Development Diary: Deep Vault Factions

I've completed outlines for each faction—some raw notes for reference as I develop the dungeon. These may be tweaked over the next couple of weeks if new ideas present themselves, but I feel like these are fairly well baked. One of my goals is to not go too deep into the backgrounds. The players won't know/discover much of it anyway, so all I need are the surface details to flesh the rest out in my mind.

Since my previous overview of the dungeon, I've decided to add a fifth faction to the mix, although they're an edge case. In developing the Leng as villains, I've decided to reduce their numbers and make them physically limited, though technologically strong. The physical limitations will also help explain some of the strange architecture found in the vaults (such as no stairs or steps, only ramps). To supplement their threat, I gave the Leng some minions which they have enslaved: hordes of (easily-killed) gibberlings (Fiend Folio) and a few (sort-of) trolls. 

Both creature types are mindless and totally under the thrall of their Leng masters, but whereas the trolls are only found in the Leng's territory, the gibberlings are likely to be encountered throughout the dungeon without any Leng present. I'm also upgrading the gibberlings from the boring old FF version to make them a little more vicious and creepy, so I want to have a playbook for them to follow.

The following factions are all present within the Deep Vaults (in likely order of appearance). The PCs will be seen as rivals by the Dungeon Raiders; all other factions will simply view the party members as more Dungeon Raiders (in terms of their motives)...

Development Diary: The Deep Vaults

As I quickly ramp up a new megadungeon to run for my friend Jeff's campaign, I want to write down the mental steps I take throughout the development phase. My other current projects include development of two large-scale dungeons, plus prep for a Norse-style run at the G-series of classic adventures—all of which feature fairly standard D&D tropes—so I'm looking to do something fresh for this dungeon, with creatures and races I don't use often.

Also, the dungeon I picked to run for Jeff is tagged for the 3-6 level range (our characters are currently 2nd-4th). Jeff named it "The Deep Vaults" on the campaign map—a title he generated with no particular context intended. But I like it..."deep" sounds dangerous and mysterious and vaults can be rooms or caves, so I have lots of design choices. More than anything, I want this dungeon to feel alien and weird. I love mashing-up sci-fi and fantasy: stuff like Thundaar and Land of the Lost, as well as adventures like Expedition to the Barrier Peaks and, in recent years, the excellent and inspired Anomalous Subsurface Environment.

(In fact, I considered just reskinning ASE for this, but as I was re-reading the modules, the big-picture setting of ASE is so vital to the inner workings of the dungeon that I felt the adventure would be lacking if I stripped all that great material out. If this dungeon goes over well with the guys, I might throw ASE onto my pile of future campaigns to run.)

Before going into a new design, I always like to lay out a set of principles...simple bullet points that define what the adventure will be about, and provide me with "bumpers" to nudge me back on target as I inevitably start to incorporate every kitchen-sink idea I can come up with. The list of goals might get tweaked during the design process, but this step always helps me get started.

For The Deep Vaults, I wrote out this list of design goals (the latter of which are pretty common megadungeon guidelines, but it still helps to say it—plus I want to really dial up #4 to high levels of interactivity and impact)...

1. No standard D&D monsters...use either weird, rarely-used ones or newly-created ones.
2. The PCs' relationship to the various dungeon factions should have an impact on play.
   
3. No standard traps or puzzle rooms; instead use environmental hazards and weird-tech challenges.
4. The dungeon environment must be interactive and have an impact on play.
5. Treasure is not straightforward; rather, the "loot" is in figuring out Leng technology and recovering valuable materials that are found in unusual forms (a spool of gold wire instead of gold coins, a tool made of sapphire, etc.)
   
6. The dungeon must be re-stockable, but ultimately could be "cleared" with great effort.

New Year, New Campaign(s)

Between the holidays, a sick girlfriend and two sets of sick parents, and a sudden rush of writing projects that came out of nowhere, December took a toll on my blog writing. With my Brackleborn campaign still on hiatus due to scheduling difficulties and my regular Tuesday night campaign currently being DM'ed by one of the other guys, I've spent a lot of time revisiting old ideas and figuring out what I want to do next.

I've done a ton of work on my Moormist Manor material and, in going through it all, realized I had an entire undead funhouse dungeon (because you can't spell funeral without spelling fun first) just sitting there in my files gathering dust. I based the quite-extensive dungeon on the classic Universal Pictures gothic-horror movies (Dracula, Wolfman, Frankenstein, Mummy, et al) and called it "Monster Mansion." It's not the most original idea, but I had a great time writing it and had completely forgotten how much work I'd done on it. I decided to shelve Moormist for awhile to polish up Monster Mansion.

So, I now have a wizard's ancestral manor house as a megadungeon-based campaign and an undead manor house as a kilodungeon-based campaign. Two big houses, two very different concepts, but still a lot of similar ideas and environments. Both are unfinished, but enough development is done that I could easily start a campaign in either one and fill in any missing gaps as we went along. I still intend to publish that material here in the blog, but before I could get to that point I got distracted in November with yet another campaign idea.

I've long wanted to run TSR's original G1-3 Giants modules leading into D1-3 (but skipping Q1), especially after reading Greyhawk Grognard's incredible dive into the secret lore behind the modules and their connection to Gygax's never-realized version of Temple of Elemental Evil. My concept is to run it in a Norse-style barbarian setting, with limited technology and resources for the players to draw upon (basically, the characters would be defending their clan's territory from the Jotuns' depredations). Behind it all would be the Svartálfar, the dark elves, who plot the invasion and subjugation of the surface world (perhaps aided by a god of elemental evil).

