On the Living Dungeon / Vision and Re-Vision

I said in my last post that there was more to be said about the living dungeon concept. I want to dig a bit further into that.

Periodically you should re-draw your maps. They should differ subtly over time; a hallway will move or a room change in dimensions. The effect surreal: the rooms are no longer quite trustworthy, and the underworld is a fundamentally stranger place. This is an effect that should be used more often as the players explore the lower levels of the dungeon.

Less subtly, the denizens of your underworld may be remodeling. The infamous "Greyhawk Construction Company" signs blocked routes in Castle Greyhawk where Gary Gygax was still working on the level in question. Depending on the tone of your dungeon, that may not work, but having clues of dungeon denizens doing heavy digging can give players future points for reference and later delving.

All of this is another good argument for creating your own megadungeon. If you start with Stonehell, for instance, and you keep this to heart - after a while your Stonehell shouldn't look like the original. This is somewhat easier when you've drawn the original maps as well as the revisions.

The most important rule of restocking is: don't punish players for making progress. A dungeon level shouldn't get harder with each successive raid into it. There are two points for this: first, don't increase the effective dungeon level when restocking, and second, don't restock all of the rooms. A megadungeon populated according to OD&D or Moldvay should already have a bit of breathing room, and getting to already-explored boundaries should generally become quicker than the initial foray. That's a reward for good play.

At least some restocking should be simple and logical. If the PCs leave a stack of dead goblin bodies, there is something in the dungeon that will want to eat them. You can pick from the "clean-up crew" or add something an animal (giant or otherwise) that makes a nest out of goblin bones. A room might be converted for use by a previously wandering monster. Or, if you want to make the PCs much more careful about disposal of enemy corpses, they might now wander into a room full of zombie goblins.

Then there are the dynamic parts of restocking. What other factions are interested in the territory that the goblins used to hold? This could be a guardpost or the site of a new trap, as the other dungeon dwellers seek to find out who has been killing the goblins. Factions can come from other areas of the dungeon, or you could have a wilderness group start to move into the newly vacated area.

Dungeon restocking, as a general question, is a question of time. This is a big part of why Gary Gygax made his infamous statement in the 1e DMG about "strict time records." (The other part was related to the open table game concept.) The longer the PCs spend away from the dungeon, the more time that the denizens have to move into and reinforce areas that the PCs had previously emptied.

If a faction is damaged, but not wiped out, it can of course dig in and lay traps for these new threats. Whatever was killed may also have had a predator/prey relationship, such as when the PCs kill the giant lizard that ate the giant rats, there might be a sudden overpopulation problem. Or, when they killed off the nest of giant rats, the lizard is now wandering around eating goblins (or of course adventurers when they're handy).

The central idea with the living dungeon is that the PCs' actions have meaningful consequences. Sure, a character who stops in once doesn't see that, but for the dungeon to stay fresh and keep being interesting instead of just a slog, characters should be able to see it change around them. This is particularly important when making sure that PC actions leave a stamp on the world. I like how Stonehell encourages players to leave their names; it's a great tradition. But a great dungeon delver should have some personal impact.

The last type of restocking I want to cover here is the idea that the dungeon has some mystical underworld connection to what is inside of it. Maybe the dungeon seeks a kind of equilibrium in the creatures that inhabit it, and the PCs have disturbed that. There will be ripples. This can become more dramatic once they are removing large numbers of magic items or if they kill a dragon or similarly magical inhabitant of the dungeon. Maybe the dungeon grows or attracts more monsters; maybe it changes organically to attract new inhabitants. Above all it should get weirder: portals should stay open too long, or magical energies find their way in, or the water elemental you summoned six months ago had babies.

So, don't forget to restock your dungeon. In putting this together I realized I also had some points on the wandering monster that I want to talk about, which will be the next post.

Megadungeons, Bosses, and Goals

In my last post, I mentioned that I dislike how Rappan Athuk used an "end boss" in the deep levels of the dungeon. The late levels (which I think were generated for publication) feature a delve that leads to the lair of Orcus. I think this is unfortunate, because it runs counter to not just the earlier levels of RA, but also generally to the philosophy that I think needs to guide the creation of a megadungeon.

Backing up several steps: megadungeons are best used for exploration-style play. This is why they work well with open table campaigns and, somewhat paradoxically, in convention play. Both scenarios were used early and often in D&D's development, much more often than the continuous party format that arose after D&D became popular among adolescent players with relatively stable peer groups.

With a continuous party of 3 to 6 player characters used consistently throughout the life of a campaign, going into small "module-sized" dungeons that take 1-4 sessions to clear, having boss monsters is fine. When they're in the Upper Lowlands Dungeon of Death™ they are doing it to fight the King Zombie, not because the ULDoD™ is interesting in itself.

Megadungeons are different. On a given delve, a megadungeon needs to be able to accommodate players who have spent 50 sessions going into the ruins, and players who are only going in this once. Maybe they're going together down to level 5A. If that's the case, level 5A needs to be interesting as an exploration goal in itself, without regard to whether the PCs ever go down to level 6A.

That doesn't mean either that every room in your dungeon needs to have a full array of what's interesting about it, or that dungeon levels shouldn't tie together in any way; neither of those is interesting. But what it does mean is that every level and sub-level needs to be a goal in itself, that it's worth going into it, and to be interesting if the PCs go there. All of this breaks down if the sub-level is just leading up to a boss monster. If level 8 is just a lead-up to the boss at level 9, the players who are only there for level 8 are cheated. And that becomes increasingly true as you get into the low levels of Rappan Athuk.

More than that, the boss monster is antithetical to the "living dungeon" concept of a megadungeon. By definition, once you beat Orcus or the Elder Elemental God or whatever, the dungeon is done. Subsequent expeditions are never going to have the same gravity as the one that killed Orcus. That kills the multi-campaign potential of the megadungeon dead. After all, you're putting this much effort into designing a huge dungeon, it should be good for more than one set of adventurers. (And having the next group kill Mecha-Orcus is worse because it just opens up an arms race of increasing absurd power levels that the OSR is pretty good at avoiding.)

There's more to get into with the living dungeon idea. At its core it means you restock and redraw maps, but it should always reflect the influence the PCs have had in some way. This is why there is a "vision and re-vision" component to megadungeon design. Done properly, the megadungeon becomes archaeological itself, with cues and remnants from past campaigns in future ones, and a richer experience overall.

None of this means that there can't be intermediate goals within the megadungeon. You can create a faction boss so that everybody remembers the time they fought and killed the Red Witch on level 6 – but that's one among many parts to the megadungeon's lore. You can have puzzles and ideas that span four or five levels at a time so the PCs unlock the Vault of Artasius on level 8C and find the Warhammer of Magnificent Smiting. But the campaign could go on after that, and there can be more intermediate goals. The megadungeon will never be fully cleared and there will still be mysteries for future groups to explore.

If you're committed to an exploration-oriented game, it should always be possible that the PCs never kill the Red Witch or open the Vault of Artasius. And it should still be a place worth exploring, and the players should still come away with memorable stories. It should even be possible for the players to find half the puzzles for the Vault of Artasius, and solve them, and then go over to a totally different path in the dungeon and never finish it. The megadungeon from this angle is really a commitment to sandbox-style exploration, with the dungeon as the "walls" of the sandbox.

This standard, where each part of the dungeon is interesting enough for a drop-in player but the parts work together in a way that is rewarding for the long haul, is the central design goal of the megadungeon. It's a difficult note to strike, and one that I don't think can be managed while designing with a final boss fight in mind. Which is why I'd encourage a megadungeon to not have an end goal, even though there are many smaller goals within its structure.

Why Build a Megadungeon in 2017?

It's 2017, and here I am playing with maps for doing another megadungeon. (Not the one in the picture, which is from the Blackmoor maps in The First Fantasy Campaign by Dave Arneson.) Which brings me to the fundamental question: why build a megadungeon in 2017?

When I got married, I was reading some books on wedding preparation. There were a lot of topics they talked about, but one was whether or not to rent a tuxedo. And it came down to the question: do you really want to get married wearing someone else's pants? It was a weird moment but it put the whole rental idea in an interesting light. I wound up wearing my own pants, from the suit I would still wear to a wedding or funeral today.

