Starting On The Surface (HTHAD2E House-Rule)

For the most part, I prefer the 2nd Edition of How To Host A Dungeon over the 1st edition. However, I feel one area that 2nd Edition is a little weaker than 1st Ed is in the lack of surface development. It's entirely possible to get to the end of the Age of Monsters without really having anything happening above the surface at all.

I liked how 1st Edition handled the Surface Kingdoms, but I also really love the new "Monster Group Cards" in 2nd Edition. So rather than trying to port over the fairly elaborate 1st Ed surface kingdoms rules, I'm just going to make one house-rule, that's effectively just stacking one card of the deck on Turn 1 to make sure you get something on the surface early on:

House Rule:  If the first two Monster Groups drawn in the Age of Monsters do not include a group with the Surface keyword (or the Miners group), roll 1d6 on this chart instead of drawing a random card for the 3rd group:

1. Your third group is Adventurers. In addition, add a small roadside inn or tavern to the map at the random point on the surface near where they spawn.
2. Your third group is Farmers.
3. Your third group is Knights. In addition, add a manor house or guard tower to the map at the random point on the surface near where they spawn. This building counts as "^", so it adds +1 to their Fight rolls when they are defending.
4. Your third group is Miners.
5. Your third group is Saltbury. (Feel free to give them a different name if you'd prefer.)
6. Your third group is Veterans. In addition, add the burned-out ruin of a small roadside inn or tavern to the map at the random point on the surface near where they spawn. You know how player characters love to burn things down.
   

Find the referenced surface-dwelling Group card in the deck and set it out just like you would have done with a randomly drawn Monster Group.

If you play a full game, you're likely to get a surface kingdom of some sort eventually, but depending on the situation and how late in the game they show up, they might not build anything. Starting with one increases the chance of them making a mark on the map. 

Another reason why I'm implementing this house-rule is because I really like the idea of using HTHAD maps for D&D later. In order for that to work, you have to have a reasonable way for the adventuring party to get down into the dungeon, and some reason why they would head to this region in the first place. Having some sort of village, city or even ruin on the surface is pretty important step toward making the map usable for D&D inspiration after you're done hosting. 

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.

 

Muck Mapping

 This is another How To Host A Dungeon map that I recently stumbled upon on my computer.  (Click here for Index of How To Host A Dungeon articles.)

This one was using the "Muck Dwellers" Civilization, which someone had posted to the How To Host A Dungeon Wiki. I remember being super-excited to try that out.  

Despite that excitement, this map/game definitely wasn't finished. Looks like I wandered away from it twice: once for 6 months during the first turn of the Age of Monsters, and then again more permanently after trying to pick the game back up for a few turns. Not sure why I abandoned it, exactly, but it does date to 2015. There was a lot of crazy stuff going on in my life around that time, and quite a few projects got abandoned in the upheaval. (I suppose it's also possible I was just mostly excited about the Muck Dwellers, and lost focus once their part was done... but I suspect this was a casualty of a particularly hard year.) It's a shame I never finished it, because I really liked the "bubble" design I used for the Muck Dwellers constructions in the 2nd and 3rd images (below).

I still have a note file from the game, so I'll post the text from that here with pictures:

Primordial Age

Started with Isle of Death map template. It’s gonna be harsh on the Surface Kingdoms.

Underground River
Mithral deposits
Caves - Gems, Primordial Beasts, Empty with tunnel, Fate
Caves - Gems (2 in 1 cave), Primordial Beasts (3 different caves), Empty, Magma

Planning to use a homebrewed civilization - probably Muck Dwellers. Can put them anywhere on the river, or just at the bottom of either sea section. The latter is very tempting since it’s not normally an option at all.


Age of the Muck Dwellers - Year 1
After founding the great city of Kli’itl-Tilp’diilb’p, the Kuo-Toa mine gems, expand their city to house the new tadpoles, and then decide to send an expedition way down river in search of additional mineral wealth. Traces of Mithral in the rocks along the river shore encourage them to create a new colony with it’s own tadpole pool.

Age of the Muck Dwellers - Year 2
The mining colony of Dwib’ilb’p is coming along swimmingly.

Age of the Muck Dwellers - Year 3
Kli’itl-Tilp’diilb’p builds the Tomb of the First Smolt, to house the named treasure “The Silvery Shoal of Squish’blip’itl.
Dwib’ilb’p expands and mines further.
Bloop’itl, the spa and breeding colony is founded half-way between the city and the first colony. A breeding pond is built over an active geothermal hotspot.

Age of the Muck Dwellers - Year 4
Chambers of Secrets built. I may have forgotten to mine this year.

Age of the Muck Dwellers - Year 5
Kli’itl-Tilp’diilb’p has the population to split, but there’s no water-routes to anywhere it could expand. Luckily, Dwib’ilb’p still has unmined minerals, and that keeps Kli’itl-Tilp’diilb’p from growing stagnant.
Dwib’ilb’p expands and mines further (including making up for forgetting to adjust the mines last year). They dig a new habitat room, and it floods a natural cave.
Bloop’itl builds an exploratory shaft, and a Temple to Mother Hydra. The treasure within the Temple is the Jellyfish Cauldron.

Age of the Muck Dwellers - Year 6
Dwib’ilb’p’s expansion unleashes a horrible Dinosaur in an old cavern. Despite these losses, the civilization continues to grow.
Kli’itl-Tilp’diilb’p builds a temple to Father Dagon. The treasure there is the Stingray Sceptre.
Bloop’itl tries to expand upon the greatness of Temple to Mother Hydra, and they break through to the surface! The great burning orb in the sky is a dire omen, so they abandon their city and its colonies in search of safer depths.

Great Disaster
All we get is new caves (my roll transferred me to the Primordial Events chart). Yet another Primordial Beast (but this one’s a Sea Monster), and a very dangerous Plague 4 cave right near the surface! There’s also some water caves that caused flooding, and a tunnel cave that goes right over (and thus fills with) magma. With this and the Kuo-Toa orphans (tadpoles left behind in the escape) we have a total of 7 wandering monsters on the map before we even get to the Age of Monsters. 

Age of Monsters: Set-Up
Auglire Keep is Built

Lithonids (Delvers, Lawful, 50% to create treasure when they die.)  5x11 = Chambers of Secrets
Crabmen (Breeders, Chaotic, No Special Rules)  3x5 = flooded tunnel-cave in lower left
Giant Octopus (Alpha, Hungry, Aquatic) 10x3 = Just above the wandering Sea Monster. It will eat it, and then start raiding the castle pretty soon.

NOTE: At this point (half way into year 1 of the Age of Monsters), I took over 6 months (of real-life time) off from the game, and a lot of crazy stuff went on in my life to thoroughly distract me. So I’ve probably forgotten a few details of what transpired and how it all works. We’ll test whether or not my notes are enough to finish this map/game.

Placing the Lithonids (delvers created by a contributor to the HTHAD wiki), I decide (since the wiki description vaguely implies they are rock monsters with gem-covered hides) that I will use the rainbow “Gems” treasure tokens I’d created back on the Primordial Age to be the Lithonids’ treasures (including the ones they sometimes turn into when they die). That lead me to rainbow population tokens, and a translucent rainbow underlay to mark their areas of the map.

Crabmen dig grottos in one of the old deep water fissures, expanding it out into a very organic shape.

Giant Octopus is named Eight-Death by the locals of Auglire. In his own tongue, he is named Chlughpligth.


