Treasure in the Dungeon

I've spent the last three days fighting LibreOffice and my printer trying to assemble all my treasure tables into something organized that I might share.  Haven't succeeded, but in the process I think I have a simple treasure system hammered out now.  Here is my attempt to organize the chaos of my many treasure item charts:

How Much Treasure?
The amount of magic treasure you give out will be too much or not enough based on how many players you have and how often you play.   But for me, with 4-6 people playing 1-4 times a month, I think this system will work okay.   My goal is to get magic into their hands so they can have interesting choices to make and cool plans to come up with using these items.  So, 1-4 consumable magic items scattered in every dungeon. I also want treasure to seem cool, more than just money, so at least 1 player valued treasure per dungeon. And a 1 in 6 chance for non-consumable magic items.

Class-Specific Treasures
I think a simple way to make sure all classes present in your campaign get stuff to use is to rotate which class a class-based treasure belongs to.  Yes, knowing this might break the sense of realism a bit for a player, but class-based treasures are only one of four things that can be rolled, so they might occur so infrequently players don't notice the rotating pattern.  And even if they do, I'm betting it is worth a little gameyness to not randomly end up with magical swords over and over again in treasures found by a party of clerics and magic users.

Birthday Treasures
One curve ball in my treasure allocation process, is that my group and I have a tradition of letting players pick a magic item on their birthday.  I think some of the most awesome items my players have, have come from this route.  It takes away from the excitement of finding things in the mysterious underworld a bit.  But, they only have birthdays once a year, and in our circumstances where our campaign play would sometimes be stopped for long stretches by life it was a way to get some magic items in play.  And they love it.   So, not sure I would recommend it as a general practice, but it is an option that seems to be working out okay for us.

Work to Do
So, I have most of the charts needed for my system.  I still need some class-based consumables for clerics and fighters.  I put my idea of what could work for those in my chart-- weapon/armor oils for fighters and candles/incense for clerics seem to fit well.  I also need to work on more permanent class-based magic items.  A place to start might be One-Page type charts that gather the most iconic magic swords into one place, same for shields.  Or just invent more.  And yes, still haven't finished the player valued treasure tables.  I will try to share these as I finish them.

Dungeon Master - Basic Tools

One of my long time players had recently gotten super excited about DMing a D&Desque pirate campaign.  He has ideas for his own character classes and everything.  It reminds me of the young pre-teen me :)  And I suppose I have done a good job of conveying my DIY vision of this gaming thing we do, because he didn't ask "What system would be good to play out this idea I have," but just started coming up with his own rules and subsystems.

It has been really interesting for me to try and help him because there are a lot of things I didn't know how to do when I started DMing so I had to craft my own methods and tools.  Now I can share those with him and hopefully he can hit the ground running and adapt them however he wants.  I have so many tables and charts. 

It's also interesting, since I suffered a few hard drive failures over the years, trying to find these tables in editable forms.  Some of my tables apparently only exist as a hard copy in my personal DM folder or in posts on this blog.  Anyway, it has been fun and useful to try and revisit some of these old tools and revise them and pull together some of the things I've learned into one place.

Map
First I showed him two easy ways to make maps, a Toss & Trace way to make natural caverns (which came from this post) and a Tetromino Template Dungeon for purposefully built dungeons that can still be arranged for variety (originally from this post).  For the latter we didn't do the whole stencil thing, just cut and pasted the individual rooms.  Here is a revised sheet to make that easier:

Monsters
Then I gave him the run down on how I put monsters in my dungeons.  Now, this is for basic lower level dungeons and just focuses on unintelligent creatures at first.  But I think it's a handy baseline to have that you can add intelligent faction on top of.

Here is the Wandering Monster table I mention in that document (a revision of this):

There is a lot packed on there.  The idea is, if you are in a rush or learning this craft, that you can just reskin the four creature behavior types and use the default stats given.  But they are printed in light grey so you can revise them by writing over them if you want.  If your pirate cave's vermin are little albino crabs you can make their AC higher and write 14 over the default 12.

The little pips are how much that monster has to outnumber the party by before they become out-right hostile (they may stalk and do other aggressive things at lower ratios).  So, vermin would have to out number the party 4-to-1 before you roll initiative and they straight up start trying to attack.

The graph paper is so you can pre-roll creature hitpoints circle the appropriate squares and scratch them off in the heat of combat.

I told my player my dirty little secret that I will often use the rolled hitpoints for double duty, as a set encounter on the map and also as a wandering encounter if it comes up.  I figure losing a little randomness by not rerolling 18 crab hitpoints is worth the convenience I get as a DM.

The other table mentioned, What are the Monsters Doing? was from a post here, but I realized I didn't have an editable version anywhere so here it is.

Treasure
I haven't quite put together the handout on treasure yet.  I'm heading back up to the mountains, maybe I can add it here when I get back.  I need to explain how much monetary treasure I place.  How many potions, rings, wands, or other magical items and share the tables I have for all those.  And I should probably try to scour my blog for spells.  I probably have at least 30 interesting spell ideas.  I'm really bad at knowing how to assign levels though.  There was a Dragon magazine article I remember about designing spells that gave some guidelines for assigning levels.  I think I'll find that, print it out and take it to the mountains with me to study.

Anyway, I've linked all but the two inmages as doc files so you can mess with them if you want.  I consider them drafts I will need to revise and maybe put together as a little booklet.  I usually annotate my map with traps and treasures so during play I only have two letter-size sheets of paper to keep track of.  It is pretty easy and streamlined, no numbered room lists or anything.  I hope this is useful for some of you.  If nothing else, I've got the files up here for me to access later :)  Stay cool, folks.

After the Regatta

It's been a year since I DMed last.  We previously left our party after one of them had one the Regatta Gloriosa.  Now the adventures continue:

Anonimo - Rogue

Aphrodisia - Cleric
G - Cleric
Oma - Fighter
and various hirelings

We rolled on the Fad of the Day chart and negotiated the answer to mean bling was in season.  Which is fitting because there would be a procession from the docks to the central cathedral.  That is because in winning the regatta G secured the right to change the city's religion for a year.  

So, Shopping & Dragons happened for a while as players tried to bling themselves up.  I am horrible at estimating prices and may need to just buckle down and develop my own simplified price lists for the city as well as maybe develop a mini-game to make it more engaging for everyone.

After the blinged-out crew finished the procession there was a banquet attended by all the most important families in Ulminster.  After many courses of some of the city's famous delicacies there was a toast.  Suddenly one old priest lurch back and melted into a tarry substance.  Chaos erupted, people running and screaming it was an ill omen.

The party investigated the body but there wasn't much left except his staff that had scratch marks around the tip.  G asked the Captain, his diety, for the power to speak with the dead and was granted it.  After asking a few questions they determined the old dude had no clue what happened to him, but he mentioned a strange word "sevreson."  Asking around, the party ended up talking to Learned Henry who informed them that sevreson was a rare, rural digestif and proceeded to sing a song about it.  Talking to another old priest Bonny Burleson who was the deceased roommate, they found he often snuck off to the cellar, for what they assumed was a snort of the stuff.  On searching the cellar, though, they found nothing resembling the rare liqueur.  G asked the Captain for gudiance and they were led to a rack in one corner of the cellar that could be swung out.

On the other side of this secret door they found a natural cavern with a keg.  on top of the keg was some tarry substance that looked like a rat had died and its foul fluids were dripping down near the tap.  They just began searching the caverns when we stopped for the night.

Oh, I forgot, Aphrodisia can see the future and had a dream of a scantily clad person clambering up a wall in the cathedral to steal a jeweled cross.  and several times during the evening (procession, banquet)  strange masked figure appeared. 

Reflection
So, about the last two notes-- I'm trying to plant seed for a thriving Snake cult they can chose to investigate (the scantily clad thief) and also start escalating some craziness in the world related to people donning masks that will occur whether they get involved or not.

Backing up, while super simple, this is the first time I've ever ventured into something mystery-like.  It seemed to go ok.  I didn't even think about the cleric's ability to speak with the dead, though.  So, next time I try something like this I should have weird clues for the dead person to give.

Also, I introduced Henry and Burleson specifically so that the players would have different avenues to find out about things.  They are two of my three ideas for distinct knowledge npcs (the Veteran and the Storyteller).  It was a bit of a rusty start, but hopefully it will become more fruitful.

