are keys, and where there are keys, there is a keymaker. Take three keys that each have a 1-in-6 chance to match any given non-magical and relatively ordinary lock you find; on a success, that key matches only that lock and won’t pair with any future locks.
83. The lover. You are in search of your lost boyfriend, wife, platonic soulmate, or similarly important person. Take a locket with their picture and a +4 bonus to saves against fear and charm effects as long as you’re on the same dungeon level as your beloved (chosen or rolled randomly by the DM at their discretion).
84. Transformed animal. You were once an ordinary beast; magic has turned you into a person. You have gotten pretty good at faking it, but still occasionally forget, and do something like munch grass or bray loudly. Take an iron stomach, keen sense of smell, or similar animal trait of your choice.
85. Dungeon revolutionary. You have dedicated yourself to undermining the structures of power that keep the dungeonfolk in check. Take a bucket of red paint and a knack for rallying the rabble.
86. Genealogy junkie. Whether you are searching for a biological parent, or merely traces of the distant parts of your family tree, your search has brought you into the dungeon. Take an uncanny ability to convince strangers you meet that you are a distant relation of theirs.
87. Corpse guy. You got corpses? You need to get rid of them? You need a guy. A corpse guy. They'll take them to the dungeon and NO ONE will see those corpses again. You are the corpse guy. You can intuitively sense the general direction of the nearest area in the dungeon with soil six feet or more in depth.
88. Dungeon telepath. You can connect to other minds, but your talent is hard to control. Take the ability to cast the spell Clairvoyance once per day, but the creature you connect to is randomly chosen from creatures within a 100’ radius of you (including, at the DM’s discretion, creatures you aren’t aware of).
89. Underdork. You’ve come up from the deepest depths to explore the mythic overworld. You haven't quite reached it yet. From your perspective, the dungeon is like a cool attic above the "normal" world. Take a baby purple worm that can eat through 10 feet of stone per day, leaving a 1’ diameter tunnel.
90. Undead ambassador. Caught between life and death due to some dark dungeon magic, you are uniquely suited to entreat both sides of life/death dungeon division. Unintelligent undead hesitate to harm you and have a 50% chance to lose their turn in indecision when trying to attack you.
91. Netherworld newsie. Extra, extra, read all about it! King Cacophonous declares war on the gnolls on level three! You were paid a pittance to spread news about dungeon developments. You are aware of a few salacious rumors about any well-known faction, at least one of which is actually true!
92. Stasis survivor. Of the sleepers in your vault, you were the only one who survived the centuries-long slumber. Take a non-operational piece of technology or an “exhausted” magical item that could be restored through some arcane means.
93. The creation. You were born in a laboratory within the dungeon. Take the ability to heal HP up to your level when you are struck by lightning or electricity, instead of being harmed by it (but yes, you’re also terrified of fire).
94. Interplanar tourist. Take a magical, ambulatory steamer trunk. It can’t fight or talk, but it can carry 100 pounds or four slots worth of equipment, and will follow you faithfully.
95. The curse has been broken, and you are now awake. Take a cursed apple, poisoned spindle, or similarly folkloric object. You bore the brunt of the curse, but it's still got some magic to it.
96. Singing telegram. You were teleported into the dungeon to deliver a message. You were not told that it would be a one-way trip. Take perfect pitch and a vendetta against the Academy of Arcane Arias.
97. Living spell. You are the essence of a spell that has taken physical form. Randomly choose a spell from levels 1-3. You can cast that spell once per X weeks, where X is equal to the level of the spell. Despite your exotic origin, you are otherwise a completely normal mortal.
98. Butlerian butler. While you are a normal PC in all other regards, you are also secretly a robot manservant. A hidden container built into your body can dispense up to a gallon of hot tea per day. 
99. Froggy fresh. A princess kissed you and doomed you to a life as a miserable human, far from the lily pad you once called home. Take a sticky, prehensile tongue that can grab anything the size of a cell key or smaller from up to 10’ away. 
100. Loose clone. You’ve escaped the vats, but you still have a weak psychic connection to your gene-siblings. Once per day, take a weak premonition about whether a course of action would be baneful or… boonful (similar to the Augury spell), based on one of your siblings' experiences while also wandering the dungeon.

