Earlier today I had an idea I might post more on or even run in the future: to honor the legacy of Jennell Jaquays, why not run a campaign using material she wrote as the spine? Jaquays, like probably every creator, had certain tropes she returned to regularly and that means that a wide breadth of material she made is fairly thematically coherent..* I personally have physical copies of The Savage Frontier, Griffin Mountain, The Book of Treasure Maps I, and the d20 version of Caverns of Thracia, so let's use those as our basis.
The Savage Frontier will act as our setting, with hopefully little reference to the rest of the Forgotten Realms and maybe with some f/r for FR gods to change them to Earth ones given Thanatos, Ra, and Set's prominence in some of her work. Esteban Maroto's art also I think mirrors the swords & sorcery vibes of her stuff extremely well.
Book of Treasure Maps is the easiest to integrate into this campaign: just sprinkle the adventures around either as new locations or replacements for existing dungeons mentioned in Savage Frontier. The Tomb of Aethering the Damned could replace the Tombs of Dekon Thar, for example. The Lone Tower/Castle Clearmoon seems sensible to place in some wilderness near enough to access but remote enough not to bedevil Silverymoon, though it could also serve well as the basis for the Dungeon of the Hark.. Arcadia could be the delving of some Netherese guy. That kind of thing.
The encounters/adventures in Griffin mountain can, with some conversion, be added in the same way. Griffin Mountain itself could obviously be placed anywhere as a griffon lair. Gondo Holst's Caravan could be the basis for a Zhent caravan with similar motives. The Troll Tomb could be a troll (or orc) tomb anywhere in the region. The River of the Damned islands similarly could fit in any river far enough way from a settlement - which luckily is fairly easy to find in the Savage Frontier. The same could be done with Water Wyrm Island. If you want you could also make the Uthgardt barbarians be influenced by the Balazarings, especially their fondness for dogs.
The Caverns of Thracia I think I'd want to use for the Karse in the High Forest. The Netherese refugees are the ones who began to worship Death, whether under the name Bhaal or Thanatos is up in the air. The many animal men inside could be holdovers from the ancient Days of Thunder, and perhaps clues to some of the ruins from the Book of Treasure Maps.
For rules I would probably advocate for Swords & Wizardry Complete since that is what her most recent modules were published for and I believe the OD&D on the brink of AD&D vibe of those rules best suits the Treasure Maps and Thracia - the most directly usable of the material above.
Such a campaign would have material to last months if not years, and indeed one could incorporate more of her work (again rather easy to do since she had tropes she liked to return to) or of course incorporate your own. Perhaps Return to Perinthos could serve as the Nameless Dungeon?
*I was originally going to do a post about how I believed she had a kind of ur-setting these tropes came from (likely a part of the Wilderlands she ran early in her career) but further research on the Candlekeep Forums leads me to believe she merely reused these elements. It's not like I don't.
I recently posted a variant of this in a discord I frequent and was asked to do a blogpost on it in order to have it in one place. I also mentioned my strict stocking procedure in my recent interview... or at least I think I did. Dysphoria prevents me from listening to that episode. So here that is:
Step 1: I take the map I am going to use (whether drawn by me or someone else) and count the number of rooms - excluding sub-rooms that are marked with letters. 2 gets counted; 4a-4d is all just one room. I take this number and divide it by 3, possibly rounding up or just adding one if I'm feeling frisky that day. This is the number of monster encounters I will spread throughout the dungeon. It's also the number of treasures I will place. To get the number of traps, I divide the new number by 2. Easy peasy.
Step 2: I divide the monster encounters into groups of ten with the following spread:
Boss
Miniboss
Miniboss
Grunt
Grunt
Grunt
Mook
Mook
Mook
Mook
Mooks are monsters that are quite weak and usually occur in numbers about double the number of PCs (or more). Grunts are tougher monsters that occur in numbers roughly half of the number of PCs. Minibosses are the toughest monster that might show up on that level, with only one appearing, and Bosses are monsters that would be tough for even two to three levels deeper in the dungeon.
I decide what each of these encounters is going to be so that a level one dungeon might have...
Boss: Ogre
Miniboss: Grey Ooze
Miniboss: Tarantella
Grunt: Ghoul
Grunt: Orc
Grunt: Orc
Mook: Goblin
Mook: Goblin
Mook: Stirge
Mook: Skeletons
Note: this list is a little lackluster because I'm trying to do this for a very generic easy to understand example. I normally try to pick (or even make) more interesting monsters than these.
Finally for step 2,* I roll the NA appearing dice for the monsters I picked (with minibosses and bosses always just being 1 or maybe 1d3). So lets say we have...
1 Ogre
1 Grey Ooze
1 Tarentella
2 Ghouls
4 Orcs
3 Orcs
6 Goblins
8 Goblins
10 Stirges
10 Skeletons
Step 3: If I had any rooms that had those subrooms - 1a - 1c and so on - I instead assign them to a lair of monsters. We have a lot of Goblins in this example so let's say we roll up a goblin lair: 35 goblins, 2 guards, and a goblin king. Dope! They get distributed among those rooms.
Step 4: I then generate a number of treasures equal to the number of monsters on the level. I use Courtney's treasure doc which apparently he sells now because the world is fallen. I got it when it was free though.
I generate the treasures assuming 250 x Dungeon Level or Assumed Level of Adventure for the treasure parcel. If I have a lair from step 3 I instead use the treasure type conversion guide in the doc. I count 19s as well as 20s as magic because that seems more fun to me but your mileage may very, as they say. For half the hoards I roll the size of the hoard without modifiers, but knowing half the hoards will be ungraded I only generate those as 1d3 parcels.
