Attack on Titan on Taenarum

I just finished binge-watching the Attack on Titan anime series.  I know it's on one of the big streaming services - Hulu or Netflix.  It's a post-apocalyptic series where humanity huddles behind a giant series of concentric walled areas because the outside world has been overrun by "titans".  Titans are gigantic smiling idiots that shamble around the countryside and eat people.  It's a clever variant of the zombie apocalypse genre.  The main characters are a bunch of cadets who join the armed forces to fight the titans, and the extreme violence and presentation reminded me a bit of Starship Troopers.  It's both horrifying and comical watching titans eat people with those idiot smiles on their faces.

I don't think I'll ever look at D&D giants the same way.  Fe Fi Fo Fum, I smell the blood of an englishman!  But D&D giants are only 8 - 12 feet tall (or thereabouts) - not big enough to hold people dangling by their feet and swallow them whole like sardines.  We must go bigger!

In Greek Myth, there are all sorts of primordial beings.  There are the personified great forces of the universe, like Erebos, Nyx, Gaia, Chaos, and Uranus.  There are gods and titans, monsters, and giants.  Gods and titans are pretty much indistinguishable to me.  The Greek gods act like a bunch of petty teenagers with super powers with the titans as their super rivals.  Half the gods and heroes have titans for parents, so there's no dearth of cross-breeding.  I see them a bit like Zelazny's Courts of Amber and Chaos in The Chronicles of Amber - they're reflections of each other, and alignment is all relative.  The one thing the gods are good at is beating up on primordial monsters.

The Giants of Greek myth could be made scary.  They're born of Gaia, one of the primordial beings, and clamber up out of the earth.  They're dangerous enough to fight the gods.  They could be super giant!  In pursuit of that goal, the giants of D&D are herby demoted to "lesser giants", the descendants of those 60' tall primordial giants from the dawn of time.  There's even precedent in Greek myth, since there are the 3 primordial Cyclopes that serve as armorers for the gods, and then a lesser race of degenerate cyclops that live on islands and eat people, like Polyphemus in "The Odyssey".  Giants are now the same way.

One of the themes I'm striving towards in the Taenarum campaign is that all those origin stories in the Greek universe are true and relevant (to a point) in the current age.  The primordial beings are still out there, sleeping and sessile.  All of the titans and monsters trounced by the gods in Hesiod's Theogony, and imprisoned in Tartarus, are all there, guarded in small part by Hades, who acts a bit like hell's jailer.  The road to the underworld is a direct path to the realm of Hades, but it's also a path to Tartarus - and all sorts of malefactors that would like to see the Titans returned to power, or legendary monsters freed from Tartarus, scheme in the depths of the dungeon on how accomplish these ends.

That also means there are ways to awaken the Primordial Giants.  With Attack on Titan firmly in mind, how can I not unleash some 50-60' tall horrors that stride across the countryside like dumb smiling Kaiju and lift the roofs of buildings, scooping out the inhabitants like a child pulling dolls out of a doll house?  This is a thing that must happen in this campaign:

Anyway, back to Attack on Titan.  The anime was great, but there was only one season (25 episodes) so we're off to figure out the best way to keep up with the manga.  My wife would exile me to the couch if I dropped a few hundred dollars on manga back issues, so I'm hoping the library has them, or there's a streaming service to read them online.  Wikipedia mentions a potential live-action movie and the idea that maybe there's a second anime season in the works, so we'll see.

New Delve Maps for Taenarum - areas 1.2 and 1.3

Here are some maps from past two week's dungeon adventures.  I've been working in a "dungeon delve" format to keep things sized for a single night of play.  Here I've annotated the maps with the main encounter in each area.

Area 1.2, Vermin Caves, is the lair of a Mushroom Dryad - a winsome fey with mottled grey skin, a gossamer dress, and various abilities over mushrooms and beasts.  For instance, she cultivated fragrant mushrooms in area 2 to draw in rats, rodents, and small mammals to keep her giant snakes fed; she had enslaved beasts in her lair, covered in mushrooms and under spore-effected mind control.  The players didn't make it far enough into this delve to meet the mushroom dryad, but this isn't the only one in Taenarum; I see the generic "dryad" as a signature nymph for a Greek setting, and the mushroom dryad combines allure, toxicity, and rot, in a disturbing way.  Plus, they live in caves.

