The Return of Dungeon 23

 My computer has been replaced, so I'll be able to type up my scribbled notes about the rooms in my Dungeon 23 sometime in the next few days. Until then, here's the current state of the ground floor of my map: 

EDIT: And then, as soon as my computer was replaced, I fractured a rib, and as dumb/lame/pathetic as that sounds, found it too painful to sit in a chair and type. For several weeks. So that was the end of Dungeon 23 for me. What a bummer.

Days without computers

 My computer died.while it's in the shop, I'm continuing to work on the Dungeon23 challenge, but won't be posting much as it's really a pain in the keyboard trying to post to blogger from my phone.

 

Dungeon23, Bridge 1.4

Room 1.4: This is a 70 foot long stone bridge connecting the north barbican gatehouse to the Northwest Gate of the Castle. The stone handrail is mostly intact, the surface is heavily scratched and mostly free of moss. 

Two sculptural elements adorn the bridge, one of which is considerably more broken than the handrails. Both stone sculptures appear to be creatures with humanoid torsos and serpentine lower bodies. The more complete of the two is along the railing, it's tail weaving between the railposts, and it reaches towards the castle. The other is inconveniently placed in the middle of the bridge, and its upper half is broken off the snake body, and rests in several pieces. The shattered one is in poor condition generally, but the one weaving through the railing is not only in great shape but also an incredibly detailed carving with lifelike (though inhuman) features and little signs of weathering. 

In reality, these are of course the petrified features of Yuan Ti who died upon the bridge earlier this year. Players will likely grok to this quickly, and the GM should make no effort to conceal it from them if they inquire along those lines. They'll probably draw the wrong conclusion anyway, assuming it to be foreshadowing of a Medusa much later in the module, rather than a basilisk showing up in the next couple of rooms. 

Speaking of which: While most of the time this bridge is empty (other than stone cold snakemen statues), there are two fairly regular exceptions when the creatures from Room 1.XX show up. On cold days, the basilisk comes to sun itself on the bridge for an hour or two in the middle of the day to warm up. At sunset, it's owner takes it out for a 15-minute walk and a frequent snack, often plucking a tasty bat out of the air when the swarms release from 1.1A. At either time, both creatures from 1.XX arrive together.

Dungeon 23, Room 1.3

Room 1.3: This is inside the base of the Northern Barbican Gatehouse. When the barbican was originally built, this base was a solid rock foundation, in-filled with stone debris and aggregate. It was still intact when the castle was defeated by sorcery and treachery, but in the years since, it has been consumed by the acidic roots of several semi-intelligent plant monsters. Their digestion has weakened the tower, causing the floors above to partially collapse, and leaving a hollow that has of late become a nest for a large colony of bats.

The locations marked A and B in this room are holes leading further below, opening onto the sublevel areas 2.XX. The holes appear to be ringed with snarls of thorny roots. These are two Stone Creepers (2x CR 1 medium plants from the Tome of Beasts 2).

In addition to the two Stone Creepers, a total of 7 Swarms of Bats nest here. (7x CR 1/4, Monster Manual)  During daylight hours, assume 1 swarm adjacent to each of Creepers A and B, and the remaining 5 Swarms in the larger cave marked 1.3C.  At sunset, the bats alight and fly out of the tower. They return 1 Swarm at a time over the hours before dawn. 

Lastly, the dark cave here is also appealing to snakes, of which there are many in the vicinity of the castle. At any given time there are 1d4-2 Poisonous Snakes (CR 1/8, Monster Manual) here, either hunting bats, or curled up in the roots of a Stone Creeper.

 

A Potential Disaster: Nothing that lives in this hole will seek to cause trouble for the PCs, but incautious PCs who plunge into the depths, make shocking loud noises, or unleash open flames will create a chaotic and perilous situation. 

Stone Creepers are not generally aggressive to other organic life, but they will get panicked if the PCs try to uproot them, or if Medium size or larger PCs try to push through or past them to get to the area on floor 2, below, and will use their acid-exuding thorns to defend themselves in such circumstances. If the PCs bring open flame down in to this area, the Stone Creeper's panicked reaction will be even worse. 

