Damage Output

Fantasy gaming with higher level characters is uncommon.  Proponents of newer editions proclaim a mid-level "sweet spot" that erodes as spellcasters begin to take over the game, making the other classes obsolete.  Is this a problem in OSR style games as well?  There are far fewer discussions about high level characters or high level campaigns.

Most of the discussions around the sweet spot focus on the magic user's ability to dominate encounters with damage output - the sweet spot is that transition period where all the character classes are contributing equally to dealing with tactical problems.  There's a secondary concern about utility magic obviating the need for a diverse party in the later game too, but today I'm focusing mostly on comparing fighters to magic users in the combat arena.  We've bounced around different old school style games so I'm curious how the relationship between the magic user and fighter scales in higher level games across some of these systems.  I've always assumed AD&D handled fighters the best, but both ACKS (Adventurer Conquer King) and LOTFP (Lamentations of the Flame Princess) have gone in vastly different directions with their respective approaches to "niche protection".

There are some additional factors to consider.  One of our typical adventure sessions might cover 3-4 encounters, plus the potential for wandering monsters.  The goal is to avoid another later era phenomenon, the "5 minute work day", where the party rests and retreats after every encounter.  So the question becomes whether the magic users have enough gas in the tank to handle the encounters on their own when there's going to be a series of encounters without rests.  Do the fighters act primarily as "offensive linemen", keeping the monsters away from the spell casters, while the spell casters do all the heavy lifting?  Contrast that role with the fighters in the early game, where most of the tactical encounters are settled through missile and melee combat, and spells are held in reserve to get the party out of jams they can't otherwise handle.  Is this a more satisfying style, which is another reason why we see more lower level games than high?

Magic users are fairly similar across editions (except for LOTFP, noted below).  The typical high level wizard is going to have enough spell slots to burn a 1st level combat trick and 3rd level X-damage spell in each encounter, supplemented by a 4th or 5th level combat spell in one of the other encounters.  Assume average damage 3.5, a 10d6 spell will let the wizard do 35 points per encounter, with magic missiles adding 17.5 points (AD&D style) or 22.5 points (BX style).  Obviously, that 35 point X-spell can be devastating as a burst, stripping hit points from a large number of enemies.  Still, that establishes our baseline - a wizard that is rationing his or her magic to have a few good volleys for each encounter is easily laying down 50-60 points of damage, and that's not counting the 2nd, 4th, and 5th level spells or access to devices like wands and staves, many of which can alter combat math even if they don't do direct damage.

Assume an average encounter is against a party of eight high level fighters - a real baseline creature - they'll have 50 hit points or so each, close to 400 hit points across the entire group.  If they're caught in a magic user burst spell, they'll have a 50% save chance to reduce the 35 point X-damage - we'll just say the magic user strips 26 hit points from each (35 expected damage, reduced by the expected number of successful saves to 26 average).  The party will still need to dish out 24 damage to each remaining fighter (and the magic user should be able remove one with magic missiles).

For calculating to hit and damage, I'll assume the fighter has a +1 from strength, is using an appropriate magic sword (we'll say a +2 sword) for an average damage roll of 8, and the opponents are wearing good armor (plate and shield).

Moldvay-Cook B\X
BX Fighters don't get any extra attacks per round.  They'll hit 70% of the time, doing a meager 5.6 average damage per round (round up to 6?).  Trying to wear down those opposing 10th level fighters and their remaining 24 hp each is going to take a long time in BX terms - very grindy.  Each BX fighter will need an average of 4 rounds to mop up a single opponent.

AD&D
The AD&D fighter also has a 70% chance to hit on each attack; the difference is they get an extra attack every other round, so they'll average 9 damage per round instead of 6 damage per round.  If you're using weapon specialization, the chance to hit is 75%, and they attack twice per round for an average 16hp damage per round.

The AD&D fighter is significantly more effective than BX - and keep in mind that fighters with high strength will be doing more than a +1 damage bonus (bringing that hp-per-round closer to 18-20hp per round).  Unfortunately, the NPC opponents would have 10 extra hit points (AD&D uses a d10 for fighter hit points) so we're still looking at 4 rounds to finish an opponent (or 3 rounds if specialization is in effect).  The AD&D fighters clean the floor against monsters with 8-sided die hit points.

