Blink, and the Age of Villainy is gone

Continuing the tale of my second game ever of How To Host A Dungeon.  In part one, the Dark Elf cities of Kharsoum and Leyban (and the Colony of Silla) burned themselves out in a hurry, and then a huge earthquake shattered the rock around them. In the second act, various monsters moved in to the ruins, and were hunted mercilessly by parties of roving adventurers. In this chapter, a new villain arises, shakes up the dungeon a bit, and then meets a quick demise. In the end, though, I've got a pretty cool map that I could use for D&D as the basis of a old-school dungeon with a rich history. So that's cool.

Link to First Post. Link to Second Post. (Click here for Index of all my How To Host A Dungeon articles.)

Here's the map as we last saw it:

Picking A Good Villain:

There’s four Villain options in the rules: the Thought Lord Cult, the Liche King, the Alpha Villain, and the Dungeon Master. You can either roll randomly, or pick the one that seems best suited to your map.

Our map is a little tricky. On average, we would have expected to see 1.3 adventuring parties in the first 8 turns of the Age of Monsters. Instead, we rolled up 3 parties, the last of whom wiped out most of the monsters on the map, and hoovered up most of the treasure. Whatever Villain we add is going to be facing serious resource shortages, and not have much of a buffer between them and any further do-gooder adventuring parties.

There aren’t enough monsters to fuel the Thought Cult’s sacrifices. It would die off very quickly.

The starting position (largest empty room) for the Dungeon Master is too close to the surface, and likely to result in a long unproductive battle of attrition with the Count that eats up all the resources and leaves the DM too vulnerable. The very first of the mandatory yearly Adventuring Parties of the Age of Villainy would almost certainly wipe the DM out.

I could make Count Laventhorpe an Alpha Villain, but there’s some potential issues with the way his “Zone of Control” would bounce around whenever Adventurers tried to kill him, thanks to the rules that I made up for him when a rolled a “12: Create your own” on the Alpha Predator chart. As a Minion of the Liche King his powers would still be interesting, but not likely to break the game the way they would if I made my unkillable Count into the big bad.


A Liche-King could work, with either Count Laventhorpe or the Magma Spirits as the Liche King’s primary Minion. It would be a slow start, due to the dungeon being cash-poor, and having very few tombs (one in Leyban, and if you’re generous the vampire’s coffin could count as a tomb - in fact, the version I put up on the How To Host A Dungeon Wiki specifically labels those escape rooms as Tombs). It's probably the best official option, but boy is it likely to make for long slow burn that takes forever to get anywhere. I'd rather save the Liche-King for use in some future tomb-ier map.


Thinking outside the box, another option would be to assume that last Adventuring Party was corrupted by the Great Flail of Melancholy they found in the Temple to Dame Chaos, and that one of them became the new Dungeon Master. This would start the DM with a lot of extra treasure, since they'd picked up 6 treasures via questing and pillaging. I would have to break the rules of placement as well, putting the DM’s HQ in old Kharsoum instead of the larger room abandoned by the vampire. While this is stretching the rules quite a bit to the benefit of the Villain, they’d also be facing a high difficulty due to how well-developed the surface kingdom is. (If the DM miraculously met his army size trigger on turn one, he’d still lose the war. He has to weaken the humans before facing them in the final confrontation if he wants to win.) I think this is the most interesting option. We want the game to be exciting, and this will do it. Thankfully, the game encourages you to ignore the dice if a more interesting choice is calling to you.

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Age of Villainy, Year 1: 

I named the villain Elzulgur Melanquish, Master of Dungeons. I rolled up his name from a mishmash of charts in Gary Gygax’s Extraordinary Book of Names. Elzulgur was the fighter of the adventuring party that just smashed it's way through the underworld. Only he and the party's wizard had survived, and they were both a little shadier than their companions. He was corrupted by the Great Flail. Hearing the voice of Dame Chaos herself, he returned to the ruins of Kharsoum, intent on restoring them to their former greatness.  Perhaps it should have been the Great Flail of Nostalgia, not Melancholy.

As Dungeon Master, he renovates old Kharsoum into a spiffy new HQ. He spends some money hiring human mercenaries (other adventurers he’s worked with before).  Renovates the Old Elf Road going west. The DM enslaves the Earthmen. Since this only used half his allowed expansion for the turn, the DM also constructs a new tunnel to the lower section of the Abandoned Merfolk Mines, and drains a room. The digging goal is to connect his new HQ to the Temple of Dame Chaos that changed his life. He also spends 1 treasure building a Laboratory for the Wizard from his old party.

Meanwhile, the Surface Humans get the fifth person in the castle, and send him out to make another farm. As mentioned in a previous post, I now suspect the rules actually intend you to create new peasants to run the farms, but I’d already run 6 or 7 turns the wrong and slower way, so I’ve decided to stand by it. I can see what the difference is like on my next play. This is not the sort of game where you stress yourself out trying to do everything just right. Tweaking and experimenting is much of the fun.

The Earthmen increase in number instead of taking a normal turn. They have been dominated by Elzulgur Melanquish, but he has not yet begun conscripting them for his army.

The tunnels between Count Laventhorpe and everyone else are longer than his hunting range. However, the way I wrote up the Earthmeld special ability for him allows him to encounter either the new human farm or the earthmen by melding through the dirt. (In hindsight, this may be over-powered and have some odd corner cases. The version I put up on the How To Host A Dungeon wiki yesterday left that part out to compensate. I’m gonna stick to my guns for what's left of this game, and see how it plays.) I could decide his target with a die roll, but I figure he probably hungers for human blood more than Earthmen dirt. Though there are a ton of humans on the surface, each construction has it’s own strength. So the farms are relatively vulnerable (+1 to the roll) whereas the castle and city are much stronger (currently +4 or +2 on their defense rolls). The minor lordling who was just recently awarded a small fief is devoured in the night.

The Magma Spirits continue to make their way up towards the Mithril ore. This “should” have been a random tunnel exploration, which could have sent them in any one of 9 (or more) directions. They were just so close, and given that they are fire-based mining creatures, it seemed hard to justify them choosing to go somewhere other than the direction that had an eternal flame and ore worth mining. It wasn’t in their zone of control at the start of the turn, so they can’t start mining it just yet, but it’s there for next time. While I was at it, I added some stairs to the shafts they’d dug. If they’re capable of mining, the "spirits" must have physical forms and thus probably legs. Plus, I think it just looks better with stairs.

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Adventurers!

At the end of every year in the Age of Villainy, an Adventuring Party shows up to seek out the big bad. Right off the bat I roll up a party of 6, which is quite possibly enough to end the game this turn if they go down the right tunnels. There was some temptation to ditch that roll, but no matter what happened, I knew this map was going to be hard on the Villain.

I decide to let random luck play it’s part, and the dice send them toward good ol’ Count Laventhorpe first. Perhaps on their way to the dungeon they passed by the bloody massacre at the farm house. They defeat him handily and take his treasure, but the Count escapes with his unlife once again by melding with the earth.
With everything cleared on the first level, I move the Adventurers to the waterfalls chokepoint, and roll to see which of many passages down they take after that. They go down the old Dark Elf exploratory shaft above Leyban and from there into the abandoned Merfolk canals, much like the previous party that ended up corrupted by Dame Chaos.
That leads down into the merfolk city that was built on the ruins of the Dark Elf Slave Pits, all of which the Villain just recently tunneled into, drained, and remodeled.
The adventurers push their way into the Dungeon Master’s Headquarters. They shatter his mercenary army in the first battle. Then they hunt down the DM himself, and take him out in a climactic confrontation. The Age of Villainy didn’t last very long at all. That's what he gets for building a crummy laboratory and expanding tunnels instead of focusing all his efforts on traps. Poor dumb DM.

There’s still a few monsters on the map, but they’re all lawfully-aligned, and very weak compared to the adventurers, so there doesn’t seem to be much point in playing out whatever clean-up might happen. Either the magma spirits hire the adventurers to kill the earthmen, or the earthmen hire the adventurers to kill the Count, whom they can’t reach. There’s at best a 1 in 12 chance the adventurers will lose to the strongest of the monster groups at this stage, and even if they do the game is basically over.


I mean, umm... hooray! Good triumphed, and the villains were vanquished! No questions about where my sympathies lay. No, sir-ee. Just another good guy here. No need to cast Detect Alignment when I'm around.

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Post-Mortem Report:

Fun game. Cool map. Documenting it for the web was a bit of work, but enjoyable.

The game worked best when it was inspiring me. Sometimes the random charts were perfect and provided unexpected results that really shook things up. Other times, I was better off over-ruling the charts and making my own calls. To the game designer’s credit, the rules encourage you to do just that.

Relying too much on the charts, or the strictest interpretations of the instructions didn’t always pay off. The Plague and Fate caves went unused the entire time, because with all those interconnected tunnels there was little reason for anyone to dig. I could have fudged the earthquake rolls, or taken more liberties in early turns to direct various groups into those hazards. Next time that sort of situation comes up, I probably will. Since this was only my second time playing the game, I wanted to see if any of the random rolls would actually hit those hazards, but I can see now that with certain layouts that just won’t be likely. I also might draw those caves larger, as being just 1 or 2 beads in size makes them not much more than a needle in a haystack.

