Death Mountain - A Megadungeon Concept

The Lord of Death sits upon a throne of bone, sipping blood from a chalice made from the skull of a dead hero.  There is nothing the Death God desires more than the death of heroes, littering the floor of his great hall with their bones and mounting their skulls on his wall as trophies.  His minions tirelessly work the veins of gold and ore that lace his underground kingdom, for it is the gold that draws heroes and adventurers to plumb the storied depths of Death Mountain.  It is the gold that lures them to their deaths.

After the previous post on MTG Theros, I gave some thought to how I'd position a megadungeon themed on Greek Myth (and also the cinematic interpretations of the Greek gods - a combination of Clash of the Titans and Jason and the Argonauts).

I want something that aligns with the core values and objectives of basic Dungeons & Dragons; characters risk life and limb plumbing the dark depths of the dungeon to find gold.  Gold means experience, power, glory, and fame; it's an objective measurement of a hero's success.  The adoring public that waits safely back in the polis doesn't care if a hero stole the gold by outsmarting the monsters, or won their gold solely through feats of arms.  The cunning hero is as beloved as the strong one.

The popular culture view of the gods shows them as petty, manipulative schemers; they advance their agendas through mortal agents, and scry on the world below as a form of "Olympian reality television".  Hades loathes and hates his fellow Olympians, and has devised tricks and traps and all manner of challenges to ensure the blood flows and a steady parade of dead heroes join his underworld kingdom; the more beloved is a hero (ie, a higher level), the sweeter is the victory to the death god when he claims their souls; the other gods, for that matter, are greatly entertained when heroes overcome the machinations of the death god, and have gone so far as to sprinkle Hade's sprawling dungeon with divine boons, godly weapons, and hidden shrines and sanctuaries where their beloved champions might gain a small respite.

But death's kingdom is eternal, and there is no limit to the number of monsters that emerge from the cthonian depths.

------

That's a summary of the background for Death Mountain.  It provides a "rational" explanation for all the oddities of the traditional dungeon - why there are always monsters and gold, why there are tricks and traps and weird magical things, and why you might find some boons or magic items along the way to help you out on your explorations.  Details of the home base even start to emerge, a nearby town or city that reveres adventurers as if they were famous athletes or Olympic champions.  "Put all your money on Leonidas, he always comes back with the gold!"  Dungeon delving is almost  a competitive sport, with fans, side bets, and rivalries across adventuring companies.  But always, the minions of Hades wait beneath Death Mountain, dragging the dead and the dying into the Stygian deaths to his realm of endless night.

What about a name?  In my notes I've been calling it Mount Mortis, not exactly Greek, but it sounds a bit classical. Less prosaic than Death Mountain.

Cthulhu Rules the Mutant Future

“And where Nyarlathotep went, rest vanished, for the small hours were rent with the screams of nightmare.” 

"These Great Old Ones... were not composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had shape — but that shape was not made of matter. When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer lived, They would never really die…"

-H.P. Lovecraft

Beyond the blighted zones lie the sepulchral remains of the coastal cities.  Elongated shapes, things that were once people in the distant past but now more insect than man, cavort and gibber around the gigantic, squamous hulks that glisten near the water's edge.  New York is the second coming of R'lyeh, its massive skyscrapers jutting at incomprehensible angles against the pallid sky where the red eye of the sun glares down on inhuman streets.  And always above the sound of wind and surf can be heard a faint, distant piping.  It is a sound that grows no closer, no matter how long the listener follows it back to the source.

The futuristic "golden age" of man was brought to a jarring end after oceanic researchers used deep sea mechs to wrench open a pair of gigantic, cyclopean doors on the bottom of the Pacific ocean, releasing a massive, octopoidal horror (and its teeming followers) back into the world.  Across the globe, coastal cities came under siege as these gigantic, tentacled leviathans surfaced near populous harbors and bays.

The mutagenic effects on the local population were devastating.  The sickening miasma brought to the surface by the Great Old Ones permeated the city streets near the harbors, causing irreversible genetic degeneration through direct exposure.  Leering mockeries of humanity, with attenuated limbs, insectoid eyes, and clacking mandibles shambled from each infection site in waves to feast on their brethren.  The viral infection spread rapidly from the coasts.

History doesn't describe how long the war was fought using the conventional weapons of the time, before  decisions were made to burn the sky and blast the earth with sanitizing atomics.  It was all such a long time ago.  No one recorded exactly how the lotteries were conceived and how selections were made to pick those who would to take refuge in the vast, underground "sanctuaries".  It's assumed people that demonstrated natural immunity or resistance to the mutagenic viruses of the Great Old Ones were prioritized, earning the appellation "pure strain humans".

Life has gone on in the polis-sized shelters for generations, long enough for knowledge of the surface world to fade along with memories of the time before the return of the Great Old Ones.  The shelters weren't made to last forever, and overcrowding, disease, and crime is rampant in the maze-like subterranean cities.  Food stores, medical supplies, and various spare parts are valuable items on the black markets.  Always there is the need to eradicate the apocalyptic death cults that sprout in the slums and back alleys of the polis, worshipping the alien gods that devastated the surface.  Unchecked, the madmen that fall prey to the whispered dreams of the Old Ones would lower the defenses and allow the surface horrors to invade the last refuges.

The governing council needs information about the surface world.  Robotic probes have broadcast footage depicting violent societies of armed inhuman raiders, motoring across the wasted great plains.  Thus, volunteers are trained as scouts and soldiers to infiltrate the surface and bring back specimens, take soil, air and water readings, and determine what still lurks within the urban blighted zones.

Notes:
I haven’t done a post-apocalyptic game in a long time - like probably not since the 80's, back when the threat of nuclear destruction seemed very real to my youthful brain.  I always wanted to take it just a little bit more serious than Gamma World - flying robotic death machines = YES, human-sized talking bunnies = not so much.

Like the campaign background above, I love the conceit of having the players start in a relatively civilized underground settlement, cut off for generations.  Like the explorers on the original Gamma World cover, they ascend to the surface as true outsiders.  Their characters don't know any more about the "brave new world" than they do as players.  It's really a perfect set up for a gigantic hex crawl.

Of course, I can never decide what kind of apocalypse triggered the scorched earth.  Was it the zombies, the aliens, the rise of the machines, a human conflict that went nuclear, or the return of Great Cthulhu?

Let's go with all of the above.

Has anyone been reading the Dark Horse BPRD comic book series?  They've  been slowly destroying the earth with the Hellboy equivalent of "The Great Old Ones" and it's been a pretty awesome story arc.  I'm also inspired by the movie 12 Monkeys and the way the scientists send out volunteers to scout the surface, looking for signs of the infection.  The dystopian, underground city of 12 Monkeys is perfect as a model for "Sanctuary", humanity's last refuge from Great Cthulhu and his ilk.

I really liked Stephen King's post-apocalyptic "Dark Tower" series featuring the gunslinger; I wish there was some way I could work a Wild West and gunslinger (or samurai) theme into it.  I'm not sure this particular kitchen sink is actually that big.

Of course, I already have a game supplement that describes a war-torn, debased world where the Great Old Ones terrorize and despoil humanity.  I could just place the underground settlement of Sanctuary beneath the surface of Geoffrey McKinney's Carcosa.  I may find myself digging out my copy of Mutant Future, nonetheless.

I'm not saying this is jumping ahead of anything else in the queue, but you know how it is - fish got to swim, birds have to fly, and writers got to write.

Ps: I'm thinking both The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms and The Giant Behemoth, two atomic age monsters-from-the-ocean movies, had a sub theme around prehistoric disease or radioactive blight. A mutagenic Old One is in good stead.

The Promethean Prison

What kind of prison would be built for a god?  How about a prison for an entire race of rebellious servitors?

I've had the Prometheus myth on the brain the past week.

There's poignancy around the myth of the titan that steals fire from the gods to bestow knowledge and wisdom on humanity.  Why is Prometheus punished, and why are the gods so jealous of the stolen gift granted to humanity in the story?  The modern mind rankles at the injustice.

In a fantasy game, couldn't the "heavenly fire" given to mankind be the knowledge of magic itself?  It's fascinating that there are so many similar stories in comparative mythology that involve stealing fire or knowledge for mankind.  (For reference, the ones I'm most familiar with are the Native American stories, the Greek myths, and the early Bible stories.  I'm sure there is more).

