#Dungeon23 — Tunnels Beneath the Earth

I've never been much of a "joiner," but I like a collective mental exercise now and then. It's what motivated me recently to enter my adventure, Bergummo's Tower, in Prince of Nothing's back-to-basics "No Artpunk 2" contest. With both my current campaigns running along on content I've already baked, I need a new outlet for some non-work-related creative energy (which has accumulated as a result of being cooped up inside with no yard projects to do and caring for a very sick dog).

Like a lot of DMs, I came across Sean McCoy's recent tweet about Dungeon 23, announcing a personal goal of writing one room a day over the course of a year in order to create a 12-level, 365-room megadungeon. The spark for doing this sort of thing had already been fired by Zenopus Archive's superlative expansion of the sample dungeon from the Holmes Basic rulebook, and I've been mulling doing a similar thing with several of my longtime dungeons-in-progress that I can never seem to complete.

My campaign world already contains a megadungeon environment—a series of ever-changing catacombs beneath the capital city of the land of Remedios. I've only fleshed out the top two levels, however, and my players have only visited the first level. I've considered developing a campaign around the catacombs, but on the players' few excursions there, they never seemed to bite down on the concept and I never did much else with it. I love the idea, though.

A formal effort like this—and one that seems to be attracting a lot of participants—is the perfect thing I need to roll into the long winter months until spring. I'm curious if I have the stamina to do it. I write for a living, but do I have the juice to take a massive concept and flesh it out in a way that is cogent and feels satisfying? A little bit each day sounds easy, until you hit Day-160 and realize you're out of ideas and aren't even at the halfway point yet. I have a feeling this is going to be way harder than I think, and I'm already a pessimist.

I will say that I completely disagree with this guideline from Sean on his Dungeon23 substack: "If you can’t think of what to write that day just write “Empty Room,” see how easy that is?"

I'm of the opinion that if you're going to write a room, then write a room. My dungeon levels will have plenty of empty rooms, but the rooms I'm writing will have something interesting in them to see/do/fight/take. That definitely ramps up the difficulty level of this project, so it will be interesting to see what techniques I can develop to stick to this commitment.

I'm also wondering if I can make something interesting to other DMs out there. I ended up in the middle of the pack in Prince's contest, but I like to believe that was more a function of scope than content (some of the winning entries were just really cool concept pieces, whereas mine was a starter dungeon for newbie players and sort of vanilla). I know what flavors I like, and everything I make is some combination of those flavors, but how strong is my palate?

I'm not on Twitter or any other social media, so I'll post everything to my blog. I'm abiding by the guideline to write the rooms in a physical journal, which I think is a neat limitation. Committing ink to paper takes a leap of faith that your hand can keep up with your brain. It's a skill that has atrophied for me in favor of keyboards and typing. I'm not sure I can post every day, though, so I'm shooting for a once-per-week post of the previous week's work. I'll see how it goes.

I feel like I'm off to a good start. I've cracked what I want to do thematically, and I have an initial bubble sketch of the first month's work. I've also outlined the rest of the dungeon levels all the way to the bottom. Now I just need to start writing the rooms on Sunday. My goal is to pay homage to the foundational works of the game, but I intend to get weird as we go down. 

I'll be following the OSRIC system as the overall ruleset for this dungeon, and I'm limiting myself to monsters from the AD&D trilogy (MM, MMII, FF), Chasoium's All the World's Monsters I-III, and some home-brewed but thematic creatures. As much as possible, I want to pick monsters I've rarely/never used before, but I definitely want some classic creatures in there as well. Also a dragon. In 40 years of gaming, I've only had ONE dragon fight with my players.

I've named my megadungeon "Tunnels Beneath the Earth" (TuBE for short). The first level (January) I am calling "The Upper Works" as a shout-out to Castle Greyhawk. 

Level 1 consists of the surface ruins (which will be detailed in Week 1). The ruins lead to three sub-surface "mini-dungeons" (Weeks 2-4). Each of those areas will have seven detailed areas (one per day). From the surface level and the mini-dungeons, various tunnels lead down to the first proper megadungeon level (February)—and some tunnels descend even deeper.

I've purchased a simple graph-ruled composition notebook to record everything, so here's to a new year of D&D and, hopefully, this time next year I'll have filled this bad boy up with lots of good stuff. Fingers crossed...

