Unknown Armies Play Report: A Dungeon Too Many Part 2

The Four Adventurers left the bloody pulp zone and returned to the vestibule. The trap in the entryway was triggered and the corpse was gone, but there was no dead cockroach in sight. The group decided to get one more soul before returning to the surface. Rope Trick had been patient with the other group members' selections, but she really wanted to try the door marked with the guy reading.

The door with the book led to a mysterious portal, almost covered by strange purple ferns growing from the lichen on the walls around it. A jungle of fantastical foliage was visible through the shimmering gateway, and Rope Trick decided to test it out herself. She would go through, and if she couldn't return she'd use her ring of blinking to teleport back to the group.

Rope Trick made it through the portal in one piece. The "jungle" on the other side was a big terrarium, lit by carvings of heavenly bodies on the ceiling, watered by gargoyles on the wall that dribbled liquid. The portal was closed to return-trips, but there was a command-word written on the inner rim in Enlightenment cipher that she was able to read. She spoke it and the portal opened, permitting the return trip if she so desired. Satisfied that the group wouldn't be trapped, she waved and invited the rest of the adventurers through.

 

Unknown Armies Play Report: A Dungeon Too Many Part 1

The Monarchy ruled the known world. The Old King ruled the Monarchy. His depredations grew unbearable, slave raids and secret police and torture gardens and the magickal experiments that would go on forever if nobody did anything. That's why the Four Adventurers came to the dungeon at Heart-Of-The-World, to claim the ancient power that would let them kill the old ghoul and create something better.

• Dacian, Failed Monk and Adept of the Tower of Pain
  
• Fever River, Matachin and Self Taught Assassin
  
• Marrow Bone, Green Man and Avatar of the Knacker
  
• Rope Trick, Former Registered Wizard, Current Avatar of The Enlightenment
  

The story began with the Four Adventurers descending into Heart-Of-The-World. They didn't know how long they had before the veins and arteries of the underground place collapsed.

 

  

 

They knew Heart-Of-The-World was a trap. They knew the power it held was the bait. But if nobody ever survived, where did the stories come from?

Don't Make Me Say It Again: I'm A Cleaner - More Monsters

Another handful of Cleaners. This time we're grabbing some creatures from the OSE Advanced Fantasy book as an explanation for who took the treasure out of the dungeon when you left.

 

It's worth quickly explaining why I like this concept at all. When I run a dungeon I just care about the dungeon, I don't simulate wilderness travel or the provisioning minigame, or anything else that would make the characters think twice about spending day after day exploring a little bit at a time. So anything that applies forward pressure needs to be something that happens in the dungeon itself. The Cleaners aren't intended as a "punishment" for slow play, they're a countervailing force to the players' otherwise completely reasonable tendency to stop exploration as soon as things get dangerous and wait a day for resources to replenish.

 

Don't Make Me Say It Again: I'm A Cleaner - Scalphunters

The Commonwealth ended the depredations of the Hanged King and the Monarchy, and replaced them with a new and different set of depredations. One of those is the practice of scalphunting.

Financiers in the Commonwealth convince the Genius Loci (the legislative body) to grant them rights to establish a colony in a particular place on the frontier. The majority stakeholders in that colony get the right to regulate trade in the colonized territory and do various other things associated with government. The colony is typically a location that has other people living in it, humans or demihumans or assorted fantasy creatures. Those creatures object to the encroachment and attack the colonists, and the Trade Wardens of that colony put bounties on them. Thugs go out and slaughter the creatures to claim the bounty. They don't discriminate between the ones causing trouble and the ones that just happen to be the same species.

Don't Make Me Say It Again: I'm A Cleaner - Angrboda the Cave Elf

I recently wrapped the Mountain of the Mad Marquis, an eight session delve into one of my dungeon23 projects. At the end of the last session, when the players returned to the bottom floor to loot the aftermath of the final fight, the random encounter table spat out a single Drow riding a Tuatara. With their consumable resources exhausted, their pockets filled with other treasure, and the NPC's capabilities unknown, the players elected not to challenge her for the haul. That's the origin story of Angrboda the NPC Cave Elf, who rocketed up to Level 4 off the loot, and her trusty steed Pythia.

Goblin Punch just made a cool post about ways to apply time pressure to dungeon exploration without having to track individual torch burn rates. One of his suggestions is to shrink the value of unclaimed treasure in the dungeon each time the players go back to the surface. There are a couple ways to explain this, such as dungeon creatures carrying off the treasure, or the dungeon being a metaphysically hostile place that didn't want you to take the money out of it. I prefer the former, since it's something real the players can interact with if they realize what's happening and plan around it. DCSS had monsters like this, slimes that would hoover up items and dissolve them if you were slow exploring. They'd eat anything you left behind in the Slime Pits once you killed the boss and opened up the vault.