I started to come to the idea last week when I posted The Age of Monsters, a campaign idea that posited a war in heaven and imprisonment for the losers in a vast dungeon.  There are too many similarities between the Biblical war in heaven and Prometheus not to mix and match themes - forbidden knowledge, punishment and incarceration of the divine rebels, and wiping out the corrupt age through a disastrous flood.

The Promethean Prison is made of the kind of vast, cyclopean architecture hinted at in Lovecraft's writing, like the lost city of the Great Race in the Australian desert.  Because it was the gods themselves that built the prison, the architecture is on a massive, inhuman scale.  The place is inhabited by caretakers, automatons, and ageless horrors left behind to ensure the primordial prisoners never again feel the sun on their faces.  Artifacts and relics within those Stygian depths harken back to a time when the world was young and wizards were far more powerful than the base variety of the modern day.

There's a theme in "lost ruins desert movies" of ancient  knowledge passed through generations to a secret sect of guardians keeping the secrets hidden - you see that theme in The Mummy, or Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.  So we need some secret religious guardian sects.  Part of the cadre of caretakers is an underground race that abandoned the surface in the antediluvian past in order to maintain the dungeons - I'm picturing something like the Cynidiceans from The Lost City module, albeit without the mushroom trips.  Like a "cargo cult", they remember the forms but not the meaning behind the things they do.

I just saw the movie The Life of Pi this past weekend, and really loved it.  The ambiguity behind the versions of the story is remarkably deep and essentially an existential challenge to the viewer.  I bring it up because I vacillate between whether "the Ancients" imprisoned in the Promethean Prison are rebellious aliens punished by other members of their race, or supernatural messengers imprisoned by the loyal angels.  In one case, the prisoners could be something like Marvel's Dreaming Celestial, rogue agents of a cosmic force (the Celestials) now buried deep beneath the earth.  Perhaps they're aliens like Ridley Scott's "Engineers" from the Prometheus movie, advanced travelers that meddled with early Earth biology.  Or they could really be fallen angels, chained in darkness until Judgment Day.

As creator, I've decided I don’t really need to decide.  The inhabitants of the dungeon and the guardians that have lingered there have certainly drawn their own conclusions, and the only thing that matters to them is their personal truth.  The players will just have to make up their own minds.

The Age of Monsters

There were Giants in the earth in those days.
Genesis 6:4

We frequently point out that Dungeons & Dragons and OSR games are essentially post-apocalyptic.  The assumed setting postulates a world where ruins point to a glorious past, and those crumbling places are littered with magic and treasures created in the bygone age.  The default approach seems to be Western European, suggesting the fallen empire is an analog to Rome and the current benighted state of man is something akin to the Dark Ages...err, Late Antiquity or the Early Middle Ages.  ("Dark Ages" is how I learned it back in the day.)

I love antiquity and the Roman period, so how would you create a post-apocalyptic predecessor to the ancient world?

Luckily for us, the ancient world comes gift-wrapped with its own apocalypse, called "the Biblical Flood".  *That flood*, the one with Noah, Mount Ararat, the Ark, and the Judeo-Christian deity sweeping away a corrupt age.  There are permutations of the flood myth throughout near-Eastern mythology such as the stories of Deucalion or Utnapishtim.  When you look at it closely, that pre-flood world could easily be turned into a typical Swords & Sorcery setting with corrupt city states and decadent sorcerers, replete with some awesome megadungeon ideas already built in, too.

And Azazel taught men to make swords and knives and shields and breastplates; and made known to them the metals [of the earth] and the art of working them; and bracelets and ornaments; and the use of antimony and the beautifying of the eyelids; and all kinds of costly stones and all colouring tinctures. And there arose much godlessness, and they committed fornication, and they were led astray and became corrupt in all their ways.
1 Enoch 8:1–3

The Biblical flood is preceded by this period where a number of celestial beings - in the story, they're angels called 'The Watchers' - abandon their role as observers and start showing people all sorts of things - how to make weapons, how to use magic, how to read the stars and skies, and since they father a race of supernatural beings (the Nephilim) there is definitely some hanky panky involved, too.  What the ancient writers called "angels" could just as easily be extra-dimensional beings or aliens for our purposes.  (I hear Babylonian art is full of ancient astronaut symbology).  These accounts are folklore stories that provide total license to place demi-godlike super men, or the hideous offspring of pan-dimensional ultraterrestrials, ruling over corrupt city states and wielding forbidden magics and waging war on each other like ravenous beasts.

The apocryphal stories have a bunch of good angels, led by Raphael, come down and smack around the fallen, chaining them deep underground until Judgment day in Tartarus:

And the angels who did not keep their positions of authority but abandoned their proper dwelling--these he has kept in darkness, bound with everlasting chains for judgment on the great day.
Jude 1:6

Finally, there's a real-world geographic location where all this excitement takes place, which is traditionally identified as Mount Hermon, the mountain of the oath, a series of peaks in Syria.  Mount Hermon also figures into the Epic of Gilgamesh.  Mount Hermon is a rich archaeological site, with numerous ruined temples and holy sites littering the slopes, including a reputed Palace of Baal.

I'm sold.

So here's the elevator pitch:  In  the ancient, pre-Roman world, powerful beings from beyond teach early humans all sorts of forbidden arts like metallurgy and magic, they establish palaces and dungeons within Mount Hermon, they set themselves up to be worshiped, and they father a race of monstrous tyrant overlords that dominate the region. Its was an age undreamed of.  Other beings from beyond eventually come along, imprison the transgressors deep beneath the ground, and instigate a massive flood that wipes out the ancient near-Eastern civilizations, 'cleansing the world' of the previous ills.  Humanity civilization rises from the ruins, but the lost hollows and hidden ways beneath Mount Hermon still contain the artifacts and monsters dating back to the antediluvian world.

I already mentioned that the otherworldly beings don't need to be divine angels in the Judeo-Christian sense; they could be dimensional travelers or aliens from a distant galaxy.  Their offspring could be supermen or horrible monsters.  For instance, lurking behind the Hellboy universe are the Ogdru Jahad and Ogdru Hem, Lovecraftian Great Old Ones and sleeping terrors, that trace their origins back to the fallen watchers similar to the Book of Enoch.  So you can get your whole tentacled-aberration-great-old-one thing going as well.  What matters is you've got a story involving forbidden sorceries and eldritch arts dating back to a sophisticated, fallen world, predating antiquity, complete with its own built-in apocalypse (the Flood) and imprisonment of the great evils beneath the earth, where surely they'll be chained on the lowest level of the dungeon until adventurers stumble along.  The dungeons and ruins would also contain remnants of the ancient religions, forbidden tomes, and the arcane wonders of the bygone age.

I'd want to investigate Roman history and find a time when Syria was a Roman frontier or home to some Roman outposts, so you could have frontier trading posts and towns to act as a home base for explorers sojourning beneath the mountain.  Alternatively, you could build a home-brew modeled on antiquity or borrow something like the Hollow World (an old Swords & Sorcery styled setting for Mystara).  But the strength of the campaign idea is basing it on real-world folklore and borrowing from other near-Eastern myth cycles like the Epic of Gilgamesh.  I'd be loath to start from scratch.

Most of the time I'm brainstorming how to do horror-themed dungeons in a low-magic real world setting in the early modern; by placing the adventures in a much earlier time, it feels less constrained introducing a higher degree of fantasy and magic so it looks more in-line with baseline D&D without restrictions.  There's another source of inspiration as well:  I'm still working my way through The Black Company series by Glen Cook, and I love how the books feature ancient horrors and old religions (many times not fully understood by the modern practitioners) resurfacing in the current age.

The Benighted City of Lichtstadt

Ravenloft:  The megadungon

I hit a wall sometime last week; I've had some long days and work travel, the 6 year old is driving my wife nuts , and I got absolutely burnt out on reading history books.  I haven't had much time to write for the blog.   I switched over to reading some fiction, and I let my mind wander towards how my own "dungeon under the city" might look after ruminating over the last post.

Oh - before I forget - on the reading front; I motored through Jim Butcher's Cold Days in just a couple of days, and moved on to Chronicles of the Black Company.  It's super interesting, particularly because it's inspirational for how a tough group of D&D characters might operate if they were a mercenary group in a world populated with ordinary folks and a scattering of powerful characters.  It's not game fiction; you don't hear the dice rolling while you're reading.

With the oldest kiddo, we're halfway through the Earthsea trilogy (night time reading - I'm a good dad) with Elric of Melnibone lined up next.

Back to the dungeon under the city.

