Against Mapping

 

Many years ago the Alexandrian guy noted in his OD&D retrospective that mapping sucks. More recently the Coins and Scrolls guy noted something similar about his OD&D game. And maybe a day after that the His Majesty The Worm guy said something identical on his discord about his OSE game. After running two campaigns of Esoteric Enterprises where I enforced player mapping, then one where I didn't, I agreed with all three of them. 

 

Then a couple weeks ago, the Knight at the Opera guy posted his advice about what to do if you tried mapping and everyone hated it. I was excited to learn his fix and it turned out to be the exact thing that I had already tried, which made everyone miserable. "Balls and sticks" style mapping where you give the exits and directions out of the room, rather than the precise dimensions of every wall and corridor. 

  

A while back I wrote Against Torches. If I'm against torches, which never really did anything to me, I'm definitely Against Mapping, which is a whole lot worse.

 

In Defense of +1 Swords

Fighters need all the help they can get. It's like their one thing.

ANGUISHEDWIRES - Music Post

I didn't do this originally because I felt it was too similar to the track list for my other dungeon The Manor of the Giant Arminius. But a friend asked me to compile it because he wanted to run ANGUISHEDWIRES.

 

Manor of the Giant Arminius at A Weekend With Good Friends 2021

Another Jackson Elias Server Virtual Convention, another run of the Manor of the Giant Arminius using the latest revision of Begone, FOE, my personal D20 dungeon crawler.

 

 

By Arthur Rackham

 

We had four players.

• Gideon the Rogue
• Elbekh the Cleric
• Douglas the Fighter/Mechanical Engineer
• Aric the Magic User

The players left their mule and cart in the forest and marched up the wedge shaped hill, on which the Manor of the Giant Arminius was sat. The hill was 100 feet high, and the manor stood a preposterous 100 feet higher. The area was patrolled by rebels, but by staying off the path and keeping to the brush, they were able to avoid being spotted - even with most of the trees chopped down. They noticed corpses of soldiers hanging from a couple of the giant statues on the way up, the ones the rebels hadn't toppled.

The group stopped before they got too close to the structure, and sent Gideon the Rogue to scout ahead.

Manor of the Giant Arminius - Music Post

I've been diverted from work on new dungeons (Oops, All Hags! and The Salt Pan) by Tormsen's superb upcoming UA3 splat Special Orders. But I did a rerun of The Manor of the Giant Arminius the other day for the latest Good Friends of Jackson Elias virtual convention, and came up with this updated music list.

There's some overlap with the Fallin' Down music posts, because I recycled a lot of the same ideas for that.

 

Fallin' Down - Music - Submitter's Choice

After writing up the music post for Fallin' Down, I put a call out to the submitters of each floor, to see if they had music tracks in mind for their dungeon levels. I also asked Conscience what he'd been using so far.

A rune wizard amends signage in the Stone Town, courtesy of one of Conscience's players

I received the following replies:

Conscience (Dungeon Master)
General Combat Relaxed: Drumbeat of the Dunmer (https://youtu.be/Yookfajt3lg)

General Combat Intense: Stormclouds on the Horizom (https://youtu.be/QdKgNP0ygMw)

Stone Town Day: Journey's End (https://youtu.be/cph3BSQq1e0)

Stone Town Journey/Event: Wind Guide You (https://youtu.be/qBBwdOGDIKk)

Stone Town Dark: Masser (https://youtu.be/Va9GQkjrnII)

Broken Venus: Mirkwood Theme (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhZMk7ZCOyw)

Ghouls Exploration: Flat of the Blade Instrumental (https://youtu.be/WfIP4DWGG28)

Ghouls at Work: Pray for Rain Instrumental (https://youtu.be/XdaJi0tdAwI)

Ghouls Attack: Babel Instrumental (https://youtu.be/rNWXDiqw-cc)

tophat (Floor 3)
"I'd put Machinarium's The Prison down for specifically visiting The Blood Pool"

Generic Pursuit System for Dungeon Crawlers

This is Fallout. It's what popped into my head when I imagined a guy running away

If you want players to do something, you need to make it easy enough that it isn't overly punishing, and isn't dramatically harder than the alternative. If it's harder to run away from a combat encounter than fight, the players are going to fight to the death rather than run away. It isn't enough to tell the players "not all fights are designed to be won", you need to provide mechanical support for this concept.

