The "Formula RPG" and the Open Philosophy

Rob Kuntz recently released a book called Dave Arneson's True Genius. It's a frustrating book, because it's written in specialized language of systems thought and references to a further as-yet-unfinished book. While I can't read the next book yet and don't agree with the systems theory parts, there is an assertion core to the first of its three essays that I want to comment on.

The essay, called "From Vision to Vicissitude: The Rise and Reversal of Dave Arneson's RPG Concept," follows what Kuntz sees as the change from 1974 original D&D with its "Why have us do any more of your imagining for you?" ethos to Gygax's 1978 Dragon Magazine editorials that say "Those who insist on altering the framework should design their own game."

Rob summarizes what he sees as the crucial change (emphasis in original):

Moreover, and in summary, this systemic change moved the previous concept (Arneson's, 1971; and as reiterated by Gygax/Arneson in print, 1974) of DMs as absolute and omniscient creators of content for their individualized systems to a demoted position akin to an administrator of TSR's system-and-premade-adventure interface. The reader should be able to parse the two philosophical extremes by way of comparison alone.

In due course the design tenets/philosophy from the original game, now ignored, faded against an immense and growing foreground of TSR doing the imagining and creating of pre-determined/pre-structured scenarios for the consumer. The sustained promulgation of this disposable and repeatable model caused all but scattered remains of the original RPG philosophy as it was then forming to be lost. This 180 degree reversal abruptly issued in the Formula RPG experience that persists to this very day as a strictly closed form expression; and this was (and still is) a direct, and glaring, contradiction to the genius of its original manifestations: First Fantasy Campaign and the commercially successful Classic Dungeons & Dragons.

To try and unpack this, Kuntz is arguing that the philosophical shift between OD&D (which he labels as "classic" D&D) and AD&D is a philosophical shift from an "open form" to a "closed form" system, where in the former there are endless creative possibilities and in the latter there are only rules and prescriptions for what the referee is to do.

Kuntz isn't the first person to make this point. Matt Finch's influential A Quick Primer for Old-School Gaming makes a lot of similar points between an open, discursive style of play, and a closed, rule-bound approach. In practice, though, the idea that there was a "great transition" from an open to a closed game system is a hunt that has no real end. Even a definition as strict as Kuntz's could be improved on; OD&D, after all, is an attempt to systematize the open-ended game that Arneson was running.

But more importantly, what we've seen is that just about any RPG can be run with an open/DIY philosophy. Look at the game Microlite20 – that took the system-bound and rules-heavy 3rd edition of D&D and turned it into an elegant, rules-light game for referees who like the basic mechanic but don't want to be bound by thousands of pages of rules bloat. If that can be done in 3.x D&D, it can certainly be done in first edition AD&D.

Short of converting the game into a board game like the Milton Bradley HeroQuest, I don't honestly think that an RPG can truly be "closed form." The players in B2 Keep on the Borderlands can always kill the monsters in the Caves of Chaos, but they can avoid the Caves and sack the Keep instead, or they can wander off down the road, outside the established map, and the DM is then obliged to answer the question - "What now?"

This is the philosophy that animated the Braunstein games, and the Blackmoor campaign, and that made Dungeons & Dragons such a phenomenon. It allowed "What now?" to be the question, the imperative, and opened up the floodgates of imagination. And it's always been the dirty secret of RPGs that you don't need the book at all. A skilled referee can wing more or less anything if they choose to; the books are there to save you work.

It's particularly ironic that Kuntz chooses first edition AD&D as the incarnation of "Formula RPG", because the grognards who have been running AD&D forever (the "orthodox Gygaxians" if you will) have long been the biggest devotees of the GM as the "absolute and omniscient creators of content" for their individual games. In a sense, Rob is saying here that the Pope was insufficiently Catholic.

When Kuntz presents the idea of the "formula RPG" as a betrayal of the basic RPG idea, he disrespects the long tradition of kitbashing in gaming as a hobby. Indeed, the true genius of Dave Arneson was as a kitbasher, taking ideas that had been present in games like Wesley's Braunstein and the Gygax/Perren Chainmail, and creating in them a synthesis that opened up a much richer type of experience than, I expect, anybody thought would be present at the time. And if you read The First Fantasy Campaign, you will find a surprisingly large amount of matter about the fairly "conventional" wargame campaign that Blackmoor became over time.

Once someone understands the open philosophy - which, rather than a creation of Dave Arneson, I would say is present in at least the 1870s free Kriegsspiel - there is no such thing as a truly "closed" system. The referee simply needs to open it up and ask the players, "What do you do next?" Even a game like HeroQuest could be used in a radically new way, as I'm sure it has been. (If you don't know what a free Kriegsspiel is, I'd suggest reading Playing at the World.)

The truth is that dungeon modules are often treated as parts to be kitbashed. You can take them and use parts that you like in your own dungeon, or take the map and restock it, or reskin the whole thing as a completely different affair. Gus L at Dungeon of Signs frequently looks at ways to use modules outside of their original purpose, and if you spend enough time around the OSR you'll find that this is a normal thing. If you look at the great OSR books that I've pushed over the years, like Carcosa or Red and Pleasant Land or Yoon-Suin or Veins of the Earth, most of them contain a lot of ideas and tools (particularly charts and generators) that can be ripped out and used elsewhere.

Of course, there is gaming that is rote and bland. It is not accidental that I am not an enthusiast for Pathfinder or adventure path type gaming in general. But this is not preordained from the system or the existence of modules; it's just a way that people play. Some people just like dungeon bashing, and there is nothing wrong with that. I have a coworker who loves Pathfinder gaming, and carefully planning his PC, and then setting that up against a mission from a module. It's not my fun, but he clearly enjoys it.

But - the open philosophy that animated the Blackmoor campaign is not "lost" in "all but scattered remains." It is a rich idea that continues to animate games.down to this day. The OSR has done a lot for "sandbox" and open world types of games, and I think Kuntz, long distant from the RPG scene, is simply ignorant of the realities of the games people are playing, because open philosophy in gaming is in no way lost and scattered.

Initial Thoughts: Barrens of Carcosa

As with Carcosa Module 5, The Yuthlugathap Swamps, Barrens of Carcosa is a 32-page saddle stitched AD&D module by Geoffrey McKinney. You can buy the module on Lulu.

Barrens has no art aside from the cover piece by Luigi Castellani. It suffers more acutely than Yuthlugathap Swamps from the print quality with the color hexmap on the back; since most of the hexes are a tan color, the numbers are almost completely illegible. You more or less need to reference nearby hexes to have any chance of figuring out what the number on a tan or yellow hex is.

The last page of each module notes that four more Carcosa modules will be forthcoming as well as sixteen "Wilderness" modules. This is a rather ambitious plan, to be certain!

In terms of its content, Barrens of Carcosa is a step above the Yuthlugathap Swamps, and I'd suggest reading it first. Not having to go through quite so many lizardman strongholds means that there is more room for the weird content that Geoffrey specializes in. There are many more villages and generally more humans in the Barrens, including a few small jungles and a modest desert.