AoM Year 2:
The new arrival is wandering Ankhengs, and I give them fairly long wormy tunnel lairs, following the path of structures from deeper strata. There are a LOT of wandering monsters on the map right now, but I imagine they’ll clear each other out fairly soon.

Humans build a little terrace farm.

Primordial Beasts (and Sea Monster) do nothing, because I roll a “3” four times in a row.

Kuo-Toan Orphans wander a bit. Some engage in Mutual Assured Destruction with an Ankheng. Others merely explore the breeding ponds of their ancestors.

Lithonids engage in tunneling. They don’t quite have the range to get to any treasure this turn, so they convert an old cave system into a staging area for next year’s mining efforts after either gems or mithral. In retrospect, they probably could have reached the Tomb of the First Smolt this turn instead, but I didn’t think to do so until after I’d drawn in and colorized their new area.

Crabmen numbers bolster, and they spread out. Since there’s only one path available to them, they dig a little. Eventually they run into Primordial Beasts, and the number of Crabmen drops back down to sustainable levels.

Eight-Death strangles and devours the nameless primordial sea monster.

Surviving Ankhengs stay in their lairs.

AoM Year 3:
New Arrivals = Party of 2 Adventurers

One Primordial Beast wants to wander, but can’t because there are no exits from his cave. Had the other one wandered it would have opened up old tunnels and probably died to plague.

Kuo-Toans sit tight. Perhaps they really liked the breeding pool. While they don’t have a Zone of Control, it’s still work drawing back in some of the areas near where they’ve wandered.

Surface Kingdoms continue to build their numbers in the castle, and establish a small fishing village (mechanically identical to a farm) in the bay below Fort Auglire. They have enough population, but not yet enough infrastructure, to launch an expedition.

The Lithonids extend a tunnel to the primordial gem deposit, which is sacred to their kind.

Crabmen numbers expand uneventfully.

Eight-Death sends an exploratory tentacle into the fishing village, and comes back with a tasty morsel.

Ankheng in the old Temple of Mother Hydra becomes agitated and digs to the surface. It raids Fort Auglire itself, and is put down after causing much carnage.

Two human adventurers arrive on the island to brave the tunnel from which the Ankheng had emerged. They wander about in the twisting tunnels of the beast’s lair and the ruins of the old Temple of Mother Hydra for some time. They find the Jellyfish Cauldron of the ancient temple and haul it out a seaside cave, only to be set upon by Eight-Death. Both adventurers die, and all the treasure sinks to the bottom of the bay. (When you end up with really convoluted tunnels, the random navigation of adventurers and monster groups can get a little tricky. Adding the water/island situation to the map made that even more complex, but I’m pleased with the result.)


T1 = The Silvery Shoal of Squish’blip’itl  (Kuo-Toa)
T2 = Jellyfish Cauldron (Kuo-Toa)
T3 = Stingray Sceptre

And that's all I wrote. After that, I wandered like a monster off the edge of the map. I've still got the master map file so it's a little tempting to take a third stab at it.

Unearthing a Dwarven Civilization

 I was thinking of playing around with How To Host A Dungeon this evening, and thought I'd put together an index of my HTHAD posts. (Click here for Index of How To Host A Dungeon articles.) In gathering those articles up, I realized, I've actually posted to this blog less than half of my HTHAD maps over the years.

So let's unearth one. This is, I believe, the first one I ever did on the computer. I have a few older paper maps floating around my gaming room somewhere, but this is the first digital one. It was sort of a proof-of-concept to see if it was worth trying to do them digitally. It was. And as it turns out, I took notes while I played, so I can paste those in here to go with the maps. The notes will be rough, as they date back to roughly 2014. It's from the 1st Edition of How To Host A Dungeon.

Light-colored circles with a large "T" on them are treasures. Darker circles with other letters on them are the population tokens of various races, such as "D" for Dwarf. The numbers on the edges of the first map were used as coordinates for placing things randomly.

Primordial Age:
Sorquoorm the Ancient Wyrm, w/ Treasure: “The Root of the World” - P2, steals Treasure.
Earthquake
Imps (Itinerant Wizard Wandering Monsters) w/ Treasures - The Trilogy of Immortality


Dwarven Age:
Year 1:
Year 2:  Workshops built.  One imp moves north.
Year 3: Great Hall with Dormsturl, the Gong of Endless Charisma
Year 4:  Exploratory Shaft
Year 5: Expansions to the Great Hall
Year 6: Hall of Records with Dromrune, The Codex of Magma Aura
Year 7: Founding of the City of Himboldihr, most of population moves into it. Create an amazing drilling tool, Nagundond. Imps move a bunch, and two of them join together
Year 8: Treasure Chamber. Nisbrund The Device of Transform Gold.  Visgund Gear of Control Gold.

Age of Monsters:
Set-Up:
Brancheley Keep Humans
Yarplikk Molenn - Derro (Delvers, Law)
Grobgash - Cave Giants (Breeders, Chaos, x2 Strength)
Cadro Bazius the Devourer - Dragon (Alpha, Chaos, +2 Strength, Doesn’t spend Treasure)

Year 1:
Dimensional Gate opens in Himboldihr. 2 Djinn arrive. One carries Doomed Box. Other carries Dreamer’s Lamp.
Sorquoorm eats an Imp and steals one third of the Trilogy of Immortality.
Other imps stay put.
Grobgash loot the Gong.
Yarplikk Molenn expanded down the hall.
Cadro Bazius attacks the Giants, and they bribe him off with normal treasure.

Year 2:
Mimick appears in the Treasure Vault.
Sorquoom eats an Imp, but can’t take its treasure because the other imp survives.
Imp tries to run and hide, but chooses a poor direction.
Yarplikk expand to surface. Build a tower and a wall.
Grobgash Giants bribe Cadro with the Gong. This is bad for them because it's Cadro Bazius attacks the Yarplikk Molenn, and they drive him off. He moves his lair down to the huge old dwarven mine level. He leaves behind the mundane treasures the cave giants had given him, but take the gong, his talisman, and his own cash.
Djinn and Mimick stay put.


Year 3:
Adalod’s Mining Company (Human Miners)
Sarquoom eats the last Imp. Steals a chapter of the Trilogy of Immortality. Reveals that the imps had been protecting the Statue of the All-Seeing Eye.
Yarplikk expands out and captures a farm.
Giants kills a mimic, don’t lose any. Population stays stable.
Cadro Bazius eats a Djinn.
Other Djinn chases the Dragon, and dies. It’s like a food and treasure delivery service.
Adalod’s company starts exploring a mine

Year 4:
Wandering Monsters - Duldrok, Kroddrock, and Shuzdrok. Sorquoom drives them out of his lair, and then dies from the wounds they inflicted.
Brancheley Keep builds a farm.
Yarplikk expands into Cave Giants, loses the war, loses their last treasure, and abandons the colony.
Grobgash siezes mimick treasure. They give that treasure to Cadro Bazius, so it is bribed and doesn’t attack them.

Age of Villainy:
Cadro Bazius becomes the Villain. He expands his lair a bit, builds a temple of chaos, and a hoard, and four defensive works.

