I've Been to that Place, Too

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time... like tears in rain... 
-Roy Batty, Bladerunner

Jim Flame Princess sent out an update for his recent campaign (the hardcover LOTFP referee book) to showcase a new piece of art.  The hardcover of the rules book came out extremely well, so I backed the referee book campaign as well.  Here's the latest piece of art:

Art from the new LOTFP referee book

I've been to that place!  Well, not me personally, since I'm usually the referee, but it feels like I'm there with the players, as I create the scene through words and gestures and the action unfolds in our shared imaginations.

I appreciate that modules are valuable for creating shared experiences.  Reminiscing with your friends about exploits from the campaign is great fun, but published adventures allow us to share those reminiscences with other enthusiasts in the hobby who weren't at the same table.  "I remember hearing about how your group defeated Strahd von Zarovitch… now when we got trapped in Castle Ravenloft, here's how it went down…"

Like anything, the ability to relate a tale briefly and well is paramount.  I don't mean to encourage the long-winded, "Let me tell you about my character…" monologues.

I'm usually not a meme person, but it would be interesting to hear brief recollections from various published modules in a form similar to that Bladerunner quote above.  It could be something recent (an OSR publication) or one of the classics from the hobby.  We can have some fun trying to identify from where these oblique references originated.  Feel free to drop your "Roy Batty" style memories in the comments.  I'll get a few started:

• I've seen the endless dead pour off Death Mountain and sweep aside the human villages below like a hungry tsunami.
• I watched with morbid curiosity as a pair of foolhardy dwarves failed to outrun a giant rolling boulder, while humming the Indiana Jones theme.
• I've sat to dinner with the ghostly inhabitants of a mist-shrouded castle and tasted food brought by spirits - and watched as some of my friends joined those spectral revelers, forever.

Before I forget, does anyone else recognize the picture?  In other words - Who else has stood beneath the ozone sky and watched the evolved Neanderthals twist in their bio-capsules?

Megadungeon Topology

A reader posted some feedback about the Death Mountain idea, and I realized my reply was becoming meaty enough to warrant its own post.  The question from Dwimmer Gan had to do with dungeon dressing one of those gigantic graph-based megadungeons.

To launch the discussion, let's start with the term "megadungeon".  The popular conception of the megadungeon seems to be one or more sheets of graph paper, absolutely packed with rooms and corridors.  The difference between a regular dungeon and a megadungeon seems fairly subjective to me, but let's say anything with 100 rooms per level is moving directionally towards a megadungeon.  There are usually other defining characteristics applied to  the megadungeon as well, but those are tangential to my point here today - I'm focused on pen and paper presentation.  Just keep that picture in your head - lots of graph paper, filled with lots of rooms.  You've all seen the style.

I would have quit the hobby a long time ago trying to stock one of those gigantic maps.

Sketching maps is one of the least interesting things to me.  90% of my dungeon design is done sans graph paper, in notebooks;  I spend my time imagining the spaces, set pieces, and environments of the dungeon.  Putting little numbers in rooms and trying to slap dungeon dressing in there makes me cringe. However, the map making side of things is an area I'd like to improve!

The formative example for me was  the Mines of Moria.  Tolkien's sprawling creation was seared in my memory as the epitome of the vast, underworld space, the dungeon as mythic underworld with its goblin kingdoms and centers of power.  But how would a dungeon master take such an expansive vision and reduce it to graph paper and notebooks for use at the table?  There was a Mines of Moria game book for Rolemaster (bye ICE) that presented Moria as a vast underground wilderness.  The ICE product was ambitious (and difficult to use) but it was tremendous at freeing me from thinking purely in terms of 8 1/2 by 11 sheets of paper filled with endless rooms, doors, and corridors.

Descent into the Depths of the Earth

Here's the thing - Gygax pioneered the "underworld as wilderness" approach way earlier with Descent into the Depths of the Earth and the Vault of the Drow.  (You really can never go wrong returning to the classic Gygaxian adventures for inspiration and problem solving - still a massive fan of the man's work).   Creating the mythic underworld as a vast hex crawl was the missing piece for me.  The approach requires a node and line-based design.  Nodes represent dungeons and cave complexes, and lines are the vast tunnels of the underworld, allowing travel between the sprawling, Stygian caverns of the underworld.  Another inspirational product that borrowed the same approach was Thunderspire Labyrinth from the 4E era - one of the few 4E adventures I greatly enjoyed and would still recommend.  The ideas in it are fantastic.