But you also don't want getting away from a combat to be costless, otherwise there aren't any stakes. There has to be an element of risk, even if the odds are tilted in favor of players.

But I also don't want it to be completely up to a roll of the dice. Otherwise you get one of those cases where the players flub the perception test (or surprise roll, or whatever) to spot the monster, flub the reaction roll, lose initiative, get beaten to a pulp in the first round, and then on top of all of that, fuck up the roll to escape the fight and get mutilated.

So the way I handle it is

When player characters run away from combat, each rolls a D20 and adds the number of empty slots they have in their inventory. Their pursuers (if the NPCs chase them) each roll a D20 and add any bonuses they get from their movement speed (default +0, up to +5 for a speedy foe, +10 for a blazing fast one).

If a character is overencumbered, subtract the number of excess slots from their D20 roll.

Escapees who roll lower than their pursuers are forced back into combat for one round, before they have a chance to try and escape again. Escapees who beat their pursuers are able to get away.

If a player (or NPC) fails to escape pursuit, they may elect to drop encumbering items equal to the difference between their roll and that of the pursuer, in order to escape that round.

Get a bonus to your roll to escape for running through an uncharted area, but run the risk of triggering traps or running into other monsters. You can choose to do this after you roll and fail to escape.

A clever solution (I cut the rope bridge with my axe once everyone’s across!) might just succeed automatically.

When dragging an incapacitated character, the person doing the dragging rolls to escape pursuit as normal, but subtracts the number of items carried by the character being dragged from their total. They may improve their odds by leaving behind the victim’s backpack, weapon, etc.

If the players pursue fleeing enemies, it is the same, but roles are reversed.

I'm sure this has been done before in some format, but I'll talk about why I did it like this.

The key is that the players have the ability to make choices after a failed die roll to turn it into a success, at the cost of spending a resource or endangering themselves in some other way. Either throw away some items to move faster, or run into an uncharted area and potentially get in even more trouble.

We can imagine assigning other bonuses and penalties based on things like the player characters' movement speed, where a faster than average character gets a bonus to the roll and a slower than average one (dwarves for example get a malus to their speed in various editions) gets a penalty.

The rules for dragging an incapacitated character omit the weight of the character and only count the weight of their carried items. I erred on the side of making the rules less punishing here because I've seen players get endlessly tarpitted by creatures with stun or paralysis abilities - unable to stand and fight, unable to retreat if they have to haul a downed ally out of the fray, and unwilling to abandon a friend. While the dilemma of leaving a wounded comrade behind to escape yourself is a rich vein of drama to tap, it's not the kind of drama everyone always enjoys.

This isn't a perfectly generic system. It assumes a couple things about your dungeon crawling game:

• It uses a D20 roll over system
• It uses a slot based encumbrance system

If your game doesn't use a D20, you can modify the math so that the sizes of the bonuses and penalties isn't overwhelming. So if you use a D10, divide by two. If you use a D6, divide by three or four, depending on if you want to round up or down.

If your game doesn't use slot based encumbrance, things get trickier. I'm personally of the opinion that non slot based encumbrance (that actually tracks pounds and ounces) is mathematically annoying enough that in practice it's usually ignored where it appears in rules. But I know that some people play games with digital character sheets that might auto-calculate stuff like carry weight of items, making those rules more practical. So there might be people out there who do use pounds and ounces encumbrance, and this system isn't going to help them at all.

ANGUISHEDWIRES Masterpost

The Commonwealth has raised a colony city over the ruins of ANGUISHEDWIRES, a Dwarf Fortress destroyed by an ancient catastrophe long ago. Adventurers have barely begun to plumb its depths, but already upturned fabulous riches and ancient horrors. More of both await in the unknown depths below.