Area 1.3 is the lair of the first eidolon of Hades, the Lord of Bones.  The area has mustering rooms with dormant skeletal soldiers awaiting activation; a rendering site where corpses are stripped to the bones by flesh eating scarabs; it has the Arch of Greed, a trapped hall that compels adventurers to ignore their defenses and focus on a wealthy treasure; a final area is the boss fight with the Lord of Bones.

I've been enjoying a book called 5th Edition Foes (5EF) from the Frog Gods - it features a blend of Fiend Folio updates and new monsters, all in 5E terms.  I'm basing some of the exotic undead "lords" in Taenarum on monsters from that book.  I used the 5EF "bone collector" as the starting point for the Lord of Bones used here.  The Lord of Bones fight included a handful of misshapen skeletons, and some pit traps that drop victims into a small warren beneath the floor where the Lord of Bones can stalk a victim for flaying.

Secrets of the Mini Dungeon Revealed

Yesterday I posted a little mini dungeon with map and key.  The text is kind of bland, and it's only an entrance area, but it actually reveals a lot about my referee style and how I approach campaigns.  Here's a peek at the thought process!

Game Balance Doesn't Matter
Game balance for encounters is an interesting tool.  You can be very transparent about risk vs reward, and relative danger - or you can mostly disregard game balance (as long as combat isn't the only solution to the encounter).  For Taenarum, there's a broad rule that the deeper you go into the dungeon, the more dangerous it becomes, but I have no issues throwing difficult challenges at players with a range of outcomes.  Yesterday's dungeon only had the first 8 rooms of an entrance area, but still had some significant dangers:

Bandit Captain:  The bandit captain is CR 2 (meaning 1 captain is a challenge for a level 2 party).  Oops.  Ghost:  A ghost is CR 4, meaning a single ghost is a balanced encounter for a 4th level party.  Oops again.  Medusa:  the players can't actually fight the Medusa in the first dungeon, so it's more like a trap \ hazard.

In the actual game, the party fought the bandit captain, though he kept asking for them to surrender.  Still, the fight was close to a TPK, but they successfully defeated him; in actuality, if he defeated the whole party, he would have kept them alive to confront the Fates one at a time as prisoners - and then gone on to be a great recurring villain after screwing them over.  Instead, they carried his head back to town as proof of victory.

The ghost was in the room of the Fates.  They didn't get a chance to fight the ghost because it won initiative, and succeeded in possessing a party member.  Otherwise, it could have been rough.  The party hasn't figured out how their empty soul gem works (yet), but I did seed an alternate solution to the ghost right in the mini dungeon.  Taenarum is the Road to the Underworld - meaning all the dead souls walk the road to Hades.  They're all around you in the dungeon, you just can't see them - that prickling on the neck, the goose bumps on the forearm, whispers of the dead.  So there are also lots of ghosts in Taenarum - victims of violent and unfair deaths that malinger in the dungeon, plaguing the living instead of continuing on to the Underworld.

Random Effects
Old school referees love their random effects.  The whole 'Triad of the Fates' statue, with its random blessings and curses, is an example here.  There are strange things all over Taenarum.  Remember, the dungeon was built by the "mad god", Hades.  It's part West World, part Murderworld.  In fact, I'm sure I'll find a reason to put a Yul Brenner gunslinger in there, somewhere.  (If you're part of the younger generation that has never seen 1970's Westworld, you must correct this at once).

The perfect alignment between randomness and lack of game balance is embodied in my wandering monster table - it's got 100 entries on it, with encounters that would challenge everything from 1st level through 5th level parties.  Anything that can be encountered wandering between the entrance and the underground lake featuring the island of the Hagagora, is on the table.

Story Elements
Sandbox games have lots of story elements.  The difference between a sandbox and adventure path is that the story the players experience at the table follows their choices, and not a scripted plot the referee has made in advance.  But you can jam your sandbox full of story elements.

For instance, why is there a Big Stone Head in the first area of the dungeon?  It's a relic of the god's war at the beginning of time, when the gods overthrew the titans.  Many of the primordial monsters in Greek Myth are incarcerated in Tartarus, guarded by the minions of Hades.  The dungeon is full of factions; there are at least two powerful, villainous factions seeking to open Tartarus and release the monsters.  This is going to be more apparent over time as the players interact more with the environment and meet more people - it’s chock full of plot and story.  It's just that my story is not nearly as important as the story the players create with their antics through game play.  Who knows, maybe they'll join the iconoclasts that want to overthrow Mt Olympus and invert the natural order.  I'm not going to make that decision for the players.