This node-based style feels EPIC, and supports vast underground complexes worthy of Moria.  It lets you separate your major areas geographically and establish strong themes at each node.  The dungeons and lairs are not so expansive that it's exhausting to stock them.  Putting more distance between lairs, factions, and other inhabitants of the dungeon enhances the verisimilitude.  It's much easier to manage dungeon dressing and similar details by starting with a small, strongly themed lair or mini-dungeon complex.  And from a preparation perspective, it allows the referee to develop the mythic underworld in much smaller chunks -  one mini dungeon at a time  - instead of having to generate a sprawling 100-room complex.  It combines most of the best aspects of the wilderness hex crawl and the graph-based dungeon into a seamless continuum.

Rationality is my shortcoming.  I have tremendous respect for folks that can make those intricate, brilliant fun-house designs, jam-packed on the graph paper, and loosening up my graph-based mapping style is a work-in-progress.  But hopefully I've given you some ideas on a different approach.

I haven't exhausted the topic - putting theory into practice, I'll lay out how this approach has worked in the Black City campaign, my ideas for the first level of Death Mountain, and even my notes for Harrow Home Manor (Death Mountain and Harrow Home are the other megadungeon campaign settings brewing across various notebooks).

Death of a Valkyrie - Black City Game 27

One of the players delivered a fine recap at the top of the session, reminding everyone that we ended last week in the vast dank caverns beneath the city, in the Kingdom of the Cave Men.  The party had made a loose alliance with the nigh immortal Blue Lady, the living goddess of the Neanderthals, joining her for a veggie feast.  Tonight they were planning an excursion into the wild spaces of the caverns to assault a domed building in the fungal forest.

My group is always pretty funny, but when they're on their game, I spend more than half the night laughing.  After the recap, some of the players improvised a bit of "Men At Work".  Older folks from the MTV generation will remember the tune:

Cause we are livin' in a land down under
With blue women and lots of plunder

I met a strange lady, she made me nervous
She just smiled and gave me a vegemite sandwich

One of my table manners is to rotate the party "caller" (I do use the caller role) based on who brought snacks that week.  Keyser was this week's snack person, which meant action.  Dice and carnage.  His hands start to shake if we spend too much time kibitzing at the top of the session, a condition assuaged only by rolling a d20 to smash something.  His character paces anxiously any time there's a long parley (secretly hoping for hostilities, I'm sure).  He changed his name from Brutok the Strong to Brutok Bearslayer after he killed a frickin' polar bear.  His war cry is a monotone "Brutok, smash!"  With Brutok in charge, tonight would be filled with action.

The group was quickly mobilized and set out into the wilds.  The plan was to navigate back to the "cairn of the dead Roman" as a landmark, then head due north into the fungal forest, aiming for a gigantic pillar, and find the elevator on the other side.  It would be a 2 hour hike.  They wanted to return to the surface to the topside camp, switch out some gear, and bring down their BFG (the alien disintegrator used for minig) to see what happened when they shot the stone walker with it.

There was a couple of wandering encounters along the way - scouting, stealth, and careful play guided the party around a swarm of giant carnivorous flies buzzing over a large carcass; in the next hour, a mob of giant bugs (fire beetles) tracked them down and the party formed a fighting formation to fend off the beetles.  Borghild, one of the fierce lady Odin priests, impaled a beetle with a natural 20, which as usual triggered a chorus of Ride of the Valkyries from the player group:  Daa-da-da-da-DAA-da, da-da-da-DAA-da, da-da-da-DAAA-da, da-da-da-daaaaaaa!  I think if we drank beer during gaming, my group would rowdily sing and clank their mugs together most of the night (wearing horned helmets, too).

After a few hours to ascend the elevator, rest, and sort out the equipment, it wasn't long in table time before they were at the clearing of the domed building, waiting for the stone walker to make its circuit.  One odd thing they noticed while staking out the building was a pillar extending from the top of the dome, apparently all the way up to the cavern roof (lost in darkness).  They caught a flash of light where the pillar met the domed roof of the building, and thought they saw a many-legged spider thing quickly scurry around to the back side of the pillar and up towards the cavern ceiling.

