A Guide to Stonehell

Ah, Stonehell. The picture of the stairs got me thinking.

If you can't see that for some reason, the second book of the Stonehell megadungeon is coming out on October 27. That is awesome, and I want to talk about it a bit, having run the first book for a number of sessions and thought about what could be done better.

Presumably Stonehell Dungeon: Into the Heart of Hell will be available both as a PDF and in print-on-demand. I'd recommend getting the PDF (volume 1 PDF), because you can't really run a megadungeon from a perfect bound book. Also make sure you get Supplement One and Supplement Two.

I have had some ideas since I ran it on how I'd actually want the book presented. This is how I'd recommend preparing and running the dungeon.

First, there's the physical preparation of the materials. I'd recommend printing the front matter, the master maps, the monster lists, and the sublevel descriptions – but not the sublevel maps and keys – in a big spiral-bound book. You can get the print-on-demand versions, but a single spiral bound book is going to be easier to reference. Then get the appendices printed on good cardstock, so you can reference them frequently. Then get the two-page spreads printed out on sheets of white 11"x17" cardstock, so each sublevel is one big spread that you can reference while running the game.

Second, go through the sublevel keys with two highlighters. Find every monster and highlight it with one color. Find every treasure and highlight it with the second color. You will want to be able to tell at a glance what is in a room.

Third, get a copy of B2 Keep on the Borderlands. The entrance to Stonehell is located in a canyon almost identical to the one housing the Caves of Chaos in B2. The titular Keep is a solid home base for adventurers, and the wilderness map is perfect for an expanded version of Stonehell's surroundings. the Dragonsfoot index to B2 contains an overwhelming amount of writing that has been done on B2. The Zenopus Archives resource page is a more compact guide, and The Project on the Borderlands is a solid set of enhancements.

Fourth, dig in and make it navigable. As you get familiar with the dungeon, create maps (which may be partly inaccurate or out of date, see the sixth point below) and write out directions that monsters or NPCs can give to PCs. Add in some extra treasure (Stonehell is pretty stingy with the gold stuff) and sprinkle in hints about where it is. The goal here is to encourage play that goes for bigger treasures rather than blundering through every room that Stonehell has to offer. You may want to also discourage players from taking a "typical" bash-in-the-door approach to areas such as the Quiet Halls or Kobold Korners (or later, Monster Dorm) as this can turn into a grind.

Fifth, make it your own. Stonehell is a campaign, not a few sessions, and it cries out for a referee's individual stamp. It needs more treasure, it needs more weird monsters, and it needs sublevels. Take either material you've written, or from other modules, and steal it for Stonehell. If I were to run it again, I'd work in a lot of material from Geoffrey McKinney's Isle of the Unknown and Dungeon of the Unknown. It's fresh, distinctive material that contrasts well with the classic D&D feel that is abundant in Stonehell. Just one example: the "dragon" in level 1A could easily be creature C11 in Dungeon of the Unknown, which has a "breath weapon" consisting of razor-winged butterflies; that would totally change the complexion of the encounter. You can hang a lot of other material on what has been written here.

Finally, make it a living dungeon. The kobolds are a great mechanism for doing this. Throw up "under construction" signs, block off passages that PCs have previously taken, and create a roster of new monsters to move into areas that have been "cleared." Slap fresh coats of paint or have a slime monster create a tunnel that wasn't there before. Especially when PCs choose to spend time away from the dungeon, it should not be the same place when they come back.

One side note: while Stonehell can be run reasonably well in pretty much any system you like, it pays to have a copy of Labyrinth Lord handy, just for reference to the monster descriptions. Stonehell's stat blocks are tight, but they don't list out any special abilities of the various creatures. B/X, and hence Labyrinth Lord, critters are a touch different from those found in non-B/X derived games.

Stonehell is a neat place, and if the first half is any indication the full thing will be worth the work. Michael Curtis has created a huge, coherent dungeon that is a solid basis for a D&D campaign. But it needs to be treated as a collaborative effort; the very style of a megadungeon campaign deserves no less.

Carnivorous Plants and the Dungeon

Reading about exotic South American mountains and their unique flora got me thinking about pitcher plants, which are also known as pitfall traps. These tend to be small, exotic plants that trap insects and convert them into nutrients. The pitchers of plants like Nepenthes lowii, pictured to the left, tend only to run as long as 35 centimeters (just over a foot). But this is Dungeons & Dragons; if there is one thing the game is good at, it's taking things and making them bigger.

You probably already know where I'm going with this. Sticking a pitcher plant, particularly one with a snap-shut "lid" like Nepenthes lowii, in a D&D pit trap is a wonderfully nasty surprise. The hapless dungeon delver falls in, and all of a sudden they're trapped in a suffocating plant, trying to get some weapon free and cut their way out while they still have air left. Meanwhile the digestive liquid burns them as it starts to turn them into plant food. Their friends can to try and cut them out, but that's pretty dangerous.

