Review of Scenic Dunnsmouth

Scenic Dunnsmouth is a recent game book published by Lamentations of the Flame Princess, written by Zzarchov Kowoslki.  I had the chance to read it on my flight west.  It's a curious offering.  The centerpiece of any adventures in the book is the backwater village of Dunnsmouth.  The book provides the referee tools to create the titular village of Dunnsmouth before play.   Through a combination of tossing dice and using a deck of playing cards, the referee creates the map, selects the inhabitants, and determines many of their dark secrets.  Dunnsmouth will be unique to each campaign (and potentially let you use the material multiple times).

As the title alludes, the village is a blatant homage to Dunwich and Innsmouth, two infamous locales in HP Lovecraft's New England (albeit with nary a tentacle in sight).  There's the opportunity for folks to have a more fantastic version of the 'Dunnsmouth Look' for instance, and the old families of Dunnsmouth with their dark secrets are well described; the moral decay adds a gothic atmosphere to the proceedings.  There's even an homage to one of my favorite Magic cards from back in the day, Uncle Istvan.

However, I tend to think this style of village adventure would be very challenging to run with the assumptions normally brought to a D&D game.  It's not like ordinary villagers are going to accept a heavily-armed party of 6-10 adventurers to go knocking door to door in full panoply, and still engage in regular conversation.  Yet the referee  needs to provide a plausible plot hook for the players to sojourn to remote Dunnsmouth and talk to everyone.   Ferreting out the secrets of Dunnsmouth represents social challenges, investigation, and plenty of roleplaying - the opportunities for dungeon crawling are thin on the ground.  Some of the suggested hooks include going there as tax collectors (no kidding), or seeking a magical artifact (getting warmer).  There are plenty of mysteries that weave their way through the village that would only manifest through careful interviews.

Scenic Dunnsmouth reminded me quite a bit of the books from Chaosium's Lovecraft Country line.  The little character sketch portraits were a fine touch.  That's where I’d leave the review; if you like the investigative and social aspects of Call of Cthulhu style gaming (without the sanity loss), more talking and less sword fighting, sending your adventurers to Dunnsmouth to snoop around, flip over rocks and check under the carpets, is right in line with those expectations.  I enjoy Cthulhu investigative games quite a bit and look forward to giving this a play when we get back to some horror gaming.

Catching Up With LOTFP - Review of Forgive Us

I'm traveling this week, and my 6 hour flight to the west coast gave me a chance to catch up on some PDFs I've been meaning to read.  Readers here know my latest campaign is focused on adventure gaming and whimsy, and I've been missing the horror!  Today and tomorrow I'll post brief reviews of Forgive Us and Scenic Dunnsmouth, two recent LOTFP releases, and reconnect with the darker side of gaming.

Review of Forgive Us

Forgive Us, by Kelvin Green, features two short adventures and vignette.  It's stark black and white, and the blood stained cover let's you know immediately - there's a bit of nasty business ahead.

The main adventure, "Forgive Us", involves a thieves' guild that robbed a nasty cult; they returned an artifact back to their hideout, opened it up, and let out the badness.  The referee needs to provide an appropriate motivation for his or her players to get involved - quite possibly someone unrelated needs them to investigate the guild.  Supplying your own hook is easy; the idea is that as the players break into the seemingly abandoned buildings that acted as fronts to the guild, clues and tension mounts as the players realize something has gone horribly wrong to the members.

Kelvin unapologetically calls out his cinematic influences, such as John Carpenter's The Thing or James Cameron's Aliens, and the referee would do well to keep those in mind.  Good horror stories build to that moment where the veil is torn and the nature of the horror is revealed; this adventure draws the player characters to that moment and unleashes horror and terror on them in a classic moment stressing greed versus survival.

The second adventure, "In Heaven Everything is Fine", presents a tragic village that calls to mind Lovecraft's "The Colour Out of Space" and a Twilight Zone episode ("It's a Good Life").  The final adventure ("Death and Taxes") is really just a vignette, involving a trio of cultists and the funeral of an old friend.  How far will the players go to dig up the truth?