 

From Atlas Obscura

 

ANGUISHEDWIRES is a system-neutral dungeon crawl based on a run of How to Host a Dungeon, a solo game by Tony Dowler. It was an experiment, to see how much work it took to convert a map from that game into something playable in an RPG. The answer was “a lot!” It's a little primitive compared to the Manor of the Giant Arminius, which makes sense since I created it first. The maps are all hand drawn, and some of the plot elements and NPCs are less refined versions of stuff that shows up in the Manor.

Still, it's got ancient dwarven train stations, vampire bartenders, secret reactor complexes, radioactive labs, glass deserts and magma lakes, rat people, ant people, mushroom people, smugglers, fiends, and too many fucking ghouls.

 

I playtested the game with my own system called Begone, FOE. I based a lot of the stat blocks on the Old School Essentials SRD, so the game should be compatible with all your other Basic-likes. OSE, Labyrinth Lord, Swords and Wizardry, etc. No promises though, since I haven't actually played those games.

 

Enough talk. Here are the links.

• The Dungeon Itself. This folder holds the scenario text with the key entries, along with the maps.
• Session 1 Play Report
  
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Session 2 Play Report
• Music Post
  

Esoteric Enterprises - Welcome to Salt Bay - Weekend With Good Friends Special

I ran another game of Esoteric Enterprises for the latest Good Friends of Jackson Elias Virtual Convention.

I used the same pitch as last time. I got two players, both last minute signups

• James -  Occultist with a sword-cane
• Rick - Lockpicking drug addict
  

They started off at the Love Shack, same as last time. I took the job from the previous convention off the list, which left the players with the following:

• I've got a line to a collector who wants art from the underground gallery to the North.
• Druid drugs are always a hot commodity. They've got a secret grove somewhere under the West side.
• Guy in the underground frontier pays good money for "dungeon meat". What's dungeon meat? Anything, once you kill it.
• Neighborhood Association isn't too happy about the abattoir re-opening. They'd pay big money to shut it down

The players decided to look for the dungeon druids. They could steal their stash and sell it, or just smoke it all. A win, either way. They went into the backroom of the Love Shack and descended into the dungeon.

 

The Manor of the Giant Arminius - Masterpost

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. 

 

By Gustave Doré

The Manor of the Giant Arminius is a system-neutral dungeon crawl for players of varying levels. It's an attempt to correct some stuff I wasn't happy with about a module called Castle Gargantua, while preserving both the atmosphere and the part where you get to climb on the giant furniture. It's got ghouls, wizards, grotesque magical experiments, peasant rebellions, cults of Dionysus, man eating hogs, man eating hog-men, gunfights, guerrilla warfare, giant undead babies, and a whole lot of treasure to steal.

 

The dungeon isn't intended for any particular level or party size. Low level parties can avoid the worst fights by hiding, running, or talking their way past the NPCs, grab a couple giant treasures and get the hell out. High level parties can tackle threats head on, then loot whole rooms full of giant size items at their leisure.

I playtested the game with my own system called Begone, FOE. I based a lot of the stat blocks on the Old School Essentials SRD, so the game should be compatible with all your other Basic-likes. OSE, Labyrinth Lord, Swords and Wizardry, etc. No promises though, since I haven't actually played those games.

 

Enough talk. Here are the links.

• The Dungeon Itself. This folder holds the scenario text with the key entries, along with both the PNG maps, JSONs for use with the RPGmap software I used, and the original sketches of the dungeon.
• Session 1 Play Report
• Session 2 Play Report
• A Weekend With Good Friends Virtual Convention Play Report
• Music Post for tracks used

The Manor of the Giant Arminius - Session Two

A second session of the Manor of the Giant Arminius, run a week after the first. Again using Begone, FOE.