A few years ago, I DM'ed a really successful campaign based in my world's version of a Viking-style realm called The Cold March. It only ran for a year or so and had a sandbox-style opening, but the players developed it into an epic quest for justice and revenge that ended for their 8th-level characters in a satisfying way (for  players and DM). My guys still regularly talk about it and I personally feel it was my best work in 40 years of running games. My concern about revisiting these characters for the Against the Giants campaign would be that I might step on (and potentially ruin) the legacy of that earlier campaign.

So, new characters then... This brings up another problem which is that my Roll20 players seem to lack motivation to care about a "bigger story." The Cold March campaign worked so well because at the beginning the players seized upon a very simple idea: revenge, and then worked it to its inevitable conclusion. Everything else that happened for the rest of the campaign was an offshoot of that one choice made by the players. The Giants modules have a deeper story going on, however, and I want to take advantage of that. I have to come up with a good hook that will cause the players (not the characters) to WANT to solve the mystery of the giant's raids, rather than just go kill them until they stop (which, to be fair, is a perfectly valid strategy for members of a barbarian culture).

Then I had an idea...

Prior to 2012, I ran a 20-year (off and on) low-fantasy campaign based on a classic, pseudo-European feudal setting, with influences from Celtic and Welsh cultures and a heavy dose of Arthurian myth. That particular campaign also saw me develop a homebrew set of rules for harvesting terrain hexes and managing fiefs (which each of the players ultimately did). The system worked very well and I was proud of it, but it was ultimately too complex for my players' tastes/capabilities and I ended up doing 90% of the bookkeeping for every player AND all the surrounding NPC-run fiefs. Great system...too much work for me.

If I took my core fief rules, however, and boiled the mechanics down to a few essential functions (aided by the low-tech barbarian setting), and then merged it with the Against the Giants campaign, I could have the players assume the roles of jarls rather than individual heroes. It would be up to the player-jarls to manage their domains and develop warriors and heroes to meet the giantish threat from the mountains. The conceit would be that each player-jarl contributes members to an adventuring party, which would then run through the modules almost as pre-gens or NPCs. This would also alleviate the sting of the high attrition factor of the modules, in that the players wouldn't be losing "characters" so much as assets, while their actual character (the jarl) remains safe back in his domain's mead-hall.

So inspired, I shelved Monster Mansion in mid-December and began refining my fief rules. It was another big burst of creative energy that made a ton of progress. I now have the core system finished and am fine-tuning the details (things like developing tables to cover random Events, as well as turn-based procedures for how the jarls interact with each other). The outlines of the campaign setting are also done and, again, I could probably start this campaign tomorrow and be fine finishing the rest of the pieces as we went along.

But then...record scratch...another creative opportunity arose that sparked my imagination.

I swap DM duties with Jeff, one of my Tuesday night players—sometimes for a few months, sometimes longer. This helps both of us scratch our worldbuilder itches and also get to enjoy playing on occasion. Both of us have been frustrated by our group of long-time players, who, with the advent of computer games and MMOs, have grown largely incurious, and difficult to inspire or enchant. They want things spoon-fed to them in ways that our sometimes-convoluted storylines and intricate setting details don't easily allow. In delving into the OSR movement, I came to realize that the problem was on the DM side. Jeff and I were developing campaigns WE wanted to play in, but not necessarily ones in which our players were enthused to play.

As I began integrating OSR game theory into my own style of running my Wednesday-night Brackleborn campaign, I've turned Jeff on to some of the same ideas. We've had long Discord chats discussing what kind of campaigns we could run that would both stimulate our players and ourselves, while reducing the amount of time and work we put into running each week. Our goal is to get the players to reassume the role of decision-makers and sort-of force them to take the reins of the player side of the campaign.

It's been a revelation for both of us and, together, we workshopped a simple megadungeon concept which Jeff has developed into a full campaign. I would be the exemplar to show the other guys how an old-school game is played...which should be part of their genetic memory, because this is how we used to play.

The base concept is that a normal, low-fantasy city was beset by a seismic event that formed a rift which split the city into two halves. The walls of this rift were seen to have many cave-like openings which led into a mysterious network of passages and chambers filled with monsters and treasure. We player-characters have come to the city and joined one of several expeditionary companies that have formed to investigate and plunder the various catacombs unearthed by the event. Pretty bog-standard D&D...

Jeff runs it using a mix of random encounter tables and keyed rooms, and the deadliness factor is HIGH. In 10 sessions we've lost three characters and had to flee for our lives numerous times. I've had a glorious time as a player and Jeff has reported how much fun he is having as well, once he built up the confidence to just wing it. While discussing the most recent session, he expressed a desire to play in the dungeon and asked if I would be willing to run one of the rift complexes (which are separated into "danger" zones based on character level ranges).

I readily volunteered, knowing I already have (yet) another megadungeon in my back pocket. Beneath the capital city of Remedios in my campaign world, lies a series of ever-shifting catacombs which are the remnants of an ancient city that was once part of a highly-advanced society. The deeper one goes beneath the "modern" city of Remedios, the weirder things get and the more ancient technology the PCs discover/interact with. I have tons of unused material for this megadungeon to export over, so for the last week, I have been developing this new concept, which I will probably start running sometime in March.

The new dungeon is called "The Deep Vaults," and, as I intend to do with each of the projects outlined above, I will start posting that material here as I work through the development process. I intend to give myself one month to get the dungeon levels drawn and keyed, leaving me another 4-6 weeks to fine-tune and prep materials for Roll20. 

My blogging goal is to do at least one post per week, and I do not lack for material. Time is the one component that I think most bloggers wish they had more of, though.

My next post will be tomorrow, however...Part 1 of The Deep Vaults: The Sketch!