All three of the adventures are atmospheric and capture a Call of Cthulhu vibe while letting you use the D&D friendly mechanics of Lamentations of the Flame Princess.  Kelvin's writing style is amicable with a touch of humor, and they're easy to read.  "Forgive Us" can quickly spiral out of control, and the referee should have a good handle on how much Cure Disease is available; I can see a harried group of player characters waking a powerful NPC cleric in the middle of the night for a cure, and then hoping to escape to the countryside before the whole town gets corrupted and overrun.  If there's a town or city you don't like, well, you can shake it up with this adventure.

I enjoyed these, and they'd make a fine addition to your horror themed D&D game.

What Does a Product Owe You?

A couple of writers I really enjoy posted follow ups to a scathing review of Island of the Unknown by RPG Pundit.  I realize not everyone reads the same blogs as me, so here are links to the articles in question.  First, RPG Pundit's review:  Review of Island of the Unknown.  Pundit's style is bombastic and critical, and every once in a while he wakes up on the wrong side of the bed down there in Uruguay, packs a shotgun with metaphorical buck-shot (shuck-shuck, locked and loaded), and fires off a double-barreled review like this one:  "There are meth-heads on street-corners with no gaming experience who could improv a better setting than this."

If you're not familiar with the Island of the Unknown product, it describes hundreds of hexes on the eponymous island, populated with bizarre creatures and idiosyncratic magic users.  Other than providing one strange encounter for each hex, there's very little over-arching flavor - there are no plot hooks or stories, the magic users aren't provided with motivations or rivalries.

Joseph over at Greyhawk Grognard and Noisms at Monsters and Manuals posted some interesting follow up articles to Pundit's review, on the nature of sandboxes and the nature of monsters.  It's fascinating because they both invoked similar pillars of table top gaming - players at the game table need to be able make informed decisions or their choices are meaningless.  If the players are in a wilderness hex crawl with 6 directions to travel, they might as well roll a 6-sided die to choose - unless the referee is supplying them with enough information to weight the options.  That's where the game is at, that's where the fun is - the exercise of meaningful choice and then handling the consequences.

I love folklore and history.  I love bestiaries and monster manuals.  Noisms discusses how real-world monsters have thousands of years of history and storytelling behind them - the monsters of folklore have evolved and survived the generations, and have mythic resonance for it.  For my purposes, I'll be bold and take his statement the rest of the way:  because real-world monsters have survived as storytelling elements for thousands of years, players already know some things about them.  (30 years of D&D play might have something to do with it too).  Because everyone knows some things about those monsters already, they're the combat equivalent of rumors and plot hooks when encountered.  The player's ability to read the signs, identify the opponent, and make a plan for combat against the monsters of myth and folklore is every bit as important as their ability to sift through plot hooks and make decisions in the sandbox outside of combat.

I'll generalize and say bloggers have a tendency to overvalue new and unique monsters - perhaps that's a perception borne of selection bias since that's what people post on their blogs.  For adventure gaming, those things have to be the exception, not the rule.  Otherwise you rob the players of too much agency, they lose an element of strategy and planning.  Of course this caveat is for adventure gaming.  In horror games, where combat is to be avoided and the monster is meant to be otherworldly and unknown, all bets are off.  Go crazy with your unknowable eldritch mutants.

As an observer of OSR publishing, this discussion around Island of the Unknown raises an interesting question:  What does a product owe you?  There was the Dwimmermount kerfuffle some time back because some of the descriptions in a draft manuscript were bland and the referee needed to elaborate them.  I don't see the same vitriol at Stonehell, an early OSR publication, and the descriptions tend to be quite sparse.  As consumers buying a product, there is an absolute right to pen scathing critiques of products that don't meet our expectations.  It's a free internet, and if you plunked down your money, by all means - get out there and let folks know about it.  Send the publishers a message.  Do it.