The Cthulhu Mythos looms much more present in Barrens of Carcosa. There are several Great Race appearances, multiple cults, and the excellent City of Pillars ruled by Alhazred himself (and, of course, a copy of the Necronomicon). This last area is implied to be an area worthy of its own module detailing both the city and the dungeons of Alhazred below.

High technology themes also come back into the setting here, with a few powerful technological areas. One small village goes into orbit periodically, and there is a powerful Overmind in a corner of the map. It was a relief to see that this theme is still present, although not very thoroughly so. I found the suggestion that the orbital village's technology doesn't work outside of its hex really disappointing, the kind of "only in this area" effect that cheapens modules.

Fewer of the hexes are concerned with learning magic-user spells, although there are still a few of these. There are a decent number of Spawn of Shub-Niggurath, and many are connected in some way to an adjoining hex. One strength of these modules is that a solid minority of the entries have clear ties to another location. A couple even reference the hexmap in the original Carcosa book.

There are some deliciously double-edged encounters in this book, particularly the Logician (hex 2811) and the village of Ullcha (hex 3001). These go much beyond the simple theme of threats and have both wonderful and horrible things in them. I won't go into detail, because you should read about them yourself.

The hex description format feels more claustrophobic in Barrens than it did in the Swamps. There are more entries where a full monster write-up would be useful; for instance, the giant scorpions in hex 3209 would have been welcome as a Monster Manual type of entry. And there just isn't enough given in the write-ups for either the Orbital Unit or the City of Pillars; either would require a great deal of prep by the referee before players stumbled into them.

It becomes increasingly clear that Geoffrey's art-free interiors are a weakness of the offering. One of the main reasons is that a good idea is hard to find again when flipping through the module. Illustrations, even fairly crude ones, provide solid mental references to remember where a stand-out piece of content was. The organization, which relies solely on hex number (there are no page numbers), tends to compound this in the modules. It also would help in the case of Geoffrey's unique creatures, which are always freakish and benefit from the pen of an illustrator, as seen in Isle of the Unknown.

Not having any art or any text outside of the hex descriptions (plus the brief overview of Carcosa at the start) also severely limits the modules' ability to offer unique details. There are almost no unique "magical" items, although there is an Elder Sign or two. No spells are present except ones already found in the AD&D Players Handbook, which is deeply disappointing for a setting that had previously taken a totally iconoclastic approach to magic. This makes them really difficult to slot into an existing Carcosa campaign with sorcerers instead of magic-users.

(I do know from the original Carcosa and the Psychedelic Fantasies modules that Geoffrey tends to put things out in this format; but information design has come a long way in the OSR and it is a step backward to have a plain layout with no art. And it's particularly painful after the LotFP releases.)

I also have a small quibble about the treasure present. Despite the general lack of hard currency or sources thereof in Carcosa, treasure listings tend to feature standard AD&D coinage (copper, silver, electrum, gold, platinum), and sometimes uses four or five coin types. This is a minor annoyance but it does not feel right for a weird setting. Defining one coin type and sticking to it would have been more in keeping with the tone of Carcosa.

I also find the division of the books into four modules distracting. Each covers a hexmap in some detail, but it doesn't feel appropriate to have them broken down in the way they are. There is no progression through the four modules, and vanishingly few references to other modules in the text. A unified index for the four books would really have helped. One has the sense that the division is to follow a pattern rather than out of necessity.

To be clear, these are my reservations with a book whose content I find very strong. I offer them primarily because I think it could have been really an incredible product if Geoffrey had chosen to do these as a follow-up to the LotFP Carcosa tome, using the same system, with a crowdfunding campaign allowing lavish illustration throughout a single hardcover book. There are some great ideas in these modules and they are worth picking up, but they're a step backward in a lot of ways from the releases that have been done through LotFP.

If you like Carcosa-style hexcrawls, this is definitely worth the $12.99. There are a lot of encounters in this book that are worth the cost of admission, and as with many products like it this can be mined for details in a campaign that doesn't strictly follow Carcosa.

Initial Thoughts: The Yuthlugathap Swamps (Carcosa)

While I don't really do a lot of reviews, particularly because for RPGs I think playtest reviews are more useful than "I read this" reviews (excluding Bryce Lynch at tenfootpole.org, who has objective criteria and does a heroic number of reviews). But I think Initial Thoughts are a good way to put forward my first impressions of a product, and it's a good way to indicate that my thoughts might change over time.

The Yuthlugathap Swamps is one of four first edition AD&D modules released by Geoffrey McKinney (all four are on Lulu here) for his Carcosa setting. Originally released as a very controversial OD&D supplement in 2008, Carcosa got an extremely deluxe release from Lamentations of the Flame Princess in 2011. These don't require either.

It's rather confusing that Geoffrey called this "Carcosa Module 5." He's said that his goal is to re-release the hex map for Carcosa in four more modules following the same format. Eventually modules 1-4 will detail the original map, and 5-8 detail the four map quadrants due south of it.

The new modules are first edition AD&D modules and assume that you have the first four AD&D books. It works better if your copy of Deities & Demigods has the Cthulhu mythos; if it doesn't, you might want to look here. If you are used to Carcosa following an OD&D or LotFP type of system, this will require a bit of adjustment. The adventures repeatedly reference AD&D monsters (in Yuthlugathap, primarily Lizardmen and various slimes and oozes) and spells in a way that previous Carcosa material did not.

In terms of presentation, it is bare bones. Each module has a color cover image in a style generally reminiscent of old TSR modules. There is a hexmap on the back, printed in color. Unfortunately the map is not reproduced in black & white on the interior; this would have made the numbers easier to read. As it stands, some of them are almost totally illegible. The interior is two-column text laid out pretty much like Geoffrey's line of Psychedelic Fantasies modules. There are no interior illustrations, and there is a lack of page numbers.

After a brief overview, the module consists of a series of hex descriptions. A lot of the entries for the Yuthlugathap Swamps are descriptions of Lizardman strongholds. There is a clear rivalry between the various tribes that is set up in a huge, deadly web of conflict. Characters can get involved in this, and the module could probably be used as the basis for a Diplomacy-like scenario with players taking the parts of various lizardman tribe leaders.

Human tribes are scattered mostly to the east, some pretty good and one quite horrible. There are a number of dinosaurs and Spawn of Shub-Niggurath scattered around the swamps as well. The Spawn are always given some kind of unique twist. A few aren't at all malevolent or even very harmful to human life.

Then there are the really weird areas, which are solid gold. These are the kind of things Geoffrey excels at, and they're evocative and flavorful. Some give wondrous boons, including a number that teach magic-user spells. Others give horrible banes. My favorite reference is that there is a Pillar of Tsathoggua that involves the geas spell (a nod to Clark Ashton Smith's "The Seven Geases"). The Ghost-Lights are a great twist on the traditional Will o' the Wisp, with various odd effects from contact such as having to eat more or becoming amphibious and needing to be submerged in water daily.

All of the entries are solid. There's not much here by way of space aliens and technology, which I think is a function of most of this module being swamps; peeking ahead, Barrens of Carcosa seems to have more technological wonders. Sorcery seems to have been either left in the northern part of Carcosa or simply not mentioned in favor of AD&D magic use. This is jarring for those who are accustomed to either OD&D or LotFP Carcosa.