I'm envisioning the crumbling, central European city of Lichtstadt - home to corrupt guilds, blue-blooded patricians, and frightened peasants that cower from the things that go bump in the night.  Built on earlier catacombs and ruins, the city sits above a deep, sprawling dungeon where aristocratic undead vie for control of the various guilds and nobles of the surface world.  The sewers give way to catacombs and deeper dungeons where every figure from gothic horror gaming - stitched alchemical golems and undead, vengeful revenants; wrathful lycanthropes, and more vampires than can be counted, all scheme and lurk and wait for the sun to sink below the horizon.  Long have the erstwhile (mortal) rulers of Lichstadt turned a blind eye to the frequent disappearances on the streets after dark, and no one survives for long in the city jail.

The arrival of inquisitors from the great southern church to remote Lichstadt has upset the city's balance of power, and now manipulators meet in darkened halls to debate whether to move against the church overtly or marginalize it through politics and their human pawns.  But this much is true; the church has cast open the gates to the undercity, and it encourages any manner of cunning opportunist willing to risk life and limb in the sewers looking to pocket some gold while striking back against the night fiends.

Lichtstadt would require a serious overhaul to the standard D&D vampire.  Forget about the high level, energy draining monstrosities from the Monster Manual.  Lichtstadt Vampires drink blood through grappling and can die with a stake through the heart.  Vampires would fill a wide range of challenges in the dungeon, from bloodthirsty neonates that don't have many other vampiric powers (other than strength and toughness), to ancient vampire warlords and sorcerers in the depths that lead their own lineages and bloodlines.  Naturally, I'd raid the White Wolf catalog and create speedy vampires, shape-changing vampires, hypno-vampires, and so on.  There's something juvenile (yet funny) about taking all those World of Darkness archetypes and treating them as experience fodder for dungeon delving murder hobos.

If The Black City started out as Vikings: At The Mountains of Madness (before it went all sideways into gonzo sci-fantasy), then Lichstadt is Ravenloft: the Megadungon.  Parking this one in the The Junkyard for now, but my normal brainstorming notebook is quickly filling up with ideas for Lichtstadt.  It's almost too easy.

Junkyard Necromancy

"What is the most resilient parasite? An idea. Resilient, highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain it's almost impossible to eradicate..."
 -Inception

I see it every day.  An excitable game master runs straight to the internet, carrying TNT and a plunger, to blow up their existing campaign because they absolutely *must* run that new game system or bring their players to a new setting.  You can't run a long term campaign without effective coping strategies for the gamer attention deficit disorder.  This is a serious problem, my friends, I know it well.  Ideas are a two-edged sword yielding creativity and madness.  How's that expression go, "I'm not just the president of the hair club for men, I'm also a client…"

My name is Beedo, and I have a problem with gamer attention deficit disorder.

My own coping strategy involves classic project risk management - Gamer ADD is the risk, and you either need to mitigate, accept it, avoid it, or transfer the problem.  I created a section on the blog called The Junkyard to park ideas that are exciting, but I don't want them to take up too much time and capsize the boat.  Getting them down in print is a coping strategy - I just tell myself I'll get back to them, someday.  Here's the Junkyard's mission statement:  This is the place where I put campaign ideas, notions, and high concepts that just haven't gotten built.  Yet.

Sometimes though, one section of the junkyard gets pretty full, and a towering mound of discarded ideas threatens to topple into the orderly little campaign next door and introduce some real collateral damage.  I had an epiphany this weekend that a half dozen or more ideas I've been circumnavigating are all about the same type of campaign - in fact, one campaign could include them all!

It's alive!

Arise, you dead ideas consigned to the junkyard, arise, and live again as a stitched together frankenstein campaign!

I've been sketching out a small horror sandbox adventure.  The initial launch of the campaign involves the players acting as marines on a small merchant vessel or privateer in the mid-17th century.  It could start in Jamestown, Bermuda, or somewhere in the Caribbean (Port Royal, or New Providence), but takes the group to the Carolina coast to investigate a derelict Spanish galleon adrift in colonial waters.  An abandoned, derelict ship is such a classic horror locale.  Before all is done, there are French pirates, hostile natives, and a reawakened heathen blood god of the Aztec world.  Assuming the players survive or flee, there's a good chance they'll have their own sloop and be free to start cruising around a Caribbean saltbox breaking things.  Yo ho, me hearties.

The back story of the galleon involves a Spanish witch hunter escorting a dangerous artifact back to Castile (and ultimately the Vatican).  As these things are wont to do, the wrong person messes with the artifact and madness, bloodshed, and death ensue, turning the ship into a floating abattoir.  I've often mused that a cool way to kick off a horror sandbox would be to inherit the library of a retired or recently vanished monster hunter like Solomon Kane.  The journals detailing his exploits and unfinished investigations allow a group to follow in his footsteps.  So why not put the guy's journal and library right on board the derelict ship?  The players can come out of this first adventure with a ship and a long list of journal entries describing eldritch horrors and lost treasures discovered by this Catholic witch hunter across the Spanish Main.  Time to raise the colors and set sail.

I mentioned that a number of my recurring campaign ideas have coalesced around this particular adventure, it's nice to realize the convergence.  Pirates, guns, ships, and weird horror.  Here are some of the many older posts littering the Lich House involving the theme of a 17th century sandbox for the Age of Sail:

• The Library of de la Torre
• Goblins of the Spanish Main
• Colonial Hex Crawl
• Mythos Expeditions as a D&D Campaign
• The Wide Area Sandbox

The discussion of Gamer ADD and risk management was here:  Winter is Coming, and so is Gamer ADD.  Now I just need a name for the new campaign (although Goblins of the Spanish Main is kind of catchy, even if there are no actual goblins…)

Pendragon!

I recently picked up the 5th edition of Pendragon (technically 5.1, I guess) and am rapidly devouring the book.  What an amazing setting!  Some readers mentioned it in the comments to the Prince Valiant post last week, and it got me thinking - I love Arthurian myth and lore, why haven't I picked up this game as a reference?  The oversight has been rectified.

Much like the Prince Valiant comic strip, the game ostensibly takes place in 5th and 6th century Britain, but borrows heavily from the high middle ages by transplanting technology, customs, and social norms, essentially enabling the stories and tales of the great Arthurian epics to occur in that earlier time with the later trappings.  Some of the unique bits to the game include a heavy emphasis on social traits (personality traits, virtues, and passions) and an epic sweep where years roll by quickly, allowing players to build families and lineages of heroic knights.

I'm in no rush to play, since my current D&D campaign is rolling quite well, but I adore the setting and could see myself using it almost whole cloth when my younger kids are ready to play.  They love knights and faeries and wizards, and the default Arthurian setting described in Pendragon is brilliant.  "Dungeons" aren't part of it, but there's an event called 'The Enchantment of Britain' which heralds a return of magic to the realm during Arthur's reign; it provides a handy excuse for old fey passages and forgotten holes in the ground to reopen, allowing the goblins and bugbears and other night creatures to return to plague the forests of the countryside by night.  My younger ones would enjoy such a setting quite a bit; my oldest just got finished reading The Once and Future King, and I'm sure he'd enjoy such a game as well.

Anyway - thanks for the inspiration, readers, but I have a further question - what are your favorite Pendragon supplements?  It seems like The Great Pendragon campaign is a must-have; I've seen it described on forums and whatnot as one of the greatest RPG supplements or adventures. Are there any other must-have Pendragon supplements for elaborating the setting?

Cherry blossoms and ashes

One of my gaming bucket list items is to eventually run a good Asian-themed D&D game.  I love the interchange between Western tropes and samurai cinema, the way you can do Shakespeare in feudal Japan (Ran) or draw parallels between American westerns and the movies of Kurosawa (The Magnificent Seven).  One of the ideas in my back pocket is to transpose elements of Arthurian myth, like the Grail Quest, or the Excalibur story (more the sword in the stone than the Lady in the Lake), into a D&D campaign set in the far east.

Here’s a simple premise - perhaps during the early medieval period, when native peoples like the Ainu of Japan were being driven out, a massive cataclysm was brought down on the imperial palace as the natives unleashed the fury of their gods, or the primal spirits punished the ruling caste for hubris; the imperial castle was destroyed, the surrounding province was turned into a wasteland, the remnants of the populace in that area are monsters - transformed into goblins, enslaved by demons, hateful shades of the spirit world, it could be any number of things.  The legendary sword of the last legitimate shogun is lost beneath the ruins of the old castle (perhaps even stuck in a stone anvil awaiting the next shogun…)

Bam!  You have a kind of leaderless chaos in the larger setting, where the remaining noble families vie to make their lord and head the new regent, but they all secretly fear if the sword of truth were recovered, everyone would unite behind the rightful shogun.  Small groups that represent the clans and families, essentially parties of adventurers, venture into the forsaken province and scour the ruined castles and dungeons to find clues to the location of the lost sword.  Everyone hopes to be worthy of recovering it, thus proving their worth to the emperor back in the new capital; the possessor would be named shogun.  It's as if the movie Excalbur has a love-child with The Hidden Fortress and you throw in a hex crawl and megadungeon.