In the preface to Island of the Unknown the author calls out that the island is left intentionally bland to make transplanting it to the referee's home campaign a simple matter.  The product does what it says on the tin.  The flip side is making a product so dripping with campaign flavor that adapting to your setting is an impediment.  There is the argument of writing rooms and descriptions to avoid all need for improvisation by the referee - minute details done to excess.  Then there's the idea of providing only those details the referee couldn't make up at the table - the art of providing just enough evocative detail.

It's a fascinating phenomenon to observe this tension between products that spoon feed the referee everything they need, on the one hand, versus less verbose products that require adaptation and thought.  Of course, the reactions to the aforementioned products leads to these contentious reviews and internet squalls - and who doesn't enjoy some popcorn moments here in the blogosphere?  We're people.

For my part, I'm on the side of saying that Island of the Unknown failed for me as well.  The author's previous work, Carcosa, is also a massive hex crawl, but the encounters and inhabitants of Carcosa are filled with motivations, and motivation creates story.  One random hex in Carcosa may be filled with escaped slaves seeking safe haven; they're fleeing the bad guys in the next hex.  The bad guys will pay a reward if the runaways are captured.  No matter which hex is encountered first, the players will have the opportunity to learn information about something else nearby and engage with story.  Island of the Unknown is littered with idiosyncratic magic users (all lavishly illustrated) but none of them have personalities or stories or ties to the larger whole.  It's a greatly missed opportunity.

I suppose in a roundabout sort of way that describes my own litmus test for a successful product.  I can embellish details about empty rooms or turn bland treasure into something more interesting, if necessary.  What I want a product to be doing is providing goals and motivations for the inhabitants and antagonists.  I can take it the rest of the way.

Taenarum Game Report - Medusa Follies

Over the holiday weekend, we didn't get the regular gaming group together, but we did get in a couple of family games.  Here are game sessions two and three for the family.  Sit back and enjoy tales of daggers implanted, frightened children, and a cleric that gets totally stoned - in the bad way.

There are a number of issues I still need to work through from a campaign perspective - for instance, I don't have a good calendar built to facilitate tracking the two different groups exploring the dungeon - I'm using a modern calendar but would love to research how the ancient Greeks tracked time and make the dates 'authentic sounding'.  Another issue is that my 12 year old is playing a character in both games.  Keeping his player knowledge straight isn't easy.  Since he plays a Magic User in both games, he's asked if his two characters could know each other and share notes between games.  One benefit I'm seeing is that the active group is able to focus on unexplored areas; he can let them know where the other group went to help avoid unproductive time at the table.  We'll see how that goes - so far it's fine.

After a week or so back in town, the kid's group headed back to the dungeon.  They ended up searching over some old ground again - for instance, they couldn't resist messing with the giant stone titan head and triggering the fear gas.  Holly the (Christmas) Elf ran out of there claiming "the Crampus is after me, the Crampus!" after dosing herself with fear gas.

Tragedy struck when Matthias explained what he knew about the Medusa mural in a nearby room.  The mural was a wall-sized painting depicting a dark and fallen Greek temple in a vast chamber.  There are obvious stone statues of people like adventurers visible.  Matthias relayed that the mural appeared to become 3-dimensional if you stared too long, and it acted like a portal to elsewhere.  "Don't touch it or you'll get sucked in!"

Every group needs an instigator, a player that boldly declares, "The DM wouldn't have a portal to Medusa's lair as the third room of a dungeon for first level guys, right?  I'm going to stare at that thing until it becomes 3-D and step through."  In this way was Starbuck the Cleric lost forever.  The portal seemed one-way, and she was quickly petrified after wandering around the ruined temple and getting  discovered by the Medusa.

Not much else exciting happened this session.  They explored some rooms and fought some bandits.  During the bandit fight, Holly the Elf used ninja-style cartwheel techniques to get near the bandit leader and "implant him with her dagger".  You're going to do what?  "I'm implanting my dagger into the bandit."  Don't you mean impale him with your dagger?  "No, I want to implant it - right into his chest!"