LOTFP
The 10th level LOTFP fighter will be hitting only 65% of the time, and they don't even get a damage bonus from strength.  They'll average 4.5 damage per round (round up to 5).  This fight will be even longer and grindier than the BX version.

Keep in mind that there are no X-damage Magic User spells in LOTFP, and the other characters in the fighter's party (even at 10th level) will only have a pathetic 10-15% chance to hit in combat each round against the heavily armed sample opponents.  In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king - that's one way to make the fighter seem good.  LOTFP obviously doesn't assume the same degree of tactical combat is going to be happening as in other retro clones.  In fact, the proposed sample fight would be a mind-numbing affair - at least 10 rounds to kill a single 50 hit point opponent.  Best just to summon a demon with the level 1 magic user spell and let the eldritch horror go and fight.

ACKS
ACKS uses a modified BX chassis for the fighter - the base chance to hit the opponents at level 10 will be 65% of the time, increased to 70% if the fighter has a "fighting style proficiency", which is likely.  The ACKS fighter gets a damage bonus based on level, which is +4 at level 10.  Thus, our ACKS fighter's average damage is 12 per successful hit, which equates to an average of 8 damage per round (3 rounds to knock out one of the opponents).  It's an upgrade from the BX fighter, but it's below the AD&D fighter (and way below the souped-up "weapon specialization fighter" from AD&D's Unearthed Arcana).

However, there are two other factors in ACKS - there's a cleave rule, which means every time one of the opponents is taken out, the fighter gets to tack another 8 average damage on the next one (a down payment on defeating the next guy), and there's a system-supported critical rule (a weapon proficiency) that maxes the damage on a natural 20.

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I expected to get to this point and begin a discussion on challenging high level parties - for instance, ways to present difficult tests outside of combat that push the spell casters into selecting powerful utility spells and forcing interesting resource choices.  But after seeing how poorly the fighters scale in pretty much all the old school variants, do you really want to run high level tactical challenges where the fighters carry the load?  On the contrary, you need to be jamming more magic wands at the casters and let the party continue the asynchronous warfare.  A combat featuring the fighters is going to feel like one of those 19-inning baseball games (score tied the whole time 0-0 until the first run is plated)… ZZzzzzz.

From the perspective of peaking early, enjoy those moments of glory while you're level 1 and level 2, fighter players!  It won't get any better than when you're holding the front line in plate and shield, and killing off humanoids and bandits every other round or so.  It's like high school all over again, where that popular jock guy seems kind of successful now to your teenage eyes, but in a decade or so he'll be the one with the beer gut and the bald spot who never left town, and that brainy nerd from your chemistry class is the next Bill Gates (ie, the 10th level party wizard).  Magic users are living the white collar dream.

Review of Qelong

Everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a mission, and for my sins, they gave me one. Brought it up to me like room service. It was a real choice mission, and when it was over, I never wanted another.

I was going to the worst place in the world and I didn't even know it yet. Weeks away and hundreds of miles up a river that snaked through the war like a main circuit cable...
--Willard, from Apocalypse Now

I've been catching up on some RPG reading.  A few weeks ago I had gotten a big box from Finland with the hardcover LOTFP rules books, along with Qelong and The Seclusium of Orphone of the Three Visions.  I've since read them, and am ready to discuss.  Let's start with "Qelong".

Qelong is a hex crawl setting that describes a war-torn jungle area inspired  by South East Asia, specifically Cambodia.  It's fairly high concept.  Imagine Apocalypse Now, but instead of two warring (modern) nations, the super powers are a pair of god-like wizards, devastating the areas beyond Qelong's border.  Sometimes their attacks are deflected and go astray, careening into adjacent territories like Qelong.  The Qelong River Valley has been poisoned by a magical super weapon that tumbled out of the war zone and now leaks it's destructive power into the environment, poisoning and mutating the inhabitants and awakening the dark powers that slumber in the earth.