One thing I'm learning in The Black City campaign, I love the ambiguity of competing human encounters, and the scheme here would let the DM populate the forsaken province with bandits, brigands, rival adventuring parties, hostile samurai, enemy ninja, and so forth.

It's essentially a limited sandbox, because one thing I struggle with when thinking about a sandbox game based in a pseudo-historical feudal Japan is whether it would pass 'the tavern test'.  The group members are probably servants of a daimyo, and they have autonomy as long as they're doing the larger meta-quest given as a mission by the boss - finding the lost sword of truth.  But how much personal liberty did a samurai have during different periods of feudal Japan?  How much must credulity be stretched to have a mixed caste party?

I don't even know if a campaign like this even has "taverns", per se:  "Ahem, can I have your attention?  I am Noboru-san, and my friend the Korobokuru and I would like to hire a pair of ninjas and a Wu-Jen (er, Shugenja) to go with us into the forsaken lands.  Are there any ninjas for hire having a drink here?"  Pssst:  the two guys in the corner dressed in black ninjutsu gi's look interested.  No wait, they're just struggling drinking without taking off their masks.  Joking aside, the whole premise of The Seven Samurai is hiring guys to defend a village from bandits, which implied a degree of freedom to adventure and places to hire mercenaries, so maybe it's not that far off.

Yeah, so I don't know much (anything) about Japanese medieval society and the social classes, beyond what you see in movies, so I have to plead temporary (but cure-able) ignorance.  I'm sure I'll be reading the related Osprey/Turnbull books I recently got.  Either way, the limited scope sandbox is a way to finesse a setting with a rigid caste system while giving the players autonomy on the frontier where they can carry out their explorations.  The trick is making something that meets the needs of traditional D&D - exploration, solving puzzles, resource planning, tactics, monsters.  If I wanted it to be all tea ceremonies and how good is your calligraphy… well, there are already games for that kind of excitement.

I don't have a name yet for this hypothetical setting… chances are it would be done using a BX type game like LOTFP or ACKS, I'd just want to add better unarmed martial arts to fit my preferences (I'm a big fan of judo and the predecessor arts, jujitsu and aikijutsu) and a mechanic to track reputation.  Some of that could even be borrowed from AD&D's Oriental Adventures.  I really like the modern trend towards "a day in the life…" history books, but haven't read a good one for feudal Japan (yet).  I've heard the old FGU game "Bushido" actually did a good job of laying out a setting, so I'll check that out as well.  I'm not expecting to do much around this setting soon, there's a bit of background reading and research to do first and I'm doing a ton on the Black City, but it's another one on the radar.

Turning One's Thoughts to Westeros

The second season of HBO's Game of Thrones is in the books.  My wife has been pestering me to read the latest book, A Dance with Dragons, so I started it last week.  Apparently 'big things happen', and she's been biting her tongue not to drop spoilers, but is insistent on discussing it.  So now I'm reading it.  One of the regulars in the gaming group is getting caught up on the first season and just started reading the books as well.  It's natural to consider if you'd run a D&D game in a setting like Westeros.

There won't be any spoilers here, I'll just be discussing A Game of Thrones in general terms.  The stories have a number of engaging elements; they follow the rise to fame and infamy of the scions of various noble houses in the fictional land of Westeros during a civil war.  The king dies in the first book with a contested heir and the novels relate the chaos in the aftermath.  No one has any plot immunity.  Life in Westeros can be nasty, brutish and short, and main characters frequently get offed.  From that perspective, there is always anticipation of 'what will happen next' when reading GRR Martin.

Westeros itself is very familiar.  The map always seemed to me a fantastic version of England, stretched to the size of a continent.  Hadrian's Wall is replaced by the gigantic ice wall, separating the settled areas from the wild north.  Folks have commented that the war between the Starks and Lannisters is reminiscent of the war between the Yorks and Lancasters; the names share more than a similar phonetic cadence.

The fantastic elements in Westeros are subdued so as not to overwhelm the human element of the conflicts.  There are hints of The Others, ice-born undead beyond the great wall, and legends of a time of dragons, but most of the main characters are disinterested in magic or stories.  Certainly these fantastic elements have gotten more prevalent as the series has progressed.

How would Westeros work as a D&D setting?  The archetypical career of the D&D character, as an explorer and dungeon delver, doesn't seem to have a place in the literary version of the setting.  There are scant mentions of ruins, and there's certainly no freeman profession of "professional adventurer" the way we see it in more typical D&D worlds.  The literary version wouldn't seem to support wealth through salvage.  Mercenaries, yes, but not gold-claiming monster-slayers.  Characters in A Game of Thrones rise to power through politics and feats of arms.  Wifey was telling me - Oh c'mon, you could put old ruins beyond the Ice Wall, or beneath Harrenhall Castle, or on one of the many islands.

Why not just use a standard D&D setting and add a layer of politics and sheer bloody mindedness?  Chances are your D&D setting already has some rulers who were previously adventurers, and a D&D setting assumes it's common for self-made rulers to rise to prominence after starting their careers as dungeon-sacking adventurers.

However, I can think of some things to strip out of D&D to make it fit the theme.  I'd de-emphasize alignment.  The question of right and wrong is highly subjective in A Game of Thrones, and a sympathetic case can be made for each side.  The vast majority of monsters need to be removed as a force in the world.  It's fine if you have some isolated monsters in the ruins or on the frontier, but there are no apparent global monster threats that would trigger the human kingdoms to unite; there's nothing to distract the nobles from beating on each other.  Many D&D worlds follow the Tolkien model of the big bad evil guy, providing a rallying cry for all the 'free peoples' to band together for all mankind and sing the campfire songs.  Not in Westeros.

I'm ambivalent about the degree of magic.  Westeros is seemingly low magic; there are few flashy spells or planar entities or magic weapons getting swung around.  The gods seem distant and remote, but there is evidence of magic-working priests and priestesses.  There's even a fair amount of 'raise dead' that happens in the stories, although the results aren't necessarily comfortable or desirable… more like revenants.

I've been using a list of campaign criteria for a good D&D setting to help the analysis, here's how it shakes out vis a vis Westeros:

The List:
Adventures and Frontiers, Autonomy, Dungeons, XP for Gold, Treasure and Magic Items, Classes and Levels, NPC Classes and Levels, Alignment, High Magic, Humanoids and Monsters, The End Game, Demi-Humans, Clerical Magic, Vancian Magic

We've already said the setting would need to be altered by adding the ruins of prior civilizations to support an adventurer class, autonomous explorers, XP for gold, recovery of treasure and lost magic, and so on.  (Valyrian steel!).  Plenty of the rulers and main characters appear to be tough, high level characters, in game terms, so there's no problem there, and the standard D&D end-game of rising to power and claiming a domain works very well here.  Alignment needs to be removed or face an adjustment, and humanoids and monsters must be marginalized (same for demi-humans).  The political conflicts are human vs human, there's no joining hands with the friendly elves to fight Sauron or Iuz or Tzass Tamm.  I'm ambivalent about low versus high magic, but tend to think low magic would work better in terms of flavor, whereas high magic would require less tweaking of the game engine.

What do you think?  Have you tried playing a D&D game in Westeros, or borrowing ideas and themes from A Game of Thrones into your game?

Setting thoughts - Combining Harrow Home and the Library

Thanks all that have voted so far on the setting concepts poll over there in the right column.  So far the Harrow Home Manor idea and the Library of De La Torre idea are leading the way.  So the natural thought is, how easy would it be to combine the ideas?

One of the interesting historical bits about the Yorkshire area in the real world is that there are many ruined abbeys and priories around the moors.  The ruins date back to an event related to the rise of the Anglican Church called the Dissolution of the Monasteries.  In the 1530's, word went out throughout England that monasteries devoted to Catholic orders were banned; the monks were told to convert, retire, or in cases where they rebelled or resisted, were executed or imprisoned.  The monasteries were sacked and stripped, the land was sold off, the libraries were burnt.