Villainy Year 1:
Cadro Bazius digs into old Dwarven Vault, kills mimick, claims all three treasures (including Nisbrund and Visgund). Goes foraging, and finds Dromrune.
Surface Humans reclaim the Farm the Derro had taken before.
Grobgash expands, outgrows its resources, and splits. The new clan is Grobghug, which expands into a cave on the far side of Cadro’s territory. Then Grobgash tries to bribe Cadro Bazius again, and fail. They fight him, and the dragon devours them.
Trolls stay put.
Grobghug expands a short distance from their starting cave.
Adventuring Party of 6 enters via the unexplored earthquake shaft. They side-step the mimick. They slaughter Grobghug. They discover Secret Stairs to the old Dwarven Vault. That’s how the Giants of Grobghug made the journey around the Dragon’s lair.
Adventuring Party heads to the trolls. Kills them around their Cauldron of Bones.
Adventuring Party encounters Adalod’s Mining Company, who hires them to kill the mimick. They do so, and are rewarded with the first chapter of the Trilogy of Immortality.
Adventuring Party finds the rest of Sarquoom’s treasures in the Halls of Decay. Then they attack Cadro Bazius, breaking in via the Temple of Chaos gate. He kills all but one of them, who escapes with most of the treasure, including all three parts of the Trilogy of Immortality. So he’s still alive somewhere.
Cadro Bazius finds the Root of the World among the bodies of the Adventurers.

Ready for Year 2 of the Age of Villainy.

Treasures:
T1: The Root of the World  (Sorquoorm)
T2-4: Trilogy of Immortality (Imps)
T5: Dormsturl, the Gong of Endless Charisma
T6: Dromrune, the Codex of Magma Aura
T7: Nagundond, the Eternal Tool of Gold Gush
T8: Nisbrund, the Device of Transform Gold
T9: Visgund, the Gear of Control Gold
T10: The Thinker’s Talisman
T11: The Dreamer’s Lamp
T12: The Doomed Box

That's where my notes end, and it's the last picture I saved. So it kind of looks like I never finished the map. It's also possible that the first roll of the 2nd Turn of the Age of Villain brought it all to an end and I just wrapped up without making a note of the result. The game does tend to end suddenly. 

Looking back on this map, one thing I will comment on is the blue areas. They're not flooded or anything, I think I was just marking civilizations or territory controlled by the initial Dwarven civilization, or the later Derro monster group. I then reverted them to the tan/orange color for empty passageways that were no longer under the control of those groups... though I'm not sure whey the secret stairs were in blue, since the Dwarves should have been long-dead at that point, or why the Derro areas are still blue-ish when they don't have any population tokens left on the map. I was probably just being sloppy because I had no idea that future me would blog this stuff 7 years later.

How To Host The Magician's Dungeon

Some photos from my second game of How To Host A Dungeon 2nd Edition. I'm not planning a full turn-by-turn breakdown this time, because that makes the game take a lot longer.  (Click here for Index of all my How To Host A Dungeon articles.)

 Image number 1 is from the end of the Primordial Age. The "Sky Gems" was from the Geographical Inspiration table suggesting that some of the gems on my map were meteorites. My Nexus is Leylines, which I drew real large in hopes that it will provide many Bonus Stars to groups in the Age of Monsters.

 Image number 2 is from the Age of Civilization. This was my first time playing the new Magician's Civilization. There were a few parts in the write-up for this Civ that were kind of vague. So be prepared for that, you'll have to make a few judgment calls with the Magician Civ. The vague areas were: Am I meant to have 1 or 2 Magicians at the end of the first turn? If I Build a construction that doesn't use/require a Jinn, should I also build a Vault, or just accept that I may have more than one Jinn at the Standing Stone at various points in this Age? Does the Omphalos prevent me from building an Orrery in a later turn? Will the Omphalos be meaningful (or even be a thing at all) later in the game? None of this vagueness here really breaks the game, but it is confusing and murky, and requires you to rule on how it all works mid-game.

Image number 3 is from the end of the Age of Civilization, after the Diaspora, with the three Epic Treasure Tokens hidden, and the location labels unhidden, to make the map more legible.

The Magician's Civilization was pretty fun. It resulted in a sprawling construction all over the left side of the map.  I could have easily run it over the right, or the top half, or even the bottom of the map. The player has a lot of impact on how this Civ develops, it's not the mostly automated script of the first edition. Part of that is because the Build list has twice as many constructions on it as you'll ever get to use on a single map, and part of it is because 2nd Ed maps have a lot more resources on them. (And a small part of it is because I included more Strata on my map than the rules-as-written would suggest. Strata #7 on this map set-up seemed way too huge, so I split it up into 3 substrata. When I get to the Age of Monsters, I'm also going to us the left- and right- halves of the surface as different Strata, so that when a Surface Dweller spawns, I'll have a system in place that randomly tells me where they start.)

Aside from being kind of vague and unclear at parts, I was also disappointed with one tiny aspect of the Magician Civilization. There are two ways it can end: in Diaspora or in Vengeance. Diaspora has zero instruction, and basically just leaves everything empty on your map. Vengeance does this cool thing where a new layer of dust and debris buries part of your map. That sounds awesome! But as written, this will almost never happen. There are 13 constructions on the Build list for this Civ, and you'll only get to pick 6 or 7 of them on a typical map. The Vengeance only happens if you choose 1 specific combo of 7 specific Buildings with no variation from that path. If you pick any one of the other 6 Buildings at any point during this Civilization, then you'll trigger the Diaspora at least 1 turn before you could possibly trigger the Vengeance. There's a little bit of wiggle room if your Nexus or some other result on the map from the Primordial Era has the ability to kill Magicians, but the game tends to skip over death during the Civ phase, and it's kind of annoying and can be quite limiting to carefully set things up to make that work. In the rules, this Civ seems amazing, but in practice it plays out as "merely" very good, but not quite as amazing as the potential implied. Like I said, it's a minor gripe about what is mostly a tiny thing, and it wouldn't have broken the game if I had decided to just dump that layer of dust on the map like I was tempted to do.

HtHaD2E: This Close To World Domination

This post covers the last 5 turns of my recent game of How To Host A Dungeon 2nd Edition. In the previous posts, we followed the rise and fall of a Dwarven City, and then a series of dungeon expansions in and around those ruins by successive waves or generations of monsters. Eventually, this culminated in an insectoid species -- known as "Antlings" -- accumulating enough Treasure to trigger the Age of Villainy. (Click here for Index of all my How To Host A Dungeon articles.)



Here is the map as it was when we left off:

Other groups on the map at this point include:

• A giant Pike that swallowed an Owlbear whole.
• A small Reclamation Colony of Dwarves, who have built an armory, reignited the old smelters and unearthed an Epic Magical Treasure.
• A high-level adventurer and his Ork henchman have set up camp in an old Dwarven drinking hall.
• An ork tribe that was once prosperous and powerful but is now stretched too thin.
• A warren of sneaky kobold thieves.

Per the rules as written, the Antlings had qualified to start The Empire, which is one of the two main forms of Villainy. Empires Ally and Annex other groups, and build Monuments and Universities. The Antlings are Mindless, so that's not a good match thematically.

Instead, I'll be using the other main form of Villain, which is The Horde. It's a perfect match for a colony of giant ants. (Alternately, I could have just narrated that the Antlings had evolved sentience, possibly a result of the weird fungus they were farming.)

As a Horde Villain, the Antlings will gain some new Actions each turn. Previously, they would Breed and Prepare every turn, and Harvest their Fungus Farm nearly every turn. On turns when they didn't Harvest, they could Explore or Fight. Now they always Scout new territory each turn, in addition to Breeding and Preparing. On turns when they don't Harvest or Explore or Fight, they can now alternately Rout tougher monsters, or sacrifice some of their own to Exterminate groups they outnumber. They always at first at the start of each Round, but at the end of the Round they get a Finishing move of Corrupting the Strata they are in if there's no one there to resist them. If they Corrupt all 7 underground Strata, they conquer the world and win the game.