In addition to thinking about pricelists I mentioned above I want to create my own version of Chris Hogan's Fad of the Day chart.  I think the idea is brilliant, but I think I might be using it slightly differently than he intended,  I mostly want something fresh and potentially funny to differentiate social interaction each session.  So, I need less support from the chart for repercussion for not following the fad and more help with what the fad actually is.  I'll share it if I make it.  Hope you are all have fun gaming with friends.  See you next post.

Imagining a City

As you learn to DM there seems to be several stages you go through.  First, you master the enclosed space of a dungeon.  Then you have to figure out how to handle a bigger "wilderness" area, whether it's underground or a true wilderness.  And, at some point, you need to figure out how to deal with the "City."

If you've followed my blog you've seen my long process of learning those first two.  Recently I've been struggling with the City. 

I was born in a suburb 45 minutes north of LA.  So when I think of a city I think mostly of freeways and off ramps.  It's hard for me to envision even a pseudo-medieval city.

Nidus
My first city when I started gaming a again was Nidus, the Shifting City.  The premise was that this chaotic place had stalls and shops that moved every week if not every day.  There was no map.  There was no ruler.  It was me trying to have the conveniences of a city for my players without having to deal with the difficulties of mapping and then peopling a place with tens of thousands of inhabitants.  And it worked pretty well.  Players had their own reason to go there - buying and selling stuff- and I had a very big "encounter" table that they rolled on each time they ventured into the city.  The encounters weren't dangers or adventure hooks, just interesting stuff you saw.  And yet, there was nothing to keep players from making them into dangers or adventures.

I can't make every city a chaotic, bazaar, though.  So, when faced with my players visiting a city recently, I was stumped at how to proceed.

The Problem with Cities
One problem with cities is that the assumption seems to be that players will get entangled in various plots and intrigues.  But unless players are really high level this is very unlikely to me.  It's as if I were to drive into LA and all of a sudden the mayor is asking me favors. 

Another problem is that cities are busy places with lots of factions and lots of plots and events going on.  But how do you get players involved without railroading them.

A third problem is that, more than any dungeon, cities are about sights, sounds, and bustling scenes.  And conveying that kind of sensory stuff through description is always difficult especially if you are trying to do it off the cuff.

So I guess, if you were to boil it down the two big ways I needed, and still need, help with DMing a city are 1) how to make it about more than a place for players to shop (without making the players seem unrealistically like rockstars with all the attention on them) and 2) how to make it feel like a busy, bustling, populated place.

To do this, I think I can take some cues from what I've already learned about sandboxes, some cues from how video games handle cities, and add in some things that are unique about cities.

Locations
So, like sandboxes I think there should be locations that players know about and can visit or not.  You can prepare subsytems ahead of time and these locales will always be available to be looped into some plot or happening going on in the city.  Here are some ideas of some I want to make for my current city:

• Great Library
• Mysterious Oracle
• Guild Work Board - jobs they can take or leave, I can have mini-dungeons attached to these.
• Arena - Maybe not the typical arena, which is very swords and sorcery, but some place where players know they can go to compete.  The possibility of competing as a group would be even better.

Events
This idea comes from Jeff Rients' awesome, crazy, parade.  If I can come up with more events, these can be like temporary locations-- things going on in the city that everyone is talking about and that players of any level can get involved but don't have to.  If they don't get involved they can still affect the whole city going on in the background kind of like a sandbox "happening."

• Auction - I did this already and it was fun and a great way to introduce powerful faction members.
• Trial- there is about to be a big, show trial in which several blag dogs are tried for witchcraft.
• Parade - I have an impending parade of religious barges on the river that runs through the city called the Regatta Gloriosa.
• Wedding

The Bustling City
This is probably obvious to you, but a city only exists through it's encounters.  The size of it, the tone of it, the flavor of life in that place will mostly be conveyed by things players encounter on the streets.  I should have known this from my great experience with the Nidus encounters.  But for some reason I thought I was only using those because I didn't have Nidus fleshed out in a way that a normal DM would flesh out a city.  So, these encounters are not encounters in the traditional rpg sense that they are dangers that will spark a combat.  And they are not encounters in the traditional (if infrequent) video game sense that they are waiting to give you an adventure hook.  These are just groups and clumps of people- buskers, locals, pilgrims, delivery wagons-- that will be the city to you players.  I need to make one for my current city.

As I get time I hope to flesh out these locations and events in separate blog posts.

Tools not Rules

I get it, it's interesting to see what the new standard guidelines for D&D will be, especially because 4e was such an outlier.  But as far as I'm concerned a different set of standardized guidelines for play is not what I need.  And I'm not talking here about having perfectly good older standardized guidelines for D&D.

Are you really concerned that you track ammunition like the DM across town?  Or that your players are leveling at the same pace as everyone else at the game store?  I doubt it. 

I'm guessing the kind of things coming out in the new rule books are the things you are probably very familiar with: classes, xp charts, spell lists.  I think of these as the "What" of D&D: "What armor can a wizard wear?  What can I do to get my hit points back?  What do I need to hit?"  They often lead to binary questions: "Can I climb up the wall and onto the ceiling?"  "Can I use a sword in each hand?"  They are about what is allowed.  They seem to be defensive to prevent player creativity from "taking advantage."

I'm much more interested in the "How" of D&D, doing things new or puzzling to me.  And I think WotC could still make money selling tools that help with these "Hows."  I think a good example is the monster manual.  Instead of worrying so much that goblins are the same from campaign to campaign, give me some tools to make my own creatures.  But maybe a better example of what I mean by "Tool" is to recount a bit of my session fom Friday night.

Friday Night in Ulminster
My players are in a city.  One of them happens to be able to see the future.  How the heck do you handle that?  Well I made a chart.  I let her roll on it each session and we (mostly I) interpret the results.  This time someone beloved would be destroyed by sacrifice.  Interesting, because she has a great grandfather in the city.  How did I know that?  Well, I had her roll on this table earlier.  So, I said" "You see your great grandfather on a table surrounded by people and they are ceremoniously putting something serpentine down his throat, killing him."  So she decided to visit great granpappy.  And now I wonder what he's up to, or what he might have to say to her?  How do I determine that off the top of my head?  We go back to the dramarama table, I have her roll the other three columns, but this time I let her pick the entry rolled or those above or below it (a great technique I learned from ZakS).  We find out he is in love but wants her to kill the women.  Interesting.  Why?  Well, if we tie it back to her vision it would be neat and help me out, so I decided she was involved with a cult that my player saw in the vision.  But how do I "play" great granpappy?  What is his personality?  Oh, I've got a table I made for that.  I roll and find out he is missing teeth and has a great abundance of  . . . talkativeness.  Haha, and thus began a goofy monologue, by me, relaying his love for this woman and how she has to die anyway.

Later in the evening the players were at a bear-baiting.  How do you do something like that?  Cock fights, dog fights?  Well I suppose you could run them like regular combat with initiative and everything, but I came up with a simple method of my own.  Another player just got rich betting on the bear.  And he intends to use that money at an auction of several barges worth or fireworks.  An auction, how do you do that?  Umm, I think I'm going to come up with interested parties, write their goals and money on index cards and let my other players roleplay them in the auction.  But I'm not sure yet.
__________________________________________________________________________

So that's four tools right there, that I feel I needed to get me through that session and one I need to devise for next time. 

I suppose other DMs might consider improvving these details an expectation of being a DM.  Or maybe other DMs figure you are supposed to prep all that detail on your own ahead of time.  But my guess is that there are a lot of folks out there like me that could use tools to help them run D&D.  And I don't see many people selling that (Vornheim is one I know of, giving you a tool for dealing with  players searching a library, for example).

I suppose the things in the rulebooks might be tools for folks that are having trouble with different things than me.  So, an explanation of skill checks, for example, helps a newer DM know what to do when a player wants to run across a wet log over a stream, or something.  But for those mechanical questions we have stats and dice and you can use the two to figure it out.  It isn't like there's some optimal solution game designers are trying to suss out like the Higgs boson.

I think I realize now that most of the tools I mention are about generating things on the fly.  But not all, auctions, searching libraries, foretelling the future are more prickly problems and not just crutches for DMs with poor improv skills.  Anyway, I wish our hobby and the industry attached to it would spend less time worried about standard rules and more time coming up with cool new tools that help me run my game.

