Recent Poll Results

I archive my polls on a page for later reference - there's a Poll Page in the links up above.  Here are notes on some of the recent ones.

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May 4th:  Which edition of version of Old School D&D will fit the Black City best?

AD&D 1E 9 (14%), Moldvay/Cook BX 7 (11%), Lamentations of the Flame Princess 22 (34%), Swords & Wizardry Complete 10 (15%), Labyrinth Lord 3 (4%), Labyrinth Lord with AEC 8 (12%), OSRIC 4 (6%)

This was an interesting poll - dipping into "edition war" territory.  However, OSR folks seem live-and-let-live with the varied flavors of old D&D.  I'm thinking either LOTFP is really popular, my blog has a higher proportion of LOTFP fans, or folks honestly think the Black City should have more of the gritty, horror vibe in Weird Fantasy LOTFP.

BX is usually my "go to" system - if you group it with LL, it came in at 26% (combining BX with LL and the AEC).  AD&D 1E came in at 20% if you group OSRIC and AD&D.  That's surprising, because everyone owns those hard covers.  It's true I flame AD&D all the time for it's munchkin power creep, but I thought it was still the king - maybe it's just more popular with discussion board members than bloggers.  (If Gencon is an indication, there is a ton of AD&D 1E stuff running and not too much Classic D&D or retro clone action - or we're not that organized).

I just got a copy of Swords & Wizardry Complete - it's a beautiful book - and I'll be comparing it to the core rules.  I'm wondering if I should have phrased this choice as S&W (any version).  Could just be that OD&D isn't as popular as everything else (but it did come in well above Labyrinth Lord).

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April 12th:  Do you have any special treatment of Continual Light in your D&D world?

No - use the rules as written   9 (32%), Raggi style - it's banned!   7 (25%), It's not permanent   4 (14%), I use lots of dispels   0 (0%), Magic is rare   7 (25%),  Other - see comments   1 (3%).

The interesting thing about Continual Light, many folks recognize that cheap, permanent light is an absolute world changer - if you're going for gritty and Medieval, it has to go.  Only 32% allow unfettered Continual Light.

I thought the most interesting comment was something about radioactive continual light that erodes or decays whatever it's cast on - brilliant.  Just look at how brutal sunlight is to roofs (or anything with color).

Sealed Buildings in the Black City

Not every place in the ruins will be immediately accessible to low level characters - unreachable areas create mystery and give the DM space to expand.  My last Black City post introduced The Black City Construction Company - making areas inaccessible by placing some Watchers near them to drive away characters not carrying the proper passkeys or who don't have sufficient power to knock out a stone golem.

I'll be putting up some brief descriptions of the proscribed areas, but these areas won't actually get mapped or stocked until later in the campaign.   Please don't mind the prosaic building names, the players will never know what this stuff is called, anyway.

Note:  the letters F and B correspond to lettered areas on the city map, and you can keep up with the project from the Black City project outline (and the page up above).

F Central Command
Central Command is a domed, shielded building warded by a pair of Watchers (blue passkeys to pass).  Inside one can find a large map projection of the island of Thule on a holographic sand table, including a red blinking dot pinpointing the location of a crashed alien ship buried beneath one of the glaciers.  It would be a fun side quest out of the city to find and excavate an alien ship, and it could introduce a bizarre new monster (Alien, The Thing) or a new race - like the Reptoids.  (The players wouldn't know what the blinking dot represented until they went there and dug it up).

Central Command features a number of arcane machines and "computers" that the characters can access, inadvertently turning on or off some of the still functioning defensive systems in the city, like the Face in the Ground.  It was once home to the psychic antenna of the Hive Mind (Cerebro?) that augmented its telepathic communication in the city.

Central Command is also the place from which the Beacon emanates.  When the Grey race died in a mass extinction, one of the last conscious acts performed in Central Command was to activate the Beacon, a massive signal beaming an SOS message into deep space to contact other Grey colony ships.