Delver Groups in particular were an area that was a little disappointing as written. That last bit of mithril sat out there forever, and when I finally “cheated” to send the magma spirits at it it was too late to matter. This may be just a function of the earthquake creating so many tunnels for them to randomly explore, but that basic scenario seems likely to happen in many games. I'm not sure I'm quite capturing the layering effect of the tracing paper the core rules assume you'll be using instead of a computer. If I was to fade out or partially clog the caverns when new Ages start, there'd be more need for the Delving monsters to tunnel, and that might shake up the map some more. What few complaints I have could also probably be resolved by either fudging rolls more often, or at least weighting my random rolls a bit more. Simply doubling the odds that Delvers will explore any tunnel that leads to ore might well fix it. (I also went to the How To Host A Dungeon Wiki and added a homebrew Delver option that would be a little more aggressive about treasure-hunting.) It's easily fixed by any number of possible house-rules, and it's certainly not particularly broken if you don't house-rule. Some maps may even solve this problem on their own by virtue of random luck. Don't let this minor gripe discourage you from giving the excellent game a try.

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Using this Map elsewhere:

Here is a version of the map without tokens, in case anyone wants to use it as a basis for their D&D game or something.

The layout during that last turn seems like it has potential in that way. The vampire so close to the surface doesn’t exactly fit the “the deeper you go, the tougher the fights” paradigm of D&D, but other than that it’s set up to fit the laws of drama and provide some meaningful choices to the players. The Magma Spirits will need some fleshing out for an RPG, but the place has tons of history you can draw on. The dungeon is loosely organized into different regions, each with their own theme and flavor. There’s a couple of Dark Elf treasures waiting to be discovered, as well as little Timmy’s tragic remains. Few actual PC parties will be willing to take the underwater routes that my adventuring parties in the HTHAD game loved to access, but it’s there if they think outside the box (and comes complete with the body to loot if they make their spot checks while down there). You could bend the history a little bit to justify leaving a few merfolk, dark elves, trolls, etc (and as whatever species the feral slave beast were) on the map. The rough caverns and waterfalls are probably worth breaking out the hardcore dungeoneering rules for your system of choice, if such things exist. Or you could hand-wave that difficulty by saying the adventurers who came before you left ropes or ladders in place (like the little one I drew in the Misty Vale).

The Age Of Adventurers

Last week I started a digital game of How To Host A Dungeon, and posted the first few eras on this blog. Today, I'll continue that through the Age of Monsters.

Link to previous post. (Click here for Index of all my How To Host A Dungeon articles.)
Here's how the map looked after the Great Disaster that ended the Dark Elf Civilization of Kharsoum Leyban:

Everything is focused on the lower right of the map, and the Dark Elf palaces of Leyban, Kharsoum, and Silla are in a terrible shambles.

Now we start the Age of Monsters.

We had a few Monster Groups already on the map.

Descendents of the Rebel Elves: Officially these were Wandering Monsters, but I decided to fudge the rules a bit and make them Chaotic / Breeders. This seemed a good compromise to making them interesting and competitive without causing them to just repeat the mistakes of their kind. (If I’d made them Delvers like I proposed last week, they would have abandoned the colony at the end of the turn for lack of resources.)

Feral Slave Beasts: Straight-up Wandering Monsters. Nothing special about them, and I'm not entirely certain what sort of beasts they were.

The treasures on the map are mostly just random trinkets left over from the Dark Elf colonies, but T1 is a magic item named The Great Flail of Melancholy, and T2 is The Mithril Veil that adorns the statue of Dame Chaos in her Shrine in the ruins of Silla.

As we explore the timeline and maps of the Age of Monsters, we'll see that it's really the NPC Adventuring Parties that truly shape this Age.

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Age of Monsters, Year 1

A variety of Monster Groups arrive and make their initial lairs. At this point, the turns start to get complicated.

The first to arrive is the Surface Kingdoms of man. They build a Keep atop the cliff, and name it Castle Laventhorpe.

Monsters appear at random starting locations, and as it turns out I rolled up one of the flooded chambers in the middle of the map, from when the river got redirected. When something like that happens you've got a couple options. You can reroll, you can assume they build a bridge or drain the room, or you can consult the optional water and magma monster chart.

I did the later, and got Merfolk. They count as Delving monsters, and will rework the natural caverns around them into architectural marvels... which I'll probably turn into simple bubble-shaped chambers to keep things quick(ish) and easy. Merfolk may leave the water, but they always flood the rooms they choose to live in.


Next up are Earthmen in the lower left corner. Not "bring us to your leaders, earthman", but presumably some sort of elemental creature. The rules are pretty short, and don't waste words on detailed descriptions of the races, but I picture them as little clay people with heads not unlike diminutive Easter Island statues. These ones are Lawful in alignment. They count as Breeders, but I've decided to have them smooth the natural rock where-ever they go. When I drew in the earthquake caverns I made it very jagged, and I'd like the Earthmen to use their supernatural powers to wear it down a bit.

Lastly, there's a Vampire in the old dry riverbed. I was rolling for an Alpha Predator, and got a 12, which is 'create your own'. So I had to make up some minor rules for him. His alignment is "Hungry" and works for the most part like any other Alpha. However, he cannot cros running water in the same tunnel or room that he's in. If he ends his turn on the surface (which is unlikely) he'll die from sun exposure. He has typical D&D vampire powers to turn into a cloud of gas or various rodents, or to meld with the earth, and regenerate. So if anything would kill him, he instead moves straight down until the next empty room, or makes his own chamber after a 1/2 finger's length of earth-melding. He only really dies if this puts them in water, magma, or off the bottom of the map. Vampires can pass freely through raw earth and rock, encountering targets within range regardless of the walls between them. Those targets cannot choose to encounter him on their turns unless they have a path to his current lair.

I could have made a case for taking full turns with the Rebel Elves and the Slave Beasts, but their turns would be pretty minor in this set up, so I let it go for now.

I did however add some minor cosmetic details to the map, like white foam on the waterfalls.

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Age of Monsters, Year 2: 

The yearly event charts tell me a statue is discovered! I decide it's a Statue of the Earth God whose earthquake destroyed the Dark Elves. A huge Easter-Island-style rock head falls from the ceiling where it had watched them with contempt.
Each turn you roll on an event chart. Usually it generates some sort of monster group entering the map, but sometimes it does something else colorful, like reveal a previously unknown statue.

The Humans build a farm.
  The Elven Rebels accomplish very little. They breed, but then suffer losses to starvation. They expand their territory just a little, just past the edges of old Kharsoum.
  Slave Beasts from wander through the old Silla mines to the waterfall.
  Merfolk mine into the old mithril deposit, in an organized grid. They also smooth out their chambers and smooth/flood the areas on their doorstep. While this area had been previously mined, I figured having lava pour through it probably made the ore liquify and relocate. Getting one more ore out of deposit seems fine, but I probably won’t let them remine the other two parts. Let’s call this vein played out.
  Earthmen have no exits, so they get motivated and head towards the Statue of their Creator god at a rapid pace. They smooth all the rough stone they pass. They are skilled enough to mine past the waterfall without flooding the tunnels they connect to. They also technically breed and starve for net zero population growth.
  The Vampire hunts unsuccessfully, and relocates his lair to different cave in hopes of finding prey.
  The Elves and Earthmen seem destined for conflict, but it could be several turns off. The Merfolk are probably in the strongest position at the end of the year, despite their initial mine having dried up.

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Age of Monsters, Year 3:

This year sees the arrival of Human Miners near the middle of the surface layer. They are separate from surface kingdoms, but I’m interpreting the intent that they are allied or at least at peace with the castle. The rules could probably be clearer there, but the games light enough I can just rule as I see fit.

Surface Kingdoms build a second farm.
   Rebels breed and starve.    Slave Beasts stay put.
   Merfolk create a series of locks and fishladders downriver from the city. 
   Earthmen slowly expand their territory, zero population growth.
   The Vampire, so hungry, returns to his original lair. The miners are not yet close enough for him to Earthmeld to them, but they will soon.
   Human miners dig down, unaware of the danger below them.

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Age of Monsters, Year 4: 

Arrival of Trolls. Two immediately team up in the old dry river (their random placement put them adjacent to each other). The third shows up in deep caverns, and encounters Rebel Elves. The lone troll invader is immediately driven off, at the cost of half the elven numbers.

Humans build a third farm.
   Rebel Elves breed, and claim the Troll treasure. Bolstered by the captured resources, they restore their numbers and extend their perimeter closer to the Trolls they just chased out.
   Slave Beasts stay put.
   Merfolk extend east of their mines. They suffer some losses to slave beasts, but seal off and flood more chambers to expand their territory.
    Earthmen extend slowly. As breeders, they move fastest when there's only one direction to go, and spread more slowly when they border a lot of rooms or tunnels.
    Vampire was going to eat the miners, but since there’s now Trolls available, that’s a tastier snack. The trolls can’t hurt it. Literally half the trolls retreat, and then grow back their other halves.
    Human Miners break into tunnels, and encounter the Vampire. They recognize him to be Count Laventhorpe, the great grandfather of the man who built the castle. He eats one of them.
   Dumbstruck and still regenerating from the recent Vampire attack, the two trolls in the west do nothing. The troll in the east heads further away from the elven rebels.

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Age of Monsters, Year 5:

A Party of Adventurers, three in number, enter the mines in search of loot and experience! They head down the mines, and “kill” Count Laventhorpe. The Count kills one of their party before going down. His Earthmeld power saves him. Per the rules I wrote up for it when I rolled the “12” that created him, he melds down a half-finger from his previous position, creating a new cavern there. This must be where his coffin was hidden. His zone of control is reset to the smaller cave.

