Dungeons all the way down – preview

I have a big post brewing about dungeons. It will probably be in two or more parts, and needs illustrations.

Here is a TL;DR preview so I can get the bulk of it out of my system. Ideas that wander in your system for too long, well, a) are exhausting and b) probably deserve to get out there.

On to the point.

Dungeons are :

1- enclosed units, space delimiting gameplay (you're in the dungeon or not, if you cross its borders, you get out of it or your GM needs to expand it) 

2- given visual representation (typically : a map, whatever form it takes)

3- filled to the brim with three things : a) dangers, b) weird stuff, c) opportunities (for treasure, adventure, story, advancement, etc.)

4- given procedures to travel in them and interacting with them.

Based on this definition, it appears that :

1- dungeons are dungeons (no joke ?!) 

2- megadungeons are dungeons (no joke ?!)

3- overworld spaces and maps are dungeons 

4- cities are dungeons (the "safe havens" just being particulary sleepy dungeons).

Corollaries :

5- overworlds and megadungeons differ mainly in their presentation (map, outside or subterranean...) and choice of travel procedures

6- you can treat any type of dungeon as any other type, and use procedures as you need them. Your dungeon is actually a forest or an island ? Okay. Your megadungeon is actually a lost valley ? Okay. Your overworld campaign world is actually underground, or is a single city ? Okay. Your gloomy city of thieves is so dangerous that some of its neighborhoods need dungeon procedures to be traversed ? Okay. (I've got references for most of these examples already, especially in video games.)

Final points :

- some games understand this very well already. I have not played it yet, but I understand that Electric Bastionland takes the "borough as a dungeon" approach quite seriously.

- you can use the same, or almost the same, universal basic procedures to fill your dungeons. Just change the content of the tables a bit. I have a d6 table that I use to fill any kind of dungeon.

- inversely, it can be interesting to taylor the travel procedures, and think about which you want to employ and why (to what effect).

- you can rename "dungeons" in my expanded meaning as "adventuring locales", "dungeon units", "gameplay units" or what have you. They still need a better name. Something with "blocks"?

- your can view your game world / campaign milieu as a landscape of fractal Legos. All your campaign is composed of dungeon blocks within blocks within blocks, arranged with all the variations you can imagine.

And that's all folks. Now to see if I can finish the detailed post(s) sometime in the summer. But you can share your thoughts already !

Reading Holmes right now

... and it's interesting. I lean even more rules-light ordinarily, and the book is still somewhat chaotic. But it's a good read, a good example on how to pack a complete game in 48 pages, and it's better organized than OD&D (which, admittedly, isn't a high bar to clear). There's a lot of good in it.

All in all, in a strange way, it's the official D&D version that I can grok the best, it seems.

Might share other impressions or house rules later.

Death at 0 HP – a simple adjustment

On matters of survival, older rules are harsh : out of HP, you're dead. It's quick and makes sense : the character can't take hits anymore. But it makes for deadly games, where lethality is a big threat. I think that is desirable (in old-school, exploration-focused, horror-adjacent games), but can be tweaked.

(More than enough digital ink has been competently spilled discussing this very topic elsewhere, I won't reiterate much here.)

Newer rules (for a wide acceptance of "new") offer many ways of mitigating the actual risk of death, sometimes effectively eliminating it from the game. So they naturally change the feelings and expectations at the table, and for the classical OSR game, we don't want that. In addition, these rules sometimes become fiddly and burdensome in play.

So here's a quick-and-dirty idea to find a middle ground that is a bit more permissive than, say, Holmes, but remains firmly in the old-school camp.

When a hit (or whatever) brings you to 0 HP (that's a floor, even if a hit should bring you to negative totals), you're out for the rest of the fight (if in combat) plus the rest of the dungeon turns till the resting turn. You are probably hurt, wounded, and someone tends to you.

Once that passes, you regain the use of your standard abilities, saves, attacks, etc. but stay at 0 HP. The HP recovery then happens at the usual rate.

But if you further lose a single point of HP when still at 0, you die.

Simple, no ? Puts some pressure on the PCs while giving them a tiny bit more air to breathe. It simply interprets "out of HP" as "you can't take further hits, but aren't dead yet" instead of "you can't take further hits, because you took them all and now you're dead".

Another advantage is that it allows TPKs to not end with everyone dead, but everyone KO. The party can subsequently be captured by the enemies, or some other story plans like that. 

So : 0 HP means KO, with a penalty, and any further hits kill the PC. That's it.

Further thoughts :

- enemies who don't want to kill the PCs can do just that.