Let's use Angrboda as our first Cleaner, to explain where all the money went. 

Mountain of the Mad Marquis - Masterpost

Thomas Cole

Pursuing a bounty on a legendary bandit, a party of adventurers on the edge of civilization descends into the ruined estate of a mad Marquis, and the unknown depths below.

 

Mountain of the Mad Marquis - Music Post

Pierre Woeiriot de Bouzey

 

Music from my eight session run of Mountain of the Mad Marquis. Items shaded in red never appeared in-game.

Mountain of the Mad Marquis - Epilogue

In the mountains, a mantis-man woke up to a strange presence in his tent. He was blind but he perceived the world through other senses, and he suppressed his instinctive reaction to kill the intruder when he realized it was none other than his long lost leader. The Bandit Chief's aura was hazy with sulfur and an inner-heat, like fire burning. But the smell and sound was unmistakable.

"Gorrister, you have returned to us" chittered the Mantis man. All was not lost. The headman would lead them out of their exile and it would be just like the old days, with blood and plunder for everyone.

The blind bug couldn't see it, but the bald bandit's eyes blinked twice, once with his eyelids and once with the nictating membrane over his new, slit pupils.

"Yes." the brigand said. "...Gorrister."

Mountain of the Mad Marquis - Session 8

On the tenth day, a pair of dungeon veterans gave the Mountains of the Mad Marquis another try.

• Al-Hafiz, Level 4 Fedayeen
• Laguna Tempest, Level 4 Warcaster

As usual, Al-Hafiz brought Eric the Barbarian along as extra muscle. They had cleared most of the Ancient Ruins on level 3 the previous expedition, and hoped to finish off the floor. They arrived at the ruined surface keep to find four Orcs carrying the corpse of a fifth. They were wearing brightly colored sashes similar to Ishizaka's mercenaries but under that they were clearly tribals from the hills. They had accepted Ishizaka's offer of protection in exchange for service, not interested in being picked off by scalphunters after surviving the onslaught of the berserkers. The sashes showed they were under the genie's protection, and it was illegal for Commonwealth bounty hunters to kill them for their ears.

The Orcs recognized the adventurers as friendlies, and accompanied them down the winch to the sinkhole. Thelema the Gravewarden received the corpse, and the Green Men offered a prayer of depositum custodi along with a flask of an unknown substance. Thelema asked the adventurers not to enter the sanctification rooms. She was teaching Endura how to cut up and prepare bodies, because having work to do made her sister less mopey and suicidal, and a group of armed thugs appearing wouldn't improve the situation.

The gang took the long way around, through the skeleton infested catacombs. This was harmless because Thelema whitelisted them after the first time the group rescued her, so the skeletons didn't attack. The players decided as long as they were over here, they would explore the water termite infested zone before going to floor three. There were still some unmapped areas and potentially some treasure.

 

Mountain of the Mad Marquis - Session 7

Nine days into the exploration of the Mountain of the Mad Marquis, three warriors answered the call to adventure.

• Al-Hafiz, Level 4 Fedayeen
• Jack Fatherd, Level 5 Survivor
  
• Porkesilaus Poliorcetes, Level 4 Hoglord

Al-Hafiz began the day by executing the three surviving Rose Hips. He had spent the last few days curing their addiction to Smoke and various other super-science drugs, but the damage was done. They gazed out of the cage at him with reptilian eyes, cold-blooded draconic beings who would do anything to escape and go back to their slave-trading ways. They didn't go quietly, but their Sleep and Charm spells were no match to the squad of adventurers and hirelings who joined in hacking them to pieces.

When their grim work was done, the adventurers decided what to do. They weren't interested in the agreement Wakefield and Laguna made with the Scalphunters the day before, and instead took Eric the Barbarian off the bench for a dive into the dungeon. They picked up their daily dose of smoke from the re-activated lab, went to the sinkhole and used the pulley system installed by the Dwarven Surveyor to descend the pit.

 

Thelema the Gravewarden reminded the adventurers that her sister Endura was still seriously injured. Nobody was allowed inside the mausoleum because Thelema was worried Endura's burns would get infected, or her mostly-destroyed lungs would get some form of pneumonia. The adventurers realized that they had enough God power between the three of them to cast a combined restoration spell... but decided to wait until after they were finished plundering the dungeon for the day.