Age of Villainy Set-Up:
We corrupt the Strata where the majority of the Antling tokens are. Visually, I went for a reddish mycelium growth, as if the Fungus Farm were spreading out of control through the rock.

What follows is mostly a stream-of-consciousness step-by-step playthrough of all 5 turns of the Age of Villainy in my recent game. I will put a summarized list of observations and proposed house-rules in another post later.

Age of Villainy - Turn 1: Antlings Horde, The Experts, Giant Pike, Dwarves, Kobolds, Orkz +Gnolls

Antlings Horde: Breed. Scout action expands their space by roughly 1 room in each direction, which means they fill some but not all of the rooms previously inhabited by the Owlbear, but will not reach the water until next turn. Prepare. Explore the rest of their main corrupted stratum by digging a tunnel towards the Demigod structures.

The Experts: Their monster card compels them to pick a Fight with one of the nearby Denizen groups. They attack the Dwarves, and their Ork henchman dies. So then they Recruit a new henchman from the Orkz, and that's enough of a drain on the Orkz population to eliminate the Orkz.

Giant Pike: Can't leave the water, and the Antlings didn't reach the water, so it just relocates to explore the other part of the subterranean ocean. I mark his original territory with "spawning bed" because I suspect he swims upstream in later turns.

Dwarves: Dwarves are playing a dangerous game. They Exploit the only remaining Ore on the map, which involves reopening passageways very close to the Adventuring Party. So it's in their best interests to Fight the interlopers, which they do, killing the new Ork henchman and leaving just the 1 Adventurer holding the old Drinking Hall.

Kobolds: They are pretty much doomed by their Explore requirement, sweet tooth for treasure, and the extinction of the Orkz. With all those factors, there's no way their mess of tunnels isn't going to hit that Fate Nexus booby trap that's been sitting there since the Primordial Era. Having found their Fate, the Kobolds are wiped out.

Orkz: Were eliminated before they could take their turn.

Gnolls: In the Age of Villainy, new Monsters spawn less frequently. Instead of being automatic each turn, it's based on whether or not any Monster groups were eliminated in the previous turn. Looking at my notes from the last play session, I see that the Owlbear was eaten by the Giant Pike in the previous turn, so I do spawn monsters this turn. It's Gnolls, and they rolled the ocean strata, so I figure the Giant Pike's migration has exposed their seaside home. They fight the Antlings and win, and then they Steal from the Pike. I draw a tunnel to the old Owlbear caves to be the route they use for both Actions. To give the Gnolls just a tiny bit of visual character, I decide all their rooms will have two support columns.

Antling Horde Finishing Move: They haven't yet spread far enough to trigger their finishing move, mostly because I chose to have them tunnel to the Demigod Hall with their Explore action. Next Turn, they'll most likely start corrupting the layers beneath them.



Age of Villainy - Turn 2: Antling Horde, Gnolls, Experts, Giant Pike, +Medusa

Antlings Horde: Breed. Scout in all directions, and drag the treasure they find in the Hall of the Demigod deeper into their nest. It's probably ambrosia or golden apples or something of the sort. They explore further down, penetrating pretty far since the Old Dwarven Loway is open and un-owned.

Gnolls: Fight the Antlings and kill one, cutting off their access to the sea. Breed, since they fought the Antlings last turn. Scout and expand their territory.

Experts: Fight the Dwarves, and with a lucky roll kill them despite the Armory bonus. Then, since it worked with the Orkz, they try to Recruit the survivors. This time it doesn't work, and they just end up giving their last treasure to the Dwarves for no gain.

Dwarves: There's no Ore left anywhere on the map, so they can neither Exploit nor Relocate to better lands. So they pick a Fight. The best odds are against the Antlings, so that's the risk they take, and they win!

Giant Pike: Hunts a Gnoll. Explores a deeper section of the water than was previously obvious.

Medusa: Spawns way down on Stratum 8 where there's no one to Hunt. Prepares. Scouts.

Antling Horde Finishing Move: They corrupt the Stratum directly below the hive, so the Antlings are 2/7ths of the way to world domination.



Age of Villainy: Turn 3 - Antling Horde, Experts, Gnolls, Medusa, Dwarves, Giant Pike,

Antling Horde: Breed. Prepare. Scout. Then they use the Horde-specific Exterminate Action to wipe out the Dwarves. It may seem wasteful or overkill, but the math of it makes sense. That single Dwarf, with his +1 on Fight, had about a 72% chance each turn to kill an Antling. Exterminate is a can't-fail Action that gets to ignore the Dwarves Fortification bonuses.  By wiping him out, the Antlings gain a Fortification of their own, making them much better at dealing with incursions from the Gnolls. Plus, by not Fighting the Gnolls this turn, they prevent the Giant Pike from Hunting them just a little bit longer. This isn't without some peril, as it drops the Antling Population briefly down to 2, before the second half of Exterminate bumps them back up to 3. Their numbers are dwindling, but they've gained a large portion of the map. They are at their most vulnerable for the rest of this turn, but it seems a worthwhile gamble.

The Experts: Fight the Antlings, and almost beat them. The Antlings have to spend their Special Bonus Star (from Preparing) in order to win. They do so, and that's the end of The so-called Experts.

Gnolls: Fight the Antlings, and lose thanks to the Fortification the Antlings have in their territory now. As they also fought last turn, they get to Breed and replace the population they just lost. Scout a little.

Medusa: No one to Hunt. Prepares. Scouts a little bit further up, and reorganizes into the area she scouted.

Dwarves: Dead before their turn comes up.

Giant Pike: Hunt a Gnoll. The Gnolls are in trouble now. If the Pike beats their Initiative next turn, they'll be wiped out.

Troglodytes: Enter in Strata 4. Start exploring a route up towards water. For some reason, I made their tunnels huge and their rooms small. Not sure what I was thinking. I'm pretty I did this part of the turn after midnight sometime last week, so exhaustion or insomnia-dellerium may have been to blame. If I use this map for an RPG adventure, I'll probably claim they worship some giant serpent-god, and this huge winding tunnel is carved in his honor.

Antlings Horde: Finishing Move: Corrupt strata 5 and 6. Now 4/7ths of the way to victory.



Age of Villainy Turn 4: Antlings, Giant Pike, Gnolls, Medusa, Troglodytes, +Starhelm ++Demonic Hordes

Antlings Horde: Breed. Prepare. Scout in all directions, making significant progress in directions where they don't have to tunnel and can just follow existing pathways. They are now approaching the Fate cave from two directions. Before they get there, they Fight the Troglodytes and kill some of them.

Giant Pike: Eats the last Gnoll, and has some Ants for desert.

Gnolls: Have been wiped out before their turn.

Medusa: Kills some Antlings. Then tries to Exploit Nexus, because it's a cool-sounding Action that I do believe is unique to the Medusa. Unfortunately, the Nexus on this map is the very lethal Fate Cave. Exploit uses the exploited resource to create a treasure. The Fate cave must have some reflective surfaces. Perhaps its a crystalline geode cave. She sees her own reflection, and Exploits herself into a statue-shaped treasure.

Troglodytes: There's no ore left on the map to Exploit, and they have a treasure to defend so they don't Relocate. They retaliate with their "Fight a monster that attacked us last turn" against the Antlings, and lose.