Megadungeon Design
I like big highways in and out of the dungeon to make it easy to get into the depths.  Not only is Taenarum literally a big highway, but the first dungeon even includes a teleporter for high level parties to skip miles of passageways and quickly get into the depths.  I also believe that lots of characters and factions create interesting encounters - as you follow the campaign, you'll meet Amazons, Fanatics of Ares, Iconoclastic Satyrs, Skull Punks and Black Brothers (two factions within the Hades Cult), and the varied and dangerous cults of Hecate.  I'm up to about 15 factions so far.

Silliness
At the end of the day, D&D is just a game and I always like to keep some humor front and center.  You've already encountered the Scoreboard, a literal 'highest score' rating like an old arcade video game, back in the Adventurer's Guild Hall.  This particular mini dungeon was littered with silly graffiti, including pop culture references.  You have to know the players are going to be cracking in-jokes and making out-of-game references the whole time.  The GM's world is 'straight man', but I'm glad to break the 4th wall for laughs, too, and reinforce that at the end of the day, it's only a game.

Does anyone remember the GM Merit Badges that used to be over at Strange Magic blog?  I couldn't find them - they'd be perfect to slap on here!

Edit:
Chris in the comments pointed out where the GM badges were being hosted, so I went ahead and added some to reflect how I view my games:

• Tactics Are Important
• I Use Maps and Content
• My Games Feature Gonzo Stuff
• I Don't Fudge Dice
• Character Death Happens
• Be Prepared to Run

Beedo's Workshop - The Entrance Area in Taenarum

Here are my game notes from the first mini dungeon - a glance behind the curtain into Beedo's workshop.  My approach to Taenarum 2.0 is to create a megadungeon assembled from little mini dungeons like this one.  There are a number of characteristics I'm targeting by assembling the dungeon from mini areas:  they're very modular; easy to sketch, map, and write; each one can fit into a single night of play (important!); each mini dungeon is themed to create a lot of variety from place to place.  There are story points, quests, and other connectors between mini dungeons, as well as quests and rumors in town pointing to them.

Since this is an entrance area, this one is sparse and mostly empty.  You can read the player's side of things in the first two game reports:

Game Report 1
Game Report 2

I took a few minutes to polish my notes to make them sensible for the blog - my play notes are usually just sentence fragments and jotted phrases.  It's a lot more work to make notes readable versus providing enough fragments and memory joggers to run the game!

Area 1.1
=========

1.  Entrance
-------------
A blemish on the nearby wall on the main road belies the presence of a permanent magic mouth, with ghoulish black teeth.  A decorative arch identifies this area as a dungeon entrance.

When approached, the mouth triggers and speaks:

Eidelon and key rewards
with treasures from the death god's hoards;
In order to conclude the quests,
You'll need to find the seven chests.

Welcome to the Underworld.  May you find what you seek.  Muhahaha.

The laughter then echoes through the halls (good time for a wandering monster check).

2.  Graffiti Room
------------------
There's a trip wire set up in the passage right before the room - it's attached to bangles of metal in the room that chime and alert the bandits.  The smell of a cookfire drifts from the north passage.  The room holds rubble from smashed statues (wings and bones - winged deaths).  There is graffiti on the walls (mostly written in charcoal or chalk).

Diodoros sleeps with the fishes.
Spartans rule, Athenians drool.
Pythios pwns you.
For a good time, ask to dance with Melantha.
If you find my head, let me know.  --Orpheus.
Don't eat the pomegranates.

3.  Bandit Camp
---------------
A group of 5 bandits camp here - 1 is on watch and listens for the chimes.  There's a cookfire, basic supplies, some firewood.  They have incidental treasure.  If alerted, 2 flank the hallway with spears to ambush anyone entering the room, the rest retreat to the corners with bows to shoot at the entrance.

4.  Bandit Captain
-------------------
Tobias, the Bandit Captain (use CR 2 bandit captain stats).  He's handsome, with silky hair, but he's terribly unlucky and curses the fates - he lost his love to the book of blessings and curses, and now forces captured adventurers to 'roll the dice'.  He's willing to spare spare anyone that takes on the Triad (room 7).

The room is lit from a pilfered soul gem (in the place of a torch).  He has a bed, trunk, gear, writing table, wine and cheese - some back story of his lost love is scrawled in a diary.  There's a potion of healing and 125gp in art objects in the room.