The tentacle of the sundew Drosera capensis is another nasty trap. When the long hairs are sprung, the sticky tentacle curls up and rolls its prey into more of its digestive juices. This one might, depending on size, do crushing as well as acidic damage as it entraps a character. These liquids should, by the by, also be doing a number on armor even if the PC gets away; a coat of mail or plate that is scarred and pitted by acid is no longer useful for defense. These can be in pit traps as well, or used as room traps in a weird sort of "garden room."

It should be obvious why carnivorous plants are the kind that thrive in a dungeon, of course: lacking much in the way of sunlight, dungeon plants will consume flesh. And it lets you have plants in your underworld in a semi-logical way.

Of course, we can hardly discuss carnivorous plants without talking about the Venus flytrap. Once the trigger hairs on this plant are sprung, its powerful leaves snap shut and the unfortunate insect caught inside is done for. A huge flytrap can catch a single character, but a really massive one could even get a whole party. Again we're relying on the combination of crushing damage and acid to actually do in the character. The initial blow as the flytrap shuts might also do some damage. They're iconic and, like the pitcher plant, will pose the difficulty of freeing a trapped character without harming them. Dungeon variants might have hardened bristles that do damage while the flytrap closes.

Plants, of course, are typically something we see only above ground. This makes their appearance in the dungeon setting startling, and clearly the sign of weird Chaotic mutation and/or a mad wizard's experimentation. Of course, you could always go full-on Little Shop of Horrors or Attack of the Killer Tomatoes as the end stage of dungeon carnivorous plants; but I think the initial horror of being consumed by a pitcher plant in a pit trap or caught by a giant sundew is a great way to incorporate some plant life into your dungeon crawls.

Sundew image by Noah Elhardt CC-BY-SA
Venus flytrap image by Noah Elhardt CC-BY-SA

Statues and the Living Dungeon

I had hinted back in my post on monsters that turn you to stone that I would do a post on statues; I was working on it but got sick, and once I was feeling better, I sort of embarked on my recent spate of monster posts.

The picture on the right is an attempt to reconstruct what the statue of Augustus at Prima Porta would have looked like when it was painted. Residues of the ancient paints were used to get the gist of what colors were originally present in the statue. It looks surprising in two ways: one, it's much more gaudy than the statues of white marble we are used to seeing represent the ancient world; and two, it's much more human in its countenance. We tend to see them as majestic white marble, but the painted human faces are much more sympathetic. Of course they were painted regularly as a matter of course; it was only art historians who decided that the pure white forms were preferable. I disagree.

Statues have historically been one of the more important pieces of dungeon dressing. The "Startling Statues" table in the Judges Guild Ready Ref Sheets (you can see the table in a picture here) gives a wide variety of options, and various puzzles and enigmas have long used statuary as their focal pieces. We can think of the "Great Stone Face Enigma of Greyhawk" as a very early example. (You can see some more discussion over at Dragonsfoot.) The illustration makes it appear very similar to the distinctive Moai at Easter Island.

Historically statues were used mainly for religious and political purposes (not that these were always different things). But they were by function extremely public works of art. You don't often make a life-sized statue just to stick in a home. So what are they doing in the dungeon?

In the kobold entry I wrote up yesterday, your typical gnome statue is fully functional: it is there to prevent new kobolds from forming. This works on the view that the dungeon is a "living thing," something that isn't natural and grows of its own volition. There are a few ways that statues can work in this environment, and a few different reasons for them to be there.

As with the gnome statues preventing kobolds, some statues in the first few levels may be placed there to prevent the area from developing further "dungeon" characteristics. These are a bulwark of humanity and civilization in the underworld, an attempt to stave off the growth of the otherness in the night below. With time and interference from the dungeon's fell denizens, these statues slowly erode and are taken to pieces, or become corrupted and magical, part of the dungeon itself. Dwarves, gnomes and human miners build statues in their underground fastnesses in order to stave off the creeping underworld forces that threaten to overtake them.

Monsters will do the opposite, and a dungeon should have crude idols and evil figures that concentrate more of the foul energies that change the tunnels and crypts into a proper underworld. They may make strange and often odd curses occur to characters; a favorite of mine is a statue that forces characters to feed it coins uncontrollably until they are physically removed (save negates). Smashing these may actually cause the rate of wandering monsters to decrease. They may also be encrusted with gems, which are handy for a cursed object.

When we deal with crypts it should be clear that some statues will be funerary. These have the opposite effect: the dungeon becomes closer to the world of the dead. Inexplicable fog, or even the animation of skeletons, may be driven by the creation of an elaborate underground necropolis. Images of the dead not accompanied by appropriate holy symbols and wards are likely to become part and parcel of this corruption.

Deeper and deeper in the dungeon we find statues that are not of any human make. These are the most powerfully magical statues, as likely to depict some monster or extra-planar being as a human, and often figure in strange puzzles or have the effects show in the "Startling Statues" table. Such statues are repositories for the magical energies that have built up and do weird things such as looking or pointing in different directions when characters aren't watching them.

Those are a few different ways to use statues in a dungeon setting. I really think they're a fun trope and they offer just too much possibility to let go easily.