Step 5: I spread the monsters and treasure among various rooms, having half the monsters not have treasure (other than perhaps pocket change I'd roll in session) and having half the treasure be unguarded by monsters.
Step 6: I use the Dismal Depths traps document from Sham's Grog n' Blog - from the prelapsarian OSR - to generate a number of traps equal to half the number of monsters, placing some on their own and placing some in rooms with traps.
Thus ends the stocking procedure. I of course add specials and tricks and dungeon decor, but that stuff is harder to make procedures for.
If you want to know why I have such a rigid schema, it's because it 1) Quiets the Voices in my head. This is it's primary function but 2) it works. I am at least going to get a solid session (or more likely several) if I follow this procedure.
I don't think this has anything to do with mermaids
I've been playing World of Horror, which officially releases next month (and which you should grab before it's price goes up with that official release), and it's made me think about an old campaign frame I once discussed with one of the Nightwick Regulars but still haven't been able to pull off. Here I wish to revise that campaign frame into something more concrete and see how it sounds to my gentle readers.
First, we need the equivalent of the Spiral from Uzumaki, the overall theme and phenomenon that will drive the strangeness of the campaign. Here is the first place I wish to borrow from World of Horror: we're going to have the imminent return of a Great Old One. For my example here I'm going to pick Cthulhu but I think you'll see any of them can work. An important thing here is we don't want one organization that is trying to summon Cthulhu, but rather he is coming and his influence is spreading throughout the world. If you're playing Delta Green, we can do that literally, but if we're doing more traditional Call of Cthulhu or Liminal Horror, or especially if you're doing Liminal High School, we're going to be focusing on how this effects one town.*
Why a Great Old One? They're thematically broad, like the core phenomenon of Uzumaki. Cthulhu is most utilized in scenarios in the form of Innsmouth/Deep Ones stuff, but remember that the story the Call of Cthulhu is about his effects on dreamers and artists. The madness of dreams could certainly show up in a number of scenarios, as could ancient artwork that seems to resemble the modern, or what of the "white pulpous thing" in the swamps of Lousiana or the stellar nature of his star spawn, or even his defeat of other intelligent races in Lovecraft's Mythos? Maybe a Elder Thing ruin activates an ancient weapon meant to stop Cthulhu's return based on math created by that ancient race but now it will destroy the town the PCs occupy. I dunno. Lots of stuff. If you need ideas for expanding the meaning of your respective Great Old One, check out the section on them in Trail of Cthulhu or, if you have it, the d20 version of Call of Cthulhu.
The stars are right
Next we come up with 1d4+2** of mysteries around the town.*** In my head players will have access to the hooks for these all at once. In my original Lerouxville campaign the analogous list of hooks came in the form of the notes of a missing friend. He had collected a number of notes on the outer layers of various mystery-onions**** and the players could kind of pick which one they wanted to investigate. Unfortunately I did not have these as thematically consistent as we want here - they were just a bunch of weird things - nor did I have the intention of ever revealing the fate of the missing friend. In hindsight I should've probably made that explicit - "you're never going to actually find out who killed Laura Palmer, that's just the frame for the other stuff" - but the first part is remedied by this campaign model. How you develop these mysteries is up to however you do it normally. I'm a fan of the method in the DG Handler's Guide, but you do you.
For the sake of our Cthulhu example, and because I have Liminal High School on the brain, maybe some high school Wicca types were all visited by him in a dream and now they're out in the swamp feeding people to those polypous things. Get a list of NPCs, leads, maybe a handout for one of their dream journals, and you have a scenario.
Do you read Sutter Kane?
Finally, at least prep-wise, we have the main innovation I have taken form World of Horror. In World of Horror, every time you investigate a location some event happens. Often these are related to the case but often they aren't and sometimes an animated head or the missing class of 1971 just pops out of nowhere and you have to run away or fight it. That's a bit... too much if we want to be thematically consistent, but there is something we can take here. What we're going to do is come up with a list of kind of one off random spooky encounters that can be inserted into any investigation. These are tied thematically to the Great Old One.
As I hinted at above, our example for this is going to be a dream-driven deep one with a fire axe that'll attack the PCs during one of their investigations. What's his deal? Unfortunately for the PCs, that's likely to be a dead end; however, he sets up the broader theme of the Great Old One thematically and introduces an element of horrific synchronicity into our game.
Investigation!
So mechanically what you'd have is the PCs select the scenario - "let's check out what those witchy girls were doing in the swamp our friend seemed so interested in. Maybe they killed him?" They ask around and find out that a fellow student who works at the Shell station***** has seen them meet up in the gas station's attached Subway every weekend before leaving for somewhere else. Thinking they might be able to follow the The Craft wannabes from there, the players decided to stake out the Shell station. The Keeper (or whatever you want to call them) rolls a die - let's say a d6 for old time's sake - and getting a 6, rolls a second die to determine which of his unplaced weird things happens at the Shell. Oh look, it's the fire axe maniac! How convenient for our example! He asks if they read Sutter Kane. They look confused. He attacks them with an axe. Gameplay ensues.
So why do this? What do we get out of it? Well from our example one thing we get out of it is potentially a higher density of weird moments instead of mundane detective work. I know a player who has disliked most of the CoC/DG games run by the Nightwick Regulars because of the lack of relative action. This perhaps does something to remedy that. Hopefully. It also sets up foreshadowing for the final bad thing in our Uzumaki spiral. And if you want to be real pretentious about it, and this is hack work, remember, it adds to the horror of the unknowable or some shit. Spooky!