5.  Abandoned Camp
-------------------
The room has the remains of an old campfire, some discarded gear, and another ruined death statue.  Old basket with a treasure map stuck in the side of a discarded basket (it shows areas 1.2.4 and the wall cache there).

More Graffiti:
She can see you.  Don't look.
I left my harp in Sam Clam's Disco.
The Lord of Bones guards the first box.
Cylons look like people, but only 7 are known.
These are not the droids druids you're looking for (added by the players)

6.  Big Stone Head
-------------------
A monstrous stone head fills a ten foot space here.  Any time the head is disturbed, on a 1-2 out of 6 the nose exhales a Fear gas.  Carved into the forehead is a piece of text in the Olympian language of the gods and primordials, the word "Forsaken".  If anyone speaks Olympian in the presence of the head, it spits out an enchanted soul gem (empty) - once (see the notes on soul gems).

The head is covered in runes (arcana to decipher) - the writing is god script and implies the head came from the Titanomachy, the legendary war against the Titans.  It's a reminder that many of the Titans are imprisoned by Hades in Tartarus.

7.  Triad of Fates
-------------------
There's a stone door embedded in a post and lintel with no obvious way to open.  Symbols and letters covering the whole alphabet are etched into the post as buttons.  Depressing the (worn) letters that spell FATE opens the door (it slides with a rumble into the wall).  Magic torch light flares into life along the walls of the room.

The room is dominated by a large statue depicting the three fates (Moirai).   Clotho (spinner), Lachesis (allotter) and Atropos (unturnable).  They carry book, staff, and scale.  A brazier near the base illuminates a stone table with the Book of Blessings and Curses - consisting of a series of bronze plates attached to the table like a book.

A lingering Ghost (an athletic looking female, with grey eyes) lingers in the corner.  She lost her life at the hands of the book and now lurks in the room with unfinished business.  If anyone doesn't try to read their fate in the book, the ghost attempts a possession.  She'll move on to her reward if her possessed victim takes on a curse and survives the Fates.

Anyone who attacks the statues or attempts to damage the book... Save vs Disintegration.

Curses:
===========
1 Take 2d8 points of damage.
2 All wealth carried vanishes.
3 Polymorphed into harmless animal.
4 Lose one level of experience.
5 Disadvantage for the next 24 hours.
6 Struck blind.

Blessings
===========
1 Healed of all damage.
2 Receive gem of random value.
3 Gain 300 xp.
4 Advantage for the next 24 hours.
5 May re-roll any one failed result.
6 +1 to a random ability score (one time gift only).

8.  Medusa Mural
-----------------
The room has a few petrified remains of dead adventurers.  The south wall is a lifelike mural looking into the lair of the Medusa (the room beyond looks like a crumbling Greek temple in a cave).  She can see anyone in the room and petrify through the looking glass - there's a 1 in 6 chance the Medusa is nearby and moves to peer through the mural if there are lights in the room.  There are sigils along the mural border that identify the sequence to a teleportation circle, allowing fast egress to the level 8 Medusa Temple for high level parties.

Introducing - The Outlanders

In which a new campaign is launched, and the players demonstrate their quality.

We started the new campaign last night.  A few of the guys have played some 5E, for the others this was their first foray.  I kicked off with some basic ground rules:

• The campaign is built around a "delve" concept, short dungeons meant to be completed in a single evening.  I expect each game to start and end in town, to support an episodic cast of players.  If you miss one week, you're free to show up the next and know that you'll be able to jump in.
• 5E combat features a lot of swing - monsters and characters that hit hard, and dice matter; the players should plan on utilizing sound old school tactics.
• While I like the Inspiration mechanic, I plan on focusing it more on things that reinforce the setting than character background choices like bonds and ideals that might draw focus from group play.  Invoking the gods or demonstrating heroic ideals from the epics are good examples of play that could earn inspiration.

The players for the first night introduced their characters - Modred, a Gold Dragonborn Bard; Etor, a Spartan Fighter; Gati, a Halfling Rogue; Aldrian, an Elf Druid.

Modred:  The Dragonborn are a manufactured race, created from dragon's teeth sown in the ground (ala the myth of Cadmus and Jason - the Spartoi).  Modred has come to Taenarum to confront Hades in song, and liberate the spirits of the dead Dragonborn, or join them.  (I totally want to see a death metal showdown some day, like Finn versus Death).