Starhelm: Monster groups were wiped out, so I draw a new card to replace them. I get Starhelm, which is a traveling order of Knights who specialize in hunting undead. They spawn in strata four. It's near the end of the game, so I just grab my old Adventurer tokens for them. They're actually more interesting than the other Adventurer groups, and if I wasn't obviously about 1 turn away from the end of the game, I would bother to treat them like a bigger deal. I figure they're too late to really trigger any of the cool things that make Starhelm unique, and it's just easier to use tokens I already have. They will, however, get to trigger their "When spawning" power. They need a foe to defeat, so I have to draw the first Undead monster in the deck and add it to the map. They can't Hunt Undead from their starting location, so they Relocate. They go to the Hall of the Demigod, and Build a Tomb for the fallen Godling. Well, maybe they can actually do a few of their cool Starhelm-exclusive tricks after all. These guys are already way more interesting than The (so-called) Experts.


Demonic Hordes: I was a little surprised to see the "Undead" Keyword on the Demonic Hordes, but in the context of placing an unholy enemy for Starhelm to hunt, it works. I rolled Strata 5, so they burst up from a volcanic rift to another plane. They then immediately relocate to a resource they can Exploit up in the old Gnoll area, blasting lightning-shaped tunnels to get there. In hindsight, maybe they should have gone to the Exploitable water around the Ancient Dwarven Statue, as it's much closer, could be reached mostly by existing tunnels, would slow down the Antling progress, and not run them through such hotly contested territory. However, I didn't think of that until after I'd already carved out the zig-zag tunnels they'd blasted into the landscape, and it was going to be too much work to undo that.


Antlings Horde: Finishing Move: Corrupt strata 7 and 8. Now 6/7ths of the way to victory. In order to extend it into both of the strata, they needed to relocate both of their remaining Population tokens to the frontiers of their expansion. Which is fine and legal, there was nothing requiring them to have a Queen chamber, or keep a Population there. If we want a story justification, perhaps the Queen has a sense that her fate awaits here in stratum 7.


My Villains are now down to just 2 Population, within Scouting range of Fate, and have just one Stratum between them and global domination. One way or another, the game is going to end next turn.



Age of Villainy: Turn 5: Antlings, Giant Pike, Demonic Horde, Troglodytes, Starhelm

Antlings Horde: Breed. Scout into Fate, and meet their doom. They came so close to winning it all, only to doom themselves.

Giant Pike: Eats a Demonic Horde. Explores and discovers a thin river where a surface creek feeds the underground seas.

Demonic Horde: Exploit the water. Breed. Explore - This is taking some minor liberty with the system, but as a sort of combination of their Exploit and Explore, I had them build a big pier or bridge out over the water.

Troglodytes: Just Breed.

Starhelm: Hunt 1 of the Demonic Horde automatically. Then Fight the remaining Demonic Horde and win! The Demonic Horde are wiped out! Which means the Order of Starhelm disbands and leaves the map for quests elsewhere.

Arguably, I should maybe spawn another Monster since there were eliminations this turn, but the game ends at the end of the turn, so it didn't seem worth it.

Antlings Horde Villain: Have been wiped out, so they don't get their Finishing Move... but I just couldn't resist firing off the mycelium corruption affect one more time, at a large scale, centered on the Fate cave.



At that stage, it doesn't look like a very usable map for an RPG, what with all that visual clutter, hardly any monsters, and treasures just piled up everywhere. Surprisingly, it took very little clean-up to get it in a usable state for D&D (or whatever other purpose you might need it for, like the setting of a novel). Once you've cleared the tokens out, all those labels of what used to be in areas become a legend of what is currently there at the start of your D&D campaign. Tweaking the transparency of a few layers, and shifting some a little further down the layer list only took a couple minutes, and let me shift the map into usable territory.

I'm actually really pleased with how this one turned out, there were a few points where I thought I'd ruined it, but layering all those extra greebly details transformed my crappy quick pixel sketches into more than the sum of the parts. Even the crazy coloring I used to designate areas ended up being less garish and awful in the final product that I thought it would.

Sometime soon I will put together a new post with a big summary of all the things that I'd like to house-rule or do differently next time I play. The game was a lot of fun, but the second edition has a few rough edges.

HtHaD 2nd Ed: Age Of Monsters Turns 5 to 11

This is the turn-by-turn summary of my most recent game of How To Host A Dungeon, 2nd Edition. In this post, I'm covering turns 5 to 11 of The Age Of Monsters.

There's less review in this post than the previous two. I'll no doubt do a big summary post of all my praise, criticism, and likely future house-rules after I've completed the Age of Villainy and wrapped up my first full game of the new edition.


As you'll see below, for many turns the Antlings were on the verge of triggering the Age of Villainy. The timing rules of this game are pretty vague. You could actually make an argument that the Age transition should have happened much earlier, at the end of Turn 6, or possibly 7 or 8 if you correct for a few places where the rules were vague, I made a mistake, or I applied a house-rule. While those earlier turns would have been valid and defensible positions, I held off until it was undeniable that the transition had to happen by the rules. I'm glad I did because it made the final map a lot more complex and rich. This map had gotten off to a slow start because it lacked early mining/building denizens due to random chance, so those few extra turns of development really helped enhance the map.

For those new to HtHaD: This is a map-drawing solitaire game, where each turn new monsters are added to the map and preexisting monsters carve new territory and occasionally fight each other. (Click here for Index of all my How To Host A Dungeon articles.)


Turn 5: Ogre, Owlbear, Antlings, The Experts, Adventurers, + Skeletons

Ogre: Relocate closer to food. Explore more mines.

Owlbear: Hunts 1 Antling. Relocates to the island mouth of the new anthill.

Antlings: Breed. Then fight the last Adventurer, and defeat him before he can Relocate on his turn. This means next turn they'll get to Prepare and then Build a Fungus Farm.

The Experts: There's nothing to fight, so they Explore. I had them Relocate rather than Explore, because Explore would have them just sit around in the corner of the map digging a small collection of new tunnels. It seems like Relocate is what the card should say.

Skeletons: The bodies of all those who died ancient Industrial Accident arise from the waters at the foot of the Statue of Edg (the founder of the previous Dwarven City from the first Age of this map), and Scout around.



Turn 6: Antlings, Experts, Owlbear, Ogre, Skeletons, + Demigod

Antlings: Breed first. Then, because they wiped out the Adventurers, they get to Prepare. Lastly, because they gained a Special Bonus Star from Preparing, they may spend it to Build a Fungus Farm. This is a special room that contains a Fungus Biome that they will be able to Harvest on future turns. Note that at this time the Antlings have reached Population 6. So if nothing kills any Antlings this round, the Antlings will usher in the Age of Villainy.

Experts: Relocate.

Owlbear: Hunts an Antling. Then Scouts down the anthill.

Ogre: Relocates back to his favorite Drinking Hall. Explores a bit more of side branches.

Skeletons: Kill the Ogre, despite his defensive Fortification bonus. They retake the Drinking Hall. With the fresh influx of bones, next turn they will get to Breed.

Demigod: He is a Lawful Humanoid divinity, and spawned in Strata 3 so he was either going to be in instant conflict with the Antlings or spawning over by the lava. I went with the later, and gave him some fancy furnishings befitting his status. He Prepares, then Relocates closer to potential worshippers.

The turn ends with the Antlings back down to 5 population, so I'm not sure if the Age of Villainy is triggered or not. I'm going with "not" because otherwise timing doesn't really matter, and I think that makes for a better game if initiative and sequencing matter. There's a part in the rules where the say what to do if 2 species both trigger Villainy in the same turn, so that implies it's not something that happens instantly or interrupts turn order.