At the going rate, there are definitely $12.99 worth of ideas in this module. A bunch are really wonderful. You could do an interesting hexcrawl in the godforsaken swamps of Carcosa or adapt a number of the locations to a different setting. I'll be doing a similar Initial Thoughts entry at least on Barrens of Carcosa.

Announcing The Secret of Cykranosh

I am extremely happy to announce that you can now buy The Secret of Cykranosh via DriveThruRPG as a Pay What You Want module.

This is a short module (6 pages) that wouldn't exist without Dyson Logos's work. I based it on the Dellorfano Protocols Dungeon that I linked in last night's Actual Play report. Dyson has been releasing certain maps with a CC-BY license thanks to his extremely successful Patreon campaign. This allows anyone to use and remix the original work, even for commercial use.

Because I like Dyson's move so much, I've also released the complete text of this module in CC-BY. So not only is it free if you want it, you can also use it in your own projects however you like. I'm a big fan of the Creative Commons license as a way to share and distribute gaming material because it's less restrictive than the OGL.

You'll also notice that it is an OSR Compatible module. I've always intended to use this mark as a way to distribute my own work, I've just run into problems getting a lot of that work out. There's a complete compatibility statement at the start of the module.

As anyone who recognizes the statue of Tsathoggua on the cover can tell, and anyone who's read "The Door to Saturn" knows, this is deeply inspired by the work of Clark Ashton Smith. I've worked CAS's ideas throughout the module, and I think fans will really enjoy this little adventure. The cover is from a (Creative Commons licensed) photo of a statue of Tsathoggua made by Richard L. Tierney, who happens to sort of be an Appendix N author (Tierney wrote a story in Swords Against Darkness III).

In my opinion, "The Secret of Cykranosh" is the kind of module that should be in a magazine like Fight On! or The Dragon. But we don't quite have that, so I'm happy to release it as a PWYW module on DriveThruRPG. If it has a good reception I'm certainly happy to do more in the same vein.

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.

What Makes a Great Adventure?

"Hither came Conan the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet." - Robert E. Howard, "The Phoenix on the Sword"

I've been thinking a lot lately about what makes a great D&D adventure, and what is necessary in a published adventure module. In no small part this is driven by the fact that I found a lot to recommend the 5e module Princes of the Apocalypse, but I also found a lot that is lacking in the module.

The ethos of Conan, such as they are, are definitely missing in the atmosphere created by recent editions of D&D. It appears somewhat in a game where the primary drivers are acquisition of wealth and conquest of a kingdom, which is the mode that OD&D set out to realize. Players just wanted to keep going with the dungeon part of the game, though, and eventually the reward mechanic shifted to recognize that fighting monsters would be the main focus of the game. Once that happened, the whole motivation had to change. Instead of being a game where there is treasure and the goal is to find it, it becomes a game where there is a problem, and you have to hack some monsters apart to solve it.

The elements, as I see it, of a great adventure are: a treasure (the motive), obstacles (the reason the treasure hasn't been taken already), and choices (multiple ways to get in trouble).

Treasure I see given a sad-sack treatment in most published modules, which is really weird given the importance of treasure to old school Dungeons & Dragons. There are very few dungeons I can really think of that have an "it" treasure that ties the whole thing together. Too often there is simply a big challenge that has a significant number of coins, gems, jewelry or magic items. It seems to me that one or two really memorable pieces, with corresponding magical powers and/or high GP values, are at least as important as the other aspects of adventure design.

For instance, B1 In Search of the Unknown has a treasure listed as "Onyx statue worth 200 g.p.". What is the statue of? How big is it? How old is it? How much does it weigh? There is an actual famous onyx cameo (engraved gem), the Gemma Augustea, with an elaborate two-tiered engraving. It's 7½" x 9" and about ½" thick. That's an actual piece of "treasure" that the PCs could take. The whole listing can be brief:

Onyx carving, 7"x9", depicts an ancient emperor and court. 200 g.p.

I mean, that's not rocket surgery, but it does give you some hook. You know it's ancient and might have some significance. It might even be a clue to information elsewhere in the dungeon, or it might just be a piece of treasure that's worth describing to the players. Either way, I'd rather have this than the anonymous "Onyx statue." And yet even the description as being made of onyx is more than you'll get in a lot of modules.

Obstacles are the wonderful things that, in the Moldvay Basic rulebook's dungeon generation guidelines, fall under the various categories of monster, trap and special. These are the things that will occupy most of the playing time if the module is played as written, and as such they tend to get the most love.

Back when 3e was new, Monte Cook wrote "The World's Shortest (Yet Technically Complete) Adventure," "The Orc and the Pie." This is a 10'x10' room. The room contains an orc and a pie. (You can see a version here.) This was written with the assumption that the PCs would kill the orc to get his pie – it's in the adventure synopsis, "he PCs kill the orc and take his pie". But even that is a multi-dimensional obstacle. The PCs can use stealth, or magic, or manipulation, or even pay the orc for his pie.

The vast majority of modules keep the monster encounters to manageable numbers that the PCs can take on in one-on-one combat. I think this is generally a shame. After all, OD&D lists 30-300 orcs as appearing, and I think that a dungeon with 150 orcs in a single general region would be a lot more interesting than one with 25 rooms and the equivalent of 6 orcs each. By going over on the "possible" numbers, the orcs are now a real obstacle to be figured out, not just an HP or spell cost to get through the room. After all, if you're going to put orcs in your module, you should do it in a way that is going to stand out.

(As a side note, I don't think that unique monsters versus generic ones does much at all to change the quality of a module. At the end of the day it's not the monster, it's what you do with it; if you have a wildly creative creature that always attacks and does standard damage, you might as well have just used a generic monster. Well-used original monsters, of course, can really enhance an adventure, but they aren't required.)

Likewise, traps should actually be obstacles, not random HP sinks. Especially if you're using a version of D&D where "detect traps" is an ability, make the trap really nasty but put it in the way of something. The PCs see a door, but stepping on the stone in front of it unleashes a trap. They can detect that trap all day, but actually getting into the door requires them to do something about the trap. The corridor is lined with arrow traps; you can see the slits in the wall, but you need to figure a way past them. The goal shouldn't just be to kill unwary PCs, but to actually make proceeding through the area difficult. After all, the traps have presumably been painstakingly built to protect a valuable treasure. Why would they be put in a random place and not impede forward progress?

"Specials" are often the whole reason modules are worth buying. I mean, would B1 In Search of the Unknown be anything other than a monster-ridden "fantasy Ikea" without the Room of Pools? This is where the adventure gets to evoke a sense of wonder and change the flow of the game and create its unique experience. In Moldvay this is one-sixth of your rooms; that may be a bit ambitious, but then some of these will just be something interesting instead of a really transcendent moment. But a great adventure has at least one of those.