A Pile of Gear

You're down and out.  You heard a recent landslide uncovered a rumored tomb location.  You and folks you know from sitting outside the alehouse gather all the gear you can and throw it in a pile.  Decide how to share it out before heading off to find you fortune:

_____________________________________________________________________

I'm DMing ~7 folks from my work today.  Only two of them have any experience with D&Ds.  I thought I might try this as a new way of starting out.  The cards will be cut up and put on the table between them in a pile.  They'll be asked to sort it out, no rules as to how many each character gets except encumbrance*

You've probably heard of fast packs.  I never really liked them for the same reason I don't like pregens, they sacrifice player choice for expediency.  My solution over the years has been a compromise between those two goals.  You can see my forms here.  I gave players a pre-made character sheet that has a basic set of gear, like food, water, bedroll-- no use spending valuable time on boring stuff like that-- and then had them make a few limited choices about weapons and other typical dungeon gear like rope and torches.  Money wasn't involved.

This has worked fairly well, it's fast, gear is limited enough to be important, and players get to make some choices.  One aspect that it isn't good at is thinking about the gear the group as a whole might need.  Players tend to make individual choices.  With my more experienced players an outgoing player might start quarterbacking "I'll get a lantern, who is getting rope?"  I tried solving this by making a record sheet for the party as a whole, but that was just an extra step and quickly forgotten once play started.

I thought I'd try the method above this time.  Players can assume they have waterskins and some bread and cheese, maybe, but nothing else.  The party as a whole will need to decide who gets the few precious bits of armor, the best weapons and, the few shields.  Hopefully this will also get them thinking about the roles each of them will play in their expedition.

I hope for a more desperate, gritty feel to the first dungeon delve.  I'm hoping this won't feel too constraining or boardgamey.  I plan to include some armor and weapons in the dungeon that players will be able to immediately use.

*Also, I read recently on a blog about "strength-based encumbrance."  I can't remember where.  That phrase intrigued me, encumbrance has always been affected by strength.  So I thought, does it mean encumbrance derived simply from the STR stat?  Interesting, I'll try that.  So today I'll try an even simpler encumbrance system than the one I've been using:  You can carry a number of things equal to half your strength.  Armor and weapons are included in those things.  We'll see how it goes, but I'm hoping this will make hireling bearers and pack animals much more real as the game progresses.

The D&D Campsite

People gathered around a fire is as old as us.  To cook and eat, to talk and rest and keep the night at bay until the sun returns again.  But, traditionally, the campsite in D&D only exists to give Vancian spellcasters a chance to reload their magazines.  With no mechanics for fatigue or hunger or comfort, players might just push on and travel all night if it didn't feel so fundamentally off for us humans.

Actually, one other mechanic has made the campsite more real in the game, the three watches and the chance of attack.  But this is just the wilderness impinging on the campsite.  And with how abstract wilderness travel in the game tends to be, camp turns out to be just another set of encounter rolls; a single choice about who will be up when the attack in the night comes.

I want campsites to be more than that.  To me they are the extension of the hearth into the wilderness and only if they feel that way, a bit safe, a bit like what we've left behind, will attacks in the night be jarring.  But even if we decide to never roll for attacks in the night again, I think the comfort of camp can be a contrast that helps bring out the work and danger of traveling through the mountains and swamps, and dark forests.  And really, down into the mythic underworld.

Around the campfire is where characters share what they've heard of the dread place they're traveling to and what they miss about home.  But for this to happen in our shared, imagined world, I think we have to provide some mechanics that try to make it feel like a campfire and hopefully give players a few interesting choices as well.
So what mechanics?  As usual, I'm aiming for brutal simplicity; the least bookkeeping and calculating possible that still gets the job done.  Here are a few houserules that might make a campsite feel more real in an adventure game:

Food & Drink
Most characters have rations, or hardtack, or trailbread.  Cooking fresh food would make a fire important and camping for the night more of an event.  I say +1 hp per level per night in camp when you are eating freshly prepared food.  This really works if you have a simple hunting and gathering system.  Which in turns makes different landscapes feel more tangible because they have more or less game available.  (I'm still hammering out the kinks in my own.  See here for it's origins )  But, even without hunting it means stopping in villages and buying or raiding for livestock becomes a reality.  On long expeditions players may even want to take livestock with them.

Music
Music in the wilderness means you are not afraid of being attacked and what reminds characters of home more than the songs of home.  +1hp per level per night in camp where music is played.  The idea came for having bards as hirelings, but I've allowed characters to buy and play their own instrument.  This costs some money and takes up encumbrance space.  And how about the noise?  I wouldn't want to penalize too much, or players would never play music in camp, maybe just a +1 to encounter rolls.

Gear
If you have a system of wear and tear for armor and weapons, camp becomes a place to hone and oil blades, tighten grips, and polish armor.  See this post  for Brendan's simple equipment deterioration system and here for how I would tie it to the campsite. 

Stories
I think one aspect of campfires that makes them what they are is the stories told around them.  One approximation of stories could be rumors.  We could use camp as an opportunity to introduce rumors from hirelings "My gran all used to say . . .?"  But I also like the idea of giving players a chance to make up stories of their own.  The problem is some players will be more comfortable doing so than others, but as long as one person can manage a goofy or spooky tale maybe it would be fun enough to implement.  How about story responsibility rotates through the players, one each camp night (it is an abstraction meant to stand in for lots of talk) and if the player pulls off one then everyone will receive a +2 to saves made in the location the story was told about.  So, for multi-day travels through the wilderness it might not be a big loss to skip the story, but the night before reaching the dungeon or the dread location, it would be worth an effort to come up with something.  Rotating through the players allows shy or reluctant players time to think up something or get suggestions from other players.

The Hearth
If the campfire is the extension of the hearth, maybe it should offer some protection against the dark.  I'll repost an idea here:

A cleric, or anyone versed in the Old Ways, can take a stone weighing a half-stone or more from the night's fire.  By incorporating it into the next night's fire ring they make that fire a hearth.  Each night of doing so makes the hearth magic stronger.  Undead and shape changers can not enter the light of a true hearth.

Half-stone is ~7 pounds which is one of my simple encumbrance slots.  I'm not interested in the bookkeeping part now.  Maybe just, using the hearth a second time on gives the protection, but skipping a use in a fire will mean you have to break the stone in again.  Particularly old stones taken from ruins or abandoned cottages might function as magic items that give extra bonuses.

Stars & Weather
This is an idea that just occurred to me.  It seems that when we camp is when we notice the sky.  I'm sure this is more because we live in post-industrial places with tons of light pollution, but then we are the players of this game.  So, what would looking at the stars do?  Maybe a chance of auguries, like comets or supernovas.  Maybe some kind of weather mini-game that would determine or allow affecting the weather of the next days travel.  Maybe a place for the DM to parcel out little bits of campaign world lore "That constellation is called the Hag because . . ."  I don't know, something to think about.

In General
Once you introduce the campsite and these mechanics, they become things you can leverage as class knowledge or feats gained by level.  Here is a post where I do some of that for fighters.  Undamaged gear shown attention might get bonuses.  Special recipes are something characters can learn and can give bonuses above general food gathered or hunted.  Bonuses for well chosen sites, and even time to reorganize packed gear can become tasks with meaning in the game.

Collaborative World Building

I've had my players in this little sandbox for a while and needed a larger world outside of it.  I am not good at this because of indecisiveness and wanting to keep the infinite possibilities of an unwritten world as long as possible.  So finally I just asked my players to help.  I took a big piece of paper, cut it in four and asked them to draw some land.

They asked me about scale.  I told them ,"yeah, I don't know, don't worry about it."

After each of them had drawn some territory I had them pass their maps to another person and draw places people might want to live.  They were adding more features than I had intended.  I just needed help with some geography and where cities would be located but they were putting strange portals, ghosts, cave entrances, etc.

So I took there maps home and treated them as if they were folk maps, I mean that I made the scale much larger than their images seemed to show, because I wanted more than just four little sandboxes. 

I traced the major features and tried to interpret some of them.  Nicely enough, they had included some swamp, coastal marshes, mountains, forests and deserts, so there was geographic variety.  There was also ocean on a few of the maps that I interpreted as a central sea.  Here is what is what my interpretation looks like:

 

The scale is about 30 miles to the inch.  Don't know how realistic or game efficient that is but it seems good enough.

Putting it into Play
That took me about 2 weeks to get around to doing.  Then this Friday was one of my players birthday.  He asked if we could play using the map they had drawn parts of.  So I wracked my brain for a way to try and have a session that might tie into this newly made landscape.  I finally decided it might be fun to just give the some free mobility like I talked about in this post.  So I basically gave them a hot air balloon.  It is called the Wicker Tower, has an encumbrance limit and a magical stove that uses meat as fuel (so they have to land every now and then to hunt).