- the GM is still free to rule that some attacks or other dangers can kill instead of KO, and should warn their players about this. Typical examples : dangers or attacks triggering saving throws, like dragon breath, falling into lava, drinking virulent poison, etc.

Note : remember that, in old-school D&D, there are other rules in place to manage and mitigate the risk of death. Inheritance is one, for example. Some select magics can be used to resurrect or bring back a PC, or healing them abnormally fast. (As usual, it's more interesting if they need a quest and/or come with a price.) And Holmes explicitly says that it's possible to play with 2 PCs at once, which helps a lot too. Finally, hirelings and henchmen are there as replacements.

Hope this helps ! I've put it in practice (as much as I practice these days), and I must say that it works quite well.

Dream journals

If you don't do it, I incite you to keep a dream journal, in whatever form you desire.

It's both a useful tool to get to know your psyche better, and a powerful source of inspiration for your role-playing games.

I've been keeping one since 2007. With great irregularity, of course, since the necessities of life and the state of my sleep don't always allow for quality dream-recording, but still : I've been at it for 17 years and I have a good pile of resources now. Plus, I am me : there are some dreams so crazy I cannot not write down.

I have landscapes, dangers, situations and NPCs for all manners of settings : modern-day of course, but also gonzo kitchen sink, realistic post-apocalypse, crazy post-apocalypse, fantasy, horror, other science-fiction. And of course, some things can always be translated and converted between settings.

So, it's great ! Do it !

I really should post a write-up of a few things here one of these days.

Actually acceptable adversaries

A random table for villains that are acceptable to destroy and crush, either allowing for kid-friendly violence (eugh, what an awful association of words) or general adventure gaming excised from the worst colonialist or genodical impulses of the hobby.

(There is something to be said about facilitating the suppression of moral quandaries by providing enemies that you can kill without a thought, something involving Milgram and personal responsibility perhaps, but that's a conversation for another post — and at least, they're not Gygax's orc children. And I do recognize that beating bad guys feels good, else I wouldn't write this post nor engage in this hobby as much.) 

Without further ado, roll d6 :

1-3 mindless murder machines

4-6 evil made flesh.

Yeah, that's it. I thought about a bigger table, with more options. But anytime there is the slightest bit of sentience, there is the possibility of communication, negotiation, avoidance, perhaps redemption — and thus, destruction becomes murder.

And honestly, even the entries in my table above are not immune to creative non-violent solutions — fortunately, of course ! But the entries themselves can be destroyed without any remorse, and that was the table's goal.

Now, to delve a tad more into the entries.

Murder machines ?!

- Fantasy flavor : artificial fantasy monsters. Gargoyles, golems, animated armors, magical constructs, astral summons, assemblages of raw magical energy, illusions made of semi-solid sculpted light, reanimated undead : whatever they are called, whatever their shape, they are inanimate things made active through a flow of magic energy. When defeated, might disappear in a poof ! of purple magic smoke, like monsters in a Zelda game. Might originate from ancient curses, workings of wicked wizards, or "natural" consequences of the circulation of magic in the world.

- Sci-fi flavor : murder robots running on standard algorithms, there's no mistaking them for genuinely sentient AIs. They're just machines you can destroy. Also applicable to fully automated facilities, semi-solid holograms and projections, automated surveillance and security systems, etc.

- Modern-day flavor : drones, missiles, bombs, mines, any kind of killing device, autonomous or not.

Evil made flesh ?!

- Example 1, summoned demons, literal echoes and embodiments of the evil collectively done by mankind since its beginning ; stewing and growing in Hell since time immemorial. 

- Example 2, nightmares made flesh, your own brain's danger simulations actually going after you.

Of course, it is possible to humanize or ascribe sentience to any of the above if that's what you want to do with your lore. The robots have human-level artificial intelligence, the constructs are "awoken" by magic, the reanimated corpses retain their original soul, demons have actually started to connect and form their own sentience and societies, etc. And all of that is valid. But the basic forms I presented can be used safely as cannon fodder if need be and if the lore accepts it. Just make sure your players know it and are okay with it.

That's why there isn't any living being of any kind in my table. Life is already something you shouldn't destroy unless absolutely inevitable or necessary, and of course the arbitrary and subjective definition of these italicized terms makes the matter irredeemably messy. And thus, it has no place in a "no moral dilemma incoming" table.