The continue on to the Trolls, whom they dispatch and burn out. I roll on the Minor Features table, and discover the room where they built the bonfire for all the troll bits is forever after known as The Forsaken Chamber.

The fight leaves just a single Adventurer alive, so he gathers up the available treasure and leaves. He probably retires and becomes an innkeeper in some module somewhere.

The Rebel Elves actually increase their numbers, fueled by tasty Troll-flesh.
   Slave Beasts remain entranced by the waterfall.
   Merfolk expand their lock system further West.
   Earthmen expand in four directions, smoothing and expanding the tunnels as they go. They run into the Elves. After a brief hit and run skirmish, they steal the troll-goods from the Rebels.
   Count Laventhorpe melds through the earth in the shortest distance, and attacks the miners. It doesn’t go so well for the Count, who is driven off further down the halls. The area around his coffin is too dangerous, so he camps out in the smoke-stained Forsaken Chamber.
   Human miners dig out the large cavern that had been the Count’s previous rooms. They do not find his coffin.

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Age of Monsters, Year 6:

Arrival of the Magma Spirits. They burrow up from deep below the ruins of Leyban, and create a new Magma Pool at their start point.

Humans build a fourth farm, and I put this one at the base of the cliffs near the old earthquake cracks. Then I noticed the use of “place” versus “move” in the paragraphs for the surface kingdoms. That subtle wording suggests that the process is different when creating a new farm instead of merely populating one that had been raided by monsters (which hasn't happened this game). I decide to keep going with the rules as I had been doing, but resolve to handle things the other (faster) way in my next game. For now, this means the knights still aren’t ready to raid the underdark.

Rebel Elves are feeling penned in by the Earthmen and Trolls, so they attempt to dig an escape route to the old ruins of Leyban. They are surprised to discover Leyban’s flooded status. The river briefly diverts into old Kharsoum, and down the Old Elven Road. In the Chaos, the Elves steal about 1/3 of the wealth of the Merfolk when it washes into them. They lose a lot of territory to flooding.
   The Merfolk go to war with the Elves, and recover their treasure. Meanwhile the Merfolk engineers build a dam and a reservoir system to bring the river and the flooding back under control.
   Earthmen raid the Elves, but find they no longer have anything worth taking.
   The Trolls are washed down the Old Elf Road by the flooding.
   Count Laventhorpe attacks the Miners, who abandon much of their tools and wealth to escape.
   Miners expand away from the Vampire for a while, but when that fails to turn up any ore or  gems, they eventually work up the courage to try to hunt the old Count down. It goes poorly for them, and many miners die or quit and move away.
   Magma Spirits expand up from their starting pool, and create a large temple to house the Earth God Statue.

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Age of Monsters, Year 7:

I roll another Adventuring Party, but it's of minimum size (1 adventurer). A brave young soul from the farming village at the base of the cliff braves the caves near his home. Young Timothy falls down the well. Lassie the Feral Slave Beast runs off to get help. Or rather, as he is an Adventuring Party with only 1 member, and the Beast is a Wandering Monster, they destroy each other.
Any time the last of a monster group is wiped off the map, you can optionally roll on the Minor Features table to see what legacy they leave behind on the map. I rolled the Ever-Burning Flame, which I may place anywhere in the Feral Beasts former zone of control. Little Timmy must have brought a torch with him for light, and it probably sparked a natural gas explosion that killed the Feral Beasts. There’s some crack through which gas continues to flow and burn. That this is so close to the waterfall is unexpected, but not impossible (especially in a fantasy world).
A Treasure is left behind by the Adventuring Party. It’s some identifying keepsake, such as a locket with a picture of Timothy’s mother. I mark it on the map as Treasure T3.
 
The Humans at the castle organize a rescue party for poor little lost Timothy. This is, after all, the turn where they finally are supported and have 4 knights available. They head down the chasm at the base of the cliff and wander about for a while. The Excursion doesn’t find Timmy, or his locket, but they do find some decadent Dark Elf arts and crafts in the ruins of one of the old Silla palaces. They call this a rousing success, and the exciting rumors of buried treasure attracts more humans. The city of Drowfalls is founded before the end of the year. The local well, and city hall’s dungeon, both open into the underground river.


It's a year of war and daring raids. Rebel Elves retake a tiny bit of territory lost to the flooding, and then turn their attention to the Earthmen. Their raids recover the troll-wealth. The Merfolk push west, extending their locks right down to the Earthmen habitat. The resulting border dispute has high casualties. Earthmen then attack the Rebel Elves, and the battles are quite bloody. Both of these civilizations are getting very small, and the merfolk aren't that far behind them.

Count Laventhorpe eats the last miner. (As this is the last of the miner group, I again roll on the Minor Features chart.) The place where he died is forever after supernaturally cold.
Troll stays put and do nothing. Stupid troll.
Magma Spirits head up the hall towards the Mithral.

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Age of Monsters, Year 8:

   Yet another adventuring party comes to the dungeon. (This is the third time I’ve rolled a “6” on the yearly event chart, having done so on turns 5, 7 and now 8.  Our dungeon is running a little low on monsters and treasures at this point. This is very different from the game I played on paper.) This adventuring party has 4 members.
   The Adventuring Party travels from Drowfalls Dungeon through the underground river to the old Dark Elf Exploratory Shaft (instead of the waterfalls) down to the river again, and then over to the Merfolk dam. The Merfolk are Lawful, so they give the party a Quest instead of fighting them. The adventurers are guided through the flooded tunnels to battle the Elvish Rebels in the ruins of old Kharsoum. The Adventurers slaughter the remaining Dark Elves, and take their Troll-Goods. The return for the quest rewards, so the Merfolk pay them a Treasure.
   Setting out again, the adventuring party follows the Old Elf Road toward Leyban. The Troll on the route kills one of them before they destroy it.
   The Troll had been holding up in a place called the Misty Vale. It’s apparently a cavern that had eroded when the area had flooded in Year 6, rendered steamy by the magma pool just below it. (This was created by the Minor Features Chart).
   So then I remember that I needed to roll a Minor Feature for the Elvish Rebels, too. The roll produces a “Bed Chamber”. How very Dark-Elven. No wonder the rebels failed to spread their culture or do much of anything but breed. They converted one of the ancient houses of Kharsoum into a giant orgy pad. I expand the size of the room a bit, and give it a vaulted ceiling.
   The adventurers head over to the Magma Spirits, who are surprisingly lawful, and so they give the Adventurers a Quest, too. They are sent to attack the Merfolk, whom they’d previously done quest-work for. That’s player characters for you. Killing every NPC they meet. The adventurers commit mer-genocide, and loot the fishtanks. They do lose one of their own in the process, reducing their group down to 2 adventurers. The Magma Spirits fork over some treasure in payment.
    The two quests, and all the back and forth involved, has resulted in the Adventuring Party traveling through the narrow, rough tunnel connecting the Merfolk and Rebel Elves areas a minimum of five times.
    I roll on the Minor Features chart for the third time this turn, and end up with a the result “A Cask of Amontillado”. This classic Poe reference is not actually on the default chart, but was added as a consequence of a previous play session. Every time you roll on this particular chart, you’re encouraged to cross out the entry you use and replace it with an entry of your own devising. I’d seeded this one onto the chart during my first play of the game on paper last week, and am surprised to have it show up again so soon. So I cross it off, and add it to the map. The merfolk managed to seal an adventurer in a trap room and flood it. I place this just off the narrow flooded passage they went through so many times. It seems like a good place for an ambush or trap.
   Next (and finally) the adventurers head though the Torture Pit into the old Temple to Dame Chaos in what’s left of the ruins of Leyban. They get their hands on the Great Flail of Melancholy. This is pivotal. They’ve now gained six treasures in the course of this adventure, which is enough to trigger the transition to the Age of Villainy. I’m thinking they probably get corrupted by the horrible things they’ve seen and done. We’ll deal with that in the next installment.

The transition ends the Age of Monsters before the turn is finished, so the Earthmen, Vampire, and Magma Spirits all lose their turns for this year.

How To Host A Societal Collapse

I spent most of yesterday playing a game called How To Host A Dungeon. It's part board game, part drawing experiment, and part tool for designing a D&D dungeon or campaign.

It's made by a local game designer here in Seattle, but you can pick up the PDF right now via the Bundle of Holding for a cheap price along with several other GM-ing goodies.

To play How To Host A Dungeon, you roll on a series of charts that give you loose instructions on what to draw. Following that guidance creates a map, or more accurately a series of maps, of successive layers of civilization and tunneling in a fantasy kingdom. Empires rise and fall, wandering monsters move in, and in the end either an intrepid band of heroes braves the dungeon to slay the big bad, or some horrible monster conquers the world. It's pretty cool pass-time, essentially a pen-and-paper analog to Dwarf Fortress. Sort of Dungeon Designer meets Blank White Cards.

Rather than just post my rather cluttered map from yesterday (rife with beginner's mistakes), I figured I'd actually take a few hours to generate a spiffy new map using Pixlr, a free online photoshop-like drawing toolset. Putting it in layers allows me to save my progress at many stages, and simplifies the process for when one in-game civilization collapses and a new one builds over their ruins.

Getting The Lay Of The Ground: 

For the initial rolls of Primordial Pre-History, I rolled up an Underground River with several caves (I kept rolling the same entry), plus some Mithral veins on the far right of the map, and a series of dangerous natural caverns bearing plague, magma, and a mysterious prophecy of societal collapse. This map has some serious potential.