Dungeon Crawler Animated by OpoTerser

Caveats and Common Sense

Tweak as needed and use common sense to adapt the result to make sense for the game, system, and setting. For example, a +X bonus can be replaced with advantage in systems that use advantage; a bonus to reaction rolls can be replaced with advantage on Charisma checks when the latter is the norm; and so forth.

Many entries include the instruction to take something, in addition to whatever gear the character would normally have. This is inspired in part by Electric Bastionland’s dirt simple character generation, which prominently features getting at least one unique item, skill, or trait. In my experience, a small, unique bonus softens the blow of starting a plain-ass character at level one. 

Randomly rolled results should be a negotiation between player and DM, with the DM (as always) reserving the right to rule what is appropriate for the dungeon milieu, as well as the agreed-upon game experience. No player should be forced to play something they don’t vibe with, but neither should they be allowed to reroll endlessly; consider limiting their chances to a few tries, or creating a consequence for passing on a roll; for example, making the rejected rolls nemeses of the PC.

How to Make Your Game In Tense

I’ve written before about how language is a powerful tool in RPGs. Here’s another great language tool for our games. Let’s talk about prophetic perfect tense. Per Wikipedia:

“The prophetic perfect tense is a literary technique commonly used in religious texts that describes future events that are so certain to happen that they are referred to in the past tense as if they had already happened.”

The biblical examples in the Wikipedia link are instructive, but I don’t think they would jump out at a contemporary bible reader, because most translations have various archaic and indirect wordings that just sound strange to modern readers. But excerpted and emphasized, they become more interesting. Something foretold by the divine is so certain that one can talk about it in the past tense even when it’s in the future. Ponder that for a moment.

In fantasy media, prophecies are a cliche. NPC statements like “the dark lord is prophesied to rise again” or “the prophesied heroes will come at the fated hour” are not going to put players on the edge of their seats. In a world of magic and monsters, prophecies are just Another Weird Thing That Happens.

So try this instead: Have prophets speak in the prophetic perfect tense. If the prophet says “the dark lord arose in spring of the year 416” and the players know it is autumn in the year 415, they’ll wonder what is up. They’ll ask the GM if they made a mistake, and when the GM says no, and reiterates what the prophet said, the players will have to engage a little more seriously with the statement. 

There's no need to hide the ball – unless it seems like an opportunity for a little diegetic puzzle. Once the players catch on to the incongruity of what the prophet is saying, you as GM can just explicitly flag that the statement is in prophetic perfect tense, and explain what that means. By that point, the importance of the prophecy has already been flagged and certified as special and truly out of the ordinary. If there is an entire lingual structure that is only used for prophecies, players are much more likely to remember it as something unusual and important, not just lore wallpaper.

Leveraging the Known Unknowns of NPCs

A reliable way to create an interesting NPC that provides motivation and interaction for the PCs is to measure the difference between what the GM knows and what the NPC who is controlled by that GM does not.

Too many NPCs have perfect or near-perfect awareness of a situation. It's understandable that this happens. GMing takes a lot of brain power, and the closer NPC knowledge is aligned with GM knowledge, the less mental exertion is required to make them work in an RPG scenario. But sometimes the additional work is worth it.

Imagine, for example, the following scenario. A demon is trapped in a dungeon prison. The demon wants to be free, but doesn't know that if it tries to leave the dungeon entirely, the structure will self-destruct as a last resort to keep them from escaping, trapping them underground.

The treasure hunters want to get to the center of the dungeon. They see the traps and locked doors and other defenses, but they don’t understand that they were created to keep something in, not keep someone out.