Their plan for the stone walker involved using the alien torc as a disguise to get close to it, then blast it at short range with the mining harness.  It would all depend on whether there was some kind of organic brain in there susceptible to the torc's mind magic.  When you need to risk someone, send in the halfling.  Ben Underfoot put on the torc and stepped out of the forest into no-man's land, awaiting the crunch-crunch-crunch of the 6-legged stone juggernaut.  It stopped in front of the halfling, scanned him with its blue eye rays, and then kept walking.  He gave the party a thumbs up and a grin, fell in behind the walker, and followed it around the whole building, scouting the entrance.

The torc makes the wearer look innocuous and harmless to the viewer; to most of the characters, the halfling looked like an unarmed waiflike child.  They had no idea how he might have looked to the alien guardian.  The torc leads to all sorts of jokes between Brutok and Timur the Elf.  Brutok:  "Put on the torc, elf, I want to see how you look when you're harmless.  Wait, there's no difference.  Maybe you broke it.  Put it on again.  Nope, I still don't see any difference".  He's gotten the elf with that one a couple of times.

Once they knew the torc magic worked on the guardian, they gave the torc over to Timur, who lugged the mining harness out into the path of the guardian, waiting for it to get real close before blasting it in the face with the disintegrator.  The party watched from concealment in the fungal trees.  The guardian was either going to miss its saving throw and turn to dust particles, or immediately crush the elf to a pulp with a brutal stomp.  The drama was palpable during the saving throw roll.  The elf is still here, so you know how that turned out.

The entrance to the dome was through a tunnel (like an igloo entrance) and it presented a challenge.  When the first rank used a green passkey gem to open the door, there was an airlock-like area with an opposite door.  Stepping in, the door behind them closed, but the door in front didn't open.  A series of beeps and descending lights on the wall indicated a count-down, and the players needed to decide (quickly) whether to push a button or not.  They didn't push it, and the room doused them with acid!  After the acid bath, the injured front four (all fighters) stumbled out into a dimly lit control room.  It was full of "plasticals", the alien-headed workers that operate some of the functional work stations in the complex, and the four injured fighters were in a battle for their lives.

Over the next few rounds, the succeeding waves of player characters took turns entering the air lock, pressing the button, and avoiding the acid bath.  That left the fighters on their own for a few rounds until reinforcements got through the air lock sequence.

The control room was oval shaped, with an elevated walkway surrounding a sunken area in the center where the aliens had work stations and a holographic map table.  The characters were on the walk way at the south entrance, with guard plasticals on either side attacking them with clubs.  Meanwhile, the two brainy plasticals from the floor got onto the north side of the walkway; one of them ditched down a west side passage, while the other held out it's arm (and braced its wrist) - one of the players described it as "Iron Man getting ready to blast someone with his repulsor."  That seemed apt, since a moment later, he blasted Brutok with a lightning bolt after the dwarf dropped the first guard, giving the electro-plastical a clear shot.   (The electro guys are technically 'Plastical Mark III' in my bestiary notes.)

Visin was dropped to zero hit points, also caught in the electrical blast.  Mustafa was whittling away the other guard plastical (a Mark I model) on the left side of the combat.  The next wave of characters brought the clerics.  Mustafa was the recipient of a Heroism spell for Borghild, boosting him to fight as a 6th level fighter, and he quickly finished the Mark I.  The other cleric, Bottvild, cast a Cure Light Wounds on Visin, getting him off zero hit points for next round.

Unfortunately, that put Bottvild in the line of fire of the next lightning zap, 12 hit points worth!  Brutok made his saving throw, taking 6, but Bottvild only had 6 hp at 3rd level (she's a retainer that's had some seriously unlucky hit point rolls).  An ugly black hole was blasted in her chest, and she died instantly, taking the full 12.  Borghild, the 4th level cleric (and her sister), went berserk, charging the lightning guy with her spear.  She and Brutok finished that guy off, as he wasn't able to get any more lightning blasts off under the flurry of attacks.

