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.

Borderwilds AAR and The Dungeon First Foray

When we last left our heroes, they had successfully ambushed a small rat-thing outpost.  The group split up, half to return a badly wounded hench-halfling to his home, half to clear the rat-thing warren.  So five brave heroes (sans artillery – if first level wizards can be classified as such) spent an hour and a half exploring the caves of the rat-things only to find the leader had absconded with all the loot. 

They were able to track said leader deeper into the mountains to the entrance of The Dungeon.  During the game and on a whim, I google image searched “Skull Mountain” and found this image.  This is now the official entrance to The Dungeon, which the players have christened Skull Dungeon.

Turns out this is from the Smurfs of all places.  Taking inspiration
from any and all media - a time honored OSR tradition.

Though it meant their quarry living to fight and scheme another day, the players returned to town to rest up for a week.  They returned, loaded for owlbear, and promptly triggered a shrieker.  Said shrieker alerted the goblins on level 1, who arrived en masse, and graciously offered to escort the characters to the second level of the dungeon (the Cult of Chaos) for the nominal fee of 5 gold per head.  (The goblins are playing both sides against the middle, having granted succor to the rat-things for the same price.)

Locked into the Temple of Chaos, the characters flubbed their first encounter with the leader of the cult and fought a vicious battle on the lower steps, won the day and blundered into a second ambush moments later.  They survived that ambush and had just enough time to loot the Black Library before cultish reinforcements arrived and chased them off into the safety (sic) of the goblin escort.

At the end of the day, the characters learned quite a bit about Skull Dungeon and absconded with several heavy tomes, one of which is cursed, one of which is magic, and one of which is both.  They’re going to need some help dealing with all three of those, but are looking forward making another attempt on the Temple.  As of right now, they figure 5 gold is a cheap price to pay for not fighting the goblins.  We’ll see how they feel about that when the goblins do what goblins always do.

Finding the Devil

A week or so ago I posted the small scale map for my current hex-crawl campaign, The Borderwilds.  A few days laterYellowDingo (over on his own blog) made a blanket offer to create a detailed hex-map in the classic style for anyone who wanted one, and I was lucky enough to hit the front of the queue.  He turned this:

Into this:

Big difference, eh?  He was worried that he wouldn't be able to do the Borderwilds justice.  Needlessly, as you can see.  Look at all those details - we can stash all sorts of metaphorical and literal devils in there.

His map is different from mine in a number of ways, but each one opens up new opportunities for my campaign.  Where my hexmap is limited to a hundred or so hexes, this one has...well, just look at them all.  This new and improved map has a lot more granularity, and a lot more variation, especially along the margins.  The break between swamp and grassland isn't nearly as sharp, and there are all sorts of little 'islands' of terrain within other terrains - perfect places to hide dungeon entrances.

The little details YellowDingo provided are going to help sell this as a living place, that long valley in the south, that high desert, the ruins clinging to a cliff way up in the upper-left hand corner.  Good stuff, people.  Wish I had the patience to produce this sort of thing myself.

Here's the thing - if a guy goes to this much trouble to add to my campaign, I'm not about to cherry pick.  So this map now represents the 'ground truth' of my campaign.  Which is really nice, because it means that I get to have those moments of discovery that my players do every week.  I didn't know there was a high desert vale in the north, but there is.  I didn't know Ogrefell was situated at the mouth of two valleys - but it is.  I didn't even realize there's a big ruined city on the bluffs up north - but there is now.  Can't wait to stock it with monsters.

Now I'm gonna have to pay that favor forward by converting YellowDingo's Dragon Realms into something a little more my speed.  Let's see if I can do his map justice.

Borderwilds: DM Map

As promised, here's the full map of the Borderwilds.

This one is for clarity.

All of the major land forms are represented on this map, grassland, swamp, forest, mountain, desert, broken hills, rivers and coastline.  This lets us throw anything we want at the players.

Risk management is a big part of the philosophy of sandbox games.  Players need to know when to exercise caution and when to retreat.  You can take that idea too far, though, by dumping a purple worm nest an hour's march from base camp for example.

This map helps the players out a bit in that regard - the three monster habitats closest to base will be stocked with low level monsters like goblins, lizardmen, and basic undead.  The troll tribes, giants, and big monsters live north in the hills and across the mountains in the wastelands.

This is for inspiration.

While not hard and fast barriers, the northern river and the mountains help constrain the players until they are ready for the heavy hitters. A determined party will find a way into the wastes without having to fight the demon guarding demon pass, which has that name for a reason.  They'd be fools to do so, and in that respect, they'd be ignoring all the warning signs and would deserve to be eaten by the wyverns and sphinxes to the west.  Likewise with that one old stone bridge that crosses the northern river.