Legend: Brown is dirt or rock. Blue is sky or underground river, depending on placement. Pale orange is the interior space of a cavern. Everything else is labeled if you zoom in. It's not much to look at yet.

I'm a little worried about the tight clustering of the Mithral to one side of the map. In my other game I found all the action for the first three Ages happened right around the minerals, making it very crowded while the other half the map was left empty. This was problematic when working on a single page paper map, but I think it's not an issue if using pixlr layering (or the tracing paper approach supported by the rules). 

The pink circles are groups of Dark Elf Nobles and Slaves.

I name the starting civilization The Three Houses of Kharsoum, not realizing how quickly that number will be rendered inaccurate. The only other time I played I began with Dwarves, and they ran a great many turns with a significant dynasty. This time, I'm starting with Dark Elves, who seem a bit a less stable. (Just for fanboy fun, I've chosen to render all their constructions and tokens in a purple and pink motif marginally reminiscent of Games Workshop's Dark Elves.)

History of The Three Houses of Kharsoum The Great City of Leyban:

Year One – The City of Kharsoum founds the Colony of Leyban, which prospers and tortures. This is a straight forward (but ill-considered) start, where the overpopulated and under-supplied City flails about trying to establish itself. 

The purple line across the bottom of the screen is the underground road that the Dark Elves use to travel to more distant places.

Year Two – Kharsoum founds the Colony of Silaa. This leaves too an unstable slaves to nobles ratio, and the city falls to Revolt. (As a side note, this is destined to happen to any Dark Elf starting city that isn't directly attached to a mineral vein. Even if it is, you'd have to interpret the Colony rules as applying to the City in order to avoid an early Revolt. I'd be willing to do so, but I didn't realize how badly the first city gets screwed by not being attached directly to a mineral vein. Dark Elves neither plan for the future nor play well with others.)

Leyban assumes the mantle of the capitol (though technically this should have happened later in the turn, and I accidentally jumped the gun), and builds a great memorial tomb for what bodies are recovered. Temples and Shrines are constructed in Leyban and Silaa in attempts to appease "Dame Chaos", their fickle goddess. 

I decide to use the Named Treasures optional rule because it's flavorful and fun. Silaa, still being prosperous and rather distant from the troubles at Kharsoum, produces an exquisite Mithril Veil for the goddess statue in their shrine. Leyban is a little moodier and worried about slave revolt, so they commission their best artisan to craft the The Great Flail of Melancholy.

An exploratory shaft is dug from Leyban towards the surface. With the “Fate” cave and the magma chamber hanging over their heads, I decided to choose a random room to start the exploratory tunnel from. They had about a 50% chance of it leading directly to death, but a lucky roll bought them another turn and dig up towards the river instead of somewhere more dire. The tunnel couldn't quite reach the river this turn, so I made it curve, because I liked the idea that the Fate cave would be subtly influencing them as they dug.

Year Three – I forgot to have the City raid the Rebels and convert one of them back into Slaves at the end of the previous turn. Adding that, plus the Nobles and Slaves from the “summer” part of the turn pushed Leyban over the critical population limit. With this trigger in place, their decadence and depravity causes the collapse of their civilization before they could build the late-stage specialized buildings (Arenas, Breeding Pits, or Re-Animation Tanks). The may have dodged the “Fate” cave, but they were still doomed from the start.

Last time I played, my Dwarves stuck around for seemingly forever, covering the map. The Dark Elves were fecund and prolific, but they burned themselves out in less than 3 turns. Good note that the game players very differently in subsequent sessions with different starting civs. 

(Minor tangential gripe  – the game calls these civilization turns' “years”, but I think they'd work better conceptually as “generations”. As neat as the turn-of-the-seasons mechanics is, it only took 3 years to increase the population 5-fold and make the entire journey from founding to collapse into decadence. That's a bit fast, even for Dark Elves.)

Where did all the Elves go?

Dark Elves are sloppy housekeepers. When their civilization dies, they leave behind the named treasures from the Temples, plus 1 extra generic supplies/treasure token per city or colony. They also leave behind a bunch of Feral Slave Beasts in the slave pens. I'm pretty sure these are supposed to be monsters and draft animals, not desperate victims of slavery, so I made a different token for them to distinguish them from the rebel slaves (who were, for the record, in no way inconvenienced by the collapse of the civilization that had previously held them in bondage).

The Great Disaster:

Oopsie! Dame Chaos must have broke something.

When the first civilization collapse happens, time passes and you roll on The Great Disaster table. I rolled up an Earthquake. The earthquake made a series of natural caves and tunnels that are mostly random. The player has some control over them – the two main lines are randomly generated, but you have more control over the little spurs that branch off of them, and just how jagged or straight you want the lines to be. But given the rolls, there was no way the earthquake wasn't going to breach both the magma and the river tunnels. So then you have to make decisions about how (and if) the lava flows and the river is diverted. I chose to not kill or destroy anything left on the map, because at this stage you want lots of plot threads and contenders.

While I was at it, I adjusted the horizon line to go with the Earthquake. Any excuse to make it not just a boring old horizontal horizon is a good one. (The rules provide random horizons, but I rolled up the most minimal one at the start of this session.)

At this point, I'm about ready for the arrival of the Surface Kingdoms and the start of the Age of Monsters. It should be an interesting run going forward, as there's few good treasures clustered on one side, at least one mining site that's still accessible for Delvers (the rules are a little iffy about whether or not the others can be mined again by new races), and some significant peril in the form of wandering monsters and those still unopened death caves. I've run out of free time for the day, though, so it'll have to wait (probably until next week).  Link to second play session post.

Digging In and Getting Invested

It's a little tempting to reclassify the Elven Rebels a "Delver Group" so they'll have a shot at prospering in the next Age. Officially, they're just Wandering Monsters, and as such are unlikely to survive for long. I may fudge their status when I get back to it, depending on which parts of the map generate random monsters in the next phase and just how crowded it gets. Gotta support the underdogs. Honestly, the game is better if “you've got a dog in this fight” and are invested in what happens. It stings a little to watch your favorite civilization meet its fate, but that's kinda what the game is all about, and you could always fudge die rolls if it bothered you.

In my game yesterday, a come-from-behind Lawful Sphinx defeated a hobgoblin tribe, two extraplanar invasions, a very stubborn owlbear, a voracious ancient wurm, and series of adventuring parties to eventually conquer the realm. There were at least a dozen die rolls that could have killed her off, and probably should have, but she won out against all odds.

(Click here for Index of all my How To Host A Dungeon articles.) 

Myth: Great Game, Horrid Rulebook

Our copy of Myth arrived last week. It was a Kickstarter we backed last year, and should be available on retail soon-ish. Myth a big cooperative dungeoncrawl game with lots of bells and whistles (and cards and minis). It's in the same genre as HeroQuest or MageKnight Dungeons or the more recent Galaxy Defenders, but I feel it's a vastly superior game to any of those. (Though, to be fair, the only thing I have against Galaxy Defenders is its plodding and fiddly set-up before play.)

Here's a quick run-down of the things I really like about Myth:

• Fully Cooperative: There's no GM. Everybody's a player, and we're all working together. There's no need for someone to run the monsters, or set up the dungeon, or be otherwise adversarial to the rest of the group. Everybody has the same amount of plot-knowledge, and the same goal.
• Flexible: Play duration is in your control, and game play starts almost immediately. Set-up of each board is quick, fun, and collaborative. You can decide on the fly just how long a game you want to play. Somebody having to leave early doesn't anticlimactically ruin your entire session, and you should be able to easily bargain with them "how about we just finish this tile we're on and then we call it end of Act?"
• Engaging: The turn structure is unique, and very clever. Things are happening all the time, and everyone is constantly involved in the action. You're never sitting around waiting for someone else to act. No one can dominate the game, because there's built-in mechanisms to keep everyone contributing at roughly the same activity level. Stealing the spotlight in consecutive turns is punished in a dramatic but enjoyable way. It's genius. The only place this "all hands on deck" turn structure breaks down at all is when a PC dies - but odds are good that a PC death will be followed quickly by either resurrection or a TPK, so I'm cautiously optimistic the downtime even in those circumstances will be short. Honestly, I'd love to see this turn-structure converted for use in an RPG in place of traditional Initiative systems.
• Elegant: The dice mechanics are robust and quick. An area-of-effect blast on half a dozen minions, or a mass attack against a hero surrounded by minions, can both be handled in seconds with a single die roll each, but still feature meaningful depth and variety of results. It's a game that can handle 4 or 5 PCs facing off against dozens of badguys at once without ever hitting a speed bump.
• Toys: There's so much in the box. Not only are the fancy physical components numerous (40 miniatures, a stack of beautiful map tiles, a bunch of decks, etc), but there's multiple game modes and a lot of quest-cards that create interesting scenarios to play out. The game feels like it has depth and replayability aplenty, with lots of eye-candy to keep you entertained along the way.

It's an excellent game. I've played it four times now, and I'm really diggin' it. Can't wait to break it out again.

Yo Momma Is A Crawla

All those praises having been said, the rulebook is wretchedly awful. It's beautiful to look at, but really hard to read. It jumps from topic to topic and back again without warning (but at least it has a better-than-average index). There are several topics, however, that never get addressed in the rules. They skulk silently between the pages waiting to ambush you.