The other Mark III returned to the room, bringing a third Mark I guard with it, and the Mark III started revving up its own lightning blast to shoot the party from the west side of the oval.   Timur wasn't having any of it, and lugged the mining harness into position to send a disintegration ray at it.  The Mark III was missed (ie, made its saving throw), but its bodyguard, the Mark I, was vaporized.  Mustafa, still under the Heroism effect, charged into the face of the Mark III, slashing and cutting with dual scimitars.  The Mark III electro guys are plated with metal, making them difficult to injure, so this became an attrition fight.  The Mark III kept retreating down the hallway and blasting the desert warrior at point blank with lightning strikes, while Mustafa whittled its life down.  He would have easily died without the level boosts from the Heroism.  Timur called for Mustafa to dodge, and the fighter stepped aside just as Timur finished the alien off with Magic Missiles, ending the fight.

We had to stop there, because we were 15 minutes over, and we're trying to get folks home on time for work and school Monday.  Overall, it was a strong performance by the players - all the main characters contributed significantly to the successes.  See you guys in another week or so.

Current Player Characters:
Mustafa of Arabia, a scimitar wielding desert warrior (L4)
Brutok Bearslayer, a dwarf (L4)
Borghild, a Norse cleric of Odin (L4)
Timur, Russian Elf (L3)
Vitaly the Lucky, Russian Elf (L3)
Ben Underfoot, Halfling Scout (L2)

Retainers or NPCs with the party:
Agnar Beigarth, a Northman fighter (L4)
Tribunas, Byzantine magic user (L2)
Visin Thorsteinson, Norse Fighter (L3)
Hunlaf the Saxon, Thief (L2)
Bottvild (cleric L3)

Return to the Black City - Game 26

After a 6-7 month break, the Black City campaign is back on.  Overcoming the 'bumps in the road', we fielded a near complete group last weekend (6 out of 7 regulars) and the party made their first foray into the "Warrens of Decay".

It literally took me most of the week last week just to recompile my notes, reestablish where we left off, and build some refresher notes.  I'll put a super-brief campaign recap here to help orient any new readers that enjoy game reports.

The Black City is a ruined, alien city on the frozen shore of the island of Thule, north of Norway (technically, the ruins are on the shore along a fjord, but you get the idea).  A viking raider, Bergfinn the Bold, discovered the ruins several years ago, and progressively larger raiding parties have returned with him each year.  Now the island hosts a temporary trading camp on the shores of the fjord, where dozens of longships and knarrs get hauled onto the beach each season.  The ship crews head south again before the weather turns too poor.

The sprawling remains of the city are divided by a glacier; the ruins north of the glacier are more dangerous and mostly unexplored (the party's only excursion beyond the glacier ended in screaming and many deaths).  Explorers roam the southern ruins, excavating tumbled cyclopean buildings to dig out alien crystals, gemstones, and strange artifacts that command a premium in southern markets.  People that die in the ruins return to life as gjengangers - flesh eating ghouls - and the ruins are also littered with traps, like the giant stone heads (Watchers) that incinerate trespassers, or skewer them with projectiles.  Explorers that spend too much time in the city frequently develop "dungeon madness" and devolve into berserkers, never returning to camp.  But the most dangerous opponent out there is definitely the other crews, since their loyalty is only to their captain and they're all seeking treasure.  The campaign has involved that 'every man for himself' gold rush ethos.

For the first couple dozen sessions, the players primarily explored the vast tunnels under the city, a vast series of arteries I called "the Transit Tunnels", clearing most of the mini dungeons discovered along the way.  At this point of the campaign, a few of the original characters are level 4, and they're ready to delve deeper  than the Transit Tunnels.  All they know about the next level down is that it's cavern-like, dank, humid, and moist.  Their only glimpse below revealed a vast forest of giant toadstools in an endless cavern.

I had considered writing a recap on the political situation back in Trade Town - the party's allies, rivals, current events.  But the thought of relaying all that additional background bored me, so  I can only imagine how it would be to read.  We'll skip that stuff unless it becomes relevant for the narrative.  (You're welcome.)

Long ago, the party had discovered a set of clamshell doors in the ground that concealed a shaft that went right down to the caverns, stopping at level 1 below the city (in a place they called The Mist Dungeon).  They chose to marshal various allies to fortify the area around the doors and set up a secure outpost there - both to block rival adventurers from using the same elevator, and to also ensure they could return (since the elevator needed to be operated from the surface).  There were other ladders and access tunnels throughout the first level dungeons that led to the caverns, but after weighing the options, they decided that establishing firm control of the elevator was the best approach.