I developed a history for the site of Harrow Home Manor that traces the use of the site from pre-Celtic times all the way through the 'modern' day (1620's), identifying how the site changed hands from Celts to Romans, Saxons to Vikings, Normans to Tudors, and so on.  The site has been home to a chapel and church at multiple times during its two thousand year history.

The prevalence of churches and monasteries around the edges of the moorland attests to the existence of an ancient, slumbering evil that called for vigilance amongst a secretive order of clergy that understood the threat, and kept records and histories.  With the Dissolution of the Monasteries, the official cover for this secretive order, as regular Cistercians, was stripped away, and a few of the monks barely escaped with whatever records or accounts they could manage before the long arm of the king tossed the rest onto the flames.

Or to come at it another way:  now it's the year 1620, at a tavern in one of the growing trade towns like Scarborough or Pickering.  A local merchant recently bought a property and discovered a store of scrolls and illuminated texts hidden in a secret cellar chamber, describing a mysterious order of monks from 80 years prior (the Ordo Fratrum Advigilo*) that warned of a sleeping evil beneath the moorlands, and documents note the various places where they had discovered entrances  and caves leading into the miasmic depths.  Never mind the superstitious claptrap, says the merchant, the texts describe treasure brought into the depths in bygone ages!  Celtic torques, Roman standards, Viking hacksilver, crusader gold!  As the merchant sits across the tavern table from you, he offers a deal:  he'll grant access to the secret library he now owns, and will provide a bit of funding towards adventuring gear and equipment, in return for a cut of the treasure.

Voila!  It combines the info-dump and target-rich opportunities of the Library of de la Torre, and the small micro-sandbox and tightly themed gothic megadungeon of Harrow Home Manor.  As I think through the implications, I'm imagining this adventure would be much more "handout intensive" like a traditional Cthulhu investigation rather than your standard dungeon, merging some of the best parts of both experiences.  Who was that monk who stashed the collection of rare scrolls 80 years ago during the chaos of the Dissolution, and are there any other secretive members of the Ordo still lurking about, watching for signs and portents?  The theme of "vigilant watchers for the return of evil" even has echoes of Tolkien, or D&D standards like the Temple of Elemental Evil and the villages of Hommlet and Nulb.

*If anyone out there is good with Latin, I'd appreciate any correction to the name for the order - it should be something like the Order of Watchful Brothers or some such, only in proper Latin.

Picking the Next Setting

I've had a setting project on and off for over a year now called the Black City - most long time readers have come across Black City posts, I'm sure - and I'm expecting to send some adventurers into the Black City sometime in the next few weeks, hopefully after we wrap up the current Cthulhu scenario.  The Black City is a mix of Vikings and science-fantasy and Lovecraftian aliens in the frozen north.  It's got plenty of weird stuff, but one thing I miss is the classic gothic horror elements that don't quite fit.  Furthermore, I've been searching for something that would work well in the 17th century (1620's or so) as an early modern setting for D&D style adventures, but with a splash of guns and rapiers instead of heavy plate and battle axes.  So while the Black City moves into active play, I'm about ready to add a second project to the queue where ideas that don't fit into the Black City campaign have a place to go.  If my Black City pace is any indication, this next setting will be ready to play around 2014 (kidding, I hope).

The early modern  has a different set of challenges than the microcosmic "points of light" trope in a purely fantastic setting.  It's a populous age with more long distance travel and potentially less space for monsters; depending on the approach, it likely requires more than hastily sketching out the home town village and the local dungeon filled with orcs and goblins.  I'm going to step through some of the ideas I've been considering and point out my view of the challenges.  Maybe even the dear readers can help me choose.

Library of De La Torre
The idea here was that a famous adventurer in the mold of Solomon Kane has recently passed away, bequeathing a library or journal to the party at the start of the campaign.  During his career, this adventurer had explored dungeons and tombs and combated horrors in the dark corners of Europe, but much of the treasure was still left behind.

Opportunity:
The library is a platform to do an info-dump, seeding a target rich environment, since the players would get leads to various adventuring sites right at the campaign start and could engage in a highly player-driven campaign.  Contrasted to the typical micro-sandbox, I was calling it a "wide area sandbox".

Issues:
Would require wide-area maps of 17th century Europe created, high level background on many areas of Europe during the 30 years war, and systems to facilitate mundane travel, staying at inns, and so on, including how to keep travel interesting.  Too much historical research is a risk.  A dozen or so one-page dungeons for distant adventuring sites would be needed.

Colonial Hex Crawl
Reading some accounts of Dutch New York and French-Canadian fur traders from Montreal got me thinking how early 17th century America was basically a dangerous hex crawl to the European explorers.  The concept here would be to sketch out a few Dutch settlements and trading posts as home bases, and build a sprawling hex crawl that covers New York through the Great Lakes - a blend of wilderness and Iroquois and Algonquin territory and competing nations and traders.

Opportunity:
American folklore and mythology is underrepresented in gaming materials and there's a great chance here to build out a horror mythology in the new world similar to Lovecraft or Stephen King, just placed much earlier in the country's history.  Plus I live right in the area these days.

Issues:
Hex crawling can be inherently dull.  The exploration challenges of traveling by canoe, portaging from river to river or past waterfalls, camping, seeking out new settlements for trade and negotiation, seem much more exciting in my head than I think they would play out on the table; there's great risk here in building a campaign solely around such a hex crawl.  Meanwhile, traditional dungeons would be unusual in the new world - although I can envision some strange cave complexes like in the story, The Mound.

Telecanter has been putting up a lot of interesting travel "mini-games" for creating resource challenges during a hex crawl, and small systems like that could be created to make basic travel by canoe a little more interesting than purely narrative.

Goblins of the Spanish Main
This idea started as an example of how a non-standard setting (in this case, island hopping during the age of piracy) could be adjusted to fit the tropes of D&D despite the assumptions of the game.  It got some interest in the comments and ways were identified to manage a few of the problems with being part of a ship's crew, so I'm bringing it back here for more discussion.

Opportunity:
D&D never has enough pirates.  Or ninjas.

Issues:
I've given zero thought to placing a megadungeon in the Caribbean, although going with a 'lost Atlantis' angle might be interesting, or making it related to the fantastic ruins and mythology of Mesoamerica (or both).  Systems to support the swashbuckling flavor could be developed - shipboard combat and swinging on ropes, fighting in the rigging, that kind of stuff.

Harrow Home Manor
Harrow Home is a crumbling manse on the Yorkshire moors, on a remote heath of northeast England.  It's the center of a small gothic sandbox in England (as opposed to placing it in Transylvania or central Europe) and the dungeons would be home to factions of treacherous wizards and undead sorcerers competing over arcane lore.  An ancient sleeping god akin to one of Lovecraft's "great old ones" slumbers beneath the moors, awaiting the time it's reawakened by the cultists to spread death and madness across the world.

Opportunity:
This is the closest to the traditional D&D sandbox - a limited sized region, a small set of villages, abbeys, and coastal towns, and a rugged interior surrounding the titular megadungeon ruin.  What makes this megadungeon "different" is the number of treacherous, insane, wizards and cultists that haunt the cavern depths beneath the old ruins, drawing inspiration from Edgar Allan Poe, Lovecraft, CAS, and similar authors.

Issues:
D&D is fairly well-suited for this type of setting, I don't see any major issues.

So there you have it - those are the different ideas bouncing around Beedo's head.  The funny thing is, none of these are exclusive - I could develop my own vision of a "Gothic 17th Century" and place all four of these campaign ideas in the same world over time - so it's really just a question of what to develop first.  Someone on the LOTFP message board mentioned that War Hammer Fantasy uses a dark/fantastic version of early modern Europe, so I'm thinking I should check that out some time for ideas as well - they recommended WFRP 1E.

Seems like a good time for a poll, too - which of these settings would be interesting to read about?  Or drop a note in the comments.  Thanks!

More Thoughts on Harrow Home Manor

The initial idea for Harrow Home Manor is here:  Harrow Home Manor.  I've been casting about as I consider various ideas for an early modern, horror/adventure setting for D&D, and Harrow Home Manor was the latest.

I'm seeing a great opportunity in placing a site where there's a lot of history, and certainly the British Isles qualifies as rife with it.  Deep beneath the Yorkshire moors, I'll place a sleeping, pre-Celtic god-monster, the inspiration for monstrous myth figures like Balor or Crom Cruach from Irish Myth.  The monster has awoken at different times to bring death and madness to the surrounding lands, and grant obscene powers to its scant worshippers.