Some time ago I was in a conversation with Cole about Nightwick in the very pretentious way I sometimes do and the topic veered into the definition of "Dark Fantasy." It's a genre which I think there is no question that the World of Nightwick occupies, even if it's not always serious. It's also a genre which, 13 years after I first started running Nightwick still has a lot of cultural cachet. If anything it's gotten bigger in this post-Dark Souls/post-Elden Ring world, and I think for someone who works in that medium, even if it's all hack work, it's worth thinking about what it is.
Normally it is defined as "fantasy with horror elements," but very commonly Moorcock's Elric saga is included in Dark Fantasy and I wouldn't say it has horror elements. Cole provided a definition that I think does the wonderful job of including the things people would want to include and excluding what they wouldn't while also being very evocative: Dark Fantasy is fantasy that takes place in a world that is haunted.
What does it mean to be haunted? Probably at least in part because of my history background, I am going to be using "haunted" here to mean that it bears the scars of the past - a psychic shock that causes the memories of the dead to cluster there like bats in a cavern and for them to weigh as a nightmare upon the brains of the living. In thinking about this topic outside the realm of games, I have come to see history writing as a sort of ghost story. The crimes of the past have a long reach and haunt us today as much as any specter from the mind of MR James.
In our fantasy game worlds, or fantasy worlds in general, we can achieve this sense of being haunted through the numinous. The psychic scars of the past have physical and spiritual manifestations on the world. In the world of Nightwick, immediately to the northwest of Nightwick Village, is the Mire of Princes - created when the blood of an army facing the Sword Brothers so suffused the ground that it became a marsh ever after. More distantly there is the Blood Red Sea - stained that color after the demon Moloch pitched the men of ancient Acheron into it. And of course there is Nightwick Abbey itself.
If you want to run something that's Dark Fantasy, as seems to still be in vogue, that's how you do it. Think about the history of the setting and how its crimes gnaw away through time into the present. It is a mode of thinking that should be easy to all of us now.
There are times when I desire to run something where the world is less numinous - a lower fantasy where heroes of maybe a Howardian stripe come to grips with monsters of super science - but then I have to write dungeon rooms. It seems my brain is either too choked by the weeds of time and the study of past wrongs or too enamored with the gothic I engaged with in entertainment and saw in the woods where I grew up. But my dungeons are always haunted. Maybe I am too.
The following hexes are adapted from the seven voyages of Sinbad the Sailor. In some cases I have done minor adaptations to make it more D&D-like. When hexes are on the same island I will not so with a parentheses next to the XXXX entry.
XXXX What appears to be an island is actually a fish of enormous size that has slept for many years. Sand has accumulated upon it and shallow rooted jungle trees have even taken root. Should any fire be set on the fish, or perhaps an anchor stuck into its side, it will awaken and return to the bottom of the sea. Anyone on the island when this occurs must make a Saving Throw or be swallowed up by the sea, starting the next round 100' or more below the depths. Those that succeed tread water on the surface. Heavy metal armor will cause an automatic failure. Should the creature be attacked, it has 36 HD. It is easy to strike, but only weapons with a +2 or higher bonus or that are meant for sieges (such as a cannon or ship's ballista) will damage it.
XXXX This heavily wooded island has a wide shore. A beautiful black mare has been tied to a stake in the surf. Anyone approaching the mare will be beckoned by a man who waits unseen at the shore. He well ask the characters to wait with him in a underground chamber. He is a groom of the king of the city in hex XXXX. He is awaiting a hippocampus to come and mate with the mare. Any foal born of such a union will be able to gallop tirelessly, having double movement speed in overland travel. If the characters refuse to wait with him, he will bang his shield and summon his 6 fellow grooms (HD 1+1, AC 15, armed with spears and daggers) to attack.
XXXX This island is the home to a mated pair of rocs. They spend the daylight hours hunting the giant snakes that live on the island in hex XXXX (see below). The island has three eggs buried partway in the sand and those not expecting such eggs my believe they are domed buildings without obvious entrances. Should the egg or hatchling of the rocs be taken to a noble or king rich enough to afford it, each of the three will fetch 3000gp, though woe be unto the noble who buys them. Should the eggs be struck or stolen, the rocs will attempt to sink any boat belonging to men associated with the act. A negative initial reaction roll will mean that the rocs think that a ship could serve as a meal. Unless their children are disturbed, the rocs are unlikely to pay attention to individual humans.
XXXX (Isle of Gems) This hex is full of a sandy desert infested with giant, venmous serpents (HD 4+2, AC 14). The snakes rarely emerge during the daytime due to fear of the rocs in hex XXXX (see above). Anyone wandering through the desert at night will encounter a snake for every 5 minutes of travel.
XXXX (Isle of Gems) The mountains in this hex are jagged and difficult to climb, but their heights are covered with gemstones (tigers eye if you're feeling cheeky). A group of merchants who know the secret way up the mountain through the skinned corpses of sheep down the mountain to collect the gems. Anyone who does so, or finds a sheep thrown by another person, will get 250gp in gemstones.
XXXX (Isle of the Apes) The shore of this island is home to 300 ape-men(HD 1+1, AC 14, Claw 1d6 or weapon)who can climb with such alacrity that they can easily get onto a ship even from the swirling ocean. They will cut the sails and ropes of any boat as well as carrying away any goods or treasure aboard. They will ignore anyone who does not attack, but if one is struck all the apes will move to attack the assailant if possible. They lair in a subterranean village, where they hide from the giant (see below), and have collected 1000gp in spices and other goods. No one is certain what they do with it, even seemingly the ape-men.
