Who Builds Dungeons?

I was thinking about secret doors, and so I was all set to write a post about how ideally in a dungeon the DM should establish a consistent pattern for secret doors for clever players to pick up on and thus work out where they 'should' be. (This also applies to traps, by the way.) But then I made the next logical leap and considered that there really should also be consistent motifs across multiple dungeons - if Saul Stonehammer builds several dungeons, it's likely that he'll develop a common motif or calling card. Thus, players who are really paying attention should be able to figure out "this is a Saul Stonehammer" and thus "there's a secret door here". Well, maybe.

But then two things occurred to me:

• This should apply to a lot more than just secret doors. Traps as well, of course, but also dungeon dressing, the layout of rooms, and even which rooms exist in the dungeon in the first place.
  
• Attaching this to a single named creator is way too obscure - it's unlikely that a single group of PCs will adventure in enough "Saul Stonehammer" dungeons to warrant learning those motifs and calling cards. But if the motifs are done by race, and especially if that lore is at least somewhat known and becomes available to (some) PCs - dwarves and artificers in particular, but perhaps others... well, that might be interesting.

So I was then thinking about likely candidates for who would build all those dungeons. A partial list, specifically tailored to Terafa, might be as follows:

Dwarves: The first and most obvious candidate, I can picture dwarves building lots of little way-stations and tombs on their escape from the Underdark. Features are likely to be strong defences, but also multiple exits, including well-hidden secret back doors.

Goblins: I envisage the goblins being a somewhat fallen race, given to cunning but not craft, at least in the modern age. But that suggests there may be all sorts of old goblin ruins out there, filled with crafty tricks, traps, and treasure for the daring adventurer.

Kobolds: The theme here is warrens, narrow winding passages, and lots and lots of traps. These are dangerous places, but they also hide all manner of arcane lore.

Humans, ancient: The people of the ancient world were masters of techniques and technologies far beyond their modern kin. Ancient human dungeons are old but they are well made, and they are places of wonder.

Humans, modern: By comparison, modern humans build dungeons that are plentiful but which are, comparitively speaking, shoddy construction.

Giants/Dragons: These dungeons are monuments to hubris - places built on a grand scale to show off the power of those constructing them. But they were also largely assembled by slave labour, which means that the work is not terribly well done, and leaves them prone to collapse or worse. Beware!

Wizards: Speaking of hubris, wizards have enough of it to demand their own category. The theme here is on strangeness - you might well find a staircase here that only goes up, or 'doors' that connect to wildly-separated places. Basically, in a wizard's construction all bets are off!

Unknown: The ancient world had at least one empire that is no longer recorded in history, and they left behind several ruins. Little is known about these builders, except that they made extensive use of a snake motif, and were great believers in strange angles and curves.

And that's where I am so far. Eight sub-groupings is more than enough (indeed, might be a few too many), but should give plenty of variety. There's more to be gained from this topic, but doing so would need more work than I'm ready to put in.

Refining My Spelljammer Campaign Idea

Last month I wrote about an idea for a Spelljammer campaign. One of the things I wasn't terribly happy about was the notion of starting off the campaign with the PCs being abducted as slaves - I'm not keen on that sort of loss of agency early on. Plus, the existing Spelljammer lore makes starting in the Forgotten Realms a suboptimal choice - that sphere is too well known, so that the campaign can quickly become a railroad, as there's probably a 'best' way to go (hire a navigator, and enjoy the ride!).

That being the case, I've given the notion some more thought, and here's what I've come up with.

First off, make sure to tell the players that this is going to be a Spelljammer campaign! Otherwise, this next step is going to feel like a big bait-and-switch.

Have the players create characters for the Eberron setting. They're going to be a group of adventurers hired by an ultra-rich nobleman - his daughter (and heir) is about to depart on a Grand Tour of the Five Nations, and the PCs are charged with going with her and bringing her back safe and well. To that end, the nobleman has hired the use of a very large airship for a year. The airship, like the Golden Dragon, has two bound elementals - a hostile fire elemental that provides the motive power and a 'friendly' air elemental. That combination makes for some planar instabilities, making it vulnerable to a disjointing ritual...