On the way out, the mage used his Read Languages to read the ancient script carved into the head of the stone titan.  It said FORSAKEN in the language of Olympus.  Once he said it out loud, the head rumbled, opened it's mouth, and a stone tongue stuck out.  Sitting on the tongue was a black lacquered key.  They have the Black Key!  They don't know what that means yet.

A few days later, we got in another family game.  It's pretty convenient being able to get your whole gaming group together "after dinner for an hour or so" with minimal ceremony.  Wifey took over Milo, the NPC fighter, while a new NPC joined their crew, a dwarf cleric named Boomer.  I'm sure other Battlestar Galactica named NPC's will be thrust upon me shortly when they need to recruit help - Adama, Balthar, Helo.  She just watched the whole series on streaming.

Game 3 saw them explore up the main hallway of the first quadrant until they found a gigantic shrine to Poseidon.  Along the way they found a storage room holding petrified adventurers (which made them think maybe the Medusa can see out of the mural sometimes); they found a refuse room, a pit trap.  A bunch of pig-men attacked them in the Poseidon shrine, using a knockout gas.  A rumor in town warned that pig-men try to take prisoners and turn people into more pig-men.  The final area of the night involved a statue of a large bronze warrior, articulated, that creaked and changed position anytime you looked away.  One of its poses seemed to be pointing to a barren area on the map, and they used that to search (successfully) for a secret door.  They left the secret door for next game

Of course, this happened:  "You know what else changes poses and moves every time you stop looking at it?  A WEEPING ANGEL!  Oh no, there's a weeping angel in the dungeon!  And it's going to eat you!"  That was the older brother, teasing the two younger ones at the game table and making monster faces.  Later I had two crumb snatchers asking if they could sleep on my floor in sleeping bags that night.  "Weepy angels are so scary, why did you put one in the dungeon, Dad?  I can't sleep now."  Kids are pretty entertaining during the game session, their turns of phrase and watching how they approach problems, but there are potential downsides.

Latest Roster:
Holly the (Christmas) Elf - Magic User /Thief
Egrog - Fighter
Leonidas - Paladin
Mathias - Magic User
Milo - Fighter
Boomer (NPC) - Dwarf Cleric

First Victim of Taenarum:
Starbuck the Cleric of Apollo, petrified by a Medusa

Using VLOOKUP to Generate Game Content in Excel

Part 1 on Monday looked at using RANDBETWEEN and IF statements to generate random numbers, evaluate conditions, and return a result.  Today we'll take it another step of the way in terms of generating stuff for your game by showing how the VLOOKUP function in Excel works.  VLOOKUP stands for Vertical Lookup, and requires your content to be in a vertical list.  The first column is the lookup value -  the number you’d be trying to roll on a die in a table.  If your table consists of 10 wandering monsters, you'd expect column one to list the numbers 1 to 10, in ascending order.  The whole set of columns (B2 through E11) is an array.  Here's a simple table we'll use for an example:

The basic syntax of the function is =VLOOKUP(lookup value, array, column index of the data to retrieve).  In the example above, column B is index 1, C is 2, D is 3, E is 4.  Here's how a simple VLOOKUP formula would look to return a random 1st level monster from that table:

=VLOOKUP(RANDBETWEEN(1,10),B2:E11,2)

Let's break it down.  A random number (RANDBETWEEN(1,10) is substituted for the lookup value.  The array is the entire table - cells B2 through E11.  I also recommend going and putting dollar signs in front of the table array values so the actual formula looks like this:

  =VLOOKUP(RANDBETWEEN(1,10),$B$2:$E$11,2).

The dollar signs lock the lookup (in Excel terms, it's called an absolute reference).  Normally a formula increments the cell values when you copy and paste the formula to other cells.  The dollar signs ensure the vlookup consistently checks the correct cells for values.