For example:

• Poison and Stun: These two status effects are caused by various cards (poison shows up a lot more than stun), but are never actually defined in the rules. Luckily, the rules do have a "Damage Over Time" status and a "Prone" status that can fairly intuitively be used for Poison and Stun respectively.  An easy fix once you're aware of the problem, but an ugly surprise if the first time it crops up is in the middle of a play session.
• Combo and Optional: These two keywords appear on a number of player cards, but really aren't defined anywhere in the rules. The Archer character and the Brigand character both rely on those two keywords, and the consensus on the forums is that they mean completely different things in the two decks. To feel that I understood it at all, I had to read the rulebook cover-to-cover, then read two FAQ threads (one on BGG, the other at the publisher's forums),  then watch a couple gameplay videos, then re-read relevant parts of the rulebook.
• Stretch Goals: There are plenty of cards, and charts in the rulebook, that reference things that aren't included in the base set. It's often not immediately obvious what expansion-product you'd have to buy to fill in these holes and complete the chains. That's no problem if you bought the "Captain level" Kickstarter pledge which includes nearly 1 of everything for a very reasonable price... but folks buying this piecemeal at retail are probably going to experience some frustration and confusion.
• Action, Reaction, and Interrupt: These are pretty simple concepts in most games, and people can usually intuit what they mean. Not in Myth. As it turns out, "reaction" and "interrupt" are horrible names for what these cards do, and using those terms actually makes the game harder to teach. The rules themselves are straightforward, but the nomenclature is misleading.

There's a huge number of other minor complaints, but those are good examples. It's all stuff you'll eventually figure out, and since it's a cooperative game no one's getting an unfair advantage out of the confusion... but damn is it annoying to have critical terms and mechanics go undefined in the rules, and to have such inconsistent templating and phrasing on the cards.

All of this could/should have been caught with a just a single blind playtest before they went to print, or by any editing pass, and it blows my mind that such obvious holes and murkiness slipped through the cracks. It's like all the time that should have been used for editing and playtesting just went into art assets and layout... but at least it looks sweeet.

Hammer-Patterned, The Multiplicity of Tongs

This is a story synopsis and play-by-play for a tabletop RPG I ran last night. The game was completely improvised, and the system was 6X, so it ended up being pretty wacky.


Starting premise was essentially "reclaim" mode of the video game "Dwarf Fortress". If you've never played DF, just picture the abandoned halls of Moria from Lord of the Rings… with a penchant for going FUBAR in delightfully slapstick ways. If you are familiar with Dwarf Fortress, you'll get a couple of inside jokes below, but you'll also quickly see that we diverged  from the source material.

For a thousand years the mighty Dwarf enclave known as "Hammer-Patterned, The Multiplicity of Tongs" had stood solid within a rocky mountain at the edge of the empire. But now, several years have passed since word or caravan had come forth from Hammer-Patterned, and the worst is feared.

 A small group of stout Dwarven settlers and explorers has been sent forth to Hammer-Patterned to learn the fate of King Blordok Syrupbraid, re-establish the trade-route if possible, and claim salvage rights should things in Hammer-Patterned turn out to be as bad as they are feared.

An aside about the ridiculous name: Three of us grabbed random words and we mashed them together to come up with a silly title worthy of a Dwarf Fortress. It didn't make any sense to us, either, but it certainly is in line with the bizarre naming conventions employed in the source material.

Our party of stout dwarves explorers is as follows:

• Oredang the Miner (played by Devon, who had a fair amount of Dwarf Fortress). Gender: Female. Skills: Miner, Novice Organzier.  Equipment: Steel Pickaxe, pet Yak calf. Beard: black, long and twisted.
• OIN son of GLOIN son of BROIN son of DROIN son of MOIN (played by Dan), (hereafter referred to as simply "Oin son of blah" to save me a lot of typing.) Gender: Male  Skills: likes Ancestry  Beard: 7 and 1/8ths inches
• Cog Claspshanks (played by my wife, Sarah). Gender: Female  Skills: Stone Engraver  Equipment: Carving Tools  Beard: 9 braids (one per child she bore)
• Brunhilda the Carver (played by Laura). Gender: Female  Skills: Carver, creates statues, curious, good fighter with a hammer.  Equipment: Hammer, Carving Tools   Beard: Has a red beard she wears in two braids.
• Thugnar the Bold (played by John). Gender: Male  Skills: bold, break rock with hammer, drink ale copiously.  Equipment: Hammer Beard: Long flowing blonde beard, braided intricately.
• Mad Oleg (played by Eric). Gender: Male   Skills: Ore-taster  Beard: filled with minerals

Fine specimens of craftdwarfship be they all.

An aside about investigation and skills:   In retrospect, I wish I'd done more with Mad Oleg's unique and flavorful "ore-taster" skill. It's got great potential for an investigative scenario, but since this was an off-the-cuff 6X game (and thus what mysteries there were remained mysterious even to the GM until they were randomly defined), I just didn't really figure out a way to make it matter. Similar things can be said for Oin son of blah's "likes Ancestry" skill that would have been really useful in Continuum or Trail of Cthulhu, but was hard to work into 6X on the fly. I wish I could have integrated these into the story better.

I started the game with some narration about the overland trip. When you arrive at your destination, the food cart has already run out and you've polished off half the mules. That baby Yak calf is starting to look pretty good.

Then I threw in a passing comment about the sad state of the disused trade route and especially the statuary along it, and it nearly took the game in a completely different direction.  I said the ancient statues at the side of the road were overgrown, and someone had put pumpkins or jack-o-lanterns where the statues heads should be, but I didn't really know where I was going with this. It was just color, drawn from an old fantasy illustration I saw once for one of the Lord of the Ring books. The players immediately started blaming the elves, so I said that near one of the statues was a tree with an old ramshackle treehouse in it's branches, and they could hear the slow sad sounds of a banjo on the wind. 

The players debated whether to sneak past what were clearly creepy elfbillies, or just burn the place.  Seemed like a great place for our first card draw.

Card Draw?  We were using a variant of 6X that I'm calling cardX. Instead of making a chart and rolling a die, each player rights a possible outcome on a notecard, and we draw one out of a hat.  Learn more here.

So we get our first result: 

• 1: "Burning down the treehouse starts a forest fire. We have to run quickly and rush the cart along, breaking the axle."

Which I think came as a surprise to the player who first proposed that they burn down the treehouse, as he thought he'd been talked out of it. That happens with 6X.

We threw in a little color narration about dim-witted elven hillbillies having a conversation as their treehouse burnt down around them. One with a banjo, the other a pitchfork. "There they go, setting' us afire agin. An' I was jus' bouts to warn 'em that there's nuthin down that road but the ol' haunted dwarves place."

Escaping past the (flaming) tree line, and hauling their booze kegs on their own backs, our fearless dwarven explorers find themselves at the massive bridge that marks the borders of HammerPatterned the Multiplicity of Tongs.

The bridge was carved of stone and set with cogs and machinery. Dangling from the sides were chains ending with metal Tongs clattering in the breeze. With his knowledge of ancestry, Oin son of blah was able to explain that the local custom was to hang a set of ancestral tongs to commemorate the moment and place of passing of any dwarf. Clearly, hundreds of dwarves had died on this particular bridge. At the far end of the bridge was a mighty lever, so Thugnar the bold ran across the bridge and yanked the lever while his friends were crossing more slowly behind him.

I like to imagine that the other cards in the bag were full of horrible trap-riddled death the likes of which would have made even One-Eyed Willie turn white as a bone, but alas the one the players drew said simply:

• 2: "The cog bridge plays beautiful music!"

The lever set the gears turning, and the chains and tongs dangling from them clattered together in a pleasant tinkling melody, accompanied by the deep bass rumblings of the bridgeborn machinery that powered it all.

Thereafter followed a long section without any cards being made or pulled. There were probably a couple moments where we could have done cards, but each time someone would announce an idea they had that sounded fun enough we all just conceded the narrative ground to them.

The dwarves came to the gates of HammerPatterned, which were huge granite things set with engravings of hammers. The doors looked like they hadn't been opened for some time. We tried speaking "friend" to them, but to no avail. An oversized steel hammer and tongs hung from a chain, dangling out of the mouth of stone grate above the doors. A grate perfect for pouring something down on unwanted guests, like boiling oil.  Most of the party stepped back or to the side.

Nearby was a pumpkin patch, growing in the sunlight beside the gates. Not a particularly dwarven crop, but we all grudging acknowledged you could ferment and brew with them if you had to. Oredang pastured her Yak calf at the p-patch.

Speaking of Yak p,  by this time Thugnar had started knocking on the massive doors with the dangling hammer, and the other players suggested that his greeting should be that someone or something pees on him through the grates above.  Sometimes you just gotta play to your audience.

Wet and smelly but surprisingly undiscouraged, Thugnar decided to yank on the big chain to see if maybe it rang a bell inside and summoned servants.  Instead it made the grates above open up. As i was about to narrate huge rocks falling and call for a card draw, again a player interrupted me with a rather more amusing possibility so I just said yes. A Yak fell from grate, narrowly missing Thugnar and going splat on the ground.

Additional chains and tongs now dropped and dangled from the grates as well, because clearly, any place where a Yak might feasibly drop on you is a place likely to have claimed the lives of many a drunk dwarf (and thus need commemorating per the previously described local custom). So the players climbed up the mesh of chains and into  the inside of the gatehouse.

Inside where the desiccated remains of a dwarf who had barricaded himself into the gatehouse. He'd clearly lived here for some time before passing on when the beer ran out. The grain and foodstuffs he had with sequestered with him were nearly out as well, but had been enough to sustain the Yak until this very day.