That's why I ultimately decided against the inclusion of two important groups of bad guys who are decidedly really evil :

- Insectoid Invasion : extra-terrestrial insect army mainly composed of giant ticks, mosquitoes and cockroaches displaying their usual level of sentience. It's likely that their original ecosystem needs them somewhere in the galaxy, but really not on Earth devouring and massacring our planet. Also works with other non-sapient, non-or-barely sentient invasive species (animal, vegetal, bacterial, etc).

- Bastard Baddies — violent invaders, slavers, assassins, Nazis and other genociders, colonizers, finance speculators, corrupt governments and so on.

Those two entries definitely deserve their place in the pantheon of interesting and justified enemies to fight, but even they probably deserve to be treated with a tad more subtlety than the first table.

I feel like Cthulhu-like cosmic eldritch horror entities probably register in the same category as well. But I don't like them, so I won't waste time (now, anyway) developing my thoughts about them.

Addendum : since this place fashions itself as an OSR-adjacent blog and it is a common topic, "what about orcs", you say ?

It's simple, really. What are your orcs ?

- Are your orcs literal, physical incarnations of magic / cosmic evil forces ? Call them "demons" or something else and don't look back, then.

- Are your orcs Tolkien-like ; tormented and mutilated images of former fair folk, victims of an evil system as much as criminals working for it ? Then be more subtle, as with my Bastard Baddies entry above. They can be evil, but they're sentient.

- Are your orcs just another type of living beings as is the traditional D&D canon, possibly unsavory stand-ins for colonized and othered people ? Can they be reasoned with, allied with ? Then they're people and treat them as such. Don't give them ugly tags like "savage", "barbarian", "wild", "tribal" or "uncivilized". These words have no right being used uncritically, especially to justify undiscriminated murder. And it certainly does not make them not people.

P.-S. : I feel like I have an easier time than most dealing with orcs. That's because the D&D implied setting is not part of my fantasy upbringing, and since I don't have much history with them, I have no heavy feelings about the matter. I've never much liked or hated them, they're just... a thing that exists in fantasy, I guess. I feel the same about fantasy dwarves and hobbits, to be honest : polite apathy. Like they're only relevant and interesting in their original Tolkien incarnation, and putting them anywhere else feels silly and tacked on ; a soulless grab.

(I have read Tolkien, quite early even, but at the time I didn't knew what orcs stood for in his work. I did percieve their link to industrialization and dehumanization, but at ten years old I mostly didn't know how to parse the whole "our good heroes are killing people left and right" thing. And most people still mostly don't, or else we wouldn't explore the topic so much.)

The only representation of orcs I somewhat like outside of Tolkien is probably the Elder Scrolls one, where they go through several stages : "random killable monsters" (Arena) -> "same but they're people and you can learn their language and help their king" (Daggerfall) -> "people integrated in society, even if as a minority and not without their particularisms" (Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim), and even -> "full-fledged independent societies you can visit and even be integrated to, or live in" (Skyrim, Elder Scrolls Online). There's no lack of distasteful or dubious lore and imagery about them, for sure, but at least the creators really managed to improve over a 20-year course.

Okay, I have rambled enough ! This orc digression really should have deserved its own post, and the treatment of "non-playable people" in Elder Scrolls does too, but oh well. That's it for today. 

Random table : which OSR are you ?

Just for fun : a quick random table to know which part of the wide OSR movement one may belong to. Heh, that might even be applicable to random NPCs for campaigns set in modern times...

Table 1 : adjective

1, grognard

2, hardcore

3, grimdark

4, artpunk

5, simulationist

6, narrativist

7, improv-heavy

8, hexcrawl / sandbox-focused

9, light-prep

10, mega-dungeon-focused

11, procedure-heavy

12, gonzo

Table 2 : noun

1, OSR (R for Revival / Renaissance) 

2, NSR / NuSR

3, FKR

4, DIY RPG

5, elfgame

6, adventure game

7, SwordDream

8, O5R

9, indie gaming

10, gaming (you just never stopped since the 70s)

11, OSR (R for Revolution) 

12, fantasy wargaming

Don't xander your dungeons, jaquays them !

 Just relaying this article from Anne, over at DIY & dragons.

You know how the OSR sphere talks about "jaquaying dungeons" since that 2010 article from Justin Alexander ?

Well, remember it's actually jaquaysing – my inner proofwriter has always been irritated by that typo –, and that Mr. Alexander really shouldn't rename it "xandering" after himself. Dishonest, distasteful, trans people erasing (the article says it all much better than I could), and it's an ugly word on top of that.

So please, go jaquays 'em dungeons. That's good game design.

(Also, thank you, Anne. You're always doing good work with what I call "community" posts, and I've been reading your blog with interest.)