I few months ago, I ran a couple sessions of Castle Gargantua. The players loved the weird encounters and giant environments, but did not like the random generation system for stringing the rooms together. Unlike Esoteric Enterprises, which uses random tables to build a huge interconnected world for the players to explore, Castle Gargantua generates rooms one at a time in a linear sequence, without any regard for how they all link together. Meaning the exploration element - ordinarily the most fun part of the dungeon crawl - was nonexistent.
So I wrote my own dungeon that used my favorite parts of Castle Gargantua, set in a map of my own design.
THE MANOR OF THE GIANT ARMINIUS
From The Ogre Gods by Hubert and Gatignol
I ran the game using Begone, FOE, my own homebrew dungeon crawling rules. All the players had played in my Anguishedwires and Castle Gargantua games, where I playtested previous versions of the rules.
In attendance:
- Jack Fatherd, Sheep Handling Rogue
- Iren Benedek, Lock Picking Witch
- Aldrich Brisbane, Crusading Dwarfaboo
The Giant Arminius is dying. Rebels have besieged his manor, fed up with the Giant’s endless raiding for food, slaves and plunder. His children and their human Soldiers mount a desperate defense. Now would be an excellent time for an adventurer to steal his treasure - before his favorite daughter Morwenna arrives to break the siege, and hear her father’s dying words.
Up ahead, the wedge shaped bluff rose out of the ancient wood. Atop its hundred foot peak: the Manor of the Giant Arminius.
The players left their wagon in the forest and approached the bluff from the sloping side. The hill was deforested except for a conspicuous grove of ancient trees near the summit, but the brush alongside the King's Road offered ample cover for their approach. They hid while a large group of rebels advanced up the path ahead of them, then snuck forward to investigate the giant statues that lined the path. The rebels had converted one to an improvised gibbet, dangling Arminius' soldiers from its protrusions. Along with several of the giant's slaves.
The giant's manor itself was a hundred feet tall - as tall again as the cliff it stood on. There was a siege in progress and the front of the building was contested. The players decided to try the giant chapel instead, separate from the main building. Aldrich rushed in, before any of the troops on the manor's enormous balconies could take a shot at him. Inside, a group of rebels were helping themselves to a giant size vessel of sacramental wine, splashing drunkenly in the blood of a giant priest lying dead on the floor. Aldrich threatened them, but they weren't afraid of a single mercenary. They told him to stop fussing with his sword and have a drink with them. Iren and Thomas recognized the art on the wall as paintings of the God King, the god of civilized giants. They also noticed the rebels had liberated two arquebuses from Arminius' soldiers. The rebels told the players that two surviving giant priests were holed up in the catacombs below the chapel, through a giant sized floor hatch behind the lectern. Thomas scouted ahead to have a look.
Beneath the chapel was a giant size tunnel, with an arched ceiling over 20 feet high. At the end of the passage was a domed octagonal chamber filled with sarcophagi, with a massive overflowing fountain at the center. Someone had placed a huge lantern at the point where the tunnel entered the chamber, illuminating anything that moved into the room. The lantern, Jack realized, used a human corpse dipped in wax as a wick. A pair of giant priests paced the room, arguing over whether they should leave or continue seeing to Arminius' funerary arrangements. Jack waited until they weren't looking, then ran past the lantern into the room. He climbed into a sarcophagus through the gap beneath the lid. Inside was a skeletal giant, laden with valuable grave goods. The giant sized jewelry was too large to fit through the gap in the lid. Moving it on his own was impossible - not to mention it would attract the giants' attention. Jack snuck back upstairs to report his findings.
Upstairs, the team debated what do do next. They were interrupted by the rustling of mail links and the clang of weapons outside. A blue skinned, bearded dwarven face peered in from behind the enormous chapel doors, noticing the adventurers at the same time as they noticed him. He swore in a language they didn't speak and disappeared from view. The players decided to retreat into the crypt, and convinced the rebels to accompany them. Jack had spotted a heap of rubble on the East side of the room, which probably concealed a passage into the cellar.