I used the elephant encumbrance sheet I had lying around.  It is 20' tall and 15' in diameter.  The boxes along the edge are hit points.  The six boxes in the middle represent the weight of one person and all their gear or the equivalent.  My players thought I did this explicitly to strip them of their hirelings (no, just trying to make them have to make choices, I'd actually forgotten how many total hirelings this party had).

Geographic Wonders in the World
On the wicker tower they found a corpse with some pages from a book and the map above.  I've been wanting to try Beedo's awesome idea of the Library of de la Torre for a long time.  Unfortunately I don't have all the cool rumors, dungeon locations, etc. that it requires, but I did have a bunch of wonders written up that hopefully might seem interesting enough to visit.  So that's what was on the pages, a selection of my wonders that worked well with some of the features my players had included.

I always have fun making physical game props.  For this I used the cool font mentioned in this post.  I printed them on heavy paper, folded them, soaked them in coffee and then dried them in the oven.  Each entry has a symbol next to it that corresponds to a place on the map.  Though some share the same symbol, so it can be unclear which wonder is at one of a few locations.  Some also have question marks because the location may be uncertain.

Cities and their Rulers
Okay, so I brought those things but I also asked them to do a bit more collaborative work on game night.  I had picked 6 locations from their maps to represent big cities and had them roll up stats for the cities as in this post of Zak's.  I still have to interpret all the results, there was actually an 18 for trade for the city nearest the party, so they were excited about that and are heading there next.  Then I had them all roll up characteristics of the leaders of each of these cities using my hireling trait chart.  Again, I need to digest that a bit but there were some promising results.

Balloon Flying Mini-game
One other thing I did, was try to see if it were fun or interesting to try a mini-game that you don't know the rules to.  I was trying to mimic the process of learning a skill in real life.  The balloon the players wanted to fly had four sets of pullies.  I gave four players a d4, d6, and d8.  They had to secretly roll the three and choose one as their result.  Then I would look at all those and tell them which direction the balloon was going.  Then they would roll again and try to direct it where they wanted, but they could only say "higher" or "lower" to each other.  The idea was that they had to figure out which pattern made the balloon go in a particular direction, then manage that pattern without communicating to much.  It was okay, nothing spectacular.  I intend to forget about it once they get a hang of flying in a wind, then we'll all assume they've learned to work it reliably.

In the end, it was a pretty fun way to make a fantasy landscape and then put it into play.  Now I need to go look at Vornheim again and come up with a map for this city they are going to.

Class-based Rule Responsibility

I've long wanted to do some player handouts or booklets specific to each class.  Someone wants to play a fighter, give them a handout with all they need to know about fighters: how shields work, weapon damage, missile range, experience chart for leveling.  I haven't made these yet. 

But I was just thinking that in addition to giving that player everything they need to know at their fingertips, it could be quite nice for more casual players to have rule expertise in one realm and not need to worry about the rest.

So, if you have a house rule for armor wear and tear, let the fighter know about it, and they can explain it to the other players.  If you have special resurrection, level draining, or healing rules, let the cleric/priests become the expert on that.  This gives each player a reason to be important and it would probably increase the number of house rules/mini-games you could get away with without becoming too complex, because no players will have to know them all. 

Traditionally, a lot of the rules can be dealt with when need arises and only the DM needs to know the rules at all.  But when your start talking about subsystems like hunting, repair, special house rules dealing with travel, players need to know this stuff to be able to make decisions.  So, split up the responsibility of that rule knowledge.

Magic users could know about your world's languages and writing systems, all about scrolls and making them, perhaps about maps and curses and such.  Maybe also enough vague history of your realm to know what things are older than others.

I would probably include a lot about the undead for divine petitioners, and like I mentioned above, how healing and disease works.

Thieves would know any relevant lock mini-games, of course, but would be a good place to put knowledge of the values of treasure sold in different towns, the going rates for different gems and different types of coins, etc.

Discretionary Monsters

I realized in my game there are three kinds of monster: placed, wandering, and discretionary*.

"Placed" are those you know are in a particular place in the dungeon.  Whether a random roll told you they were there or you decided to put them, they are certain to be in a location.

"Wandering" monsters may appear, especially when noise is made, anywhere in a dungeon and at any time, if a roll says they do.  There is a certain line-up of possible creatures which might appear, but it is never certain they will, or which of them will.  Players could clear a whole dungeon and never encounter one of these.

"Discretionary" monsters appear when I, the DM, decide they do.  There are most likely one or two I've prepared ahead of time for any dungeon.  The monster comes and goes when I decide it does.

Now, hold on, you might be thinking, how is this old school?  It may seem a bit hypocritical for someone who believes so much that "story" is what emerges from play, and all the random rolls that move play forward.  But my game is fairly low magic, where you are likely to encounter wolves, and bears, and difficult terrain.  I like my game that way.  An adventure game that is so magical that wolves in a forest would no longer be considered a threat, because there are manticores, and minotaurs, and dragons in every hex, would lose much of what is thrilling about adventure tales from the real world.

And yet, I'm not trying to simulate frontier living, I want that spookiness of fairy tales.  If all that ever show up in my dungeons are wolves and bears and I have no control over when they appear, a dungeon might become a very mundane affair.  I want players that go underground to be afraid.  And to fear more than the loss of their lives.  And so I started keeping some monsters on "reserve."  They would show up at times players felt most vulnerable.  And it really worked.  It freaks them out.

Now, to avoid my becoming some adversarial DM that kills parties by making monsters show up and attack at my whim, I make these discretionary monsters non-violent.  They don't attack, even magically.  What kind of monster you might be thinking?  Well, old ghost story standards: a lost child, who by all rights shouldn't be down in the dungeon, who says something before slinking off into darkness.  A talking animal.  A little man riding a dog.  Something odd, but not outright threatening.

You might think that players will, after a while of seeing many of these, catch on to these non-violent monsters and no longer fear them.  But it turns out that it can be difficult to tell between one of these and a wandering monster, or if the characters have just entered a room, a placed monster.  In other words, it is never quite clear to them what type of encounter they are having so as long as a dungeon has all three types it will always be in a player's best interest to be wary, if not fearful.

"Might I hold your sword for just a moment?"

So, in a nutshell, here are some things I think required for a successful discretionary monster:

• Appear when players feel vulnerable.  See here for some thinking on that.  I find when characters are climbing up or down long drops a perfect place, either the first person to climb down a rope is pulled aside and told about what they see, or the last person to descend is told something is stirring in the shadows.
• Are hard to determine if they are a threat.  Something odd or off about a normal thing is pretty much the definition of creepiness.  The "why are you down in a dungeon, child!?" is probably the perfect example.  But a cat that comes out, sits, and offers a hand to shake, or a dog that comes out and starts coughing as if to vomit could work.
• Not outright hostile.  I think a Blind Agnes is an example of a creature that, while not a pack of orcs with swords, would cross the line for me and be unfair for me to use when I choose.  It would steal the vision of a player, and while creepy that is an outright attack. And yet, these types of monsters don't have to be harmless, which leads to the next point:
• Will make the situation even more dangerous if you engage with them.  The monster seems to want to lead you somewhere else.  The Blood Dove and Greater-Crested Potionguide would both work well as discretionary monsters.  But children or peasants might ask characters to do something that would be dangerous to do: "Close your eyes," "Hand me your sword for just a moment," "Follow me, I have something to show you."  I don't think it matters that few players would be foolish enough to do these things, even having the option presented to you is creepy.
• Used sparingly.  This gives me the option to do something a computer can't do, make monsters appear based on what I can tell about player mood.  Good times to deploy are when players are getting bored, distracted, or play is starting to slow down into a slog.  These kinds of monsters allow me to put a spark back into the game.  But they work because they create tension, and if they appear around every corner there is no tension.  Once or twice a dungeon is usually plenty.
• Aimed at particular players.  This is another thing that a computer or random system would find difficult to do.  I like for new players or quiet players to see these.  Then, it gives them something they can, and even need to tell the rest of the party, it gives them a reason to interact with the other players.  I like pulling them outside the room to tell them what they see because it causes tension with the other players, the rest of the party will really want to know, now, what that player was told.  It makes the new/quiet player the center of attention for a bit.  Note, that this all only works because these discretionary monsters are non-violent.  When a wandering monster shows up it is usually quickly evident to everyone.

I'm curious if other old school DMs use monsters in this way.  I think it is a pretty easy and effective practice though.

*Yeah, it's an accurate but horrible name.  If you have an idea for a better one let me know.