It's assumed the players are outsiders that come to Qelong for… reasons.  Perhaps a patron knows about the errant super weapon and wants it recovered, or they're do-gooders out to fix the ecological disaster by removing the taint.  For looters and raiders, there are refugees, abandoned temples, and a lost mine to sack.  The book assumes the DM will employ some creativity and account for the aspirations of the players when designing appropriate reasons for the players to visit Qelong.

The presentation of the hex crawl material is slightly different than the standard treatment.  Instead of a laborious catalog of numbered hexes, Qelong is presented through 10 major destination locations, and then random encounter tables by terrain type (along with practical ideas for making the terrain types interesting).

The core of the descriptive material is the handful of factions at work in the valley.  These are the powerful rivals with whom the player characters will have to fight or negotiate.  There are the Lotus Monks, remnants of the area's religious orders (and yes, they're flush with cool martial arts powers).  The Myrmidons are a gruesome, parasitic, ravaging army, insect soldiers created by one of the great powers, that angled out of the war zone and are now cutting a path through Qelong.  They seek hosts for their eggs.  My favorite group was the Varangians, tough mercenaries from the west that are exploiting the chaos to loot the region.  They have a giant flying construct, the lich-garuda, and similar war machine constructs - queue Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries".

The book contains the mechanical bits you'd expect as well - rules for disease and "aakom poisoning", the name of the magical contaminant leaked by the super weapon.  There are lots of new monsters, themed from Asian mythology; nagas and angry ghost variants headline the monster section.  There are name tables to help the referee generate flavorful NPC names on the fly.

Qelong is 48 pages, softcover, and is nicely laid out, with art by Rich Longmore.  This one is for mid level characters, in the 4th-6th level range.  You can get a pdf copy at the usual place (RPGNow:  Qelong) or a hard copy at the LOTFP store.  It's by Kenneth Hite, a prolific horror writer in the Cthulhu gaming space, and the choice of placing a sandbox setting near fantasy Vietnam is unusual.  Ken is an avowed fan of history; this is a clever way to hold the mirror up and explore some underused themes in gaming.

How do I recommend this one?  As I said near the intro, it’s fairly high concept (and perhaps narrow) but the material is thought provoking, well presented, well written, and offers a radical alternative to the dungeon crawl.  How many campaigns support access to an Asian-themed war zone?  The idea of warring super powers, and mercenary companies with war-constructs, implies a higher magic world than many campaigns (albeit "grim and gritty") than a low fantasy setting. The referee could have characters teleported to the region via a high level patron, or even travel to the world of Qelong through planar travel, for instance.  It's ideal for a jaunt.  It fits the whole "Heart of Darkness" theme to have 'ordinary' characters from the world thrust into the war zone, not fully understanding what they're getting into when they accept the mission.

Review: The Gnomes of Levnec

The Gnomes of Levnec is an adventure about the fate of an empire and the byzantine machinations of a court that no longer has a monarch.

Just kidding, its about Gnomes.
--Zzarchov Kowolski

I really enjoyed this one.  The Gnomes of Levnec is a short adventure, 16 pages, but you get a lot of value in those 16 pages. The book details a small adventuring area set around a remote village, Levnec.  Within is described the village, a handful of characters, the nearby woods, and a few adventuring sites in said woods.  The village has fallen on hard times, starvation is a problem, and the toymaker, a gnome, has been murdered.  Worse, did some of the starving villagers actually eat the toymaker?  There's an opportunity for a bit of investigative role playing.

The author, Zzarchov Kowolski, incorporates a lot of humor into his writing style, and Gnomes is an entertaining read.  There were a few times I caught myself laughing during the read through, and immediately knew I'd slot this adventure into any upcoming low level campaign.  Between the investigation, the village, the woods, and the adventuring sites, there are quite a few interesting things to do, and the sense of dark humor and whimsy seals the deal and makes this a winner.  There's also a nifty gnome recipe.  Running this adventure will be entertaining for the referee.

On the other hand, check out that cover.  You might think a hand drawn gnome picture demonstrates some OSR hobbyist charm.  If so, you'll be fine with the presentation of this adventure.  If you require commercial game books to have high production values, take your $2.85 somewhere else.  The maps and pictures are rough, and the writing could use some editing.  None of that affects the game play, nor does it detract from the subversive humor throughout the adventure.  Don't miss out on some fun because something isn't "professional enough".