Conflict against otherworldly forces has raged on the site time and again, such as when the Pictish worshipers of the beast were driven off by the Celts; the site was sacred to the druids, and then taken from them by the Romans.  A church was placed there for a time, following the early Dark Ages practice of coopting pagan sites with Christian chapels, but the scant population didn't support a church on the remote heath and the land was claimed by a sorcerer in the late Medieval period after the church fell into abandonment.

Taking a cue from "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward", a distant relative from a southern city inherited the property in the 16th century, restored the fallen manse, and began exploring the dungeons and crypts beneath the ruins.  Discovering a cache of sorcerous lore, the descendant restored one of the Medieval wizards to life and the great project was resumed.

As mentioned in the earlier Harrow Home post, the restored wizard set about gathering from the corners of Europe those few bearers of forbidden knowledge that had thus far escaped the fires of the Inquisition, bringing together collaborators on the great project, to awaken the sleeping god and restore the world to the madness of a bygone age.  The lure of power corrupts, and the gathered host factionalized and fell to destructive infighting once it was clear the project would take extended effort to recover the lost secrets of waking the sleeping god.  Less than a century later, Harrow Home is again a crumbling ruin with an evil reputation.

The part that's interesting to me about this mega dungeon approach is how it can be made "character driven".  I can develop portraits of these powerful, insane, gothic figures, and populate the tombs, crypts, caverns, and depths with the fruits of their mad schemes and revenge plots.  There's the sorcerer, burned at the stake or beheaded and returned to a mere semblance of life through undeath, who uses mortal pawns to kidnap the descendants of the handful of Medieval knights that ended his existence the first time, 200 years earlier.  His revenge plot spans centuries.

There's the Carpathian blood-drinker, bored with life in the dreary caverns beneath Harrow Home, who has taken over a local abbey and changed the rites and rituals to fit a religion more to his tastes.  One hazard in the dungeon is the body parts of the severed sorceror, the crawling hands and arms that scurry around the dungeon looking for the sorceror's head.  When the wizard proved too difficult to kill, his enemies had him dismembered and scattered.  His head lies in a trunk, thrown into the bottom of a well.  He's quite angry.

And so on.  Lots of mad, bloody wizards, lots of fun little stories.

Adapting D&D to the Early Modern Settings

Lately I've been looking at criteria for a good D&D setting because I knew I had a few ideas kicking around, and I wanted a structure for looking at the opportunities objectively.  I'm intrigued by the idea of a D&D setting in the early modern period, but when bouncing the settings up against the things that make a regular D&D setting great, some issues emerge.  Let me know if you agree.

Here's the check list I'm using to see how well the setting match the needs of the game.  Some of the items involve what adventurers do or need, some are institutionalized in D&D's mechanics:
Adventures and Frontiers, Autonomy, Dungeons, XP for Gold, Treasure and Magic Items, Classes and Levels, NPC Classes and Levels, Alignment, High Magic, Humanoids and Monsters, The End Game, Demi-Humans, Clerical Magic, Vancian Magic

There should be no problem with adventures, frontiers, player autonomy, or even placing dungeons in the early modern age; the big change you notice is they need to be more remote or isolated.  XP for gold might seem a bit fishy - in an age with nation states, would private individuals amass vast fortunes through sacking old ruins?  I just have to stop and remember Spanish galleons loaded with treasure, and I can see the XP for gold mechanic still working out in early modern.

Regular D&D tends to assume that high level characters become rulers, there's a correlation between battlefield prowess and domain rulership.  History is littered with guys like William the Conqueror, Alexander the Great, Charlemagne, Julius Caesar, and so on, that had great personal power which translated into careers of conquest and political power.  That paradigm, which works so well for D&D games at tech levels of the Medieval period, Dark Ages, or Antiquity, seems to break down in the post-Renaissance world.  I'm sure one of the talented students of history out there could explain what changed that diminished the political role of the battlefield hero.

You can argue a D&D game in early modern needs to be somewhat low magic, otherwise you have the problem of magic warping the setting.  Humanoids and monsters are rare or nonexistent, for the same reasons.  But doing an "alternate earth" with humanoid races mixed in with humanity would be pretty interesting - perhaps take an approach like Trey's Weird Adventures.  But I'd avoid a high magic setting with a Renaissance or later level of technology - I've seen that before, and it looks like Mystara, or perhaps Eberron.

There you go - take a game like BX D&D, reduce the amount of magic, make monsters rare, and remove the traditional end-game, and you end up with a view of D&D like Jim's LOTFP.  Funny stuff.  The only other major adaptation to is to swap the gold standard for something fitting to the age, like the silver standard used in LOTFP.  Now that LOTFP will have an upcoming firearms supplement, it's the perfect fit for one of these campaigns.

This is a bit of an odd post, as I started by wondering what needed to change for D&D in early modern, and it became clear LOTFP is already there.  However, how do you feel about ditching the traditional view of domain rulership and conquest for sliding D&D play into a setting themed against a later age?  I've always like knowing there's an "end-game" out there, where D&D crosses over into a different style of play and there's a natural point for retiring characters.

Referring back to an old poll here at the Lich House, only 23% of the readership at the time were concerned that their campaigns supported a high level end-game:  Beedo's hierarchy of campaign needs and then the associated poll results.

Harrow Home Manor

I've been casting around lately for an early modern setting that would work for D&D, something with guns and flashing blades.  My recent interest in distilling the essence of a good campaign setting has been bent towards this goal, and further evidenced by some of my recent ideas such as the "Colonial Hexcrawl" or "Goblins of the Spanish Main".  Fear not for the Black City, it trundles towards playtesting, hopefully as soon as after our next Cthulhu scenarios (unless the players clamor for more of the AD&D game first).  But since I'm tossing things against the wall, here’s another early modern setting kicking around the cranium:  a sprawling Gothic ruin I call "Harrow Home".

When the fires of the auto-da-fé burned across Europe, witches and warlocks gathered in the highlands of dread Albion to escape the noose and pyre.  The cellars and dungeon beneath the old manse were greatly extended downward into the earth, giving these foul necromancers solitude far from the prying eyes of the church.  In time, fewer and fewer visit were made to the little villages beyond the moors, and Harrow Home fell into disrepair.  But the old manor was never truly abandoned.

100 years have passed, and the  castle manor has tumbled into ruin.  But the moorland surrounding the fallen manse has an ill reputation.  Shepherds go missing on the moors, and travelers disappear by night.  Dark deals are consummated at lonely cross-roads, and it's not uncommon for a hunter or farmer to discover a new cave entrance where none existed, with a reek that seems to come from the pits of hell itself.

The dungeons and caverns beneath Harrow Home draw inspiration from gothic horror and place it in the early modern setting.  Source materials would include the tales of Edgar Allen Poe, Lovecraft's story "The Festival", and the classic black and white horror films of the 1930's.  The byzantine politics and tortuous relationships of the wizards living beneath Harrow Home recall classic D&D adventures like Castle Amber, Tegel Manor, or Mervyn Peake's excellent novel, Gormenghast.  I might even watch Clive Barker's Nightbreed again.

The back story of occult characters and families retreating to the haunted moors of Elizabethan England provides a fiction to populate the depths of Harrow Home with ghoul cults and witch's covens, servants of the mummy, soul-jumping body thieves, devil worshipers, degenerate serpent people left over from Pictish times, and perhaps even the odd vampire from the Old Country or a mad scientist bent on re-animating the dead.  What's not to love about it?

Next up, I think I'll match a few of these ideas up against my 'criteria for a good campaign' and see which one has the most promise.


*Image is Slain's Castle from here, with a simple sepia filter applied

Goblins of the Spanish Main

Yesterday, I was suggesting some elements that are core to D&D that need to be addressed by the campaign setting.  The more of these elements that work in the setting "as is", the better is the fit between the setting idea and D&D; the closer it is to a core D&D experience.  Just to try it out, I thought I'd come up with a random half-baked idea and see how it tests as a D&D setting.

Yo Ho, me hearties!  Let's set sail for a fantastic version of the Gulf of Mexico and trawl the waters of the Spanish Main during the golden age of piracy - buried treasure, bottles of rum, and 15 men on a dead man's chest.  And monsters.

First up, dungeons and adventure sites.  How could you handle dungeons in a "saltbox"?  Exploring a wild stretch of sea, it's got to be sprinkled with islands.  Each island could be a simple hex crawl.  You could arrange the islands by distance, such that the furthest islands are more dangerous - a bit like dungeon levels.  Some of the islands themselves could have a few simple ruins on them, or basic sea caves.  You're not going to have anything quite like a traditional dungeon, though you could have ancient Atlantean ruins or something similar.

