"Relics of The Dungeon Age"

Note: I'm not going to do session reports on the current ongoing dungeon jobber, though some of this post will seem kind of like its going that direction. As if. But I do want to get into what its about a bit, more or less, to point out some thoughts and ideas in relation to such a campaign. It seems every campaign these days has me getting the privilege of touching upon beloved old school notions, while also exploring new things with the latest edition. Yes, I do believe these things can live together.

So,

One of my "things" as a DM of old school persuasion who is doing a dungeon-as- tentpole campaign is to delay the actual dungeon crawling for several games (at least). There are a lot of reasons for that. Sometimes it's to let the characters settle into the campaign, and maybe go up a level or two. An extreme example would be my Night Below campaign for the old ongoing group back in my home city of Los Angeles almost 10 years ago. It was maybe a 30-session campaign of almost a year, with the characters, when all was said and done, were in the neighborhood of 8th or 9th level (traditionally high levels in my post-teenage years). And the first three or four of those were just bumping around the surface towns and villages getting to the point of being strong enough to go into the Night Below (which I believe counts as a dungeon as much as the old Descent into the Depths was). 

So, a little Roll20 campaign with a handful of my besties. A journey to one of the last remnants of the time of dungeons, or the Dungeon Age as I like to call a time period now mostly past (in my setting and in D&D in general). And I love the title "Relics of The Dungeon Age" because I can kind of see it having multiple meanings. The dungeon itself a relic of a time past. Old relics you actually find in the dungeon. And perhaps the players themselves, wanting to delve into a dungeon, are themselves relics of that age in an analogical sense. 

As a nice change from dealing with often oddball strangers of the Roll20 forums, this is an intimate little campaign with my very closest friends. 

 Best friends. Almost family. There is no more comfortable gaming than with people you have known for a long time, or feel close to for whatever reason. Not "D&D" people, but just some people who sometimes play D&D. That was always my sweet spot, especially in the 90's. Private groups filled with people you already know who want to play. 

So yeah, several games of just travelling south to get to the dungeon. So the deal with the delay is: B &L are new to Roll20, so I thought a series of basic overland and town encounters would kill some time till they were up and running with it. But I also wanted them to be a little higher in level than 1st when they entered the dungeon for reals. Why? I mean, a classic dungeon is just made for, you know, 1st level dudes on the first level. 2nd level on the 2nd level. Rinse and repeat. 

But c'mon. Does it have to be that ginned up for fairness in leveling. Was it ever? Back in the day in the Caves of Chaos you would) fight kobolds and goblins at 1st level?  2) orcs and gnolls at 2nd? 3) ogre and Medusa at 3rd-4th?

OK, CoC really isn't a levelled thing classically. But you know what I mean. 

Naw. I mean, when trying to go full classic every few years with a self-designed magical dungeon, it was fun to go "ok, rats and kobolds on 1st level, the orcish clan on the 2nd, a 3rd level with minor undead, blah blah blah." That is fine for the oldest of old school. But with this edition I think I can stray from the formula. You know, what they consider classic dungeoneering gold on old grognard sites such as Dragonsfoot.

"...AND EVERY THIRD ROOM SHOULD BE
EMPTY AND FULL OF DUST!"

So these guys would eventually enter the dungeon, probably through the entrance that goes to the 1st level, and they shall be around 3rd level when they do. 

So we started the campaign in a rural hillside town in the human shire south of the kingdom proper. Overtown in the shire of Overton. 

A location I have used for decades. I love rustic shires as a break from city games or deep wilderness slogs. Out in nature but still in civilization. 

And just to the south the halfling shire of Bundtland. But Overtown was the furthest south human dominated town. The last before things get all hobbity. With B's young sorcerer Ruvan, and L's wood elf ranger Myrnigan (a gal running a male character...grrrr) a team was forming. 

Ruvan the sorcerer. 

Myrnigan the wood elf

Ruvan is from the sparsely populated Riverlands just east of the shire, and Myringan from the nearby Blackwood Forest; a far cry from the metropolitan wood elf community/city of New Denaria a few days east of the city Tanmoor. These are areas I wanted to develop for a long time. My setting has been built in large part from character backgrounds and birthplaces, and these are two new towns/villages I can put on the map. 

T was not present for the first session. I wanted to do a little work on getting B and L up and running with characters with the nifty Charactermancer, and some character set up. They were knew to Roll20.

