Dungeon Crawling Double Feature Masterpost

By Zi

Welcome to the Dungeon Crawling Double Feature, a linked pair of adventures for Unknown Armies 3e.

 

In Part 1: A Dungeon Too Many, the players dig into a dungeon filled with traps, monsters and treasure, in search of the power that will let them topple The Monarchy.

 

In Part 2: No Country For Old Kings, the players get to use all the cool stuff they found in the dungeon to take on The Old King in his desert War Palace.

 

These dungeons are based on a discussion I had on 33.3 FM. The hosts wanted to see an Unknown Armies dungeon crawl set in an actual fantasy world, rather than the regular UA3 urban fantasy/occult setting or a historical setting. 

 

The fantasy world I chose is the same implied setting as the one I used in my previous Dungeon23 project: The Mountain of the Mad Marquis.

 

A Dungeon Too Many - Music Post

Piranesi

Music post for the Unknown Armies dungeon crawling double feature A Dungeon Too Many and No County For Old Kings.

Unknown Armies Play Report: A Dungeon Too Many, Playtest Three

You call it A Dungeon Too Many, yet this is the third one. Curious...

 

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 Three 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
• Marrow Bone, Green Man and Avatar of the Knacker
  
• Rope Trick, Former Registered Wizard, Current Avatar of The Enlightenment
  

As you'd expect, the story began with the 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.

 

Phil Tippet's Mad God

 

The descent into the vestibule went as it always did. Marrow Bone used darkvision to peer into the chamber and spot Whalefall the Roach feeding on the dead adventurer. He grabbed her and snatched the magick misericorde Nocticola's Mercy from her hand before she could stab him. He got her to give up the Iron Flask of demon containment and the location of the hidden garbage chute below the big platform, then scuttled away down the pit when he released her.

Unknown Armies Play Report: You're Not Alexander, Playtest Two

The time: the fourth century BC. The place: the ruins of Troy, in the shadow of the Temple of Athena. The cast:

• Jocasta, the last virgin sacrifice offered by the Locrians in a thousand year ritual to cleanse the sins of Ajax the Lesser at the end of the Trojan War. Survived the bloodrites and was allowed to live as a slave at the Temple of Athena. Champion boxer, serves as the town's police force.
• Kancharmonetes, busker who makes a living re-enacting battles from the epics of old. Also by hooking on the side. Avatar of the Sacred Androgyne with the ability to physically change his sex, which helps sell both types of performance.
  
• Pseudanor, bastard son of a drug dealing maenad and snake priestess. Incapable of casting his mother's snake based magick, but blessed with innate snake abilities. A teenage hellion who loves pranks and mischief. 

Pseudanor's mother, India, was out collecting snakes in the foothills of Mount Ida, and wouldn't be back for a couple days. It was up to the trio of hospitality workers to deal with what happened next.

It started with Kancharmonetes. It was the middle of the night and he was swapped to female, looking for customers at the Fawn's Heart - the only hotel in the ruined city. She was approached by a pair of Dorians interested in taking the roles of Achiles and Patroclus in her infamous Briseis act. They offered her a single gold Alexander for her trouble, which was an insane amount of money. Enough to allay her suspicions that something was up with the pair.

 

 

The pair of Dorians revealed what was up with them when they got upstairs to one of the tavern's private rooms. They pulled out iron-bound clubs and demanded that Kancharmon come with them, by order of the Hipparch of Hellespontine Phrygia. They didn't wait for her to respond. She took a blow to the head before she could get a word in edgewise.

Unknown Armies Play Report: A Dungeon Too Many, Playtest Two Part 2

 LATER, IN A FAR AWAY PLACE...

 

Cactus Garden was a border city, captured at the beginning of the Monarchy’s war with the Djinn Potentates. It sat atop a vast rock formation overlooking a desert of red stone and sand. Water from the pinnacle spilled down to the gardens and farms below.

The city took its name from the dwarf forests of cactus that grew in the foothills of the rock. These were deliberately cultivated by the Djinn, protected from overwatering or clearance by orchardists. They did this so they could use dense patches of cholla to crucify their enemies, tossing victims naked into the dense patches of cactus and watching them impale themselves trying to squirm free. The Old King had the Djinn Citadel converted to his War Palace, where he could direct the war from a safe position reasonably close to the frontline. In the interest of maintaining continuity with the previous rulers, he maintained the tradition of executing people by cactus.

Over the last month, flagellants, mercenaries, itinerant wizards and adventurers gathered in Cactus Garden. Unlike the rest of the soldiers and profiteers flooding into the city, they didn’t come in anticipation of the King’s new offensive against the Potentates. They came to stage a revolt, and that’s exactly what they did. 

 

Every gate in the city was packed with insurgents, attacking soldiers and preventing the Monarchy’s forces from moving freely. The rebellion had no chance of taking and holding the city long-term. They weren’t trying to. Their job was to keep reinforcements out of the War Palace until the Two Adventurers and their mutant brute squad could kill The Old King.

The sounds of battle in the city below were audible fifty feet below as they disembarked the climbing-snail, through the shredded window-grate and into the palace baths. Swords, shouting, lightning bolts and crumbling masonry.

 

Unknown Armies Play Report: A Dungeon Too Many, Playtest Two Part 1

Another day, another Dungeon Too Many.

 

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
  
• Marrow Bone, Green Man and Avatar of the Knacker
  

The story began with the Two 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?

 

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.