Lazy Blog Post - Micronauts

Always a favorite here at BtBG!

AD&D DMG Appendix A: Random Dungeon Generation in acutal play.

Last month when I was "rediscovering" AD&D, I convinced a couple of friends to let me try out the Random Dungeon Generator found in Appendix A of the DMG*. I had used this Appendix a couple of times in the distant past to help come up with a dungeon before a game session, but never actually just opened the book and run a session right out of it. I warned the guys that this would be a completely random dungeon, so anything was possible, and that I was going to Let The Dice Fall Where They May.

First up was rolling character, which I wanted to do "by the book"AD&D style, having not done so in a while (Method 1, p11). This was going to be "original 3 books" only - no UA, Best of Dragon, etc. I rolled up an NPC along with them. I should pause here to recommend Mad Irishman's awesome 1E Character Sheet replicas. Having one of those in front of you is like riding a Time Machine. Character generation took all of 10-15 minutes, and we soon had a Fighter (with an 18/73% Strength!), a Magic User, and a Cleric. Oh yeah, their names were "De Gausser"(?), and "The Norseman"**.

I named the NPC Cleric "Bad Rick"***.

De Gausser and The Norseman arrived in the shanty town of "Dregs", somewhere on the edge of the "Forbidden Lands". There, they were approached by Rick, who told them he had been sent by his church to investigate an underground temple complex abandoned by a lost cult for more than a century. Rick assured them there would be treasure aplenty, and they could split it evenly, with any religious artifacts being considered Rick's share. De Guasser and The Norseman decided that would likely be the only interesting thing to do in Dregs, and so, after purchasing some dungeon crawling goods, a mule, and hiring to 0 level redshirts, "Luke" and "Barry", they set off into the Forbidden Lands until they came to a hill topped with some crumbling pillars and covered in razor sharp broken shards of slate.

For the curious (and because I have it written down on my scratch paper), the equipment purchased was: 10 Leather Sacks, 2 Dozen Arrows, 4 Spears, 2 Suits of Leather Armor, 2 Backpacks, 2 Tinderboxes, 5 Waterskins, a 10' Pole (hah!), 20 Torches, 50' of Rope, and 14 days of food, which came to a total of 31gp, 6sp, and 3cp. Apprentice "The Norseman", as rich as most 1st lvl Magic Users, footed the bill, reluctantly.

A wide stair at the top of the hill led down into darkness, torches were lit, and the dungeon crawl began. I rolled a d6, and came up with Start Areas for Random Dungeons number 4 (enlarge the map above for a better look). Bored with stereotypical dungeon decor, I told the players everything down here was gleaming white marble, pristine, glossy, and bright as is if it was cleaned 5 times a day. The walls and floors were segmented into 3' squares, like the walls of a mausoleum.

The players chose the first door on the left, which brought me to my first challenge, I couldn't immediately find anything in the Appendix about doors. Plenty about what's behind the doors, but not the doors themselves, so I scribbled this little table on the map (d12):

1. Locked & Trapped
2. Locked
3. Trapped
4-6. Stuck
7-12. Open

The first door was open.

Roll, roll, roll, off they went down a long hall, exploring carefully everything along the way. This hall took like 30 minutes, and nothing happened, but the guys seemed to enjoy it immensely, tapping on the walls, trying to pull the mausoleum-style squares of marble off the wall, poking at the ceiling with the 10' pole, and so on. Eventually, they moved on, turned a corner south, and came to a chamber where they encountered their first monster (roll, roll, roll): NPCs! (Roll, roll, roll), these turned out to be 2 1st level Fighters and their retinue of followers (4 men-at-arms, and 3 porters/torchbearers). A sort of standoff ensued while both parties sized each other up, exchanged insults, and glared a lot. Eventually both sides deemed they were sort of evenly matched, and went their separate ways, though the promise of future aggression was definitely implied. This encounter actually took a bit of time up, and was fun to roleplay. Sort of "Westerny" in feel actually.

Continuing on (roll, roll, roll), the party found a large room, which was completely empty, except for some more doors (roll, roll, roll) all of which were open (you can see on the map here in the lower left hand corner, randomization leads to some oddly close quarters sometimes). Past a door was another hallway, and the players barreled down it (they had by now provided me with a "marching order", and a "fighting formation", which are the little letters on the bottom of the map), and completely forgot to check for traps anymore. (Roll, roll, roll) a pit! With spears at the bottom! Luke fell in and died. Then they immediately encountered 2 skeletons, which Bad Rick was completely incapable of Turning for some reason (ie crappy rolls!), but were dispatched fairly easily otherwise. Then another pit, which Barry fell into and died. This dungeon apparently eats hirelings, so the players swore they'd bring more last time.

On down the hall, they were ambushed by 2 Piercers (which I made look like marble plates so as not to appear too incongruous) which both missed, and were pretty easy to kill after that. Moving on, they found a secret room (empty), and some more hallways.

Then came the stirges! Nine of them, and tough little buggers. Totally overpowered for three measly 1st level characters, right? No. While they were pretty banged up, the party managed to defeat them by the skin of their teeth. I rolled that their lair was nearby, and ruled that it was in a tomb behind an open marble plate. Then I started rolling on the random treasure table for the Stirge's treasure type. I came up with:

6000ep
5000gp
8 gems
2 Potions (Treasure Finding, Clairaudience)
Sword +1, +4 vs. Reptiles

Now, normally I would scale that back a whole lot for a 1st level party, but I was letting the Dice Fall Where They May, so there you go. The challenge was getting 1100 lbs of treasure out of the dungeon. The party made a few trips out of it, carefully avoiding the NPC fighters that were still lurking around the dungeon, and buried the treasure outside. They went to down, bought some more mules and redshirts, and came back out to get it.