That colors my thinking about dungeons. Running someone else's megadungeon is a weird and slightly personal thing, and it just seems off to me. And I'm not the only person who thought this way; Gary Gygax and his cohort at TSR thought so as well. It took them four years to publish G1 Steading of the Hill Giant Chief, because they figured that referees wanted to design their own dungeons. TSR wouldn't publish a portion of a proper megadungeon until the Forgotten Realms boxed set Ruins of Undermountain in 1991, long after Gary had been pushed out. (A rather disappointing effort at Castle Greyhawk was published the year before.)

For me, the megadungeon is all about the design process. The original advice that Gary Gygax gave was to "construct at least three levels at once," and said that a good dungeon would always have "new levels under construction so that players will never grow tired of it." The megadungeon, then, is the original cure for the referee's interest flagging. Castle Greyhawk was known for the riotous diversity of its levels, and there is no reason you can't just grab whatever module or idea your favorite creators have come up with lately, steal its ideas, and put them in your megadungeon.

The process centers around vision and re-vision. You need three or four factions to start with; maybe the PCs ally with the gnomes and wipe the kobolds out. Then you invent (or steal) a race of fungoid men, and design a whole set of caves around them. After that you watch the new Alien movie and decide that you want to do something with that, so you have a buried spaceship with a homicidal xenomorph analog. Then you decide to move on to Vikings. And you can do it all within one megadungeon.

You could, of course, just do each of those as a separate adventure by putting them on a hex map and having NPCs come up to the PCs with juicy dungeon leads, or let them discover each new area as they do a larger hex crawl. But with the megadungeon they have a much better chance of organically coming upon the nice juicy bits. Let's say that the PCs discover the hidden wreck of the starship while they're trying to find a way around the fungoid cavern; they now have an important choice about which of the threats they want to face. Good megadungeon design always involves that choice between sub-optimal paths.

The "living dungeon" also means you can always fix your mistakes (well, except for TPKs). If you stick a bunch of undead in a sub-level and it turns into a bit of a grind, you can always have some carrion crawlers come through and eat them, and now have a new threat lurking the halls. The PCs might find that the goblins were a pushover, but with the goblins are gone the trolls are expanding. The megadungeon always has something fresh to throw at PCs.

Megadungeons of course also have that part that doesn't change. I particularly like this when you have things like the "goblin market" or the established neutral / allied factions that the PCs don't usually get violent with. This lets you take one of the advantages of a fantasy city and put it underground. All the neutral monsters aren't in OD&D by accident or to pad the page count; they're meant to be there as encounters that can go any which way.

Another reason to stick with the megadungeon is that the dungeon stocking rules in old D&D were really, really good. They put things at the optimal density for an exploration-focused game: there are enough empty rooms that most paths won't feel like a grind, but enough nasty stuff comes up to keep the players on their toes. Designing small dungeons using the rules in OD&D vol. 3 or Moldvay (the two best books for dungeon design) feels empty, and there is always the desire to put a "boss" or a "prize" at the end. There is some point in going down into the Upper Lowlands Dungeon of Death™, after all. Whereas level 5A of your megadungeon gets explored purely because it's level 5A.

(Incidentally, that's a mistake in Rappan Athuk: megadungeons don't have a boss monster.)

The other best reason for megadungeons, and this is something I decided after dropping in to Eric Hoffman's excellent B/X game for the second time in a long time yesterday, is that they are ideal for open table type games. This is hardly an accident, as the megadungeon grew up around this style of play, and it's mirrored in OD&D's suggestion that "four to fifty" players can be in a campaign. A tentpole megadungeon is a structure built for being able to throw out a notice, "I'm running D&D," and having a game to run in a jiffy. You show up and you go down to the deepest level anybody knows about, and see what they can find there.

Finally, if the players grow tired of the megadungeon per se, they can go somewhere else for a while. The outdoor random encounter tables are probably unsafe for low level PCs, but all of the classic megadungeon campaigns involved wandering about in the wilderness. Heck, you can even find other entrances to the megadungeon itself.

But no matter how many megadungeons there are in print, at the end of the day I think they're worth making on their own. Because, after all, you don't want to run D&D in someone else's pants, do you?

Typology of Random Encounters: In the Dungeon

Most of my games this past weekend were driven by the random encounter. And, despite the image above, none of them were with bears. Although one was with a crocodile. That, along with general considerations about dungeon design, has me thinking about the types of random encounters you'll find in a large dungeon or megadungeon.

Type I: Faction Members. When you have a faction in the dungeon, it should be represented on the random encounter table, unless there's a good reason that its members stay put. So if there is a goblin tribe, a gang of bandits, or a cross-species evil cult, you should be able to run into them. This allows for PCs to figure out what else might be in the dungeon without knocking down every door, and provides opportunities for faction members who leave an encounter alive to tell their allies about the PCs' activities.

Type Ia: Factions without a Base. It's possible for there to be a faction in the dungeon that is an itinerant group. This should be a temporary condition; perhaps you have a group of cavemen who've wandered into the dungeon for shelter, or maybe a half-dozen goblins got away when the PCs beat their king. They will initially be "homeless" within the dungeon, but within a session or two, they may take over a cleared room.

Type II: Predatory Monsters. There are "big" monsters that have their own room in the dungeon, but logically will be wandering about looking for things to eat. It could be a pack of hell-hounds or the minotaur; whatever it is, it's not home. If the PCs kill a significant monster outside of its lair, of course, now they have to find its treasure before anyone else does.

Type III: Animals and Unintelligent Creatures. These are your Rodents Of Unusual Size, your skeletons and zombies, your oversized bugs and so forth. They are here on little more than instinct, and most are optional encounters one way or another. The PCs can throw some rations to distract the R.O.U.S., or have the cleric turn the skeletons, or just go around them and hope the reaction roll isn't an instant attack. (These encounters should always involve reaction rolls.) They don't have the same impact as faction monsters, although they may also come from another room. I particularly enjoy relatively innocuous animals like dungeon chickens (there is a coop in my dungeon).

Type IIIa: The Clean-Up Crew. Jellies, slimes, oozes, globs, glops, puddings, molds, blobs, and various other unwholesome growing things come along and eat dead stuff. Sometimes they convert the PCs into new dead stuff to eat. These come in particularly handy if the PCs are in an out-of-the-way corner and you roll a random encounter.

Type IV: Non-Player Characters. In the encounter tables for older editions of D&D, NPCs with classes and levels were regular entries. (OD&D used the level titles for this, which is great if you remember the level titles.) They are distinct from faction members; generally once somebody has at least 2 hit dice, you should think up a name and a background rather than leaving it at "bandit #479". Fighters and thieves may have hirelings; wizards may also have familiars; clerics are more likely to have acolytes. They may have a relationship to one or more factions, and in time may constitute a faction in themselves. It's also entirely possible that they will join the PCs, and if they do so, they could also betray the PCs. Sure it's possible for bandits to do that, but in my experience PCs get stabby once someone says "stand and deliver."

Type V: Wandering Oddities. Perhaps the most neglected category, strange and wondrous effects can sit on the random encounter table along with all kinds of monsters. This can be as simple as an unknown sound, seeing a figure disappear around a corner or down a hallway, optical illusions, or even minor magical effects. This is a good way to reinforce a theme throughout a dungeon or dungeon level without necessarily dedicating a room to it or hammering it home constantly. It could be a detail like a particular fungus that is growing in this level, or mini-features like having carvings left behind by the cult that is operating nearby. This makes the dungeon a richer and stranger place.

Each of these types feeds back into solid dungeon design, and helps tie together a living environment that has strange and wondrous features. Featuring multiple examples of each type should help fill out that encounter list without the exploration feeling like a slog.

Megadungeons and Artifacts

I've started working on a megadungeon again, and as such I've been thinking about them lately. (It was initially called the Red Keep dungeon, but since I realized I'd cribbed that unintentionally from A Song of Ice and Fire, I'm just going to call it the Castellan Keep dungeon. Yes, it's set beneath a ruined version of the Keep on the Borderlands.)