The wall marked 1.3D has been weakened over the years, and the creature will rip its way through to escape. This will cause the entire west tower of the north barbican gatehouse to collapse. Damage to any PCs in or within 10 feet of the tower (and any Sword Wraiths in 1.2, above) is as described for the Stone Creeper's Weaken Stone ability. If the Bat Swarms and/or Poisonous Snakes survive they will become agitated and violent. 

In the wake of the collapse, a large pit will be left open directly into area 2.XX. This collapse will obviously raise a great commotion, and the sudden unexplained transformation of the tower will put all the denizens of the ruins on edge. If this happens, raise all Alert Levels by 1.

 

Dungeon23, Day 2

(I'm jumping the gun a little, getting ahead on this because I don't anticipate having time tomorrow night. Don't want to fail the challenge on day 2.)

 Room 1.2: The upper floor of the gatehouse. The eastern section has a Scorpion (treat as a Ballista, per the DMG) that can be pivoted to aim out any of three firing ports. Additional slightly smaller arrow slits allow for crossbow shots along other avenues of approach. 

The western section has a collapsed floor leading into area 1.1A, and the Scorpion that should be on this end is missing. 

Between the two sides is a middle section overlooking the bridge. It has two raised portcullises in this upper space, and the floor section between them has numerous murder slits for raining bolts downward. Note that the gears and winches for the portcullises also collapsed when the floor in the western section gave way. The grates are held in place by locks and wedges. If they were to be released, they would slam downward into place, and given the broken and missing winch system, there's no easy way to lift them back up.  (Lifting the now-jammed gates by hand in the middle of a battle is a Difficulty 25 Athletics check. Doing so with a group of people outside of combat is automatic, but takes several minutes of focused labor.)

This room is guarded by two Sword Wraith Warriors. 

(2x CR 3, per Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes) 

In life, these warriors were tasked with guarding the bridge, but when the castle was defeated by treachery and sorcery instead of by force of arms, they were trapped within the barbican and starved to death. They now wait eternally for the attack they were sworn to repel. 

If any of the PCs (or their allies) come from a distinguished family line with a famous coat of arms or long history, it's possible that these warriors will recognize their heraldry and seek to block their passage on the bridge. The same holds true if a PC returns to the surface with the magic shield emblazoned with the three black crowns on a red field (see room X.XX, below). In such a case, the portcullises come crashing down forever and the Sword Wraiths will sally out for combat, or fire bows or scorpion as necessary. 

Note as well that the Sword Wraith's special Martial Fury ability has great synergy with fighting on the staircase from 1.1B: they get the extra attack, and the Advantage it would give the PCs is canceled by the Disadvantage of fighting up the stairs. That would be part of these Warrior's trained tactics from their mortal posting to this tower, so it's definitely a tactic they would attempt to utilize from beyond the grave. 

Treasure: Scorpion (if you can disassemble it), 20 large bolts for the same, 14 electrum pieces dating to the era the castle was built in, and the weapons and armor on the Sword Wraiths.

(The missing scorpion and winches from the western section can be found in room 1.3, below.)

Dungeon 23: Day 1.

I've decided to try the "Dungeon 23" Challenge. The goal is to make a 365-room, 12-level Mega-Dungeon, one room at a time, one room per day for a year.  I'm sketching out the map in my RocketBook, so that I can snap regular photos of it and post them here. Probably won't take pictures every day, as it's one thing to find a few minutes to draw a room and think about what might go in it, but it would be a whole additional hurdle to have to find time to post that here every day. 

Here's today's initial sliver of my map (...and part of my thumb, because of how I was holding the RocketBook).  It's actually sort of two rooms, and a bit of a bridge, but none of these have monsters or anything, so I'm just counting it as my one room for the day. The idea I'm working from is that my dungeon is a castle ruin. So this part is a gatehouse or barbican at the far end of a bridge or causeway leading in to the castle. There will probably be a few other above-ground features, so my first official Dungeon Level may actually be split between two floors. 

I plan to label the rooms in MM.DD format (Month/Day).

 

Room 1.1: Two towers sit on either side of bridge or causeway, their upper levels connected to house a gate. Both look intact (though very weathered) from the Northern approach towards the ruin, and the portculis is raised.

1.1A: The western section of the gate house is in rough shape. The door is missing, just a few old shards of wood dangling from a mangled hinge. Within, a large section of the floor is broken away, leaving a gaping hole nearly 15 feet wide. A central support column holds what's left of the floor in place. Darkness below. 

