A Framework for D&D Horror

It's no secret I've been casting about for the right vehicle for running a campaign merging horror and D&D styles.  I have a deep passion for the genre, although it's not always the best fit for my gaming groups - especially when I have a bunch of kids at the table.  Earlier this year I put horror development on hiatus to focus on developing an adventure campaign appropriate to all ages - regular readers are familiar with Taenarum, my mythology themed megadungeon.  Taenarum is going great, but that doesn't mean I won't revive the horror side projects.  It's just a matter of finding the right approach.

Specifically - I need something that lends itself to episodic play and small scenarios so we can do some one-shots and interpolated games.  It also needs to merge the key tropes of D&D and horror.  Before delving forward, let's take a moment and identify said tropes.

Old school D&D emphasizes exploration and recovering treasure over combat, separating it from newer iterations.  Settings assume gold and treasure is sequestered in old ruins guarded by traps and monsters, lending itself to a player-driven sandbox style.  Exploring old ruins to recover treasure, while avoiding combat - these shouldn't be too hard to work into a horror game.

Traditional horror game scenarios are almost always presented as mysteries.  The players are engaged with defining the mystery, then presented with clues and evidence that allow them to ultimately confront the danger or solve the mystery.  The mystery structure lends itself to horror when you overlay uncertainty, isolation, and the weird and unnatural over the top.  The place where horror gaming tends to break down is the ongoing campaign.  Either the entire campaign represents a macro-mystery, or you need a good narrative explanation for why the adventurers keep running into  the horror of the week.  Monster hunter shows, while greatly entertaining, usually  don't generate much terror or horror.

Stepping back, I'm thinking the theme of "bad places" supports blending the genres.  Picture a countryside littered with mysterious and forbidden ruins, each surrounded by peculiar lore and shunned by the locals - for good reason.  A handful of horror writers have gone down the path of mythologizing a local area with lurking horrors - HP Lovecraft's Massachusetts, Ramsey Campbell's Severn Valley, or Stephen King's Maine spring immediately to mind.    Creating such an area as a D&D style sandbox, with most plot hooks represented as legends and lore around lost treasures, seems well within grasp of our available technologies - the hex crawl, the site-based location, the conventional mystery structure.

Of course, each place necessarily represents a challenging, 'screw you' style of dungeon - as in, you woke the dead, now deal with it.  I've repeated it before, horror is ultimately conservative, and victims and protagonists alike bring the horror down on themselves by treading into the forbidden.  Monsters stand as warnings and signposts at the limits of humanity, guardians of the frontiers.  Striving to learn things 'man was not meant to know' calls for destruction.  (Grave robbing old tombs and recovering secrets best left buried fall into the same category).

This reminds, I saw something either this week or last where a reviewer was making cranky complaints about Death Frost Doom and the way the twist  in that dungeon can screw over the players.  I tend to view this as misalignment of audience.  Spoilers about Death Frost Doom:  In a moment of greed, the scenario sets the players up to destroy a thing that unleashes ancient horrors, sending the adventure into a radically different direction.  It's brilliant.  But it is very much true to the tropes of the horror genre, not heroic  adventure fantasy.  Springing a survival horror twist on the players is fair game in a horror scenario.  There has to be alignment of expectations between the players and referees (and I guess, in some cases, module reviewers) around the nature of the game and the genre we're actually modeling.

Anyway - this is where I'm at with it.  Start small, with a simple hex crawl and a few scattered lairs, and craft the sites into locations filled with mystery and horror.  I'll post an example in the next day or so to demonstrate the flavor.  Some of the more interesting questions fall into whether 'the horrors' should revolve around traditional monsters imagined fresh, or creatures generated whole cloth ala Lovecraft or Campbell.  What do you guys think?

Taenarum Games 7-8 Hey Jude Don’t Let Me Down

One aspect of having the blog I truly enjoy is getting to discuss tools and techniques, then running the games, and having the chance to reflect on how they did in action.  Your campaign is one big empirical experiment.  I'm a few sessions behind on game reports, so I'll just touch on the major actions of the past couple of sessions.

We resume with a merchant ship standing at anchor in the quiet waters of the cove for the past few days.  Normally the visiting ships drop off some cargo and go; this particular merchant had business in town that required an extended stay.  The players heard about it back in the Adventurer's Guild Hall; Barnabas, a scurvy criminal working for a competing adventuring group, explained that a merchant named Feodor was offering a reward for a rescue from the dungeon.  He told the players about a cool location his group had found in the northwest of level one:  "We're calling it the arch of greed, a mystic arch behind which was all sorts of gold and treasure piled up.  Would have plundered it ourselves, but a bunch of skeletons came along and we split.  Now the boss lady wants to work for the merchant so I figure there's no harm letting you know about the archway."