The guardian of the land in charge of the dungeon’s defenses wants to stop the demon from escaping, but doesn’t know that if the demon is crushed by the self-destruct measure, its oozing ichor will seep into the surrounding land, poisoning it for 100 generations.

Without the PCs’ intervention, this situation is going to slide toward a bad outcome for everyone. The treasure hunters die. The demon will be crushed. The guardian will fail to protect the land.

The PCs can "win" this scenario, in essence, by collecting information until their knowledge is roughly equivalent to the GM’s knowledge. Once they know all the unknowns above, they will know more about the scenario than any of the NPCs. That gives them the tools to resolve the situation favorably. Even if they merely prevent the worst-case scenario, they’ve done so by leveraging information. They figured out what they knew they don’t already knew – their known unknowns – and answered those questions.

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.

Ecology of a Dragon’s Demise

A “whale fall” is an oceanographic phenomena in which whales die and sink into deep, nutrient-poor parts of the ocean.

A whale fall occurs when the carcass of a whale has fallen onto the ocean floor at a depth greater than 1,000 m (3,300 ft), in the bathyal or abyssal zones.[1] On the sea floor, these carcasses can create complex localized ecosystems that supply sustenance to deep-sea organisms for decades.

D&D isn’t required to follow real-world ecologies. But they are amazing sources of inspiration because their complexity and natural logic creates verisimilitude without requiring that we build complex working systems from scratch. How could we use this shortcut for a D&D game?

Dragons are among the largest creatures in a typical fantasy world, and already have the most cultural cachet; it makes sense to make them similarly central to the life of the fantasy world in question. The dragon is more than just a monster to be fought. It can be set dressing, a hazard, and even an adventuring site.

Whale falls happen because of the particular environmental conditions in very deep parts of the ocean. When whales die in shallow water, they decompose normally. But in the ocean depths, their death radically changes the local environment.

So how is a dragon dying different from any other large animal dying? Dragons are unusual creatures. They are inherently magical. They change the land around their lairs during their life, reshaping it to more closely match their chromatic type. Why not also in death?

Green dragon by Better Legends (betterlegends.com)

When a dragon dies outside its lair*, it changes the land around the site of its death for a period of time equal to the dragon’s lifespan. The change corresponds to the type of dragon.

Black Dragons: It gets into the air first, like a crummy gray haze that the wind can't disperse. It’s really noticeable when the first storm hits, and acid rain falls; it will be the only kind of rain in the region for years, maybe decades. Plants turn into monstrous, sickly mockeries of themselves. The water table’s PH level gradually sinks below 7.0. Most creatures shelter bitterly or flee, but purple worms burrow unerringly toward the site, and oozes and other toxic things follow. These conditions do eventually fade, but even centuries later, it’s still possible to identify the site of a black dragon’s death by the pitted patterns on even the toughest exposed rock.

Green Dragons: The location of a green dragon’s death is a superfund site that will someday grow into a horrible, mutant forest. A miasma of toxins fill the water, the air, the very earth. Creatures adapted to such environments are like clownfish hiding in a stinging anemone.

White Dragons: A frozen bomb goes off, like a snowglobe dropped from a great height. An already-cold region turns into a desolate wasteland. A temperate or warm locale gains a localized forever-winter, spinning off tornados and other weather phenomena due to the drastic temperature differences along its borders. Cold-loving creatures sojourn to this place to bask in its frostiness.

Blue Dragons: Perhaps the least obvious of the draconic death-sites, at least at first glance. The effects are subtler, but just as pronounced in their own way. Animals that use magnetic fields for navigation and migration are lost. Metal objects are constantly conveying electric charges, sometimes dangerously powerful. Water tastes metallic. The air is perpetually dry, and people in the area experience frequent static shocks and nosebleeds. Lightning mephits and conduit demons spawn with every thunderstorm.

