MEGA DUNGEON LEVEL 1 - WIP

 So I read this the other day:  https://www.paperspencils.com/two-week-megadungeon/

and thought "Fuck now I have to write a mega dungeon".  Here's the WIP for level 1.

Dungeon Description & Origin

The dungeon was previously an old city.  During a time of great cataclysm, the old city was buried in sand.  Recently an entrance to the city was discovered.  The original city was built in and around a large crevasse, the upper levels were those of the merchants having easy access to the outside world & trade routes.  The middle levels were that of middle class dwellings.  Deep within the lower levels were the rich, living in extravagant underground mansions.  

Nearby the ruins of the city is a small village, where the PCs make their homebase.  Many adventurer’s have looked long and hard for the entrance to the old city, many have never found it, and many have died, never bringing back tales of the city.  

Level 1 

24 rooms.  Monsters include Assasins hiding out in the dungeons, and a group of Bakula’s (Beatle humanoids), The BBEG is a medusa, Something similar to orcs. 

*Theme is an old city, warehouses for mechants, destroyed square with wagons, etc. 

1. Monster:  There are a pile of broken wooden wagons, small merchant tents, refuse.  The square is littered with skeletons in states of decay.  A few of the wagons contain CPs, decent goods, rope, etc.  There’s a large pool of dark tar occupying most of the room, its a about 8 inches deep in the centre.  The area is home to a small group of dwarven miners & excavators who have travelled here from their homeland in search of gold.  Among them are members of an assassins guild. These could be great additions to the adventuring party as hirelings.  A few of the dwarves have setup shop selling wares to adventurer’s and some of the denizens of the first level.  The alliances between the dwarves and the Bakula’s are shaky to the say the least. 


2. Monster:  Turquoise slime.  This is the remains of a tavern.  The slime is on the ceiling of the tavern.  The bar contains 4 giant kegs.  Behind the bar is 300 GPs under the floor boards.  On the walls are ancient paintings worth 50 SP each.  


3. Monster:  Fire Ticks (like beetle).  A former dwelling with furniture, beds, hearth etc.  The remains of a giant creature (actual giant humanoid) are on the floor.  Bites have been taken off of all the limbs.  A family of fire ticks occupy this area.  The giant had a warhammer of smiting +3, can only be carried by someone of 15 strength or higher.  On a 19-20 it does double damage.  It’s inlaid with runes that appear to be made of ice.  


4. Empty:  This was likely a brothel or bathhouse at somepoint.  The entire area is filled with skeletons wearing next to nothing for clothes.  Some of the skeletons are still in their evening wear, while relaxing in the pool.  The water in the pool is potable.   


5. Special:  An ancient temple, statues.  To gods that have long been forgotten.  Praying here will grant bonus clerical spells once per day.   


6. Monster:  Cobra snake, 


7. Trap:  sliding staircase that dumps the players into the second level..  ROOM #  


8. Trap:  illusion left here by a group of assassins to kill off the bakulas.  It appears to be a giant bee hive filled with honey, the honey is dripping all over the floor.  


9. Special:  This room holds the remains of a dragon.  Inside are the zombies of the men that killed it.  There are 20 fucking zombies in here.  There’s also a lot of fuckign treasure.  So whatever.  Go for it.  


10. Monster:  Bakula lair guards, guard eels? Sure eels that somehow can move onland, and wildly innarporiate.  Like they will kill people but also think they are in fine physical shape and comment out there behinds.  Honestly I’m just writing at this point, so it doesn’t really matter, but I feel like this might be fucking hillarious.  Alright next bit. Note the whole idea behind this is to write, and not actually edit shit.   Just goto town, and then deal with the consequences at some other point.  Okay next thing. 


11. Monster:  Bakula lair kitchens and stuff


12. Monster:  Bakula lair + the leaders area.  


13. Empty:  


14. Empty:  A small medical centre that held areas to help the infected, inflicted, etc  


15. Trap:  Spear trap near a door, if the door is opened with out checking, 4 spears will penetrate from the ground and the ceiling, impaling whoever is in the doorway.  Here is some treasure of the bakulas.  


16. Monster:  Medusa lair.  The room has 12 statues that only go from teh torso down, in some cases only feet.  The medusa has been thwarted a few times from this room and is no longer here.  THe statues were originally full length, but over time and battles have been destroyed. 