(Whether the daughter in this case should be one of the PCs or not is an open question - the campaign will work either way. However, it should be made clear that the daughter is not in charge of the expedition - the whole reason for agents being hired to protect her is her lack of experience! I would also check whether there are any players who really want to run characters of spacefaring races. In such a case, I would give that player the chance to switch out his character after the first adventure.)

Also accompanying the party will be the noble's court wizard, also charged with keeping his daughter safe. Unfortunately, what the nobleman doesn't know is that the wizard is in league with his younger son, who seeks to remove an impediment to his inheritance. The wizard has a ritual available to transport the airship "to the outer darkness", thus removing the problem.

Anyway, the voyage starts, the wizard performs his ritual, and the party find themselves Lost in Space - the airship disappears from Eberron and instead finds itself in a junk-field of fantastical ships. The fire elemental has been released as part of the ritual (and is gone), while the air elemental is rapidly dying, but can sustain the ship's air supply for a few hours. Perhaps one of these ships has something of some use?

The first (second?) adventure is therefore to investigate a broken Spelljammer for salvage, which will just happen to include a helm (thus fixing the air supply, giving them a means to get home). And it will give the party some guidance as to their next step.

From there, as discussed in the previous post, it's mostly a case of navigating home. However, because the Eberron sphere is isolated, they can't just hire a navigator. Instead, they must follow some clues and generally find their way. The last step in the campaign, and the penultimate adventure, sees them making a literal leap of faith, crossing the Phlogiston where there is no longer a path, and getting back to the Eberron Sphere.

And then it's finally a journey home, a confrontation with the evil wizard, and time for tea and biscuits. Huzzah!

My Top Games of All Time

Firstly, I should note that these are the games that I, personally, have had the most fun playing. I don't claim this as a definitive list of the best games ever! Still, with that caveat in place, here are my top five RPGs of all time:

1. D&D (in its various forms): Of course this had to be number 1. Ranging from the heady days of the BECMI Red Box back in high school, through the dark times of the cancellation in the late 90s, the resurgence with 3e, the dark times of 4e, and then the resurgence with 5e, this is the game I've always come back to. It's the game I've logged the most hours of play with, and the game that has given me most of my best campaigns. So, #1 it is.
   
2. Vampire (in its various forms): The game I played in university, and for years afterward, Vampire caused a fundamental shift in my thinking on how an RPG should be played, how a campaign should be structured, and so forth. Great stuff - even if I find I have no real desire ever to play it again.
   
3. Star Wars: Another obvious big-hitter, for me Star Wars has two flavours of 'good' RPGs - the original d6 incarnation (mostly as expressed in the very first edition), and then in the final d20 "Saga Edition" version. These are very different, and do different things very well, but they're both great fun to play.
   
4. Firefly/Serenity: The newest game on the list, this one gave rise to several wonderful "Christmas Games" and also the "Lost Episodes" open tabletop campaign. This game has the particular distinction that the rules fit the setting almost perfectly - playing this game feels like running an episode of the show. It's just good fun.
   
5. Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: I've run two good campaigns with this game - the "Path of the Damned" trilogy of published adventures, plus a homebrew "Company of the Black Hand" campaign. The latter went particularly well - it seems that for playing a game that feels like the "Black Company" series of novels WFRP cannot be beat.

And that's it; the top five. An honourable mention should go to "d20 Modern", and perhaps also to "Exalted".

I don't have, and don't intend to compose, a list of games I don't enjoy. I've only had a small number of bad experiences, each of which can be mostly explained by other factors than the choice of game - my policy still remains that if someone wants to run a game for me, I'm willing to play just about anything.

Where No-one Has Gone Before

On Saturday I watched "The Undiscovered Country" again, and once again I was stuck by just how good a seam of material there is for role-playing purposes. By the end of that film you have an uneasy peace breaking out between the Federation and the Klingons, albeit with plenty within both civilisations more than willing to bring it down; you have the Romulan Empire scheming constantly; you have whole regions of space out there to be explored; and you have the Enterprise-A and its crew being decommissioned and the Enterprise-B being brought into service.

All in all, that's a great environment for role-playing! And, as an added bonus, that era also has the best uniform design of all Star Trek. Really, what's not to like?

Honestly, the more I think about it, the more I want to run that campaign. Sadly, chance would be a fine thing...