Creepy Vermin

I mentioned in this post that I could use the behavior categories also as a kind of template, so, as a base, vermin have giant rats stats by default, and then I can differentiate them from there.  I've been thinking since that post about about how to do this.

Someone might call this "fluff" but, to me, this is where much of the game lies.  If I can freak out my friends just by describing what is slithering towards them, I'm happy.  Also, just mechanically, there isn't much range of damage or hit dice you can give creatures and keep them within the same dangerousness.  I mean, start giving giant rats 2 HD and they are no longer vermin, they start functioning as some other kind of dungeon monster.  So, in the end, a lot of creatures, unless you've given them a cool special ability, will be palette swaps for previously encountered creatures.

Anyway, on to what I came up with.  I started by trying to come up with a list of adjectives that might describe what I consider creepy or verminous.  I made a chart.  Then I thought it might be simpler and more strightforward to just combine creepy critters, so I made a second chart.  I'll show you that second one first because I don't think it works as well:

You can see above that I tried a second draft of this chart.  I cut bat and leech, because mouse/pigeon in my mind is much like a bat, and worm and leech seemed too close as well.

Again, I still didn't like the results much; how much different from a centipede is a worm/centipede or a maggot/centipede for that matter.  I think the problem is that too many characteristics that ick us out are packaged into each verminous thing and we need to tease some of them out to get more possible, and novel, combinations.

I think now, that a way to fix this might be to have the creepy stuff in one column and then fuzzy-pet stuff in the other (you could get like maggot-kitten hybrids, ick) Anyway, I just wanted to share it with you so you could see my process.  So, now back to the first attempt I mentioned:

I'm thinking now another possible column would be to add a "target," because an easy avenue to body horror is to tell you the thing is crawling toward your ear or burrowing into your armpit.

Anyway, let's try a few:

8, 9 , 2
Naked skin, it glides, and has teeth, okay maybe flying cave squirrels.  Or to try and get weirder, hairless Chihuahuas that bark continuously and glide at you with little needle teeth.

8, 8, 4
Okay that's kind of gross, it looks like a hairless hamster with a long proboscis and it will hop suddenly and try to plunge it into you and suck your juices.

2, 5, 6
This is scaly like a small lizard and it moves on shaky legs like it is sick or dying but it has a stinger on its belly.

5, 5, 3
This is slimy and shaky, sound like a newborn.  So, maybe this looks like a newborn puppy that shakily approaches with eyes closed and then pounces with sharp claws.

Not too bad.  I might use some of those.  One of my players is a dog groomer and I think having new-born puppy-things following her around the dungeon trying to do her harm might freak her out.

It doesn't completely solve my problem because I have scavengers and pack creatures to worry about too, but it's a start.

3 Knowledge NPCs

I've posted about npcs several times before but I wanted to zoom in on a particular type that I haven't handled very well in the past: the npc that helps players figure out magic items.  If you imagine a game world stripped down to having only one npc, it would probably be one of these.

I can imagine a game that doesn't require figuring out what rings do or how wands work, for example, because players are told immediately upon finding them.  The point of the items is for them to feel like rewards, to allow for new abilities, and to provide some fun toys, after all, so why not just streamline towards those ends.

And yet, there is some mystery lost by doing that and some possible fun, tense situations are lost where players have to experiment with potentially dangerous items.  So, the compromise is to have a way for low level players to find these things out if they go back to town.  Traditionally I've used cantankerous and greedy npcs to do this, but that gets annoying for players fast.  And charging too much eats into the idea of the items as rewards (especially keeping in mind that some of these might be single-use).

Another thing to keep in mind is that I'm a ham and like to roleplay a bit to try and make my players laugh.  So I want to allow for that without being too annoying.  So here is my idea of a new way I might handle this with three different  Knowledge NPCs.  All of these would be free of charge to talk with, but have some downsides.

The Veteran
"Have I ever told you about the time I . . .?"
Upside: The veteran will tell some ridiculous story that actually has good tactical gaming advice embedded in it.  Ever wonder how to teach new players what to do with a potion of diminution or a wand of mineral detection, this old soul can tell them a specific example involving an amusing anecdote.
Downside: The veteran has a poor memory so activation words or potion tastes might be slightly off.  For example, he knows a common wand activation word is "something like loose, or lute" when it is actually "luz."  The players will have to experiment a bit, but should be able get the right answer without too much trouble.

The Storyteller
"Ah, the lay of Phineas mentions such an item, let me sing it for you . . ."
Upside:  Get your DM singing and rhyming fun here.  A bard type or maybe just a village gossip, this person can help players understand the range of possible items.  So, what are the most common ring types in your world?  They might reveal a few common types each time.  This can help players know what they might want to find or later make themselves.
Downside: Not every story you hear is true.  The storyteller will give the truth + some ridiculous baggage.  For example, "The wand's activation word is "Luz" but beware, for every time you use it you will shrink 3 inches."  The idea is to make the players a little hesitant.  The false part can't be too scary though, or they will never want to use it.

The Scholar
"Where exactly did you find this again?  I have the memoirs of Helen the Bald in which she describes exactly how she made that item . . . and an indication of her heir."
Upside: The scholar has original sources, or photographic memory of triple-checked accounts and can give you three possible activation words and a recipe for making the device yourself.
Downside:  The scholar wants to know where you found this, when, who was involved, all the details.  This is a way that any player tomb robbing shenanigans (or thinly veiled lies about such) might spread.  It could be a way that rival adventure parties or disgruntled heirs get on the trail of the party.  But mostly it will create a bit of worry by implying to players that those are definite possibilities.  Also,I think it could still be fun to have a little experimentation involved to discover the actual knowledge.  For example, "Helen made three wands of this type, one was said to activate by speaking the word 'Luz,' one with 'Beleuchten,' and one with 'Nur.'  With the actual word for this wand being "Luz," but if similar wands are found in the future, the players can try the other two without even consulting the Scholar again.
_____________________________________________________

So, one of these might be more helpful for particular items, for characters of particular level, or even for DMs of different proclivity.  One thing you might do is have each of them available nearby and let players alternate and discover the weaknesses of each type.  Another idea is, once players are familiar with the npcs throw in a complication, for example the Scholar acts like a Veteran when thoroughly drunk.

But, I'd love to hear details about how you handle this part of DMing in your campaign

Monster Tactics / Encounters

So I blogged here and here about wanting to have a simple system to help with how creatures will act when they become hostile, but I realized that I was trying to solve another problem as well.  I most often run small dungeons and trying to come up with wandering monsters is always tough for me.  Sure, you can come up with a cool showcase monster, but a dungeon needs a whole array of possible creatures to encounter.  And, come the end of the week my tired brain has always struggled with that.

With the creature behaviors as a starting point I can, hopefully, more easily flesh out the ecosystem of each new dungeon.  If the dungeon is submerged, for instance, the vermin can be little crab-things, and I'll up their AC.  If the dungeon is a sewer under a urban area, I can have down-and-out humans act with the behaviors of creatures: scavengers and vermin.  Or I can just palette swap -- these vermin are worms not rats-- or riff, these spiders act like slavers, these termites are soldiers with different castes.  Etc.

Another thing I want to address is the method I've been using to keep track of wandering encounters.   What I've done for a quite a while is, for each dungeon, make little booklets made with the cool telemonster tool Jensan made.  But I've found the little booklets fiddly in play and hard to store along with their dungeons because they aren't a flat piece of paper.  I'd like a single, letter-size piece of paper that I can fold in half.  That way, with a single-sheet map, and the encounters I can walk around DMing with two sheets of paper.

Here is a form I've been working on to help with both of these issues at the table.  I'm not done yet, but the idea is you pencil in whatever adjustments you want to make to the standard monster type (I'll probably add standard HD and dmg values), generate a few encounters worth, and then draw the hit points of these in boxes on the graph paper (a great trick I got from ZakS).

I've simplified the encounter results roll to 2 and increments of two from there, to try to help me memorize this and do things quicker at the table.  If I remember correctly this will make packs and scavengers more likely to show up than vermin, which makes some sense to me. 

The asterisk could be the cool showpiece monster.  It will also most likely be placed in a specific location, but this would mean you encounter it outside of there.  Or, heck, the asterisk can just be overtly aggressive things like zombies or rabid bears.

