Cult of the Dungeongod

Castle Meatgrinder is an extension of a Lovecraftian chaos-demon-god, oozing into the mundane world.  It tempts the unwary with promises of riches and power, but hungers for only the bravest and fittest, and so guards its lucre by extruding guardians both foul and vicious.  As heroes plumb its depths, and as it consumes ever stronger heroes, it deepens and grows and offers up great treasures the better to tempt ever more noble prey.

Not all denizens of Castle Meatgrinder were birthed from the mucus of its raw chaos.  Some men believe that they can tap into the power of the Dungeongod, and attach themselves lamprey-like, to its bulk.  Taking little, but adding to the chaos of the dungeon, they are welcomed by the dream-like sentience.  They lure the unwary, and sometimes even drag unwilling innocents into the depths of Castle Meatgrinder in the hopes that the screams and pain of their sacrifices will appease the Dungeongod, and it will grant them power and wealth.

They are the Cult of the Dungeongod.  They are a mix of figures from RPE's Southern Death Cult and 15mm.co.uk figures.

First up, these Hooded Executioners.  The pack comes with six figures, but one was miscast, and not needed.

Most of the rest are from the Blighthaven pack.  That pack comes with three more figures; the zombies don't work with the human cult angle, but they'll make a re-appearance when I paint up the undead faction for Castle Meatgrinder.

I couldn't decide whether to go with black or red robes, so I went with both.

The guy on the left in the next photograph is probably supposed to be a zombie figure, but he  is clean enough to look like a degenerate human, so he goes with the Cult.

 

The two figures on the left, the guy with the grimoire and High Priest Come'atmebro, are list on 15mm.uk.com's website under the HOF sci-fi line as Cultist Sinners Retribution.

That full pack comes with a third cultist herding little creepy crawlies.  In retrospect, those critters would work well in a dungeon environment, too.  Kinda regret not picking those up at the time.  Here's a shot of the book holder and High Priest working together.

A Note on Random Dungeons

Long time internet based D&D dungeon designers know all about Dyson Logos and his brilliant series of dungeon geomorphs.  They also know about Dave Millar's amazing contribution to our little hobby, Dave's Mapper, which builds a random dungeon using geomorphs created in Dyson's style.  The Mapper has geomorphs created by a couple of dozen artists, and the individual tiles can be rotated, flipped, swapped out, and tweaked in a bunch of different ways.  It's a very powerful tool for inspiring dungeons that rises above the level of "random generator".

Well, now the Mapper has one more contributor.  In my on-going effort to give a little something back to the community, I've added a dozen new tiles to the "side-view" portion of the program - you can even see my name in lights.  (LCD screens are lights, right?)  My surface tiles give DM's a chance to sink a dungeon right below the streets of a town or village with secret entrances outside the wall, through the sewers, and of course vie secret ways beneath pubs of ill-repute.

Don't thank me.  This is my thank-you to YOU.

I've used this tool to build a few levels for my current (under-construction) mega-dungeon by starting with a random map, tweaking the tiles to get the right layout, and then redrawing the map to bring it all together into a coherent whole.  Although there is no way to select tiles based on themes such as "undead" or "underwater", many of the contributors have tiles that have their own little theme.  Once of the artists includes a lot of little niches set into the walls all over the place, so I've used his tiles as a starter for my catacombs level, for example.

So go, play with it a bit.  Enjoy.  Maybe if I ever get caught up on a few of my other projects, I'll add more tiles to the program.

D&D, The Teen Paradigm

My now fifteen year old son showed me the notes that he's drafting for the D&D campaign he is running for his friends.  It's an interesting glimpse into one creative solution designed by a player who has played the game for years, but has never cracked open a module.  He had no model on which to build, so he just sat down and started making notes in a very visual manner.  You'll have to click to make these readable.

This is the start of the campaign.  The players are tasked with helping a large city defend itself against a besieging orcish army. The double lines are the city's inner and outer walls. The king has been duped by an evil mage, and there's a dragon riding hero in the mix too.  Evidence that the king's adviser is a traitor is scattered about; hopefully the players aren't expected to find them all, but that they represent different ways to learn the truth and confront the evil mage.