Etor:  Etor was a Spartan soldier who deserted on an overseas campaign, and spent years in the wilds north of Greece.  He's come to Taenarum because he's a professional adventurer now.

Gati:  Halflings originate on an isolated island that was discovered by explorers after the Trojan War - when members of the Greek fleet were blown off course.  The race indulges in drink, pleasure, and leisure, and hold Dionysus as their patron deity.  (Now I can't help but picture Halflings as the chubby little satyrs from Fantasia).  Since the Halflings have learned about the outside world (and vice versa) many youthful Halflings have stowed away to see the wider world.  That's why Gati left too.

Aldrian:  Aldrian is an elf druid revering Artemis in the wild forests beyond the Alps.  A vision called him to the south of Greece.  He believes the will of the goddess will be served by exploring the dungeon.

The players agreed that they met at the Adventurer's Guild Hall in Psammathous Bay, the small seaside village along the cape from which jaunts to Taenarum are launched.  They call themselves 'The Outlanders', because they all managed to choose Outlander as a character background, sight unseen.  One of the hallmarks of the Adventurer's Guildhall is a "scoreboard" on the wall, where a running tally of total gold earned is kept on the wall, along with the status of various rival adventuring parties.   The game was officially 'in session' with Lykourgos, the proprietor of the guild hall, banging a tankard on the bar top loud enough to silence the crowd.  "A new group of adventurers has incorporated.  They call themselves The Outlanders."  Lykourgos walked over to the scoreboard and hung the placard with the player's group name on the bottom rung of the scoreboard, with zero points.  "Outlanders - welcome to the Scoreboard!"  And many cries of 'huzzah' went up around the tavern, and then the various rival groups went back to their drinks and conversations… although comments like "Wonder how long it will take for that group to end up in the dead pile", was also heard a few times around the hall.

The players spent some time seeing what kind of rumors they could pick up, and whether there were any quests being dangled about the town (queue the sound of furious DM dice rolls).  A distraught woman at the bar, Desma, was hoping to hire adventurers to rescue her husband from a dryad.  His companions returned to Sparta, leaving him enslaved in the clutches of a vampish dryad.  Meanwhile, the captain of the guard pointed out how Lord Yorgos, the ruler of the nearby area, would be happy if an adventuring party took care of some bandits that were camping somewhere near the entrance.  In both cases, the more powerful local adventuring parties - the Nefarious Nine, or the Big Gold Hunters - couldn't be bothered with dryads or bandits - so the players saw these as good opportunities for themselves.  Off they went to the dungeon.

The walk to Taenarum from the village cove is a couple of miles across sun drenched hills and the ridge line.  At the end of the cape, overlooking the vast and open water, is a high sea cliff and a large passage carved into the living stone.  The post and lintel of the doorway is chiseled with images of giants holding up the roof, and a weather worn visage of a gorgon over the entrance.  The players prepared a torch and descended into the darkness.

The road to the underworld is spacious and high ceilinged, a broad twenty foot passage with numerous nooks, alcoves, side rooms, and even side passages.  After about twenty minutes, the players came to the first dungeon - an archway with a long passage leading off to the right.

How I drew up the first delve area in my planning went something like this… the players would miss a trip wire, alerting the nearby bandit camp, causing an ambush in the bandit area that would drain most of the party resources.  The party would be softened up for the "bandit captain", a super dangerous encounter for 1st level characters.  I'd be fine if the bandit captain dropped most of the players and then took the party prisoner.  Getting sand kicked in your face at first level is good for building character, amiright?

What really happened is that the Halfling thief checked the hall for traps, easily found the trip wire, disabled it, and found the bandits long before they knew anyone was there.  The players ambushed the bandits, wiping them out without a problem, and were also able to surprise the bandit captain in his lair a few minutes later.  Things didn't look good for the DM's team.

Despite the players seriously outplaying me, the raw power of the bandit captain versus four first level fighters began to tilt the fight.  The bandit captain was on the other side of a large table, and Etor charged from one side, and the Dragonborn charged from the other.  Etor was dropped to zero hit points by the bandit's "three attacks per round" routine, and while the druid was using 'healing word' to revive the fighter, the Dragonborn got pounded.  The Dragonborn was knocked out of the fight, the Druid took his place and was also knocked out of the fight, and the Halfling needed to run under the table and start doing thief backstabby types of things.  A timely critical by Etor finished the bandit captain, and the players were able to stabilize and revive their fallen friends.