Turn 7: Skeletons, Antlings, Experts, Owlbear, Demigod, + Earthdevils

Skeletons: Because they were drawn first this turn, they take no actions. Sucks to be undead. I think this also means they lose out on the opportunity to make an Ogre skeleton, because of the wording on the card.

Antlings: Breed (taking them momentarily back up to 6 Population), Prepare (getting them a Special Bonus Star), Harvest Fungus Biome (creating a new Treasure).

Experts: Relocate

Owlbear: Hunt an Antling, Scout out another nearby cave (this one has a large column in the middle of it for no particular reason).

Again the Antlings end the turn 1 Population short of Villainy. It may look at a glance like they have 6, but one of those is just the Special Bonus Star they got from the Prepare action. If the Owlbear keeps their population check, it will take them another 4 turns of Fungus-Treasure production to achieve the other type of Villainy.

I'm tempted at this point to have the Owlbear dig and accidentally burst through the floor of the underground sea above him, flooding the antlings. There were some optional rules in the 1st Edition that would handle this, but it's a lot of work and I don't have a better reason for it than fearing the Owlbear-Antling stalemate may grow tiresome eventually.

Demigod: Prepares and Relocates again. Rather than restricting him to the same slow pace as some others, I figured a Demigod could perform Herculean tasks. So he digs a longer than normal tunnel, and builds a gleaming staircase to connect it to the old Dwarven LoWay. He also crafts a perfect golden dome above his home temple. I leave him in a position where Initiative order will determine how things play out between him and The Experts.

Earth Devils: I wasn't sure what to make of the Earth Devils, as they don't really have a D&D analog to base them on. The card says "Earth devils live in angular, asymmetrical chambers that are uncomfortable to other races." So I started drawing spiky outlines down in Strata 8, that I planned to turn into some sort of rocky towers until something magical happened. I realized the frameworks I'd started sketching would actually make really neat sort of irregular crystalline spiderweb stabiles. So I dug through the deck of undrawn monsters in a hurry to make sure that there weren't any actual spiders in there (there aren't). Now I had my hook for Earth Devils: they're more like Ore Spiders. I'll use the Earth Devils name and stats/actions, but just make these huge bizarre webs for them. For the first turn, they don't have the requirements for Exploiting or Breeding, so they'll just scout a route into the rest of the dungeon.


Turn 8: Demigod, Owlbear, Earth Devils, Experts, Antlings, Skeletons, + Dwarves

Demigod: Prepares, then Recruits from The Experts. He gives this adventuring party a gift, and then convinces one of their number to leave their band and become his sidekick mortal companion.

Owlbear: Hunts 1 Antling. Scouts a tiny little dead-end cave just off the antpath. Claws the wall of that cavelet to mark his territory.

Earth Devils: Relocate closer to ore, leaving a trail of web behind them. Can't quite make it to the ore in one turn, so they dig a temporary den near the old Purple Worm nest. (I guess it would have made more sense to have them just build a web in the nest. Oh, well, I've already drawn the side room for them to web.)

Experts: Haven't yet explored the old Dwarven Citadel, so they arguably can't fight the tantalizingly close Earth Devils. They then attempt to rout the Demigod, and fail miserably (not even spending their current Special Bonus Star would help them).

Antlings: Breed. Prepare. Fungus Harvest Biome and dig a small room for the new treasure. Three more turns of this and they'll become The Empire of Villainy.

Skeletons: Fight the Earth Devils, and flub the roll. Half the skeletons are wiped out. At this point, the Skeletons could reorganize their treasures up into the Drinking Hall for free, but I decide buried beneath the waves is protected enough.

Dwarves: A team of Dwarves have come to reclaim their ancestral home. They immediately dive into the surface mine, fix up the elevator and light the fires of the smelter.  Then they get to work exploiting every last scrap of ore they get their hands on. They are briefly at 3 Treasure, before detecting the ant-hole in the ruins. To be safe, they invest 2 Treasure in Building an Armory that gives +1 on future Fight rolls.

Turn 9: Experts, Antlings, Dwarves, Earth Devils, Demigod, Owlbear, Skeletons, + Orkz

Experts: The Experts are underperforming the promise of their name. Last turn, I argued that they shouldn't Fight the Earth Devils, because there was a big unexplored castle in the way. Honestly, that was kinda lame on my part. Nothing actually printed on the "The Experts" card suggests they can't just dig tunnels. It is terribly unfair of me to complain about which Actions The Experts have access to (which I did in my previous post) if I'm not giving them a chance to do some of those Actions and see how it plays.

So this turn, I decide to let them figure a winding route through that big castle to attack the Earth Devils, and I decided to let them roll for two such attacks, since they should have had one from the previous turn as well. Both times, the die they rolled scored 1 lower than the die the Earth Devils rolled. The first time this happens, they can spend their Special Bonus Star from having Prepared, so the Earth Devils lose 1 of their 2 population. The second time, not having the Star to spend, The Experts lose 1 of their 2 population. So both groups are down to 1 Population.

The remaining Expert then tries once again, and fails once again, to Rout the Demigod. These "Expert" guys... *shakes head*

They can at least re-organize to place themselves anywhere in their territory, which I guess means they can hide out in the fort, to get +1 in any future Fight. That's something.

Antlings: Breed. Prepare. Harvest. ETA till Villainy: 2 more turns.

Dwarves: Exploit Ore and use it to Build a Hall to attract a new population.

Earth Devils: They dig a new tunnel to the nearby old Dwarven mine, and Exploit every last bit of Ore from it. It was either dig a fairly large chunk of tunnel, or sneak through skeleton territory, or skip their "Always Exploit Ore" directive.

I think before the next time I play this, I may have to come up with a consistent house rule for how far groups are allowed to dig for the Exploit Action (and other Actions that involve movement or tunneling). It may even become a per-species thing that I list on the Monster Cards.

Demigod: Prepares. Attempts to Extort the Treasure back from the lone Adventurer, but he won't give it up.  The Demigod temporarily loses his Special Bonus Star in the attempt. For his third Action, he tries to Steal the Treasure, and this time is successful.

Owlbear: Continues to snack on Antlings, and Scout small caves in the vicinity. In this cave, he stores all the discarded Antling exoskeletons, after he's sucked out the innards and munched the tender tasty sensory organs. Num!

Skeletons: Fight the Earth Devils, and successfully eliminate them. Earth Devils, especially ones I've decided are Spider-like, won't have any bones, so no skeleton reinforcements. They do, however, get the Treasure: I mean, it's ore-based, and some of it was mined from the old Dwarven property, so if there's ever a Treasure to be coveted by the spirits of angry Dwarves, this is it. Weirdly, this now moves the Skeletons into "first place" as far as being one Treasure away from triggering Villainy.

Orkz: Arrive in Stratum 8. Dig some initial caves, with campfires. Orcish society is organized around campfire stories. Explore and annex passages that had been created by the Purple Worm or the Earth Devils. It is theoretically possible the Orcs could defeat the Skeletons and become the Villains as early as next turn. Initiative order will again be critical next Turn.

At this point I figure out I've been using a House Rule without realizing it. A close read of the rules suggests new monster groups should not be taking actions on the turn they spawn. I've been doing that incorrectly since Turn 2 of the game. I had actually suspected my mistake a few turns ago, decided not to correct it, because in theory this would speed up the game a little. Early on I only had Alphas and Adventurers, so anything to get Denizen groups building and breeding a little faster seemed welcome, plus, it would be really hard to reverse all those maps and take new snapshots, so it's not worth the hassle. But now I've hit an ugly ripple effect that I hadn't considered. It might be weird and anticlimactic if a new species popped onto the map and immediately became the Villain without warning. On the other hand, you could rationalize that as they were already the Villain before they arrived, and their first turn is an invasion. So maybe that's not so bad.