Red Dragons: Bro, have you ever even been to the elemental plane of fire? You think it is just a hot place? Wait until you see fire so hot that it can burn rock. Fire that flows like water. Fire that sets other fires on fire. This environment is obviously dangerous and deadly to creatures not native to the elemental plane of fire, but the hardiest and greediest dwarven smiths will seek out these locations, because a red dragon’s grave is also a furnace capable of forging the most epic creations.

*A dragon’s lair is not just its home. It also serves as an environmental safety measure to minimize the blast radius of the dragon’s detrimental death. Woe to the creatures of the land when a dragon dies outside its lair!

The Inside Game – Buying Into a Bad Idea

Last week: The Magnetic Rose Scenario – Running Two RPGs at Once

Magnetic Rose follows horror movie logic. Not long after the characters enter the derelict spaceship, looking for the source of the distress signal, it’s obvious to the audience that This Is a Bad Idea and Will End Badly. The characters continue to go deeper, even as the audience says “no, run away!” This is an intentional choice in a horror movie (or book, or whatever). The audience knows (or reasonably expects) something that the characters do not, and that gap in knowledge creates tension. When the characters “sync up” with the audience in terms of their knowledge of the situation, it creates a pleasing release of tension. That’s not as easy to do in an RPG, because the characters and the audience are one and the same, not separate.

So the players need to be on board with the conceit that their characters get into this situation even though they should know better. I’m not certain what system works best for the inside game. It should not be a science fiction game; a different genre will help create the separation and different feeling we want. I have not yet played Trophy Gold (or its related games), but based on session reports and reviews I have read, I suspect it might be a good fit, because the players know more about the characters’ circumstances than in other systems, and have buy-in and input on their fates. I would need to try the game myself to say for sure.

It’s important that the PCs buy into the idea that the hallucinations are a beguiling lie. Their characters want to believe. The players need to be OK with controlling characters who are deceived, and in great danger because of it. This can be a challenge for players accustomed to a high degree of autonomy and a close alignment of their perspective as players with their character’s perspectives as, well, pieces on a figurative game board.

The inside game kicks in whenever a PC falls to the deceptions of the hallucinatory environment. That PC begins playing the new game. Other PCs continue playing the outside game until they too fall into the inside game. Those playing the outside game are in danger of entering the inside game as long as they stay in or near the shipwreck.

Successfully resisting the hallucination can “kick” a PC back up to the outside game, as happens in Magnetic Rose when Heintz, one of the salvage crew members, sees through the illusions. More on that in a moment.

Exploring the Details 

Incorporate all five senses. The salvage crew in Magnetic Rose don’t just see the station’s deceptions. They smell, taste, hear, and eventually touch the phenomena they hallucinate. A GM running this scenario should create a short list of objects, sensations, and phenomena that can trigger at least one (and preferably two or more) of the five senses. The chosen themes should appear in both the outside and inside games, but in different states.

Personal and foreign memories mingled together. Magnetic Rose was written by Satoshi Kon, who would go on to perfect the permeability of memory and perception in Paranoia Agent and Paprika. Throughout these works, deception often takes the form of mingling internal memories and desires with external stimuli. 

Particularly if run as a one-shot, each PC involved in the Magnetic Rose scenario should have something that anchors them to the real world. It doesn’t need to be a full backstory; just a few attachments in the real world. Family is the obvious one, and the focus of Heintz’s story in Magnetic Rose, but it could also be an occupation, art, religion, or something else entirely.

Attachments or connections are both a blessing and a curse. Heintz’s love for his family gives him a compelling reason to resist the hallucinations and survive the scenario, but his desire to see them again (and more subtly, his guilt over leaving them for so long to work) is also the hook the hallucinations use to tempt him.

Challenges and obstacles. They can be drawn from the standard selection of dangers and hazards in both the game’s or inside game’s system, or inspired by the following:

The outside game:

• Wayfinding challenge
• Physical obstruction
• Gravity/power/environmental control change
• “Split up so you can cover more ground!”
• Communication interruption
• Totally lost
• Automated defenses 
• The station computer intervenes
• Structural collapse
• Countdown to escape

The inside game:

• The most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen
• Releasing your burdens 
• “I never thought I would see you again…”
• Undoing a past mistake
• A chance to be the hero or the star
• Reliving your happiest day
• “Of course it’s a lie, but does that make it any less wonderful?”