Despite my stated goal of finishing an entire delve per night, this night was heavy on roleplaying in town, telling war stories from Gen Con's past, and otherwise just catching up and getting the band back together, so over half the night was spent on that kind of stuff.  Not willing to risk the wrath of They Who Must Be Obeyed (the wives, and it was a work night) we ended on time and the group returned to town.  I imagine the players will finish this area next week and then I'll post a map of the area.

Overall, it was a fun game night.  Player skill matters, but the damage output of monsters is high enough that hot or cold dice create a lot of tension round to round.  I have some concerns about how this "delve approach" of short game nights will work versus resource management, healing, and spells, but I'm willing to see how it goes.

Design Principles for a 5E Megadungeon

We're on the eve of kicking off my first foray into a 5E megadungeon and campaign, assuming weather complies and the players can make it over tomorrow with more snow in the forecast.  For this one, I've gone in a much different direction than the ways I've designed and built megadungeons in the past.

The Old Way
A fair amount of time in the OSR was spent looking backwards to the 70's and trying to recreate how Gary did it with famous campaigns like the dungeons of Castle Greyhawk.  The campaigns seemed gloriously fun and the return to the megadungeon sandbox style was a refreshing escape from scripted stories and DM as author.  I'm immensely grateful for all the tips, tricks, techniques as a member of the OSR movement.

However, the context for modern gaming is changing.  I'm finding that my adult gamers can't make every game session; we can't game 8 hours at a time; players want faster gratification and aren't interested in the skill-testing inherent in gigantic dungeon crawls.  Creating a sprawling dungeon level of 100+ rooms for each level of the megadungeon was fine from both sides of the table in the days before we had kids; I'm seeing that my approach needs to adapt to the realities of busy families and modern people with shifting schedules.  Plus, the table top is competing for mindspace with consoles, tablet games, online stuff, all sorts of competing media.  The RPG model needs to assume episodic attendance and shorter sessions - at least for me, and maybe you too.

Solutions
I tend not to give WOTC a lot of credit, but the idea of the "dungeon delve" as it was positioned in 4E (and maybe even late in 3.x) caught my attention while I've been pondering solutions.  Dungeon delves were short, self-contained scenarios consisting of a series of rooms and a few encounters, perfect for a single night and a pick up game.  They line up well with the modern context - intermittent attendance, pick up games, shorter sessions, faster character advancement.

How would I go about re-envisioning the megadungeon as a sprawling collection of loosely connected delves?

Here's a section of a top down view of Taenarum, complimenting the cross-section I posted a while ago. I'm not happy with this map, there's a long way to go, but it gives you the idea on what I'm thinking:

The overall structure of Taenarum is a large passage winding into the depths of the earth, the legendary road to the Underworld, crossing vast caverns and spaces.  I figure each hex is probably a quarter of a mile, so some of the caverns will be miles across - large enough to hold lakes, islands, even underground cities.  Along the way are countless rooms, nooks, side passages, tertiary halls, and entrances to mini dungeons.  Here's an example of what I mean by a mini dungeon:

One other change I'm doing is trying to do everything electronically, right from the start.  No graph paper maps or hex paper, everything is in notepad or graphic files.  You never know if you'll want to collect it in a book for readers or vanity publishing.  Maybe my players will want to 'Return to the Black City' and I'll have the chance to recreate some older stuff this way.  How cool would that be?

Open Questions
I have a bunch of questions on how 5E is going to work for this kind of dungeon, which I only expect to answer through experience.  How well do the CR systems and encounter guidelines correlate to in-game challenges?  How will the short rest and long rest mechanics work, from a resource management perspective, when the game is built around episodic delves?  Heh, I have a list of observations on 5E, I'll just collate them into a 5E rules post.

Post Script
One funny thing I realized - it didn't require adoption of 5E for me to make some of these changes to the megadungeon approach!  I could have stayed with my favorite rules sets, like LOTFP or ACKS, and run smaller delvers, faster advancement by modifying the XP system, etc, and just run classic OSR rules with alterations to fit the modern gaming context.  My purist tendencies and adherence to tradition tended to get in the way, but I'm getting over it.  I'm looking forward to 5E, though, and the players like all the gadgets and powerful characters - the new races, classes, all that stuff.  I'm sure they'll show up tomorrow with tons of interesting characters.