Choices are why people hate railroads. It's why they hate quantum ogres. When I read a module, I usually look for branching points on the map, and see what happens if the PCs pick one versus the other; you can usually tell whether a module's going to be good or not by that expedient. Even if it's a small dungeon, there should be at least two paths with meaningful unique places to go. A module without meaningful choices offers nothing to the players as a challenge; even very limited alternate paths can really change the tone of an adventure. I like Justin Alexander's Jaquaying the Dungeon for more on this.

The trick with choices is finding ways to give the players information about the choices they are going to make. A blind selection between left and right is a coin flip, not a meaningful decision. Rumors, hints elsewhere in the dungeon, information gained through monsters, partial maps, or any sensory clues are all ways to inform a decision. One corridor is warmer than the other? That changes the calculus. Doubly so if the PCs think there might be a dragon in the dungeon.

A lot of information-gathering tricks are just underused. For instance, graffiti; large underground complexes in the real world frequently have "street" names to indicate different corridors. Why not have that, particularly in a language of underground humanoids or other intelligent dungeon denizens? Any kind of signal about the "areas" of a dungeon makes for solid information. Even deceptive clues can drive player choice, and later be put together into a bigger picture.

I really think this is the dividing line for a great adventure: if meaningful choices are not created, if the map is just random or the choices are all made blind, then it can't create the kind of play that I think exists at the highest level of D&D. Players have to be able to route around obstacles, which usually will mean picking between two. And that's the beautiful thing in an open adventure design.

By these standards, I don't think there are that many great adventures. For the most part, what people see as both classics and great modern adventures are ones where the "specials" or the particular use of obstacles (usually monsters, except S1 Tomb of Horrors, a master class in traps) are memorable. S2 White Plume Mountain is probably the only module I can think of where the treasure is as noteworthy as the dungeon, while Caverns of Thracia has a terrific choice structure. But I do think these are good criteria to judge an adventure, and worthwhile goals for a designer setting out on a new one..

How Not to Write an Adventure

Jason Paul McCartan at OSR Today wrote a short link to an article from a site called RPG Knights that alleges to give advice for how to design adventures. Unfortunately, it's really not. The advice given is a recapitulation of Freytag's pyramid (in a modified version slightly different from the above, where the rising action is temporarily interrupted), the dramatic structure you learn in middle school, without significant insight into how to make it into an RPG adventure.

This kind of adventure writing is lazy, bad and everything that should be avoided both by referees and by writers creating modules for RPGs. If you've already written the plot, the PCs aren't the protagonists; they are just along for the ride. And that sucks.

In a well run roleplaying game, the elements of Freytag's pyramid (exposition, rising action, climax, falling action and denouement) arise organically out of player choice. Plotting them in advance prevents this from happening; if your climax requires that a certain character be in a certain place at a certain time, well, the best-laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft agley*.

An RPG adventure needs something completely different. It's a type of writing that is totally different from writing a screenplay or short story, since the referee is not an author and doesn't know what the protagonists will do. So it should be no surprise that the elements needed are totally different as well.

The main responsibility of the adventure is that it becomes plot when PCs are exposed to it. This requires it to have potential conflict, or the seeds of conflict, within it. This doesn't need to be anything fancy; it's just another way of saying there should be monsters and/or NPCs standing between the PCs and what they want. A dungeon will often do this literally, for instance by having the quintessential orc and pie. If the PCs decide they want pie, that instantly transforms into conflict between the PCs and the orc. Nothing fancy is required, and it can be as detailed or simple as the referee prefers.

Conflict can be between factions, or between NPCs, or simply with the PCs. The more complex your potential conflicts are, the more ways that adding PCs can make the plot go pear-shaped. What is critical is that nothing ever be indispensable. There can be no NPC who can't be killed, no monster that must get away from a fight, nothing that the PCs need to find or know or do that will stop the adventure cold.

Everything else, really, is optional. A dungeon with monster and treasure keys is a baseline for a solid adventure. But there are a few different elements that help a good adventure.

• Background. This can be revealed through exposition, items, and dressing. The real shame of a lot of professional adventure writing is that it has extensive background that is not revealed to the PCs organically through the elements in the module.
• Methods of discovery. Ways to reveal background and information about the world and their enemies to the PCs are helpful. This can be through books, talkative NPCs, visions of the distant past, or many  other strange and odd ways to show the world to the PCs. Rumor tables are a classic method for revelation and point up the key fact that they are not necessarily reliable
• Physical obstacles. Sticking a chasm between the PCs and a goal, or making an adventure location particularly dangerous to approach, are good ways to add to the conflict without reference to more NPCs or monsters. Traps, of course, are a personal favorite.
• Dynamic world elements. A good adventure has elements, usually random, that can happen throughout the adventure so that it is not static. For instance, a random encounter table indicates that events outside the PCs' adventures are happening, and it is not necessarily a good idea to respond to all of them. Other examples include timed changes to the setting, such as the Swedish Army that will be coming soon in Better Than Any Man.

Again – none of this relates directly to plot, and if the players want, no story other than "PCs go in, get gold and leave" needs to be told in the game. Each of these points can be covered whether the adventure is a good dungeon crawl or a solid city adventure where a sword is never drawn and a spell never uttered. What's important is that the adventure be open-ended and have several potential forks, because no plan ever survives contact with the enemy, and no plot survives contact with the PCs.

* The English for this line from Robert Burns's Scots poem "To a Mouse" is usually given as "The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry."

Modules Worth Emulating

I was thinking recently about the new fifth edition of D&D, and how honestly I don't much care for its adventures so far. They are not strictly "railroads" in that players don't have to follow the plots to their conclusions, but they are a sequence of episodes that happen in a certain order, more or less no matter what the PCs do. And I don't like that model at all.

And the natural question is, what modules do I think are better models?

No reader of this blog should at all be surprised that I'll start with B2 Keep on the Borderlands. It's a natural choice, because it's the best module. I mean, there are other contenders, but certainly for low levels it's brilliant. The module can be attacked from almost any angle, but it works brilliantly. Hordes of kobolds? 1st level PCs possibly wandering into an encounter with an ogre? Death traps? Monsters right on top of each other? Gygax put it all in a sandbox and it all works.

B2 is brilliant because it presents a sandbox where every choice is possibly lethal. Simply fighting it out is rarely the right choice; PCs need to learn to explore, negotiate, trick and improvise. It's just big enough for the neophyte referee to not be overwhelmed, while giving the party truly free rein. There are several potential plots, or new ones can emerge through gameplay, but the module would work if you didn't pursue any of them, or added new plot lines in that were totally irrelevant to the existing rumor table.

Another great sandbox module is Better Than Any Man, the 2013 Free RPG Day module for Lamentations of the Flame Princess. BTAM is much more plotted than B2; in fact, the plot is iron-clad. The Swedish army is going to invade, and lots of people will die. But in context, this threat is nothing but a timer. Whereas in B2 the players can go back pretty freely to the Keep and recuperate, in BTAM they have an absolute need to finish the adventure in a certain time period or the sandbox goes away.

BTAM is dark, and disturbing, and has nasty stuff about sex. It also has great ideas, like an infinite repeating tower and several other interesting mini-dungeons. There are really only two that lead directly to the climax, but getting there is neither assumed nor a very good idea, to be honest. Instead it offers a number of very inventive locations to explore before the PCs should get out of Dodge Karlstadt while the getting is good. The timer of the looming Swedish invasion is a great way to encourage this without forcing it.