With an eventual party of 3, I need a 4th. So in comes the DM NPC, Evador, who is a young cleric of the healing god Billick. She is "a Blue Heart on the Red Path," a cleric of Billick who wished to be an active field cleric for the faith. So she chooses a dangerous mission of a personal nature to complete as sort of a thesis to impress the leadership at the Billick cathedral. She hooks up with Ruvan and Myrnigan during a barfight at the tavern they get swept up in. Evador explains her mission, to go and enter one of the worlds last true mythic dungeons. She asks them to accompany her. 

I have fun with this NPC. She is a former rich party girl from the city, who had a year or two of college then discovered the religion of the healing god Billick. Despite her rich kid rearing, she is taking the religion seriously, but I also have her dealing with physical stats that are not optimal for fighting monsters. I portray her as a tall girl who is a little awkward physically (in the most recent encounter she missed with her mace five times in a row). 

T's (wood elf) character Xanthia, playing tunes as a bard at the tavern, would be there to meet the other characters in the second game. Evador was seeking her out, because Xanthia had been to the dungeon before.

 

..and looked fabulous doing it.

Yeah, my very first little Roll20 campaign where T first ran Xanthia about 3 years ago was to this very dungeon. They got to the second level, and got to mess with its magical pool room, a staple of my mythic dungeons going back to In Search of The Unknown. I thought it would be fun for her to go to The Meadowlands Dungeon again as the sort of mentor about it to the other characters. In the first game she was still 3rd level while the others were 1st. It was a fun dynamic. Both T and I played with the notion of her coming off as the seasoned vet and Defacto leader. 

Off they went, heading south into the halfling shire of Bundtland. I already posted about their encounter with the halfling witch Emerelda, and their starring in a dating game show at her festival.

Fun in the chill halfling shire. Xanthia knew Governess Cymbaline Garlandheels from the previous campaign and ran into her and her entourage at the festival. This time there was to be a party at the estate. After helping out with some giant spider problems in the area, they boogied down (more or less) with local personages and interesting locals. A halfling high society deep dive. Good contacts. And a good way to gain a quick 5 lbs. 

I'd had Cymbaline as the governess of the shire forever. Tall and more slender, I always referred to her as a "Manling," a rare half hobbit half human mix. Be when all is said and done probably just a "Tallfellow."

So the party was swell. Xanthia playing tunes with the band. Myrnigan dancing with the young halfling gals with a crush on him. 

It was cool, but there would be more parties before the dungeon was delved. 

Next: Overdoing it with a DM NPC

 

Campaign Gaming and "Plot B"

 "Plot B" is a concept in media, but mostly pops up in Sitcoms. Like almost every sitcom episode ever made since the 50's.

Usually in the case of sitcoms, it's a means to fill things out if the main storyline won't fill up the slot. Most if not all episodes of Seinfeld leaned heavily into it. Some even have C plots. Like the "Festivus" episode that had a side story with Kramer protesting his old bagel shop, and also one with Elaine trying to get a free sub sandwich. And for god's sake, there was D plot - Jerry's "two face" girlfriend. Whew, that's a lot of subplots. 

The Simpsons pointed this trope our back in the day, where Lisa is given a long vision of her family years into the future. When she asks the shaman "why did my vision include a plot where Homer was looking for buried treasure?", the magic man replies "I guess the spirits thought the main plot was a little light."

So anyway, I try to get these little subplots going in a campaign. Always have, though in the past I didn't have to think about it so much. I ran a lot of city campaigns back in the day and was winging it like crazy like you often have to do in a city setting. PC's often going off to do their own thing, and maybe 10-15 minutes having do be devoted to their activities. But at least these days I have a phrase for it. We do live in a time when we have to label everything, right? 

So your main "plot" might be the characters going to Keep on The Borderlands. It could be a full railroad "go to the keep, get rooms at the inn, hear some rumors, go to the Caves of Chaos, fight some shit. Take the treasure. How many experience points do we get. 

Fuck no. That shit needs padded out. When I ran this module last, I set up the Castellan of the keep (and named him and everybody because they didn't bother to come up with names in the original material), his seconds, the NPC's running the inn, and some interesting NPC's to fill out the market area. Enough personalities with some color to help them stand out so they can get interacted with. A prostitute, a pick pocket urchin, a handsome ranger of whatever sex. Anything to fill the dead air. If I recall in the material the only major NPC within the keep is the evil cleric who wants to be besties. That just ain't enough. Now, not all your NPC's will get interacted with. But the point is to have a wealth of them and see what might stick. 

In my last couple of posts I talked about a couple of potential antagonist NPC's who ended up piquing the interest of members of the party. But initially I packed this campaign with interesting NPC's. Most of them being part of the high-end merchant caravan the PC's would be a part of. 