This thread on the OD&D forums had me look back through Monsters & Treasure. Toward the end of that booklet is a short list of artifacts: a Teleportation Machine, separate Crown, Orb & Scepter for each class, and the Stone Crystallization Projector. The latter is obviously the fun one, although whether it's a crystallization projector that turns things to stone, or a projector that crystallizes stone, is up to an individual referee's imagination. Eldritch Wizardry, of course, added the whole array of now-familiar artifacts to the game. They are the best treasures that D&D has ever come up with, but are rarely presented in games because they're so powerful.

It strikes me that the deep levels of a megadungeon are possibly the most natural resting spots for artifacts. After all, if the Invulnerable Coat of Arn or the Sword of Kas is just sitting within 600' of the entrance point of a dungeon, why hasn't someone already come along and taken it? If there are a dozen layers of dungeon and monsters between it and the surface, well, that makes a bit more sense. Especially if the artifact is Lawful and the monsters are Chaotic and can't use it. Or the artifact is Chaotic and the monsters do use it.

Deciding that an artifact is in a megadungeon adds a powerful thematic element, and a fascinating high-level motive for characters to keep questing. When you get to the level full of wild boars, the idea that there are secrets beyond simply lots and lots of monetary treasure in the dungeon becomes a relevant question. "We have to keep pressing on or we won't find the Spear of Longinus!" Well, it's worth a thought, anyway.

The PC party doesn't need to be the only group trying to get to the artifact, either. If there's a rival party trying to make their way toward a given artifact, it can create a time tension that can otherwise be missing in the megadungeon environment. One of the truths of D&D is that it's a more challenging game when there are time constraints and a PC group can't simply go rest after every major fight. Another way to bring time-pressure is to tie an artifact's effect to a particular temporal or astrological event. Perhaps the door to the room containing it only opens on a certain day, or when the stars are right, etc. There are a lot of options here.

A megadungeon environent also adds a potential solution to the power dilemma. For one reason or another, the artifact may not be removable from its present location. One very good reason for this is to simply make it too large to physically move, or tied into the physical environment. If the artifact is a statue that grants Wishes or a Fountain of Life, but you can no more take it out of its current room than you can remove the room from the dungeon. That is to say, sufficiently clever players will find a way.

Magical limitations can also stop the artifact from being removed. There are parts of the Holy Grail myth, my favorite being the climax to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, that make it so the Grail simply cannot be taken out of the cave where Jones finds it. That's a shame, too - imagine the good it could do to the medical community. But such are magical artifacts, at least until you find that Wish granting statue and use it to change the rule about no removing the Grail.

Artifacts being part of the megadungeon are a strong support of the theme of the dungeon as a mythic underworld. By their nature, artifacts shape and change the setting around them in ways that are not entirely logical. Following this logic, the referee might even think of the artifacts as part of what "powers" the megadungeon and keeps it weird. Of course, this requires the kind of artifacts that you can't remove, or otherwise the dungeon would go away, or change fundamentally.

Once PCs reach the artifacts in a dungeon, in some sense they should be changed forever. Galahad ascends to Heaven once he finds the Grail. It's not entirely out of the question for PCs who've found a dungeon's deepest and greatest secrets to go to another plane (or another planet). Even the chute on level 13 of Castle Greyhawk, tongue in cheek as it may be, takes the character who's traversed its depths to a new world. Other changes might include some innate ability or physical sign of change.

As a general rule, it's worth taking a lesson from Dungeon Crawl Classics and Lamentations of the Flame Princess, both of which have lots of effects that permanently alter characters, and building such changes into a megadungeon's "big" features. It fits within the mythic underworld theme as well.

The choice of artifacts might seem like an odd place to start fresh musings about megadungeons, but it's not. I think that, to the contrary, deciding what lies deep beneath is a great way to build the dungeon in ways that lead organically to it. If you know that level 12 is going to have the Holy Grail, you can begin to put allusions to Arthurian myth in your dungeon, and so on with other themed artifacts. Players will get more out of the dungeon if it seems to be leading somewhere rather than just being a massive underground zoo. That's not to say that the megadungeon is plotted entirely in advance - it shouldn't be - but its big ideas should be informing it from the word "go."

Photograph by Locutus Borg (José-Manuel Benito Álvarez). CC-BY-SA 3.0

The Tao of the Empty Room

The dungeon stocking table in OD&D results in 5 out of every 9 rooms being empty. (We're excluding rooms stocked by the referee.) These rooms have no monsters and no treasure.

I've written before that empty rooms are critical for spacing and timing in OD&D. The question that we have to ask, though, is how empty they should be.

Of course, some of these rooms will be trap rooms. Those are good, noble, and deserve their own separate post. I will make one side observation about traps here: pit traps in OD&D only trigger on 1 or 2 in 1d6. A pit trap that has PCs have passed over without it opening can be even more dangerous than one that is fresh, because the PCs think that nothing is there. But here we are mostly talking about the empty ones.

Sometimes rooms should be empty of anything at all. This is a useful reminder to the referee that the dungeon is a mythic underworld. Not every square inch of the underground needs a rationale. In logistical terms this also allows the referee to use rooms that only appear to be empty. When they turn out to contain traps or secret treasure, the reward is all the better.

James Maliszewski wrote about the mystique of the empty room. Every turn in a dungeon is a use of resources runs the a risk of wandering monsters. Timekeeping being important, such empty rooms become tense situations.

But not all empty rooms have to be devoid of everything. When you have members of a dungeon faction in an area, nearby empty rooms can create a more "lived-in" feeling. This could mean, for instance, that there is a second area where denizens spend their time. Monsters might even split their time between the area that the map key indicates for them and an ostensibly "emtpy" room. This also makes it possible for PCs finding the empty room first to get a clue of what is up ahead.

There could also be structural reasons for the room to be empty. A room noted as empty on the key might, for instance, have a large pool of standing water. Perhaps it is unsound, with cracks in walls or floor. Anyone who has been through a home inspection can think of many reasons a room for a room to want for occupants. Mold, mildew, even just something with an unbearable stench makes for a good excuse.

If your dungeon has tinkering monsters, the room could house a partial or failed construction project. A bunch of bricks might have been removed from the wall or ceiling. There may be the discarded makings of a fortification. This is a good excuse to give fodder for clever PCs to make attacks on monsters.

Another interesting trick is to use a room that is only mostly empty. Such a room might have architectural interest that provides hints to the history and nature of the dungeon. It can also have one of several physical features typical of underground areas. A fun one is to have a spot where it is possible to see or hear what is happening in an adjacent room. Perhaps there is a loose stone, a pipe, or a spot where the acoustics just work out.

Remnants make a great feature of the mostly empty room. A discarded wine skin or broken weapon implies that the PCs aren't the only adventurers who have been in the dungeon. Broken or torn and generally useless items are classic red herrings. They also present opportunities for the referee to place vermin and insects that don't merit a proper monster entry. Even non-poisonous insects can make for a great creepy underground experience. (Such vermin can later appear in monsters' stew-pots as a fun callback.)

The condition of empty rooms is one of the most useful ways to give out information about the dungeon. The condition of its floor can hold crucial information about what lives in the dungeon and where. One floor may be dusty and another well-trodden. A particular path may bear the marks of frequent traffic, especially when clawed feet walk across stone.

A fun variation is to feature graffiti on the walls. Scratched or painted writing and pictures are another excellent source of hints. For an extra twist, consider having graffiti on the ceiling to reward players who think of checking above their PCs' heads.

There is also the opportunity here to make the dungeon get weirder the deeper the PCs go in it. If the first few levels are a bit more quotidian, you can change things up with empty rooms that seem more Stygian and have stranger features. The random noise table from the 1e DMG is a great resource for unexplainable sounds. Likewise, air currents deeper underground and shifts in temperature or humidity become ominous.

One of the reasons I like the empty and mostly empty rooms so much is that they avoid the "fantasy IKEA" effect. Excessive rooms full of stored stuff takes away the mystique from the dungeon. I also don't like it because generally I prefer when the dungeon is well scavenged. A room that was once a dining room shouldn't have a table in good shape; it should either have rubble or nothing in it.