The mech powered by the oblisk (sic) in the lower right hand corner ties into the second part of the campaign...

I don't know the full details here.  There are pieces of the oblisk scattered about, so there's your fetch quest.  Now we learn the evil mage from part one was serving a lich undead boss.  It looks to me like an evil lich is supplying the drow - commanded by driders (a departure from canon already, thumbs up).  There are potential allies up above that spooky magic fog in the form of a dwarf fortress.

When I asked him about the details, he said these two pages give him everything he needs to fill those in.  He doesn't know what the players are going to do, so he just wrote down a bunch of stuff to help him remember the important bigs.  ("You mean those are all mnemonics?"  "Is that what those are called?").  As for stats...he figures all he needs is a spell list for the casters, and he can make the rest up as he goes.

Harry Chapin put it best...

The Brass Canon's Plunder - A One Page Dungeon Contest Entry

It's getting to be that time of year again.  Time for the One Page Dungeon Contest.

My entry this year was designed for ease of use at the table.  Most of the relevant backstory didn't make the final cut.  Maybe it wasn't so relevant after all.  For those who are curious, more information is presented below the fold.

The Brass Canon's Plunder by warrenabox

The Legend
The tale of The Brass Canon, pirate captain and terror of the Rainbow Seas, is a ripping good cautionary tale about the fate of all thieves.  A holy man captured by slavers, he turned pirate himself and rose to become the most notorious high-seas brigand of the last century.  Such a nuisance he made of himself, that the Old Empire sent a small fleet to bring him to justice or send him to the bottom of the sea.   The long search finally concluded when the Imperial Fleet found the Captain’s ship, the Godshank, sheltering from a heavy thunderstorm in the lee off a small lighthouse isle.

The captain ran for open sea, but was driven onto the rocks protecting a small cove. A thousand imperial sailors and officers watched as every man pirate fell into the wave-tossed waters and drown. The Brass Canon’s plunder was never recovered.

The Facts
The Brass Canon had already buried his treasure on the island, and intended for the fleet to watch him crash his ship on the rocks and bear witness to the death of he and his men.  The plan was to swim to shore and steal the lighthouse supply caravel.  The Captain didn’t reckon on the high seas, and did indeed perish in the seas along with all but one of his men. A young cabin boy managed to swim to shore and wait out the storm.  He recovered his Captain’s body and buried it in a shallow grave.  Before burying his Captain, the boy cleverly recovered the Captain’s journal from his great coat pocket.

Escaping on the supply caravel by stowing away, the boy grew to an honest man and never managed to return to the scene of the wreck.The journal passed down from father to son to grandson.  After a one hundred year journey, it somehow found its way into the hands of the party...

Under Construction - One Page Dungeon

Hey everybody, big fan of the One Page Dungeon contest here.  One of my prouder gaming moments came a few years back when Bryce, of tenfootpole.org reviewed my last entry.  He's a cranky old bastard, and his personality shines in his many take-downs of the failures of most published work, let alone that of the work of hack amateurs like yours truly.  And yet he had this to say about mine:

"I WANT MORE OF GOOD SHIT LIKE THIS!... A decent goblin adventure, which is not an easy thing to do."

Why Bryce, ah do declare!  Like to give me a case of the vapors!

The deadline for this year is April 30th, so it's time to get cracking.  This year my own personal challenge is to whip up a quick and dirty one page sandbox campaign.  How's that for ambitious?  So far I've got the preliminary map complete.

Still need to stock it, add some rumors, maybe a couple of small landmarks if there's room after all that.  Still and all, so far so good.

Stock These Caves

Need a natural cavern map?  Here's one you can use:

Shameless Ripoff: The Crypt of Laun Phien

It's no secret that Djekspek is pretty a damn impressive designer.  Check out a few of his one page dungeons over on Devian Tart and you'll see.  Look at this thing - it's beautiful.  Or this one - that just begs to be stocked and run.  Even with nothing in them, his dungeons have more character than most network sitcoms.