There was Marge, the boisterous seasoned caravan master and boss of the outfit. 

The merchants themselves were all from the big city of Tanmoor and selling all high end, expensive wares. 

Like Lacy the clothes seller. Or Bradly the Bookseller. Or Waldorf the Wine Seller. Several NPC's whom the characters can assist along the way and get to know if they so choose. Callie, the lovely paladin and secret Aasimar, was roped into a fashion show by Lacy for a local Counts daughter to see:

Callie, the glue that holds the party together. 

Lacy kept slapping big city outfits, makeup, and wigs on Callie and rushing her out to be ogled. And it was a hoot. One of my players who had singing experience started singing "Girls just Wanna have Fun" as I revealed each image:

It was just one of the many side bits that came out of having a variety of NPC's around. Like in that particular session, this little fashion show was Plot B. And all the characters participated in a way, that is, they got to see a party member, a shy seeming, cookie baking village girl, in a different light. It was a little thing that IMO had a bit of an impact. 

Injecting things that can promote "Plot B" type things is very effective if you have players who are into role playing at all. And I'm not talking community theater here. But many players enjoy a world where lots of things can happen outside of the railroady main quest. Especially with the advent of video game RPG's, such as Skyrim where you seem to do endless side quests. 

But just making side plots possible is part and parcel of emergent gameplay. YMMV.

Man, I can't get enough of that word. "Emergent." Just rolls off the tongue. 

Cheers. 

Orcs, goblins, bugbears - same, same, same?

Early on in this blogs first run, I made a post about orcs in general. But my friend "L" has recently been reading a book called "Orconomics" or something like that which got me thinking a bit about them. Not so much as "what are they," but what I have had them be in the past and present. 

For sure I have gone back and forth about the general nature of orcs.  For most of my DMing life I have had them be of the almost demonic Tolkien variety. Murderous, hateful, cannibalistic.  Other times, like now, I have backed a little bit off my belief that most human women would rarely survive an assault scenario.  But there are a lot of half orcs characters in my games the last few years. For many years now various media (video games, non D&D rpgs, etc) often portray orcs as more or less barbarians, though sometimes noble. I've resisted that interpretion. I think its pretty boring just to make them human-like thugs or barbarians. Hateful and inherently and irredeemably evil beyond human ability to be so are my orcs.  Orcs, elves, dwarves, halflings; I like them to be pretty much drilled down into a single type of personality with particular behaviors. Its humans who should have the wide variety of behaviors. Saintly to thuggish. 

I have found over the years that everybody has a kind of orc they like. I guess my biggest change to them, starting around the late 90's up into more recent years, was to have goblins and bugbears just be different sizes of orc. Goblins are the wee ones, and bugbear stats used to signify Uruk Hai types. 

I may be totally wrong, but my impression from LOTR goblins were indeed just low forms of orc. The original hobbit of course had them be goblins, a separate race. Peter Jackson went that way with them. I think the old Rankin Bass Hobbit cartoon had them as goblins. 

Or...something...

This kind of made it easy on me. I did not feel I needed a wide diversity of humanoid types. With gnolls, kobolds, ogres, etc. around there seemed to be plenty. 

I think it was several years ago when I used The Keep on the Borderland's Caves of Chaos that I started going back on this notion a bit. The caves are a highly diversified series of apartment flats sectioned off by race. Orcs, goblins, gnolls, bugbears. At this point it was harder to think in terms of "ok, small orcs are over here, and a bunch of Uruk Hai are over there. " Doable but felt a little awkward to me. My thinking would have made the other races quite outnumbered by orcish types. 

But it was my adopting 5th edition about 3 years ago that had me breaking up the orcish diversity thing. In old edition the humanoids are mostly divided up by HP, AC, and damage ability.  But in 5th things are way more unique. Advantages and such giving them specialties. Abilities to gang up on foes, charge their foes, etc. So I parse them back out. Goblins have zero relation to orcs. Back to being creatures more akin to Brownies and Red Caps of legend.

"I'm a goblin. In a red cap."

 And I think I prefer it. I like to think of goblins classically, more mischievous than outright bloodthirsty, but also often murderous. A single blade-wielding goblin coming up in the dark to stab you in the back, or a small gang of them looking to take down a loot a "big'un." But also capable of just being families of mushroom farmers in the upper caves of the world, wanting to be left alone. My basic orcs are less diverse. They just want to torture you, kill you and maybe eat you.  

Bugbears are back to being their own thing as well, though I might still look to them as examples of nice big badass Uruk's. 

We just won't mention what they are like per Runequest.