The rebels were drunk enough that they blew their stealth attempt, alerting the giant priests to their presence in the crypt. Battle was joined. Iren cast Sleep, which had no effect on the giants (they had twice as many Hit Dice as the spell's maximum). The rebels scattered around the room, ensuring the giants couldn't swat more than one of them at a time. Aldrich rushed in with his sword and was swatted aside by the larger giant, completely destroying his arm. The rebels pelted the giants with missile fire - a mix of javelins, slingstones, and arquebus bullets.
ibid
The giants squashed a few rebels, but had trouble spotting and chasing them around the room in the dark. The players hid under the tombs - except for Iren, who rushed the larger priest with her dagger and climbed up his leg. One of the priests fled, rather than face further missiles from unseen opponents. The other soon followed him, depositing Iren on the floor. The rebels regrouped. They weren't happy about losing three of their number for no result, but hoped their comrades on the surface would finish the priests off. They let Iren have an arquebus from a dead man, as recognition for her fighting spirit.
The players explored the crypt. Aldrich noticed a hidden door in the North end of the room, dwarf sized and hermetically sealed. Iren recognized the panes on the door as blowout panels - pieces designed to fail in the event of an explosion, directing the blast out of the room. The chamber beyond smelled like the arquebus she carried. Meanwhile, Jack struggled to get the lid off a giant sarcophagus, to steal the jewels from the corpse. The rebels told him that wasn't okay. The contents of Arminius' manor belonged to the rebellion, and would be held in common after his death. Anyone stealing for themselves would be executed, and they didn't want to kill him. So Jack stopped trying to rob the graves - for the moment. The rebels and players went East instead, crawling through gaps in the piled rubble to enter the giant's basement.
The basement was piled with old junk from the manor upstairs. Laughter and shouting was audible from a giant sized door to the North. Firelight glinted off a veritable ocean of spilled wine, oozing from under the door. Jack snuck under to have a look.
The giant's wine cellar was filled with casks, ranging from ten to forty feet in height. Rebels, soldiers and satyrs danced and capered drunkenly around bonfires of burning barrel staves, drinking and laughing drunkenly together. Jack watched from the shadows as a russet colored blob picked off an oblivious soldier who strayed too far from the firelight. He returned to report his findings, and the rebels rushed in to butcher the defenseless, intoxicated soldiers.
The soldiers didn't put up a fight, but the satyrs did, drawing short swords to defend their new friends. Aldrich slew two singlehandedly (no pun intended) while the rebels pincushioned a third with missile fire. Jack lifted coin purses off the dead soldiers while the rebels were distracted. Aldrich went hunting behind the casks for the gross wine blob that Jack warned him about. The wine blob surged out and tried to attack the group. The players tossed torches and pieces of burning wood from the bonfire at it. The rebels hacked it with their polearms, which just split it into more pieces. The pieces ran away, rather than face further flaming missiles.
Aldrich noted that the wall to the North was bricked up, and there was probably a chamber beyond. They decided to worry about that later - there was a giant door to the East that needed investigating. Jack snuck under, but was driven out of the room by a powerful wave of superstitious fear, which emanated from a massive icon that towered over the room: a twenty foot high faceless statue - formerly of the Liberator, messily rededicated to the Gnasher, pre-civilizaed god of giantkind. The rebels proved similarly unable to enter the room (they worshipped the Great Lord of Embers), but Aldrich and Iren had no such trouble (they worshiped no gods). The pair of agnostic adventurers dragged the giant curtain across the alcove holding the statue, allowing the rest of the group to enter in peace.
Aldrich spotted two more dwarf sized secret doors, leading West out of the room, and decided to investigate one. He stepped inside and loudly announced his presence, proceeding forward with torch in hand. The chamber was empty. The next one was hastily abandoned and piled with loot. Aldrich heard someone running away down one of the connecting tunnels and rushed forward to pursue them. He was confronted by a crowd of dwarves brandishing blunderbusses. The retreat was a ruse.
Aldrich was a big fan of dwarves. He told them so. The foreman told him she was a big fan of raiding the manor above and selling people into slavery, but didn't think he would be worth much with only one arm. He agreed with this assessment. She offered him a franchise agreement - if he happened to capture any humanoids during his adventures in the manor, she'd buy them at a fair price. He agreed, hoping the rebels hadn't overheard him. He left before they decided to shoot him. He told the rebels he had stumbled on a colony of harmless dwarves. The rebels were a little annoyed - they were hunting giant people, not small people. This whole exercise was beginning to feel like a waste of time.