The players made their own appointment with the merchant anyway, meeting him at the Moxie Nymph, the other tavern in town.  "500gp to return my son from the dungeon," the portly man offered.  "He was all set to inherit the family business, we're importers you know, and then was lured off by a sorceress.  I've tracked him all the way from Athens to this remote place.  She turns her victims into pig-men or pigs, I hear.  500gp to the adventurers that rescue him."

So the players planned an excursion into section 1-4 (the southeast quadrant) of level 1 to rescue 'Handsome Jude' from a sorceress.  They've fought plenty of pig-men and heard the same rumors - a sorceress creates them from her captives.  The party bard sang 'Hey Jude' on the way to the dungeon, of course.

Once they made it to the correct zone in the dungeon, a decent 40 minute walk, they carefully explored the areas nearest to the entrance passage.  They found a large chamber decorated and outfitted like an Athenian courthouse; they ran away from a room where stony bats fluttered out of the darkness and bashed into them; they tracked a clean swath of passage into a large chamber holding an ochre jelly.  The jelly split into smaller jellies until they realized they needed to burn it; the worst thing about that particular battle was they lost their hefty Celtic NPC, Connell, who was devoured by the jelly and reduced to steaming bones.  After burning the jelly, they said a few words over his bones and moved on.

Things got serious when they confronted another party of adventurers in one of the rooms in this area.  Moe recognized Barnabas from town - this was the Brew Crew, one of their rivals on "the scoreboard."  Here's the problem - the Brew Crew is led by Tisiphone the Witch, an unhinged spell caster with a bad temper.  She called for defense and began preparing a spell.  The players spent a bit of time table-talking over their options - try to parley and risk getting "Sleeped" and killed, or throw all in and Sleep the Brew Crew first?  They chose the latter.  Talus their magic user rolled well on initiative, and the Brew Crew went to sleep -except for Tisiphone, who was higher level.  The fighters ended up charging her and sticking sharp things into her gut, which made her die.  Getting an axe planted in your collar bone or a shortsword rammed up your gut will do that.

It's funny how the murder hobo games devolve to these situations - two gangs of dungeon looters throw down against each other in a quick, violent struggle, and now the players are staring down at their trussed rivals trying to figure out what to do.  Loot them and kill them?  Give them the chance to join?  Make them swear oaths and cut them loose?  Their leader's quickly cooling corpse lay nearby in a pool of blood.

We're trying to model a view of heroic Greek virtue that emphasizes battlefield glory, individual honor, and bravery rather than Christian virtues like mercy.  The bard woke up the prisoners one at a time, gave a speech about bravery, no honor in defeat, and so on, as part of a pitch to join Moe's Marauders.  A few of the prisoners were 'sent to the Underworld' but Barnabas and one of the fighters didn't have too much loyalty to Tisiphone and threw in with the players, at least for now.

One of the next areas they discovered was the large north-south hall that connected this quadrant to quadrant three, and also spiraled down to level two.  This piece of the underworld road was lit with intermittent torches and lamps, and felt inhabited.  The players broke into a room off the main hall (chopping down a door, in fact) and ended up discovering a small treasure trove.  There were coins, supplies, and expensive trade goods like fine wines and drinking glasses.  It was a miracle no guards were attracted to the sound.  The players loaded themselves up with loot and decided this was a good time to leave the dungeon.

Quadrant four is a fair distance from the dungeon entrance, and their escape was complicated by some wandering monsters, but they made it back to town intact and tallied a few thousand GP in earnings.  It was the time of the Bendideia, a festival to Artemis, and the players capitalized by auctioning the wine and glasses in the village square.  It also became clear in the Adventurer's Guild Hall about the fate of the Brew Crew.  Moe's Marauders had absorbed a few Brew Crew members, and jumped the now defunct Brew Crew in the standings on the Scoreboard.  "My kind of scum", cried out Lykourgos, the proprietor of the guild hall.  "They're not above stepping on the heads of some rivals to climb the ladder of success.  This round is on the house.  To Moe's Marauders!"  Unfortunately, getting called out as cutthroats in front of your peers isn't something the players craved.  All around the room, they could feel other groups making mental notes - watch out for Moe's Marauders in the dungeon, they kill other adventurers!