Your Gameworld: Reboots and Retcons

I was very fortunate as a kid, early on in my gaming, to have started a game world and kept with it for decades. It was really just a dungeon and a tavern to go to between games. That really only lasted a couple of sessions, as supply shops and residences besides the tavern became necessary. And that's how my setting Acheron grew. As things were needed. Often locations would be created by players as backgrounds for their characters, and that added to my world. So it was a growing thing, created out of shared experiences.

I always tried to maintain a consistency in my world. If something happened, then the world was forever affected by it. The Isle of Dread visited for the first time? OK, now it was no longer virgin territory. The Caves of Chaos battled through and the evil temple destroyed? Guess I'm never using that location again. At least not the way it was. 

But I softened on that consistency in the last decade or so as I found myself wanting to reuse certain adventures that I loved. Mostly notably the old White Dwarf Magazine dungeon The Lichway. Also, I have had a lifelong love for the Runequest Glorantha town of Apple Lane, a module I also adapted for use in D&D. In the Lichway you very likely release a hoard of undead in the complex. In Apple Lane you will defend a pawnshop from an evening attack (in the Runequest material its a tribe of baboons), and eventually explore The Rainbow Mounds and fight the forces of the Dark Troll White Eye (an orc in my D&D setting). 

Apple Lane I could reuse a couple of times because the first time (and maybe second and third) I used it for Runequest. Decades ago. For D&D I changed some names; Gringle became Gengle. Apple Lane became Lemon Tree. But most details stayed the same. Lichway was sort of "one and done" because, well, hundreds of undead at large in the place. 

But there came a time when I realized the only person I was fooling with a sort of enforced purity of continuity in the world was myself. Every few years I found myself with a brand new group. In every case nobody had ever heard of Apple Lane or The Lichway. This was a fantasy world with no real value outside my games. Why was I so worried about continuity. Did it really matter? 

But in a way I have found, for me at least, a happy compromise. A location reboot. I decided that some locations might be in sort of a dimensional loop (or whatever). Perhaps a curse or will of some godling that no matter what happens it returns the location, all its inhabitants, back to a zero setting. When one group of players is out of my life, I can refresh these old favorites to use again if I so choose. The undead of The Lichway return to their crypts. Dark Odo and her followers rewind back to their old positions. The local fishing village forgets the adventurers who came that time and unleashed the undead hoards who would keep them awake at night howling within the necropolis. Apple Lane itself is also in a continuity loop. Gringle will always need brave souls to protect his pawn shop. White Eye the orc always returns to life and haunts the Rainbow Mounds. 

These are out of the way locations, so its easy to just reset and reuse.

There is a new wrinkle though. One of my old players from my home town is involved in my online Roll20 games. I want to use Apple Lane and its environs once more (maybe for the 5th time, in two worlds). But the thing is she had a character experience this 20 years ago. The entire adventure was a major point in her characters life. Back then she ended up falling in love with the pawn shop owners assistant "Hobbit John" (a duck in the Runequest version) and marrying him (yes, she was a hobbit as well, a cleric and local sheriff). So she would surely remember all this. 

But its cool. She is a trusted old player. She has played in several different groups of mine over the decades. So I can go ahead and jerk the curtain a bit in her case. Let her know what I am doing. Tell her about the reboot concept. It would be a rerun for her, but its been long enough where she won't remember every detail so it can still be fun for her. And of course there will be differences. Hobbit John is gone, having married a players character and being released from whatever curse maintains the retcon in Apple Lane. My last go at the Lichway was different as well (she was not involved in that campaign as it was face to face before the pandemic) as noted in my previous posts about The Lichway. 

So things can and should be changed up. But there is no negative side to reusing beloved modules and disrupting the continuity of your world. And modules aren't the only changes I've embraced. Hell, back in the day I let a friend run a campaign in my world where he promptly affected things on a continental level. For the longest time I just kept all his messing with the world as part of its history. But it got to the point where I said "why?" and just dismissed those things. Wiped them from the history. He certainly would never know. He died in the 90's.

Nobody really knows but me. And as I get older I just don't care any more. I'm not writing The Silmarillion here. Its just a D&D setting. When I'm gone it comes with me.  Its just about having fun and is no more serious than that. 

The Lichway - "why are they here?"

 

The Lichway is a dungeon that originally appeared in issue #9 (Oct/Nov 1978) of White Dwarf magazine out of England. It was an old favorite of mine, and over the decades I've now used it probably 4 or 5 times. It would have been more than that, but my groups tended to be long lasting, years, and I could only spring it on an entirely fresh group of players. 

