Keystone Treasures

I've been constantly thinking about the best way to implement my new megadungeon (I'm on a kick with it, these days, and Flying Swordsmen is paying the price, not getting worked on, but oh well).

One thing that really worked in my first iteration (the maps I posted earlier) were the rumor box, especially rumors about specific treasures. It gave the players something to strive for within the unknown element that is the campaign dungeon.

Some of my rumors were about monsters they could find, some were about some of the 'specials,' some were folk superstition type rumors (sprinkle a ring of powdered silver to keep out demons), and some mentioned certain treasures within the dungeon.

Obviously warnings about what sorts of creatures are down there are useful, as it gives the party some ideas about equipment, spells, etc. they should take along. But the real inspiring rumors were the ones like, "The owlbear guards a huge pile of gold" or "The crown of King Jargo is hidden on the second level."

The 'Let's find that' impulse really leads to the desire to explore the dungeon, both for completeness (the emerald ring of Trogdor is supposed to be around here somewhere) and for advancement (if the bugbears have as much loot as we heard, we'll surely all level!). Of course, magic items often deserve their own rumors as well, but mundane treasures can really get the players raring to go as well.

So I'm gonna be making up a list of cool, named treasure items. Sure, there will be plenty of gems and jewelry, but I plan to throw in lots of other odd things as well. Stuffed heads, gilded chariots, matched sets of fine porcelain teacups, clay tablets with epic poetry in cuneiform, fancy hats, whatever. And rumors will hint about where they can be found, or who or what guards them.

Had a dream last night...

Woke up this morning, and smiled. I'd been dreaming that I was playing D&D with my brother and a couple other dream people. We were running 3E characters, I was playing a Monk. But my brother, who was DMing, was apparently using Classic D&D rules on his side. We were fighting some Rock Baboons. The male dream person disappeared, and the female dream person, who was playing a Dwarf Fighter was doing alright, but my poor Human Monk couldn't hit the broad side of a barn and I was slowly getting pounded to death by the baboons.

I looked at my character sheet for something to save me, and I had something called a scroll of cavarous (?), which I thought would somehow turn the baboons on each other, but I woke up before my initiative came up again.

I've read about some people doing that (mixing 3E characters with a Classic world, not inserting scrolls of cannibalism, although that's a good idea too) before to good effect. It keeps the DM from having to worry about all the fiddly crap of the d20 system, while players get to customize and twink their characters as they see fit.

Saving throws would be the only hard part, I'd think. If you just used the 1st level Save values for the players, and let them roll d20+whichever of the three bonuses is appropriate vs. the DC of whichever of the five classic categories is used might work for the players. But for the monsters, you'd need to calculate bonuses for saves against the DCs of the players' effects.

Otherwise, the combination could work really well.

Maybe I could try it with my group. Alex, who hates Classic would jump at the chance, and Pat has said he really prefers 3E/3.5E. But who am I kidding, I don't really have the time to DM right now. As I said before, if we get back to gaming, I should just really shut up and be a player.

What about the end game?

I was doing a Google search for some online information about cool tricks, traps, and special encounters for my megadungeon. Yeah, I can think up a lot myself, but with the scale of the place, I'm gonna need help if I ever want to get it up and running. And the sites I was looking at yesterday really helped me not only with the ideas presented, but getting me thinking of ways to change or modify what was there.

And while I didn't find what I was looking for, I did find this interesting blog post from about a year and a half ago, about a group's experiences using 3.5 D&D for a campaign centered around several large dungeon complexes.

I'm personally not planning to let my megadungeon get deeper than maybe 10 levels. Because I'm a big fan of the Classic D&D endgame. When you get up to Name Level, it's time to switch gears. Build your castle, manage your domain, and when you do adventure, it's time for the epic world-spanning, world-saving quests, and small, focused dungeons that are meant to be raided and forgotten.

In the blog post I linked to, they seemed to only consider the problems with 3.5, especially with regard to high level play (there are a lot, IME), and with using a megadungeon without fully utilizing rumors and hints about what's in it and why anyone should be exploring it.

Well, rumors I'll save for another day. Actually, I'm pretty sure I blogged about my rumor system back when I first started this blog up, but if so, I may return to that topic soon, as it's been on my mind.

What I really took away from that blog, however, was that they shouldn't have tried to keep up with the dungeon exploration at the stage when they were trying Maure Castle/3E Ravenloft, and instead should have switched to more of a 'game of thrones' type game.