1.1B: The eastern section of the gate house is completely intact. The closed door to this tower is greyed and swollen wood.  PCs who try to force this open via foot or shoulder should roll a DC15 Athletics check. If they fail, they still get it open, but take 1d3 damage in the process. Characters with axes or mauls can smash it down automatically, but doing so will alert the undead sentries in area 1.2, above.

 

An inner wall and a central support column divide room 1.1B in half, and on the other side, a narrow staircase winds up the wall. The stairs are tight to the wall so that anyone (such as the PCs) fighting their way up them in melee will have a hard time swinging with their right arm, putting them at Disadvantage for any attacks made using their right arm (or both arms, if using a two-handed weapon).

Star-Forged: The Eluss Fold

 

Occasionally playing a bit of Starforged in the evenings. (It's the sci-fi/space version of Ironsworn.)  The above is my map of The Eluss Sector, which I assembled from Assets available on Roll20. The Luminous Coil is my PC's ship. The Cacophony is a derelict ship he investigated. The Ophidian Mantle is a enemy vessel we've tangled with twice.

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.

A Horse Of Another Timbre: Campaign Log, Session 4

 The following is the campaign log for the fourth session of my current Amber Diceless RPG campaign. Most of this log was typed up by one my players (thanks, Brendan!) during the session. I've added a few notes of my own. 

You can Start from Session #1 or just Rewind to Session #3.

Campaign log: 12 October

Setting the Scene: The first few sessions were a failed assassination attempt and a murder investigation set against the backdrop of a banquet in Amber with visitors from Chaos. Tangential investigations continues in this session more than anything else.

The PCs are:

• Dalziel, son of Bleys. A scientist who has been in Amber for several months.
  
• Maarit, daughter of Sand. An orphan who never met her mother.
• Spinturnix, son of Julian. Grew up in Forest Arden.
  
• Medore, child of Dierdre, just recently arrived in Amber to learn Dierdre is dead.
  
• David Weyreth is a retired officer from the militaries of Amber.
  
• Abn Haram, the human-shaped son of Lady Nykae of Chaos. 
  

Most of the NPCs are from the novels. Not just the big-name Amber Royals, but also plenty of minor characters, such as Will and Dik, who only show up in a paragraph or three of a single novel each. I was particularly happy with the way I utilized Roger and Rolf, two castle guards from the novels. Another non-Royal is completely my own invention: Jinna the Scullion, who dispensed exposition and minor clues in several later sessions as well.

A few major Chaosites show up in this session: Nykae is the mother of one of the PC, and serves as General in the armies of her brother Sevran. Other minor Chaosites such as Brute and Steward are present as well, these are all connected to Abn Haram's character sheet in one way or another. Allies, minions, conjuration results, etc.

Scene 1: Abn Haram heads to the stable with Steward - Abn Haram, Steward, Brute in the stables of Castle Amber
Abn Haram stuck Kimchee in his eye. (He was trying to figure out if chemical weapons work in Amber.) Steward shows up with a painting, front/back, and some Amber chess pieces. 

That's the back of the painting. It's sort of a map.

Steward says she was on an errand for Abn Haram's mother, Nykae. They head for the stables.

Abn Haram wanders the castle some more, and Maarit (who was in the opposite end of the stables, see scene 3 below) decides to stay on his trail.

Abn Haram tries to use the Tarot to find his mother (the card grows cold but he cannot establish a connection). Haram asks a guard if he can have someone contact King Random, but no one is willing to do so. Haram goes to the library and marvels at the old timey technology. He browses the organizational materials, histories, scientific treatises, etc. Haram makes an excuse to head for the toilet when he senses contact through a Tarot.

It's his Uncle Sevran; they chat about the state of things. Sevran suggests Nykae might be injured, suggests it's suspicious that Haram hasn't seen her. Sevran tells Haram that Nykae was trying to get "some objects," directed toward an effort to reach Haram's father. Haram passes the chess set and painting through to Sevran. Sevran decides to bring Haram into his confidence in his mother's absence. Nykae and Sevran have been watching a hole in reality, which has been growing. Recently the hole ruptured and a "horse with a horn" came out of the hole, killed people, and escaped. Sevran's trackers went after it, but they haven't returned.