I mentioned in the last post that the number appearing will be important.  I thought about it a lot and I think, with my play groups of around 4-6 people that sometimes have hirelings, 2d6 for packs, 3d6 for scavengers and 4d6 for vermin should work okay.  With the understanding that packs get overtly aggressive when they are twice as many as the party, scavengers when they are triple, and vermin quadruple the party number.  I'm going for simplicity and the ability to easily recall these. 

The way I have the table set up in this draft, a result of 11 or 12 would bump you to the second table of intelligent opponents.  That would make them pretty unlikely to be encountered.  But, I can flip those tables and have some locations far less likely to have wild creatures wandering around.  Which makes sense, because the cult temple guards would probably want to deal with roving packs of predators.

I'll try it out, next dungeon I run.

Monster Tactics cont.

Continuing to come up with a system to help me run monsters.  First a few thoughts I've had since last post:

I thought of "want to touch you" as an additional kind of behavior category.  This would include rust monsters and anything that wants to lay eggs in you.  But I realized, that I have no problems knowing what those things will do when and encounter happens.  The more unique a monster the more I feel comfortable knowing what tactics it will probably use.  This is more about trying to add complexity to the kind of battles that happen very frequently in my games where giant rats just suicide attack a party if their morale doesn't fail.  (I also want to work up a framework to deal with parties of humans, which I've largely avoided up to now.)

That being said, we have to keep in mind that if the majority of the behaviors depend on outnumbering the party to attack, # appearing for monster encounters becomes much more important.  Too few rats, and vermin never attack outright which is effectively reducing the number of wandering monsters in a dungeon.  Too many rats, though, and you basically moot the whole behavior system with the rats attacking as normal.

I think one way to address this is to allow for escalating numbers.  In other words, vermin that shadow the party for, say, a whole turn will accumulate more vermin.  Shadow for another turn more vermin gather, until the party leaves the dungeon or does something about the vermin.  Then all the number based behaviors become a ticking time bomb.

Another possible approach is to use escalating behaviors.  If it seems a bit much that more and more of these monsters appear in a dungeon you could just make them more and more bold.  With a bit of adjustment, the list of animal behaviors from last post becomes almost a list of increasing boldness:

1. Defensive Attacker
2. Vermin
3. Scavenger
4. Pack hunter
5. Lone Hunter
6. Aggressive Attacker

Here, I've added a category for animals like bulls and rhino that won't bother you if you leave them alone, and when they do fight will likely fight to drive you off, not to slaughter everyone in sight.  Aggressive Attacker is just a more descriptive name for grizzlys and orca and such that will attack in an aggressive and straight forward way, taking down one target before moving to the next, combining what I called "mindless" and "high threat" last post.

So, except for the lone hunter step, this gives us a pretty smooth progression from little to more boldness and aggression.  I think my current lean is to go with escalating behaviors.  So, for example, the party encounters a pack of sickly scavenger dogs.  There are too few dogs for them to attack outright so they start shadowing the party hoping for food.  After a certain amount of time of not being fed by the party or by corpses from the party's other encounters (1 turn, 1hr?)  the dogs will have lost their fear enough to start acting like pack hunters, with the highest hp individuals darting in for attacks and dogs attacking from multiple sides.

Sentient Behaviors
One thing I realize is that maybe the "tactics" in the title is not quite right for what I want here.  I want, not only help in know how groups will fight, but what the heck they want if they parley.  With that in mind here are some categories I came up with for groups of humans and other intelligent foes:

1. Bandits
2. Slavers
3. Guerrillas
4. Warriors
5. Soldiers
6. Adventurers

Bandits want money and don't want to risk their skin if they don't have too.  Give them what they want and they will likely just leave you alone.  If they are outnumbered or outpowered, they might try subterfuge, trickery, or predicting where the party might be later and meeting them there.

By Slavers I'm thinking any group that wants prisoners, so they could be cannibals or zealots gathering religious sacrifices, or just slavers.  They will use try to use non-lethal weapons and maybe swarm opponents with grappling attacks or try to disarm foes.  But if they have to kill a few folks to break resistance they will.

Guerrillas are used to fighting an occupying force that outnumbers them.  They will shadow and reconnoiter carefully before committing to doing anything.  They will try to predict where the party will be later and set up an ambush.  They will try to use traps and missile weapons to their advantage.  They may break off the attack even if it is going well, just to be careful as well as trying to demoralize the party.

Warriors come from a society that honors and values individual bravery and feats in combat.  They aren't necessarily hostile, but once they are they will have high morale and be dangerous.  They are skilled warriors, fighting man to man and trying to quickly take out the highest threat targets in the player party.  They are less likely to take prisoners.

Soldiers are trained to fight as a group and will use group tactics like shield wall and fighting retreats.  They will have a leader that, if taken out, will cause them to suffer severe morale penalties.  They
are more likely to parley and accept surrender.

Adventurers are the least clear in my head and might just be a place holder until we think of a better category.  They are essentially like the party a mixed group individuals of varied ethnicities, gender and abilities.  Loose cannons, they may act as bandits or as warriors.

And that's what I have so far.  I'm sort of assuming fairly homogeneous groups for my own sanity's sake.  So, even if it makes sense to have a ragtag bunch of bandits where each of them have different weapons and armor types, I will try to avoid that for simplicity.  Also, I'm hoping that these guidelines will help when I add magic-users and divine-types to the mix.  Magic-users with slavers will try to use their spells too immobilize and knock out the party, guerrillas MUs will use spells to aid in stealth, reconnaissance and misdirection, etc.

Monster Tactics

I don't see my DM role as being an adversary of the players.  I see myself as a facilitator of adventures.  In other words, I have to do just enough to know that adventure is possible and keep spinning the wheels so the game continues.  I don't have to worry about story, or big bad finale monsters, or anything but helping players move around in that shared imagined world.  The problem comes when players face opponents, because then I am the brain of the adversaries.  And this is one of the last places that I feel the game is not giving me enough support when I DM, when monsters attack.

I've largely dealt with this by using random rolls to determine which target, from those closest to it, that a monster will go after.  That and morale has been enough, surprisingly, to have some really fun combats, partially, because I have stuck to mostly creatures of animal intelligence.  But I've wanted something more sophisticated for a while.

Traditionally, I think the solution is supposed to be to look up the monster in the monster manual and you find out about its behavior and ecology there.  But that means you have potentially infinite monster behaviors to memorize as DM.  That's not a good option.  I think traditionally the encounter dice are supposed to give the DM valuable info too, but because it just generates a range of numbers it isn't going to solve that memorization problem: high or low numbers will presumably lead to different corresponding actions by different creatures.

In this post by Alexis of the Tao of D&D looks at creatures by intelligence and one of the factors is how they react during encounters.  That has been bubbling in the back of my head for years now as well as an article from the Dragon that talked about intelligent monsters targeting high threat party members like magic users.

I think I have finally come up with a solution that simplifies the idea while keeping much of the flavor.  I can assign all creatures one of a small number of behaviors.  That will give me some consistent behaviors without requiring too much to remember.  I would put them into these six categories:

1. Mindless
2. Vermin
3. Scavenger
4. Pack hunters
5. Lone hunter
6. High Threat

I still need to flesh out the actual behaviors but here are some ideas:

Mindless creatures, like zombies, would function the way I've been handling monsters, they attack whatever's closest with a bit of randomness for equally close targets.

Vermin would only physically attack if they far outnumber the target or are cornered, but they will shadow the party and try and steal small trinkets and food.

Scavengers would behave similar to vermin with a lower outnumbering ratio needed.  They would also become aggressive over any carcasses the party produces fighting other creatures.

Pack hunters would try to encircle the party and, also dependent on the numbers of each group, might start probing attacks by stronger pack members to see if the whole pack should swarm in.

Lone hunters might shadow the party for a while before darting in quickly in an attempt to carry off the smallest party member.

High threats are like mother bears with cubs or elephant bulls in must, unless you show sign of submission and back away quickly, they will attack ferociously.  (hmm, that seems a little too similar to mindless).

What I like about this is that players could learn these behaviors and gain a sense of expertise about the dangers in the wilderness as their characters become veterans.  And all I have to do is decide which behavior type traditional monsters fall under.  Are stirge vermin or pack hunters?  And that gives the cool possibility of having some stirge that act as vermin, the bluish-black ones, and some as pack hunters, the reddish tinged ones.  Parties will learn to pay attention to that small difference.

Are there any other broad behavior types that are left out?  Maybe lie-in-wait type hunters, but those are more like traps that would then attack mindlessly.

(I know this still doesn't deal with sentient foes, but I have an idea that six additional categories might work for them, including guerrilla tactics and such.)