XXXX (Isle of the Apes) A large "abandoned" manor serves as the home for an adolescent giant and his mother (as Hill Giant and Stone Giant). The mother is rarely seen unless the adolescent is injured. The adolescent scours the island looking for people to eat. He will select the heaviest member of any party to take home and roast on a spit. He will only attempt to seize his potential meal and if attacked by others or injured will run to his mother. There is furniture in the manor worth 2500gp, and a +1 set of greek armor (as plate).
XXXX (Isle of the Cannibals) This small city of c. 1,500 is inhabited solely by cannibals and the Type IV Demon that serves as their king. The king usually operates under an illusion to make him appear as a mortal, but the scent of death is always present about him. Anyone who eats food prepared by the cannibals or presented by the king must make a poison Saving Throw or lose all sense and wish to do nothing more than eat. The first meal of each day prompts a new saving through, but with a penalty equal to all previous meals consumed. Eventually those stricken begin to resemble cattle and eat grain out in the fields, watched by cannibals. These victims are eventually slaughtered, their blood and organs fed to the demon and their flesh devoured by the cannibals.
XXXX (Isle of the Cannibals) This city, also of around 1,500 inhabitants, is much more innocuous than the city of the cannibals; however, it has a macabre tradition. Whenever a man or woman dies, they are lowered into the catacombs beneath the city along with their possessions and their living spouse. Some of the spouses have tried to form gangs in the underworld, killing newcomers for the little food and water they are given. An entrance to these catacombs exists on a cliffside facing the sea and is unknown to the inhabitants of the city.
XXXX This island seems like a lovely paradise - temperate but warm weather, sweet flowing streams, plentiful fish and fruit. Its sole inhabitant is the Old Man of the Sea (HD 4, AC 10, 1d6 damage with both fists, immunity to nonmagic weapons). He will ask to be helped up onto the back of anyone unfortunate enough to meat him, so that he might cross a stream he sits in front of. Once on the victim's back he will refuse to remove himself, forcing the character to move as though encumbered and in heavy armor, and will constantly gode and strike the victim into doing his bidding. It is impossible to remove him unless he sleeps, which he only does if he drinks alcohol. He has never actually seen alcohol before so does not know of this effect. This slumber also removes his immunity to magic weapons.
XXXX The area around this island is a set of doldrums which will permanently entrap any boat with sailors not adept enough to avoid it entirely. Once trapped the only option, baring magic or player ingenuity of course, is to set down on the nearby island. It is rich in natural resources, gems, gold, silver, and ambergris which flows out of a geyser for some reason. However, the island lacks any forms of food. A stream on the island leads into a dark cave that, if traveled long enough, leads through the earth and into hex XXXX, but it becomes so narrow that anyone attempting to make it through with treasure will at best only be able to come away with 1000gp in goods, and that is if they can think of a way to avoid bringing food on the journey.
XXXX This city of 666 buildings is actually home to 666 vrocks masquerading as humans. They will do little to reveal their nature, but will also refuse to allow any to leave the island. A family of humans dwells hear in fear of the vrocks, but they know a secret that can destroy them: causing the vrocks to fly into the sky will make the gods of good and light aware of their presence and bring down a cleansing fire.
This is the first in a series of posts where I want to outline a playable version of the city of Lychgate, the seat of the bishopric that includes the territory of Nightwick Abbey. I have technically run it before but only in very vague terms. I want to correct that and also just have a city of my own make to run city adventures in.
Specifically I want it to be an adventure site, but perhaps a little less chaotic than the City State of the Invincible Overlord. The first season of Netflix's Castlevania series has a scene where some priests try to mug a guy, which is about right.
I was originally inspired to do this by Jeff Russell's Middenheim project, as well as the original presentation of Middenheim and Chris Kutalik's Fever Dreaming Marlinko. More recently I've been running the City State of the Invincible Overlord again and am debating incorporating some aspects of that into my presentation. I'm still on the fence about some aspects, and part of the purpose of doing these posts is to make up my mind one way or the other.
On to the map. I knew I wanted a map in some way based off of Riga because, as I noted in the caption to the picture, it was the seat of the real world Livonian Brothers of the Sword. However I had to make it line up with the River Deep and Dark River as they appear on the "official" Dark Country map. When I was still thinking of primarily designing it by district, I turned it on its side and made this:
The districts are...
Red - The Fires (once slums but then a series of fires occurred allowing the Bishop room to build a new palace and his cronies some nice houses).
Purple - The Low District (Slums)
Orange - The Old Fortress (Middle Class and Upper Residential)
Yellow - The New City (Middle and Lower Residential and market area)
Blue - The Market District (Duh)
Green - The Shanty Town (totally burned to the ground the last time the PCs visited, likely rebuilt by refugees after the recent battle).
These are still going to be the district locations in the final version, but I debated doing a more CSIO-style street by street stocking and made this map just yesterday:
I have a hand written version with a couple of the unnamed streets on here named but no scanner. In hindsight I have decided to rename the Street of Swords Half Moon Street.
If I end up focusing on districts then I wasted some time coming up with street names. If I do the more CSIO model I'll still need the districts for encounter table purposes so it was worth my time. The next couple of posts likely won't need me to make a decision one way or the other anyway.
Next up will be an overview of the city, the watch, and religion.
Here are the current hooks available to the online group in my Wilderlands game. Those marked with a * are based on hooks provided in the City State book and those with a ** rely on the dungeon maps that came with that product.