You can easily change which column the content is retrieved from by updating the column index -

=VLOOKUP(RANDBETWEEN(1,10),$B$2:$E$11,3)

By updating the column index to 3, a result of 7 on the RANDBETWEEN number yields "gray ooze".  You can even get fancy and make the column index a random number, too - let's say you didn't care if the VLOOKUP returned a 1st, 2nd, or 3rd level monster, you could put in a formula like this in place:

=VLOOKUP(RANDBETWEEN(1,10),$B$2:$E$11,RANDBETWEEN(2,4))

VLOOKUP is an important building block.  Along with the RANDBETWEEN and IF statements we looked at Monday, we're cooking with gas!  Let's look at a simple practical example I used in the Black City game to generate tons of Viking names on the fly.  Consider this logic I used for Viking names.  First you have basic names (given names).  A last name has a 50% chance of either being a father's surname, a location, or a nickname.  So Vigor son of Baldi could be Vigor Baldison, Vigor of Zealand, or Vigor the Hook Nose.  As long as you have content tables with the three lists - the first names, the locations, and the nicknames, automating name creation in Excel with the functions we've reviewed is a snap.

In this next example, here are 10 given names (out of around 300) to show how the concept works.  I called this worksheet "name content":

On the next worksheet, I'll go ahead and put the following formulas in place.  You'll note that when you highlight an array of cells in an external worksheet, Excel prepends the sheet name to the array - it shows up as 'name content'! in the examples below to let you know it's referencing another sheet in the workbook.

Column 1 - generate first name
Formula:  =VLOOKUP(RANDBETWEEN(1,10),'name content'!$A$2:$B$11,2)

Column 2 - use a random number to generate type of last name (1-4).  This is just a working cell to create a value for columns 3 through 5 to check against:
Formula:  =RANDBETWEEN(1,4)

Column 3 - check the value in column 2 to see if there's a surname (on a 1 or 2 out of 4); if so, retrieve a firstname from the 'name content' sheet, and append "son" to the end to make a Viking surname.
Formula:  =IF(B2<3,VLOOKUP(RANDBETWEEN(1,10),'name content'!$A$2:$B$11,2)&"son","")

Column 4 - check if the last name identifies the character's homeland; if so, retrieve a location and add "of " to the beginning:
Formula:  =IF(B2=3," of"&VLOOKUP(RANDBETWEEN(1,10),'name content'!$A$2:$C$11,3),"")

Column 5 - check if there's a nickname; if so, retrieve a nickname and add "the " to the beginning of the nickname:
Formula:  =IF(B2=4,"the "&VLOOKUP(RANDBETWEEN(1,10),'name content'!$A$2:$D$11,4),"")

Column 6 - Let's concatenate the first name and the content of the other columns together to make a handy column for use in the game:
Formula:  =A2&" "&C2&D2&E2

Here's the working table with all the formulas in action:

We get a nice list of Viking names (all with A's in the first name, since I only put about 10 in the content table.  But you get the idea).  Here's that list:

Aran Anirson
Agnar of Dublin
Agnar the Black
Alrek the Beer-Drinker
Anir the Bellower
Annund Armodson
Alfgeir Agnarson

Muhaha - what will you do with your new powers of Excel?  Many times, I generate a list of names and personalities in advance, and keep them saved in a text file for use during the game.  When a need arises, I'll just pull the top one off the list as necessary during the game.  When the players run into bandits, or traders, or start talking to a random guy at the tavern, the improvisation goes much better when I can rattle off that it's "Alrek the Beer-Drinker" who they're talking to instead of 'random Viking guy'.

In fact, I use long lists of personalities, quirks, and mannerisms generated through VLOOKUPS quite a bit. I don't do well improvising interesting people on the fly and can use a little help. I may not know how I want to portray the bandit leader (so they're not like every other bandit) when I roll a wandering monster, but once I see that the leader is violent, or jealous, or risk averse, I can take it from there pretty easily and make a fun encounter.  NPCs with personalities keep the game interesting for me, and you never know when that random encounter is going to lead to a memorable scene or a future henchman or an enduring villain because you took the time to give the character a name and a personality hook, and then something funny or meaningful happened.