A critical fact about empty rooms is that, in a living dungeon, they don't need to stay empty forever. Putting monsters in a room that players have already explored and found empty is the best payoff for having empty rooms. A group of monsters that wasn't finished off the first time might change addresses, or a new monster might move in. Given the 5 of 9 ratio, there should be more rooms available than taken, so the dungeon can make a complete change through play. This is one of the factors that keeps drawing me to the megadungeon idea.

The title of this post implies its central idea: the Tao of empty rooms matters. Letting a dungeon room stay empty can be more rewarding than you'd think.

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.

How did these people get into the dungeon?

OD&D volume 3's Monster Level tables include numerous human-types in the dungeon, mostly a mix of fighting-men, magic-users and Chaotic clerics. Of the humans in volume 2, only Bandits and Berserkers appear. The rest are listed by their level titles from volume 1, and run the gamut from Warriors (level 2 Fighting-Men) to Wizards (level 11 Magic-Users) and Evil High Priests (level 8 Chaotic clerics).

It's telling that the charts don't contain any Lawful clerics. If you run into priests, they are either Evil Priests, or Evil High Priests with a retinue of apprentices. In typical OD&D fashion, other possibilities include at least a couple man-types: Mermen (who are not necessarily fish-tailed) and cyborgs (who are not mentioned elsewhere).

Dungeons probably aren't suitable places to find dervishes, nomads, buccaneers, or pirates, but it is a bit odd that cavemen don't show up on the monster level table. Given everything else that's in the dungeons, why not a Neanderthal? After all, we call them cavemen because they tended to leave artifacts underground, which seems consistent with the underworld. Brigands are also missing, but they're really just Chaotic bandits.

Supplement I: Greyhawk changes things around. We find various levels of thieves at all levels, and encounter dwarves and elves only on the first monster level. We also get our only Lawful wanderers, as there are paladins roaming about these dungeons.

B/X D&D changes things around, by creating a whole category of random humans to wander around the underworld. Class-leveled characters still appear, but so do Traders, described as armed merchants carrying trade goods. This has potential that simply has never been fully exploited, in my opinion.

OD&D, though, has an interesting wrinkle: the Monster Determination and Level of Monster Matrix. Basically, the monster encountered on a given level might be from the same monster level, or from 1 level lower, or from up to 3 levels higher. The upshot of this is that dungeon level 3 is the only level where you can encounter all of the class-levelled types in OD&D. Level 4 (Evil Priests, Myrmidons, and Enchanters) is the most common Monster Level encountered there.

If we extrapolate logically from all this, the OD&D megadungeon suggests to us at least 3 human factions, and probably more. First, there are both bandits and berserkers, who are likely to appear on level 1 of the dungeon (both monster levels 1 and 2 appear most frequently on level 1). It's possible that one or both groups have a "base" on the first level of the dungeon, or that they are coming from a base camp outside the dungeon entrance. But either way, a classic OD&D megadungeon has bandits and berserkers nearby.

Beyond that there is at least one faction of leveled humans. Lords, Wizards and Evil High Priests – presumably the leaders of any such faction(s) – appear from level 3 and downward, so it is unlikely that the base of any faction would be on the first two levels. Evil Priests are most frequent on levels 3, 4, and 5, so one of these levels is likely to have a Chaotic temple, or at least some kind of idol or presence, in its depths.

Other factions are possible. Any faction with magic-users or fighting-men to it should have at least one outpost on level 3; otherwise, the Warriors, Conjurers and Theurgists in the monster level 2 table would have no "home base." But the faction's leader is increasingly likely to be on a deeper level, suggesting a faction that holds several areas in the dungeon.

This is an interesting challenge for dungeon design. Say that a faction has its "home base" on level 7 and its "outpost" on level 3. There should be a way for members of that faction to get from one to the other without fighting their way through. This may include truces with other factions, or a secret passageway, or a specific "safe" pathway that could also be found and exploited by the PCs.

Beyond these factions, it is of course possible that at least some of the humans are freelance. They may be a "rival NPC party," an idea that has been written about before. They might be traders; some accounts in Alarums & Excursions show that OD&D play did in fact include such oddities as wandering salesmen and religious proselytizers (think '70s Hare Krishna types) as dungeon encounters. Such a dungeon should have "neutral" spaces that are not simply about fighting all the time, and areas where at least some of its human inhabitants actually live.

Or, you know, they're just guys wandering around the dungeon. It doesn't have to make sense. But you can do a lot of interesting dungeon design if you extrapolate.

A Missing Link: A Miniature Megadungeon

(A brief edit to note: This is officially my 300th post on this blog. Wow.)

Zach Howard at the Zenopus Archives has managed to surprise us again, this time showing the original cross-section of Holmes's sample dungeon. Take a look and come back, I'll be talking about the hand-drawn image a good bit.

This little diagram is a master class in the "megadungeon in miniature." It condenses into 3 levels most of the principal ideas that underlie the Gygaxian megadungeon. There are multiple entrances, multiple connections between levels, different types of terrain, sloping passages, and generally everything you'd want from a complex dungeon, all in three neat levels. None of which is to disregard Tom Wham's great Skull Mountain diagram, but Holmes manages to do a lot with a few levels.

We come to two entrances on separate hills. This creates an interesting choice right off the bat. There might be something low-level like goblins or kobolds guarding the hillside entrance, but the descent into the mine is obviously the deeper way down. It's a good idea to let the rumor tables give a hint that the mine shaft to level 2 is a way down to more difficult monsters than the hillside cave.

In level 1 we're about equidistant from the two ways down. The level below the ladder has one of the long, gradual slopes that Gygax was fond of, and a party may reasonably be surprised when they go up a level of stairs and are still on the second level. Holmes's original wandering monster tables, drawn from Supplement I: Greyhawk, might give us a good idea of what kinds of threats lurk in each of them. Given how many humans with levels there are, it either suggests that the dungeon has a significant human faction, or is actively plied by rival adventuring parties. Either choice is interesting.

I really love those two carved-out areas by the mine shaft. They just have a ton of potential for mischief. As soon as I saw them I was envisioning a nasty monster swooping out as the PCs try to go down (or up) the ladder and causing all kinds of havoc. Or they could be rooms that are rigged with nasty traps, maybe something explosive, or a simple arrow trap that happens to knock the PC a long way down to the dungeon floor below. Or one of them could have a treasure visible, but a monster or a trap nearby that will turn the PCs' avarice into their undoing.

The third level's relative size suggests it should be a nice, big, sprawling level with lots of rooms and interesting tricks. Then there's the cave, and I have to admit if it had a lake indicated it'd be exactly after my heart. As it stands, the cave feels like it should really be the lair of a dragon as the culmination of the whole adventure (and a justification for the game being "Dungeons & Dragons"). It would really make the whole thing a summation of D&D in three levels.

It doesn't have the domed city and the great stone skull of Wham's drawing, but Holmes's original sketch points to a dungeon that can be played in the three character levels suggested by his rule book, and still give you the megadungeon experience. There's no reason the weird and cool stuff we've talked about previously can't be on these three levels, and Wham's drawing really only gives us an extra two or three true "levels" (counting 2 and 2A, the entrance cave as "one up", and the cave separate from the third normal dungeon level). What I think using a dungeon like this does is gives just enough of the complex elements without going into "megadungeon fatigue" that modern games often run into. By the time the players are bored with runs into the same dungeon, they're finished.

From that perspective, this is the missing link between the megadungeon and the smaller types that came to dominate the scene after the mid-1970s. You could describe this in a relatively short module but have months of play material come out of it. The only published dungeon that really comes close to this is Caverns of Thracia, whose reputation should tell you how great of a dungeon I think this could be turned into.

Looking at a Real "Megadungeon"

Hat tip to Dave Younce on G+ for sharing this link.