Before the booze ran out, the dead dwarf had kept himself busy carving the walls of his gatehouse tomb. Here is an engraving of a dwarf and and elephant. The dwarf is riding on the elephant. Here is an engraving of dwarves and an elephant. The dwarves are holding hands around the elephant. Here is a superior engraving of dwarves and an elephant. The elephant is giving birth to the dwarves. Riffing off of "Boatmurdered" (google it), mostly, followed by one  reference to the Simpsons: Here is an engraving of just words, dwarves runic script in shaky handwriting, "can't sleep, elephants will eat me, can't sleep, elephants will eat me".

Undaunted (and now motivated by the inescapable conclusion that the fortress had been abandoned and thus the salvage rights were theirs), the players took down the barricade, and opened the doors.  Beyond were balconied galleries, overlooking the main hall and gates to the fortress. Far below them the main hall angled downward into the bowels of the earth.

It was at that moment that I told them, "all of a sudden, you hear a terrible noise reverberate through the fortress. Everyone contribute a card to the hat describing a possible noise." Apparently someone liked my engravings, because the card that was drawn said:

• 3: "The Sound of a Mastodon"

There was much debate over how to differentiate the calls of an elephant, mastodon or mammoth from one another, but eventually everyone decided it was indeed a mastodon. It didn't sound particularly close, however, so the players probed deeper into the galleries.

The floor of the main hall below fell further and further down, until at least 7 stories separated the extended balcony they walked upon from the main floor. As they probed deeper into the gloom, they eventually saw a giant Jasper elephant statue. It's head rose to the level of the balconies, so it was 7 stories tall, and equivalently long.

Mad Oleg said something to the effect of: "That is the largest collection of Jasper I have ever seen in all my years of ore-tasting, and the second-largest elephant statues I've seen, too."

The thought occurred to me then and there that it'd be a cool demise for the fortress if they'd had a "Trojan Horse" scenario where the elephant statue had brought some invading force… but the gates were clearly secure and intact, whereas at Troy the gates were torn apart. If I wanted to go the Trojan route, I'd have to give the players another clue… and I'd have to do so quickly, because in 6X you can't be subtle or slow because at any time a player action could derail your plans.

So I said there was a lever nearby. The players pulled it, and the entire top of the mountain retracted, giving them a clear view of everything. This meant you'd be able to drag the 7-story statue in our out of the fortress's 2-story gate. That (plus "the elephant is giving birth to the dwarves") made me feel like I could later go more explicitly Trojan and it'd be deemed foreshadowed rather than contradictory.

Oin son of blah suddenly got the idea into his head that if we can't find stairs down from the gallery, maybe we can somehow find stairs down from an elephant. It was a novel idea, and he approached it with masochistic gusto, suddenly jumping off the balcony towards the head of 7-story elephant. This had some potential to backfire, and we hadn't done cards in a while, so what the heck…

• 4. "The jasper elephant collapses into a pile of bits burying Oin."

An aside about character mortality: I probably would have been justified in killing poor Oin given that result and it's vague statements about his status at the end of it. 7 stories of falling and then being buried under tons of shattered jasper could easily be lethal.  Just like I could have made the Yak, rather than just it's pee, land on Thugnar earlier, and taken him out.  Instead I would just file this away in the back of my mind. Later, when it was time to start kicking the players butts a little, I'd remember that I'd previously gone easy on the two of them.

The statue fell to rubble, and this gave me a chance to reinforce my Trojan Elephant idea. I narrated that it had been a wooden frame with a jasper shell, hollow on the inside, and mostly breaking his fall as it collapsed in upon itself.

Rather than split up the party, I allowed the others to quickly find a ladder down and start unburying Oin son of blah. But as they labored, they could again hear the trumpeting of a mastodon, and the sound was now growing closer. Oh, and something about the cantilevered clockwork mechanisms closing the mountain top again since no one was up there holding the lever any more.

They free Oin son of blah, bandage him up, loot the huge garnet eyes of the crumbled statue, and then realize the source of the mastodon sounds is now only 1 room away from the main gall. It's behind Door #1.  Mad Oleg starts trying to barricade Door #1. The other players start to scatter, and one opens a door across the room (which we'll call Door #2) to make an escape. The remainder of the part started describing various other dubious escape routes, and I decided the best way to bring this chaos under control was to have everyone make a card describing the event they wanted to have resolve first.

• 5. "Inside the door [Door #2] is the skeleton of a mighty elephant. It's eyes light up with a ghostly flame and focus on Oredang."

So whatever the mastodon sound was on the other side of Door #1, it was suddenly back-seat to the Undead Elephant behind Door #2. That precipitated yet another card round.  The card I put in to the pot was particularly nasty, but alas it was not drawn. Instead, we got:

• 6. "The mastodon bursts into the room, shattering Mad Oleg's barricade! The mastodon then crushes the skeletal elephant in one blow of its mighty trunk!"

Combat in 6X (or my cardX variant) is pretty damn swingy. Here we have flaming ghost elephant about to attack Oredang one moment, and then it's obliterated by something else entirely in the very next action.  Why, I don't know. Clearly, with the players having that much narrative power, I needed to stop pulling my punches.

I gave everyone the opportunity to put in one brief bit of flavor narration that didn't change the overall situation, so they could illustrate how they fought or fled as appropriate, and then we did another card round to determine how the fight would resolve.  Hammers and picks were swung, Brunhilda clambered up a ladder to line up a daring leap towards the mastodon's head, and the monster thrashed about. Then:

• 7. "The mastodon impales Oin son of bla on its left tusk, and Thugnar on the right. Both are badly injured and freeing them will take much effort or heroism."

Yep, that card was mine. Major wounds and impairment to two PCs, and specifically the ones I'd gone easy on earlier. I decided to keep running combat for however long it took the players to make up a card that defeated it and get the corresponding lucky draw. As for my own cards in that time frame, I planned to eliminate one PC from the fight per round. Chances are they'd win the day, but we'd see if the mastodon couldn't take a few of them with it.

And wouldn't you know it, the players drew another one of my cards the very next round.

• 8. "The mastodon swallows Cog Claspshanks in a single gulp. Meanwhile, the impaled Dwarves bleed profusely, and Thugnar's weakened arms drop his hammer."

Three PCs down, 3 to go. More color narration for those that weren't swallowed, impaled or immobilized, and then another card-round. But I was not anticipating this result.

• 9. "Cog discovers that this mastodon is also hollow."

That's definitely a good break for the PCs, but a little open to interpretation. Hollow in what way? Well, if you leave it up to the GM, you have no one to blame but yourself.

So, I narrated that Cog drops down into the belly of the mechanical beast, and is immediately sealed inside one of several cages therein. Above her, safe within a metal cockpit with, are two kobolds operating the bicycle-driven mechanisms of the mechamastodon.  They have reinforced windows that let them look down at Cog, or stare out through the "eyes" of the mechamastodon.

Next round:

• 10. "Brunhilda jumps on the mastodon and starts beating it about the head with her hammer. The main effect is that she manages to realize there are kobolds inside. She kills the closer one."

We do some more color narration, and someone mentions that perhaps the mechamastodon, now missing the copilot, could be stuck running around in circles. That's funny enough to say yes to. 
At this point, I decided it was worth dealing with the impaled people. I announced that one of the tusks went limp, and Oin son of blah slid off the end of it. He's now bleeding out on the floor as the mechamastodon runs circles around him. I directed the players that this round of cards should not resolve the overall fight, but primarily determine Oin's fate.

• 11. "Oin dies in a pool of blood and miasma.   Dan's next character may arrive as the first of a wave of migrants sent to aid your colonization."

Dan quickly came up with a brand new character, well, kinda…

• GROIN son of OIN son of GLOIN son of BROIN son of DROIN son of MOIN, (hereafter referred to as simply "Groin son of Oin" to save me a lot of typing). Gender: Male  Skills: likes Ancestry  Beard: 7 and 3/8ths inches

As a general rule, when a PC dies, I usually require that the replacement character be something very different from the previous character, so there's some sense that death has impact, and is a thing to be avoided. Usually. This time, however, it was funny enough, and relevant to the "likes ancestry" mention on the character sheet, that I felt that was actually the perfect way to continue.

Various color narration. Circular mechamastodon chase. Cue benny hill music.

Then: "I am GROIN son of OIN son of GLOIN son of BROIN son of DROIN son of MOIN. You killed my father, OIN son of GLOIN son of BROIN son of DROIN son of MOIN. Prepare to die!"

• 12. "Groin son of Oin swings into the battle on a long tong-chain. The mastodon is still running in circles, however, and Groin son of Oin misses it.  Meanwhile, Brunhilda drops into the mammoth next to the kobold."

Color narration. The kobold shrieks: "Peddle left! Peddle left! Why aren't you peddling? We're going in circles!" and then realizes that Brunhilda has replaced his copilot. He goes for his loaded crossbow, she goes for her hammer.

• 13. "Brunhilda bashes the kobold to mush! Thugnar is saved through the immediate application of dwarven french bread through the wound."

Wow. Bread bandages. Or rather, a bread blood plug. If it didn't very specifically say "saved", I totally would have had that backfire… but the spirit of the cards should be obeyed as much as possible, even if it makes no sense. I mean, everything else in this adventure is logical and sensible.