Getting back to Dungeon Content, I try to have giant tables of empty room types and trap types to integrate into the random stocker, as well as monster customized for each level and area of the dungeon.  You should see how the same techniques of content lookups and concatenation used to generate the Viking names can be used the same way to integrate content for a dungeon stocker.  However, let's be clear about something.  This is not programming.  The goal is not to make a finished tool to publish.  The goal is to give you a reason to dump all those random tables and content lists you've been acquiring, to dump them in Excel and to arm you with some basic techniques to generate tons of cool content during your game prep - and to do it much quicker than rolling and flipping pages and writing stuff down.

However, one type of content where there's no substitute for hard work and brainstorming is 'Specials'.  The 1E DMG has a pretty good list of dungeon objects and special properties, and -C over at Hack and Slash put together a list of types of specials - descriptors like Riddles, Quests, Terraformers, and Shops.  For a large dungeon like Taenarum, I try to smash it all together and see if something inspires me while trying to make sense of a bunch of random inputs.

Here's an example from this morning:  I was working on a room on level 4 of Taenarum and it contained a 'Special'.  The random results indicated it was trapped, weird, involved a pillar or column, and was intelligent.  Furthermore, the trap had to do with blindness.  Yikes.  What to do?  Well, the adjacent room has 'tritons' which clambered up from level 5 below.  Tritons in the game are scaly fish men with bug eyes and gills.  I decided the thing in the room is an Obelisk (close enough to a pillar for my purposes) and the tritons are worshipping it.  They're triton heretics who have turned their back on Poseidon, and the Obelisk represents Dagon, who they consider a scaly lord of the deep.  Furthermore, Dagon is trapped in the Obelisk itself!  In truth, Dagon is no god or demon, but was an Atlantean sorcerer imprisoned in the rock by Poseidon before the sinking of Atlantis.  The Obelisk was retrieved from the depths and hidden in the dungeon by Dagon's followers - it was brought up from the sea caves below.  The Obelisk communicates telepathically and can strike unbelievers who touch the stone blind.  Smashing the Obelisk destroys the magic prison and releases Dagon from an interdimensional space.  He's now an insane wizard with a god-complex and a bad attitude.  Great fun, right?

This is why jamming together a bunch of random results from giant mega tables is entertaining.  Dagon the mad wizard could make for an interesting campaign plot twist if the Obelisk is ever found and broken.  I doubt I would have put something like it in that area of the dungeon without being forced to reconcile some random inputs.

I hope this series has been helpful.  I'm at close to 500 rooms for Taenarum, the new dungeon, and a big part of why it's going so quickly is having tools that I like.  Whether the end result is good or not is a judgment best reserved for my players, but the two groups seem to be enjoying the campaign so far.  We got in a couple of family games over the holiday weekend, so I'll have some game reports before the end of the week.

Edit:  Based on requests in the comments, I've tried to put a sample Excel with the formulas out on a public DropBox - try to access it here:   VLookup Examples

Excel and Random Dungeon Stocking

If you're familiar with a programming language, you can go pretty far in automating a random dungeon .  Not everyone is a programmer, but lots of people use Microsoft's Excel - it's been a workplace standard forever, and lots of students get access to Office at university.   Here are some tips on generating basic content with Excel that anyone can try.

The 1980 Moldvay edition red book for D&D has a simple stocking approach on page B52 - one d6 roll for room contents, and a second d6 roll for treasure.  Today we'll automate those rolls in Excel.  The first Excel function we'll look at is RANDBETWEEN - it generates a random number between two end points.  For instance, type "=RANDBETWEEN(1,6)" in an open cell in Excel to generate a number from 1 to 6 (omit the quotation marks when you put it in Excel).

Because of how quickly you can copy formulas between cells in Excel, this is also handy for generating lots of random numbers without rolling dice.  I always have a spreadsheet open to the side when I'm running a game, with around 20 cells of "=RANDBETWEEN(1,8)" to generate lots of hit dice for wandering monsters.  I have similar lines for other common hit dice values - "=RANDBETWEEN(1,8)-1" for those 1-1 HD monsters like goblins (treating zeroes like ones) or "=RANDBETWEEN(1,8)+1" for hobgoblins.  You can add multiple results together -  "=RANDBETWEEN(1,8)+RANDBETWEEN(1,8)" adds two 8-sided rolls together for a 2 HD monster.  You can use this approach to generate ability scores on the fly for NPCs - a formula like the next one generates an ability score between 3 and 18:

"=RANDBETWEEN(1,6)+RANDBETWEEN(1,6)+RANDBETWEEN(1,6)".

