Making a Dungeon

After recent fun experiences playing both noisms Yoon-Suin setting and Lamentations of the Flame Princess with Patrick DMing, I've been thinking about (eventually) running something a bit old school myself.

I'm trying to come up with my own homebrew dungeon and have some ideas for (hopefully) novel traps and situations; I'm wondering what people would recommend doing/thinking about when creating a dungeon. There are great resources out there of course:

• I got Vornheim a few months back and am really enjoying that.
• noisms linked to this guide to putting a mega-dungeon together, and that seems pretty cool.
• When I get it (maybe for Christmas), LotFP will help me put some numbers to things.

But nevermind those: what do you think is important to think about when designing a dungeon? Are there particular tropes that should be followed? And are there cliches that should now be avoided?

Turn To Stone!

noisms continues to negate the need for me to write any kind of actual play report of Yoon-Suin, by relating all the salient points. Suffice it to say that, as ever, a damn good time was had by all.

Even by me, when I was pecked by an evil magical peacock and turned to stone. Once the ongoing danger had been averted, and the rest of the party were safe, the question arose as to whether or not I could be moved. There is a monastery several days' journey away, and the monks there may be able to revert me back to flesh (or so the party thinks).

But since I am now literally stone, can I be moved? I was already a STR 16 Fighter in full plate mail, carrying about 300gp, a shield a big axe and a miscellany of adventuring gear. But now that my flesh is stone, could I be moved by five people, who already have to carry a man on a stretcher?

Gut instinct says no, but let's do the maths to check...

Games Night: A New Man in Yoon-Suin

Last night was another journey in Yoon-Suin, and my new character didn't disappoint. noisms has given a good account of the session, but states early on that I rolled "a ridiculously lucky set of stats" which, I guess, is probably accurate.

noisms method for rolling stats was to roll in order for STR, DEX, INT, WIS, CON and CHA, and he would allow one switch after they were all rolled (i.e., no re-rolling, but if I wanted to WIS and CON scores I could). Thankfully, the dice were extremely well-behaved last night!

STR 16
DEX 13
INT 11
WIS 13
CON 13
CHA 6

Well, OK, except for Charisma... I decided that these were pretty good stats for a Fighter, and early on decided that the only way to play someone with a Charisma of 6 is to act as someone who thinks they are very charming, and can't understand why others seem to screw their face up at him or roll their eyes. Poor Manjeet.

I don't have a clear picture in my head yet of what Manjeet actually looks like; I'm thinking tall, shaved head but with a few days of stubble coming in around his chin. His family are artisans (again, the luck of a random roll; after my previous success with stats and maximum hit points everyone was rooting for my personal history to reveal I was a eunuch) so I guess he would be fairly well turned out.

When I first met Marich (David) and Anil (Patrick) in the forest they gave great short descriptions of themselves. Patrick said, "You see a short, squat, bald man." David: "You see Prince Harry in a wizard's robe."

A high point of the session for me was being the one to deliver the killing blow to Manesh, the Bandit Chief who we battled against last time. I think we were really well coordinated, and Patrick's idea to hire retainers and to kit them out properly worked well. Not only did they hold their own quite well in delaying large numbers of attackers, but because we bothered to armour them up they didn't just die as soon as an opponent looked at them.

noisms claims I was ridiculously lucky; a quick bit of calculation and it turns out he is probably right: there's approximately a 1 in 6.8 million chance of me being that "lucky". And that's before you factor in the max HP roll as well. I just see it as the dice rewarding me for the spectacular fails in the last session. I wonder if I will be so lucky next Tuesday. When you have a Charisma of 6 you really have to make your own luck I guess...

Human Again

Two weeks ago my slug-man magic user Eki Ulele was killed in our regular OD&D game. noisms has hinted a little that there may be ways to raise characters from the dead in Yoon-Suin but has given no actual hints about how that might be done. That means that tomorrow I will be statting up a new character, and I've decided that this time he's going to be human.

And he won't be a magic user: after five sessions of getting knocked out and several where I've had spells that were often not useful - possibly, this was down to me not finding a use for them - I've decided that it might be best to go down the Fighter route. Our party already has a Cleric and a Magic-User, so I've decided that someone a bit hands on, covered in armour might be good. Playing as a Thief is tempting, but I'm not sure what the benefits of being a thief are in OD&D.

So I think I will be a Human Fighter. And I might play with the George Costanza path to decision-making: whatever my first inclination is, I will do the opposite. A pacifist fighter... Hmm. Maybe not.

Wicked Wednesday (Sort Of)

No trip to Yoon-Suin this week: noisms was too busy with work, and then Patrick and David both had to cancel on the hastily arranged In A Wicked Age/Tales From Zero Point one-shot that I proposed.

I'm quite a fan of both In A Wicked Age and our homebrew oracle that we played with the same mechanics, Tales From Zero Point (I've blogged about them here and here before). Plus I like GMing and those have been my only experiences so far.