While poking through past winners of the One Page Dungeon contest, I stumbled on to his brilliant little dungeon called the Temple of Laun Phien.  It incorporates clever rotating floorplans in a way that makes sense but should baffle players just long enough.

As usual click it to big it.  Because me no am smart, me build
physical map with card stock so me can rotate dungeon
as game is played.

It's brilliant idea, but flawed.  You see how that middle drum rotates opposite the two outer drums?  That means you get an effective 90-degree rotation and you limit the number of permutations the dungeon can have. It also means the hallway in the central drum will never line up with the hallways in the middle circle.  Much as I love this dungeon, it also misses out on a couple of other features that I think should be important.  To remedy these concerns, I've shamelessly stolen the basic concept and built my own Temple of Laun Phien.

Also remember that I'm a big fan of real time clocks to up tension in games, so my Crypt rotates every 10 minutes in real time.  The clock provides a big clue for the players that something hinky is going on here.

First big difference here is that the inner ring is locked in place.  The inner ring rotates one way and the outer ring another.  That fixes the problem of inaccessible areas.  It also keeps the the three labelled rooms, the ones that most vary from Djekspek's original version, locked in place.  This also means that clever players can escape if they find that straight hallway and just wait up to 80 minutes for it to swing around.  That's okay - that's clever play and should be encouraged.

A - Entrance and Warning
Players have to fully commit every time they enter the Crypt.  The first room in a bare room with a single lever in the back wall and a warning carved into the wall to 'abandon hope' effect.  This forces the players to take action and pull that lever for a trip around the fun house. That's kind of important because it means that the dungeon is always open when they get there, and it gives everyone a concrete start time for the countdown to rotation.


B - Control Room
Once they realize what's going on, the characters should have at least a little control over the rotation.  This room does just that.  It contains two levers.  Pulling one rotates the drums and resets the timer to 10 minutes.        The other lever controls which way the rings rotate.  You could use these levers to pick which hallway you want to exit, but since this room only faces the outer ring that doesn't get you much closer to the central crypt.  This might seem like it gives them power, but it really just complicates things by giving them one more variable to have to deal with.


C - Power Supply
This might be the most dangerous room in the dungeon.  It houses the clacking and wheezing and buzzing machine of brass and copper and glass that taps into the aethaer to power the whole dungeon.  Break this and you're stuck here...possibly forever.  Hope you've got a dwarf or a tinker with you then.

Anywho, that's my take on the Temple of Laun Phien.  Can't wait to inflict it on my players.

More 3-D: Just Can't Help Myself

I feel like Lenny from Mice and Men.  I've found something new and shiny and now I just can't let go of it.  I have to love it and pet it and squeeze it and hold it and design it to death.  The good news is that you get to take advantage of my dilettante-esque largess.  Two more sets of three dimensional dungeon graph paper are available.  The best part is that you can use both of these two different ways; if you flip the paper over the design works just as well. Damn, that's spiffy.  Here are the two blanks:

And just to demonstrate a little proof of concept, here's a little number I banged out in about 30 minutes using the second template.  It's not going to win any awards, but this is a dungeon that isn't constrained to any two dimensions.  Just mapping this sucker is going to present a nice challenge for the players.

Three Dimensional Dungeon Graph Paper

Tsojcanth of Lost Papers of Tsojcanth fame offers up this gem of a post in which he explains how to make awesome 3-D dungeons out of horizontal and vertical dungeon geomorphs. 

Here's a peak at it, but you have to hit up his blog for the full skinny.

This is a really slick way of designing dungeons, and he sells the idea good and hard.  Apparently, climbing up and down presents challenges for characters that players actually enjoy.  Who knew? 

The problem that I had with this process is that I don't like using geomorphs.  They're great for inspiration and I can see why so many DMs use them, but overly random nature leaves me cold.  I found myself wondering why some clever guy didn't just make some 3-D graph paper that I could use to draw up my own dungeon.  Then I remembered that I'm a clever guy and got busy:



Click on this for the bigger version. You can see the
seams in my hacked together blocks, but you should
be able to work around that.