Bringing Down the House

Broadly speaking, there are four possible outcomes for the scenario. 

Lose the internal game, lose the external game. Crew dead or missing, ship lost. That’s a TPK.

Lose the internal game, win the external game. One or more crew members lost to the hallucinations, but some crew members escape on the salvage ship.

Win the internal game, lose the external game. The salvage ship is lost, but some or all of the crew have survived, either by embracing the hallucinations or by escaping into space, hoping that someone hears their own distress call before their air runs out.

Win the internal game, win at the external game. The crew overcomes the hallucinations and destroys or disarms the derelict spacecraft, ensuring no one else will meet the fate they escaped.

The Magnetic Rose Scenario – Running Two RPGs at Once

Magnetic Rose is the first of three stories in the 1995 anthology film Memories. The premise is simple: The crew of the spaceship Corona explores a space wreck, looking for survivors and salvage, encountering increasingly creepy phenomena as they venture deeper into the derelict craft.

How would this work as a TTRPG scenario? I started thinking about it after someone mentioned Magnetic Rose in response to a question about spaceship graveyards on the Alexandrian Discord. I rewatched it for the first time in many years, and thought about using two different RPG systems to play out the difference between reality and hallucinations.

For this I am indebted to a campaign structure that I saw… somewhere online, where players would run Tales From the Loop or some other kids-on-bikes game as the first game system (what I’ll call the “outside game” from now on). They would also run a second game system – D&D or a similar system – as the “game-within-the-game” that the characters in the first game are playing (I’ll call it the “inside game” throughout this post). I can’t recall where I read this idea, so I apologize that I can’t give proper credit for the inspiration.

The Outside Game – It Was Supposed to Be a Simple Job

The scenario begins with the outside game, which could use various science fiction RPGs. The implied setting within Magnetic Rose’s story is lightly sketched, as the segment has less than an hour to work with, but it’s present. The characters are blue collar “space truckers,” in the mold of the characters from Alien. They’re experienced and work well together, but are driven by different desires and motivations.

The important thing is that the PCs are probably in over their heads; they are not hyper-competent Star Trek characters who can figure things out reliably. It should also be relatively rules-light, for reasons that will become clear later. I’ll be using Jason Tocci’s Orbital Decay as my north star, but this is more about vibe than mechanics.

After finishing one salvage job and turning down another, the crew of the Corona receives a distress call. Laws require that they respond and record video of their entry into an apparently abandoned space station, so they reluctantly check it out. They quickly begin to learn that Things Are Not As They Seem.

Other relevant media for inspiration purposes:

• Event Horizon (it muddles it’s message with inconsistent signposting, but it’s still an excellent reference)
• Scavenger’s Reign (Kamen’s story, and his flashbacks in particular; but also Sam’s backstory)
• Prometheus (and various bits of the Alien series generally)
• Sphere/The Abyss (the strangeness is in the ocean instead of in space, but otherwise similar ideas)
• William Hope Hodgson (the most famous writer of Sargasso Sea stories about mysterious shipwrecks; Magnetic Rose namechecks the Sargasso Sea explicitly)
• Many science fiction shows have single episodes that are variations on either Hodgson stories or similarly themed "Flying Dutchman" ghost ship stories
• Solaris, and Tarkovsky generally (internal made external, at the intersection of the unknowability of alien intelligence and the unknowability of one’s own interior world) 
• Annihilation and VanderMeer generally (not set in space, but otherwise similar to Solaris for our purposes)
• Inception (for the concept of “kicking” back up into reality, and the idea of beguiling lies)
• All Satoshi Kon works (for reasons elaborated upon in the next post)

Next week: The Inside Game – Buying Into a Bad Idea