No rescue ship arrived, but many deep space organisms inimical to earthly life have followed the Beacon down to earth over the millenia; some have even established lairs in the frozen city.  (You'll see them referred to as Star Demons or Space Devils in the area descriptions).  One of the most dangerous of these Space Devils lives in the Palladium, letter N on the city map.

The Beacon still functions today, blazing it's radio signal into the sky.  Characters with ultravision can see it clearly, and it lights up the city like a searchlight for monsters with ultravision.

B Tower of Astronomy
The Tower of Astronomy is a twisted spire of impregnable rock in the southern part of the city; a long stair climbs to the sole entrance, where a pair of Watchers flank the door making attack nearly impossible.  Green passkeys will allow access past the doors.  The Tower was used for charting the stars and exploring other times and places.  The Greys watched the stars carefully, using the stars to select the proper celestial alignments for opening dimensional portals.

Inside, there are telescopes, star maps and 3-dimensional representations of the solar system and galaxy (mind-blowing for Vikings!) and the opportunity to see into other times and places - including the past and future of the city itself!

Portals and visions feature in many Lovecraft stories ("The Shadow Out of Time", "The Haunter of the Dark") and I like the idea of giving the players a glimpse of the city's alien past.

Next up - the remaining sealed areas - the Institute of the Arcane, the Great Plaza, and the Spire of Thaumaturgy

Many Faces of Stonehell (a junkyard post)

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

The Junkyard:  This is the place where I put campaign ideas, notions, and high concepts that just haven't gotten built.  Yet.
* * *

This is a continuation of my Ode to Stonehell  - the review from the other day - putting some thoughts together on different ways I've considered using the book.  Stonehell is more than an adventure module - weighing in at 20 dungeons in scope, plus the upper works and a pair of supplements, it's a mini-campaign covering character levels 1-5.  Once Stonehell 2 is out, I'm thinking it will cover levels 6-9 or 6-10.  Truly epic.  On with the ideas!

From Funhouse to Madhouse
Stonehell was a prison created by a mad despot and his twisted vizier as a dark experiment; the prisoners themselves carved the dungeon after generations of laboring.  A powerful extraplanar creature was attracted to the pain and suffering within the prison, feeding on the negative emotions, and it continues to lurk in the deeper levels even today, attracting monsters to the dungeon and keeping it Chaotic.

Stonehell has some of the "funhouse" qualities of the early megadungeons, but I would play up the horror aspects of it.  Many of the human 'monsters' in the dungeons are descendants of the prisoners, in various states of insanity and degeneration - one level is full of the insane and exudes a creepy vibe.  Asylums feature in many of my favorite horror movies.

Gothic Horror stories are almost always personal in nature; in the horror version of Stonehell, the characters would be related to the descendants of the prisoners that escaped after the dungeon fell into disuse.  As they plumb the depths, are the sub-humans they're fighting distant relatives, and do the players ever learn the truth about their legacy?  Lovecraftian themes implicit here are things like tainted blood, degeneracy, and one's inescapable destiny - conceits from such heart-warming, inspirational stories like "The Lurking Fear", "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family", "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", and "Pickman's Model".  Horror and Stonehell, best friends forever.

The Less and More Approach
Sometime earlier this year I reviewed the excellent Lesserton and Mor supplement by Faster Monkey; it describes a fully realized home base town for adventurers, along with a nearby ruined city for placing adventures.  Hmmm, the one thing Stonehell is missing is a home base town… combine those tastes, it'd be like peanut butter and chocolate.  Lesserton and Mor and Stonehell.  Mmm, tasty.

I'd consider removing the Stonehell upper works and placing the entrance right in the ruined city, perhaps under the old imperial palace or citadel.  Having to deal with Mor's Orkin tribes every time you go in and out of the city would be loads of fun (for the DM).

Alternatively, use the simple wilderness map that came with Lesserton and Mor to place it out in the countryside, and give the players multiple options on dungeon destinations.  Either way, between these two products, you have everything you need to run a long lasting campaign.  If I didn't have so much going on, I'd probably be running this as a campaign myself (with the horrific version of Stonehell from above).  Time to start warming up the TPK voodoo doll again and ask for nothing but 20's.