After a day of recovery, the players traveled back to the dungeon to scour zone four again.  They encountered some pig-men sentries shortly after entering the area; the sentries fled, the players gave chase, and the players were able to take the pair of sentries down with arrows and thrown spears before the pig-men made it to a door off the main hall.  The players ended up storming the door, and quickly entered the actual audience hall of the sorceress herself.  A small pool and fountain separated the entrance area from the lady's throne, creating an obstacle.  Pig-men soldiers stood on guard nearby.  It was another one of those moments - do they banzai attack around the fountain, or stand down and try a chance at parley?

Moe's player is comfortable with the social aspects of the game and stepped out from the group to engage the lady in conversation, explaining they were there to rescue Jude of Athens - but that it was open to discussion.  "Jude doesn't need rescuing", explained the lady.  "He's one of my apprentices.  He's here willingly.  Assuming I choose not to turn you all into swine, or make you join my legion of pig-men, I'll let you talk to him and ask him yourselves.  What amusement can you provide that would stay my hand from transforming all of you on the spot?"  She grasped a wand loosely in her left hand (one of Circe's wands of mass polymorph).

As it turns out, a fringe benefit of being a bard is you can perform music, recite poetry, and tell stories.  The party earned an invitation to dinner and a stay of execution transformation.  They were escorted to the giant pig-man banquet hall to await dinner.  In the meantime, a messenger was sent to another part of the dungeon palace to retrieve Jude - a good-looking youth in his early 20's, who seemed to be working in the kitchens.  "So, my father sent you to retrieve me?  I'm not going back with him.  Here in Taenarum I'm learning magic under the guidance of a sorceress that learned from Circe herself - I'll even have the chance to travel to Circe's island some day.  Or I can go back to Athens and waste my life as a grain merchant counting barrels of wheat imported from Egypt.  My dad wasted his trip.  Oh, and good luck not getting zapped into pigs this evening.  There's a first for everything, I suppose."

That's where we ended last game session.  I was glad to see some recent creations from the referee's workshop have immediate effects on play; I've been extolling the virtues of rumors and quests in the megadungeon, and the players enjoyed the opportunity to focus on a specific goal by joining in on a quest.  I'm also a big proponent of calendars and campaign events, and you can see the first evidence in the mention of the Artemis festival.  In an upcoming post, I'll lay out what I've done behind the scenes to build out an event structure for the Taenarum game.  The combination of festivals, political events, and machinations of the gods adds depth and background as we begin tracking time in earnest.  It feels the campaign is starting to come together well.

Looking back over my session notes, I did a fair recap of the past few games.  I did have two player quotes noted - first, the murder hobo motto - "what happens in the dungeon, stays in the dungeon."  "Wake up and smell the bacon" takes on a different meaning when you're facing transformation into a pig.

Thanks for reading!

Cast of Characters
Moe, a Bard
Talus, a Magic User
Alantir, Paladin of Poseidon
Etor, Spartan explorer
Connell the Celt (Billy) - NPC - died this session

Hirelings
Zero-level fighting men - Dorus, Eutropios, Dunixi, Apostolos

New NPC's
Barnabas - a thief
Thaddeus - a fighter

Catching up with the Lich House

I've been off the web for a couple of weeks.  Business travel, a major system outage back at headquarters, and then prep for a professional exam all conspired to give me more urgent things to attend than blogging - which, at the end of the day, is really just a vehicle for my musings and chronicles about games.

The Taenarum campaign is still moving forward; Taenarum is my classic megadungeon locale, a sprawling dungeon around the entrance to the Underworld and the vaults of Hades.  The monsters and  themes are heavily inspired by Greek myth and heroic fantasy. I'll need to do a recap of recent game sessions.  The first 16 dungeon areas are ready for play, so I'm moving on to the larger game world.  I've been working on the calendar and festivals, charts for generating annual campaign events, and maps.  I can't stress enough the importance of campaign events outside of the dungeon to help bring the rest of the world to life.  I've also started hex mapping the setting and have some interesting questions to answer - like, should I use characters from Greek legend in the game as kings and heroes?

I also had the chance to read GURPS Horror.  I'm not a GURPS player, but I've been hearing about the book for years as a general resource for horror gaming, and it's written by Kenneth Hite.  I was not disappointed.  I'll consider doing a review, but I couldn't really speak to any of the GURPS game rules or statistics.  My evergreen side project is developing a good approach to running a campaign that merges sandbox style D&D (or similar class and level-based gaming) with horror themes.  I've had some good megadungeon concepts that integrated the horror with a sandbox style of play, such as the Black City or Harrow Home Manor, but since Taenarum is an active (heroic fantasy) megadungeon, I'm looking to do something a little different.  Developing two megadungeons at once doesn't sound enjoyable, even if one is horror and awesome.  July is just about here, which means it's time for some summer Cthulhu.  Altair moves in the sky, and the stars are right.