Then there's B1 In Search of the Unknown. It's Mike Carr's module that B2 was written to replace. B1 was solid, though: it provided the only extant module with a geomorphic level ("paper-thin" walls) and separated the rooms, the monsters and the treasure so that the referee had to place all of the enemies and loot logically. A good learning exercise, but it also greatly ramps up replayability. With certain exceptions like the room of pools, a referee who's run B1 multiple times can still be surprised when playing through it as a player.

The weakness of B1 is that the room descriptions are really long and overly mundane, and that it's not given over to randomness.

But Geoffrey McKinney fixed that with his Dungeon of the Unknown. I've spoken highly of this module before, and I'll do it again: DotU is a riff on B1 that provides new maps, and new monsters, including several monster generators. There are also weird encounter areas to be found. It's really quite stingy with treasure, using Geoffrey's idiosyncratic money types, but otherwise it's a great riff on what B1 did so well.

What's really interesting is that Dungeon of the Unknown is much more of a dungeon creation kit with a filled-in sketch in the back. I think that approach is something more modules should follow.

Then there's S1 Tomb of Horrors. It's the most infamous "tournament dungeon" and its actual tricks are pretty well known, especially the Great Green Devil Face. Despite its reputation, S1 does one thing very well: it gets PCs to do things that cause their own horrible deaths. You walk into the entrance? It collapses, you die. You pull the lever? You die. But it's always your fault.

What I love about Tomb of Horrors is how few monsters it has. It's one of the deadliest modules ever, but aside from a gargoyle and a demilich there just isn't much to fight. And that's brilliant. As I've said before, LotFP modules read as if James Raggi took this as an artistic manifesto.

Each of these is something I'd love to see more of in modules: the sandbox aspect of B2, the time pressure in BTAM, the modularity of B1, the kit format of DotU, and the non-monster threats of S1. Even those of us doing OSR modules could stand to go back through these and pick up a few of their ideas.

Indispensable Game Books

Sorry I haven't posted much lately. I've been doing a lot of reading, and busy at work, and at home; I actually have a long-ish post that I've been working on for a bit.

In lieu of a more substantial post, I thought it'd be interesting to note the books that I try to have on hand when I am preparing and running games.

• B2 Keep on the Borderlands. The PCs use the Keep as a home base.
• Ready Ref Sheets. This should go without saying.
• Holmes Basic D&D Rulebook (1st edition, 3rd printing). In case I want to reference any rules or spells left out of Moldvay.
• The First Fantasy Campaign (1st printing). In case I want to reference any rules; the Blackmoor Dungeon is my fallback if I have absolutely nothing else to run.
• Metamorphosis Alpha (Print on Demand reprint). For mutations and science-fantasy goodness.
• Empire of the Petal Throne (Different Worlds reprint). In case I want to use Tékumel rules, monsters, or items.
• Mythmere's Adventure Design Deskbook, Volume II - Monsters. Obvious.
• The Random Esoteric Creature Generator. Same.
• Moldvay Basic D&D Rulebook. I'm running B/X, so it makes sense.
• Cook/Marsh Expert D&D Rulebook. As Moldvay above.
• The Dungeon Alphabet (non-expanded edition). For the charts.
• Dungeon Masters Guide (1st edition, 2013 reprint). For the charts.

Since I play D&D mostly via Google Plus these days, there's also a copy of OD&D within arm's reach as well, and one of the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG. But they're generally not in my prep list, and I would very rarely consult them during a game.

A Proposal: The Six-Page Dungeon Level

Apologies if this is a bit long; if you want to find out how a Six-Page Dungeon Level will work, just skip to the end.

This post is prompted in part by an article I've shared before, Why Word Walls Won't Work, as well as Ramanan Sivaranjan's review of Forgive Us and the 2014 One Page Dungeon Contest Entries. And of course usability issues from my recent post against boxed text.

Most reviews of Forgive Us, unlike Ramanan's, don't highlight the layout (which you notice more in the printed book than if you're reading the PDF). That's unfortunate, because it's a really well-done product in that regard. Green took the two-page spread as the fundamental element of his adventure and made it so that each spread basically has what the referee needs at that point in the adventure. That is an excellent goal.

There are a couple reasons that I've been thinking about the one-page dungeon template; aside from the fact that this year's contest has just ended with 110 entries, Michael Curtis is nearing completion of Stonehell II, a product built around a modified one-page template, and I recently used the first half of Stonehell in a discussion as an exemplar of good layout.

I find that one-page dungeons often tend to be one-idea dungeons. It's too compact to convey a full dungeon level that isn't very conventional, so one-page dungeons generally have one or two gimmick ideas and not much more to offer. Curtis busted this limitation open in Stonehell by going to two pages, having more pages before the two-page spread detailing the rooms that needed more detail, moving full monster stats outside of the key, and putting charts at the end of the product for detailing the rooms that only get a couple of sentences.

There was an entry in the one-page dungeon contest that does stand out to me, Stellarium of the Vinteralf by Michael Prescott and Michael Atlin. I'd seen it before, and I back their Patreon campaign so this isn't exactly news to me, but it is a very neat design. Isomorphic maps have certain limitations, but it shows a good way to integrate text and pictures in communicating ideas. As a system-neutral thing I think that it's not 100% as useful as I'd like, but it's influenced what is kicking around in my head.

Both the standard module format (every room with a description in the key) and the one-page dungeon format fail to highlight the central points of interest. "Filler" rooms have equal standing with the most complex areas of the dungeon. (I'm tempted to call this "Dwimmermount Syndrome" but not everybody is a backer so you may have not actually read Dwimmermount.) Stonehell solved this somewhat by bringing those points onto separate pages from the main key, but I'm wondering if this isn't somewhat backward.

Unless a dungeon is so meticulous in its design that every element, every monster or treasure presented is totally unique and necessary in its specific place, there is no reason for published dungeons to stock filler rooms. You need these rooms in gameplay for pacing, which is why tournament modules tend to be poor fits in campaign play. Every room shouldn't need to be a special room; if you had, say, thirty rooms in a dungeon level, there should be maybe 10-12 rooms that need specific details.

The other 18-20 rooms can be determined by charts. Now, as a rule of thumb I would say that having to flip 1-2 pages isn't a bad thing. You still fundamentally have your "place" in the book, even if you need to make a cross-reference back and forth. Having to go to a completely different section of the book, though, is extremely annoying in play. This was a weakness of Stonehell, where the charts for randomly determining room features are inconveniently located in the back of the book.

What I'm getting at is the Six-Page Dungeon Level. It would work like this:

Pages 1-2: This details the overall feel of the level, provides stats for any new monsters or magic items introduced in the dungeon level, notes about level features and any clusters of rooms, and any special rules that may apply to areas within the level. Very much like the first two pages of a dungeon level quadrant in Stonehell.

Pages 3-4: A two-page spread with the dungeon level map and the keyed areas, representing about 1/3 of the total areas indicated on the map. Other areas can have contents indicated in a legend format, such as letters or symbols for "Monster," "Treasure," and "Trap."

