A Princess of Greyhawk - Elise Gygax

The Sword & the Sorcerer - Sequal...

After more than 2 decades, the sequal to The Sword & The Sorcerer (1982), "Tales of an Ancient Empire" is filming. It is even being helmed by the original director, Albert Pyun, who is a sort of modern day Roger Corman. Some production clips from the film can be seen here.

I have to say the original film is a guilty pleasure of mine; though often reviled by more critical folks, I found it to be enjoyable, funny, and escapist. And lets face it, pulp fantasy films aren't exactly a power-genre in Hollywood. Probably, we're never going to see a 200-million dollar big-budget version of Lankhmar starring Tom Cruise, The Rock, and Selma Hayek (does picturing that film make your blood pressure rise?;). Compared to fantasy with more universal appeal, like Lord of the Rings or Narnia, dark Sword & Sorcery is a niche within a niche (something us old-school gamers should be familiar with).

And so I embrace the occasional, and admittedly cheesy, strait-to-DVD genre film that comes along, a custom I've been following since that first string of "Sword & Boob" films from the early 80's.

The clips linked above look ok. I imagine an aging Kevin Sorbo traveling around with a group of beautiful, young female warriors holds a certain amount of wish-fulfillment for many of us;)

I just hope Pyun tones down the feaux-Enya a bit.

Mapping that Megadungeon

At first, the prospect of mapping a Megadungeon can seem like an extrememly daunting one. Megadungeons are typically considered to be a minimum of 5 or 10 levels, and sometimes even more. Factor in that there can be hundreds of rooms on each level, and the task quickly begins to look insurmountable.

Obviously, one "fix" a lot of DMs take is simply to make the dungeon smaller. Say, 30 or 40 rooms per level, thereby making the mapping a bit more manageable. But then, its not really a Megadungeon anymore.

The best way I've found to manage that heavy mapping load is simply to change your perspective on what exactly needs to be mapped. Most DMs I've spoken with running Megadungeons will tell you that they're running it about 33% pre-planned, 33% random charts, and the remaining 34% "on-the-fly". Why?

Because that's the way we run most Campaign Settings.

The Megadungeon isn't a tournament module, where every 5' step needs to be carefully planned out. It isn't even a normal adventure, where most stuff is planned out, with a wandering monster table thrown in for good measure. Megadungeons are living, breathing, Campaign Settings. They change, sometimes from session to session. They are ultimately indefinable, as extensions of the Mythical Underworld. They are necessarily mutable, as the best and most memorable Megadungeons are influenced by the whims and wants of the players in the campaign.

Map your Megadungeon the same way you would your campaign setting. Start with a familiar "home town" area they're going to frequent. In most cases, this is the main entrance to the dungeon and the main connection points. Sketch out a rough idea of the scope of the campaign setting, er Megadungeon. Then add detail as you need it, and as the characters journey. Map possible areas of further exploration a little at a time, in between sessions, so that mapping goes back to being a fun, relaxing pasttime, rather than a chore.

There are only two parts of the Megadungeon that should be even remotely set in stone (ahem;):

1. Where the players have already been. They're going to be mapping it too, so don't be too cruel and change everything every time they walk through the caverns on level four. Try and keep things fairly constant where the players have already been, and if you do change something in that area, make it for a good anf fun reason, like giving them a mystery to solve. It can be a good idea to collect the players' map at the end of every session, especially if they've ventured off into an area you havn't fully mapped yet, so you can go ahead and copy their map down on your own "official" one.

2. Places you think are friggin' Cool. Those "iconic" locations within your Megadungeon. The center points in between all those empty rooms filled with wandering monsters and random traps and tricks. The places where you really let your creativity shine as a DM. You don't have to map everything between the Entrance and the Hall of Shattered Thrones anymore than you have to detail everything between Verbobonc and Hommlett unless your players are going to be traveling there sometime soon.