The Missing Tricksters* Kogmeni Goldtooth, an obviously nervous clerk from the Litigation Trickster’s Guild, is looking for someone who will investigate and stop the abduction of tricksters that seems to be occurring with some regularity on Shady Street. He is willing to offer up 700gp for proof this task has been completed. The more usual patients inform anyone who has heard his offer that rumor is that some obscene cult has a secret temple on Shady Street, and that more than tricksters go missing. The Goblin Basement** Long Vran is the owner of the Cutthroat Tavern but is rarely seen inside except to collect money from the lockbox and to straighten out unruly customers. Tonight he sits among the assembled rogues and complains of goblins in his store rooms. What they’re doing outside their reservation after nightfall, he knows not, but he doesn’t like it. He promises a fine debauch for any man willing to slay the goblins and find out their intentions. He adds that such a debauch will be aided by sumptuous powders purchased from distant Karak and the finest houris Naughty Nannies can offer. The Spider Temple* A pair of drunken Skandiks in the inn are complaining about an offer they received from a heirophant of the Spider-God. They claim he is hiring fighters and bravos for a task, but that it is so chilling that no man would take him up on his offer. The heirophant, they assert, wants someone to go to an ancient temple in the Dearthwood where lives a half-spawned abomination of their god and slay it. The Sunken Spire A legend overheard in the Cutthroat Inn In time out of Time when the sandaled kings of Orichalca sat upon their rubied thrones and the brother-races of the Altanians and Alryans had yet to leave each other, no city was greater in all the world than Modron. Its purple-sailed vessels plied the waters of the world from the Demon Kingdoms to Klush and Wulin beyond. Many were its treasures and great its science and greater still its water-goddess, Modron. But time fades all things and Glaukos the Impious, a pirate from Kelnore, came with reavers and sacked the city and stole off with its jewels and idols. Thus was Modron destroyed, for a time, and its treasures lost, hidden in a pirate’s keep. Many legends tell of the doom of Glaukos, for he did not long outlive the dead city. The goddess Modron, abandoning the ruins of her home, followed him across the Winedark Sea. It waited long beneath the waves for him to become besotted and over-happy with his deeds, for a goddess can wait forever. When, at last, Glaukos set up for himself a keep on an island off the Roglaras, the goddess struck, drowning the keep and all its lucre… Until now! Sailors of the Overlord say that where once there was no island now a great spire rises out of the ocean, barnacle-wracked and blasted. No one has yet braved entering the strange holes in the side, and those who have sailed close to it at night speak of ghost lights flitting about from within… The Ghost of the Lake* A legend overheard in the street between the Cutthroat Inn and the Werelord Tavern An obviously drunken Altanian, singing in his barbarian accent, stumbles through Slash Street. Those who go outside the Cutthroat Tavern can hear him chant
Three nights awake In Oracle Lake The Lady cries for Help Four nights she sleeps And doesn’t weep Her soul’s gone down a well
Those about him make signs to Mitra or Hamarkhis to ward away the spirits of the dead, knowing he sings of an apparition just north of the City State. The Cool Noble On the 10th day of the Howling Winds, the party encountered Varius, an Alryan Noble who wanted them to steal an item from the house of Xanatheria Lily-Limb. The Doom Metal Pyramid Near the Adderwood (hex 2918) there is a mysterious doom metal pyramid (b/c its black). Mystery of the Manipulated Mules* Ion Skamos determined that the mule the purchased for the wagon from the wailing street vendor has been placed under a charm spell by an unknown party. While discussing this in the Cutthroat Inn, a passing Alryan noted that he heard from a friend who knows a guy that the Overlord himself is seeking the aid of ghost chaser in an alley near Wailing Street to rid his stables of phantasms.
I've talked with certainpeople quite a bit about the pros and cons of the scenario tools in Silent Legions. One of them has argued that it doesn't do enough to create a holistic mystery. Instead of having each new piece of information compounding to create a picture of the incident, they act as breadcrumbs to lead you to a preset resolution. This isn't necessarily linear (indeed non-linearity is part of the point) but Silent Legions' goal is focused on having certain types of scenes rather than replicating a police procedural. However, that structure works better for the kinds of superhero games I want to run. Having the kind of action and investigation "beats" (for lack of a better word) allows problem solving to be tied to the heroes' abilities and superhero stuff while still keeping it from being a bunch of fights in a line. I've made a couple of these before, but for this post I'm going to use one I made while writing it to show how it's done. I'm going to roll on the Silent Legions tables, provide the results, and then convert the whole thing into a supers scenario. First we need a resolution. I roll that it's going to be a Time Sensitive Resolution and get the following result: An Enemy seeks to destroy a Friend or an object which is impeding its Scheme. Investigations will reveal the existence of the threat and the means by which it intends to do this.
So we need to figure out what clues lead to the Existence of Threat and to the Means. I decide that both are people/events (the means being an actor of some type) and for the Existence of the Threat i get: The event was related to a Secret in the location, and those that are trying to protect the Secret will also try to dissuade the PCs from examining the event.