Pages 5-6: Tables and charts. Including random encounters for the level, and potential monsters, treasures, traps and anything else thematic (dungeon dressing) that might be in the unkeyed areas or enhance the keyed areas.

As necessary, illustrations and so forth go on pages 1, 2, 5 and 6. The ideal is that a referee needs to read pages 1-2, and then just glance through pages 3-6 in order to "get" the central idea of the dungeon.

It lacks a bit of the snappy cachet of the one-page dungeon level, but I think that it gives the proper room for a designer to focus on putting the correct balance of their own ideas and not wasting our time with filler rooms. It also is pretty close to my ideal for use at the table; at most you only have to flip two pages.

I'll see about getting together a dungeon level as an example in the near future.

A Note to OSR Adventure Designers

This is a simple note to people who write OSR adventures.

DON'T USE BOXED TEXT OR READ-ALOUD TEXT IN MODULES.

I listened to a long review on the Save or Die Podcast (a podcast I enjoy very much) talking about an intriguing module/mini-setting called Whisper & Venom. The SoD crew waxed poetic about the art, the maps, the production values, the boxed set, the hardcover, the adventure and NPCs and locations; but they said two words that killed it for me: boxed text.

I don't care if it's a TSR module or OSR module; I don't care who wrote it, or what ideas it has. I will not run a module that contains programmed text meant to be read aloud by the referee. I'm no longer going to buy or support modules that I know contain read-aloud text from OSR publishers. It's a holdover from tournament modules, which aren't fit for campaign use, and should not be used as a model for designing adventures today.

Read-aloud text should never have been a part of an exploration game. The whole concept of D&D is that player characters are discovering what is in a previously unknown environment through their characters' actions. Either read-aloud text is made of clues about the room, in which case it has to be listened to carefully and parsed line-by-line by players, or it doesn't and it is just a waste of time. If I'm running a module, I need a concise description of the room that I can convey to the players as their characters explore it. All clues should be in the room description, not some in the boxed text and others buried in the other description paragraph.

This is a foot-down issue for me. It's 2014! Stop making modules with boxed text.

A dungeon with an elevator

Spoliers ahead if you will be playing in the module Tower of the Stargazer.

Yesterday I ran another B/X game, and the players decided to check out some rumors outside of the Caves of Chaos. That was fine, as I have laid out some additional modules in an expanded woodland area (via a very rough sketch of a map that I drew). The adventure seed the PCs wound up following was the stories of mysterious lightning leading up to the Tower of the Stargazer.

This was a very interesting transition from Keep on the Borderlands, simply because the modules couldn't have been more different in execution. No huge sprawling caves here, it's a very compact area. Rather than every corner hiding a lurking creature, there was danger of death at every step, but in a largely abandoned area.

As Tower of the Stargazer runs, it feels like James Raggi read The Tomb of Horrors and considers it less of a one-off death trap and more of an artist's manifesto. His module is more focused on tricks and traps and puzzles, than on monsters and demons. Even exploration is blown wide open for this module by having the elevator system - which allowed the PCs to see, and get, the treasure in the lowest level.

The one PC who died did so because he insisted on looking in each mirror in Dungeon Level 1 and managed to fail every saving throw. (They did trigger the snake trap at the door but made their saving throws.) The surviving PCs figured out the switches in Dungeon Level 2 and got the treasure without a scratch, which gave each of them a level up. The wizard himself was a hilarious encounter for the already-wary PCs, who thought long and hard about trying to kill him but thought better of it.

Part of why I enjoyed this was that it made a total death trap that still felt appropriate as an adventure for low-level PCs (in this case, a level 3 now ex-thief, a level 2 dwarf and level 1 fighter and cleric). It also let me set the tone that not everything I'll be running is classic TSR in style, but felt like it worked well into the existing campaign. It's also a short module, but in a good way - whereas B2 gives you a ton of bang for your buck, Stargazer finishes smoothly without a dozen or more sessions.

It's also worth a shout-out to J.D. Neal, whose town from JN1 The Chaotic Caves I've nicked as a settlement not far from the Keep on the Borderlands. It's a good alternative to just sticking with the Keep.

In future sessions we'll have modules even further afield. But I do have to say, mixing Gygax and Raggi in a campaign isn't as hard as you'd think, and at least for Tower of the Stargazer it works to good effect.

Some B2 Notes

Apologies for the unplanned hiatus - being busy around the holidays and having a bit of writer's block doesn't help with blog productivity. I'll see about getting Dungeon Crawl 4 out before the end of the year but there's no guarantee there.

In the meantime I've run a couple games set in B2 Keep on the Borderlands. It's worth noting how much play I've gotten out of this module, and the players are a ways from being done. The humanoids have been totally devastated for numbers, while the deeper caves have only just been scratched.

The PCs played politics very well between the orc groups in the previous session, getting them to help in a raid that wound up killing both chieftains (with some PC trickery in the mix as well). The elf NPC with a vendetta proved quite bloody, though he wound up meeting his end last night, not at the hands of the orcs he hated, but from a group of zombies. He died having had his vengeance, so he was probably on his way out.

B2 encourages a lot of play that I really find enjoyable as a referee. For instance, there was a lot of roleplaying that led to the orc slaughter; the reaction and morale systems are really important for this. In a room further down the caves, the PCs cleverly destroyed a dozen skeletons before setting off the trap that would animate them - although this attracted the zombie guards that killed the elf NPC and one of the PC fighters.

In last night's game, surprise almost doomed a dwarf PC who's made it through many Stonehell and a few B2 sessions; he was in the path of the bear from my B2 wilderness encounter list. A 4 HD bear with 3 attacks per round is a formidable challenge to 1st and 2nd level PCs, even if they outnumber it. The bear won surprise and decided that the dwarf in his plate armor was a meal in a can, and he was determined to open it. High PC damage output did get the bear to break in morale and probably saved the life of Tybur.

I've also been doing some preparatory work in expanding the wilderness area. It's a good basis for a bit of a sandbox with dungeon modules around it; I won't spoil exactly what is lined up, but once the PCs finally finish with B2 I think there will be some good opportunities.

Actual Play: B2 Keep on the Borderlands

1. My wilderness encounter list (available here) came in handy. The party encountered bandits, dressed as clerics. It made initial sense because, in downtime, the curate at the Keep ran the traveling priest and his acolytes out and the party thief had tracked them. The bandits wound up getting beat with a quick Sleep spell.
2. In looking for a new NPC to help them, the PCs managed to find an elf (as per the notes in the tavern of a wanderer) coming along with a merchant group. The elf knew the Sleep spell that came in handy, and when facing the kobold chieftain managed to use the Wand of Paralyzation (and in so doing identify it in the breach).
3. The thief, who had not used most of his skills in four prior sessions, got to move silently, backstab and open locks - all successfully. The first two did a lot to take out the ogre, but once wounded the ogre batted one of the party henchmen, baseball-style, with a massive club. He was knocked directly into a tree branch and died. Another henchman bit the dust at the hands of one of the kobold chieftain's harem.
4. The kobold chieftain is kind of living the pimp life. Huge piece of bling around his neck, five kobold women - wow. It's a very profitable encounter, beating both the hobgoblin and goblin chieftains for money. But not getting slaughtered on the way in took some doing. After one henchman fell in the pit, a TPK was likely if the PCs held their ground. They wisely retreated to the mouth of the cave and beat the kobolds there, then picked off rats - who were not rushing in to fight - from a distance. Good tactics, no dead PCs.
5. The kobold cave was a lot of fun to run. It was good that the PCs went to it after several other caves and had some idea of what to do tactically to win.
6. I'm wondering what I want to do with the factions, since there have been two deprived of leadership (kobolds, hobgoblins) and two removed (goblins, ogre). But I have a couple of weeks to make the power vacuums interesting.