An example map: That roughly rectangular blur above, if you click on it, will enlarge into an early version of the the first three levels (plus two sublevels) of my 10-level Megadungeon, the Forsaken Halls. It serves mainly to detail the "big" locations (with cheesy names to remind me what's there) in the dungeon, and the main connections between the levels. Those crosshatched areas between the big chambers can be interpreted as "dozens of minor rooms, chambers, and caves" and get detailed as needed. For instance, the area on level one that looks like a cross with a star in the middle (The Halls of Madness, as they are known to the players), actually fills an 8"x11" sheet of 8-square-per-inch graph paper and has about a hundred or so rooms. Its been the most extensively explored area of my Megadungeon, and is therefore the most extensively mapped. I have about three sheets of the same size filled in, and a dozen more with just the main areas and connections blown up to the proper scale, waiting to be filled in and detailed as necessary.

By keeping a list of encounters, traps, treasures, and room descriptions handy, I can place these rooms wherever I want, as needed, without being contstrained too heavily by a pre-planned map. The Megadungeon has so far grown organically, and as it has deveolped primarily through play, I can run many sections of it by memory as I run different groups of players through it, adding a little more detail each time as I go. Just like a Campaign Setting. :)

Swords & Wizardry in Print!

Mythmere Games has partnered up with Black Blade Publishing to get Swords & Wizardry in print and in game stores. Go here to order your copy, or let your FLGS know to order it for you. Also available now is Knockspell #3!

Congrats to all involved with this!

Some details on Hex-mapping

Thanks to John for pointing out this interesting little page, which gives some helpful notes on scaling your home-made hexagonal maps, drawn from a variety of old-school references.

And here's a link to a printable, 30-mile hex divided into 1 mile hexes. I used to use a lot of these to blow up regions when I was running Greyhawk. I have some pretty good one of the Pomarj and the principality to the South of it, I'll try to find for scanning and posting some time.

Sad FLGS story....

The other day I happened to be in the neighborhood of one of the older gaming stores in town, and one that I actually assumed had closed a couple of years ago. I was surprised while driving by to see the flashing neon "open" sign in the window, so I popped in to kill the remainder of a lunch break.

The store itself is a pretty stereotypical "down-in-the-dumps" gaming store. Dark, dusty, lined with shelves full of mis-matched random product, but in a good way. I browsed around for awhile, and feeling like I should help support the business, picked up a copy of Hackmaster Basic, which I had been pondering ordering online anyways, a 1st print box set of Gamma World, and a stack of 70's comics (which I love to read... for the ads!), about $60.00 worth of stuff in all.

I approached the man at the counter, who looked like he was obviously the owner and sole employee of the place. He rang me up, and I whipped out my visa to pay...

"Sorry, I don't take credit cards," he says.

Bewildered, I looked out the window (this was not a particularly safe part of town), "do folks carry a lot of cash around here?"

He looked at me, perplexed. Sadly, I had to put back everything but the old comics (not wanting to have to deplete my cash reserves so early on a Friday), and left feeling a bit let down. What if someone wanted to make a really big purchase in his store (he had quite a few boardgames running on average $80, and lots of miniatures which are expensive these days)? That seemed like begging for failure. (While leaving, I heard him turn down yet another sale, some young kids wanting to buy a bunch of dice!)

I mean, we all know what a hard time game stores are having these days. Why make it harder on yourselves, guys? My company takes credit cards, and we're not even a retail business; its something that happens once or twice a year. We use a online service that charges like 1% for the transaction. I thought about going back with the web address for the credit card processing company we use, but honestly don't know whether this guy would take offence. If he really wanted to make big sales, wouldn't he have researched this himself already?

The moderately successful gaming store in my area takes all forms of payment, of course. Anyone else have a store in their area that seems determined to fail?

Bring back Korgoth!

Most of you have seen the pilot for Korgoth of Barbaria by now. What you may not know is that the series was shelved before the pilot was even aired (for a variety of rumored reasons, some of them fairly insulting to fans of the Sword & Sorcery genre). Even "Assy McGee" got a couple of seasons (yep, "Assy McGee", good call, guys) :\

At any rate, some folks have taken the time to start an online petition in an attempt to get the ball rolling on this again. Proabably futile, but who knows? If you liked the Korgoth pilot, take a moment and add your name to the list!