For the Means I roll: The Actor involved has been kidnapped by agents of the Enemy and taken to a remote Place. They mean to keep him or her out of events until the Scheme has come to completion, but they’ll kill him or her if necessary to preserve their silence. Now I decide I want a clue to the Scheme itself and get: The event was hushed by local police, and getting the facts requires either the cooperation of an Actor involved in the investigation or a stealthy inspection of local police records. For the Introduction scene I got: A Friend gives the PCs the results of their own research which aims the PCs at one or more Investigations. They’re still looking into things; if the PCs don’t dissuade them they’ll discover a useful clue for the heroes, but will perish hideously. ... and the Hook: The site's Enemy needs victims or recruits, and just happens to pick the heroes for an attack that is decidedly less overwhelming than it should be. The assailants have some sort of clue that traces back to the site. To give a little more description I want to flesh out some of these. I decide the Hook is an Ambush and so roll an ambush scene: The Enemy threatens a known Friend or ally of the PCs in order to goad them to come to their aid, and then attempts to deal with them all. The PCs will be aware they’re heading into danger, however, and may choose not to respond. I decide the Means is going to be some kind of physical Combat scene (the thing guarding the captured Actor) and get:an eldritch entity summoned by the cult. I decide to ignore the direct text - since this isn't a Cthulhu game - and instead that it's going to be some kind of non-human baddie as guard. For the Actorinvolved with the police I decide I want a social encounter with Someone Who Fears Something and get: fears a person present with them And finally the clue found that points towards the existence of the threat needs someone to..: recognize the residue of an occult ritual or event. Again I'm ignoring the word "occult" and just going to say they need to recognize that some kind of villainous activity took place. Taking some cues from the current political moment, I decide that HYDRA is working to get Taskmaster to train some Watchdogs recruits so they can infiltrate the NYPD. Ben Urich has been doing a report on the Watchdogs and wondering who is funding them and what they're planning. A group of trained but not yet initiated into the police Watchdogs take Urich hostage and are overconfident in thinking they can take out the team of heroes that arrives to confront them. From interrogating the Watchdogs or perhaps from some card or written address they can track down where Taskmaster is training them. Taskmaster doesn't exactly know who's funding him or why they want the guys trained but he's not one to leave money on the ground. The PCs can either confront him directly or stake out the place to become aware of his presence and then figure out how to proceed from there. If they want to follow the cop angle there's a non-crooked member of the NYPD, we'll call him Officer Joel because that name popped in my head, who realizes that all of his buddies are being replaced by real racist assholes but isn't in a position to talk about it and is usually followed, even off duty, by somebody in with the Watchdogs. While the PCs are working on one of those two angles, Urich continues the beat and gets kidnapped by actual HYDRA members. They lock him in a warehouse with some robots made by Arnim Zola and you got some things the PCs gotta fight to save him. It also leads some loose ends, like where are the HYDRA brass opperating out of? Do they have a goal with the police beyond just turning a blind eye to hate crimes? Do they have any other schemes with the Watchdogs? So hopefully that shows how you can use the Silent Legions tables to make super hero scenarios.
Dark Green - Viridistan
Pink - The City State
Yellow - Thunderhold
Grey - Warwick
Purple - Orcs of the Purple Claw
Orange - Kingdom of Lightelf
Light Blue - Kingdom of Ossary
Brown - Kingdom of Croy
Unlike Rob Conley's vision of the Wilderlands, I do not view the politics of the City State as fundamentally feudal. Instead I think the name implies that it is a city state in the Greco-Roman or Mesopotamian mode and instead of having subordinate fiefdoms it has a "sphere of influence."
Within that sphere of influence the power in question has de facto power but not necessarily de jure power. The de facto power comes mostly from the fact that they are more heavily militarized than the small villages they effectively bully. You'll note on the map that many of the spheres of influence overlap, and these are the places in which battles happen.
Viridistan is slightly different. On this map it shows a sphere of influence like the others, but on its home map it has provinces with governors who are more or less left to their own devices because of the incompetence of the inbred fish emperor. Most governors use their position to line their own pockets despite, or maybe because of, the fact that many have secretly been replaced with demons.
I should note that the kingdom of Lightelf is technically a client state of the Skandiks at Ossary, and that both Ossary and Croy are client states of the CSIO. Pity the villages that lie where their spheres of influence overlap, because they get bullied twice.
My first attempt at this received some flak for using some Old School D&D blogosphere jargon terms. I'm going to try to do better about that this time and make it more friendly for people who haven't been reading about these things for a decade now. What better way to do that than to talk about how to make them for the latest version of D&D?
I am not going to cover why you would ever make a megadungeon in this post, but may handle it later if there is interest. Instead I'm going to assume you already see the fun in exploring a big, weird space and in making one to be explored. Based on your hypothetical desire to run this style of game, I'm going to assume you would benefit from a houserule: half xp for monsters but you get 1xp per 1gp of treasure found. This will, hopefully, encourage players to spend resources going deeper into the dungeon to find treasure instead of trying to play the world's weirdest version of Rainbow Six.
Another assumption I'm making is that you want to follow the traditional megadungeon model where the level of the dungeon is roughly equivalent to the level of the PCs exploring it. Unfortunately, this is difficult in 5e given the nature of low levels. A fix I recommend (and that I use in the 5e version of Nightwick Abbey) is to have the first level of the dungeon have challenges for characters levels 1-3, and then each level after that is equal to one character (so dungeon level 2 is for character level 4, 3 is for 5, etc.). If you have c. 70 rooms on a level this should work fine with the other methods mentioned in this post.
Nightwick Abbey was inspired by films such as the Blind Dead.
As I said in the first post, if you want to run your megadungeon for a long time and not get too bored with it, you're gonna need to have a theme that resonates with you. The old "built by a mad wizard" potentially allows for a wide variety of potential content but may not grab you enough to work on it in the long term. My two most developed megadungeons (Nightwick Abbey and the Uz undercity) were based on the midcentury horror cinema I liked. A Tolkien fan might want to do a riff on the ruins of the Pits of Utumno or Angband. A fan of classic sci fi may want to do some version of the huge Krell machine in Forbidden Planet. Someone who is more familiar with the works of the big three pulp authors might want to base their dungeons on Mt Voormithadreth or the city in "Red Nails." There are a lot of possibilities but the important thing is that they resonate with you and are broad enough in terms of genre that you can draw from a wide variety of sources.