The stairs to the manor above were back in the giant's basement. This time through, there was a light coming from a pile of furniture and books. Someone had built a human scale, two story house from assorted cellar junk. Jack snuck up to investigate. The first floor was a hog pen, filled with sleeping hogs. He climbed up to the second floor window, where the light was coming from. The hogs woke up and began snuffling around. That alerted whoever was in the house, who went downstairs and tried to reassure the hogs. That spooked Jack, who climbed down and made a run for it. Which alerted the wild hogs, who chased after him.
The rebels unleashed a barrage of missiles, wounding the attacking pigs. Aldrich dispatched one with his sword, and the other hogs broke off the attack to feed on its corpse. The occupant of the house - a humanoid swine who walked on two legs and spoke intelligibly - stepped out and asked what the hell they thought they were doing. He was the hog prince, and they had no right to mistreat his subjects. Aldrich questioned his authority over hogdom, and the prince offered him single combat. Aldrich cynically asked for a moment to prepare, lining up a powerful strike. Then battle was joined. The hog prince dealt Aldrich a wound with his tusks and short sword. Aldrich responded by decapitating him. The remaining pigs laid down and acknowledged Aldrich's authority as their new hog lord. Jack and Iren looted the prince's house - by this point the rebels had gotten sick of the players' antics and went upstairs, leaving them with an admonishment not to steal anything.
One Arm, Johnathan T
The players went up the stairs to the kitchen, Aldrich accompanied by his herd of hogs. Jack snuck ahead to scout. The kitchen was unoccupied, so he investigated the door to the foyer. The stairs to the second floor were fortified, guarded by a squad of soldiers with firearms. He went back to get the rest of the team, and they went into the giant's pantry instead. Aldrich was joined by more wild hogs, which emerged from among the giant grain sacks to acknowledge him as leader. Iren noted that there were slaves watching them from the highest shelf in the pantry, maybe thirty feet above them. The team decided to leave the house through the pantry side door and check around back.
There was a human scale village around the North side of the house - home of Arminius' slaves. The players heard screams from the village, and the unmistakable report of a blunderbuss - it was a dwarf raid. The players rushed in as an old man carrying a ring of keys rushed out - the Chamberlain, head slave and personal attendant of the giant. He offered the players all his hidden treasure if they would fight off the dwarves. Aldrich made a counteroffer: he would sell the Chamberlain as a slave. The Chamberlain made a counter-counteroffer: he would tell them the location of a secret exit to the manor, if the players would help his granddaughters escape through it. Turns out, his granddaughters were the ones on the big shelf in the pantry - five women, ages 3 to 30. So the party split up, Aldrich taking the Chamberlain to the dwarves, while Iren and Jack escorted his grandkids to the secret exit.
Aldrich and the hogs' journey through the cellar was uneventful, until he reached the temple of the Gnasher. There, he was ambushed by a giant undead baby, crawled forth from one of the little grave boxes in the crypt. Fortunately, the baby's uncoordinated flailing was no match for his faithful hogs, who set upon and devoured it. Unfortunately, the hogs caught the plague from the baby. Undeterred, Aldrich entered the dwarven tunnels and exchanged the Chamberlain for a tidy 150 silver pieces. He tried to return to the kitchen and await the other adventurers, but stopped on the giant stairs when he heard someone stomping around behind the door, angrily berating her soldiers in a gigantic voice for their failure to guard the slave village. So he went downstairs to rejoin the team.
The Chamberlain's five granddaughters led Iren and Jack to the crypt. Iren hatched a plan. She would wait to be shown the secret exit, then sell all five of her charges to the dwarves. So she waited until the ladies climbed up the giant fountain and began unclogging the drain, then threatened them with her arquebus. They reminded her she needed to light the matchlock, and ignored her while she struggled to ignite it. When she brandished the loaded gun at them, they dropped out of sight behind the edge of the fountain. She climbed up to the edge of the fountain, and they came back out to stomp on her fingers. She got ahold of one of them by the ankle, and wouldn't let go. Jack ran through the secret door, through a dwarven powder magazine and into the hoard chamber, where he told the dwarves he had slaves to sell them. The dwarves emerged with blunderbusses ready, right as the woman unlaced her boot and dropped Iren to the dungeon floor. The dwarves fired, peppering the ladies with stinging salts to stun them. One of the women was hit, but fell backwards into the freshly unclogged fountain. The others leapt after her, disappearing from view. No slaves for Iren. She was able to buy some of the stunning ammunition from the dwarves, to load her musket.