The cast of characters that went on the excursion is listed below (at the end).  They took a week's worth of food, and only two days worth of water (due to the weight), so they'd have to find a water source if they were going to spend more than a few days exploring.   The "elevator" is basically an open platform that descends due to an unseen mechanism below the platform; as they dropped the 80 feet into the dark cavern, the characters were completely exposed, and gigantic insects occasionally flittered near the shaft of light up above.

The elevator placed them right in the middle of the fungal forest.  During the descent, they saw lights far to the north and south, indicating structures, and perhaps intelligence.  Lighted windows hinted at a vast mound or tower north of a ravine in the upper half of the cavern.  They estimate the cavern is at least a mile across, with a vaulted roof that seemed to be held up by columns.

Their first destination was a dimly lit clearing east of where they descended - they saw a dim glow and a structure only a few hundred yards away.  Once they knew the landing was secure, they formed a marching order, and sent the halfling up front to lead.  His knowledge of "bushcraft" would help identify dangerous giant fungi and avoid spores and giant molds.  They tromped off through the muck and filth.

(DM's Note:  I have the Warrens of Decay mapped and structured like a hex crawl - I'm essentially treating it like a small scale wilderness adventure).

Before reaching the clearing, the party ran into a war-band of primitive humans (neanderthals) wearing piecemeal armor made from gigantic insect parts.  The neanderthals turned out to be friendly, almost worshipful, and after pantomime and non-verbal communication,  the party allowed the cave men to guide them away from the clearing towards the south side.  The neanderthals had described a large, stomping monster back in the clearing that guarded a place of death; the group's halfling and a thief scouted it out, corroborated the giant 6-legged stone horror was real, and so they decided to follow the cave men.

Along the way, they encountered another group of cave men, gatherers out collecting foodstuff from the edge of the fungal forest.  A swarm of giant flies attacked, and Timur the elf impressed all the primitives by putting the giant bugs to Sleep.  The cave men took special care to point out a Christian burial cairn (complete with grave marker and cross) atop a hill, indicating that someone like them was buried up there from long ago.  They weren't the first people to visit the caverns!

Side note:  early on in the campaign, the party discovered some Latin graffiti in one of the Transit Tunnel dungeons;  they've discovered archaic Roman gear in the dungeons; they even thought they saw living legionnaires through a scrying device that revealed glimpses of the deeper levels.   They fully expect to find living Roman descendants somewhere in the dungeons.

The cave men guided the party to a large palisade fortress made of gigantic lashings, complete with guard towers, gates, and other defensive measures.  The cave men had a remarkable settlement beyond the walls, with crude gardens, animal pens, and a stone palace carved into the cavern wall.  The tribesmen themselves lived in a large series of caves spread across the rock face at different elevations.

The party was brought to the palace to meet "the Blue Lady".

The rest of the night was a roleplaying exercise as the group made contact with the Blue Lady.  She wasn't a neanderthal; she looked nearly human, but with bluish skin and silvery hair.  Tall and lithe, she was draped in gossamer that kept no secrets about her (attractive) figure.  She addressed the players from the balcony, in perfect Latin, and then had her worshipful cave men bring them into the audience hall, to the accompaniment of drums and ceremony.

The palace was filled with wonders and treasures and displays of decadence.  The Lady indicated that she hadn't had surface visitors in hundreds of years, and was pleased to entertain; the players were taken by a cave man chamberlain to a watery grotto in order to wash up and make themselves presentable for dinner.

Over dinner, the Blue Lady plied the players with questions about the surface world, the Vikings, and what brought men back to the city; they asked her lots of questions about the cave men, the caverns, and what she knew about the city.  So far what they've learned is that she's very old, if not immortal; when she came to the caverns, the cave men were barely surviving the depredations of the various predators and parasites out in the caverns.  She guided the early cave men to this spot where her palace was built, and has shepherded them ever since.  They treat her like their goddess.

The Blue Lady has a number of specific projects she's pursuing, which keeps her rooted to the area, and the players didn't get access to the labs or private areas deeper in the palace.  Timur the Elf presented himself as a fellow scientist and wizard, and later that evening learned that she carefully breeds the cave men, arranging births and marriages, keeping meticulous records around their heredity.  It seemed like she had creepy intentions for the characters, and was on the prowl for a consort, someone willing to give up the surface world and the adventuring life and stay as her pet in the palace.