Taenarum 2.0 Player's Background

Wow.  It's been over a month since the last post.  I've been keeping super busy in the meantime, though most of it has been work related (I'll spare the details).  From an RPG perspective, I've gotten some experience running 5E games and been working with the system.  I installed mapping software on my 8.1 machine.  I got Taenarum reconfigured and ready for some 5E action!  Players are on the way this weekend, so I'm going to post a player's background here for easy reference.

Player's Background

Taenarum is the legendary entrance to the Greek Underworld.  Hades, the god of wealth and the underworld, covets the souls of mortal heroes, and his undead minions have created sprawling dungeons along the road of the dead, promising fantastic treasures and ready death.  Heroes from around Greece sojourn to Taenarum to test themselves against the death god's minions and the chance to loot Hades' wealthy vaults.

The great heroes and kings of the Trojan War have faded to obscurity, leaving behind petty city states and grasping kings.  It's a landscape ripe for a new generation of heroes , where a strong sword arm and a hefty purse can raise an army and allow one to start their own conquests.

The gods themselves are deeply divided.  Slights and insults from the war years have created rifts across the pantheon, rivalries that are echoed amongst their mortal followers.  When angered, the scornful gods send terrible monsters to punish disrespectful followers.  Apocalyptic oracles warn that the known world is on the verge of a new Dark Age…

Next are the maps I'm using for the world.  This view of the world came from the Greek historian Herodotus; if you google "Herodotus world map" you can see what I mean.  Imagine if the world really looked like this!  There are decadent and ancient city states in the lands beyond Greece, crumbling and corrupt centers of old civilization like Carthage, Memphis, and Babylon.  Somewhere in the far north dwell the bizarre and otherworldly Hyperboreans with their alien science and magic.  This map of the world is far enough away from the real world that it's easy to "fantasy it up" and place Mythic Greece at the center of it all.

Oikoumene, the Known World

Taenarum, in southern Laconia

Assumptions for 5E
I plan to run 5E using most\all of the core assumptions and keep it "by the book", interpreting races and classes through a mythic lens where warranted. Customization will mostly be new monsters, magic items, and artifacts.

The following core classes all work fine as is for Greek adventurers - Bard, Fighter, Cleric, Paladin, Rogue, and Wizard.  All the wild lands north of Greece are filled with Barbarians.  Druids and Rangers can hail from the Celtic wilds of Iberia, and Sorcerers and Warlocks can be from any number of the decadent civilizations to the east.  I'm sure the players will generate additional ideas, and I plan on taking in some player suggestions, too.

The dwarves of mythic Greece are forge-bound followers of Hephaestus; elves and the fey races are be outsiders from the wilds of Europe and the north - though keeping with the Greek theme, the natural world is somewhat split between the portfolio of Artemis (order) and Pan (chaos).  Keeping with the swords & sorcery vibe, Tieflings hail from the decadent east and demon-plagued cities of night, and perhaps Dragonborn are from some distant part of Asia (although there's also the mythic "Spartoi", the men grown from dragon's teeth by Cadmus).  I could go either way on Dragonborn.  I'm not a fan of Half-Orcs - there aren't any orcs in the game, they're "pig-men" instead - but perhaps the Half-Orc represents a human cursed by the gods - like Caliban from the cheesy "Clash of the Titans" movie.  A Half-Orc is made when a god takes a clay statue of a man, and warps it into something twisted and grotesque as punishment for a slight or insult.  I'm not 100% sure how the Drow are going to fit into the Greek mythos yet, I just know that I got a fever, and the only prescription is more Drow.

Taenarum 2.0

Here's a technique I try whenever I find myself blocked or unable to solve a problem - just imagine how the person that's not you would approach the situation.  For instance, I've been considering how an old school megadungeon might look for 5e D&D.  So I approached the question another way -  how would a trendy designer working for one of the popular 3.x boutiques tackle a 5E megadungeon?

Introducing - Taenarum 2.0.

Taenarum 1.0 was an old school megadungeon I started working on last spring, for the kiddos and neighborhood players.  Taenarum is the legendary entrance to the Greek Underworld.  Hades, the god of wealth and the underworld, covets the souls of mortal heroes, and his undead minions created a sprawling maze that promised fantastic treasures and ready death.  We played Taenarum up until about Gencon, at which point the purchase of Icons (a superhero RPG) and a recent obsession with manga inspired me to run American Ninja Cowboys, our current super hero campaign.  Taenarum had a lot of good ideas, though, and the players never got too deep into the dungeon.