The Seven Samurai… in Stonehell
I have a limited knowledge of Eastern history, but when I hear about a despot using countless laborers to build a massive underground prison dungeon to hold political dissenters (part of the Stonehell back story), I can't help but think this would play well in a land once dominated by a corrupt, Imperial empire in a fantasy version of the Far East.  You could imagine the mad Dragon Emperor of the previous century bending the vast resources of the empire to implement his cruel scheme, his soldiers dragging away his enemies to the endless dungeons.

I keep waiting for the OSR version of AD&D 1E Oriental Adventures done right… it's coming some day, I believe it!  In the meantime, there's Ruins & Ronins, an add-on to the Swords & Wizardry rules to provide some Asian feel.  Unlike AD&D 1E which took an expansive view of Asian myth (with a whole lot of martial arts), Ruins & Ronins is Japan-centric and fairly grounded.   I'd want more of the high flying wire-based wuxia martial art action in the AD&D 1E version in my own Asian themed campaign - iron-skinned monks catching arrows, kung fu eagle claw attacks, ninjas and crazy kiai shouts - brings me back to those Saturday afternoon Hong Kong theater movies.  (Ruins & Ronins, though, is an excellent value - the monsters alone are worth having as a resource).

Assuming I didn't do a Stonehell campaign with my regular group as a main campaign, I could see reskinning it to be an Asian themed megadungeon.  Costuming orcs, hobgoblins and similar humanoids in lacquer armor and giving them some nunchucks - I'm all over it.

Closing Thoughts
Stonehell really changed my thinking around dungeon layout, and how much detail you need to run a good game.  Hopefully yesterday's picture of Gygax showed that he ran his own game off sparse notes as well.  I don't know if I can take advantage of the same layout techniques as I put together the Black City, I'm a rambler, but I'll be thinking about it.  As I get older and crankier, I want game products that play well at the table more than read well.  I've started to loathe products where monsters and key information are camouflaged in a wall of text as part of the encounter description - blech.  (Just because TSR did it that way doesn't mean it was a good approach, people).

I'd also recommend using my ideas for keeping a megadungeon campaign fresh in a Stonehell campaign - I'd build campaign events for the Stonehell campaign and a handful of rival NPC groups to keep the players on their toes, and require them to react once in a while instead of always initiating adventures.

Improvisation and Greyhawk

In the Stonehell review, I mentioned how the 1 page dungeon format and Stonehell's 2-page dungeon format are really throwbacks to the 70's - I knew I had seen some pictures of Gary running a level in the original Castle Greyhawk in a similar manner.

Folks get caught up with how intricate is the map, the dead ends and ability to get lost.  I like seeing the map key on the left page - you can see how sparse it is, really just a bare bones list of scrawled notes.  It's a style that implies a lot of improvisation, keeping the details in your head, or both, and if you're comfortable with that style, improvising can be *fun*.

The Black City Construction Company

One issue with the sandbox campaign style is how much to build up front - the DM can quickly find themselves over preparing, and that's one of the most common recommendations to new DM's building a sandbox - start small, add on to it organically.  With that in mind, there will be areas on the map that are ready for adventuring, and some areas that are stubs or left blank for future development.

A common technique Gary Gygax used  in his dungeons was to wall off areas for this future development.  Back in the early Greyhawk campaign of the 70's, Gary used "The Greyhawk Construction Company" - literally sawhorses, construction signs, orcs with hard-hats, etc, that let the party know the stuff down that hall or stairs was still being built, please come back later.

I'm going to use a less tongue-in-cheek approach for the Black City - higher level areas will be warded with automated guards like Watchers (from the bestiary article).  If a Watcher is near a door or entrance, it'll be really hard to get past - lower level groups can't take on a stone golem (even an immobile one).  By controlling access to the right colored gemstone passkeys, I can place sealed areas fairly early in the campaign, knowing the PCs can discover them when they're low level, but space beyond will remain a mystery until later in the campaign.