Speaking of Invasions, since the new Spawning rules just place Monster Groups to large vague Strata with a lot of wiggle room, it is somewhat unlikely you would ever actually need the Invasion rules (the rules that govern what happens if a new Monster Group spawns inside the territory of another established group). It could happen, but that either means you decided to force it to happen when it wasn't truly necessary, or it means one of your existing Groups has prospered so much the entire Statum is their active territory. In the former case, if you've fudged things to make that happen you've probably already got a good idea of how you want it to play out. In the latter case, it may seem kinda weird if a civilization big enough to fill an entire stratum got driven out completely by the new upstarts they greatly outnumbered, but there's a 50% chance that's what will happen.

Turn 10: Experts, Antlings, Skeletons, Owlbear, Demigod, Dwarves, Orkz, +Kobolds

Experts: Fight the Skeletons, as find them to be easy pickings. The last Skeleton is destroyed, so the Experts gather up all their Treasure. They reorganize to the Drinking Hall because that seems like a fun place. They then use their newfound wealth to recruit some of the Orkz to their cause.

Antlings: Breed. Prepare. Harvest Fungus for Treasure. Next turn, they become the Villain if no one stops them.

Skeletons: Wiped out by Experts.

Owlbear: Hunt 1 Antling. Scout out a little further afield, and find a new room full of stalagmites and stalactites.

Demigod: Prepare. Tries to Extort the Experts. When that fails, he successfully Steals from them instead.

Dwarves: Exploit Ore. Fight The Experts did not go well, and 1 Population of Dwarves died.

Orkz: Fail to Extort the Experts. Successfully Fight the Demigod, killing his recruited Minion. Then, they proceed to Ally with the Demigod! They cannot attack each other next turn at all, and the Orkz gain a rare Special Bonus Star since the Demigod had Prepared. This may be a magical blessing from the Demigod, who was clearly impressed that they were able to kill his sidekick.

Kobolds: Explore. Prepare. Build Tunnels. As Kobolds do, they are digging lots of narrow tunnels. They survive by traps and thievery.

Turn 11: Dwarves, Orkz, Owlbear, Antlings, Kobolds, Experts, Demigod, +Giant Pike

Dwarves: Exploit ore, and find a Holy Relic: The twin axes of Sedg, the original founder of the Ancient Dwarven City of Segun Rokot!

Orkz: What a turn! Extort cash out of the Experts, and then Fight and kill the Demigod! (Oops! It has been pointed out they should have been under the effects of the Ally Action this turn, and shouldn't have been able to betray the Demigod yet. It's too late to fix that now. I guess these particular Orkz are just hyper-violent.) The Orkz then build Defenses (+1 in Fights).

Owlbear: Hunt antlings. Scout a small underwater cave near the island. I didn't realize it at the time, but this would quickly be their undoing once I flipped over the new Monster Card for the turn.

Antlings: Breed. Prepare. Harvest. They are now at 6 Treasures! Villainy begins at the end of this turn!

Kobolds: Explore, and Steal from Orkz. Theft succeeds but costs the bonus star from both Kobolds and Orkz to resolve. Kobolds always Explore, so they'll likely hit the Fate Cave next turn and wipe themselves out.

Experts: Fight Orkz and win despite the Orkz fortifications. Attempt to Ally with Dwarves but fail. Dwarves are pretty upset about the desecration and occupation of their ancestral city.

Demigod: Was wiped out. His treasure is pretty remote on the map, so I decided not to give it to anyone.

Giant Pike: Spawns in the nearest body of water. Clearly it was a bad idea for the Owlbear to explore that flooded cave. Fights the Owlbear, killing it.

The Age Of Monsters Has Ended
That is the end of Turn 11 of the Age of Monsters. The Antlings have collected the necessary 6 Treasures to launch the Age of Villainy, and become The Empire Villain. More on that next time.

Here is my map at the Transition, without Tokens, and with all the areas labeled in case anyone wants to use it as the basis of a D&D adventure or something. If you click on it you should be able to see it in high enough resolution to be read the labels.

HtHaD 2ndEd: The Age of Monsters!

The Second Edition of How To Host A Dungeons features a radically different system for the Age Monsters. As with the Dwarven Civilization, the changes seem to maximize the variability and replayability of the new edition. Monsters are now on a deck of (print and play) cards, and each has their own list of behaviors, rather than falling into broad categories of monster with the same AI. The player also has a lot more control over monster behavior, which is both good and bad. It makes it a better tool for telling a story or creating just the dungeon layout you want, but those improvements come at the cost of being slightly less of a game. (Click here for Index of all my How To Host A Dungeon articles.)

At the start of the Age of Monsters, you shuffle all the monster cards, and deal out three for the first turn. I got two Alpha Monsters: a Worm and an Ogre. My third "monster" is a roaming party of 4 adventurers.

There are zero treasures on my board. None of the monsters I drew on the first turn start with any, and none of the choices I made for the Dwarves created any long-lasting Epic Treasures, either. None of these creatures Exploit ore, either. This means it will take many turns to trigger the Age of Villainy by Empire, and also in the early game a lot of Actions the use or target treasure won't be available.

The new rules really don't keep track of territory and range, and how far a monster can move is left up to your judgment. For this game I'm assuming they can move about the length of 1 finger (as measured in the previous system) if there's a clear, explored path with no intervening dangers. If they have to explore or tunnel, they'll get a lot less distance in a turn. This assumption works well in some situations, and in others it just kind of dragged out the game. Having played most of a game now, I think the rules actually intended there to be no range limitation, with no one ever failing to get where they wanted to go in a single turn. That's implied by the Relocate text, and probably would have made for a more exciting and shorter game. I wish the rules were more overt about that.

I also wish there were more subtypes of "Relocate" because it is used a little too broadly. There are a number of Monster cards that use one of Relocate, Scout or Explore that feel mislabeled. A party of Adventurers probably shouldn't be digging tunnels or really claiming territory at all, so it seems like the game would benefit from them having a movement Action that was different from Explore or Relocate. It's particularly egregious on The Experts, who as written sit in one place and dig new tunnels every turn. This bugged me so much that I ignored the rules as written for both Adventurer groups that showed up in my game.

I also wish there were more subtypes of "Relocate" because it is used a little too broadly. There are a number of Monster cards that use one of Relocate, Scout or Explore that feel mislabeled. A party of Adventurers probably shouldn't be digging tunnels or really claiming territory at all, so it seems like the game would benefit from them having a movement Action that was different from Explore or Relocate. It's particularly egregious on The Experts, who as written sit in one place and dig new tunnels every turn. This bugged me so much that I ignored the rules as written for both Adventurer groups that showed up in my game.

If you're just here for the review and house-rule suggestions, you can 

click here to skip the turn by turn analysis and go straight to my ruminations.

Turn 1: Initiative: Worm, Ogre, Adventurers

Worm: Digs towards the nearest water in search of food and a spot to nest. The lateral route opens up into a big ol' cave of lava from the Primordial era, so I reveal the nearby parts of that cave and then he changes direction. He doesn't get far enough to do any other actions on his list.

Ogre: There's nothing to eat in the old Dwarven drinking hall, so he relocates to a nearby room. He confuses the old bronze "impossible engine" for a big egg, and sets up camp there. He explores a little further down, but returns to the egg. To eat it now, or wait for it to hatch? That's a big think for the ogre.