Sevran says he will assemble a group of people to try and force a call to Nykae. Haram gives Sevran's card to Steward to use to give Sevran regular updates. Maarit and Haram chat about Haram's pretend diarrhea that he used as an excuse to avoid being observed on his call.

Haram studied the painting before he passed it to Sevran - the painting is very old, has cracks where it was folded. No tarot quality to it, but the paints are very high quality. It has the potential to have some under painting. 

GM's Note: I have had very little luck in anticipating the motivations and actions of Abn Haram. His player always surprises me, which is really cool, but does sometime result in wasted efforts on my part. This map-like-thing (above) was clearly a secret the character's mother was interested in, with an implication that it was the whole point of her traveling to Amber. It was also implied to be related to the disappearance of his father (Osric). We're six months and a dozen sessions since that prop's introduction, and this thread has gone more or less nowhere. That's okay, the campaign has a lot of subplots, so there's plenty happening. It _may_ mean that this could prop back up later in the campaign if the plot ever slows down a bit. Which will probably feel like a cool call-back when and if that happens. Until and unless it does, though, I can't help but feel like it's a failure on my part. A bit of a fizzle in an otherwise excellent campaign.

Scene 2: Dalziel heads for the dungeon to check on the pattern - Dalziel, Rolf, Roger, and what's left of Will in Dungeons of Amber
Dalziel sees the guards Rolf and Roger, discovers that someone "fell" down the stairs. They report that someone tried to access the dungeon. The story Rolf tells: the guard Will came by with a junk of drink, they imbibed, then a person from the Court came by to try to get down the stairs, called himself "Thelkor," Will relieved Rolf while he whizzed, and when he returned, he found Will missing. Roger reported that Will fell down the stairs and had a burnt artifact. Dalziel examines the burnt object, which smells like a burned heavily-decayed body. The object that fell with Will has human-like teeth in it. Roger mentions he thought he saw a hand reaching from the burning corpse.

GM's Meta-Note: Rolf, Roger, and Will are actual minor characters from the Amber novels. All three are guards in Amber's dungeons. Of the three, only Roger gets any memorable lines or development in the books: he's basically an author-insert character. The books are written by Roger Zelazny, and Roger the guard is writing a novel at his guard post. My real-life name happens to be Rolfe, so I decided to give Rolf a tiny bit of development and screen time as well, as a tip of the hat. In one of these early sessions (probably this one) there was a fair bit of meta-/sub-text to the banter as Rolf and Roger talked about how they split the responsibilities of keeping the Pattern safe.

The pattern is glowing but seems undisturbed. Dalziel decides to secure the door with himself inside, sends Roger back to his post.

2b: Dalziel waits at the pattern. - Dalziel, Corwin, Dungeons of Amber
He uses the opportunity to study the pattern, attempting to draw it on a page, checking out the pattern. The proportions of the pattern keep messing up the drawing. Eventually, Corwin knocks on the door and Dalziel lets him in. They discuss the odd state of Will and his attacker. Dalziel worries about pattern whizzers. Corwin says he needs to go check the corpses in the murder scene; he asks Dalziel to go check on Maarit, and then to bed.

2c: Dalziels slumbers - Dalziel and Bleys
As he sleeps, Dalziel dreams of walking around the pattern, but its fire has gone out and instead it smokes, as if full of incense. Time stretches and he finds himself fruitlessly walking around the pattern, getting nowhere. He spots his father on the other side of the pattern, speaking to him but beyond being heard. Finally his father shouts at the top of his lungs and can barely be heard shouting, "Wake up, Dalziel! Wake up!"

As he wakes, he receives a Tarot contact from his dad. Bleys asks Dalziel for info (says Dalziel is the "most trustworthy" person there). He indicates that there's "blood in the water" and says Caine is up to something, and that there might be a war. He suggests Caine is mounting an offensive against Random, and says he can avoid taking a side by not being there. Dalziel suggests that the assassins LOOK like they were sent by Bleys.

Bleys ponders the idea that there is an impending coup, wonders if Corwin is still in the capital, thinking that having a powerful brother of the King in town would help keep Caine from advancing "his coup." He asks Dalziel to pass along the impression that Bleys is still there, contemplating the defense of the city. He also gives Dalziel a request to find or speak to David, and then suggests that Dalziel get David's message for Bleys.