I don't see any problems using the following D&D tropes on the Spanish Main - classes, levels, alignment, high magic, and XP for gold.  One could even place demi-humans back in folkloric Europe and have the odd halfling, dwarf or elf in a crew.

It's not hard to imagine populating the mythic Caribbean with various monsters from the bestiaries, both sea monsters of nautical lore and monsters appropriate for the tropics.  A dinosaur-filled "lost world" like the Isle of Dread seems de rigueur.  What about two-legged opponents?  There'd be no end of foreign nationals, opposing pirates and buccaneers, or hostile natives that could be found on the islands - assuming you want to stay away from using traditional D&D-style humanoids.

If you cared about "domain level play", what would the end-game be like here?  Maybe mid-level to high-level characters buy their own ships instead of building castles.  I seem to recall Pirate Lords are like 11th level fighters in the Expert set, so you could adapt the end-game to a maritime milieu.

Actually, the biggest issue I see in adapting the tropes of the D&D campaign to such a setting is the fact that those NPC ships are commanded by high level characters!

The party is the unit of autonomy and exploration in the dungeon, and the idea behind the setting needs to support these small groups of picaresque adventurers setting out to scrabble for loot.  It's a bit hard to plan your own capers when you're on board a ship commanded by someone else.  This could be a fatal flaw.

Maybe the adventuring "unit" in such a campaign would be the longboat - just large enough for the players, their gear, and retainers, and once they get to shore they're on their own to plan and explore.  From that perspective, the ship becomes the local "town", the place the adventurers return to drink some rum, hear rumors, and plan their next expedition.  A tidy sum of loot is "taxed" back to the captain.

That's a potential solution - still doesn't provide a satisfactory solution for piloting the ship and crew from place to place, or how combat on the high seas would work when the players are a small group of pirates on a much larger ship.  I've got to think about it some more - the list was skewed towards mechanical elements and adherence to a core D&D experience, but there clearly needs to be some things on the list that address these non-mechanical concerns, like the importance of planning, autonomy, and small group play in the setting.  Playing the role of minions at the whim of a high level NPC is not a great recipe for D&D.


*Picture is NC Wyeth Treasure Island

Your Default Setting

Lately I've been thinking I'd like to build a default setting for simple gaming.  We have a ton of kids in the neighborhood, and summer is fast approaching - the time when my son usually pesters non-stop to fire up another kid's game for the summer.  Since the adult game has featured a few weeks of Cthulhu (no kids allowed in that one), the cries for a kid's game have intensified.

Kids approach fantasy gaming with a different set of eyes.  They're not burnt out on fantasy tropes - this is the first time they're encountering "high fantasy", unless they've read The Hobbit or seen The Lord of the Rings movies.  I don't event think the grade school kids in the neighborhood learn medieval or ancient history these days until junior high or later.

So I've been thinking about sketching a simplistic setting as the go-to place for pick-up games and kid's games.  It'd be friendly to the tropes and stereotypes of medieval history and fantasy, and home to a simple megadungeon.  When I sang out my Ode to Karameikos a little while ago, I rediscovered how simple and classic is that place, and figured it was time to have my own default home brew setting.

I'm still working on The Black City, but that place is strange (a little too weird and horrible for the neighborhood kids), and The Colonial Hexcrawl is super interesting, but perhaps too rarified a taste (and also filled with horror).  My reading list for it is great fun, however.

I've been orating The Once and Future King for my oldest son (10), and was thinking a chivalric setting that mashes TH White with The King of Elfland's Daughter and Three Hearts and Three Lions would make for a classically themed default setting, great for a kid's game.

The idea has generated a couple of quick questions for readers - One, do you have a default home brew you've written that you return to again and again in between other games, and what's it like?  Two - what are your thoughts on getting kids involved, go with a classic fantasy approach, or would you pull out the stops and mix ray guns, robots, and orcs in a sci-fantasy mash up or similar fantasy niche?

Colonial Hex Crawling

I keep coming back to the idea of putting together a hex crawl for colonial New England - something in the mid-17th century, before the Salem witch trials, probably even before the Dutch lost New Amsterdam to the English - 1650 or earlier.

For our upcoming Cthulhu game in 1930's New York, I've been reading up on the history of the city, and it struck me how the early Dutch colonies of New Amsterdam had the frontier qualities of the American Wild West.  You have these European fur traders landing in the new world to make some money, heading up rivers and tributaries to trade with natives and trap animals, then returning to the settlements to get hammered and have a good time.  Basically the types of things you’d expect from adventurers.  Accounts of life in those Dutch colonies are quite a bit different from the theocratic colonies of Plymouth and Rhode Island.

Once you overlay the tropes of Lovecraftian horror, the idea of a fantasy game hex crawl in this type of setting becomes real interesting to me.  The native Algonquin and Iroquois nations struggle with degenerate neighbors that worship ancient horrors sleeping beneath the ground.  Alien terrors like the Mi-Go have been visiting earth for millennia, mining rare minerals and performing heinous biological experiments, such that remote ranges of hills are considered taboo for their evil reputations.  Beneath the ground, atavistic cave-dwellers emerge on moonless nights seeking flesh.

Many of the early colonists came to escape religious persecution; in a weird fantasy game, why wouldn't there also be witches, cultists, wizards, and sorcerers leaving Europe to avoid the inquisitor's pyre, either hiding in the settlements or striking out on their own?  American folklore has a tradition of "deals with the devil" - as the Black Man, or Old Scratch - happening out in the dark woods.   There's a theme of 'chaotic wilderness' versus 'law and civilization' that can be developed as well.

Part of why Lovecraft's body of work is so compelling is how he's created an intricate mythology for New England, blending science and cosmicism with supernatural horror in a self-referential body of work.  Stephen King carried the torch in a similar way with his Maine mythology.  I'm also enamored with Ramsey Campbell's treatment of the Severn Valley in England.  So I'd mine those sources for ideas on creating a sprawling hex crawl wilderness representing the eastern seaboard, littered with locations for these ancient horrors.

There could be opportunities for traditional dungeon crawls, too - cavern complexes and underground lairs of the atavistic cannibals, the lightless caverns carved by unknown hands implied by The Festival, the lost civilization of K'n-yan (from The Mound), or the subterranean dungeons carved by wizards to hide their experiments - like Joseph Curwen's dungeons from The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.

I admit, it' an unusual idea - I see a frontier of isolated colonies of competing nationalities, and then small border forts penetrating the interior of a dark and foreboding land, and then the discovery of monsters.  I usually carry around a brainstorming notebook for ideas, I'll keep it handy for jotting down notes for the colonial hex crawl and see if it generates a real spark.  Must be something about the zeitgeist, Chaoisum released a monograph called Colonial Terrors, there's an entire rpg called Colonial Gothic, and Sixtystone Press has a Colonial Lovecraft Country book penciled in for next year.  All of these works seem to be 18th century or so, around the time of the Revolutionary War, and they focus on traditional horror investigations, and not exploration and adventure.  Doing this type of thing as a D&D setting allows the use of technologies that explicitly support free-form wilderness exploration, like the D&D hex crawl and dungeon crawl.

With a cover like this, the LOTFP Grindhouse Edition looks tailor made for the colonial hex crawl:

The Return of the Fey

It's not uncommon in urban fantasy or speculative fiction to portray the realms of myth and magic as something just out of touch with the mundane world, occasionally intersecting.  There are even some games that have a similar theme - the premise behind Shadowrun was all the myth creatures return in a near future, at the dawn of the Mayan 6th Age, blending fantasy with cyberpunk.  I don't remember seeing that approach used with a D&D setting.

Over at From the Sorceror's Skull, Trey has been posting some weekly blurbs he's calling "Apocalypse Under Ground" - readers here should them check out.  (And, uh, Trey should label them or something so I can link to the series instead of the first post…)  The central conceit is this… what if D&D's "adventurer culture" was a recent thing?  What if some fundamental thing changed in the near past, and suddenly dragons and monsters and dungeons and nightmares of every shape and form start coming back to the surface from deep underground?

Take your favorite myth cycle or bits of legendry and develop a suitable apocalypse - perhaps it's the beginning of Ragnarok, and the barriers separating the Nine Worlds have faded.  The island of Avalon has returned, the Greater Seal of Solomon was shattered, or it's the time of the astral conjunction or harmonic convergence.  Maybe something has shifted in the cosmic battle between Law and Chaos, and the intersection of the mortal world with the magic realm is the result of Chaos triumphant.  Like the picture above, showing Oberon and Titania* re-entering the world, I would use the return of the various Fey as the initiator of "The Change".