The main thing is that the players negotiated the privilege to use the cave man fortress as a sort of home base - it offered protection, fresh water, and the Blue Lady was knowledgeable about the larger cavern.  The players made inquiries about the forest clearing and the huge "stone walker" that patrolled it, and began to draw up plans on how to assault it for the next game.  Meanwhile, they're fairly aware they're playing into the Blue Lady's clutches, whatever may be her secret agenda and motives.


Current Player Characters:
Mustafa of Arabia, a scimitar wielding desert warrior (L4)
Brutok Bearslayer, a dwarf (L4)
Borghild, a Norse cleric of Odin (L4)
Timur, Russian Elf (L3)
Vitaly the Lucky, Russian Elf (L3)
Ben Underfoot, Halfling Scout (L2)

Retainers or NPCs with the party:
Agnar Beigarth, a Northman fighter (L4)
Tribunas, Byzantine magic user (L2)
Visin Thorsteinson, Norse Fighter (L3)
Hunlaf the Saxon, Thief (L2)
Bottvild (cleric L3)

Bumps in the Road

A crack of light on the horizon indicates a new day is coming.  The Black City lives again.

We haven’t rolled RPG dice in months, and it shows in the dearth of content here at the Lich House.  What happened to our smooth running weekly game that knocked if off kilter?  The first big problem is that some of the guys starting playing Friday Night Magic (myself included) which puts me on Sunday night for any kind of regular RPG night - and not everyone can play Sunday with work on Monday.  We had rallied our game group to help save a local store that was going under, kick-starting a MTG gaming scene there and helping them stabilize (and ultimately move to a better location).  All worthy endeavors, but it was rough on the RPG game night.

One of the regular players moved an hour away; another can't have two game nights per weekend, and is prioritizing the Magic; another guy has been on an intense work project with lots of travel; yet another of the players professed they were over and done with the old school gaming (they exaggerate).  It's remarkable how many things have to go right for a bunch of middle-aged dudes to be able to get together for their weekly elf games.  If you have a regular group, don't take it for granted.

But now we’re all set to resume this Sunday, with most of the regular cast returning for "season two".  I'm expecting they'll venture into the never before seen second level below the Black City, the Warrens of Decay, before weather forces the Northmen to leave Thule.  We'll see what they choose - the surface ruins have some unexplored areas, too.  I have a few days to dust off the notes and get ready for adventurers.

Look for a game report sometime next week.  My motivation to blog about RPG's dwindles when I'm not actually playing - though I do try to keep up with what various folks are putting on their own blogs.  The coals are stirring again.

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.

An Introduction to THEROS

Last weekend, the next block of sets for the Magic the Gathering card game kicked off with Theros, a setting strongly themed after Greek mythology - gods, minotaurs, gorgons, hydras, the whole thing.  Magic is a gaming industry juggernaut, and the Wizards creative team does a phenomenal job of world building as they introduce these new settings - the blend of art, mechanics, story, and a splash of flavor text pull the whole thing together really well and fire the imagination.  Every time I encounter a new set, it gets me thinking how to borrow ideas for the RPG games.  I actually can't recall too many successful (or popular) settings based on Greek myth in the old school space.  Let's take a look at what Magic is doing with Theros, and then see what kind of ideas can be borrowed for your RPG.

The gods of Theros dwell in the night sky, the starry realm of Nyx.  This is an elegant way of tying in the constellations with the homeland of the gods, and gives the artists a reason to depict all the gods and their enchantments as being made of stars, like "Eternity" from Marvel Comics.  I also like this approach hearkens back to a view of the world that includes "mythic geography", where the mortal world and the divine realms are coterminous.  Climbing a high mountain really puts you in touch with the realm of the gods.

The power of the gods manifests in the game as "enchantments", one of the MTG card types, and there are a lot of new "enchantment creatures" that represent creatures infused by divine power and the realm of Nyx.  Furthermore, most of these creatures have an ability called Bestow, meaning they can be used to power up one of your own other guys, or exist on their own.  To put it in English:  divine power can be bestowed to one of your characters, boosting it into a huge beater, or it can manifest on it's own as a living enchantment.  An example here is the Emissary of Heliod (Heliod is the Theros sun god) - one of your other creatures can take on the powers and become Heliod's Emissary, or you can summon Heliod's Emissary as a stand-alone creature.