They also discuss the burning bodies / burned bodies, and some magic / person who makes beings appear? They discuss whether someone else might be marshalling a new attack on Amber. Bleys, a bit annoyed, breaks things off. 

GM's Edit: The thing that caused Bleys to break off was Dalz thanking him for including him in things and not treating him like a child. Bleys said "let's not get all sappy about it" or something to that effect as he broke off the contact.

Scene 3: Maarit heads for the stables - Maarit, Mathis, Bronze
She looks for some guards on her way, adding the stables to their rosters. Then she finds a spot to sit in the stables where she can listen for Abn Haram to guard him, subtly. Steward sees Maarit and alerts Abn Haram to the surveillance. Haram goes back to sleep.

Maarit admires Bronze, a strangely-patterned horse (it's striped brown and green), and chats with a stablehand about it -- who reveals that these are "wonder horses." She and the stablehand open the idea that she might come back and ride the horse. Bronze belonged to Sand, whom Maarit has never met, but has been told is her mother. Bronze has been maintained in these stables for a very long time.



Scene 4: Medore questions Dik - Medore, Nix (Spinturnix), Dik in Castle Amber
Upon realizing Medore is trying to get Dik alone, Nix stays in the library while Medore walks toward Dik's quarters. Medore questions Dik about the messages written under the plates. Dik confesses that he smuggled a gift on behalf of Lady Karm to Abn Haram, some sort of light love token. Medore promises to protect Dik in exchange for his help finding out which Kitchen staff might have planted the message. Dik suggests Ginna the Scullion seems suspicious, as does the chef.

Dik mentions the message he had to give - "The door is open far below...Lady Karm remembers the debt owed to Gehenna's finest son... Many happy returns" - it was accompanied by a key. Dik hands out a folded-over handkerchief with a gravy-stain image of the key stuck on it. Medore assures Dik that he's protected.

4b: Medore meets up with Corwin - Medore, Corwin,
Medore asks Corwin about Lady Karm, that she's trying to reach out to the Chaosites.. Medore suggests that it was a servant who wrote the message, and Corwin agrees, but suggests it was done at the behest of a family member. Medore says it could have been "Jinna the Scullion" or "Chef Wilhelm." Corwin invites Medore to join him in the morning at the place where Corwin likes to go to remember Medore's mother.

Corwin asks more about Karm's message, Medore repeats the message to Corwin. They proceed to the ambassadorial suite, then stab some bodies and rifle through their clothes. The bodies start smoking after he stabs them; Corwin puts the smoking body in the bath tub and takes its clothes. They search the bodies to see if they're carrying any shared item. They each have a piece of iron jewelry, which Corwin finds significant. Corwin suggests he'd want the King to arrest the Chaos delegation. Corwin establishes that the murdered Chaosites smoke or burn when he stabs their corpses with Greyswandir; the assassins do NOT smoke.

Medore and Corwin discuss the next steps -- who they can trust, which door they think the key opens. Medore gives the gravy napkin to Corwin, then heads for the kitchen. He gossips with the kitchen staff and learns that the Chef yelled at everyone that night, was fussy for his table settings. Medore has a tasty dessert and reports to Corwin before he goes to bed.


Scene 5: David leaves Caine's ship - David, Caine and (Caine's nephew from Rebma?) aboard the Venom
As David leaves Caine's ship, he sees an eddy of water and a submarine from Rebma surfaces. The person on the ship calls out that his uncle is expecting him, and Caine's crew invites the unknown person aboard. David, having seen this, rows ashore and heads for his camp to go to bed. He arranges for an early call.  

5b. David makes breakfast - David in City of Amber then Castle Amber
David rises early, takes a run to the early markets, and then begins cooking breakfast for King Random. He learns that Chef Wilhelm has taken the morning off, so David makes the relatively simple dish: pancetta something something something (not at all simple). David has to rush and ends up giving the King a plate of total garbage. 

(David's Edit: In fact, I simply stopped curing the pancetta a few minutes early, so it may be only somewhat less salty than optimal. And the meal is pancetta, oysters, and crayfish in a soft scramble with Egg-Avocado toast, which I assure you is quite simple, in the grand scheme of culinary things: a protein scramble with toast, more or less. One must be mindful of what one puts in one's body, yes?)

