Imagining Content - Dungeon Bestiaries

Inventing monsters is always fun and it seems to be something that happens to me automatically as I try to invent and imagine dungeons, settings and so forth. Often I will scribble out a map and then write a paragraph or two of silly fluff about the map and from there will spring ... the background of the setting, the rationale for the monsters, decorations and so forth. I don't start working room-by-room but basically set down to write a description of the entire dungeon (or section of dungeon). For example, a while back I fiddled with a 3d labyrinth in illustrator and came up with the following (text added earlier today):

The Fourfold Catatomb

From the description I came up with a massive tomb built to commemorate a deified, vicious despot who ruled with an iron fist and a trumped up state religion. After his death the bureaucratic state he set up kept running things by reference to the aforementioned monarch - a bit like a feudal-fantastic police state. Eventually it might have collapsed, but that's neither here-nor-there. The dungeon/tomb is explained as a state effort to glorify a mighty monarch and keep him protected and pleasured through the ages ... or his spirit, in any case.

What does the dungeon look like? Geometric, symmetrical, finely made and richly carved. Obviously, no expense was spared to make it and slaves were worked to death to ready it. There might be hidden niches, scrawled graffiti where it couldn't be seen, places that were sabotaged by the workers themselves. However,  most of the dungeon is rich, carved and well made. Much of the treasure in such a dungeon would be in the form of carvings, friezes, wall-hangings and so forth. Places might have decayed over time, been flooded or otherwise, but the overall feeling should be rich, and possibly oppressive and over-awing, with large statues of the monarch.

What are the monsters? Well, this is where my imagination usually runs off with me. Basically, the dungeon was stocked with protectors for the monarch - undead made from enemies of the state. These would be the afore-mentioned bronze-corpses, wood-walkers, bone-banes and lilting-weirds. These are probably more-or-less mindless undead or combinations of automatons & undead, powered by the souls of the king's enemies. These would be a generic menace to adventurers entering the dungeon, but something that could also be turned or subverted to help - or at least ignore - the cunning adventurer. A simplistic approach would see looters trying to wade through ever larger hordes of them, possibly dying pointlessly. On the other hand, the crystal-and-blood creations are sworn protectors of the dead monarch, implacable foes of looters and a combat trial that has to be faced to win riches or avoided. The bone-and-wax creatures are there to provide pleasure for the monarch, these would be used more to give a sense of horror and the macabre to the dungeon than to truly be foes for the adventurers, though they might overcome weakened characters. Finally, should the characters come upon the resting place of the king himself, a fitting end would be to have them face the "four ancestors" - perhaps demons bound to the king's body, who had empowered him to raise the kingdom.

In a final twist, the demons might actually be waiting for somebody worthy of them and they might offer one of the adventurers the temptation of taking their gifts (lets say of a silver tongue, a mighty hand in war, eyes in the back of the head and a ward against physical attacks) and reclaiming the lands the king had ruled. Perhaps the king was an unwitting pawn, perhaps he had played the demons for fools, in any case, this gives an open ending - instead of just going for the treasure, the heroes might unleash further adventures.

And there it is ... a self-contained, wealthy, maze-like tomb, filled with macabre soul-powered automatons, dolls and corpses, centred around a quartet of powerful demons. Add a dash of jellies, oozes, gelatinous dodecahedra, perhaps some worms or rats, and voila. Serve properly dried and diced!

Sandbox BASS

I have run sandbox-ish campaigns for as long as I can recall, and most times the rules I've run them with have made it harder, not easier, to run a campaign of that sort. Playing with various incarnations of D&D, there would be the invariable scaling from 1st level wimp to 10th level hero, to a situation of "high-level over-powered munchkin that is impossible to challenge seriously". Well, impossible to challenge without putting in far more time as a DM than I found fun. I never wanted to spend hours compiling spells, abilities, treasures to *finally* challenge the players. I wanted to spend that time on fun characters, plots, twists and turns ... bits and pieces of lore and adventure that I could drop into the game.

About 2-3 years ago I ran across the various concepts of old-school gaming & sandbox games on the internet and soon realized this was pretty much what I had been looking for. Fiddling around further, I realized I wanted a game with less of a power-curve and more bloody damned adventuring. I wanted the players to start with "heroes" like Conan, characters with back-story & ability - but not with super powers. That's the direction we started developing BASS - which is basically still little more than a simplified house-rule-set & a character generation system for creating bad-ass, unusual characters.

The next few steps I want to take are the development of tables & elements for populating the sandbox: regions, locations, items, artifacts, opponents. Tools that will allow me, as the DM, to throw more at the players, more easily and with less planning. Because that, I think, is a rule that should be set in stone:

Planning and preparing for a game should not take longer than actually running the game!

It might be fun, but, honestly, much of it will never be seen. So why do it? That's why I want elements that can recycle from adventure to adventure, campaign to campaign ... and if one of them sparks a hook that starts a player of on a cycle of adventures, then so be it. If not: it's just loot for sale!

More to follow ...

Sandbox Thinking 1

As I work on preparing my sandbox I find that the tools I use impose their own logic and workflow. If I just jot notes in a notebook, I end up with a lot of ideas, but basically just a brainstorm. If I try to work in a text editor, I keep trying to write whole stories, but end up writing a lot of text that is (at least to my style of role-play Refereeing) quite useless.

An interesting tool I've found while working on a "codification" (if you could call it that) of the character generation process in our D&D game is the humble spreadsheet. With a spreadsheet you're automatically in the world of semi-random generated tables and ideas that can be slotted together modularly. However, the spreadsheet still imposes the need to be brief with your descriptions since there's just no room for whole stories. Also, the spreadsheet naturally gives itself over to a focus on the key elements say of an encounter, a monster, a piece of treasure or whatever it is you are using in your adventure. Finally, it imposes non-linearity, since each piece of a spreadsheet is interchangeable and available as an independent data point, while text is linear and imposes an authorial logic.

Anyway, after wasting two evenings writing text, I've decided to just stick to a spread sheet for now - not least because my laptop has recently started to become more and more important as a refereeing (DM) aid in my games over the last year.

Longwinter Introduction

I am preparing a sandbox adventure cycle, which I will possibly eventually package into a module. I will post much of the background to it here (possibly omitting those details that would not be player knowledge).

Without further ado:

Background

The fall of the Empire drove smallfolk around the northern fringes of the settled lands deeper into the hills and mountains of the Worldspine to avoid the centaur khans and the humanoid bandits that prowled the wastelands. Beyond the Hungry Ghosts the settlements were especially exposed and the southern fringes of the Great Steppe were almost completely depopulated. Further east the survivors pushed, some prospered, most perished.

One group under Goodlord Verdek settled a high, wide valley that nestled among the peaks of the Tibur, with narrow defensible approaches to the northeast and steap pass leading west. There they fought off the centaurs of Khan Enkurtz and eventually established a little barony in the valley and called it Sant Nomme. Iron and mercury ores were found, farming communities were established, trade began to come to the barony and things seemed to be settling down, despite the fall of the old order.

Then the long winter came.