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.
BEG AND THE BLINK DOGS
Blink Dogs are intelligent, playful animals, and Beg the Dark Creeper invented a fun game for them to play: teleporting behind locked doors, collecting all the treasure, and running away before the monsters inside can catch them. They aren't interested in fighting, except to protect Beg or another member of the pack. Beg is sneaky, but the Blink Dogs are not. They're like a flock of crows trained to steal money from strangers, except they can teleport. If you can keep up with them, they'll lead you right back to him.
The Dark Creeper is mostly interested in magic items, regular treasure is useful only as a trade good. If the players manage to find him, he'll offer them cash in exchange for any magic items they don't want. Potions, scrolls, stuff for other classes that they're just carrying around because a normal merchant won't sell it. He'll pay in silver, redeemable as XP. Of course he doesn't carry the money on his person, he's got it stashed. If they still feel like shaking him down, he's got a Wand of Fear and a Potion of Haste to get out of dodge until the dogs back him up.
Beg wants magic items because that's how a Dark Creeper finds a wife. A man who can't do anything with magic is a man who expects his wife to do all the work for him, and who would put up with that?
RUST MONSTERS
It occurred to me today that Rust Monsters should leave an obvious trail when they traverse the dungeon. Not just iron shavings, the can destroy doors by corroding the metal parts and pushing over the wood planks. Rooms visited by Rust Monsters are obvious and leave a trail that adventurers can follow if they want to stop the beast from eating more of their haul. Or stay the hell away from it.
If Rust Monsters are actually oxidizing metal, they should be unable to destroy silver, gold and platinum, which don't rust under normal circumstances. That still leaves a lot of things they can eat, like weapons and armor waiting to be looted.
XORNS
Xorns are those earth elemental guys who burrow through rock looking for gems and precious metals to eat. In OSE they have a meld-with-stone ability that lets them move around without leaving a giant hole, but I think that's boring. It's more interactive if there's a giant hole, leaving a visual indicator of what happened and a new passage deeper into the dungeon. Like Rust Monsters and Scalphunters, any area they clean out is effectively unlocked, bereft of treasure but no longer impeding progress.
No comments:
Post a Comment