Here's an implication for our RPG's:  instead of focusing treasures and rewards primarily on magic items, couldn't bestowed benefits from the gods take a similar (mechanical) role in the RPG?  Greek myths imply a world where the gods are active participants; the gods of Homer's Iliad are directly powering up their mortal heroes for the battlefield.  Instead of earning that boring +1 sword, the fighter who consecrates a great victory to Ares at the war god's dark shrine gets touched by the god so that any spear he uses acts as a +1 item because of the god's favor.  A thief in the service of Hermes might get a one-use divine invisibility boon - essentially a Potion of Invisibility, but with a flavor that ties better into the setting.  Hecate might grant a loyal magic user a one-use Animate Dead in lieu of finding a magic user scroll.  And so on.  I need to think it through further, but I like the implications and setting flavor.

There are a few more Magic mechanics in the new set that are awesome for the mythological flavor but harder to pull off in an RPG; two examples are Scry and Devotion.  Scry allows you to see the top cards of your deck, a nod towards prophecy and foresight.  It's awesome to call to mind a world of oracles and divine visions; unfortunately, prophecy is hard to pull off in an RPG (just look at how messy and used spells like Augury tend to be).  I've done some prophecies successfully in the past, but it warrants a larger \ longer post.

Devotion allows you to gain additional game benefits by being strongly aligned to a certain color of cards on the battlefield; it's basically like being "all in" on Zeus, or Apollo, and getting an extra benefit by showing the loyalty.   The whole cleric class is problematic in D&D for a slew of reasons, not least of which is the general discomfort of a referee having to make some judgment calls whether the player's role playing is line with the god's ideals.  Now imagine extending that to cover all the classes.  However, there might be a way to identify a series of objective accomplishments any characters could perform that would get their god's attention and shower a little love their way - some well-known, stock actions characters can demonstrate to show the love.  I'll need to think about it.

The last two new mechanics are Heroic and Monstrosity, and both affect creatures.  Both types of creatures progress from  their base state into something bigger and better - Heroes are mostly human creatures that get a small personal boost while improving the rest of their team; Monstrosities are beasts that get gigantic and go on a rampage.  The whole class-based level system in a Dungeons & Dragons style game already works well to describe the hero's arc.  When I think about implementing "monstrosity", I'm drawn to having more unique and legendary versions of monsters that represent "boss fights" that act as capstones to an adventure, rather than regular encounters.  However, the Magic flavor of monstrosity is usually a dangerous monster that goes into overdrive, so it might be worth modeling that in the RPG stats.

Here's a big consideration:  How would you structure a campaign inspired by Greek Myth?  My first inclination is that it would primarily use the hex crawl style - legendary locales and mythological sites spread far and wide.  If 1960's "sword and sandal" movies have shown us anything, you have to travel far from the cities of man, to a remote ruin, and there confront the legendary stop-motion claymation monsters in a crumbling ruin.

I really don't like running a whole campaign as a hex crawl.  Travel exposition is difficult or mind numbing, and the infrequency of wilderness encounters creates a "5 minute workday" problem around appropriately challenging the players.  I don't think we have the hex crawl technology right yet.

How about a gigantic, Greek-themed dungeon?  Labyrinths feature in the myths.  How about the sprawling workshops of the forge god (filled with mechanical clockwork monsters).  The mythic underworld could actually be the entrance to The Mythic Underworld.   Hmm.  Ideas are taking form.

I'll see what I come up with.  In the meantime, if you want to bask in the Theros flavor, the entire card gallery is available at the Wizards of the Coast site, and you can read the introduction to the plane of Theros by the Wizard's creative team in their Planeswalker's guide articles:

Theros Card Gallery
A Planeswalkers Guide to Theros, part 1 
A Planeswalkers Guide to Theros, part 2
A Planeswalkers Guide to Theros, part 3

Let me know if you've played any Theros in the comments and what you think of it so far!


*All images and creative is copywrite Wizards of the Coast and the respective artists.  (Nykthos by Young Park, Nylea by Chris Rahn, Heliod's Emissary by Sam Burley, Chosen by Heliod by Zach Stella, and Hundred Handed One by Brad Rigney)