The module's gotten interesting. I'm also starting to think about that point every B2 referee comes to - the eventual follow-up to B2. I had been thinking of Caverns of Thracia but it is another faction dungeon.

Wilderness Encounters for B2 Keep on the Borderlands

Doing some work for my next session, I've decided that B2 Keep on the Borderlands is really missing random wilderness encounters; it gets PCs to the dungeon more quickly but is problematic in terms of challenging experienced players. In the interest of making these wilderness encounters more interesting, I've taken some enemies from the Caves of Chaos that make sense as wandering scout parties and added some random encounters drawn from the Moldvay Basic rulebook and a couple borrowed from B3 Palace of the Silver Princess to round things out.

Wilderness Encounters for B2 Keep on the Borderlands

In doing this, I've tried to imply some new locations on and off the B2 map. I really feel like the existing map, where PCs can camp out with impunity as long as they stick to the road, sort of misses the "borderland" feel.

Keying the Corridors

If you bought Dungeon Crawl #3, you know that there are several places located in the corridors where I've keyed the traps. I'm thinking more and more that this is a philosophy I want to use and see more of in published modules.

I've found in writing adventures for Dungeon Crawl that numbering rooms tends to lead to a "one thing per room" mentality to dungeons. You can only get so much detail into a single entry before you cause your reader's eyes to glaze over; but at the same time, there needs to be more in the dungeon than answers to "what is behind this door / in this room?"

A big part of this is the idea that there are interesting things in the corridors. After all, the stereotypical old school dungeon has 10' wide corridors; my office is narrower than that. A rat's nest that is in a room could just as we'll be in a corridor; a hallway can have niches filled with statues, or hollow areas where treasure or traps are hidden. Creatures, traps and puzzles in the corridors make for a more tactically rich environment.

A lot of creature types are well suited to corridor encounters. For instance, the "cleanup crew" - slimes, oozes, jellies - make a lot of sense in corridors. Rats and other creatures of unusual size, which I've talked about in the past as much more compact than the space they're usually given, are another good choice. Non-intelligent undead make as much sense in a corridor as anywhere else; why would a lumbering zombie prefer a room? Generally opportunistic creatures should logically be in hallways.

For mobile threats, one interesting wrinkle is to make their presence a numbers game. If there is a giant rat nest in a niche of the corridor, perhaps there is only a 2 in 6 chance that the rats are there. They can go in the wandering monster list for the rest of the time.

Obviously the corridor encounters won't have non-hidden, unguarded treasure, but the possibility of hidden treasures is real. A single gem in the base of a statue can raise the stakes of a dungeon permanently, with PCs vigilantly checking every possible location for treasure, at least until they find a trapped one, and of course pit raps, arrow traps etc are natural corridor hazards.

The intrigue is in the ability of PCs to avoid encounters. These should not be in places that can't be circumvented; instead they give certain paths a higher difficulty cost. Perhaps the players find a shortcut but there are shriekers, or green slime, or another obvious challenge. Or perhaps they found an empty giant weasel nest going down a hallway; do they risk counting on it not being home on their way back?

So you'll see more of this from me in the future. I'm curious what others have done with this and what you think of the idea.

Notes on playing B2 Keep on the Borderlands

I ran some more Moldvay B/X D&D last night, switching from B1 In Search of the Unknown to B2 Keep on the Borderlands. Overall I found the module more satisfying, although there's plenty of Caves of Chaos waiting for the next session.

The Keep itself worked out well. The PCs got very into interaction with the various characters, including the Curate. It was an interesting prelude to the actual adventure. It also set them off on the track of the hermit to the north of the Keep, which was an encounter they handled well. They defeated the puma quickly and one player was able to knock down and overbear the hermit himself, tying him and taking him back to the Keep, which netted them a small reward.

For tripping I used an attack roll and then a Strength roll to overbear the hermit. Anyone who says classic D&D combat is boring has little imagination - the "rulings not rules" attitude made the encounter interesting.

Once the PCs headed into the Caves of Chaos, they were surprised that they were multiple caves but wound up picking the goblin cave. They wound up fighting goblins in the first room they entered, and lost one PC; they outnumbered the goblins and beat them, finding the money in a barrel. (The character who got the "Bree-Yark" rumor from one of the guards was a dwarf and knew it was wrong since he knows goblin.)

They encountered the wandering goblins after that, and successfully got them not to attack with a good reaction roll. The dwarf tried telling them a story that their chieftain was going to sell them to a giant as slaves, but the reaction rolls kept them skeptical, and the PCs wound up casting Sleep and killing them. They avoided a larger room of goblins and went to another guard post, where they killed a third group of goblins.

It wasn't a terribly profitable adventure for the PCs, which kept the XP fairly low. That's a danger of the first expedition, but I'm interested to see what tack they'll take in the next game. A large number of PCs makes the combats easier but spreads the XP thin. Outnumbering in older D&D, I'm convinced, is the main key to victory.

B2's map was straightforward compared to the mapper's nightmare of B1. Yet it's a much more tactically interesting environment, since there are so many different possible entrances. The home base and wilderness map also make it really quite good, although the wilderness is not exactly full of lurking peril; it's fairly safe as long as the PCs aren't a few squares from a numbered encounter.

On Running B1 In Search of the Unknown

Last night I ran a session of B1 In Search of the Unknown using the Moldvay Basic Set. I've always liked the idea of B1 because of its dynamic dungeon key, where monsters are placed and treasures hidden by the individual referee before the game; as classic modules go, that makes it easier to run B1 for players who have played or even run it before.

I did a fairly "light" stocking on the first level, leaving some unguarded treasures - which turned out not to matter because the players didn't find a well-secreted gem. But the empty rooms turned out not to be too big of a factor.

An early encounter was with goblins who I had in the dining room (room 3). This killed one of the NPCs rounding out the party but had the interesting effect of the PCs capturing several goblins and using them as guides, and out of the three captured goblins one even survived. The rumor table really worked, because the PCs knew about the room of pools and had the goblins lead them straight there. I always find such treks in a dungeon to be really interesting, because they reveal a bit about the layout but just a very specific subset. Goblin fear of orcs also helped the PCs out because they knew where I had placed them. (I ruled that the goblins weren't that adventurous and hadn't explored much beyond that part of the dungeon, but the pool room was so close they knew how to get to it.)