 

The second session took place an in-game day after the first. The Rebels had seized the ground floor of the mansion, and carried off or destroyed all the treasure. The floor above was a battleground, Arminius' soldiers mounting a desperate last stand against the attacking Levelers. Smoke billowed from the second floor windows. If anyone was planning on robbing the place, this was their final opportunity to do so.

From The Ogre Gods by Hubert and Gatignol

 

I had the same players as last session. Thanks to the haul of treasure from the basement crypt, their characters were Level 5.

• Jack Fatherd, Sheep Handling Rogue
• Iren Benedek, Lock Picking Witch
• Aldrich Brisbane, Crusading Dwarfaboo and Ex Hoglord

The adventurers approached the manor in much the same way as last session, stealthily advancing through the brush until they reached the house. Then they walked right in through the front door.

 

FATAL and Friends Reviews

Over the last year, I wrote some reviews of games for the Somethingawful FATAL and Friends thread.

You can read the reviews here.

The RPGs I reviewed were:

• Eclipse Phase: Zone Stalkers
• Esoteric Enterprises
• Castle Gargantua
• How to Host a Dungeon
• Mothership
• Maria in Three Parts
• Think Before Asking
• Delta Green Shotgun Scenarios

The Manor of the Giant Arminius - Session One

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

We began play with the characters approaching the manor through the forest. They had the following briefing to draw from:

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.

Esoteric Enterprises - Welcome to Salt Bay - Jackscon Elias Special

I ran a game of Esoteric Enterprises for the Good Friends of Jackson Elias Virtual Convention.

Salt Bay - once a mining town, now a coastal tourist village. Sit your cliffside resort with a glass of wine and watch container ships fight their way across the whirling bay to Coal City down the coast. Quiet, scenic and expensive.

That ain’t you. You drifted into town with the wrong crowd. The kind that hangs around the Love Shack behind the dive shop at one in the morning, sweating gin and eying the staircase in the back. The one that leads into the undercity.

You’ve heard stories about what’s down there. Buried gardens of killer kudzu, infested with urban druids. Old rotting houses full of giant spiders. Gutters of meat that squirms like it’s still alive. Moving sculptures that really stretch the definition of “art”. It all looks like dollar signs when you’re an occult criminal with a pistol in your hand and ten dollars in your pocket.

I had three players, all new to the game. I made a simplified version of the character creation rules that incorporated my houserules and removed the need to laboriously copy down skills and saving throws from the book. After about fifteen minutes, we emerged with the following characters:

• Sploon, Devoted Slave of the Parasite God (Mystic, Lvl 1)
• Frank "The Wall" Turner (Bodyguard, Lvl 1)
• Dweezil the Clever (Criminal, Lvl 1)

They started off at the Love Shack, an old brothel converted to a low rent gin joint (and shamelessly recycled from the Cow Town campaign). The management had torn up the floor in the back after an... accident had messed up the boards, and found an old staircase leading into the undercity. A few hoodlums had explored it and already there were stories about treasure and danger to be found:

• I've got a line to a collector who wants art from the underground gallery to the North.
• Druid drugs are always a hot commodity. They've got a secret grove somewhere under the West side.
• Couple guys went exploring on the East side, past the fairy enclave. Ones that came back said there's a buried mansion, full of spiders and treasure.
• Guy in the underground frontier pays good money for "dungeon meat". What's dungeon meat? Anything, once you kill it.
• Neighborhood Association isn't too happy about the abattoir re-opening. They'd pay big money to shut it down 

The gang decided to investigate the spider nest in the buried mansion. Dweezil asked around with his contacts, and found a rumor that might help: The employees at the Coal City Power substation on the East side of town had a hatch down into the basement, that they wouldn't enter without a HAZMAT suit and flamethrower. It sounded like the hatch led right on top of the dungeon area they were interested in.

(Finding out about the hatch let the hoodlums skip slogging through the undercity and enter directly on top of the spider nest).