This isn't perfect.  If you use this paper, (and I encourage you to do so and wouldn't mind seeing how you use it, wink nudge) you're stuck with my big blocky structures.  But it does free up your imagination and allow you to a lot more control over your dungeon architecture.  I highly recommend hitting up Dave's Mapper for more inspiration on the vertical tiles.
Keep an eye out, as inspiration strikes I hope to put together more block files to give you more options, too.

Carving Out the Dungeons

Remember that sweet map by Dyson I showed you yesterday? Here it is again, marked up and ready for some serious analysis.  It really is an elegant design with all sorts of architectural features that work in favor of treating it as multiple dungeons.

First off, notice that big red area is connected to the greater dungeon by only one passageway.  There's only one way in or out, and it's tucked pretty far away from the dungeon entrance.  Clearly, that's pretty deep in the game.

What's more, there is a small cluster of rooms in orange tucked way back in the dungeon behind multiple secret doors.  That's the lair of the boss of the whole shooting match.  That's the home of the lich or deranged wizard who thinks he runs things.

The dark blue area is water filled passages - another buffer between the big bad bossman and the characters.  If they can't figure out a way to get through water filled passages, and monsters built for the water, they've got no business knocking on his door.

The light blue areas are shallow waters just barely deep enough to hide all sorts of nasty critters that low level adventurers should avoid.  That will keep them penned in to the right and upper portions of the map until they are really ready for the red danger zone.

The pink area is clearly a temple of some sort and (if you ignore the latrine on the right) it's connected by only two obvious doors and one secret door.  Another easy level to carve out.

The greenish areas are also islands with only tenuous connections to the rest of the dungeon.  In my plan, they become mini-dungeons, sub-levels to use the vernacular, that can be skipped altogether.  In fact, they will wind up with guardians, but a treasure to be named later.  We'll wait until that dwarf wonders where he can get a legendary throwing hammer, and we'll stick it there for him.

There are a few details that need to be changed around, and I'm not going to use all of those lines as they stand.  Next time I'll show you exactly how I sliced up the dungeon, and what levels each little portion of the dungeon represents.  Maybe a few words on other ways to let players know that they are running around in areas that are beyond their abilities.

Happy Birthday Alex!

This post is brought to you by my son's 13th birthday.  Everything I'm doing here, I'm doing in preparation for his party in which he and a party of friends will enter a dungeon...and they'll do it old school.

The last decade or so has witnessed countless attempts by your humble author to build a sprawling mega-dungeon fit for an insane wizard or alien evil godling.  Every effort failed miserably because I was too caught up in numerous new-school problems.  What do these guys eat?  How do they get in and out?  What is the poltical relationship between these orcs and those rock apes?  How the heck am I going to fully detail and flesh out over a hundred rooms?

Specifically, the following wonderful full page map from Dyson's Dodecahedron.  (He has lots of other pretty little things, you should visit his blog, too.)  Look at that thing, sprawling, interconnected, lots of fun little nooks and crannies, and enough chokepoints to carve it up into a bunch of separate mini-dungeons. Three times I've tried to fill it up and failed, but now I think I've finally figured out how to do it right.

My recent dive back into the old ways brought me into contact with some lovely blogs (links on your left) that helped me realize that I don't need to answer those questions at all.  There's one over-riding rule that I'd forgotten over the years:  It doesn't have to make sense, it just has to be fun.

With that in mind, the seed for a campaign was planted.  What if the dungeon was really a physical expression of an ancient entity forcing its way into our reality?  Thus was born the idea of The DungeonGod.  That alone wasn't enough.

It was Philotomy's musings that poured water on that seed and really helped it germinate.  In that link he quotes the original rules on doors. To whit, the dungeon isn't just the place where the monsters happen to live - the dungeon is itself a monster with a will of its own - a will set against that of the characters.   More to the point, it's a place where the boundary between the fantasy world and the other (even more alien) fantasy world are thin.  The normal rules do not apply.

Generally, doors will not open by turning the handle or by a push. Doors must be forced open by strength...Most doors will automatically close, despite the difficulty in opening them. Doors will automatically open for monsters, unless they are held shut against them by characters.