BLDGBLOG: Nato's Underground Roman Super-Quarry

This is a terrific article that looks at a massive megadungeon abandoned Roman quarry / NATO bunker beneath the Netherlands and Belgium. You go into one nation and come out in another. There is a brilliant description of what it was like to navigate the underground tunnels:

Most corners were roughly 90 degrees, but only roughly. Going through the caves was an exercise in left and right turns every 50 feet or so. Navigation was helped by street names. Unlike in the USA, where streets are numbered on a sort of grid pattern, these were zigzag streets. My office on Main Street and J Street, so if I got lost I would just keep walking until I came to either Main or J, and join it. If I went the wrong way, eventually the street would peter out either at the perimeter or a T-junction, and you would just turn round and go back the other way.

This massive complex was built from limestone, and was soft enough to cut with a chainsaw; the bunker was a "black hole" where everything that was brought in was thrown out in one of the underground landfill sites.

The BLDGBLOG link doesn't show much of what this place looks like, but it provides links to some photosets that do. Here they are in a clean format that doesn't block right-clicking:

Talk Urbex - N.A.T.O Quarry
flickr (Behind The Signs) - NATO Quarry
28 Days Later forum - N.A.T.O Quarry, France.
28 Days Later forum - Nato Quarry, Paris Suburbs May 2011
Urban Ghosts - Urban Explorers Discover Corroding Military Vehicles in Abandoned Subterranean Bunker

It's fascinating how wide these corridors are; many are 20' or wider, but even the narrower pathways are anything but claustrophobic. You could easily have full, programmed encounters at any point in the dungeon, regardless of whether it was an "office" (cleared out room) or not. The stairs down are dizzying. And when you find a pile of rocks like this, it only raises the question of what is lurking beneath it.

One of my favorite parts in the quote above is that there were "street names" in this labyrinth. It just seems like a very organic way to tackle a labyrinth; of course, in a fantasy world these "names" might not be written in a comprehensible language for the PCs, but rather a series of sigils or unreadable characters that the players have to figure out are in fact used by the denizens to navigate. And the idea that "streets" are not straight makes sense if there is any defensive value to the layout, as anyone who has driven around Washington, DC can tell you.

The manmade-but-not-worked nature of the stone also has a lot of potential. Since it is relatively soft, it's a great material for laying in secret doors or cutting out niches in floors, walls and ceilings to hide treasure. Tunnels – the kind beloved of kobolds or giant rats – are pretty easy to dig, and PCs can even do some small-scale mining. And I love the idea of ladder rungs right in the stone.

Of course this is just one example of a large structure built underground, but it has some really great ideas for what things look like when people build things beneath the earth.

The Monumental Chamber

The size of the Son Doong cave, in Vietnam near the border with Laos, is massive. Its largest chamber is 5 kilometers long and 150 meters wide. It has massive stalagmites 70 meters tall. Almost 500' wide and over 16,000' deep is almost unfathomable. But it makes me think about huge underground areas. (Technically Son Doong is not all underground; a hole has burst through its roof and there are plants growing in parts of it.)

There are two parts to what I'm going to define as a monumental chamber. First: a person standing at one point and using a torch cannot see the edges of the area. A torch occupies a circle 30' in radius, or about 2827 square feet. A 60'x60' room is the smallest such monumental area; at 3600 square feet it has around 1.5 times the square footage of an average house. The second criterion is that the monumental room has multiple entries in the dungeon key. A room that is huge but empty doesn't count.

A monumental chamber is a gripping idea to me, mainly because of its sheer scale. Frequently they will be much more than the average 10' high, and as often as not will have some support, whether in columns or through a stable structure like a dome. Vast caverns can shift elevation even within a single room; a manmade version of such might have several platforms linked by stairs. The monumental room is open to pedestals, megaliths, gaping chasms, cliffs, lakes, rivers, waterfalls – any of the geographical features you've always wanted to use in a dungeon but can't fit without making the room humongous.

Inhabitants, too, need not be single. Sure, you could fit an entire orc tribe inside of a sufficiently large chamber. But a truly large room could be home to multiple entities, particularly if it has niches, alcoves or other defensible areas. Perhaps humanoids come out to harvest mushrooms, or crystals, or some metal, while other creatures live in a secluded area. This is particularly potent if the chamber is very high and has multiple effective levels. Bats and stirges, among other types of flying things, are prone to live in the upper reaches. One idea I've always relished is giant bees with a hive up at the top of a chamber at least 50' high. Lower levels, a sub-floor or a body of water all create other natural divisions for multiple encounter types. The sheer size can encourage a whole miniature ecology.

Huge rooms can house multiple wonders as well. Natural features can be spectacular, as can megalithic sculpture and large-scale architectural designs. At the same time, you have some interesting options. If you've ever been to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, you may have seen the Temple of Dendur – an Egyptian temple inside the museum. There's likewise a small Japanese temple in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Massive caverns can logically have multiple sub-caverns. A monumental chamber can be a dungeon room with other rooms inside it.

The monumental chamber is also a great way to link several different levels together. Entrances can be at multiple heights; a chute from one level, a landing leading down from another, a third on the same level as the floor, or a fourth with a chute or stairs leading down to a deeper level. They make great "crossways" of the dungeon where wandering monsters can come from a variety of original dungeon levels as well.

I feel that I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that dragons are naturals in such areas. A truly massive hoard needs a massive room to fit in. But generally I think that, especially in megadungeons, it pays to think big. (No, bigger than that.)

OK, so it's a little wet ...

The galerias romanas (Roman galleries) in Lisbon, Portugal are one of the harder architectural marvels to get into. A crack in one of the galerias means that the underground ruins are accumulating groundwater, and most of the year, they are flooded. Every year, the ruins are painstakingly drained (the process takes a full month) and visitors are allowed to enter for about 3 days. The rest of the year, the water is allowed to stay, at about 3m depth (10').

Which is a fun way to transition to talking about water in dungeons. Homeowners know all about the tendencies of underground spaces to accumulate water; we've invented sump pumps, French drains and all sorts of systems to reverse this tendency. But in dungeons it's a fascinating obstacle that I've thought about for a while now.

The first thing you have to decide about water is whether it is flowing or stagnant. If it is flowing underground, there must be some source: a river, spring or aquifer that is feeding the body, and a corresponding outlet. If there were no outlet, the body of water would continuously rise. (This is certainly a possibility: an extremely slow rising body of water, fed at a rate of well less than half an inch per year.)

Stagnant water has been deposited by some source and is not continuously refreshed. This is extremely dangerous to humans, since stagnant water is a breeding ground for disease and bacteria. Contact with a pool of such water should require some kind of appropriate disease checks; suitable rules exist in Blackmoor, the Dungeon Master's Guide and Lamentations of the Flame Princess. Drinking it is even more dangerous.

After that the next decision is depth. Water becomes a different type of obstacle depending on the depth. A foot deep permits more motion than two; three might be navigable for humans but is swimming territory for halflings. Deeper than that becomes a serious problem, if not totally impossible to cross. Water, of course, ruins most of the things adventurers carry; waterlogged boots can get mildew or mold, and generally become useless, while soaked torches or spellbooks are useless. Swords and armor will rust if not properly cared for. And swimming while in armor is basically impossible. Watch the video if you don't believe me – heck, even if you do believe me, it's a great experimental video.

Other factors can also be interesting: temperature, current, or brackishness. For instance, clear, cool water is very different from hot mineral spring water. In a dungeon near the sea, some water may be salty and undrinkable. And it could be very dangerous if the water has a strong current, pulling adventurers along with it as they try to navigate it. Varying any of these can create unique environments and pose certain challenges.

Now that we've put water into the dungeon, comes the payoff: all the water monsters in D&D are fair game. From sharks to sahuagin, from ixitxachitl to aboleths, and any kind of new monsters based on fish or whales or anything else you like, you've now got a reason to use these in dungeons. A long-standing version might have a blind cave version of the classic lake monster archetype, or vicious schools of piranha, or pretty much any cave swimmers you might imagine. It's a rich environment for monsters that aren't typical. And let's not forget about amphibians, arthropods and the like.