Law and Chaos in the Badlands — Part 3

Part 1 | Part 2

The perpetual religious warfare between the Khossites and the Lahrists has been a primary driver of a string of human civilizations throughout history, but other faiths also came and went over the centuries. These "pagan" religions were mostly regional and much smaller in scope, and none of them ever approached the scale or relevance of the Khoss/Lahr dichotomy in human affairs.

This state of affairs existed until a little more than three centuries ago, when the establishment of the merchant empire of Meridia heralded the dawn of the Fifth Era. With it came a new polytheistic religion—an amalgam of popular pagan religions that emerged during the previous period of tumult. This new religion was devoted to a sun god called Solis and a pantheon of lesser gods representing other elemental and divine forces. Like the order of Lahr, the Solists were civilized and believed in an orderly society, but a radical philosophical divide separated the two religions. 

Whereas the tenets of Lahr centered on duty, self-sacrifice, and blind obeisance to lawful authority in order to further their goal of destroying Khoss, the Solis faith embraced a new view of good societal behavior. It introduced revolutionary ideas of earthly conduct—concepts such as "honor," "redemption," "chivalry," and "mercy"—and made them essential to truly defeating darkness and evil. These ideas seemed alien to devoted Lahrists, who rejected the new "cult of Solis" as heretical.

As the merchant empire expanded, however, its trade caravans and ships began to spread the word of Solis around the world, and the new religion was quickly adopted in lands conquered by the imperial legions. The faith appealed to so many because it was better suited to a more-agreeable world, in which prosperity and trade were the primary goals instead of constant, existential war. In a short period of time, the influence of the Lahr faith waned as the glory of Solis waxed.

The current "civilized world"—and particularly the land of Remedios, my primary campaign setting within it—is human-centric. Dwarves, elves, and other fantasy races live beyond the borders of human civilization and are uncommon visitors within human realms. Most non-human player-characters are foreigners to Remedios, and even unwelcome in certain places. Each race has its own spiritual faith and divinity, but those religions are largely inconsequential to (and unconcerned with) the greater world dominated by human beings.

The following section details the religion of the sun-god, Solis—the Lord of Light. Followers of Solis occupy Irongate Keep and represent the forces of goodness and Law that the cultists of Khoss want to drive out of the Badlands.

Law and Chaos in the Badlands — Part 2

In Part 1, I defined the central conflict in my Badlands campaign as a struggle between the forces of Law—represented by the Keep's residents, who are faithful followers of the sun-god, Solis—and the minions of Chaos—represented by the evil Cult of Khoss. This basic plot is lifted straight from the original module, B2 Keep on the Borderlands. The next few posts will detail both these religions, along with a third religion called the Order of Lahr, all of which comprise my world's major human faiths. I'll provide a little context first, but I don't intend to get into the weeds of my world's history (which isn't terribly original and consists mostly of sketched-out notes).

Law and Chaos in the Badlands — Part 1

The central conflict in the original module: B2 Keep on the Borderlands is between the ostensibly-good forces of Law—represented by the Castellan and the Keep’s residents—and the shadowy forces of Chaos—embodied by the cultists and their army of evil humanoids gathering at the Caves of Chaos. I wanted to keep the same overarching Law vs. Chaos structure from the original module for my Badlands campaign, with the chief difference being that at the start of the adventure, the forces of Law are mostly unaware of the growing cultist threat, outside of some vague rumors of “...trouble brewing in the south.”

In B2, the religious nature of the fight between Law and Chaos is never specified outside of the existence of generic elements such as priests and curates, temples, altars, etc., and no gods are ever named. This is consistent with Original/Basic D&D’s alignment system—which categorizes people and monsters as lawful, chaotic, or neutral—but I think it’s also left intentionally vague because this module was intended as a template adventure for DMs to dress with their own details. That’s part of the genius of the early adventure modules, and what modern, official campaign-book adventures are mostly (but intentionally) lacking.

Wandering Encounters in the Badlands

After dealing with the goblin ambush, the adventurers abandon further pursuit. The day was getting long, the heat was brutal, and they were all parched with thirst, so they return to Irongate Keep. In a bold move, the party decides to start their second foray into the Badlands at night, when the heat would not impede them. 