The following five areas on the surface map of the city (F Central Command, B Tower of Astronomy, O Institute of the Arcane, P The Plaza, Q Spire of Thaumaturgy) are all still-standing buildings that are inaccessible because of Watchers and other guards blocking access.  They were hardened, shielded, and built to survive devastation, and a few of them still tower above the surrounding rubble.  Players won't be able to access them until they've spent sufficient time acquiring enough of the right gemstone passkeys to avoid getting pulped by the Watchers at the entrance.  However, these sealed buildings *will* be accessible from below, in the dungeons, when the party gets deep enough.

I'll post some notes on those five areas as the week goes on.  Bit by bit, I'm working my way down the Black City project outline!

Review from the vault: Stonehell Dungeon

One adventure I've owned for a few years, DMed it, but hadn't formally reviewed on the blog, was Stonehell Dungeon:  Down Night Haunted Halls.  It's one of my favorite OSR products, and The Society of Torch, Pole, and Rope was one of the first blogs I read and followed (long before I became a blogger myself).   There've been signs of life over at Torch, Pole and Rope regarding Stonehell 2, and I'm hoping we'll see it before the year is out.   Plus, the recent chatter on Dreams in the Lich House on megadungeons has me looking back at this product.  Stonehell is one of those cool books I'm always scheming how to build a campaign around it, so this will be one-part review, one-part Gamer ADD brainstorming.

First off, on the rating - it's a 5 of 5 on the Beedometer.  My subjective scheme is basically this:  how does this product compare to my typical home brew stuff?  If I home brew better and could've saved the money, the product isn't getting lauded.  We've had 30 years of meat and potato adventures that cover the basics, so I'm on the look out for things that have never been done.  Luckily, there are plenty of creative folks in the OSR doing just that - breaking new creative ground every day - so there's no lack of quality of stuff.

So that's how I rate things - if a product has opened up a new theme or style, is well written and evocative, or changed how I think about designing an adventure, I'm pumping it up.  Let someone else focus on the latest beginner dungeons - those are valuable and have a place for providing options, but I don't personally need them.  I'll probably go back and recalibrate some past ratings a little tougher as the Beedometer evolves.

The other thing about my reviews - I mostly write reviews about exciting products, products that I've run at the table and want to use, so most of my reviews are slanted towards things on the high end of the Beedometer - the standouts.  Maybe someday I'll put capsule notes and one-liners together regarding the pdf stinkers on my hard drive.  Life's short, though, and writing negative reviews just seems depressing when I've yet to exhaust the great stuff.

But let's get back to Stonehell!  The first thing to notice is the physical layout.  It's a 130+ page monster, all dedicated to a single dungeon, but its designed to have high usability at the table.  It uses a modified version of the one-page-dungeon, so that the pertinent details of each level are on the open left and right pages of the book.  Each quadrant has 30-40 rooms, so that's a lot of information on those two facing pages.  (Each level of the dungeon has 4 quadrants, and there are 5 levels, so there are 20 mid-sized dungeons detailed in Stonehell - at $6.50 for the PDF, that's a lot of dungeon for the dollar!)

The adventure itself is what you'd expect in a traditional dungeon modeled after Castle Greyhawk or the fantastic stories of 1970's megadungeons - there are whimsical locations, humanoid factions, a miniature trade town tucked away in the dungeon, and a fair amount of new monsters, magic items, traps, puzzles and specials.  My high praise of Stonehell has less to do with any one single mind blowing idea, and more to do with scope, sustained high quality, and usability.

Stonehell takes a curious middle ground between detailed set pieces, and leaving some room descriptions sparse to allow for DM improvisation.  The two-page dungeons present the sparse details and memory joggers, providing the DM the opportunity to improvise descriptions.  The intricate set piece locations are detailed in the preceding pages in the level notes.  It's a format that really worked for me - I don't need intricate details on every room, but if there's a macabre arcane machine in a given room with lots of levers and knobs, I'd like to know a little more about how it should be presented.