So that's it for today - I'm back online.  For the readers - do any of the aforementioned topics sound particularly interesting to develop or share on the blog?  Otherwise I'll get caught up on game reports first.  I also need to get out there and see what I missed with other bloggers, too.  Have there been any OSR dramas or tempests in a teapot that are worth spectating?  I'm looking forward to seeing the Basic D&D PDF this week - WOTC is supposed to put it up July 3rd, right?

Review - A Single Small Cut

Last week's travels gave me a chance to catch up on some reading; one of the smaller items in the queue was A Single Small Cut, an 8 page adventure from LOTFP.  What kind of adventure can you pack into 8 pages?  This one includes a thievery fiasco gone awry, a prosaic locale, and an interesting monster \ artifact pair that adds some ongoing potential to your game.  For a mere 8 pages, this one punches way above its weight class.

A group of mercenaries hired by an ambitious sorcerer, Eutaric, break into a church, slaughter the mid-day worshippers, and begin looting the crypts beneath the church seeking an artifact the sorcerer has traced there.  When they find the artifact, horror ensues, and the players arrive at the church just in time to get swept up the mess.

The centerpiece of the adventure is a magic item, the Red Bell, which summons an extra-planar monster - the Corrector of Sins.  The Corrector forms a body from any nearby corpses and presents a frightening combat challenge as well as a gruesome, horror-themed opponent that crawls up out of the crypt.

I really enjoyed this one.  Horror is typically a "conservative genre", where dabbling with things best left alone or blatantly grabbing for power frequently rebounds on he who overreaches.  Many times there's an element of just desserts in horror stories.  The horror is deepened when innocent bystanders are caught in the crossfire.  In this adventure, the players represent the innocent bystanders that get caught up in a heist gone awry.  It's a classic horror situation, and this one has a potential nasty twist and second act lurking.

The ostensible plot hook is that the players are going to this church for healing, but it'd be easy to expand the role of the Red Bell in a campaign.  The author alludes to a set of similar items; perhaps there's a concerted effort to recover them, and Eutaric the sorcerer is part of a larger cabal.  Establishing a prelude where the players track Eutaric and his gang to the church, or a postlude where the players pick up the quest to recover the remaining Bells, would work well for an ongoing campaign involving monster hunters, and such an order is even hinted at - the Order of the Kite.  There is a lot of potential for enhancing a campaign present here.

A Single Small Cut was written by Michael Curtis, a seasoned vet in our OSR space - he's written things like Stonehell, The Dungeon Alphabet, and a number of adventures for Dungeon Crawl Classics.  I'll be frank, I loved Stonehell, so I was a fan already.  A Single Small Cut is a $2 PDF at the usual suspects, and at that price there's no reason not to check it out if your tastes bend towards gruesome monsters, weird objects, and a bit of the horror.  I should mention - it's set for characters in the 3rd or 4th level range.

As for the title… it's a clever allusion to the player's chance of reading the situation before the chaos starts.  Well titled indeed.

Alas Poor Feedly, I Knew Him Well

Day two of the DDOS attack against Feedly, and I've lost track of many of the other blogs I read.  Supposedly the attack is mitigated, but I still haven't been able to get to Feedly.  Is anyone else in the same boat?  After google reader was taken out into the field and shot, I ported everything to Feedly.  It's been a good reader so far - although the effort is manual to add things to a blogroll so I rarely get to it.  It was much simpler when blogger had a follower widget on every blog and you could just hit 'follow' and then import them directly.

I've had to manage DDOS events in my career - no fun.  DDOS mitigation costs aren't burdensome to a big company, but I can imagine they're crushing to a start up.  It highlights how these cloud service providers we rely on are actually small shops behind the scenes.  Good luck Feedly team!

How are you keeping up with blogs these days?  Is there another popular reader, or are you just watching the G+ stream?

You Had Me At "Bounded Accuracy"

I'm starting to get interested in this new D&D Starter set that Wizards is putting out in July.  The adventure included sounds like a blend of wilderness hex crawl and mini-dungeons; the latest column from the Mearls reveals it has 4 dungeons and 5 adventure locales, enough material for a party to advance from levels 1 through 5.  On the interwebs, folks have mentioned it's inspired by B10 Night's Dark Terror (although I don't have a WOTC direct source to quote).