So it was that yesterday evening I decided to draw the cards anyway for what the story might have been at Zero Point Waystation, the greatest single work of humanity ever, a vast space station adrift in the Oort Cloud, right at the edge of the solar system...

THE ORACLE SAID:
Ace of Spades: An insane Robot tends an ancient mosaic, endlessly renewed.
4 of Hearts: A criminal punished with sentient stasis.
10 of Spades: The foundation stone. A beam of iron drawn from the heart of the Sun. The druid that serves it.
King of Clubs: A militant hegemony virus propagates through the transient population.

Now, I have no idea what Patrick and David would have made of this, but in the ten minutes after I pulled those cards, the following ideas for characters and interests came to me.

The insane Robot who builds the mosaic is not "insane" in human terms, it merely has Asimov circuits and directives that are stuck. I think this would be a good NPC. It used to work for or with the Criminal, a PC, who has been released from millenia of stasis by the Druid, also a PC, who is more of an Engineer-Mystic who tends the deep bowels of Zero Point and worships the central beam of perfect iron at the exact centre of the station.

No-one seems to know where the Virus has come from: perhaps somewhere long forgotten within the station, perhaps from a fragment brought in by a salvage-captain. Maybe it is a weapon sent by the Schwarm-Laden beings from beyond space-time. What is known is that it is organising. It creates a network within the small pockets of sentience within the station, then it spreads. And spreads.

The druid thinks that the criminal might be able to help stop it, and the criminal needs the robot repairing to get it done. It's in the druid's best interests to help the criminal recover and stop the Virus. The criminal wants to escape the station and head for Far-Away Earth, even after all this time. So he'll do what he needs to in order to achieve that. The Robot, for now at least, just wants to perfect the mosaic.

And the Virus... Well, no-one can figure out what It wants...

I'll turn it over to you anyway: given the four prompts from our Oracle up there, what do you see?

Games Night Redux

Some thoughts, actions and communication from this week's games night, which I talked about here and noisms talked about here.

As some party members consider attacking some birdmen...
Me: You know that a slingshot has roughly a 30% chance of killing you outright?
David (Level 1 magic-user): What???

After a spot of melee, our party decides to psyche out our remaining, retreating opponents...
David: I pick up the head of one of their fallen comrades and throw it at them!
noisms (DM) (immediate quip): It does d6 damage...

Following another battle, we have killed six bandits but paid a heavy price. The DM summarises...
noisms: You two are on your feet, you're unconscious, Asha and Bam (retainers) are dead... What do you do?
(give up?!)

After a night of wandering through the bamboo forest, randomly encountering non-aggressive animals...
Me: Did I recover a hit point?
noisms: No, you've been up all night messing with peacocks...

Games Night: Yoon-Suin Obituary

noisms has already pretty much covered exactly what happened last night in Yoon-Suin, although there are a few points that I want to clarify, before I get on to talk about Eki Ulele.

With Eki Ulele eventually recovered, they pressed on, and discovered the treasure of the Feathered Men: 800 gold pieces in metallic urns. These urns, coated with poison, nearly killed the foolhardy Eki Ulele...

I was far from foolhardy! noisms described the urns as being covered in a thick, clear gel or oil. I scraped some off with my knife, looked at it under the light. Sniffed it, dabbed a rag into it to see if it was corrosive in some way, I think I tried burning it to see if it was some intense flammable agent. Finally I very carefully dabbed the tip of my little finger into it.

"Roll a d20," says the DM.
"7."
"What's your save against poison?"
"...oh come on!!!"

At the end of the session, Eki Ulele's death mirrored his life: he wanted to be more than a magician or wizard, he wanted to be other than a slug-man, bound by his caste and his father/mother. Despite being high-born, he had a rage against the unhuman and the inhumane, the treacherous and the despicable. And yes, somewhere along the way he decided that the Jack Bauer approach to getting information from NPCs was 100% legit.

Eki knew Read Magic, Read Languages and Charm Person: only the latter ever really worked, and even then it was used to charm opponents to lie down on the floor while he stabbed them through the back of the neck. He liked to talk, and his strange relationship with the world meant that he would veer wildly from acts of cowardice to acts of courage. He was about three-quarters of the way towards levelling up, and was desperate for more hit points and an offensive spell.

His death, in a bizarre and random encounter after successfully giving his friends time to make their escape was exactly in keeping with his life: short, strange and utterly unpredictable.

Games Night Redux

A few days ago I forgot to include a few things from our Yoon-Suin game that had really tickled me. Patrick, in writing about the game that he is DMing and which my nephew is a player in, reminded me of the importance of great lines and player strategy that come out in play, and which really should be recorded.

Here are some notes I made from last week's game; apologies if they make little sense to anyone else out there. They were perfectly reasonable at the time.

Patrick, thinking like a giant lungfish (whose stomachs were filled with silver pieces): "I'm so hungry, have you got any coins?"