It was the middle of the night when they rolled up on the power station. The gate was open and nobody was watching it. There was a single quonset hut with a single line worker, staring at a computer screen with headphones on, and a concrete structure that led underground. Dweezil got the lock off the bunker without making a fuss, and the gang snuck inside. There were a lot of technological looking rooms that nobody understood, probably related to providing power to the city. There was also a locker room with a bunch of padlocked containers and a very secure floor hatch.

The footpads realized the cabinets were probably full of HAZMAT suits and flamethrowers. Neither Sploon nor Dweezil could open them. The group opened the hatch and descended into the unknown depths below.

Esoteric Enterprises - Advancement, Scope, and "Domain Level" Play

I never thought I'd say it, but I'm actually interested in "Domain Level" play. And the game I want it for doesn't say anything about it. Esoteric Enterprises is a game about being a criminal in the occult underworld. In the current open table game I'm running, the players have clawed their way up through the underground to become serious players in the Coal City nightlife - partially through their fearsome reputation, and partially because they're some of the last wizards standing after months of gang warfare. Kaldron's Kimeras should be thinking about recruiting their own goons, setting up their own hustles. But the game has no rules for creating and running your own criminal gang. You can work for other factions, and you can fight other factions, but you can't be a faction.

This is unfortunate because the dungeon crawling loop (get mission, go under, fight things, grab money, map a new area, run away from things, limp back to the surface) is feeling a little stale. Shooting people in gang wars is feeling stale. The players keep showing up, but I'm running out of ways to mix things up. The gangs of Coal City are running out of bodies, and the dungeon is running out of unexplored rooms.

(Indie Game Reading Club had a post that mentioned this, which I can't find now. About how even games with really good procedural content generators will eventually run dry if there isn't something else to do besides burn through the randomly generated maps and encounters)

When I brought this up on the server, one of the players speculated that the PCs were never actually intended to be as powerful or relevant as Kaldron's Kimeras. I applied a 5X multiplier to experience, and most of the group is between level 2 and 4 after nine sessions. Without the multiplier, most of them would be just about at level 2.

But then, either the players are eventually supposed to achieve those positions, at which point we still come to the problem of running your own criminal enterprise. Or they aren't supposed to reach those heights, and the huge tables of XP advancement, power advancement, saving throw advancement, and nine levels of spells aren't actually intended for use.

I think it's the latter. I think the players are supposed to be magical hobos living on the edge of civilization, diving dungeons and getting into gritty magical underworld gunfights for gas money and child support payments. The best they can hope for is to be useful enough that the real players keep them around, or dangerous enough to not be worth bothering, or have a plan to escape when the powers-that-be finally get tired of them. Maybe someday if they prove their worth, they can join a faction, be granted safety and security and purpose, and move one or two concentric rings inward toward civilization. But being tough enough to start your own? Fuggedaboutit.

Except, if that's the case, why all the levels and spells and so on?

Esoteric Enterprise is cloned from Lamentations, which is cloned from B/X. My guess is the author did this to avoid the agony of developing a bespoke system, and get right to the meat of cranking out the actual content. All the huge XP tables, spell levels, and even the classes are reskinned from Lamentations.

I ran Lamentations for a few sessions in undergrad, way-back-when, and it suffered from the same problem. It still had mechanical support for character advancement, but the actual modules for it were all survival horror. There was little treasure to be had, certainly nothing like the windfall of the B/X treasure tables, and the characters were lucky if they made it out alive. More so if they avoided all the mutilations and mutations the scenarios had in store. It wasn't a game about advancement, it was about degeneration - more like Call of Cthulhu or Delta Green than the games it was cloned from.

A lot of game designers who make OSR stuff are in love with the first-level experience. Characters can't count on a cushion of HP, special powers, decent saving throws or damage output to protect them. Smart use of limited resources is essential to survival. The players are always paying attention because, like the man said, death waits for the slightest lapse in concentration.

Instead of cloning B/X, I encourage these designers to create their own game systems that take the things they like about first level play and stretch them out to cover the entire game. Instead of porting over thirty year old rules for XP advancement that clearly no longer reflect what their game is about.