Everyone made 2nd level!

It was actually fun, and I enjoyed being as surprised as the players were with every twist and turn. Try it sometime. But bring beer.


*It should be noted that this is much easier to do after several pints of Guinness.
**It should be noted that naming characters is not particularly helped by the liberal consumption of Guinness.
***See?

Hot Elf Chick savagely attacks Lady Gaga!

I mean really, can you blame her?






By the way, welcome to the OSR! Ohyeah!!!

Check out this cool blog list right here for more Hot Elf Chicks and other stuff.



While you're here, here's some new 1st level Sorcery for you(roll d6):

1. Black Eyes of J'Geth - Renders 2d6 HD of creatures unconscious for 1d6 turns.

2. Claw of the Bodiless - Telekinetically move and manipulate object of up to 10lbs/level.

3. Eyes and Ears of Pawleesh - Enables caster to see in darkness, see invisible creatures, and enhances hearing (5 in 6) for 1 hour/level.

4. Winsome Guile of Grix - Target must save or serve the caster faithfully for 1d3 days, plus 1 day per level of the caster.

5. Xgh's Perilous Mist - Green mist covers 10 cubic feet per caster level for 1 Turn + 1 round/level. Anyone in the mist must save each round or become ensnared in its grasping tendrils.

6. Zggzr's Spiteful Orb - Orb of purple energy (range 120') leaches life force from all living creatures within 20' of it for one round (1d6 damage, increases to 2d6 damage at 5th level).

You should read this article...

Caught this link over at Akratic Wizardry: "How Dungeons & Dragons Changed My Life".

Its a pretty insightful article by a writer who played voraciously in the early 80's, abandoned it, then rediscovered it when life settled down again, a story I suspect mirrors those of a lot of folks.

As the author puts it:

"Pure and simple, for many, D&D represents a lost age: It was an individualized, user-driven, DIY, human-scaled creative space separate from the world of adults and the intrusion of corporate forces. As Allison rightly noted, D&D recalls that day "before orcs and wookiees were the intellectual property of vast transmedia corporations." Back when you had lots more free time than money --- before girlfriends, job, kids. Life. But it also reminds me of a part of my creative imagination that I lost touch with as well."

Read the rest here.

Fun Dungeon!

Came across this while walking through the Excalibur resort in Vegas, with some stairs leading down into the unknown...

BtBG Reader: Book of the New Sun

15 years ago, on our honeymoon, Mrs and I stumbled across a back-alley used bookstore in New Orleans' French Quarter. As is typical of these places, I walk right past all the enormously important 200 year old first editions bound in leather and signed by both the authors and their mistresses, and head for that back room overflowing with beat old paperbacks!

One of the paperbacks I grabbed there that day was Gene Wolf's Shadow of the Torturer. No, no subconscious aftershocks from being married for the first time (I think;); I thought it had a cool cover, and knew Wolfe had a reputation as an "author's author": someone so good at his craft that other authors worship his every word! I read it, a bit at a time, each morning for the rest of the week while sipping chicory coffee at Cafe Du Monde. I thought it was "ok". I never finished it, or grabbed any of the consecutive books from the series though.

This was the mid-90's, and the Age of the Fantasy Epic Series (aka "Shelfbusters"). Jordan, Eddings, Modessitt, Feist, and other such authors covered the shelves at bookstores with their overstuffed doorstops, volume after volume, book 4, book 12, book 15, etc, and I snatched up every single one of them to read during the short breaks between class and my shifts at the record store. To say I "didn't really appreciate Wolfe at the time" is a vast understatement. The yellow-spined, DAW Science-Fantasies of my youth were a dim memory - bring on the Dark Lords and Blue-Robed Wizards!

Every now and then, though, an image from Shadow would percolate up into my mind. A coin secreted in a tomb. Silver fliers zipping overhead while men duel with razor-sharp flowers. Masks, and weird devices, and despairing ingenues. For all that I didn't appreciate it at the time, man, did it stay with me.

So I picked up the whole series recently. If you like "Dying Earth"-genre literature, this is for you! Protagonist Severian is no farmboy - he's an apprentice Torturer, and his magic sword was weighted for the chopping block, not for dueling with Dark Lords. The whole world is crumbling beneath its own weight, blue skies are nothing but a dim memory. Even the star-faring age is part of the distant past. One telling passage describes how even the dirt - the dirt! - of this future age is of no natural origin, but instead the crumbled remains of long-disintegrated works of man.

Fair warning - its dense stuff (Wolfe has the vocabulary of an Oxford Doctor of Linguistics; I'm not always sure which words he's making up, and which I'm simply ignorant of), so don't pick it up it if you're in the mood for "popcorn reading", there's plenty of Jim Butcher for that. No, save it for when you're in the mood for something deep, something dark, something difficult, and something that will worm its way into your psyche like some lost Vancian artifact.

La la la, Unicorns L. Ay-ay, la la la Unicorns L Ayayayay!