The Gnomes of Levnec is available at the usual suspects (RPGnow: The Gnomes of Levnec).  It's for low level adventurers and will work well for any referee setting up a sandbox area who has space for an outlying village.  It's system neutral and can be used with any old school version of D&D or clone game with no fuss.  I'm recommending it.

Your Path to Real Ultimate Magic

...Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,  
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full  
Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood;  
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,  
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between  
The effect and it!
--MacBeth

The spell system in Dungeons & Dragons works fairly well for the game.  The game is mostly about exploration, puzzle solving, and combat, and the spell system is loaded with utility effects to give players tools to solve game problems.  It's great for the game, it's just not very literary.

Example, the Light spell:  The torch of tomorrow, today!  Why carry a burning stick of wood, when you can have light that's safe, heatless, and brighter than a torch, all for the low cost of a 1st level spell?  If you act now, we'll upgrade you to a permanent heatless lamp at 3rd level, Continual Light!

You see the same thing with the Levitate, Fly, Dimension Door, and Teleport sequence of movement spells.  It's magic as technology.  Narrator:  Why physically walk up stairs with your own muscles when you can fly?  In the future, wizards everywhere will dazzle with feats that defy gravity and both time and space.  Grocery shopping will never be the same when you can teleport to the market!

(Apparently, magic as technology makes me view standard D&D magic effects as a 1950's expo for the world of tomorrow, since that's the voice in my head...)

Literary magic, on the other hand, usually features horrible choices and sacrifice.  There is a price to be paid for power.  Odin sacrifices an eye to learn wisdom at the well of wisdom (Mimir's spring) and in other stories is hung for nine days on Yggdrasil, the World Tree, in order to gain wisdom.  Alberich the Dwarf forswears love for his magic powers.  Faust sells his soul to the devil, one of many such literary dealers.  Even characters embedded in a setting where they have superhuman powers often make dark choices for more power - Saruman, Voldemort, Darth Vader.

Then there's the approach we see in writers like HP Lovecraft, where magic frequently has terrible (unforeseen) consequences.  Lovecraft's fiction is full of instances where a would-be sorcerer contacts beings from beyond or summons liminal entities, then gets blind-sided by the repercussions.  That's the twist.  Sure, the Deep Ones will give you gold and valuables dredged up from the ocean muck… just don't read the fine print.  And remember, a deal's a deal.

Earlier this year, one of the cooler OSR type game books that came out was the LOTFP Better Than Any Man for free RPG day.  While folks gritted their teeth about the salacious cover or the full page picture of the cannibal cultists, one piece that flew under the radar was the approach to low level spells in the book.

Consider such "overpowered" first level spells as A Spell to Grant One’s Heart’s Desire, Journey to the Past , De-Age, or Deflect Damage.  A Spell to Grant One’s Heart’s Desire is essentially a first level Wish spell, but the caster dies as part of casting the spell; it's the nearby folks that get their wishes granted!  Journey to the Past is a severely limited version of time travel; De-Age is a longevity effect that can force loss of levels and other unfortunate side effects; Deflect Damage provides a powerful combat effect, but the deflected damage lands on random nearby people - ideal for a power mad loner, not so great for an adventuring party looking for utility spells.

The bit that's so interesting about these overpowered first level spells is that it highlights an implied axis in the default D&D spell system: high level D&D spells are high level because they combine usefulness, a powerful effect, and a notorious lack of negative side effects.  Sure - you can have a powerful Wish effect at 1st level, but the short cut is going to cost you more than you can imagine.  If you want to do powerful magic the "safe way", it's going to take a lot of hard work and a ton of experience points.  See you again at level 18.

The benefit to DM's is clear.  If there is a powerful, whimsical, literary effect you want to achieve, there's very little harm making it a first level spell, as long as it's accompanied by terrible costs or awful side effects.  Think of it like a skill test.  Your player character magic users aren't going to be interested in effects that maim their characters; leave that to the NPC's who "fail their wisdom checks" to make short-sighted power grabs.  For instance, I love the idea of a first level Raise Dead spell to bring back a dead loved one, but then the caster has to deal with the Pet Sematary style consequences when the loved one isn't quite the same person on the return side.