GM's Edit: That is one of the great things about running your game online, and having logs and pages the players can access. Players can jump in and later clarify bits that others didn't catch the first time. I'm lucky to have such active participants.

Scene 6: Nix roams the castle - Nix (Spinturnix), Jinna the scullion, Hendon in Castle Amber
Nix spends about an hour researching a) recent events at the castle and b) methods of movement among shadow. After learning a bit, he leaves to try and dig up a little gossip with the scullery maid. He chats with Jinna, the scullery maid, who reveals that the banquet wasn't well attended, that Droppa MaPants chased everyone out with his bad performance, and that Lord Bleys was in charge. Nix learns that Chef Wilhelm demanded some time alone with the table settings, and later Bleys did the "yank the tablecloth" magic trick. Next, Nix seeks out Hendon to find lodgings. After revealing who his identity, Hendon eagerly helps Nix find rooms. Nix takes modest rooms near Julian's wing of the castle. Hendon tells Nix he'd be welcome to have lunch with King Random the next day.



Quote Log:

“I can still deny everything. I don’t know anything about it.” -Abn Haram

I rub a bit of Kimchee in my eye. Does it hurt?  I am a man of science after all!  - Peter/Abn Haram

"I'm giving him space, but also making sure that he doesn't get got." -Marit

“I’ll protect your secret, but in exchange, you will help me figure out who on the kitchen staff had motive to leave those messages.” -Medore

“My friends do very well… I protect my friends.” -Medore

“That does make sense… he is always trying to get in mah pants too.” -Kitchen Maid

“Yes, turns out Dick is the center of the universe.” -Rolfe

“I am in a bit of a hurry, I had a lot of that Kimchee.” -Abn Haram, hoping to not be followed into the bathroom

I supposed we should serve less Kimchee next time. -Marit

“I haven’t had a party this interesting in at least six months.” -Medore

"Family is far more plural than it used to be." -- Corwin, to Dalziel

D&D Maps

 The following is a snapshot of the Roll20 landing page for my current irregular D&D game. 

 

We'll be playing a bunch in the next few days, and then probably not again for months. This tends to be a holiday game, as that's the only time all the players have days off in common.

Quiet Conclusion

I just realized I don't think I ever did a post from the end of The Quiet Year game that I played with my buddy Brendan from Chicago. It was a lot of fun. Here's a picture from the end of the game, to save me from writing a thousand words of play-by-play for a game we finished up a few weeks back:

We played on Roll20. Just a heads-up for anyone thinking of doing the same: the game is a lot of fun on Roll20, but it does have some technical hurdles you'll want to prepare for. Drawing is clumsier in the Roll20 interface than it is face-to-face, and labeling things with text is super-easy and more legible than it would be in-person, so we ended up with quick little scribbles and relied a lot more on our ability to put text on the map (than the rulebook officially discourages labeling, but on Roll20 it's a welcome tool). You'll notice that the fence on the map was drawn in by a couple hundred strokes of the drawing tool. By the end of the game, things were lagging a tiny bit, so it might be better to not draw every individual fence-post next time.

I was surprised the Roll20 version isn't quite ready-to-play straight-off-the-shelf. The default page has nowhere for you to note scarcities, abundances, or characters, so I changed the page size (landscape rather than portrait fit my screen better anyway) and added a section for notes on the side. It also doesn't come with anything to represent the Contempt tokens, and no placeable dice. So I used a token I'd uploaded for an old Warhammer RPG for Contempt, and slapped together a rollable table token of a d6. It was all pretty simple, but just be advised that if you do want to play it on Roll20, you can't just fire-and-forget at the marketplace, someone in the group is going to have to do a few minutes of work to prep the game before the first time you play. Thankfully, the deck is already loaded up, so it does save you a whole bunch of time and effort by not having to scan the deck in. It does feel worth the 8$ or 10$ it costs on the Roll20 marketplace, and I'm glad I bought it, but I was a little surprised that I had to provide my own dice and tokens. It seems like if the publisher had included those in the Roll20 assets, it wouldn't have cost them much time or effort, yet would have resulted in a much more polished product.