17. Monster:  Gnome trader, who is working with both the bakula’s and the dwarves 


18. Trap:  this trap has been set by some of the dwarven miners to stop monsters getting too close, there is a large treasure chest filled with actual gold.  On every side of the chest is a pit trap which is triggered by the floor.  The only way to actually get at the gold is to come cfrom above? Nope that sucks.  


19. Trap


20. Monster


21. Trap 


22. Trap  


d30 Crowd sourced "Jerk henchmen" table

I rejoined mewe last week, I had taken a bit of a break from RPGs and social media while working thru a lot of tests for my job. Jumped on the osr forum and suggested creating a table. Here you go.

Big thanks to: Arthur B, GLG Johua, Shane E, Bud, Steve C, Rod T, Kryinn E, 

1.  Bakall, never seems to have a sharp weapon, or a weapon handy.

2.  Awet, runs at every monster, except rats. Totally skeeved out by rats.

3.  Magal, greedy swordsman that counts loot whilst engaged in combat.

4 Ronaldie, wildly flatulent.

5.  Jessica - has gotten banned from every tavern on the coast due to her wandering hands.

6.  Nutsy, always leaving a trail of peanut shells wherever he goes. Occasionally, the odd person turns pale at this and quickly moves away.

7.  Barrelhouse Baskil, a mediocre and craven swordsman, who constantly subverts the characters plans by saying "You really think that's a good idea? Huh."

8.  Jaynal the Anal. A foppish middle-aged human who constantly complains about everything.

9.Born Again Bran, overshares his personal Testimony, loudly, every time the party stops.  Worse, he's a Nugganite from Discworld.

10 grojan, always wants to turn right in the dungeon

11 some people call him Tim! He always suggests the longest way possible

12.  Terrek the Foppish, a mediocre wizard with great taste in foppish hats.

13 quibd, stops to tie his shoes at inopportune times.

14.  Kam Fantac, illustrious thief and bard, who sings about all his party's recent exploits...

15.  Gotago - needs a pit stop 10 minutes after the party enters the dungeon.

16.  Tassel, barbarian braggart that suffers from extreme rhabdophobia, to the chagrin of the party wizard...

17). Tanzer, M-U, won't stop talking about how everyone confuses him with Tenser.

18 Neb, critizes all party decisions, doesn't offer solutions until after. Woulda coulda shoulda.

19.  Pardu of Pallmall  - stalwart lancer who frequently talks about how cool his previous adventuring party was - their priest had the best God  ever, their magic user knew the most awesome spells...

20 Laz, carries a large extremely dull sword.  Which matches his wits.

21.  Nudford is a wiry halberdier who has a monster brain eating fetish; he sometimes "accidentally" makes too much noise to attract them.

22.  Rasp, a cursed cleric with two tongues, you never really know which one to believe...

23.  Money Bags, the party gambler who looses half the loot carousing in the tavern on the first night back. At least he always makes certain that sacks don't have holes, like that wretch, Spills...

24.  Harkin, Spends most of the time charming himself into oblivion.  The rest of the time he smokes random plants he finds and dries.  

25.  Galwit, Much better than his brother Halfwit who died when a tree he was cutting fell on him.  Galwit tends to tell that story often, even to people who have heard it before.  

26.  Horah, A wonderfully excellent thief, her sneak ability is a bit low due to the rather large heeled boots she wears.  

27.  Goolang, A troubadour who only sings songs that rhyme on sundays.  Every other day are haiku's that are in a extremely weird time signature.  

28.  Nahgi, claims to have every alchemist ingredient known to man and elf in her backpack.  In reality, the backpack contains dust, spider webs, weird triangular shaped dice, and medieval hair spray

29.  Abrati, A reknown healer, who is a complete fraud.  He does however talk a big talk, and every town he enters people know of him, they tend to even give him money.  

30.  Jabjib, An half orcish smuggler, who wears rather loud jingly bells on his boots. 

Update

 I just joined Matt Jackson and the guys last week for a fun session.

Here's the play report. http://www.msjx.org/2020/09/the-gatehouse-on-cormacs-crag-session_14.html

We are playing barrow maze with ose. Which I'm digging so far! My mage misstep took a misstep and died. Good news is I have two backup characters. And there's always this generator http://save.vs.totalpartykill.ca/web-apps/

Looks like this is a every Thursday thing for a few hours which is nice. 

******

I was talking with Ray otus the creator of the gygax 75 challenge about my difficulty with completing it. I figure I'm going to start from scratch at this point. I always try to think too big or outdo myself and fail. Smaller is easier. One big thing is to really decide on the system ahead of time! 

