A year between Turns

 Just on a lark tonight, I decided to open up one of my old incomplete How To Host A Dungeon maps and run a couple turns on it. So this is 2nd Edition HTHAD, and the map I grabbed is this Magician's Map where I did the Primordial Age and the Magician's Civilization, but nothing further. It's currently September of 2021, and here's two more turns on an old map that I hadn't touched since May of 2020.

Age of Monsters, start of Turn 1. Click on the picture to zoom in.

 I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was to pick it back up after such a long gap. That's probably a function of stopping where I did: right after the resolution of the relatively complicated end of the Civilization stage, with a map that was mostly empty. 

• There are some epic treasures in play: Three enslaved Djinns left over from the previous age. Those are the tokens that say "Dj" on them. One is in a great Orrery on the surface, and the other two are buried deep in the ruins of the Magician's arcane college. 
• There are also some Primordial Beasts left over from the earliest days of the world, located in deep in the lower right corner of the map. They'll just sit there, itching for a fight.
  

At the start of the Age of Monsters you pick three random Monster Groups. 

• My first group is Goblins, who spawn in the deep corner strata, very close to the Primordial Beasts. 
• The second group is Stirges. These little blood-suckers nest in the empty dungeons below the orrery and the wizard's tower. 
• For the third group, I've got Miners, who are on the upper right above all those valuable gemstone deposits. I could have put them on the right, above the magical gemstones that the Magician civilization had used, but that would have put them digging directly into the stirge nests, which seems like a mistake they would avoid.
  

 I must confess, I fudged things just a little to get Miners in the first turn. I used a minor house-rule when picking my third starting group. I'll post about it tomorrow.

Age of Monsters, Turn 1:

Fast and simple: 

• Goblins breed, then explore and trade losses with Primordial Beasts. 
• Stirges lose a fight to Miners, but then steal the treasure the Miners started with, and drag it back to the basement of the old tower.
• Miners dig down to exploit a gem deposit, and build a Minehead with a crane and elevator on the surface above the shaft they dug. 

Per the rules, no new Monster Groups until Turn 2.

Age of Monsters, end of Turn 2. Click on the picture to zoom in.

Age of Monsters, Turn 2:

 You randomly reorder the Monster Group's activations each turn, so we'll start with the Miners this Turn. 

• Miners exploit more gemstones, and build a Mill, which drops their population by 1 (apparently some amount of them give up Mining and become Millers?) but gains them a lot of treasure and I add some underground vaults to store it. I put the mill wheel on the underground river, as that seems fun. They have a very linear no-nonsense vertical organization, focused around a single shaft straight down.
  
• Stirges lose another fight to the Miners, and are eliminated from play. Their sole impact was to effect where the Miners set up in Turn 1 and then steal one treasure and drag it across the map before being wiped out. That's not especially exciting, but it's not really a problem, either. 
• Goblins breed, and digging the necessary rooms to house them pushes them into proximity with the Primordial Beasts, so they trade losses there and drop back down to 4 population. Then the goblins build a "Shiny" - I decide it's a statue to the great fork goddess, who gave them all those tasty primordial beasts to eat. Num num!

The new buildings are kind of hard to see on the map at the moment because monster tokens are covering them, but when I get to the end of the game in a future post, I'll uncover them, and I think they'll make for some interesting map details. I'm pretty happy with the direction the map is developing in. The statue of the fork goddess is huge, a bit larger than any of the miner's constructions.

At the end of Turn 2,  I draw a new Monster Group, and I get: The Temple. Instead of adding a new group to the map, it upgrades an existing random group, so that's a 50/50 flip. I roll the goblins, which is perfectly appropriate given that the Shiny they built was already a statue of the fork goddess. Clearly a strong component of the new goblin religion is community feasts. This gives them another population, another treasure, a prepare "star", and the "Order" keyword. The goblins are basically about a turn away from triggering the Age of Villainy already. This might prove to be a really short game... then again, I've had one game of HTHAD2E where the Villainy phase alone ran about a dozen turns, so there's still some chance I'll be surprised and have a lot more happening on the map. 

It's late, so that's it for tonight. It was nice to get back on the dungeon-horse. I expect I'll play out some Turns of this map in the near future.