Review: Dungeon Crawl Classics

Last week I finished my read-through of "Dungeon Crawl Classics". As I've mentioned before, this was a somewhat odd experience, as I concluded part way through that I would most likely never run this game. Still, it's worthy of a review.

This is a black-and-white hardback book of some 466 pages of text (plus a detailed index and some adverts in the back matter). It presents a complete RPG in those pages - at present there are actually no supplements for this book, at least from the original publishers, although there are many adventures and a setting available for use. That's pretty cool.

The book really is a work of art, with lots of illustrations throughout, all geared to give a very particular atmosphere. In that regard, this is one of the very best RPGs I've seen - so many of them follow the standard fantasy glamour aesthetic (which is fine, but gets rather same-y).

The rules material is presented clearly and with a minimum of fuss. And, despite the obviously love of the designers for Gygax's work, the language used throughout is nicely clear and comprehensible - no High Gygaxian text on offer here! That's all to the good. The mechanics are a little table-heavy for my tastes, but that does allow a lot of information to be presented concisely.

All in all, this is a great book and well worth the money, if you're going to actually play the game. As noted, this game is very much not for all, and indeed is very much "not for me". So the reader is advised to consider carefully whether they'll actually play it - and indeed should seek out the free Quickstart rules if in doubt (these give a good taster of the game, so are well worth a look).

(One thing I would be really curious about: this game very clearly states that it derives its influences from Appendix N. Which is cool. It also starts the PCs are level 0 nobodies, raw newbies off the farm with no skills to speak of. That's also cool, although a definite instance of "not for me". However, I would very much like to know where that particular bit of inspiration comes from - it's certainly not a feature in the Appendix N works I have read, where Conan, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, and Elric are all badasses when we first meet them, while the Fellowship of the Ring is positively heaving with warriors and wizards. Is it just the hobbits, or is there some other antecendent for that design choice?)

Christmas Game: No No No

One of my better ideas in the field of gaming was to run an annual "Christmas Game". Somehow over the years this became an annual game of "Firefly" (or, before that, "Serenity"), which was invariably good fun.

Unfortunately with all the chaos surrounding the house move, we didn't manage to get around to a Christmas Game in 2016, and then last year there was just no time to fit one in. Unfortunately, this year will make three years in a row that this tradition has not been observed, which sadly means it is probably over and done with.

(That said, it's not entirely impossible that it might be reincarnated in some later year. In which case I suspect I may also adopt a slightly different tack, hearkening back to an even older, and now obsolete, tradition: ghost stories at Christmas.)

We'll see: either I'll run a Christmas Game in 2019 or it really will be time to declare that tradition ended.

Bringing a New Player On Board

One of the players from the Work Game has left the company, having chosen to pursue a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Which is a shame, but also quite cool.

I had expected to deal with this by writing his character out, with the potential of having one of the other players possibly switch role to take on the Cleric (as he'd previously indicated a slight dissatisfaction with his Fighter). However, in a useful bit of timing, another colleague has expressed some interest in joining the game.

The only downside with this is that he's jumping in at 5th level, and will be taking over the Cleric - possibly the most complex of all the characters at the table.

So, what to do?

Well, my plan is three-fold.

Assuming he sticks it out after his first session (which was okay but not stellar), I think my plan is to start really small and build from there.

As I think I've mentioned before, I tend to introduce the character sheet across three weeks - the attacks and defences first, then the skills and abilities, and then "everything else".

Similarly, the rules are introduced a little at a time, starting with the dice and the three types of roll, then the action types and combat system, and then the rules for spells and magic.

For the spells, as they are the most complex part of that most complex character, I'll start by giving just three to start - Cure Wounds (of course), Call Lightning, and Spiritual Weapon (since those are the character's two most iconic abilities) - and allowing him to use any of them as he wishes. In the second week, I'll introduce the Cantrips, since they can also be used at-will. From there the different levels of spell and the uses per day. Then the domain spells, since those are always prepared. And then, finally, the full set of spells.

But the key and crucial thing will be to take it slowly - introduce a bit at a time, and make sure to indicate that some things have been cut down significantly for simplicity!

(The other concern, of course, is the possibility that other players may 'help' by throwing random bits of explanation at the new guy, without any sort of rhyme or reason. But I'll deal with that if and when it comes up!)