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

Fading Gems in Classic D&D

I'll preface this by noting that I prefer to use OD&D volumes II and III to roll up treasure for my classic games, no matter what rules I am nominally following. This has led me to notice a small but extremely meaningful change in gems, specifically.

When you roll on the gems table in OD&D, you come up with a value between 10 and 1000 GP. Once you roll each gem, you roll a d6 to see whether it needs to be increased a step. Every 1 rolled moves it up by a step and calls for a further roll. Beyond 1000, this goes to 5000 GP and then, by increasingly large steps, all the way up to half a million. (This is less ridiculous than it seems; there is only a 10% chance of rolling a 1000 GP gem, and you'd need to roll six 1s in a row - almost one in half a million odds, in total.)

Without getting too much into the math, OD&D gems wind up averaging about 440 GP each. This is heavily inflated by outliers, but that is the reality of gems in the game: you get one 5000 GP gem and it also skews a PC's XP total rather nicely. Over one percent of gems will be so valuable, so they are rare but possible in-game events, too. (Whereas maybe two in a million will be worth 500K.)

The Holmes edition contains a reworked gem table that changes two factors. First, it lowers the chances of high value gems, skewing the whole situation toward lower values. Second, it caps the value of increases at 1000 GP. The net effect is that, in Holmes, the value of the average gem declines to under 250 GP. This is quite a letdown, even though the rationale for removing gem values over 1000 in Holmes is sound: they could take the PCs clear past level 3 and out of the basic set's purview.

Moldvay uses the same modified table as Holmes, but has no increase rolls. This further simplification shaves another 50 or so GP off the average gem, leaving it a few GP under 200. At this point we are less than half what we had in OD&D, and all through some evidently minor fiddling with the numbers of the chart.

In play, this makes gems in an OD&D dungeon a very desirable commodity, since their values tend to run higher (and since, in OD&D, you tend to find 1d6 gems rather than a single gem at a time). Gems are already the second best treasure in the game, after jewelry; after all, if one gem weighs the same as one gold piece but is worth five hundred, that makes a huge dent on encumbrance relative to value. In OD&D, it's worth taking a determined effort to specifically find gems in a dungeon. In Holmes and Moldvay, because their value is so much lower on average, it's not really worth seeking them out after level 1.

Also, I think that the removal of the 5000+ GP gem values takes out a bit of the excitement of finding a treasure hoard. By allowing for that possibility in a GP-for-XP game, OD&D makes it really possible that an individual treasure will get some low level characters up in level in a single adventure. It also allows for some really impressive physical specimens - after all, isn't a lot of the joy of treasure hunting not just finding some average jewels but a massive pearl or ruby? If you can't find a diamond like the one in the film Titanic (which I figure would be in the 100,000-500,000 GP range), I think it diminishes gems as a vital part of the hoard.

Hiding the Treasure

I've been thinking a lot about the idea of hidden treasure, particularly treasure in rooms that don't have monsters in them. In OD&D, there is a 1 in 9 chance that a room will have no monsters (3-6 on the first roll) but have treasure (1 on the second roll). Clearly these aren't lying about in the open; U&WA says:

Unguarded Treasures should be invisible, hidden behind a secret door or under the floor, locked in hard-to-open strong boxes with poison needles or deadly gas released when they are opened. (There are many variants of the above possible, and many other types of protection which can be devised.)

Given the above parameters, one in nine dungeon rooms should have some interesting feature that conceals or guards treasure. I had a PC in my pick-up game on Saturday fall into a pit trap triggered by removing a jewelry box from a treasure chest. A Stonehell PC was recently killed by falling rocks triggered by taking silver from an open bowl.

It's obvious why treasure isn't lying open; if it were, someone would have taken it by now. In a dungeon, there are really three things that should make getting at a treasure difficult: it can be dangerous, time-consuming, or in a genuinely obscure place. Chests with false bottoms, money sewn into the lining of a robe, jewels at the bottom of a particular empty wine cask - there are dozens of possibilities for valuables to have been hidden. PCs with treasure on their minds will think nothing of laying a room to waste, knocking through floors, ripping apart furniture, searching through trash - anything for a gold piece.

Consider the Nobel Prizes that were dissolved in aqua regia to hide them from the Nazis during World War II. This could be a great way to hide gold, or even a magical item, if you have an alchemist who can reconstitute the item afterward. People will go to tremendous lengths to hide wealth.

I think in some cases there should be hiding-places that PCs can conceivably discover more information about, rather than sitting around tapping every stone for hollowness. For instance, say a wall has not one but ten hollows, to to deter would-be raiders from stumbling upon a hidden treasure. Perhaps a long-dead body elsewhere in the dungeon has a note among its possessions with nine "X"s and one "O" - that could be pieced together to find the correct hiding spot. In general, I think that this should be a reward system for good exploration. At the same time, other treasures should only be discovered by pure gumption, having been hidden generations earlier by someone or something who never got to go back and find them. Of course uncovering them is time-consuming, and raises the probability of a wandering monster, particularly if you're using a hammer to take out dungeon wall stones.

One last type to consider for today is the places that will be instinctively avoided by PCs. For instance, a perfectly good treasure could be at the bottom of a pit trap - even one that had been carried by a previous unlucky delver. Stick a green slime right on top of the treasure, and stick it in a fireproof box, then plan to flame it off.