Once you have determined you're overall theme, you'll need themes for the different levels of your dungeon. Gygax suggested starting with 6 levels, but I think 3 is plenty and you can get by even with one with the judicious use of something like the Greyhawk Construction Company (in Nightwick I used purple mist). Each level should have a theme, like "the catacombs," "the sunless garden," "the orc spawning pits," "the house of portals," etc. This theme should fit within the broader theme of the dungeon (catacombs in a haunted abbey, for example) but provide a different flavor from the levels adjoining it. Each sub area should also fit within this theme.
Your New Best Friends
But what the hell do I mean by sub area? Your dungeon is going to be made up of smaller complexes with themes connected together on a level that has a theme in a dungeon that has a theme. M A R Barker, the creator of Tekumel, called these "Saturday Night Specials" - the dungeons within a dungeon. What I did for Nightwick Abbey, and what i recommend for your first time, is that you generate a level using a 4 x 3 set of dungeon geomorphs like those created by Dyson Logos. His geomorphs and those of his imitators are 10x10 sections of dungeon that all have exits at the same points so that they can easily be connected into larger complexes. Using Dave's Mapper can help you make a level with very little effort, and you can replace geomorphs that don't fit the theme very easily. However, you'll most likely need to add the connections to other levels to the map in the forms of staircases, ladders, pits, chutes, etc. I cheated with Nightwick Abbey and made the nature of the dungeon such that space is bent within it and thus the stairs didn't need to match up. You could also draw your own, which I have done with more recent iterations of Nightwick Abbey.
There are of course other ways to create these sub-complexes, but we're going to stick with geomorphs right now because tools like the ones above make them easy to work with. If you follow my advice, you should have about 12 geomorphs (with the open edged option on Dave's Mapper) to come up with sub area ideas for. Now some of your complexes might just be "storage" or some similarly vague thing like that that doesn't differentiate that geomorph much from the background themes of the level and the dungeon as a whole. That's fine, but you'll definitely want at least a few that are very unique. The more you have generally the better.
But What's Inside a Room?
To stock any dungeon, I use the following algorithm to quiet my body thetans: between 1/3 and 1/2 of the rooms will have monsters in them. This number is taken from old school D&D but I find it works just as well in 5e. I use a set of monster types including Bosses, Sub Bosses, Grunts, and Mooks. The CRs of these will be dependent on dungeon level. For every thirty rooms I have 1 boss encounter, 2 sub boss encounters, 3 grunt encounters, and 4 mook encounters. I've found that 12 geomorphs usually works out to 75-90 rooms, so a given level is likely to have three sets totaling 3 boss encounters, 6 sub boss encounters, 9 grunt encounters, and 12 mook encounters. I tend to determine these encounters based on the whole level, but one could hypothetically stock every geomorph with a smaller version of this setup; however, I find this produces too many boss encounters, so I use total dungeon rooms to determine how many monsters exist.
There will be a number of rooms with treasure in them equal to the number of rooms with monsters in them. Half of these will be a room that already has a monster, and half will be rooms where the treasure is merely hidden, trapped, or unguarded. To determine the total amount of treasure in a dungeon level, I generate treasure as though the level was the lair of each boss on that level. Typically this means 2-3 bosses. Look at their CR, and then roll in the DMG or pick based on whatever method you prefer the amount of treasure they would get for a creature of that CR. I recommend then using courtney's treasure document to divide treasure into parcels and make the stacks of money something more interesting. I then group these parcels into however many hoards I need to sprinkle around the dungeon (again equal to the number of monster encounters) and sprinkle them based on what I think is appropriate.
The map to a metroidvania, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
I hope to do an example of this kind of stocking soon, but this post is already one of my longest and I still have another topic to cover: Metroidvanias. This is a style of video game that has nonlinear paths but some are only accessible after certain progress is made in the game. Usually this is in the form of new powers granted to the character that allow them to overcome previous obstacles; however, for D&D megadungeons I recommend just using interesting keys. Have areas on some levels that can't be accessed until a key is found or an object manipulated on a lower level. This can make having to go through previously cleared areas to get to new dungeon levels more interesting because the players may realize "wait a minute, there's something still to be explored on this level and we just found that weird octagon stone like the hole in that wall."
I love that kind of stuff but it has a potential problem. The first several times I tried to implement it, the PCs found the key before they found the lock and ended up selling it between delves. This is part of why I specify that the key should be on a lower level than what it unlocks. It is still possible they'll sell or get rid of a key before using it, not realizing its true value, but sometimes it's more interesting if a door remains secret forever. If it wasn't, why have secrets in the first place?
Have I done this post before? Oh kinda! But I want to handle this a little different. This is kind of a combination Appendix N for my current campaign and my history with the Wilderlands. This is partly a response to friend of the blog and longtime online group player Huth's statement that he didn't quite "get" what I was going for. This post is meant to either help him get it or explain why it's difficult to get. I won't be sure which until people read it.
I first found out about the Wilderlands my freshman or sophomore year of college. I was not sure what to run for my college group so on a whim I looked up the wikipedia page for fantasy RPG settings. I saw the name The Wilderlands of High Fantasy and thought it was the dumbest thing I'd ever heard. It was so dumb I had to know why someone would name something that. In reasearching it, I found out there was a 3e version of the setting, and since that was the main RPG I ran at the time (it's the one I started with) I looked into it more.