Many old schoolers probably are more about using Keep on the Borderlands and the Caves of Chaos multiple times (I've used them maybe twice since I was a kid). But while KotB is about as basic and vanilla as it gets (just fight endless caves of humanoids and maybe a nice-seeming cleric is a homicidal asshole), Lichway is an artifact of old indy style D&D like Arduin Grimoire and Judges Guild. The old school common dungeon elements are abundant:

The location has a gritty background (necropolis for deceased undead worshippers).

It has a shallow waterway running through it.

A deep variety of mostly offbeat monsters inhabit the area. 

There is plenty of grim mood and dungeon dressing (hundreds of open crypts, worms that will choke you in the fresh water sources, vampire statues, a long-ranging rustling sound emitted by a unique creature, a horrifying possible no-win scenario...think quick!).

But most iconic to me is the fact that several (and by several I don't mean like just 2) different groups/gangs are currently inhabiting the dungeon with for the most part no real goal or purpose other than await murder hobo's a'coming to call. I mean, there are a pair of Man Beasts (character class out of White Dwarf and another favored old school thing of mine)  just sitting around in a small enclosed hallway. Just like old school you need to inject your own motivations and reasons, whether the designers planned it like that or not (I suspect in most cases not. The style was just to give little description, because D&D was once a game about just killing monsters. Period.). 

I always injected a little of my own juice here and there since the first time I used it as a teen. It was easy just to assume the 2nd level Man Beast, a male, is training his lower level female follower, and a crypt with all kinds of creatures in it seemed like a good spot. 

I think that in all but one of the times I used it, the party manages to release the Sussurus, the ape-shaped thorn creature that emitted a windy sound that put undead in earshot to sleep. In my second to last use around four years ago back in LA the MU cast silence on it. So I've experienced that joy of playing out the party running away in chaotic "every man for himself" style through the part of the dungeon they hadn't explored yet to get away from hundreds of angry undead. Always a hoot. I think a player or two has been lost over the play through due to a bad decision or delay (describing a body being torn to bits by a howling mob of skeletons never gets old), but so far no TPK. but its come close almost every time.

So anyway, my first campaign in my new town the other year ended up geared towards Lichway. It didn't start out that way. This was an entirely new group and I was using 5th edition for the first time. To say I went into it NOT studied up on the rules in an understatement. Since all my players were newish to the edition, I used that as a way to learn. As the players learn while using their characters I would tap into that and learn along. 

And to be honest, on an old school note, I was able to wing things much more than I thought I could. Just tap into the stat base save mechanics for everything and you are good to go. Really, outside of magic use the system is pretty easy peasy. 

But since I was new to it I started slow. Running each game in sort of a simple episodic manner. At first not really looking to the future, but as time went by, the characters made contacts and friends in the way of NPC's, I had to start looking at a direction. And I knew I wanted to use an old school module, in part because I knew the players would not be familiar with anything I had from the old days. They were all a good bit younger than me. 

So first thing was to be prepared to use Lichway for 5th editon. No worries. Really nothing in there was too out of the ordinary. Man Beasts and the Susurrus were needing to be adapted. Not much else. 

But this time I decided to do something entirely different. This was a twist for me, and since it might be for you, you might want to consider it if you ever use this really excellent dungeon setting. What did I do?

Two things. First I decided to give all the groups in the dungeon an actual reason, and actual purpose, for being in the dreary place. A convergence of coincidence for good reasons.

Second, I would have the party, early on adventuring a hundred miles south of the Lichway in the big city Tanmoor prior to the Lichway delve, actually meet and interact with some of the inhabitants whom I had yet to set up shop in the Lichway. There would be a variety of things ahead of time that would set up the dynamic elements within the necropolis. And in so doing quadruple the feeling of gravitas once the location was reached. Sort of a prequel to Lichway as presented, starting  maybe a month before the actual dungeon delve.

I switched the female MU gang leader Dark Odo from a human to a young drow magic user. Highly charismatic and specializing in charm magic, the dark elf enchantress' gang was almost complete as shown in the module.. The Man Beasts were paid scouts and body guards working for Odo, hirelings more than charmed henchmen, while all the other members of the gang were recruited by Odo's considerable, manipulative charms.

Why would Odo go to the Lichway? And who where the unrelated thieves who were exploring the Lichway? Not to mention the former adventuring party that was slaughtered except for Odo's gangs captives. How did the character party get involved in all this? 

In my next post I'll lay out how I took my first 5th edition campaign towards the Lichway, and why all the NPC's are in it when the party finally shows up at the Korm Basin necropolis. 

Cheers

Kevin Mac