Pit Traps

I was thinking about pit traps in dungeons a while back. Apparently (haven't looked at my pdfs, just read some stuff on Dragonsfoot about the subject), OD&D doesn't go into specifics of the damage done by pit traps--there's some rules for falling damage in there somewhere, but not in the pit trap section. That's where the standard 1d6 per 10' fallen rule comes from.

Well, for pit traps in a megadungeon, or at least one with multiple levels designed to get harder as one progresses, I've had a simple idea.

A pit trap does 1d6 damage for each level of the dungeon you happen to be on. So if you're on the 1st level, that pit trap is only 10' deep and you take 1d6 if you fall in. If you're on the 3rd level, it's 30' deep and you take 3d6. If you're on the 6th level, better hope you've got lots of hit points and your buddies up top have at least two lengths of rope! You've just taken 6d6 and have a 60' climb ahead of you!

I like this, as it means I can simply make a note on the map of where a pit trap is, and don't have to write down how deep it is. The only extra notes I'd need is if there were spikes, it fills with water or some other substance, a monster was at the bottom, or something like that.

My son's first 3d6

Last night, as I was coming home from work, I stopped in a little 'dollar' shop called Daiso. I wasn't really looking for anything in particular, but in the toy section I saw they had big red foam d6s for sale for 1000won each. So I picked up a trio of them for my son.

When I got home, he was having fun throwing them around and imitating me when I said the numbers that came up (he can count to twenty with a bit of help, to ten on his own except for sometimes skipping 8--he's 2 1/2 years old). Anyway, I made sure to tally up the dice for the first 18 rolls he made. If he'd been rolling a Classic D&D character, here's what he would have gotten:

Str 13
Int 10
Wis 5
Dex 13
Con 10
Cha 13

Not too shabby! You could do anything but a Cleric easily with those numbers. And they're good numbers for a Fighter, Thief or Halfling.

Monster Origins

Once upon a time, way back in the crazy days when I was into 3rd Edition D&D and frequented the Wizards.com message boards, they had a section for essays, research, and more formal stuff that required authorization for all posts by the moderators. It was called Redgar's Repository. I have no idea if it survived the 3E to 4E purge, er transition, or whatever it was, as I'd long since stopped visiting that little chunk of the internet.

But my little contribution to Regdar's Repository was an article listing the sources of the monsters in the 3E Monster Manual. As best I could, I searched my books of mythology and folklore, online sources, and asked for a lot of help from other people in the know.

Of course, there was (as one might expect) debate on the origins of some of the monsters. Since monsters have changed over time, some names get recycled from time to time, and two differnt D&D monsters are sometimes the same monster in mythology, it can be hard to get a definitive answer for some creatures. Add to the fact that some monsters were created whole cloth, and others are basically created by some TSR writer but given the name of an actual monster, and there's bound to be confusion.

One of the funniest complaints I had in the thread about my article was about the Cloud Giant. It's obvious that Gygax or Arneson modeled it after the giant in Jack and the Beanstalk. Lives in clouds, smells really well. One poster just refused to admit it, and tried arguing left right and center about some other origin, how the mighty and regal Cloud Giant could never be based on a kiddie fairy tale! Of course, I challenged him to show me another source of the monster, and he couldn't.

Well, I was reminded of that because we're reading Jack and the Beanstalk in one of my kindergarten classes. Another class is reading Hansel and Gretel, another Puss-in-Boots. And it brought home to me how much monster slaying/treasure looting there is in old fairy tales, in addition to reminding me of that old thread on Regdar's Repository.

Anyway, if you've got kids too young yet to dive into Robert E. Howard or Fritz Leiber but want to get them interested in D&D, a good Fairy Tale inspired campaign might work wonders. And you may be surprised at how well kids brought into the game that way take to the idea of outsmarting the monsters rather than just charging in with swords drawn!

Monmouth, IL and Seoul

Looking at my Google Analytics numbers for this blog last night, I was a bit surprised to see that there's someone in Monmouth, IL that really follows this blog closely. Since I'm originally from not too far away from Monmouth--a little tiny town called West Point, about half way between Quincy and Macomb--I'm kinda curious if it's someone I actually know or not.

I've also been getting a lot more hits from Seoul lately. This month I've gotten more hits from Seoul than from Busan. I haven't been up to Seoul for a while, but if any of you Seoul folks ever make it down to Busan and want to meet up for a pickup game or something, just let me know!