Aldrich returned to the crypt. With the rebels gone, the players decided to loot the rest of the tombs. Each giant sarcophagus was filled with a wealth of giant jewelry. The dwarves began pillaging the room from the other end. The players piled up a tidy sum of oversized items, which they loaded onto Aldrich's hogs. If they could just get it out, they'd be rich. The treasure wouldn't fit down the drain of the fountain. The only way out was the surface. Iren simplified the equation by selling a few of the items to the dwarves. She got one of their wheellock blunderbuses in trade.
Jack snuck up into the chapel to see if the coast was clear. It wasn't. He didn't notice the crowd of angry maenads sitting on the giant pews, until he was practically right under them. But it was okay. They weren't mad about his friends killing the satyrs in the basement. He just needed to do a job for them, and everything would be square. He didn't like his chances of running away, outnumbered and loaded with wealth as he was. So he went with them back to their sacred grove.
Iren and Aldrich were sad to see him go, but decided getting the treasure out was more important. Jack had demonstrated that he could handle himself, whereas the money needed help escaping. They stole up to the cathedral door and made a break for it, running down the hill away from the manor, accompanied by a herd of wild hogs. A giantess burst out of the manor's front door, accompanied by a crowd of soldiers. The troopers unleashed a hail of musket fire, knocking Aldrich to the ground with a serious chest wound. One of the hogs stuck its nose under his arm, attempting to pick him up. He grabbed onto the beast's side and it carried him clear of the danger, before the rampaging giantess (a runt, only ten feet tall) could catch up with him. Iren and Aldrich escaped, though the latter caught the plague from close contact with an infected pig.
The maenads took Jack to the stand of enormous trees the players had seen on the way in - the only grove still standing on the bluff. Up close, he noticed that several of Arminius' soldiers had been crucified on the trees. The women explained that these men had tried to cut down their sacred grove.
Satyr and Maenad, attributed to Makon
The woods were full of satyrs and maenads, and they didn't look happy. Their god, the Liberator, was once worshiped in the temple beneath the manor, which predated the modern structure. Those bastard giants had rededicated it to the Gnasher. But that was about to change. See, they'd made a big mask of the Liberator from one of their sacred trees. All Jack had to do was go into the crypt and put it on the faceless statue, and everything would go back to normal. And they wouldn't rip him to shreds. Oh and the Liberator would probably give him a boon.
Jack waited in the grove for the battle outside to stop. The rebels drove the giantess and her goons back into the house, and he seized the opportunity to run back into the crypt. A human sized cleric, dressed in the same vestments as the giant priests, almost fell on top of him when he entered. The cleric was very angry about Jack and the other adventurers stomping around in the tomb of the giants, blaspheming and defiling the holy place of the God King and so on. Jack acted like he was going to swing at the priest, then juked him and ran for the pit. The cleric cast Enlarge on himself and stomped after Jack, but the crafty rogue had left all his heavy treasure behind with the maenads, and was able to outrun him. The priest was too large to squeeze through the rubble between the crypt and the cellar, while Jack had no trouble.
From there, it was easy. Jack avoided the reformed wine blob monster in the cellar and wrapped the curtain around the Gnasher statue, so that he could climb it without being exposed to its face. Then he mounted the mask over the missing face. The Liberator rewarded him, as promised, by granting him immunity to all mind altering magic whenever he was drunk.
The big cleric was still stomping around the tomb, so Jack went up through the kitchen stairs instead. Sneaking past the front balcony, he spotted the rebel leader, holding a drumhead court on the gigantic table. She was horribly burned, but her good eye shined with the same divine fire as the oriflame on her shield. She sentenced a group of soldiers and "collaborators" to hang. Jack hastily returned to the sacred grove, and spent the night partying with the maenads.
The game took a little over four hours, including breaks. The rules changes since the previous build of Begone, FOE worked great, and we came up with some additional improvements. The players said the module captured all the fun parts of Castle Gargantua, which was the intention. There's enough content left in the Manor of the Giant Arminius to run a followup game, so look forward to that.
EDIT: I forgot the most important difference between this and all my previous OSR games: I didn't make the players map everything themselves. I made a set of digital maps for the module itself (forthcoming), threw those in the roll20, then used the fog of war tool to reveal areas as the characters explored. It massively streamlined and improved the play experience. I'm never going back to player-led mapping, it isn't fun and it's just too much of a headache for everyone. Doing the maps myself takes a little more work from me upfront, but the payoff is immense.
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