Of course where there are monsters, there is also treasure. This can be a bit tough to figure out. In chemically pure water, basically, copper, silver and gold should be relatively unaffected by corrosion. (In fact, copper coins in fresh water should tend to reduce the bacterial load.) The problem is that water is not pure and contains other minerals and compounds that will interact with metal. It could also complicate things if the coins are not pure metal. Seawater will corrode copper and silver coins, but leave gold fairly intact. Only acidity, introduced by the breakdown of wood or the general condition of sandy soil, would pose much of a danger to gold coins. The most dangerous thing would be an untreated wooden chest containing them.

Most gems will not be water soluble and should survive pretty well in tact. But iron is toast even if it gets minor exposure, as are most books or scrolls (leather parchment will be ruined and the ink will dissolve), and pretty much any wooden objects that aren't covered with tar, pitch or some other sealant. Magic items are the referee's call; it would be interesting to find a shining steel blade in a rotting leather scabbard and with a ruined handle, but the blade and tang in tact. Potions may or may not leak, which could have very interesting results – say, a wizard's laboratory where several potions have mixed together to form ... well, pretty much anything you want.

Water complicates everything very nicely. Spells will be interesting, from Sleep (does it turn into an effective Drown?) to Lightning Bolt and others. A Fireball might boil some of it. And of course there are many interesting spells and items that only work under water.

Given all these possibilities, it's a disappointment that there aren't more modules and books dealing with flooded environments. It's definitely something I keep intending to explore. I hope this inspires other referees to do the same.

Dungeon Markets and Other Neutral Spaces

Guillermo Del Toro's 2008 film Hellboy II: The Golden Army has a wonderful sequence where the heroes have to go into a hidden "troll market," filled with all kinds of weird creatures, as part of their investigation. This is a long scene full of wonderful visuals; Del Toro is a genius and he clearly gets to let his imagination run wild here. It's also an idea I quite like, and I find a good analogue in the Plaza of Dark Delights from Fritz Leiber's "The Bazaar of the Bizarre."

Michael Curtis's Stonehell megadungeon has a small kobold market on level 1, but it doesn't really have the same kind of flair that the Troll Market did. The 13th issue of Fight On! does have a neat table for the "Goblin Market" that I think hints at the kind of wonder that Del Toro managed to create.

The central idea that I like here is that there are spaces in the dungeon where a sort of "armed peace" is maintained, however tenuously. The idea of the market or bazaar implies a particular sacrosanct character, where people and creatures are generally not killing each other and taking their stuff. Of course, this can be broken for a wide variety of reasons, but overall the character of the market is one of neutrality.

What I think is important is that such a thing is not in any way a "magic mart." The things for sale should be strange and wondrous, and not always available for something so mundane as money. There is ample precedent for such markets to be covered in webs of illusion and full of wondrous things, as well as dross posing as the same. Dangerous bargains and barters should be possible, from selling one's soul to requiring unusual items or dangerous favors in return for a good or service. And of course the issue of slavery is always a possibility here.

It's a natural place for NPCs to be found and get more information on the dungeon; this is likely to be a rare and precious commodity. Witches, representatives of dungeon factions, and all the other elements of intrigue in a faction dungeon are possible within the market. Indeed, it's simply brimming with possibilities for bargains and backstabbing.

Neutral ground, by its necessity, will be governed by some rules that keep it from being a free-for-all of murder. Maybe it is under the protection of one faction, or maybe governed by a truce between two or three factions. In either situation, there is likely to be some enforcement of a "don't kill everyone" rule. Given the morality of the dungeon dwellers, it may not be too heavily punished; there may be a tax like a weregild on murder, or permanent exile from the market, or worse. Of course, this sets up an obvious giant chaotic scene where the neutrality of the market is violated and everything goes to Hell in a handbasket.

The other reason I like the market in particular is that it's not necessarily permanent. Access may be limited in time; there may only be a market day on Saturdays, or only for a week at a time, leaving the space open to other uses in the interim. There may also be a special access to the market, such that PCs wouldn't normally be able to access it, and getting in may be itself a reward. Having things like this makes time meaningful and gives the dungeon the feeling of being alive.

Different sorts of neutral spaces may be present as well. For instance, it's conceivable that there is an arena in the dungeon with gladiatorial combat, or one faction may control an area and allow others to use it for certain purposes. These can also vary with how strongly they are neutral for the PCs as opposed to for other factions, depending on how PCs relate to various groups within the dungeon.

I'd love to hear of any experiences with markets or other neutral places that readers have used or seen in dungeons.

Witches, Lovers and Pigs

In addition the charisma score is usable to decide things such as whether a witch capturing a player will turn him into a swine or keep him enchanted as a lover.

This is an interesting allusion. Gygax is clearly referencing Homer's Odyssey, where the enchantress Circe uses her magic to turn the companions of Odysseus into pigs and then keeps Odysseus as her lover. He stays on her island for a year, then finally frees himself and sails home to Ithaca. Holmes changed this to a frog, perhaps thinking that The Frog Prince would be more familiar to the young audience of his Basic Set than The Odyssey.

Lately I've been thinking about the idea of various sorts of magic-using types in D&D. Generally, these prompt the objection that a single Sleep spell can beat an entire party of low-level PCs. And while this is very true, they remain a standard part of the encounter tables, and in my opinion provide rich encounter potential. It helps to think of the Sleep spell as similar to the NPC having a powerful weapon and requiring negotiation instead of being dealt with in the "standard" way.

One particular role I like for magic-users is that of a dungeon "neutral." I think these are generally underused: creatures and personalities of the dungeon that aren't necessarily harmful, nor helpful; depending upon the PCs' actions, they can be taken in either direction. Magic-users are great for this, in a whole variety of ways. In the early levels of a dungeon, they can be conduits for spells and items that PCs won't necessarily have access to; a 5th level magic-user in the second dungeon level, for instance, can do all variety of divination that the PCs don't have access to yet. And the referee can make the cost of such assistance whatever they like, allowing them to set up all sorts of missions into the dungeon.

The second role is that of a nemesis. An enemy witch or magic-user is a great foe, in no small part because of the threat of polymorph and charm spells. While I am generally leery of the "boss fight" concept from video games, they do make good leaders of dungeon factions. The built-in fragility of magic-using types in D&D means that they will not be there for long drag-out fights, but rather short, desperate struggles as the PCs try to disable them. In the mean time, their abilities make the PCs' lives very interesting, since their comings and goings might be monitored, illusions cast, or many other magical tricks used to deter them.

The third concept is something I've mentioned before: giving NPC magic-users totally sui generis abilities. Circe, after all, was somewhere between a witch and a minor goddess, depending on what interpretation you choose. They can be the source of magic abilities unseen in the books, or even magical items that are unique without being artifact-level objects. (I'm thinking here of the magic sword forged by a witch from lightning bolts in The King of Elfland's Daughter.)

At heart, this dilemma — lover or pig — is an interesting one to place PCs into. It requires care that it doesn't become a railroading tool, but embracing both possibilities opens wide the options for magic-using NPCs as a major force for the kind of emergent dungeon roleplaying that I find really fascinating.

Thinking about Dungeon Factions

I'm quietly doing some work on a megadungeon and one of my main concerns as I design it is the factions. While I'm not yet at the point where I want to tell you exactly what the factions are, I do want to go through some ideas on broad types of factions that will exist.

The factions in B2 Keep on the Borderlands are primarily classifiable as tribes: kinship groups of humanoids organized around a single leader. The tribe is a basic, fundamental unit and can be used to describe basically any monocultural society with a strong leader, whether it's hobgoblins, berserkers, cavemen or hill giants. Typically they are not humans of the prevailing civilization. These are a solid form of organization and work well, although they shouldn't be the only type of faction.

A second type of common faction is the voluntary group. A cult, a group of bandits, or rival party, often made up of human or demihuman characters. There are two interesting factors about voluntary groups. One is that the characters in it will frequently speak Common, and therefore be able to negotiate, bargain and discuss with PCs. The other is that membership is an open question. You can do fun things like having a henchman or PC get Charmed by the evil cult and used to betray the PCs' cause. It's also possible to ally with or even join the voluntary group.

