[Play Report] Assault on Stormgate Island

Oof! Just got back from a couple of days' gaming and skiing in Maine. Had a chance to introduce the DT ruleset to a longtime member of my playing group (like, 35 years) and his two kids, along with my kid. We picked up the game where we left off but introduced a bunch of new characters who were also interested in catching the mysterious Snatchers and also in penetrating Obdura's prison/fortress.
Read on for the plot and for some interesting rules bits we tried out in play...

[Free Stuff] Wondermorphs Sets 3: Stairs and Passages

This set includes some handy connector pieces and some stairs. Enjoy!

Link to PDF

[Free Stuff] Wondermorphs Sets 1 and 2

Hi, my first resolution of the new year is to make some of my hand-drawn geomorphs available to you as free PDFs. I calls 'em Wondermorphs. I draw them on 4/inch graph paper, using a Pilot pen, mostly without sketching first, although I will reach for my pencil when planning out some of the larger morphs, like the crypt in Set 2. I've played around with coloring them in PhotoShop, but for now they're in glorious, printer-friendly black and white. Because they're drawn in one-point perspective, with the nadir centered in the middle of each tile, they look great in any orientation.

You can print as many copies as you like, cut them out, and paste them together to make a dungeon layout. Or you can mount them on 2.5" coverstock or cardboard squares to make tiles that you can shuffle or pull out of a bag for building randomly/on the fly. Kids love to "explore the dungeon" by adding tiles and telling a story as they go along.
I give you my permission to make copies for your personal use, but please don't repost them without a linkback to this blog. I have more on the way, and I'll also take requests.
Here's to a year of wonder!
Link to PDF of Set 1:

Link to PDF of Set 2:

Player Characters Always See Secret Doors

Confession: I nearly always tip my players off to the presence of a secret door, even if the dice say otherwise. Secret doors that remain secret are boring -- they add no value to the narrative and provide no suspense. But I use them often. Why? Because they evoke a sense of mystery and suspense when they're found. As I've opined about traps in a recent post, I also feel that DMs who focus on the mechanical value of secret doors are missing the point. The point of a secret door as a dungeon element is as a road sign that someone wants something to remain hidden. It's a chance to pause at the threshold and wonder what's so important behind there that it merits concealment. It gets interesting when you open it. 

The only time I make a secret door hard to find is when the players have been tipped off to look for one. Then you can make finding it (and possibly unlocking it) a part of the narrative. Case in point: in an adventure I'm writing, the PCs are told that in a certain room there's a secret door that will allow them to sneak into the bad guys' lair. The adventure becomes about figuring out how the door is concealed and how to open it, rather than a matter of rolling dice until it's revealed. The best kind of secret door is like the Gate of Moria, when you know where it is, but have to sweat a little before you open it, and hey, what are those ripples coming from the pond?

Don't Check for Traps

Traps, you are unsatisfying for players and provide no drama, just non-sequiteur moments of grief. This is how traps seem to function in most dungeon games:

1. Hit-Point Tax: You're walking down a corridor and thwack a blade drops down from the ceiling and robs you of 1d6 hit points. Not meant to kill or disable you, but to wear you down, maybe force you to use magic or a potion to get those hp back. Might also slow the game down in case D&D is too fast-paced for you, as players begin to check laboriously for traps every 5 feet.
2. Saving Throw-away: The floor drops out from under you and you will either leap to safety or plunge into a pit, depending on the result of a die roll. No drama here, cause there's no choice to be made on the part of the player. It's truth or consequences.
3. Red Wire or Blue Wire?: You're presented with a choice, with no clue as to which is the correct one. One chest will open to reveal a 10-pound bag of sugar. The other chest is filled with giant wasps. Will tweaking the living statue's nipple clockwise deactivate it or put it into Berzerk mode? Again, no drama, because there's no real choice. 
4. This way to the Boss: Enough of this aimless wandering through my dungeon. I have placed this slide trap here to deliver you into my lair half-stunned, on your ass, and unprepared. I had thought of putting the trap just inside the front gate, but I thought it was best to let you go up against some of my weaker minions and do a little plundering first just to warm up for me.

So what are some features of a trap element that contributes to the narrative?

1. Eluctable at a price of your choosing. Sure, you can grab on to the edge of the pit. Do you want to drop your sword, shield, or both? You're falling into a hedge of punji sticks coated with orc droppings. Think quickly! I cast wall of ice  to cover up the sharp spikes!
2. Makes its presence known, but not its solution. A wall of fire? How could we get past it? (Players suggest various solutions, all of which will probably work, but when they get through alive, they have OWNED that trap).
3. Actually traps you. A trap, as the name implies, should trap you. The real drama starts when the boss's minions arrive to see what the Have-a-Heart in Sector Three has caught this time.

 

[Actual Play] Spiders and Orcs

The hurricane kept us at inside today -- so we continued our DungeonTeller campaign, while the wind whistled outside and the lights flickered.