That also ties in well with another idea malingering about in my head, that monsters aren't just another (all too often categorized as misunderstood) race.  They are monsters.  They are evil incarnate.  They don't enter this world the way humans and dwarves and elves do.  They aren't raised from birth by loving families and clans that have hopes and fears for them. 

B1 - Caves of the Unknown Pool Room

Monsters are malicious creatures of pure malice crawled forth from the belly of blackness to bring pain and misery into the world. They are literally spawned in pools of foul ichor, sprung forth whole from the mind of the DungeonGod complete with armor and implements of pain.  And in a terrible twist of genius, they spring forth laden with gold and other valuables - birthed by the DungeonGod to entice greedy men into entering its domain.

Men like the party of adventurers who now need no more motivation to enter a deathtrap than, "We know there's monsters in there that need killing and lots of gold there for those willing to do it."  If, along the way, they happen to stumble onto one of those pools and destroy it with holy oil and water and powerful magicks? So much the better.

And that's how you justify not having to justify every little thing that happens in a dungeon.

Fore Warned is Four Armed

Woah, that's a lot of hits my One Page Dungeon post generated this week. Hello to all you Campaignwiki people.

It looks like this blog is slowly morphing from a miniature wargame blog into an old-school D&D blog.  Even to the point that my post titles directly tie in to high school memories of old edition modules.  Skip the italics here if you ever plan on running through S1 - Tomb of Horrors, or don't, it's been so long I'm probably remembering it wrong anyway.

So we had penetrated this far into Acererak's Tomb.  A dead end but for this mysterious statue.  Somebody gets the bright idea to put a few gems in the three hands of the statue.  Kr-r-runch!  The gems are turned to powder.  "Do it again," I tell the party skinflint.  Three more gems. Kr-r-runch!

"Obviously this means something, do it again," I tell the party skinflint. At this point I just wanted to see how much money he'd throw away onthe gem crushing statue.  Never found out though, after something like 5,000 gold worth of gems, a magic seeing-eye crystal appeared in the broken arm on the floor.  In a way I was disappointed.  We probably could have talked him into parting with another 10,000 gold before he gave up.

So if you're not into the whole D&D thing, or the meandering tales and 'show prep' of a middle aged sad sack dungeon master don't interest you, check back once in a while for the minatures.  Those aren't going anywhere.  But we're going to be doing some pen and paper dungeon delving.  I'm building a mega-dungeon for the boy, and you get to come along for the ride.

Old School Renaissance for the win, baby.

That's not such a bad thing, though. After all, what is D&D but a glorified war game anyway?  There's plenty of overlap between the two, and the one should keep my ADD from distracting me from my AD&D. Okay,technically, it won't keep me from my Rules Compendium 1991 update of the Cook/Moldvay rules for Basic D&D, but that joke doesn't have the same lilt to it.

Bonus Post! A One Page Adventure

UPDATED MARCH 29 - SEE BELOW

While trolling the seas of the internet for a fish of rules worthy enough to grace my table, I've been drifting in and out of the role-playing game blog-community.  Today I discovered a little thing called the One Page Dungeon contest.

"I can do this," thinks I.  After dusting off the old records, (by which I mean dusting off a three year old hard drive with my last round of notes on it,) and stripping down the notes from an adventure never run, I have crafted a one page dungeon in which a goblin tribe vexes the countryside, and the only solution is to send in a band of plucky heroes to put a cork in the font of evil spewing forth the hateful little thugs.

Here's a little preview of a one page dungeon titled, Will No One Rid Me of These Troublesome Goblins?

One delicious page of cliched goblin tropes assembled for your use.

UPDATE!
Here is the official entry form for your perusal.
Will No One Rid Me of These Troublesome Goblins?


By the way - that mouthy looking passage between the Foyer and the Main Hall?  Yeah - that's too narrow to squeeze through, but perfect for shooting arrows through.

And if any of you lot out there in internet-land ever run this thing, some feedback would be nice.  Like, a nice thank you, if you catch my drift.