This is all part of an underlying philosophy that eschews game balance and treats the campaign world with reckless disregard for the status quo.  My name is Beedo, and I approve this message.

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 Witches of High Helmsley - An Encounter Discussion

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
--TS Elliot, The Hollow Men

A desperate, pox-ridden man stumbles out of the underbrush and into the lane ahead of the party, crying out for help.  Aged and covered in diseased sores, the exertion is too much for his frail state, and he dies after gasping out… "three… they did this to me, they tricked me…"  The dead man has a distinctive hunting knife and sheaf stuck into his loose-fitting belt, assuming anyone overcomes their disgust to get close enough to search him, along with a hand-made fetish around his neck.  Looking down at the map, the main track continues to skirt the moors towards the old abbey and the village of Helmsley down in the river valley, but an underused trail leads off towards the moorlands and the small hamlet of High Helmsley in the direction the man came.

There are big differences between different "versions" of an encounter:  how the encounter area looks in my raw notes, how I'd use those raw notes at the table to bring a scene to life, and how it could be presented as a written piece for an audience.  These variations - it's surely worth some Friday conversation!

For instance, the little excerpt written above would never actually be written out by me as game prep.  I'd probably improvise that scene  (or something similar) as a random encounter for a group that happened to be trudging towards the market town of Helmsley as a combination teaser / plot hook to investigate the witches of High Helmsley.  The encounter teases just enough to indicate there might be something fishy going on in the small community further on.  If they continue on to Helmsley proper, they might learn the hunting knife belonged to a robust young man from a neighboring farm, someone not at all resembling the horrible pox-ridden corpse left behind on the lane.  Following the lead out to the remote farm where "Oswyn Hardaker" recently went missing, they discover he left behind a morose young bride and a now ill-tended farm.  "He was spending too much time climbing up toward High Helmsley, he was, he had eyes for a girl there, I just know it, and now he's left me for her", bemoans the abandoned wife.

A written description of Helmsley as an encounter site might go like this:

The Witches of High Helmsley:

Subtle fear of curses and malevolent spells allow a trio of beautiful witches (Agatha, Rhea, Clara) to rule over the misty Hamlet of High Helmsley from within the small traveler's inn there, The Hanged Man.  The trio long ago signed their names into the Black Book in return for their eternal youth; the Horned Man taught them the Scapegoat Ritual, a piece of dark magic to transfer their illnesses, years, and imperfections onto a sacrificial victim through a hand-crafted cursed fetish, which quickly ages and overwhelms the host.  It's been a few years since they last enacted the ritual, and Agatha is beginning to show a few wrinkles near the corners of her eyes again… 

High Helmsley is a tiny settlement on the edge of the moors, home to clannish shepherds and folks that mutely ignore outsiders and close windows and doors to strangers.  The vicarage has gone abandoned and the church lies in disrepair; only the small tavern shows a sense of upkeep and displays any welcome on a dark evening.

[ I'm omitting the actual game stats and descriptions for the 3 witches since they're not pertinent here]

My actual handwritten notes are even more sparse, since it's mainly sentence fragments and jotted thoughts with a few ideas on how a wandering group might learn all is not well in that remote Hamlet of High Helmsley.

The OSR is as much about publishing (either via blog or book) and sharing creative thoughts as it is about rules and the old games themselves.  We're a movement with many facets, but doesn't it always come back to the table top?  It's difficult to convey the nuts and bolts of the DM's craft via the written word; the presentation of the material can vary based on the decisions and interpretations made during "run time" by an imaginative DM with a bunch of energized people around the table.

Another way of offering the question is the problem of Voice:  how much authorial voice is necessary to convey meaning?  I find it's analogous to presenting an oral play, a drama, with or without the staging or reading directions.