The room of pools is probably my favorite element in the module. The PCs were pretty methodical about it, and I allowed a saving throw against the pool of muting which meant it had no effect. They used the fish to "test" each pool that was suspect, which helped them avoid the pool of sleep, though they also avoided the aura pool because the fish looked stunned for a few moments. It was an effective way to get to the healing pool, which provided welcome HP after the scrap with the goblins.

A few later encounters just "felt right," including a monstrous black widow spider hiding above the bed in the mistress's room. (It lost initiative three times and missed the one attack roll it got, which was enough to do it in.) The valuable mirror was under the pillow and promptly found in the thorough search of the room. Another was a shrieker in the garden room, which of course had the intended effect of drawing wandering monsters - in this case some kobolds. Monsters kept failing morale checks and surrendering, so they now had a kobold and a goblin along who didn't like each other.

In the end, combat managed to kill the dwarf, as the party ran into a programmed kobold encounter - the kobold with them betraying the party. The PCs got out with some good loot from it, if nothing else. The dwarf's demise managed to derail their plans for a permanent goblin servant because no remaining PCs spoke goblin.

The biggest impact of the Moldvay rules was the damage factor. The party's fighter had a two-handed sword and a 17 Strength, and 1d10+2 is more than most of the monsters in B1 can handle by a high factor. Monsters would've been harder in Holmes with all d6 damage. Without a magic-user there was no other major shift away from Holmes. Moldvay's morale rules proved once more why they are my favorites - this group of players was the most creative with their captives of the ones I've seen. As I noted above, initiative rolls really mattered because I kept making crappy rolls for initiative, but I roll initiative even in OD&D.

Because of multiple store rooms, there were two good observations. The first was - "I think we're in an IKEA, not a dungeon." (The difference is the furniture here was already assembled.) The second was how much B1's first level feels like you're raiding somebody's house. This is one of the real oddities of the module. The module also was a pain for the mapper but since so much hangs off of the central area with the kitchens dining room and the landing from the first corridor, it all fits back together.

B1 was only nominally moved to Moldvay by adding morale scores. I was using a brown cover copy of the module instead of B1 for that reason, but there's a dwarf who has exceptional Strength and another whose Constitution score isn't high enough to qualify for the class. There's also a place or two using 3d6 under stat as an ability check instead of the B/X Expert method of using 1d20 roll-under; I find each to work pretty well despite the different probabilities.

All in all it's a fun module to run, and Moldvay worked as well as I expected it to. PCs are a bit tougher than in Holmes because of how ability scores work, but it's still the same fundamental game. I really think B1 could use some re-skinning though in the future. If nothing else, to avoid the "fantasy IKEA" effect.

Historical versus Pseudo-Historical Settings

I've started working on an idea for a sandbox and multi-level dungeon. The inspiration is from old Roman catacombs (there are some pretty amazing maps out there) beneath an old abandoned Roman city near a backwater modern village. I'm thinking that Glanum in the South of France as an inspiration for place, and possibly using the Albigensian Crusade as a setting to have some high-level drama with a local component (heresy and all that).

Which is all well and good. Where I'm a bit torn is whether this module should be set in the actual Languedoc or in a fictional analog. James Raggi stuck his Better Than Any Man in historical Germany during the Thirty Years' War, and I think it works fairly well as a module. But there is an automatic feeling from "we're in historical Europe" in games I've run there that I'm not sure I want to evoke in this particular sandbox (which I am hoping to eventually get into shape as a proper module).

Some excellent fantasy literature has managed to be set directly on earth. Adept's Gambit is a novella set during the Seleucid rule of Tyre, rather than in the traditional Lankhmar of Fafhrd and the Mouser. C.L. Moore's Jirel of Joiry and Clark Ashton Smith's Averoigne stories take place in medieval France just as my sandbox, complete with fictitious towns and provinces.

It has certain advantages, as I discussed in the "Dark Age Dungeons" article in the second issue of Dungeon Crawl. You get the richness of medieval Christianity, although that is sometimes a step too far for some people. There's a whole world of culture that you can draw from, although it also restricts you from being able to freely make up as much.

What I'm wondering is whether a thin veneer of pseudo-history might better serve the overarching goal of a flavorful setting while avoiding getting bogged down in details about reality. For instance, because it's inspired by an area that spoke Occitan (sometimes known by the name of one of its dialects, Provençal), French names would be wildly historically wrong in a real-world setting, but in a fantasy analog of France, I can use French names which would give it a much more recognizable flavor.

Simply for my own running, being able to make up churches (and a conflict similar to the Albigensian Crusade but different) would be a major bonus. Too much Christianity is a bit off to me, and the devil-worshiping goat-men could also be a race of demon-worshippers. It lets us detach a bit and insert a good amount of extra "fantasy" into this process.

I also think this is easier to fit into another fantasy setting. Languedoc is specific, whereas my pseudo-France will be much more ready to slip into an already established world. The labels easier to change, the references less baked in by nature.

Now, if I could only figure out which version of D&D I want to run this in...

The Impact of Unique Monsters

There's a school of thought in the Old School movement that says that monsters generally should be unique things. I understand this impulse even though I don't subscribe to that school of thought - mainly because I love books of monsters. Lamentations of the Flame Princess and the recent "Psychedelic Adventures" series by Geoffrey McKinney have gone the furthest in seeing this through, although there are discussions to this effect by others. Seeing Better Than Any Man, the LotFP Free RPG Day release, has sort of cemented some of my thoughts on this.

One result of this is that there are, well, unique monsters. These are cool, because they're always new and different. Sometimes they follow themes, such as the animal-like creations in Geoffrey McKinney's Isle of the Unknown and Dungeon of the Unknown. (The former is usable as a virtual bestiary on its own.) Other times they're just truly bizarre things, like some of the creatures of Better Than Any Man. There are plenty of good routes to go here, and between Matt Finch and James Raggi's books for designing monsters, there are good resources to go any of them.

The second thing you see in these modules is a lot more human antagonists. It's quite easy, and indeed some people champion the idea, to have the entire cursus honorum of humanoids replaced by humans of various aspects and types. Bandits, brigands, cavemen, berserkers, and so on become more important, as do unique humans with class levels. It makes a world where some humans are the worst monsters of all. At the same time, I've found that parties are less likely to charge blindly into combat with humans instead of at least attempting parley, so it's a mixed bag overall.

The last thing we see is a lot of giant animals. Mutant animals, magic animals, animals that are extra vicious for one reason or another, insects, mammals, reptiles, arachnids - pretty much running the gamut. The tendency to do this is pretty universal among the modules I've reviewed, and it has interesting world-building implications. Why is the world full of giant/mutant/magic animals? Does it have hybrids like owlbears? Where do beast-men fit in all of this? The questions are interesting. One thing I'd like to see is fantasy fauna - that is, animals that are mundane but otherworldly - sort of a fantasy equivalent of the thoat, calot etc of Barsoom. It'd make these a bit more varied.

On the whole, I enjoy the modules that use this approach. They're fresh and different, and have useful ideas. But as a great lover of monster books I can't go along with the idea, even though I enjoy the fruits of their creations. The diversity in all this is really one of the best things about the Old School gaming movement today.