I leave one cell free on the sheet where I type a letter or number - you'll see that whenever you make a change to that cell, all of the random values reset, effectively 'rerolling' all the random numbers.  There are many rolls that are important to roll in front of the players - attack rolls and monster saving throws, for instance.  But for set up items like hit points, it's great to have this kind of thing handy while you're running a session.

Getting back to the dungeon stocker, let’s take a look at using the IF function in Excel (a simple type of if-then-else you'll see a programmer use) and marry it up with our random roll.  We can nest a couple of "If" statements to generate room content in line with Moldvay's tables.  Assume you've put your 1-6 die roll in cell A1.  In cell B1, go ahead and put in a formula like this:  "=IF(A1<3,"Monster",IF(A1=3,"Trap",IF(A1=4,"Special","Empty")))"

Breaking it down step by step, the formula first checks to see if the dice roll is less than 3 (meaning a result of 1 or 2) in which case the value is "monster".  If it's not a result of 1 or 2, it checks to see if the result is 3, yielding "trap"; it goes on to check if the value is 4 (special) and anything else is "empty".  Simple, right?

We need to add a second dice roll for treasure in cells C1 and D1.  In C1, go ahead and put another d6 roll - "=RANDBETWEEN(1,6)" - and in cell D1, put a slightly more complicated "IF" formula like this:

"=IF(AND(B1="Monster",C1<4),"Treasure",IF(AND(B1="Trap",C1<3),"Treasure",IF(C1<2,"Unguarded Treasure","No Treasure")))"

By using IF and AND, we're able to evaluate two results at the same time - the room contents we generated previously and the new dice roll - to see if treasure is present.

To finish up today, go ahead and copy the four cells down the page.  An easy way to do it is to highlight the four cells containing formulas (A1, B1, C1, D1).  In the bottom right corner of cell D1 there is a little square in the highlighted outline - by clicking on it, holding, and dragging your cursor down the sheet, you can auto-copy the formulas down the page.  This way you can generate the contents of lots of rooms at once.

Even if you don't plan to do any random dungeon stocking, the random number generation available in Excel is really useful.  Let me know what you think.  In part 2 I'll cover how the VLOOKUP function can be used to retrieve actual content results from our content tables to make the stocker provide a little more value.

Game 3 - He took an Ogre to the Knee...

We left off last week with the regular group arriving at "the market", a place deep on the second level where denizens of the underworld crept towards the surface to trade with the surface dwellers.  The players had hired themselves out (as first level characters) as bodyguards to a trader and his retinue.

While Kyriakos the trader set about to conducting his business, the players wandered the market.  Grey dwarves rubbed shoulders with cloaked and masked strangers - referred to obliquely as "the Faceless".  A pair of nymphs wandered through, and the party saw multiple hags bartering with outsiders.  Other humans included goth-garbed followers of Hades, and other merchants like Kyriakos.  Narkessa, a blind seer, offered prophecies from behind a screen, but they never saw what kind of creature is Narkessa.  The players could only window shop, since they're fairly poor.  They learned there was an adjacent hospice run by one of the grey dwarves, and they were able to afford a place to sleep despite the exorbitant cost.

During all this mingling, they paid a guard some 'information money' to learn a little about the dungeon outside the market.  This part of the dungeon had a large temple to Ares and a cult of bloodthirsty followers of the war god.  The market was neutral ground.  A band of Amazons established a hideout somewhere south of the market and were conducting raids on the Ares cult.  There was also a witch that often came to visit the market.  But the most important thing they learned is that there are nearby stairs going up and down!  A shortcut up to level 1 would cut the trip to the market by half at least.  Agreeing to meet back up with Kyriakos later in the day, the adventurers left the market to scout for the stairs.