Related to voluntary groups are alliances. These are not as formal, and may actually be partly made up of a tribe or voluntary group – for instance, a tribe of goblins may have "pet" giant rats, or be enslaved by an ogre. These are not generally groups that are being recruited, and may form on more tentative lines than other factions. Player intrigue might be able to turn an alliance into two or three separate factions, while others may form in the face of PCs raiding the dungeon.

The specific form of the faction might also differ. These are a few ideas for how leadership is decided, each of which I'm sure has some variants.

Frequently leaders are assumed to be despots, absolute leaders who rule through violence or fear of violence. That can be plenty of fun, particularly if the faction uses "Klingon promotion" where a new leader rises by killing the previous one. There are several potential player hooks there – particularly if, in the style of A Princess of Mars, PCs actually find themselves as leaders within the faction.

But there are other methods. Maybe bandits will use a pirate democracy, where a leader is elected, and can be recalled (violently) if needed. Or there may be a cult of personality; I'm interested in the idea of having a charismatic leader in a dungeon who leads a sort of motley coalition by sheer charisma. Others might be a protection relationship, where a powerful creature or NPC leads weaker followers because it offers physical or magical defense. Some enemies will undoubtedly use slaves, which present a bit of moral dilemma.

As my own dungeon keeps growing, I'm going to develop several of these types of factions. A dungeon with sufficient factions, IMO, is rife for more roleplaying than even many city-based adventures. And it reinforces that my favorite type of roleplaying is the kind with the threat of violence behind it.

It was ALL weird!

In Michael Mornard's discussion thread over on the OD&D forum, I asked this question:

OD&D lists a bunch of increasingly weird options at the end of the monster types - dinosaurs, living statues, robots, androids, etc. Do you remember any encounters with that kind of creature?

Michael's response, which I am enthusiastic enough about to get on a t-shirt:

Greyhawk was FULL of weird sh*t. Once you got below the fifth or sixth level the odds of encountering anything "usual" except as a wandering monster was virtually nil. Go look at Rob Kuntz' "Bottle City" for an example. It was ALL weird!

Somehow, the idea that Greyhawk was vanilla crept down into the gaming world, and it has sort of lodged there as one of the great falsehoods of our hobby. It leads to the perception of the megadungeon as nothing more than a reverse mountain of stock fantasy, and of the Greyhawk setting as a big boring realm, when nothing could be further from the truth.

In The Dragon #17, Jim Ward wrote the following in an article called "Boredom and the Average D&D Dungeon":

The Future or Machine Age: While some steady readers might think that I harp on this topic too much, the first time I came in contact with a level of this type was in the “mighty” castle of Greyhawk; run by Gary Gygax and Rob Kuntz. Imagine conveyor belts that force players to travel in one direction or another, a cellophane machine that wraps you up no matter how big or small you are and puts you in a holding area for as long as it takes to rip yourself out, how about a die press that shapes anything in its path into a bottle top (Boy, can that hurt!), or a row of blades that cut in a pattern on the belt with a 25% chance that any given blade will cut you? Try a slot machine that takes only large sums of gold and with the flip of the handle takes a random magic item from the party, and how about a lever that turns on something way off in another part of the level (like a robot or level clean up machine) that you can’t know about until you travel to that part of the level? The treasures of this level could easily be more fun than the level: imagine bottle tops made out of mithril on wine bottles; how about guns and pistols that work; a set of chain mail made out of a super hard and light alloy that acts like plus 5 armor and shows no magical traits; how about a huge pile of gold dust in a large plastic bubble that isn’t small enough to get out the door and can’t be cut by anything less than a plus 5 sword?

Archivists of the magazine will recall that this was the very same issue in which Gygax writes up a foray from Greyhawk Castle inhabitants onto the Starship Warden of Metamorphosis Alpha fame. A story, which is too long for me to quote here, by Gygax talks about the Black Reservoir, a massive body of water in Castle Greyhawk. (Allan Grohe, who created that Greyhawk site, ran a group I was in through some of that Reservoir using the AD&D rules.) And of course several oddities from Greyhawk have seen print: Gygax's EX1 Dungeonland, EX2 The Land Beyond the Magic Mirror, WG6 Isle of the Ape; and Kuntz's The Original Bottle City, The Original Living Room, and Garden of the Plantmaster.

What this adds up to is the opposite of a big vanilla madhouse. The point of this classic megadungeon was to get down, survive the weirdness, get the treasure, and get the hell out. Perhaps most impressive is that Gygax and Kuntz were so good at making these environments into really challenging game areas, as we see in Ward's summary: the things that are trying to kill the PCs are themselves objects of intense curiosity.

Forays into science fantasy are expected; there is a way to get to Jack Vance's Planet of Adventure and face the birdlike Dirdir (documented in the DMG) as well as to Edgar Rice Burroughs's Barsoom. One of the remarkable things about Greyhawk is how literary it was; everyone talks about Appendix N as inspiration, but Gygax was using various novels straight-up as material for his dungeon. This of course allowed Gygax to use puzzles, riddles and puns that relied on real-world references and wouldn't make sense in a totally fleshed out fantasy-land like, say, Tolkien's. Compared to this, S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks seems almost par for the course of what you'd expect in a Gygax dungeon.

Gygax advocated using the weirdness as a contrast to the "standard" grind:

That is, moments of silliness and humor help to contrast with the grinding seriousness of a titantic struggle and relieve participants at the same time.

In the ponderous high fantasy seriousness of the '80s, the railroady plots of the '90s, the over-the-top '00s and the grimdark teens, it's way too easy to lose sight of this simple advice. Gygax was on the ball, but more importantly he managed to shift tone without losing playability. That's really the most important takeaway from all this: everything described above was seamlessly part of the game. It didn't stop to look at something cool, there was something interesting just around the next corner and an encounter in Wonderland was just as threatening as anything in the grim "area of evil."

Arneson had a reputation for being the weird one, but in the most productive era that he had, Gygax really laid this on thick. It's not a coincidence that large chunks of Appendix N are either planetary romance, post-apocalyptic or straight-up science fiction. So the next time you're wondering how to make your dungeon a bit of a stranger place, try to make it a little more like Greyhawk. You won't go wrong.

Some World-Building

Image from Wikimedia Commons

In addition to my B/X campaign, I've been working on some concepts for a combination of a world setting and a megadungeon. But it's a bit different from what I've been doing previously. I want to talk a bit about where I'm thinking of going in terms of world creation, theme and influences.

A big thing thematically that I want to achieve with this setting is to do a world that is, at the same time, both recognizable as Dungeons & Dragons, and isn't at all a generic fantasy setting. Hence the deinonychus above.

What I'd really like to get down is a science fantasy world that doesn't have a gonzo, crazy-go-nuts feel. I know that's an odd balance to hit when your goal is wizards and laser rifles, but I feel that it's a time-honored part of Dungeons & Dragons that should still be able to take itself with a modicum of seriousness. Part of that is doing things like dinosaurs but having them be scary rather than wacky. Again, hence deinonychus.

The basic assumption of the Dungeons & Dragons setting is that it's a pseudo-medieval world. I'm not going with that, although the PCs still look and act basically the same. The underlying idea is that the main human civilization are themselves literally aliens. The world that the PCs (well, their ancestors) come from is a high-magic world with all of the standard fantasy trimmings. They no longer live there. During the magical equivalent of a global thermonuclear war, the Second Empire opened a gate to another world. The first brave and hardy settlers had wizards helping them; much of their resources and knowledge were lost, but fragments remain. Now it is two centuries later, and the human realm (name TBD) has gone into a semblance of normal life.

So there are several sources of monsters. One is the other civilizations of the world that the humans came into; at this point the one they have the most contact with are lizardmen, who live in a vast swampy kingdom to the south of the human settlement. They have some weird technology, mostly a mix of found tech from previous civilizations – nothing orderly and modern, but enough that humans pose no fundamental threat to them.

As to the megadungeon itself, it's a multi-level dungeon that happens to be built near the ruined and long-since buried capital of an Atlantis style civilization, a mix of high technology and high magic. There are tribes of primitive blue-skinned humans living underground, the descendants of the last survivors of this world; they are savage and have no memory of their lost homeland, only a sort of religious worship of some of its artifacts.