I'm not sure exactly what happened next. The kobold was dead, the threat neutralized. They must have freed Cog. I remember Devon saying that Oredang had grown attached to her fine steel pick.
Mad Oleg wanted the flaming trunk "mechanism" off the ghost elephant, which was now somehow retroactively also a hollow mecha-skeletal-elephant and not a ghost elephant and I'm not really sure how any of that made sense, but it was amusing and he'd had the unfortunate distinction of not having any of the cards he'd created get drawn by anyone in any of our 13 to-date pulls from the hat, so I just said yes to his crazy idea. Plus, that retcon made at least as much sense as shoving bread into your wounds

… but other than all that miscellaneous insanity, I'm not really certain what the context was of this card, or why we were drawing:

• 14. "We need beer. NOW."

So they all piled into the mechamastodon, and drove it around till they could find the local brewery.
The brewery was guarded by kobolds in bronze armor, carrying bronze whips, and making mastodon calls on bronze french-kobold-horns. They apparently assumed the PCs were just another run-of-the-mill kobold-filled mechamastodon.

The doors to the brewery swing open, revealing dozens of emaciated, broken dwarves, clearly now enslaved to the kobolds.  They are being forced to labor, and brew pumpkin ale for their kobold overlords. It is a truly sad sight, and a dishonor that cannot go unavenged.

Thugnar leaps forth from the cockpit of the mechamastodon, in much the way Athena sprung from the head of Zeus. The mythical reference will matter (sort of) a few cards later. The other dwarves start crawling out of the hole Thugnar leaves behind him, except for Brunhilda and Cog who drive the mech.

• 15. "Thugnar plows into several kobolds, knocking them down. Thugnar plays kobold golf. The mastodon's tusks swing, killing several. Oredang sneaks into the brewery! Another mechamastodon appears!"

The two mechs battle, mastodono-a-mastadono.

• 16. "Our mastodon rams their mastodon. Mad Oleg is thrown from the rear. Sensing his opportunity, he lobs the flaming ghost trunk into the hole in their mastodon. It lights on fire."

More color narration followed. Oredang and Groin son of Oin took up position near the beer.  The battle raged on as they sampled the kegs.

• 17. "Brunhilda drives their mammoth backwards, forcing it through the doors into the walkway over the abyss. Burning kobolds climb onto the top of the mammoth."

There was no previous mention of an abyss prior to this card, but not only is that how 6X works, but it's also perfectly in tune with the subject matter for there to be a big bottomless pit with a narrow walkway spanning it such as one might use to battle a balrog.

• 18. "The hide is burnt away as Cog figures out how to shake off the flaming kobolds into the abyss. The other dwarves have liberated the brewery."

There dwarves bow to their new saviors. An elderly, broken looking, emaciated dwarf steps forward. He identifies himself as Blordock Syrupbraid the Younger, son of Blordock Syrupbraid the Elder, and thus heir apparent to the throne now that HammerPatterned the Multiplicity of Tongs has been liberated. Mainly he serves as a obligatory exposition/wrap-up info dump to explain in case anyone had missed the finer details of what had happened. Kobold siege. Kobolds appear to give up, but leave a giant jasper elephant behind. The dwarves hall it inside, and worship or party around it. When everyone's drunk… well, more drunker than is usual even for a dwarf, the kobolds sneak out of the elephant and deploy mechamastodons to conquer. 

Being drunk, stupid, and beaten-down, these dwarves have started worshiping elephants and specifically the giant jasper elephant statue. They even call the players half-elephant demigods in dwarven form, come to free them from the half-elephant demigods in kobold form who were enacting the punishment of the high elephant gods.

Or something.

At this point, I realize we haven't had anyone go crazy, which is totally a Dwarf Fortress thing. So I start narrating how one of the dwarves here had used the giant jasper elephant as a component in a slightly fancier artifact statue of his own design - mainly by attaching wheels (so they could haul it in) and big garnet eyes to the existing statue. But it's totally his design now, and the pinnacle of his life, and as the players explain that the statue has been destroyed, he goes berserk. 

You thought the previous fights were big and crazy, wait till you get a load of even round one of my big climactic battle with the psychopathic spreekilling craftsdwarf. We pulled out all the stops for this one!

19. "Mad Oleg knocks him out with a single blow."

Nicely done, sir.

All that's left is the "happily ever after" solution, so I let everyone throw into the hat their own personal best interpretation of how this could end.

• 20. "After being honored by the freed dwarves, the party seeks out the next fortress.  However, at their camp that night, Oredang's pet yak calf creeps up on them -- her mouth opening to reveal a kobold crossbow…"

I must say I rather like the idea of a mechayakcalf getting the drop on them. Was it replaced by kobolds when they left it in the pumpkin patch, or was it secretly a kobold spy mechayak all along?

Your Princess Is In 6X Castle

About a week ago I played a short but very enjoyable game of 6X.  6X is a two-page-long settingless RPG rule-set, intended for improvisation and pick-up games. Link to 6X rules.

The core mechanic of 6X is simple, and collaborative. Whenever someone tries to do something that would logically take a die-roll in another game, the group builds a d6 chart for that roll. The player picks what happens if they roll a "1", listing off exactly what they wanted to accomplish if everything goes perfectly right. The GM picks a "6" result, basically the worst case scenario. "2" to "5" are filled in by group consensus, with "2" and "3" being good things but not the full intended success, and "4" and "5" being failures or side-effects you'd probably rather avoid.

Honestly, I was a little dubious about the system going in. I couldn't imagine I'd be happy with a flat 50% success rate for all actions, and I feared the collaborative table-making would slow things down terribly. I'm pleased to say I was wrong. Table-making is super fast and simple, and is at the heart of the fun.

Our game was set in a fantasy kingdom made up on the spot. Since we did all the charts on paper, I can easily transcribe them here as an example of play.

Theme: Medieval Fantasy
Plot: The Princess has been kidnapped

Player Characters:

Captain Midea
Captian of the Royal Guard who hails from an Amazonian land. Good at archery and swordplay. Strong leadership skills.

Fülöp the Transmutor
Duttering old court wizard several years past his prime. Powerful sorcery in a frail body. Very poor eyesight. Wielder of the Sacred Staff of Bitterness.

Bevan Rees
Plucky young annoying assistant to Fülöp. Stupid lucky, sarcastic, underpaid. Magic is not advanced.

Set-up and Pitch:
Ireeki, the Royal Princess, has gone missing, and it's our job to find her… but we don't know that yet. The PCs are all servants of the royal court of a the King of... anybody got a name for a country?  Okay, it's called Walterland. The neighboring Kingdom called... Chevalier... is very antagonistic and may or may not be involved in the kidnapping. Go!

The 3 PCs and a few NPCs are standing outside the Grand Hall of His Majesty's Castle. We've been summoned to a private audience, but then told to wait until The King calls us in. The wait was pretty long, honestly, and the party-like sounds coming from the other side of the door did nothing to make us feel that there was a mystery or adventure afoot. Our interactions with the Royal Court Jester were silly enough to keep us amused even if the plot was spinning it's wheels. I really couldn't tell if the GM was floundering, or just trying to subtly let us know that the King wasn't really too concerned about his missing daughter. We chewed the scenery, developed our character personalities, and turned Bevin's fingers intermittently invisible with a minor transmutation.

Eventually, we realized out-of-character that the King wasn't really getting to us and the plot wouldn't start till we did something.  So that's when Bevin decided to sneak into the Grand Hall.

Bevin sneaks into Grand Hall

1. Bevin sneaks in, and finds a beautiful woman in the royal court that is happy to dance with him.
2. Bevin sneaks in, and finds a slightly attractive woman to dance with.
3. Bevin sneaks in, and is about to dance with a beautiful woman, when Fülöp realizes he's gone missing and casts "summon assistant" to drag him back.
4. Bevin sneaks in, and gets himself slapped by a beautiful woman.
5. Bevin is kicked out by the guards, and it's really embarrassing.
6. Guards catch Bevin sneaking about and throw him in the dungeon.

We rolled a "1", allowing Bevin a fine time dancing with a courtier. But the player of Midea figured she really out to be doing her in-character job as Captain of the Guard. So she heads in to the Grand Hall to drag Bevin out. 

So this was our second roll, and we didn't even know the plot, yet. The rules probably would have had us roll initiative and take interwoven actions, but we figured it'd be faster and easier to just make a contested roll table. Midea's player would chose the "1" result, Bevin's player the "6", and a single roll would resolve the conflict. I feel this was a great way to handle it, and will be my preferred way to resolve PvP conflicts in the game from here on out. There's a bit of abuse potential if the PCs chose results that affected the world more than each other, but I'm pretty sure the GM could easily punish such bad behavior in later charts.

Midea heads into the Grand Hall to get Bevin

1. Midea pulls Bevin out without incident.
2. Midea pulls Bevin out, but the earlier transmutation proves contagious, and now her fingers are intermittently invisible.
3. Midea pulls Bevin out, but stops the party, causing a scene. This is NOT becoming of a guard!
4. The King sees Midea and calls her over to talk. Bevin keeps dancing.
5. "Sorry, Ma'am." The rest of the guards stop Midea from setting foot on the dance-floor.
6. Midea tries to get Bevin off the dance floor. The beautiful courtier thinks Midea is trying to cut in, and scolds her in humiliating fashion.

Looking back on it, the table was kinda stacked against Midea, but at the time it wasn't obvious. The dice favored her however, rolling another "1". She halls Bevin out, and we all now get the joy of waiting patiently once again.

The GM eventually gives us admittance to the Grand Hall, but decides to throw me a little challenge in the form of the King's  Steward deciding my wizard is too old for whatever this mission is.  So I pull a Gandalf on them: "Do not take me for a conjuror of cheap tricks!"