Wonders Worth Exploring For cont.

Sorry for the lame delay, work got busy again.  My last post asked what we hope to find when we explore a sandbox.  I've been doing some thinking for myself and hoping to come to some general principles that could help us generate stuff.

Scale
My main conclusion so far was that scale doesn't really work as a inducer of wonder in an imagined landscape.  The grand canyon is awe inspiring in real life, probably impossible to convey in D&D.  Of course, that doesn't mean you can't try.  In my own game I had a huge hole in the ground based on the Cave of Swallows and I would show new players a video of someone parachuting into it to try and give them a sense of its size.

A couple other ideas related to scale.  I think it is partially personal based on familiarity.  If you know rivers and I tell you the dimensions of this fantasy river, its width, speed, depth-- that might have a potential to awe you.  Likewise for anything, mountains, pine trees, particular animals.  But in general, you wouldn't know as a DM who has enough knowledge to be amazed by the thing you made up.

Also, I noticed that my whole last post seemed to assume wilderness features.  Can't wonders be found in a dungeon?  I think so, sure, but the very dungeoness of dungeons, their constrained underground space, will make it harder to awe.  So in this case scale does seem to matter.  A room full of petrified trees is not as impressive as petrified trees as far as the eyes can see.  And maybe the underground, being the mythic underworld, is expected to be weird, so something must be that much more impressive to invoke a sense of wonder.

Features of a wonder
Okay, so we have not relying on scale as a feature, what else?  Here are some ideas I had:

Something that is a semi-permanent part of a landscape.  A miniature city or a tree that has diamonds for fruit might be cool, but the fact you could dig them up and carry them off in a wagon detracts for me their wonder.  The wonders we want will be locations players can return to again and again. (I guess, in a sense, this is another way that scale does matter).

That being said, it might be more of a draw in a game if players can take souvenirs-- bits of the landscape, vials of liquid-- that have value or strange properties from these sites.

Odd, but not deadly.  Deadly can be awesome too, but I think it is much easier to evoke fear in someone then a sense of wonder and I'm shooting for the latter.  So, we'll try to keep them survivable even if they are dangerous.

A toy to use or figure out.  Either they have some pattern or system to them or they might have potential uses for players.  This doesn't have much to do with wonders more with any building block of a game where players can make choices.
_______________________

Let's start with the elements and go from there:
1. Walking rocks - A great flat plain filled with rocks of various sizes.  Each night, they slide along at walking speed in one of the four cardinal directions.  They range in size from pebble to huge boulders you could build a keep on. (sort of like sailing stones).
2. The Teeming Plains - Vast plains with many overlapping fossilized tracks.  Apparently caused by some near-instant calamity in the ancient past.  If you learn to distinguish the tracks you can follow those of mages, warriors, and angels to where they stop, dig there, and find caches of ancient magic left where they died.
3. Everburning Fire - In some far away hollow surrounded by wastelands is a fire that will never go out.  It can catch fuels on fire and burn them up, but will remain, burning on the ground even when the fuel is burnt up.  Burns in the rain.  Burns in the snow.  Smothering it might put it out.  Have a sentient species of creatures covered in this fire (they just want to be friends) or obsidian trees that blossom with it ever spring.
4. Cold Fires - Found in a crater this fire can be spread by normal fuels - carried on a torch, in a brazier - but will never consume the fuels.  It burns underwater.  It burns eternally but is not hot.  
5. The Great Mirage Lake -  A huge, dry, sea.  When a water craft is pushed into it water forms all around, lifting it up.  This water might be collected in a container from inside the craft.
6. Lesser Mirage Lake - A beautiful blue lake in a dry land.  The waters recede from any living thing.  It might be possible to catch some with a suitably long pole.  It might be possible to explore sunken cities hidden in its deepest parts.
7. The Blanched Moors - Low, wet lands covered with shallow, bitter pools.  In these are the perfectly preserved bodies of creatures that have died here, all white.  White stallions, white cocks, white apes, albino princesses.  Perfect for those searching for material components or extinct beasts to revivify.
8. The Solid Fogs - At certain times of year the mists across some bays coalesce into solid clouds.  These are a danger for ships.  There are tales of mages gathering the stuff with shovels and saws to place in the air and build towers on.
9. Lethe Fogs - Said to rise from the ground in fell bogs.  It smells faintly of over ripe apples and eats away at the memory (lose XP ever day you travel in it).  If bottled could cause memory loss in targets elsewhere.
10. The Sweet Wind -  A chance wind that arises on a certain lost plain.  It smells faintly of vanilla.  It clears the air and sharpens those that breathe it (extra XP for anything that grants it bonus chance for checks like casting spells to be successful). 
11. The Crowding Grove - A forest of trees that press in on any living thing, becoming impassable.  Cuttings and twigs taken will have similar properties.
12. The Shy Thickets - Thick brush that parts for anything living.  Plantings can be taken.  Might function as a good anti-undead defence.

Okay, some of those don't fulfill all of my own criteria, but hopefully they would be suitably interesting and trippy if encountered by your players.  I have a few more ideas, including human-made wonders, for a later post.

Wonders Worth Exploring For

I love exploring in sandboxes.  But what does that mean?  What do I-- and you hope to find?  I suppose the largest parts of it for me is finding the edges.  In this sense, exploring is less about geography and more about understanding how things work.  How big is the world?  What happens when I reach the edge?  If there is a snowy region will I suffer from the cold?  Can I swim?

With the last few questions I realize I am mostly thinking about video game sandboxes.  Because of the limitations of technology they are never really able to model reality, you have to figure out what this particular sandbox decided to try and model.  Can I jump this little fence?  Can I break this door?  But an RPG sandbox is presumably free of the technological limitations that cause this.  Anything in our imaginations is possible.  If I want to break the door, or jump the fence I say it and it happens.

Ironically, the freedom of the imagination means we are still uncertain of the world because the RPG sandbox is not required to model the world.  Water might burn in this world and all doors made of lead, or dragon scales.  Which is fine, because it means there is still the pleasure of figuring the world out.  But it does leave us back at the beginning with our first question unanswered.  What do we hope to find?

I suppose something that does reveal a bit about how the world works would be one answer.  So, if planar travel exists finding a portal and how to use it would fit the bill of understanding the edges of the world.  Or, a shrine that allows time travel.  Or just examples of what geography is possible- burning seas and crystal forests on one end, and just confirmation that, yes, deserts do exist, on the other.

Because there is a type of pleasure in genre expectations being fulfilled too.  So in a world that we get to explore, we will probably want to encounter terrain types that we are familiar with from real stories of exploration: deserts, tall mountains, undersea ruins.

But I think there is more to my desire to explore than that.  I think there is a part of me that hopes to be surprised and awed.

One of the difficulties of the RPG sandbox is that although anything is possible, the majority of it will be limited by what we can describe using language.  And so the things that might have awed actual explorers like the Grand Canyon or the giant Sequoias, Angel Falls or the Pyramids, are going to be far less impressive when just described.  Heck, even standing right beside a giant Sequoia it's hard to perceive its size.

So, I think there are limits to our ability to create awe or wonder through description, at least if we limit ourselves to using sensory details.  The imagined wonder might need to be more conceptual.

So not the tallest waterfall, but one that flows backwards, not the biggest tree, but one that grows in a single day.  Maybe.

I've been gathering some ideas.  I'll share them soon.

Visual Dungeon Challenge

Okay, friends, for my 999th post I'm throwing down my glove and offering a challenge to each and every one of you:

Make a one page dungeon that uses only images and visual devices.  No words.  No abbreviations.

This is intended to be given to another DM, not a personal bookkeeping system.  Because of that it can allow for some customization by the other DM.  You can use numbers, roman numerals, or your own invented symbols if you can convey what they mean to someone.

Post your attempt to your blog, link in the comments below, or email me, just share your map with us somehow.

This is not a contest.  You win if you make a damn attempt.  There is no time limit.  You can keep making these.  I think this should be an interesting exercise for any DM, because it will force you to look very closely at what exactly you require to run a dungeon, and how that may or not be different from what other DMs require.

Here is my first attempt:

I tried to indicate elevation with shades of gray and curved steps.  Each step is 10' and the darker it gets the deeper you are.  So, for example, the central area has a 90' drop to the right.  I think numbers might work better but didn't want them confused with room numbers.