Adventurers: Looking for adventure, they head down a mine and an old rickety elevator. They don't get far enough to accomplish anything more beneficial, and none of the follow-up actions are applicable.

Turn 2: Ogre, Worm, Adventurers, + Owlbear

Ogre: Gives up chewing on the bronze aeolipile and moves the banks of the small underground lake. Throws rocks at the old dwarf sculpture for a while, but can't figure out how to kill or eat it. Explores a bit of tunnel after he runs out of rocks.

Worm: Heads closer to the water. Because of my not initially understanding that there's intentionally no range limit on Relocate, the Worm didn't get as far as he probably should have.

Adventurers: Relocate to deeper in the dungeon. Again, probably should have moved further.

Owlbears: An Owlbear wanders in from the grasslands of the far left edge of the map, and moves up into the hills. There it finds a cave to use as a den, and scouts by digging to open up access to the nearby underground sea.

Turn 3: Worm, Owlbear, Ogre, Adventurers, + Antlings

Worm: Digs until he finds water, then builds a Nest. Routs the Ogre, driving him back to the Old Dwarven Drinking Hall.

Owlbear: Relocates to an island in the underground sea. Scouts around a bit, subsists on small blind cavefish.

Ogre: Hunts and eats of the four adventurers. Then he scouts out an escape route, since he's trapped between two opposing forces.

Adventurers: Have no good way to deal with the Ogre, so they relocate closer to the surface.

Antlings: Start with 3 Population, and our first Treasure of this Age. The giant ants Breed, then Explore towards the ruins of Segun Rokot.

The addition of the antlings to the map has made it all a lot more interesting. Exactly what happens next turn will matter greatly upon the initiative order in Turn 4.

Turn 4: Adventurers, Owlbear, Worm, Ogre, Antlings, + The Experts

Adventurers: Hear some noise in one of the old Dwarven vaults, and investigate. They pick a Fight with the Antlings, and lose.

Owlbear: Relocates from the island to the far shore. Scouts out some of the smaller caves at this end of the cavern, and discovers an opening to the surface.

Worm: Follows the scent of the Ogre, and short-cuts through the giant bronze tubes of the ruined Dwarven hydrothermal system. Despite bursting up from a floor grate in the Ogre's fortified lair, it fails to rout him a second time.

Ogre: That worm should have left him alone. Most creatures in the game with a Hunt action specify that it can only target Denizens or some other specific category of target. The Ogre's "ravenous hunger" implies the lack of targeting requirements is intentional on this creature. Since he wasn't routed, he turns the tables on the worm and devours it. After a nice meal, he Explores another possible escape route in case anything else ever bursts up from the floor of his home.

Antlings: Breed. They fight the Adventurers, and kill 1 of them. They then Explore, digging a tunnel all the way to that island in the sea.

This is actually something of a mistake on my part. When their Fight action finished, it should have ended their turn. By the time I realized it, I'd already drawn a big ol' tunnel on the page, and didn't want to delete it.

As you'll see in a future post, the existence of this Tunnel is what slows down the Antlings from becoming the Villain, turn after turn, and prolongs my game significantly. Little things can have huge ripple effects in How To Host A Dungeon, and that's kind of cool, even if it was brought to my attention because of what seemed like an innocuous mistake on my part.

The Experts: (These are a type of Adventurers, so I'm using the same color tokens for them, but technically if the two groups somehow meet, they aren't necessarily allied.) The Experts arrive in strata 4, so I have them enter via the old Dwarven Loway. Technically, they Explore this turn... but that seems like it should be some version of Relocate instead, so I'm treating it more like that. It doesn't really make sense for them to sit still unless they lose a fight, or to start building their own dungeon.

That's the end of the Fourth Turn, and we've had our first eliminations of the Age of Monsters. The Purple Worm was devoured by the Ogre. The first Adventurer group was reduced to just 1 Population, so they'll be Relocating off the map at the start of their next Turn.

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Things I Would Change

This seems like a nice moment for a few observations about the new edition. I love the idea of the "Monster Cards" providing different actions and priorities for each species. I like the way the initiative changes turn by turn and am pleased with how easy the card system makes it to know what part of the turn I'm on if I get interrupted and come back later. That's all pretty great.

However, the actual particulars of the Monster Cards themselves often leave a lot to be desired. They really could have benefited from some serious proofreading and blind playtesting. Here are a few things that seem really weird to me:

The rules for Fortifications and special bonus stars are inconsistently applied in the descriptions of the various Actions, so it's not easy to reference during play, and it can be hard to be certain if they are meant to apply to certain Actions or not. I think the intention is that Stars can be spent on any Conflict, but Fortifications only boost Fights (which are a type of Conflict). It seems strange to me that having Built some sort of fortress does not give you a defensive bonus against Extort, Hunt, or Steal.

Ogres should say "Hunt anything" if that's what is intended. One word (literally "anything") would have made it crystal clear, but without that I'm left wondering if it's really supposed to be able to kill other Alpha Predators or not. Compare that with the Owlbear, who has the same "always Hunt" but no statement about great hunger. Both of them have another way of dealing with Alpha Predators, so if it was intended that they can't eat Alphas, they still have things worth doing when they have an Alpha neighbor. Mechanically, it's going to be rare that they gain more from Ally or Trade with an Alpha than they would if they Hunt them, so it makes me wonder if maybe in some earlier edit of this edition the Hunt Action could only target Denizens.

Antlings should have Scout instead of Explore, or maybe have both options on their list. Scout would create tunnels that look more like an Ant farm, full of side passages and growing in every direction. At the start of this game, it felt like maybe Antlings could Breed too fast.  I eventually learned that their speed-breeding can be held in check by a single Alpha, so it's not game-breaking, but that brings up another question. Why don't Antlings have any way of driving off or killing an Alpha Monster? In the real world, ant colonies regularly swarm and devour creatures larger than themselves. Before my next game, I may give them another option that is a weakened version of the Swarm from the Horde Villain in 2nd Ed. Sacrifice some Population to Hunt or Rout an Alpha. Next time I play, I may make them "Always Scout" and "If we have killed a monster token this turn, Breed and Prepare." Then give them another option on their list of "Pupate: Requires * / Breed". That would keep them from popping up in a quiet corner of the map and triggering Villainy before even meeting their neighbors.

The Experts should have Relocate instead of Explore. As written, they just keep digging and expanding their territory instead of moving. That's so weird I ignored the instructions and made them behave more like Adventurers.

Why do owlbears Trade? It doesn't really break anything, but it doesn't make much sense, either. In general, the Owlbear card just confuses me. I get the Lords of Waterdeep joke, but there's a lot of strangeness on this card, and the particulars match neither D&D lore nor the Waterdeep boardgame. Scout has them drawing new caves nearly every turn: that seems more like what the Antlings should be doing. Trading with Alphas, and Ally with Animals don't really seem in-character for this species.

The system in the 1st Edition (all printings) had you start the Age of Monsters with 1 Delving Group, 1 Breeding Group, 1 Alpha Predator, and 1 Surface Kingdom. 2nd Edition does nothing to guarantee such a starting mix, and it suffers for it. I may have gotten a fluke in my opening draw, but having a Dungeon with 2 Alphas and some Adventurers makes a weird dynamic. Things started slowly, and many potential Actions were pointless or impossible for the first few turns. I also really miss the Surface Kingdoms. Next time I play, I may change the set-up for the Age of Monsters to call for specific types the way that 1st Edition did.

The next post will cover turns 5 to 11.