Convincing the King's Messenger to admit Fülöp

1. Fülöp briefly grows to 12 feet tall, wreathed in lightning and emphasized by a dramatic crash of thunder. The steward and messenger as so impressed and terrified, they show me nothing but respect forever after.
2. Minor lightning hits the messenger, who is slightly dazed and somewhat impressed by this. He lets Fülöp in.
3. The light show is kinda scary, they let Fülöp in just to get away from him.
4. Fülöp gets the targeting wrong, making Bevin 12 feet tall. The apprentice runs into the hall and the wizard hobbles after him.
5. Fülöp reverses the polarity, shrinking down to 6" tall and squeaking with minuscule rage that impresses no one.
6. Fülöp accidentally turns himself invisible and the guards cannot find him.

We rolled a "3", which got the job done well enough. The GM, however, was not yet done making things hard for me. Seriously, I can't recall ever having to struggle this much just to be told what the mission was. Anyhow, I suppose I did it to myself by being the only PC with obvious flaws to poke at. Since Fülöp is old and frail, he can't bow before The King. At least, not without magical assistance to overcome his arthritis.

The Bowing Spell

1. Fülöp successfully casts the spell, gracefully bowing despite his aged and stiff spine.
2. Fülöp successfully cast the bow spell, but with the side-effect of turning purple.
3. Fülöp successfully casts the bow spell, but lets loose a loud and undignified fart in the process.
4. Fülöp bows, but the spell haywires and causes him to do some weird acrobatic upside down levitating bow.
5. Power-word: Bow. Everyone but Fülöp feels compelled to bow. His Majesty is not amused.
6. The senile old wizard accidentally confuses the "bow" spell for the "bath" spell. It's not pretty.

A "4" has Fülöp twisting and contorting, but at least not pissing off The King.  After proper respects are paid to His Majesty, we learn the plot.

Princess Ireeki has gone missing, and was probably kidnapped. Her lady-in-waiting was present when she vanished, but The King has held off doing anything about it out of suspicion his daughter had just run away to get attention. Suitors from a nearby kingdom are due in a few more days, however, and we must get the Princess back before they arrive for political reasons.

Midea suggests we interrogate the Lady-In-Waiting. This results in a skill roll that I think came very close to stalling out the adventure before it could even get started. Clearly, there's a learning curve to 6X, and we were about to realize it.

Interviewing the Lady-In-Waiting

1. She gives us a good description of the man who kidnapped the Princess. He has a dark beard and a heavy unibrow, is 6 ft tall, and was wearing a dark cloak. When he put the cloak around the princess, they disappeared.
2. She didn't get a good look at the kidnapper, but she thinks magic was involved.
3. She didn't get a good look at the kidnapper, but he left behind an eyebrow hair we might be able to use for some sympathetic magic to locate or track him.
4. She won't stop crying and has nothing more to add.
5. Her thoughts are muddled. The man doesn't actually have a unibrow, that's just a masking spell that prevents her from remembering what he really looked like.
6. She saw nothing. In truth, she was busy in bed with The King, and not at her post in the Princess' Quarters at the time of the kidnapping. Her description was made up, and His Majesty will cover for her.

Isn't that horrible?  "2" and "4" are both total derailments for the plot with no further obvious direction for the plot to go. They'd be better as "5" and "6" than "2" and "4", given that they represent total failures to follow the clue trail.  Entries "3", "5" and "6" all give a tiny bit of information, coupled with another derailment that's not quite as bad as "2" or "4" but would still result in some wheel spinning.  Only "1" advances the plot or provides useful intel, and even that doesn't really give much of a "lead" to follow. Regardless of what we roll on that chart, it will require another roll just to figure out what direction to go in.  All our tables after this one were constructed to be far more dynamic and less likely to stall out the plot engine.

As it turns out, we rolled "3", and were blessed with a single hair to enchant in hopes of finding the suspect. Of course, our wizard was a bit dodgy and senile, so this was far from guaranteed to work. Knowing it had even odds to go horribly wrong, I asked for something pretty darned advantageous on the "1".

Fülöp's Follicular Flight

1. We are magically transported to the eyebrow man. We catch him with his pants down, sitting in the privy.
2. We are transported to the eyebrowed man's town. He's in a tavern.
3. We get a vision of the unibrow, and know his location.
4. Miscast! Bevin loses all his body hair!
5. The spell transports us half way to the unibrow man. We end up in a swamp.
6. The spell transports all of the unibrow man's extended family to the castle we're in.

I felt the GM was being far too kind to us, and I told her so. I was asking for the moon on the "1" result, and I felt the "6" should be just as punishing. Instead, the "6" on this chart was more directly useful than the "2" on the previous chart.

Not that it matters, since we rolled a "3". The spell revealed his location, and we had to ride all night to catch him. He was in the village of Targethorpe, staying at the Lamprey Inn. Targethorpe was also known for its large monastery full of orthodox bell-ringing monk mystics.

We arrive just after dawn, and attempt to find out from the inkeeper whether or not the kidnapper or princess are still here.

Lamprey Inn

1. They're upstairs sleeping.
2. They left at the crack of dawn, and they're less than an hour ahead.
3. They're an hour down the road, and accompanied by a platoon of soldiers from the rival Kingdom of Chevalier! Those fiends!
4. The owner leads us out back and facilitates us getting mugged.
5. He's not sure what happened to the princess, but the unibrowed one was found dead and drained of blood earlier this morning.
6. The bar keep pours you a drink to answer your questions. You are drugged, and pass out quickly.

A "5" put us back into investigation mode, despite what was almost going to be a chase or fight scene. A discussion follows about whether or not this entry on the card definitively implies that the blood-draining was vampiric in nature. I'm not sure we ever came to a consensus.

Since the only other thing that had been established about Targethorpe was the monastery, we decided to go ask the monks if they knew anything. Gwyon, the bell-loving Abbot, was a wise mystic, and old acquaintance of Fülöp's. So, once the begloved abbot was done deafening us with his bells (another great characterization by the GM), we were able to ask if he'd seen Princess Ireeki recently.

Monastery of Targethorpe

1. Good news! She's actually up in the belltower as we speak, and Gwyon thinks it will only take him a fortnight to cure her vampirism.
2. Your princess is in another temple. She's been sold for a sacrifice to the temple of Nergal.
3. The monk knows of a vampire nest in the hills, and we go to rescue the girl.
4. Gwyon hisses as you realize that he's become a vampire. He sneers "You'll never get her from our nest in the hills!" - and flies away.
5. She was captured by slavers from Solarian Wastes. Their caravan is three days ahead.
6. The Orc leader Gloksnag and his clan have been doing the bidding of the high wizard Dloththal. He has Ireeke.

Apparently the GM wasn't as enamored with the vampirism concept as some of the players were. But she had awesome NPC names, and that's cooler than undead any day. When the die rolled the GM's way, she got to tell us all about Orcish blood magic, and the dred wizard Dloththal.  Clearly, the Princess was in peril and we must ride out to save her.

We didn't get far. The orcs were waiting for us. As they sprung their ambush, mighty Amazonian Captain Midea tries to defend the dottering old wizard and his young apprentice. Yep, that would be another die-roll.

Orcs Attack

1. The orcs are all female, and are mad because the evil wizard Dloththal has stolen their men. Midea convinces them to join us.
2. There's a fight, and Fülöp's Sacred Staff of Bitterness glows so brightly the half-blinded Orcs flee in terror. They'll be back for round two after we get to prepare defenses.
3. Midea wipes out half of the orcs in a mighty battle. Bevin hides. Fülöp accidentally sets the forest on fire, scattering the rest of the attackers.
4. We defeat the orcs, but one of us loses a limb, and another of us is slain. Luckily, the slain hero is magically reincarnated as a sentient talking truffle-hunting pig.
5. The orcs capture us.
6. Fülöp turns the party into mules, hoping that orcs only drain the blood of humans. 

Again, we experienced a bit of trouble getting the 2s through 5s to fit. (Our 2 and 3 should be switched, and our 4 and 5 should probably be switched as well). This time it was my fault.

Not that that mattered, as a "6" came up on the die. We're all turned into mules!  That seemed rather silly and fitting. Plus, it was late. So, we all decided to end it there. Game over - we're mules now! Presumably, hopefully the orcs used us as pack animals instead of dinner. Then there'd be a chance for a sequel next time we're all feeling goofy.


Gotta admit, 6X was a ton of fun. It's easy to run, and great for engaging everyone at once. Even when you split the party, everybody gets to contribute to the possible results of every single die roll. I definitely recommend it for pick-up games, impromptu sessions, and groups that experience a lot of chaos at the tabletop. PCs working at cross purposes, players hogging the spotlight, lack of focus, and many other potential problems for crunchier traditional systems actually work as strengths for 6X. That's pretty cool.

Reading the rules for myself several days later, I see that the game is expecting for fights to be handled with several die rolls. The examples feature NPCs getting wounded at "1" and PCs wounded at "6". That's certainly more conventional and balanced, but I've got to say that for our purposes the wilder results tables worked just great.

On that topic, I must admit that the rules, despite being so minimal and looking ripe for abuse, turned out to be very enjoyable and really well balanced.  I tried _hard_ to break the system every time I was getting to propose a "1" result. That I could just as easily fall victim to an equally-ridiculous "6" (as we all eventually did) kept things from being too easy.  We sometimes had trouble filling in an appropriate "3" or the like, but for the most part that didn't matter as long as the best-case and worst-case scenarios were clear. The GM getting to define the 6 after the player defines the 1 is critical to keeping the game balanced and exciting.