I used a number to distinguish similar icons, so you can distinguish the potions, for example.  This will only work for very small dungeons or bare ones.  So I might need to come up with symbols for spells to put beside a scroll or for potion affects beside each potion, etc.  Though, that sounds very challenging.  Rather than use the same technique for the coins symbol, I could just put a number for the amount of coins in the hoard right next to it on the map.  Of course that would assume it was a hoard of one coin type or get very cluttered quickly.  A lot of problems.  But this is all okay, it's why I'm doing this: seeing what the limits are, seeing what is possible.

Now, I'm kind of cheating by telling you all that.  But maybe a sentence or two of explanation is okay-- something you might put in an image caption or email to a fellow DM.  Like "Roman numerals are NPC level" or "Greek letters are for traps."  And certainly we want to hear your thoughts behind your design decisions.  You just can't make something that requires a long explanation to be functional.

Good luck.

Into Red Crystal Cave

I'm not dead yet, just lazy, procrastinating, and currently obsessed with finding a donkey in Minecraft.  :)  But I had two fun sessions of D&D at a cabin in the mountains last weekend that I wanted to write about.  If you're normally bored by after-play reports, skip to the bottom where I reflect on DMing and design.

Gino - Divine Petitioner (worships Captain Morgan)
   Adrian - non-combatant hireling
Aphrodesia - DP (worships Victoria and her secrets)
   Mine - hireling
Anonimo - Rogue (my first thief like character I've allowed)
   RP - hireling
Oma - F

The party was camped outside the Red Crystal Cave after last session's brief exploratory visit.  They decided to go back in.  There were sticky black guano droppings everywhere.  They found a mummified goat carcass that appeared to have been drained of all moisture and had puncture marks.  But big puncture marks and all over the body.

They came to a room with natural flowstone that was tall enough to disappear into darkness.  Anonimo used is skill at climbing to explore and eventually secure a spike and rope.  The party ascended to find a shallow, concave area that used to have water and had flowstone falling off into darkness on the opposite side as well.  Anonimo descended to explore, heard a coughing and saw a very thin women shuffling into the darkness.

He tried to find her but couldn't, though the cave appeared to be a dead end.  He also found a cluster of rosy-pink crystals growing.  After rejoining the party they all headed down a smaller passage.

They found a room with puddles of thick, red liquid.  The party quickly started bottling it up, emptying a wineskin of water to help.  They continue exploring the only other exit.  The passage becomes narrower, causing them to move through it sideways with no shield coverage.

Gino, in the lead, feels something under his feet.  The guano is up to their calves now.  He pulls it up to find it a mummified human hand.  It has been drained of its liquid too.  They press on.  The passage opens up to a cave.  The ceiling is covered with bat-like creatures.  Gino gets the drop on them, throws a flash firework, and goes out swinging.  Luckily, the firework blinded most of them, he quickly comes to his senses and backs back into the corridor.  Adrian pitches several bottles of oil and it is lit.  The critters are mostly toasted.  A few blows and the final big ones are killed.

They find another cluster of crystals, a mother-of-pearl statuette of a limbless woman, and a earthenware religious yoke that Oma recognized to be her own family's.  They left the cave and headed back to the nearby trading post.  They discovered that the statuette might be of interest to the Sisters of Perpetual Abnegation (worship St Cecily) and sell the crystals for lots of gold (they are apparently useful in scribing magic scrolls).  Gino decides to drink some of the red liquid he collected.  It makes him feel more robust and yet weaker as well.

That night Anonimo had a terrible dream about a thin woman squatting over him, pulling pearls from his mouth while he was unable to move.  In the morning he woke to feel literally weaker.  The party decided to head back to the cave and kill the "witch" he'd seen.

Excursion 2
On there way back to the cave they got lost, traveling in a big circle and finding themselves back at the trading post.  They spent the night and tried again the next day, carefully building piles of stones along the way as they went.

On reaching the cave, they made a beeline to where Anonimo saw the woman.  The whole party descended exept for Adrian who was to guard the rope.  They found nothing but a filthy nest of sorts with a small string of pearls.  While searching some small creatures attacked Adrian out of the darkness.  They looked like caterpillars with hard, crab legs.  She scampered down the rope and the creatures didn't follow. 

After climbing back up the flowstone, the party decided to explore the passages they hadn't gone down.  They came to a room with more puddles of red liquid which they gathered.  They eventually heard the sound of a baby crying.  In the next cave they found an infant lying on the ground.  Aphrodesia was quick to pick it up, though the party had reservations.  Only feeding it some softened rations quieted the baby.  There was another cluster of crystals in this cave.

Heading back to town, the baby began crying again.  They noticed it had aged by two years.  This happened several times on the walk back to the trading post, the baby getting bigger and heavier in Aphrodesia's arms.

When they had almost reached their destination a group of ragged and hungry men surrounded them in the darkness demanding food.  Gino was angered and took a swing at the men, missing.  The two women were more sympathetic throwing bags of food and gold.  The men, satisfied disappeared into darkness.

Upon reaching the post, they sold the crystals and tried securing the now ~8 year old child, but he ran off naked into the night.  The trader told them it might be a Bantling and best left alone.  Somewhere along the line Gino's weakness subsided, but not his robustness.  The other party members decided to drink of the red liquid gaining some robustness and weird symptoms.

Thoughts
First, you can see a bit of my process with my map.  I just rolled dice and traced them to make a cavern-like location.  Then numbers are elevations.  It looks like they never visited one room but I think they did the very first foray, when I called it a night due to lateness and being unprepared (this cave was one of 4 locations I had half-ready).  I'm really happy with the way the simple method gives a decent sense of verisimilitude.  This method will be in my 1000 post booklet (though there really isn't much to it).

The bat things were a flock of stirge, ~12, which I was sure would kill half the party.  I forgot Gino had the firework.  I have a tradition of giving players stuff on their actual birthdays.  And Gino's player wanted fireworks, so I let him chose from a list.  That was a few months ago.

With the red liquid I was trying to train these newer players that there can be rewards to trying things, so I made drinking it give permanent, extra hit points.  I also wanted them to be a little leery, so I had them have a random side effect for a day.  It may have been too much of a freeby, now Gino has more hit points than he should.  But I think it was worth it.  He was ecstatic when he realized I was giving him hit points for drinking it.  It was also fun to watch the rest of the players waiting to see if he had any bad effects before drinking it themselves.  And me pausing just long enough before asking him to roll again.

The "one ration a day or bad effects" rule combined with the poor availability of rations at villages has made food seem real in this world, or at least a sense of hunger and famine.  The players are concerned about it and trying to buy it everywhere.  Of course that made me think the bantling was the perfect creepy creature to have them find.  It ate a week's worth of rations and stressed out Aphrodesia's player :)

I'm still trying to figure out my economy/store stocks.  The trading post felt too much like Walmart with infinite rations and plate mail available.  I'll have to implement a system that limits goods like some of you suggested in comments.  My players have tons of gold, now.  I need to figure out some gold sinks.  I mentioned giving villages heath points.  I want to do that by next session and come up with some suggested improvements.  I think labor would be an easy ongoing cost, maybe allow the players to fund local village watch/guards.  Or tell them they can hire peasants to make roads/cut trails.  After getting lost for the first time that might interest them.

I tried out a simple hunting/foraging system based on Talysman's and I think it worked well.  Foraging gives rations/time based on how "Lush" a terrain.  With the plains' low lushness, hunting small animals and foraging are pretty close to equivalent.  I remember now, that before heading into the cave the first session the party spent a chunk of the day hunting and gathering.  The women decide to forage.  I told them they were finding dandelions, wild onion, and wild strawberries.  The men hunted feral goats and a few of them got lucky but one of them didn't.  So, it was a good indicator to them of how available food can be.

In terrains that are more lush, like jungles, they should be able to gather enough food for the day just walking along the road.  Though I'm thinking foraging (and hunting) might need to be "unlocked" first by having a local show you the foodstuffs and game they usually go after.

When I was scrambling to make the sandbox ready two session ago I was thinking the whole point of a sandbox is for multiple choices to be laid out in front of the players.  While that is true, I was silly to forget that the size and scope of sandboxes are usually gradually revealed.  That, no sandbox is revealed completely at first.  I'm speaking from video game experience here, but I think it would translate.  So it's fine for them to putter about around these initial three villages before I expand the map and reveal more, and more brutal terrains to come.

Since we had two sessions and this was the 4th, we aren't playing this week.  I'm curious where they will head next.  I didn't ask them again.  But it seems like "where do we go now?" is a natural start-of-session decision, not something after the release of tension of surviving a dungeon delve and tallying up your xp.  That's it for now.  Hope you have a great weekend.