The stairs up weren't too hard to find, and they ascended back to the level 1 dungeon to look around.  Almost immediately, the air was split by the sound of a klaxon - the ear-splitting screech of "shriekers".  Matthias thought this was worth a Burning Hands spell, and scorched the shriekers; the melee guys quickly finished them off.  However, the damage was done, and within a minute, a troop of patrolling skeletal hoplites marched into the room from the north and assaulted the party.

Even the regular group has a couple of kids in it (three sons of dads - all twelve year olds).  Every time Connell the Celt does something, the kids all start singing "Con-nell, he's the greatest warrior ever, a hero of renown…" and playing air guitar - I realized they've given him the Billy-song from Adventure Time.  I can see how they think of Connell a bit like Billy - Connell just runs headlong into most fights, swinging a giant 2-handed axe.

This is pretty much how the kids treat Connell the NPC

Billy, er… Connell, indeed ran headlong into the skeletons, busting out "berserkergang", a proficiency.  A couple other guys joined him, and they quickly smashed the first rank.  Then Mack called on Hephaestus to banish the undead, and a successful turn undead roll drove the skeletons away.

The last room of the night was far to the south.  The players were trying to find an easier way back to the main road out of the dungeon.  They found a large room where the walls are completely filled with bright mosaic tiles.  Outlined in the tiles are the likenesses of various monsters - a lizard man, a goblin, a white ape, and so forth.  Searching the walls, they found a secret door, but as they touched the wall, the mosaic of the ogre they touched flashed briefly; the ogre mosaic disappeared, and suddenly two very real ogres materialized in the room behind them.  Yikes!

Two ogres for first level guys is rough.  Necro-Leo (Leonidas the Necromancer) had a Sleep spell for one of them.  When he does his sleep spell, a black cloud appears above the target and the victim dreams black thoughts - or so the player tells me.  For the remaining ogre, they went to wolf-pack tactics, getting 4 melee guys around the ogre  so they could take it out quickly.

Connell got smashed by the ogre's club, below zero hit points, and went flying out of the fight.  The other guys cut down the ogre before anyone else got smashed; the dwarf crushed the ogre's leg with his hammer, and then skull cracked it when it dropped.  It was a big night for Mack the Dwarf.

The death and dying rules for ACKS are quite a bit different than regular D&D.  Basically, the guy is considered to be lying there in an indeterminate dying state (or not - Schrödinger's dying character) until someone checks on him, and then you make a roll to see the extent of the injuries.  In this case, Connell was just below zero hit points, Necro Leo was a trained healer and got to him immediately, and Necro Leo rolled amazingly high on a giant 'mortal wounds' table.  Connell was only knocked out, and recovered with 1 hp - but he now has a permanent injury, a -1 to initiative due to scarring - perhaps a bad knee.  After which Moe immediately quipped, "I used to be an adventurer like you, until I took an ogre to the knee…"

After the ogre fight, the remaining mosaic tiles in the room had faded.  They could still see the outlines of the other monsters, but they were no longer vivid.  Where the ogre mosaic used to be, there was now a keyhole for an oversized skeleton key.  A mystery for later.

The players were low on resources and hit points.  They made their way back down the stairs to the market on level 2, meeting back up with Kyriakos and his retainers.  The plan is to use the hospice room to rest overnight in the dungeon, regain spells and some hit points, and then escort the traders back to the surface.  They need to try and recruit a couple more zero level guys back in town to act as fighters.

Sadly - no family-kids game this weekend.  Another sleepover foiled my attempt to get everyone to the game table.  My children clearly have more of a social life than myself.  : sigh :

Cast of Characters
Moe, a Bard
Talus, a Magic User
Mack, a Dwarven Craftpriest
Leonidas, a Necromancer (Necro Leo)
Connell (Billy) - NPC

Missed the Game:
Etor the Explorer
Alantir, Paladin of Poseidon

*Image is "Billy" from the Adventure Time cartoon