The description of the Witches of High Helmsley encounter is bland, although there's probably enough there for a referee to give the hamlet a foreboding, ominous character when a group wanders into the place.  But if I absolutely wanted someone at home to have the same patented "Beedo Experience™ " as me and mine, I would need to recommend \ encourage \ dictate that they stage the whole thing nearly the same way as me - including that lead-in encounter with the recent victim of the Scapegoat Curse in the prologue, who stumbles out in front of the party,  dripping with corruption like Dorian Grey's secret portrait.  And even then, you can't commoditize an experience or guarantee it would work the same at your table.

There was a kerfuffle some time last year when the drafts for Dwimmermount started to surface after the successful Kickstarter - I think it was Tenkar's copper pieces group that ran one of the levels, sans any kind of embellishment or DM creativity (as a kind of experiment), and then said players complained about how flat and boring was the game.  "But James Mal's sessions lead to such interesting game reports!  We wanted that patented James Mal™  experience at our table, too."  It ended up being hollow.

This is a fascinating dichotomy for me - the contrast between strong, directive encounters vs bare bones - since I favor megadungeons and similar material that's usually meant to be improvised off of sparse notes; contrast that with the micro-setting approach where numerous encounter details are often plotted, scripted, and/or scheduled using timelines.

Dream Codex of the Oneiromancer

In the crumbling surface ruins of Harrow Home Manor is the statue of a forlorn angel, shielding a heavy stone book behind her folded wings.  After viewing the statue, characters skilled in magic will suffer a visitation from the dreaming angel the next time they sleep.  Flipping to a random page of the book, a fragment of incantation and formula is highlighted to the dreamer in unnatural clarity.  Upon waking, the dreamer can transcribe the magical symbols into a nearby spell book, the fragments representing a small piece of a great master spell, glimpsed only as wisps of dream.

Other magic users have tried to collect all the dream fragments into one whole and recreate the spell.  The lich-like Petrus Magnus, who lost the ability to dream when he crossed into death's kingdom, has created a scriptorium populated with enslaved dreamers to whom he subjects visitations by the dreaming angel.  His human agents purchase rare opiates from the exotic near East in order to keep his thralls in enchanted slumber, scribbling their disparate pieces of the spell if they receive a somnambulant gift from the muse.  Magnus became obsessed with completion of the incantation after a rival, the sorcerer Absalom, solved the formula and escaped to Deimos Oneiroi, the land of dream.  Petrus no longer dreams or sleeps, engendering a homicidal obsession with completing his own version of the dream spell.  He murders rivals who are compiling their own codices, absorbing their fragments into his growing translation.

Players may learn about the lich while encountering members of the thieves' guild, who might be selling kidnapped victims to join the lich's "Scriptorium of Sighs", or smuggling the rare opiates up from the coast that keep the dreamers in their deep slumbers.  Player magic users that begin to keep their own dream journal become targets of the lich if he learns of their efforts; Magnus brooks no competition.

Eventually, a player learns the title of the dream codex, the Oneirocon, and begins to understand the true nature of the dream spell - an incantation to grant the caster's every wish, to reshape the world, to become "the lathe of heaven".

Unfortunately, the dreaming angel is both persistent and insidious.  Once a magical character views the angel, there's a 10% chance each evening of a dream visit where a page fragment is revealed.  The character must make a Save vs Spells upon waking to avoid spending the next day obsessively writing out the dream-glimpsed formulae, representing 1-6% of the completed spell.  Each time a character adds to his dream codex, the completion percent is the chance the character duplicates a previous night's effort - so if a character has 9% of the dream codex transcribed, and they roll 8% , then their dream has duplicated existing pages; anything over 9% adds 1-6% more to the compilation as they see a new page in their dreams.  In this way, the Oneirocon becomes more and more difficult to complete because they have to roll above the current compilation percent.  Other characters within the dungeons of Harrow Home have taken up the quest to complete the  Oneirocon in centuries past, so dream fragments jotted in spell books can be found from time to time as treasure.  The percentage factors can be used to determine if someone else's dream book covers new material or the same transcriptions already possessed by the character.

A Remove Curse spell causes the visits from the dreaming angel to cease, forever.

(Harrow Home Manor is a gothic-themed megadungeon in something akin to the Yorkshire Moors; I was dusting off the notebook where I was keeping the Harrow Home ideas as I start up more creative work, and pulled this one out for sharing).