They depart the Keep the following evening, just as the gates shut for the night. As they head out, the guards on the wall stare in disbelief. The Captain-of-the-Gate gives them a stern warning: "The drawbridge will not be lowered again until dawn, so whatever happens to you is on your heads. May the gods have mercy on you this night..."

Setting out down the canyon under the darkening sky, they soon become surrounded by a deep gloom. Their torches seem feeble and pathetic under the night's ebon pall, and the ridgelines now loom over them like walls of utter blackness. The air quickly grows cooler, then cold, and the howls of coyotes begin to echo through the canyons. 

The going is slow and difficult, and the party has virtually no visibility to potential threats or obstacles. Thero, the elf ranger, leads the way just outside the ring of torchlight, but even his night vision is limited to just a few dozen yards, eliminating much of the range advantage of his longbow. Ban the bard second-guesses their decision, but Smitty the fighter is determined to mitigate the sun's relentless effect on their travels.

Without warning, the party is beset by a half-dozen skeletons dressed in the remnants of archaic wicker armor and wielding corroded bronze scimitars. The skeletons scramble toward them from a nearby rock terrace, scrabbling down the scree slope like rattling avatars of death. Quickly gaining their composure, the party reacts to the surprise attack and manages to defeat the skeletons without serious injury to themselves. Still, it was an important lesson that random threats can emerge suddenly in the Badlands—especially in the darkness.

__________

I'm a big fan of wandering encounters. 

Interestingly, B2 Keep on the Borderlands doesn't include a wandering encounters table for the Wilderness Area, nor does it give any guidance for using the tables in the rules booklet (which are explicitly for dungeon levels "below ground"). In the module's text, Gary Gygax created a curious sub-system for possible encounters if the party camps overnight within a specified number of squares from a numbered area on the map—a system which isn't used in any other adventure module, as far as I'm aware—but that's it. There aren't wandering encounters in the Caves of Chaos, either.

The omission can be easily explained by B2's relatively limited wilderness region and the Caves' layout of segregated lairs; or, perhaps, by Gary's desire to simplify the novice DM's transition into the role of managing an adventure (although there are wandering monster tables in B2's predecessor—B1 In Search of the Unknown—which is much more of a "training" module).

B2's iconic cover image by Jim Roslof. After David Sutherland's
blue-tinted red dragon on the box cover, this was the second D&D image
my 13-yo brain ever saw. It still holds tremendous power over me.

Nevertheless, I almost always include wandering encounters in my adventures unless the scenario renders them unnecessary. As DM, I have so much control over the proceedings (other than the dice rolls) that I find it thrilling to surrender control over "what happens next" by rolling random encounter checks. (I feel the same about rolling magic items randomly.) 

In fact, the skeleton encounter above led the party to explore the ridgeline from which these ancient skeletons attacked, and that exploration in turn created a whole series of unplanned adventures that transformed a lowly Lurid Lair (L1) into a Major Encounter area I later dubbed "The Dead Pines." (I'll include all this material in future posts, because it ended up having a major impact on the campaign.)

I created the following wandering encounter table and descriptions for the Badlands.

Keying the Badlands Wilderness Map

Previously, I described the methodology for developing my hexcrawl map of the Badlands. In this post, I will lay out the different types of terrain hexes on the map, and provide descriptions of the important adventuring locations to be found within the campaign area.

The Hexcrawl Map

The original area map is around 17.5 x 17.5 inches, which strains the blog's capabilities to display a detailed image, making some of the keying numbers difficult to make out. I increased the font sizes of some labels and changed the color to black to increase readability. A full-sized, fully-legible version of the map may be found here.

 

The Badlands Hexcrawl

When I set out to re-frame B2 Keep on the Borderlands as a pseudo-Western setting, I knew that I would keep all the original encounter areas in some form, but needed to replace the Wilderness map with something that would not only provide more adventure opportunities for my experienced players, but also put a little distance (and secrecy) between the Caves of Chaos and the Keep. 

The discovery of the existence of the caves (and the evil cult) is a big part of the early campaign, but the site is a fair trek from the Keep and the environment will limit the party's endurance on a particular foray. I also intend to bump up the difficulty level of the Caves of Chaos a bit and expand it into a mega-dungeon. The "breathing room" to explore an expanded sandbox should give the characters opportunities to earn a few experience levels and magic items by the time they find the site.