Circle of Dar Janix

On Sunday, I took my daughter to the Skyline Caverns, about an hour from my house. To a certain extent the whole setup is a tourist trap. In addition to the cavern tour, they have a dragon themed mirror maze, and a small train ride. There is a large gift shop, which mostly sells junk and the inevitable polished “gemstones”. All of that said, it is a very fun tourist trap and a great place to take a three-year-old. The mirror maze and the caverns themselves are of interest to this blog. I you have never been to a mirror maze before, it is a maze where all the walls are mirrors. This creates the illusion that the maze is infinite and creates enough confusion that the maze feels much bigger, and more complicated than it actually is. At first a mirror maze feels like one of those dungeon tricks (like spinners, teleporters, or sloping passages) that are neat in theory, or in a Wizardry game, but come unglued at the table. But, I do think that you could make use of a mirror maze in a du...

Before I embark on my Stonehell customization project, I need to think about what tools I will need. I have divided them into three categories, these categories each include both physical tools and processes I will use for content creation. Content generation tools Content management tools Quality control tools "Content generation tools" are pretty self explanatory, they are the tools I will use to create the content that will go into the dungeon: Graph paper: I still do the rough draft of everything by hand. I am not really sure why, it is very inefficient, but it is how I work. Pencils Drawing templates Writing journal Geomorphs: Some I will steal from other places, some I will make myself. I actually shouldn't need that many, I am leaving levels 1 and 2 untouched and they will have the most real estate. Treasure tables Dungeon tables Random dungeon generation procedure: I started talking about that here Monster books: I have plenty A dungeon d...

So, how do I go about planning my Stonehell customization project? I already have a good first pass at a high level definition of my goal: A customized version of Stonehell dungeon that is consistent with the history of my campaign world and reinforces careful play and resource management. I will need to sharpen that as I go, but it will serve to keep me pointed in the right direction for now. I can't talk about the history part yet because my players have spent the last several sessions almost stumbling on some big reveals. Some of my players read this blog, so I don't want to spoil anything. I can discuss the play style of my group though. My current Stonehell group consists of people who either work in, or are students in, the science and technology area. There are both professionals and skilled tradesmen in our group. I am a lawyer with an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering. As you can imagine, my group has a very methodical play style. They carefully explor...

Speaking of megadungeons.

There is a reason that I cannot start on the Castle Whale right now, I already have a megadungeon project I am working on, my ongoing Stonehell game. I have been running Stonehell for various groups since early 2010, and I have kept a persistent dungeon through every session. That means that there have been a lot of changes to my version over many sessions, especially in the first two levels. While the physical layout is mostly the same, most of the original room descriptions have changed as a result of player actions. Recently I have started changing the dungeon further by adding my own sub-levels. These sub-levels have introduces an interesting wrinkle to my dungeon, history. My current campaign world does not have much history. It is a mixture of parts of my old campaigns and commercial products. The "civilized" continent has only its major port city, The City State of the Invincible Overlord, detailed. I brought Judges Guild's classic city over from a Castles ...

I continue to think about The Castle Whale . I am pretty far off from starting any real project here, as I do not have any outlet to run it at this time. I am already running a megadungeon game set in Stonehell, so I don't think my group would appreciate me jumping at a new shiny. But I am thinking about how I would go about it if I ever get the chance. I think, if I was going to build a megadungeon from scratch, I would do it as a complete stand alone game with a rule set specifically tailored, not just for megadungeons, but for the specific dungeon. I would probably make a rule set descended from either Swords & Wizardry, Searchers of the Unknown, or E6. I would probably go the route of having characters be a bit more survivable than baseline D&D, with more hp and faster recovery options. The combat system would be theater of the mind and abstract to facilitate quick encounters. I would probably use a lot of ideas I discussed in a previous post about streamlined games...

I was thinking a bit more about what a low magic world with a mystical underworld megadungeon would look like. Is there some way to make the megadungeon a pseud-natural occurrence? As others have pointed out, you can't just make magic strange by making the setting low magic, players are already used to magic spells and items. How can I make the megadungeon itself feel weird? The idea of a low magic world with a mystical underworld megadungeon put an image in my head. An Age of Sail setting where enormous whales roam the oceans, true titans of the deep. Not only are the whales large, but they do not rot when they die, instead their flesh turns to stone. Whalers regularly drag the carcass of a whale back to shore and towns are built in the bodies. Legends tell of a leviathan that dwarfs even these massive animals; the Castle Whale. The Castle Whale is the size of a mountain. It died centuries ago, but its hardened corpse still drifts in the oceans, it becomes a floating megadunge...

Ken H. at The Rusty Battle Axe started an interesting discussion about streamlined rules in the dungeon the other day (you should go read it now). He asks the question, "What if the dungeon (in this case, a megadungeon) was a unique feature in an otherwise mundane and non-fantasy medieval world?" He goes on to describe a system, based on S&W Core , that only uses the Human Fighter and the Human Thief. He goes on to describe how this would focus play and force the players to make more creative decisions. He also raises some concerns about gaming this way: The lack of healing The lack of character class choice The loss of tactical options with magic gone It would suck My first thought when I read this was that it would still be really fun. I have always been enchanted by simplified and pared down rule sets. I have been wanting to run an entire campaign using only the Pathfinder Beginner Box set and some monster books. I was intrigued a few years ago by a discussio...

I have continued to run Stonehell since my last post here and have continued to use Castles and Crusades to run it. While the group has not met regularly we still have managed to get several good sessions in, and have even added a player. I am happy with this, as I now live more than an hour from the rest of the group. Last weekend I ran two sessions of Stonehell at GenCon. I took a different approach than I have in the past when I run Stonehell at a convention or other "one shot" situation. In the past, I have had a prepared adventure that is set in Stonehell. My thought process was that players at a convention would not be interested in undirected exploration. It turns out I was wrong. In both sessions I offered the players a choice, they could either start at the top of the steps and begin exploring, or I could use a prepared adventure set in the dungeon. Both time the players made the unanimous choice to just start exploring. There wasn't even any real discussion ...

My plans for my next campaign have changed. It looks like I have a group of pretty experienced players who want to play D&D. I managed to convince them that AD&D was the way to go, so we will be using OSRIC. I am planning on starting with just the core OSRIC rules and tacking on weapon speed and some other things as we go. I anticipate working in a count initiative system with Hackmaster-like movement eventually. I am seriously considering using the entourage rules I saw in Knockspell. I really like this as a way to make old school death sting less without having to nerf the difficulty. I also like how it ties the players more to the setting in a continuous fashion. I will be running my first megadungeon in this campaign. Now I just have to figure out how I want to go about that. I will likely set this in either a setting from one of the Points of Light books or James M's outdoor map from Knockspell (or was it in Fight On!)

I have come to prefer a blend of sci-fi and fantasy over either in their pure form. This can take the form of science fantasy like Star Wars or Expedition to the Barrier Peaks style UFO's in a fantasy world. Post apocalyptic fantasy like Gamma World is also very appealing. I do not like prophecies, supermen, or chosen ones. Anyone like that is likely to be a villain in one of my games. Actually a villain is likely to be someone pretending to be genetically superior to others to control them. I want to have a megadungeon in my game. I have never run a megadungeon, in fact I have run very few dungeons period. There have been caves and ruined castles, but they were always realistically small in size. In order to have a megadungeon I will need to come up with a reason for it to exist that makes sense. I do not want to have character classes or races in @ttack. That isn't to say that players cannot have a character of a race other than human, just that they will not be forced to adh...