Is that meta-gaming?  It is in a design sense, but not in a 'playing the game' sense.  No more so than listening to the rumors of great winged beasts sometimes seen in the skies past the mountain tops.  Which brings us to another 'design' way of steering players - rumors.

But we'll talk more about that tomorrow some other time.

Borderwilds: Building a Better Sandbox

As things stand I've got the megadungeon, one page goblin caves, and the revised Crypt of Laun Phien.  That's two big and one little dungeon.  Not a bad start, but the players are badgering me about what's going on between these dungeons.  Luckily, they grew up on a steady diet of video games, so once I explained the nomenclature, they8 dove right into the merits of a narrative campaign versus a sandbox campaign.  They chose the latter.  

Which is fine, because Ben Robbin's West Marches style-hex-crawl-slash sandbox campaign has snared another convert in me.  After days of letting ideas fester deep in the recesses of my lizard brain, I've put graphite to paper and started filling in the hexes of a wilderness.  This series of posts will detail my progress and hopefully provide some insight into the process.

Right from the start I knew that I wanted to keep this thing manageable.  So I set a limit of 144 hexes, or an area 12 by 12.  That's plenty big enough for a wide variety of wilderness types, but small enough for a single group to really make a dent in exploration wise.  There should be one region of each of the major terrain types.  The dungeons should vary as wildly as possible.

So here's the background:  Cornerstone Keep used to be the central fort on the frontier between the Empire and the barbarian hordes to the north.  Over the course of centuries, the grass on the plains north of the keep was watered with the blood of countless men.  Eventually the barbarian numbers dwindled and the wars faded and the Keep fell into disuse.  Then the wilderness took over   Monsters of all stripes filtered into the areas north of the Keep and the frontier was restored.  Now the  Keep stands as a bulwark against monsters that have mostly learned better than to cross the Brillig River.  As such, it's really more of a dumping ground for politically connected incompetents and ne're do wells.

The players start the game with the map shown above.  It shows the end of the road (literally) and all that is known at the outset.  You can walk across three road hexes in a day or two off-road hexes, but you've only got a 1 in 6 chance of stumbling onto a point of interest walking across a hex.  To really explore a hex, you need to park there and spend a full day covering the ground.  This raises your chances to 5 in 6.  Still no guarantee, but at least you gave it the old Unseen University try.

Next time we'll look at the rest of the map and how things start to fit together.

AAR: Borderwilds

In which the author recounts his experience running 5-7 thirteen year old kids through an OSR D&D campaign:

When last we met, our intrepid heroes successfully foiled the evil wizard Bargle's plan to discredit the king by retrieving the king's Sword of Authority from a dungeon of Bargle's design.  The wizard, tired of fancy footing around, murdered the king, assumed the throne, and ordered the arrest of the heroes who ruined his first plan.  Getting wind of the threat, the heroes fled to the farthest corner of the tottering empire, there to lay low while they lay their plans.

Borderwilds - DM Map

Cornerstone Keep is the empire's trash heap - the place where the Emperor exiles all the screw-ups and misfits who are too politically connected to be shot from a catapult.  This is the last place Bargle would think to look for them.  The keep lies on the far border of the empire in a quiet, out of the way hole that hasn't seen any trouble in decades - not since the wildmen of the north stopped raiding civilized lands.

Borderwilds - Player Map

That's the keep at the bottom of the map.  North of this map are the barbarian tribes who once warred with the empire for generations.  A few hundred years ago, their numbers dwindled, and the frontier fell quiet.  No one really knows what lies north of the Brillig River any more.  Used to be the Battle Plains stretched farther north, but time and nature have changed things.  At the start of the campaign this is all they have to go on.

Two roads diverge before them.  Do they explore the Borderwilds to find treasure and powerful artifacts with an eye towards returning to civilized lands and stabbing Bargle in the face repeatedly, or do they carve out a kingdom of their own from the Borderwilds, attract followers and henchmen, and then march on the empire to overthrow Bargle and stab him in the face repeatedly.  Either way, they are going to need a lot of gold.  And that means finding holes in the ground to plunder.

Not the final disposition.

Their first encounter at the Keep was with the Castellan, who bade them investigate rumors of foul creatures in the mining town of Ogrefell.  After meeting with the locals, they assaulted a small cave and got their asses handed to them by the tribe of rat creatures that lived there.  After some retreating of the expeditious kind, they planned out an elaborate ambush at the mouth of the cave.

The wizard and two halfling henchmen stand above the cave, ready to roll rocks down on the heads of the the stupid rat creatures.  Archers stand behind trees, with the dwarf ready to flank.  In the end, they laid out bait for the stupid rat creatures, and pulled off a big win.  Thinking they'd dealt with all but the ring-leader and his shaman side-kick, the evening ended with the plucky adventurers once more delving into the dark.