Here's what I like about this type of campaign setting for D&D… you can take your favorite real world historical period, dump all this magic and chaos on right top of it, advance the timeline a few years, and then roll in with the adventurers.  It's the Thirty Years war, and the world groans beneath the weight of religious strife and constant warfare, until the horror is complete and the doorways to chaotic Faerie gape open again, allowing goblins to swarm across the battlefields of Europe.  Trade and travel suffers from a countryside suddenly overrun with monsters from beyond.  Where there was a barren moor, a strange tower has appeared overnight; the dead rise from unhallowed earth, and in the heart of every kingdom, at least one yawning cavern grants access to the dark places underground where the monsters have waited, and watched. The only place where people can find the kinds of weapons that can be used against the monsters is by entering the dungeons.

The problem with using the real world as a D&D setting is rewriting history to account for the presence of humanoids, demi humans, and magic, and by the time you shoehorn them into this faux history, you've pretty much rewritten The Grand History of the Realms or The Silmarillion.  I'm pretty lazy.  I'd want to use the real world as is, keep a few thousand years of world history the same, up until about 5 years ago when everything changed during the Chaos Apocalypse.  All this magic shit happened and dungeons and the Underdark appeared whole-cloth overnight.  All those things whispered about in dark fairy tales and hinted at in ghost stories are suddenly true, and they want to eat you.

Maybe you'll have other mental images, but for me, I kept thinking of one of my favorite X-Men comics from back-in-the-day, it was a two-part story called "An Age Undreamed Of" where a sorcerer from the Hyborian Age, Kulan Gath, casts a master spell that turns Manhattan into a fantastic realm of magic and swordplay.  In that particular story, heroes and villains are changed into their fantasy analogs - Captain America is a blonde barbarian with a shield and sword, for example.  Long suppressed enchantment would remake the world overnight, and humans would be forced to seek alliances with the exotic and foreign demihuman invaders as they struggle to adapt to a world where the rule of science has been replaced by magic.

I'm filing this one in The Junkyard** to refer back to on a rainy day.

Edit:  Trey is kindly labeling the series, you can find all the entries here: Apocalypse Under Ground

*Images:  The top one is Charles Vess from, Sandman: A Midsummer Night's Dream, the bottom is the cover to Uncanny X-Men #190.


**The Junkyard is the place I put campaign ideas that I'm just not ready to act on; it helps me manage my gamer attention deficit disorder by putting future campaign notes somewhere for reference and gets them out of my head for a bit.  Next time there's a TPK or we're ready for a change, I know I can visit the Junkyard and see what kind of ideas are stored away gathering dust.

Projects

A little Saturday introspection calls for a quick run down on what's cooking in Beedo's world.

Gothic Greyhawk
The campaign continues to roll weekly.  While the players grind day-by-day through the crypts of Ravenloft in wintry Barovia, big things are brewing in the wider world.  The spring thaw will see the resumption of the zombie war in the Earldom of Sterich, and I've got the various factions and cabals involved with the "Race for the Demonomicon" ready to go when word reaches the civilized lands that the Horn of Iggwilv has been discovered at last.

The Black City
It's alive!  I've been really sidetracked this summer with our adoption - integrating an older child from Ethiopia and assimilating him into family life is no mean chore, and I'll leave it at that.  Blogging about gaming has been a welcome outlet.

That being said, I've reorganized my headspace and am ready to kick the Black City back into gear.  When I set out earlier this year, I really wanted to make it a weird horror setting, but the needs of a megadungeon ecosystem quickly pushed it into gonzo, and that aesthetic began to discourage me.  Now I'm ready to embrace the gonzo.  Editing the manuscript and working on turning the dungeon levels into e-files starts this weekend.

The Library of de la Torre
Part of the reason I'm content with the Black City as a gonzo place is because I see the excellent potential for the Wide Area Sandbox as a "serious" horror setting; I've been diligently reading stuff on the 30 Years War and the early modern period, and compiling ideas into the brainstorming notebook; it's like Lovecraft Country meets The Three Musketeers.

Halls of the Erlking
I've wanted to build a fantastical and whimsical dungeon for a while - something where monsters have alternate origins and non-naturalistic explanations, and fairy tale logic applies to the world.  I have promises from the wife and kids to start a family D&D game sometime in the next year, so I'm slowly putting ideas into the notebook for a fairy-themed dungeon that should appeal to wifey, my daughter, and the younger kiddo - I'm calling it the Halls of the Erlking.  It's part Lord Dunsany, part Arthurian legend and chanson de geste.

I don't have expectations of making significant progress on the last two projects any time soon, but it gives me a clear place to park ideas that don't fit into the Black City without derailing me; for instance, I had been seriously thinking about stripping down the Black City and rolling it into the Library project, but in the end, it's better to stop worrying and learn to love the dungeon.

One big decision is whether I pull back on blogging a little; a daily post has been my aspiration, but 3 posts a week might make more sense for maximizing time to work on projects.

The Wide Area Sandbox

There's an idea I can't get out of my head - it keeps rattling around in there since I got exposed to Stars Without Number and the idea of generating a sector of space as a sandbox - how can we take the standard D&D sandbox, blow it up in size, and let the players cut loose with serious mobility?

For purposes of scale, I'll say something like Keep on the Borderlands, with its limited wilderness area, town and cave complex, is a micro-sandbox; a regular sized sandbox is in the 6 miles per hex range, covering 2-4 hex crawl sized maps.  The regular sandbox is a good size if your group is trudging around or even traveling by horse; journeys are measured in hours and days, but rarely weeks.

The Wide Area Sandbox
Mobility defines the scale of the Wide Area Sandbox.  Consider the idea of the "Saltbox" I'm seeing the cool bloggers talk about; the group is traveling from place to place on ships and time is measured in days, weeks, maybe even months.

I'll use a historical setting like the Spanish Main as an example; it covered an area roughly 2,000 miles by 2,000 miles; it would be one of my first inspirations for a Saltbox.  You've got excellent home bases like Port Royale, Havana, Tortuga, Charleston, or Porto Bello, international competition between privateers and ships flying national colors, pirates, tons of uncharted islands, dangerous jungles laden with gold.

It seems to me that the current state of the art could handle such a setting quite well - larger and smaller scale hex maps could be created, random tables for island stocking, one could even adapt the Stars Without Number style of tags for islands, and tools for generating a wide range of ships, crews, and missions on the fly.  The DM could have some prebuilt ruins and similar encounters ready to go for when the results called for it.  I've got to fool with Vornheim some more, too, and see if some of the loose ideas on presenting an undefined city could be extrapolated into the wilderness.

The Macro Sandbox
Let's talk about going bigger.  Let's start the group back in the homeland - I'll use the early modern period as an example, and the group is considering hiring on with the West Araby Trading company after asking around for exciting opportunities - they learn that the following high risk jobs are available:

Travel to an exotic port near the desert lands, where the company is outfitting caravans to head into the desert and conduct searches for lost tombs, from which they hope to recover artifacts that could be thousands of years old.

The church is sending missionaries to a distant jungle land to preach the faith; dangers include pirates, privateers, and hostile natives.  There's the chance to stop on uncharted islands, recover lost pirate treasures, and discover civilizations and lands untouched by the "civilized nations".

So this is one of the things I'm thinking about - what kind of tools would support a macro-sandbox?  Is there a way to take the current state of the art - the techniques we use for sandboxes and saltboxes, and configure them to support play that supports an even grander scale of travel?

I'm also kicking around the idea of what something akin to an early modern D&D game would be like for me - there would be highly civilized lands, where adventures would be necessarily mundane and magic would be rare.  Monsters would be fairly rare in downtown London, for instance.  So the plot hooks would involve traveling extraordinary distances to remote frontiers where the possibilities would still be wide open - the Spanish Main, African continent, the gothic heart of old Europe, the frozen areas near the arctic circle.  Here there be dragons.

Maybe I've answered the question by repeatedly pulling in real-world analogues - that such a far flung campaign would have to draw heavily from the real world so the DM could shortcut a lot of the creation of the mundane cultures and just focus on sandboxing the frontiers - and then whatever techniques would be used for the Wide Area Sandbox would be extended to the frontiers (each frontier is basically a Wide Area Sandbox).

Just thinking out loud at this point.  What's the most ambitious geographic scale you've seen in someone's home fantasy campaign?