We’re still running Icons, although it's not going to be a long term campaign.  I'm behind on some game reports, in fact.  I can see a time within a few months when giant-sized Kaiju will stomp across post-apocalyptic America in the campaign finale.  When Icons wraps up, I'll have a 5E game ready to go.

Making peace with 5E from a campaign perspective came down to three tenets I'm going to try on for size - 'go small to go big', 'love the five-room dungeon', and 'needs more drow'.

In Order to Go Small, You Must First Go Big
A modern design isn't going to have pages and pages of graph paper, with rooms and passages filling every square of blank paper like those 1970's dungeons.  The modern megadungeon needs to big - so big you can't even graph it.  We're not dealing with squares any more - we're hexing it with the hex paper.  The road to the underworld in Taenarum 2.0 is going to be depicted as a meandering downward path on a hex map, leading to various spacious caverns and vaulted chambers the size of small wilderness areas, like the old Descent into the Depths of the Earth.  The new Taenarum has been biggered and bettered.

How I Will Learn To Love the 5-Room Dungeon
One of my other concerns has been the rate of advancement, and keeping the game moving along quickly without overbuilding the upper works with lots of rooms.  Taenarum 2.0 is going to have lots and lots of lairs - smallish dungeons without too many rooms, very modular and easy to plug in as necessary.  The 3.x crowd has been enamored with "five room dungeons" as a design concept, and that structure would work fine for lair creation and small dungeons.  I haven't been a fan of the five-room dungeon in the past, but I'll work on getting over it.

These two tenets together - a giant sprawling hex map, and lots of lairs and mini dungeons, seems like an interesting way to present a modern megadungeon.  I'm intrigued.

Need's More Drow (And Planescape Too)
I'm not a big fan of Drizz't.  I liked Erelhei-Cinlu and the 1970's introduction of the Drow - they had a decadent, opulent, sword & sorcery vibe.  Their hidden society was presented as a vice-ridden cesspool populated by pointy-eared Melniboneans.  Drizz't romanticized the villains and now the Drow are everywhere.  I haven't read the 5E adventures yet, but I'd hazard to guess there's a Drow villain in the Phandelver thing, in the Hoard of the Rise of Tiamat path, and probably in every book that Paizo still puts out (now I'm going to have go skim the 5E stuff, just for giggles).  All modern adventures need more Drow.  I'm going to put a whole Drow city in Taenarum.

Planar travel is a lot more accessible to modern characters too.  I  fondly remember Neil Gaiman's "Season of Mists" story arc on The Sandman, where all these extra planar and mythological entities come to the Dreamlands to barter for the key to Hell.  The afterlife is prime real estate!  With that in mind, I'm going to put a bunch of extra planar embassies in the depths of Taenarum, just outside the gates to the Underworld.  Everybody wants a piece of Hades.

In a rare burst of creativity, I quickly sketched a side view of Taenarum 2.0.  Check it out:

The Vaults
There are many set pieces, puzzles, and themes from Taenarum 1.0 that I can reuse for the 5E version as I build the lairs and mini dungeons.  The seven major vaults are each a destination, community, and potential base for  exploring the next leg of the journey.

Food of the Gods
The original Taenarum featured a fountain that mutated the surrounding fauna, leading to a chasm filled with giant bugs and lizards.  Seems like it can be ported almost directly.  Like its 1970's namesake, there was indeed a giant killer chicken, which amused me greatly.

Hagagora
Taenarum 1.0 had an underground market for various dark dwelling races to buy and sell exotic goods, like the troll market.  In Taenarum 2.0, it's the Hagagora.

Faceless Enclave
The Faceless are revenants that escape the underworld by swimming across the River Lethe, losing their memories and identity.  As undead, they can't return to the sunlight of the surface, so they've created their own refuge in the deeps.

Dark City
This is my place holder for the Drow City because, well, 'needs more Drow'.

Giantopolis
One of the themes of Taenarum is the imprisonment of the Titans, and the efforts of Kronos's minions to free or awaken them.  The giants opposed the gods during a primeval war called the Gigantomachy.

Planar Embassies
Once you're this deep into the underdark, it's not even clear you're still on the Prime Material Plane any longer.  I'm picturing a Casa Blanca style settlement on the outskirts of the Underworld with representatives (embassies) from various interplanar factions - a place for intrigue for high level characters.

Shores of Styx
Charon, Cerberus, the whole thing, as the very bottom of the dungeon.