*****

As is typical I have way too many creative ideas and not enough time. 

Current thoughts. 

Write and record a 7 song punk record

Build a better studio in my basement. 

Order a fuzz box or guitar kit and build it. 

Start a rpg zine. 

Complete any number of half started writing projects. 

OH and just play guitar. 

Maybe get a game going on Wednesday afternoons. 

Tone when gamesmastering

 I've been thinking a lot about tone when running games. I find that most of the games I run, or have played in have been very "chuckle fuck".  Meaning lots of giggles and not that serious. While the overall tone maybe dark, there's still a lot of room for enjoyment.

Obviously it depends on the group and gm, but I believe that pretty much any module can be run in any fashion. I've run keep on the borderlands very silly and very dark. Adventures from lotfp could be run non dark and gritty, you could even turn it high fantasy if you want. Long story short, don't worry too much about written tone, play it the way you want. 

In other randomness, I've been thinking about running an open ended game using the judges guild ready ref tables and the 1e dmg tables. No map or plot, just start the players off having escaped a possible slave, and go from there. The idea that the gm won't know what's next really appeals to me. One version of DnD that I haven't really tried is first edition advanced, so I may give osric a go. 

Yesterday I added a few new blogs to the blog roll. 

If you didn't know, grognardia has started posting again! Which is exciting. I've been reading everyday. 

http://grognardia.blogspot.com/

It's funny how as soon as you play a game, you get the bug to write more game stuff.

Super fun game last night.  Got together with Jeff and a few cohorts from the One Shot Group on facebook to play some Star Frontiers (Which I've never played).  Jeff was using the Zeb's Guide version, which has the oddball faserip style charts in them.  (See below)

Jeff was borrowing stuff from Zeubulon's guide as well as the Knights Hawks and a lot of dragon magazine articles.  The whole premise of the game is super neat, basically post apoc earth, everyone lives under water.  The world is managed by corporations rather than governments.  Not exactly waterworld or shadowrun, but there's waves of that which is cool.   This is my first d10 style game that I'm playing in, and my first non D&D game that I've played in a long time.  We went thru basic character creation last night, and got the intro to the world and backstory.  Afterwards it was starting to get "early" for one guy (whose in England), so we pulled the plug at that point.  What I really enjoy about playing in hangouts games is that 9/10 we tend to all chat about games afterwards.  I spent about an hour and a half talking about OSR games, was labelled a Grognard (which is awesome!).  A few of the players are only just recently getting into OSR (hence the grognard thing), so we discussed some of the history, G+, etc.   

One thing that I did come to the realization of was that I really just like playing games on hangouts (or zoom I guess if I have to), whilst I don't mind roll20 it often becomes very boardgamey.  I tend to spend more time farting around in roll20 and creating maps than I do prepping a game.   I just find the whole player agency thing to be really wound up tight when you are playing only theatre of the mind (and playing a system that doesn't bog you down with +/-s and other nonsense).  

One of the guys I was talking to last night wants to get into writing more, so we talked about that and the 5 room dungeon model (Which he hadn't heard about).  

Coming away from this discussion and the beginnings of a game I've got a WHOLE wack of inspiration and a few good ideas to start working on.  It's funny how as soon as you play a game, you get the bug to write more game stuff. 

I'd like to jump back into the Gygax 75 challenge, but with a few tweaks to the process, more 5 room dungeons, less one big close by dungeon.  I think enough time has passed that I have a few more concrete ideas to put down.  I was discussing my thoughts on character creation last night, and how I'd like to have everyone get one magical talent, likely from a d20 list.  The suggestion was made that I do the table DCC/Lotfp style, where at a starting level you roll a d20 and as you level up your roll on the same table but it's a d100.  Fucking genius! This is the real trick with writing for me, is bouncing ideas off of people! It gets the juices flowing.  

*damn it! I started the challenge in frigging April! It's august! What the heck shane!

House Rules For Swords & Wizardry FMAG

1. You will earn experience points for overcoming challenges, and for gold acquired.  Note that you don’t necessarily have to kill the monster to overcome the situation.  

   
2. We are playing in an open world, which means that you can pretty much do anything.  Think outside the box and have fun!  Obviously there could be consequences.  

3. At 0 hit points you are unconscious, at negative your level you must make a saving throw or die.  On a success you are returned to 0 hit points.