There had been a healthy debate in the community whether a printed megadungeon was even possible.  Gary never published Castle Greyhawk, after all, and Greyhawk was the pinnacle of what people imagined when they pictured a megadungeon.  Gary claimed to improvise much of the dungeon, using scant notes on a single page next to the map.  There are even photos of Gary DMing Greyhawk in later years, and you can see just how sparse were the notes.  (I'll try to add a pic later when I find one on my other computer).  From that perspective, the one-page-dungeon approach and it's evolution in Stonehell is a spiritual successor to how megadungeons were managed and conceived back in the 1970's.  Very cool!

Alright - this review has gone on long.  I learned over the weekend that one reason my blog sucks is because I'm not writing short posts - Hack and Slash posted "Why *My* blog isn't any good", and I'm sure he meant me personally, j/k.  So in the interests of brevity and appeasing -C, I'll put the rest of the article - brainstorming interesting ways to use Stonehell in a campaign - in another post.

Ciao!

Mythic Monday: The Honored Dead

Before getting on to the post, let's take a moment and remember  the soldiers and members of our armed forces, deceased and living, keeping us safe.  My grandfather was in Normandy, my dad in Vietnam, and Memorial Day has always been an important observation for us.
…A moment of respect...


Now on to something gaming related-

Hellboy: The Storm.  The honored dead return.

I'm an avid Hellboy reader.  A recent storyline involved "the honored dead" of England rising up again to serve the once and future king, because the sword Excalibur had been returned to the world.  Crypts of ancient knights were found open and empty, as if the 800 year old corpses inside had gotten out and walked from the churches where they were interred…

This seems like a folklore theme where I should be able to recall other instances of the dead returning… if danger calls or the homeland is threatened, the honorable dead sworn to protect the homeland will rise to defend their wards once again.  The theme is a bit like the ghosts from the Paths of the Dead in Return of the King.  It certainly seems fitting for a fantasy game!

The closest series of stories I can come up with involve Medieval revenants.  The modern weird tale and all those EC Horror comics and the Cryptkeeper and the Tales from the Dark Side often featured the dead coming back due to unfinished business - the lifeless murdered spouse "takes care" of the cheating husband and the home wrecker, for instance.  The traditional revenant is a short term phenomena - the revenant returns from the grave with the single-minded purpose of avenging his own death.

Anyway, I like this alternate "oath fulfillment" approach to the revenant a bit more.  "An oath or promise sworn in life can be so strong that the oath-maker can return even from beyond death to see the oath fulfilled…"

As an aside, are you watching A Game of Thrones with me on HBO?  If so, we'll see some revenants (though maybe not this season).  Won't name names for spoiler purposes, but there are definitely a few characters coming up that blur the distinction between life and death while they take care of business.

Oathsworn Revenant (for Labyrinth Lord)
No. Enc.: (varies)
Alignment:  Neutral
Movement: 90' (30')
Armor Class:   2
Hit Dice:   9
Attacks:   1
Damage:   By weapon
Save:   F8
Morale:   12
Hoard Class:  nil
XP: 1700

<Ack - apologies for the 4E style CompoundWord DoubleName - if someone has a better one than "Oathsworn", I'll gladly edit it.>

Some oaths are so powerful that the dead will rise again to see the oath fulfilled, becoming a type of revenant.  Regardless of age and composition, the bones of the revenant will reform and it will rise from the crypt to see its ancient promise fulfilled, returning to dust once the trigger has passed.

The Oathsworn can only be hit by +1 or better weapons.  Most Oathsworn were knights in life, and will appear in armor and wielding knightly weapons - two-handed swords or pole arms are favored.

Like other types of revenants, the Oathsworn cannot be turned and are immune to holy water, but otherwise share undead immunities.

DM Note:  obviously, an army of revenants would be over the top - I think I'd use one of these guys as a lone defender somewhere (like a knight that died protecting a sanctuary) or use them as a plot device, like the dead ghosts that served Aragorn in Return of the King.