What I found was a lot of people talking about how it was more Swords & Sorcery than a modern D&D setting. It hearkened back to the Old Days, when fantasy and science fiction were not so separate. The days of pulp magazines and bronze age four color fantasy. The days of pulp fantasy. Now at the time I actually had fairly limited experience with the actual texts involved in these statements. I was familiar with pulp sci fi and horror through my love of spaceships, the works of H P Lovecraft, and the book the Art of Imagination, which I was given for Christmas once in high school. I still treasure that book.
I was also familiar with the successors of these forms of adventure fiction, though I wouldn't have recognized the connection at the time: 1950s sci fi and mid-century adventure films. The idea of a setting that felt like that and the appeals to a nostalgia for a past that I never lived in set my mind afire. I was also intrigued by the type of gameplay it promoted that the OSR now calls the "hexcrawl," because it matched the video games I actually liked to play but I had only experienced and run fairly linear storyline stuff before this time.
So I bought the 3e box set. I also bought some of the fiction people said it resembled - most notably the Conan stories of Robert E Howard (specifically the collection with illustrations by Mark Schultz, whose art still defines the Hyborian Age to me). I also picked up the Conan movie because people said it was good, and while I found them very different I enjoyed both immensely.
The box set took some time coming in so for a long while I relied on the free Lenap chapter that was hosted online. Its jungle climate with barren hills and volcanic islands reminded me of Infant Island from Mothra, which made me love it all the more and makes it still one of my favorite areas of the Wilderlands. In fact, it is the basis for a large part of Yavana. However, this campaign ended in a TPK and by then I had gotten a hold of the box set and moved the action to the City State of the Invincible Overlord (with a brief excursion into Tarsh).
An important thing to note, then, is that the Wilderlands was in many ways my introduction to pulp fantasy, though reading Grognardia a few years later would greatly increase the amount I read. It was easier for me to deal with the fact there were weird D&D races that wouldn't normally be in Swords & Sorcery fiction because I didn't yet have a developed enough taste to recognize it. My primary science fantasy D&D alike exposure was the Might & Magic series, and that had elves and dwarves and even minotaurs and vampires in some games and you ended most of them by shooting the boss with rayguns. Heck, in some of the games the elves were even blue, which made it easier to understand the funny colored wilderpeople.
Another thing to note is that I started running the Wilderlands during my college career, where I majored in history and minored in classics (and eventually went on to get an MA in Premodern History). To the Retro Stupid Wilderlands setting I added a great deal of Pretension. The difference between the Skandiks of Croy and Ossary became many of the differences between Vikings and Saxons. The armies of the City State became late Roman in character. I knew enough about Persia to make the connections to the magic archers and name of Viridistan.
A mock cover created by Trey Causey that I think gets the tone Exactly Right
My history with the Wilderlands certainly makes it my most maximalist setting. It is a jambalaya of influences that developed as I ran the setting. My interest in "precious shithole hellscapes" developed after finding Huge Ruined Scott's original Wilderlands OD&D blog and through that the rest of the OSR. That blog is why this blog exists. The tastes I developed through reading OSR blogs led me to trying to decide from the ground up why OD&Disms would be the way they are, based on my own proclivities, which is what led to Nightwick Abbey. I don't design settings the way I did for the relatively blank slate of the Wilderlands material anymore, and I would never put elves in a Swords & Sorcery setting now.
But the Wilderlands is enough part of my D&D DNA now that I can run it without chaffing too much at its contradictions. Things are sometimes the way they are because that's the way they are in the Wilderlands. Elves and Hobbits go steal the jewel from the Tower of the Elephant.
Anyway I mentioned an Appendix N at the beginning so I should probably do one of those. This represents both what I was reading for the original campaign and what I've read since that has been incorporated into my imaginings.
Books
Geary, Patrick - Before France and Germany
Howerd, Robert E. - Almuric, Conan Series***
Jordanes - History of the Goths
Leiber, Fritz - The Sword Series***
Lovecraft, H. P. - "The Mound," At the Mountains of Madness, and other Cthulhu mythos stories.
Smith, Clark Ashton - The Hyperborean and Zothique Cycles*, "The Abominations of Yondo," "The Maze of the Enchanter"*
Moore, C. L. - Jirel of Joiry Series, Northwest of Earth Series
Tolkien, J. R. R. - The Hobbit*
Movies
Atlantis: The Lost Continent
Conan the Barbarian
Deathstalker 2 (and some of the visuals from 1 but man does 1 have too much rape).
The Golden Voyage of Sinbad*
Hawk the Slayer
Hercules in the Haunted World
Jason and the Argonauts
The Minotaur, the Wild Beast of Crete
Mothra*
Rodan
The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad***
Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger**
Comics
Conan and Savage Sword of Conan by Marvel
Conan by Dark Horse ElfQuest (currently by Dark Horse)
Godzilla by Dark Horse
Video Games
Elder Scrolls - Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim
Heroes of Might and Magic 2
Might & Magic 1 - 8**
Legend of Zelda - Link to the Past, Link's Awakening, Ocarina of Time
Sid Meier's Pirates
Wizardry 6
Special Mentions: Basil Paledouris's soundtrack for Coanan the Barbarian, which I listened to while both prepping and running, and My Barbarian's "Unicorns LA" which gives me some of the same weird Nostalgia for Past Times of D&D feels.
.png)