(honestly, why am I even posting this, why would anyone care??? I had to hold my head and pinch by brow to stop myself from crying with laughter at the feeding habits of dungeon dwelling lungfish)

Eki Ulele, my slug-man magic-user, has a reputation for going all red mist-y around the edges whenever someone tries to get one over on us. His standard reaction is to burn the village and salt the land with the widows' tears. When the others talked him down from killing an unarmed prisoner it made me realise: "I'm like a slug Jack Bauer!"

noisms, the DM, as we set forth on an improvised bamboo raft across a dungeon lake: "You float off into the Dark Sea of Doom."
Everyone else thinks: "I've made a huge mistake."

Patrick's PC, Anil, is a cleric who serves Manpac (rearrange the syllables); Manpac is apparently the god of mazes, the eater of ghosts and his servants chant wakka-wakka-wakka as they do his work. When Patrick exclaimed "fear the might of Manpac" I thought I was going to die laughing.

But here's the thing: the repurposing of Manpac is AWESOME. If I was a cleric in another world, another time, I can totally see "the God of Mazes, the Eater of Ghosts" as a being who is to be feared and obeyed.

And Games Night is tomorrow.

Games Night: Yoon-Suin

noisms has already written about one aspect of last night's Yoon-Suin escapades, the loss of our devoted teenage retainer Dev. We all miss him very much. It was a strange sort of evening, our initial plan to get back to the dungeon and take some names was thwarted by running into some bandits.

We killed several of them easily enough, but a few escaped on horseback and another was our prisoner for a short time before he escaped as well. We know the name of the bandit leader, and perhaps we will have to do something about him sooner or later, but it was decided that we should push on to Sangmengzhang.

Some dwarf skeletons in armour nearly killed one of the PCs, and so we retreated out of the dungeon to rest up for a few days. We went back in, where we were promptly attacked by a horde of cockroaches. Escape on a flimsy raft across a deep lake of glow-in-the-dark jellyfish worked well; as we reached the far bank we tried to take out some giant lungfish that were stirring in a cave. Even this was beyond us, but eventually they ran and we licked our wounds.

For two minutes, until a giant slug oozed out of the lake and chased us into a corridor. Thank heaven for doors.

I'm beginning to find out more about my character. Eki Ulele is a slug-man magic-user. He has 3HP when at full health (more on this in a second), and the spells he knows are only borderline useful most of the time - although Charm has worked out quite well. He tends to think quickly, is more often than not an optimist (at least with others' lives). He is prone to rage and violent acts against unarmed opponents, possibly as an overcompensating reaction to his caste - his desire to adventure is atypical for slug-men - and possibly as a result of his upbringing, having a father-mother who was utterly indifferent to him.

I'm almost halfway towards levelling up, and next time we really need to find some treasure to make that happen. I did some back of the napkin maths and realised that an attack by someone with a d4 weapon has a probability of nearly 30% of knocking me out (if not outright killing me). For someone with a d6 weapon that probability jumps to almost 40%. Given that most things we meet have attacks at that level (at the moment) this is very, very bad.

Games Night: OD&D/Yoon-Suin

Last night we had another trip to Yoon-Suin, ably DMed by noisms. Patrick, Whimsy and I headed for the dungeon with three retainers to soak up some of the damage. We were cautious at first; we had arrived at the entrance to the dungeon in the late afternoon, and so our plan was just to have a quick explore so that we could get the lay of the land, see what the entrance was like, get a feel for the place.

Then we met the hostiles.

noisms described them as humanoid, grey-skinned, red eyes, dressed in rags and with long, lank hair: there were a lot of them, and they attacked in groups, armed with spears, clubs and slings. There were three or four skirmishes in all; they tried to flank us several times, but we were always able to stay one step ahead of them, more or less.

In the end, we killed all of them, but not without paying a price: we lost Patrick's character Damodar.

Damodar was awesome. He was always stood at the front of a fight, always keen to jump in; his INT stat was low, but Patrick played that really well by having Damodar ask naive-sounding-but-clever questions. Being the only fighter in a party of magic-users meant that he had to be the guy at the front; plate mail can only do so much, and Patrick effectively played the odds all night: hit after hit from slings, spears and clubs didn't connect, until they finally did.

Luckily, once we had killed all of the creatures in that party, we were able to "rescue" a 1st level cleric that Patrick was frantically rolling up. Damodar and one of the retainers were buried just outside the entrance of the dungeon, and the next day we decided to head back to Silaish Vo to lick our wounds and rethink our strategy.

It's my first time playing a magic-user, and I hadn't realised just how restricted options were in terms of combat: as a 1st Level I have only one spell as well, and none of my options are offensive in nature. I just about killed some of the grey-skins with my staff, and I had wits enough to make flame-bombs from flasks of oil. I'm hoping that I can level up (safely) over the next session, and possibly start the path towards offensive capabilities.

Having more than three hit points would also be handy.