The new edition appears to swing the pendulum back towards supporting the types of adventures and campaigns I want to run.  The biggest philosophy shift is the idea of "bounded accuracy".  Monster armor class doesn't scale with level, and player character accuracy stays within a narrower band as well.  You no longer have the 4E problem of a marauding troll with an armor class over 30, literally impossible for the levies of peasant archers to damage using the rules as written  4E didn't lend itself to fantasy simulation.

A commitment to bounded accuracy implies the new edition will support world builders, and that makes me happy.  World building is the best part!  So what combat attributes are going to scale with level?  Damage is going up, and hit points are going up.  That means the levy of peasants is going to be able to protect their village against the marauding troll through numbers - but if the troll lays a hand on one of them, it's going to tear them apart.  Flipping it around, you can picture battles where a high level fighter cuts through a large swath of lower level mooks because the fighter's attacks are powerful and damaging, but the mooks are still tagging the fighter and wearing away resources.  It feels like a better implementation of the "minion" concept from 4E.

It'll be interesting to see how damage scaling applies to inanimate objects and structural hit points - is chopping through a wooden door with an axe any different for a beefy peasant compared to a skilled fighter?  From the little I've read, it sounds like those types of activities would be handled as skill checks, and bounded accuracy applies - leveling the field between the strong peasant and the fighter.

I also really like that they're releasing Basic D&D as a free PDF.  Kudos, WOTC.  Between the starter set and the free Basic game, we'll have plenty of opportunity to evaluate new D&D before the hardcovers start shipping.  I'm even fine with a delay in learning about an OGL or other 3rd party creator license - the books aren't going to be out until the fall anyway.

Where are you at with the upcoming new edition - interested, indifferent, or actively hostile?

Campaign Structures and Scenarios

A reader (Michael Shea) asked last week what are the other campaign structures besides a sandbox style and an adventure path.  It's a good question!  Aren't there countless campaign styles?  Plus, we often conflate scenario structure with campaign structure.  But maybe it's not that complicated.  From a reductionist perspective they can simplify down to two basic approaches - sandbox versus plotted.

The sandbox campaign style is player-driven.  The referee creates and describes the game world and the players identify and launch their own adventures exploring the game world.  Information in the sandbox game is usually stored as maps and keys; the dungeon or hex crawl (for fantasy games) or the sector map (for space-based games) are common documents.

The plotted campaign is driven by plot hooks that lead the characters to predefined scenarios.  Mission-of-the-week style games (like spy games or super hero games) are plot-driven.  Many of the adventure series modules from the TSR days of classic D&D and AD&D were plotted.  Modern "adventure paths" show how an entire campaign can be scripted from level 1 through high level play.  Most Call of Cthulhu campaigns are presented as plotted campaigns constructed of consecutive investigative scenarios.

About the scenarios.  There are a handful of common ways to structure individual scenarios.  They can be site-based, event-based, investigative, scene-based, even character-based.  I like to build my sandbox campaigns with a combination of site-based adventures and events.  You can certainly mix and match scenario structures within the overall campaign structure.  A mission-of-the-week style of play (like an adventure module) might have a highly plotted angle to get the players involved, but the adventure itself is a site-based structure and could easily work in a sandbox game.  For instance, the old G1-G2-G3 series of TSR Modules (Against the Giants) are free-form site-based dungeon crawls.  But the plot hook to start the series is something like , "Go kill these giants for us or we'll chop off your heads!"  How about we chop off that plot hook instead and just drop the locations somewhere in the sandbox?

I'm actually fairly forgiving of plot hooks in published scenarios since I'm going to ignore them anyway.  The author has no idea of the best way to integrate the scenario into your campaign, but he or she has to provide something for the finished product.  Tossing the plot hooks is like throwing away the shrink wrap.

One of my pet peeves in plotted games (at least in class and level style games like D&D) is this idea that the plot hooks for low level characters all lead to low level encounters, and then when the players are a little higher level the plot hooks lead to ogres and mid-range monsters, and then a little later it's the giants and the dragons and the liches.  I'm sure are ways to plot that style of game in a manner that doesn't feel contrived, but I'm dubious.  I say put it all in the setting, right from the beginning, and make it the player's problem to avoid the dragon lairs and the giant's caves and the lich's tombs and find the goblin-mugging adventures on their own.  Then again, it's a rainy Monday and I'm cranky.  Nothing that alcohol can't fix.