4. Each character starts out with 2 luck points, these work the same way as inspiration and can be used to re-roll any dice.  

5. After a fight, a player can bandage their wounds for 1d6 hit points. 

6. Consumables are important!  Don’t run out of food, torches, arrows!

7. Each character will get one hireling.  You will be responsible for this character, and in the case of things going sideways you will be asked to “check the morale” of the hireling.  They may flee, or stand tall.  The hireling can be used as a backup character in the event of death.  The hireling character will be expecting payment. 

8. Every encounter (monster or otherwise) will have a reaction check, this means that not everything will attempt to kill you right away. 

9. Surprise will be determined on a case by case basic, by rolling 1d6, on a roll of 1 you will be surprised (same goes for monsters).  Prior to rolling Initiative the players will state what their intentions are.  Initiative is handled by rolling 1d6 for each side (players and DM).  No bonuses are added to the roll, and the players will take turns rolling initiative for the group.  In the case of a tie combat is resolved simultaneously.

10. Critical hits will be double damage.  ex you roll a 5 for damage, which means you do 10 points of damage.  
11. Critical fails result in the loss of a weapon, in the case of an ability check some awful will likely happen.  
12. Ability checks are D20 + Stat Bonus.  Target number will be determined by the GM. 
13. Your attack bonus is added to your d20 roll, and your strength or dexterity modifier.  Only fighters add their modifier to damage.  Ex d20+Attack Bonus+Dex Mod = To hit.

14. Encumbrance:  You can carry 20 items, not including gold.          
15. Levelling:  Upon levelling up you can re-roll any stat, if the number is higher than the current stat you can keep it.  You regain all lost luck, and gain 1 extra.  

Adding a few basic adventures to the Isle Of Dread

As we all know, Isle Of Dread is an awesome sandbox filled with a lot of adventure options.  If you need a few more options for the campaign, or even a U-turn, here's a few extra ideas using some basic era adventures.  Alternatively you may have a whole new crop of Characters (after the demise of the last bunch) and you might want to keep them on the island, but with a different scenario.  

I know that a few people have replaced the major city on the isle with the dwellers of the forbidden city.  Which is a perfectly logical and evil thing to do.  I do like the idea of placing the city down south between some of the villages.  In the intro to dwellers, a Chieftain finds the PCs and tells them that trade has been hijacked by the denizens of the mysterious city.  I like this because you can play off all of the villages.  The PCs start in the main village of Tanora, they find out about some of the other villages and the trade issues.  Maybe they've been expecting a shipment and the PCs catch wind of it and investigate.  

The Lost City.  It easy for the PCs to get lost and run out of food on the isle.  The Pyramid doesn't have to be the typical Egyptian styled one, in the middle of the dessert.  It could be a Mayan styled one, deep in the jungle.  A fun intro could be that the PCs have wound up on shore after their boat sank, they have plodded along thru the jungle and finally stumbled upon the pyramid.  Eventually maybe they will leave the pyramid and explore the Isle.  

In Search Of The Unknown is a great dungeon that you can pretty much pop into any campaign.  Having it reasonably close to the village of Tanora means that the PCs can investigate and make their way back to town often. 

Keep On The Borderlands is another great adventure that you can pop into any campaign.  My twist is a bit different however.  One version is that the keep was built long ago and its location was lost in time.  The keep is now overrun with Orcs, Goblins etc.  Hiding in the caves nearby are Cavemen who have no memory of the keep.  Alternatively the keep can be a forgotten outpost from the mainland, it manages to keep its head above water (jeez that was all kinds of puns there....) by trading with local pirates and some of the villagers.  Cue usual kotb activities and the caves of chaos.  

Horror on the hill is meant to be a self contained location north of a river, it could easily be popped onto the small island north of the isle of dread.  To the east is a smaller island where you can put the town from the original adventure.   Once again, this is a good spot for the PCs to wash up on shore, or possibly float by in a raft as they discover the rest of the isle of dread.

Another one that comes to mind is "rage of the rakasta"., which changes the way the Rakasta are in Isle of dread, but could setup some interesting stuff.  A lot of the adventures from Thunderrift could be ported over to the isle. 

In September I'll be running the Isle weekly.  I'll be using Swords & Wizardry FMAG for rules.  Should be lots of fun!  

*This will be the second time that I've ran the Isle.  I'm looking forward to it.  Some of the above ideas may make their way into the adventure.  Or may not.