Rosima the elf sorceress continued her quest to discover who was using the fabled Staff of Monsters to send monsters forth from the underground to abduct human victims. With her went Sir Oxblood, a warrior assigned to protect Rosima; Jenny, a paladin; and Ironbones, a dwarf whom they had rescued from ogres previously. Also with the party are Lucky the pony and Milo, Rosima's cat familiar. (No kid's campaign is complete without cute animals).

The party was faced with the challenge of crossing a pit by walking along a log spanning the gap. A giant spider had strung a web across the mouth of the pit about 10 feet down. The elf tossed her fog cloud potion into the pit to confuse the spider. The warrior and the dwarf fell in and got caught in the web. Lucky the pony refused the elf's encouragements to cross on the log. At last, the warrior jumped on the spider's back, and the spider rent a hole in the web to escape by a single web-strand to the bottom of the pit. The elf snapped the spider's lifeline with a lucky arrow shot, and sent it plunging to the bottom, while the warrior made a grab for the loose strands of the web and managed to hang on.

Two bundles wrapped up in the web proved to be dead orcs.
"Orcs! I hate those guys," said the dwarf. "There are sure to be more around."

Lucky finally made it across the pit, and the party moved on.

Spider pit is black square near top.

Sure enough, they found the orcs' lair, protected by a portcullis, but they managed to coax out a few orcs and ambush them. It was a fierce fight at close quarters. The other orcs were trapped in their lair after the elf used her rust spell to disable the chain on the portcullis. (Brilliant suggestion on the paladin's part to allow the party to finish the orcs piecemeal). We stopped with the rest of the orcs struggling to raise the portcullis by brute strength, while the party finished the ambush. Everyone's getting low on Luck, and won't have a chance to rest much. Might be time to break out the healing potions!

[Flavah Menu] Dungeon Raisons d'etre

Today's flavor menu is a quick little crib you can use to justify the existence of an underground complex in your campaign. When I'm writing an adventure, I often start with one of these to focus my dungeon design -- once you have the motive, it becomes much easier to plan the dungeon.

• Catacomb: The dungeon was built to house the remains of the followers of an ancient cult. The tunnels are haphazardly planned, because they were added to at need, rather than according to a grand design. Levels are often connected by narrow shafts or pits, because they were not built for frequent use. The ruins may contain chapels and other chambers where the Mysteries of the cult were performed to initiate new members.
• Refuge: The dungeon was built as a retreat for an entire village or community during times of war, or because the locals were the target of frequent raids from neighboring cultures or monsters. Because life has to go on, the dungeon is designed as an underground city-in-miniature, with residences, markets, storage areas, wells, bakeries, armories, and other specialized structures, both private and shared. Gaining entrance is often difficult, via a disguised or well-hidden portal, but once inside, navigation through the public areas is relatively easy. Some areas may resemble courtyards, open to the sky. The city of Petra in Jordan and the hidden city of Cappadocia in Turkey are classical examples.
• Mine: The dungeon was excavated to extract a valuable resource, either metal ore, a valuable gem, or the buried treasures of an older civilization. Each level may contain many galleries, that either follow a vein of ore in twisted fashion, or else are dug in a regular pattern, like a grid. Each level will most likely be connected by vertical shafts that are (or were) served by elevators or large baskets on a winch system. As lower levels are reached, water features and flooded areas become more common, and throughout is the possibility that the mine will breach natural features like limestone caves. The mine entrance will usually be easy to discover, because of the mounds of slag and other rubble stacked nearby.
• VIP tomb: The dungeon was built to house the body of an important person: a monarch, high priest, wizard, or hero. Repeated attempts by tomb robbers may have led to the more accessible parts being looted, but other areas remain intact, hidden by secret doors and the like. Monsters may be of the immortal guardian sort, like golems, along with strays that have moved in since. Lots of traps and false passages too.
• Prison: Like a VIP tomb, except designed to keep whatever's inside from getting out. Extremely difficult to enter, exit, or navigate, but time's heavy hand may have caused some of the defenses to crumble, making it easier to access. Whatever's in there was worth building a complex prison for that would last for centuries -- so tread lightly. Any monsters are either cell mates of the prisoner, or guardians set to prevent anyone from getting in or out. 
• Sunken City: An entire city that has since been buried underground, either by subsequent layers of occupation, or by a mudslide, sandstorm, or volcanic eruption. The old city may have been entirely cased in mud or ash, and subsequently hollowed out again by deliberate mining, occasional flooding, or the mindless burrowing of underground creatures. All is preserved as it was the moment the city was entombed, including its many treasures, which await those with enough patience or courage to recover them. Think Pompei or Herculaneum, or the Seattle Underground.

The Underdarkchocolate Realm

My spouse and daughter are planning an awesome birthday present for me in May. They're designing a dungeon module to run me through and they will have chocolate and other goodies hidden in various rooms for me/my PC to find. I did this for friends' birthdays when I was a lad -- we were pretty strict about not letting the birthday boy open a real present until he had found its simulacrum in the dungeon.

Anyone else ever have a dungeon-themed birthday party?