About half way through the second session, we realized that we should have been making notes in the chat window of each turn's development and what all Projects and Discoveries were. If we had done so from the beginning, then we'd have a nice chat log of what had happened, and it would have been much easier to pick back up when we came back two weeks later for the second half of the game. So file that tip away for next time.

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.

The Noisy Season

Got together tonight on Roll20 with an old friend from half a continent away. After catching up (we hadn't seen each other since GenCon) we played 1/3 to 1/2 a game of The Quiet Year. If you haven't heard of it, The Quiet Year is a collaborative map-making game. We're building a community in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. It's a lot of fun. Here's our map as it stands at the moment:

I like The Quiet Year quite a bit. Enough to buy it on Roll20, despite owning a hardcopy that I suppose I could have just scanned in, or played by drawing cards in meatspace and just reading them into the video chat. It was enjoyable enough we're going to get together next week for the second half. (There's more than half a game left to do, but we spent the first hour mostly gabbing and catching up tonight, so it will probably zip by fast next time.)

The Roll20 implementation is pretty minimalist. It has all the pages of the rulebook as individual handouts, which is great for searching up individual rules, or for splitting up the reading of the rulebook between players. I wasn't completely convinced that Roll20's drawing tools were up to the task, and as you can see our drawings are pretty rough. I gotta say though, it worked well enough and was every bit as fun as in-person play. The Roll20 interface actually sped the game up, because if you had something a little more involved to draw you could fill in details while the other player took their turn. That's not normally a thing you can do when passing one sheet of paper back and forth in the physical game. So in some ways the Roll20 version is better than in-person (speed of play, and being able to play long-distance despite quarantine), and in other ways it is inferior to tabletop (mostly because the drawing tools on Roll20 aren't as easy to use as a box of colored pencils is).

I have always wanted to use The Quiet Year to create a map and history together with a playgroup, and then later set an RPG for the same group in that world we'd created together. It occurs to me that the Roll20 implementation would make it really easy to do that, as well as much easier to tweak that map (or upgrade it with a fancy version) after the start of the campaign. You would, however, then have a few dozen redundant rules-handouts jamming up your journal that you would want to delete or archive.  Even so, that is really cool, and now I really want to try that sometime.

One thing that did disappoint me a little about the Roll20 implementation is the lack of bells and whistles. I had to add the tiny dice as rollable table tokens. For the Contempt Tokens, I had to steal a chip from an old WH40K RPG campaign I ran back in the day. The yellowed paper background was on a single pregenerated page that took a little bit of ingenuity to duplicate to other pages for a second game.

(Addendum: It occured to me a few weeks later that they probably set it up that way intending for you to launch the module as a new campaign each time you want to play, so having multiple pages per campaign wasn't even a thing they considered. I think I prefer to have all the maps from every game of The Quiet Year that I've ever done online all be accessible in the same campaign framework, for ease of reference, and so I can show off old maps when teaching the game to new players. I suppose that preference might change if I do ever get around to starting an RPG campaign with a round of The Quiet Year to make the map for the campaign. You might not want a dozen other maps clogging up your campaign in that situation.) 

All told, it was less than half an hour of work to set up a reusable online version of the game, but if I had just bought it and thought I could start play right away I would have been surprised that I needed to take those extra steps the first time. I don't really know the first thing about how hard it is to build a sellable product on the Roll20 Marketplace, but it seems like it wouldn't be too much to ask for the game to come with a few assets that were selectable from the art library of the marketplace item, such as a set of tiny dice icons (or better yet, a prebuilt rollable token), a themed graphic for Contempt, and the yellow parchment background that you could then drag and drop to start a new page (bonus points if you could use it in other games/campaigns). I wonder if that's possible?

Along those lines, I'm really surprised that the Roll20 interface doesn't really include any generic "glass bead" -style tokens. Maybe they worry that would cut into sales of art assets? It sure seems like it would be useful for any number of gaming applications, but not so cool that people would be willing to pay much for it. But it also doesn't seem like it would take much work for Roll20's staff to make a set of half a dozen colored bead tokens available as a freebie (Edit: Or just one, which the GM could color via the existing token Tint feature), since they already give away for free several dozen virtual miniatures that are way more detailed.

Anyhow, The Quiet Year is elegant, goofy fun, and I highly recommend it, whether in dead-tree or Roll20 version. It's not perfect, but it's definitely worth the modest asking price in either format.

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.