I want to play a lot with megafauna in this setting, both dinosaurs and giant creatures. I'm particularly inspired by this description from Holmes's manuscript (reproduced on the Zenopus Archives):

Giant rats, spiders, scorpions and other horrors are naturals for dungeons. The Dungeon Master should adjust the monster's hit dice to the depth below the surface and assign a suitable armor class. These creatures fight ferociously, have special abilities, and there are many interesting possibilities.

I really love that bit about "have special abilities." Yes, you know what a fire beetle is in a standard D&D world, but the beetles in this world might be based on the bombardier beetle.

Future posts will talk more about this as I flesh out the world and solidify more of its aspects. But I'd be interested in reading what thoughts and ideas folks have for developing this kind of setting while keeping it feeling like a more or less logical world, not a zany mish-mash.

Spell Effects in the Dungeon, Greyhawk Style

Back last summer, I had done a post called Spell Effects in the Dungeon looking at the spells in Men & Magic as spells that had been cast well in advance of player characters coming down through a dungeon. In this follow-up I will be looking at the spells from Supplement I: Greyhawk and their potential impact on a dungeon.

One note is that Greyhawk has Permanent Spell, so I'm disregarding the duration limits for these spells. Assume that the magic-user is either an archmage, or has scrolls or other access to Permanent Spell. Note that this is a general improvement for having spells pre-cast in the dungeon.

Darkness, 5' Radius. Make one square of 10' map into absolute darkness. Great for setting the mood or hiding a devious trap. Or create the apparently infinite pit trap: Darkness and Silence at the bottom of a 10' pit. People fall in and you can neither hear nor see them.

Web. Nothing like a big sticky mess for characters to wade into. Very good for lining pit traps, the bottom of a chute, or in front of the lair of a monster.

Magic Mouth. There's a lot of potential for these. Greyhawk lists the possibility of using them attuned to alignment, or specific individuals. This makes them excellent alarms, but they're also good if you want to give a riddle, a joke or invoke a trap. For instance, consider a Magic Mouth rigged to deliver the command word to a wand of Fireball - a perfect explosion trap. The structure of the spell gives a perfect excuse why dungeon denizens don't set off the trap, too. Of course, this can be used on other kinds of wand to make different traps.

Pyrotechnics. The fireworks variant is good if you combine it with the Magic Mouth wand trick detailed above. A permanent smoke effect can create a nice low-visibility area for a trick or trap, or a fake "dragon" lair that will freak a low-level party out.

Explosive Runes. Well, this one is pretty obvious. BOOM!

Rope Trick. A rope ascends upward and disappears into another dimension. Pulling it will bring whatever is at the top of the rope down on the characters. My personal inclination is to stick a bear or two up there, but it can be pretty much anything you'd like to have inquisitive PCs bring down on their own heads.

Suggestion. You can pretty much have an otherwise intelligent character doing anything the magic-user would like. It's prime for just plain weird encounters – why is that guy carrying a bucket of acid back and forth? The wizard told him to.

Ice Storm. If you are using 10' squares, in a dungeon, the ice storm can impact 27 squares - a big swath of the dungeon. If temperatures cooperate, this will let you create a frozen sub-environment with slick floors, icy hailstones, and/or snow - or with permanency, a perpetual ice storm. If is too warm, you can wind up flooding the same area.

Repulsion. Creative casting can make a room, area or object unapproachable in a spectacular way. Most interesting if PCs try using missile weapons on it.

Delayed Blast Fireball. BOOM!

Reverse Gravity. It's pretty obvious what you need to do here. Three 10' cubes have reverse gravity and characters entering them fall upward. Very interesting in a room where only part of this is true. Extra fun bonus: make the ceilings more than 10' high.

Charm Plants. The spell description says explicitly that it's a good warning system. Not to mention things like strangulation ivy.

Mass Invisibility. What's better: six invisible dragons or a small invisible army (300 men plus horses)? Either way this packs some punch.

Symbol. This is of course made to go into the dungeon. The Death symbol is pretty much concentrated havoc, though others such as Discord have roleplaying potential.

Polymorph Any Object. This spell pretty much lets you make anything you want.

Time Stop. Using this as a trap may cause some very interesting philosophical debate. If you want to make creative solutions necessary instead of a Dispel Magic, stick the nastiest monster you can find in the affected area.

Prismatic Wall. When you really need to stop someone from getting in.

Now, I could go and list the Limited Wish and Wish spells - but they pretty much would let you do anything you want. That's endlessly creative but has no specific ramifications to look at. Overall I thin the Greyhawk spells have a lot to contribute to the dungeon by having them cast in advance of PCs arriving.

The Importance of Time

In early D&D, time was of the essence, to the point where Gygax wrote in the Dungeon Masters Guide for AD&D: "YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT." (His caps, not mine.)

At the dungeon level, there are several important timers. The length which a torch will burn (in both Holmes and the AD&D PHB this is listed as 6 turns, but it is not found in OD&D) creates a strict limitation for characters who do not have a Continual Light  spell available; you can only be down in the dungeon as long as you have torches. Wandering monsters force exploration along if they are high-risk, low-reward encounters. These are balanced with the time it takes to explore rooms, search for secret doors, and so on.

In the mode of Blackmoor as explored in The First Fantasy Campaign or the semi-competitive Greyhawk, it makes sense that Gygax would talk about a meaningful campaign - having multiple players with their own goals and different playing time - needing a strict timeline. But often campaigns are party-oriented and time becomes less of an issue.

I think that this is unfortunate, because a number of mechanisms - such as the design time for magic items, or the simple expedient of sleeping after the fighter's taken a couple hits and the magic-user's out of spells - should have more of a meaningful impact on the game. There are a number of ways that I think this can still be achieved.

One is the living dungeon. Any set of intelligent creatures who know that a group of adventurers are invading their living space should react by finding the most defensible spots and laying traps en route to them, then holing up where possible. Even a single escapee from a group of enemies should cause headaches to a party that gives them sufficient time to reinforce and defend themselves. Similar is the rival party, another group that roams the dungeon; if PCs clear a difficult area and then leave to rest, imagine their surprise when the easy pickings beyond have all been looted. One possible variation on the rival party would be a 9th level fighter who is clearing the area where the dungeon is in an attempt to claim it as a barony, and starts a full-on military expedition against the dungeon's denizens.

But what I really like are timers in the game world. One that I think was really brilliant was in the LotFP module Better Than Any Man: eight days after the beginning of the adventure, the sandbox will be destroyed by an invading army. It's quite explicit that there is a hard time limit, and it's not practical for the PCs to forestall the invasion or the destruction of the adventure locales. For me, this is really a great type of timer, because it creates the reality of the outside world while limiting access to the dungeon environment. It would not work for a proper megadungeon, but I think the idea that a certain locale has to be explored by a certain time or it will disappear is interesting.

For instance, what if an underground reservoir was breached and the dungeon was slowly being flooded? It's most interesting of course if the PCs wind up being the cause of the flood. Or some structural flaw has been revealed by the PCs' exploration and a level is now slowly becoming unstable and subject to cave-ins that could also lead to really interesting problems when the PCs are present. You could even have some magical force slowly eating away at the dungeon, or due to cause some local disaster when the stars are right.

Seasons could also be a way to make time matter. Underground areas tend to reflect the world above, so in a temperate area a dungeon in the winter would be so cold as to be uninhabitable by normal humans. In summer, a cave in a warmer area can become so hot as to be hostile to human life. In a true megadungeon there could well be active delving seasons in the spring and fall.

The key to all of this is that it puts time pressure on a sandbox situation. That's not always desirable, and I don't think it should be contrived, but I do think it's an interesting way of adding time pressures at a larger scale. Some of these also apply to hexcrawls; I know that plate armor is lighter than its reputation, but it's still unbearably hot in the hot sun. Mail likewise can be quite comfortable, until it bakes for a while on a summer day and becomes scalding hot.

So, to open it for comments: what have you used to make time count for PCs?