1d20 Megadungeon Safety Code Violations

It's almost as if the archlich-in-chief didn't have everyone's safety in mind!

(Lousy no-good penny-pinching archlich-in-chief.)

 

 1d20 Issues The Inspectors Bring Up In Their Initial Report:

1. Sixteen cases of poisoned darts shooting from walls without warning signage 
2. Lit torches in corridor RM-70-B burning within two metres of hanging tapestries
3. Thirty-storey staircase lacks railing or other cordon around open stairwell
4. Inadequately ventilated throughout (see attached list of 781 affected rooms)
5. Chasm bridge constructed from inadequate materials. Code requires use of steel cable, tethers
6. Insufficient drainage ducting to prevent floods on floors B2 through B29  
7. As-built construction plans yet to be lodged with regional fire rescue co-ordinators
8. Shrine Of Darkness should be electrically insulated against celestial lightning
9. Enormous boulder insufficiently shored up with mechanical apparatus; risk it could fall and roll
10. Hellfire conjuration chamber not adequately equipped with hellfire suppression equipment
11. Giant mushrooms pose unacceptable spore allergen/asphyxiation risk
12. Several parts of floor B30 are exposed to magma flows (not a safety code violation; brought up as a point of overall concern)
13. Unholy Water Cistern not shielded against heavy metals found in local groundwater 
14. Too few first aid kits (three per floor; code calls for five)
15. Human remains not maintained at morgue temperatures, and allowed to move around freely
16. Floor B7 torture chambers not accessible by ramp or elevator
17. Cursed font of immortality lacks fence to prevent accidental drownings
18. Black, yellow, ochre, blue, umbral, and invisible mold found in food preparation areas
19. High-visibility safety lines should be painted in zones where ambulatory juggernaut roams
20. Giant talking stone head is blocking fire exit

 

 

(Yikes. Well at the pace stuff gets fixed around here, better hope they shut the worksite down before someone gets hurt.)

Reviewn June 12: The Undercellars

Every few days in June I’m picking a TTRPG book that’s been languishing on my shelf or hard drive, reading it, and writing a review. I don’t believe in attempting a full critique of game content I haven’t run or played, so my focus will be on discussing the work’s best ideas and keeping criticisms to text-level quibbles.

Today I read The Undercellars, a 7-page dungeon by Joseph Manola. It was a response to a community challenge a few years ago, to use a Dyson Logos map for ‘the condensation of utility, beauty, meaning and originality into a functional and interesting micro-adventure’.

Joseph M’s dungeon could be used for his Against the Wicked City setting, but could equally be plopped down and used as-is in many games. It seems to be for a non-specific old-school or OSR system; anything with GP, AC, and classic ability scores should work. Monster stats are compiled at the end, referring back to their locations. All the monsters have specific traits rather than being bags of hit points, which is nice.

The dungeon’s contents:

The dungeon is an abandoned secret temple complex lying in ruin, with layers of history. There’s a strong implied story, about a family lying in ruin, with its own layers of history. I really liked this dungeon, and the only thing I think it was lacking was a concise explanation for the GM at the very beginning, if its purpose isn’t to be ‘read for entertainment’ (something Joseph M has talked about at length).

The Undercellars has some consistent theming, in particular sleep, hallucination, blood, worship, ruination, and a corrupted family line. There’s history there, with a murderous family, blackmail, cult worship, a covert graveyard, dark secrets, shame and horror, bloodlines and mysteries. It’s all discoverable and more importantly, the dungeon offers actual interactions with player characters, such as the chance to perform an ancient rites and acquire power at a nasty cost.

Everything on the map is keyed, and nothing notable on the map is absent. Even in seven pages, The Undercellars resonates with a feeling that there’s always more to discover. It’s full of evocative details which are great fodder for dungeon adventure:

• Animated skeletons that are desperately trying to get away, and which crumble under an open sky
• Laudanum laced with hallucinogenic herbs “worth 10 GP per dose to an artist or insomniac”
• Troglodytic proto-human ghouls
• Dead cultists lying where they were killed long ago by looters, deepening a sense of history
• Undying demonic object of worship offering magical/chemical indoctrination into the cult
• A monster with deathly cold toxic blood, and another which causes wounds to bleed secrets

One of the set pieces is a big persistent slow beast that can be eluded but is unlikely to be beaten in a straight-up fight, the kind of thing that's an OSR staple. The text includes half a dozen possible ways of dealing with it, scattered throughout the dungeon, which I appreciate. They are some of numerous ties between aspects of the dungeon, giving it a dynamic feel and enhancing the feeling of history.

Minor text quibbles:

This scenario was well-written and textually polished, with nary a typo to be seen (if I remember correctly, Joseph M is an academic writer, which might help). The only thing I noticed was the occasional mismatch of full sentences alongside others that are simplified phrases (eliding ‘is’ or ‘the’ or ‘there is a’).

My favourite bit:

The mysterious, laconic, semi-immortal lotus-eater ‘Dryden’, languishing in a pit.

Where to get it:

On Joseph M's blog: http://udan-adan.blogspot.com/2021/02/the-undercellars-playable-dungeon-for.html

TTRPGs and the state, redux: Looting the dungeon

When I was talking about states recently (one, two), someone said they thought there was a more fundamental question.

In a classic fantasy tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG), why are there reasonably nearby zones of adventure (shorthand: dungeons) filled with hoards of treasure and magic items (shorthand: loot)?

Why hasn't the local viscount sent an expeditionary force of, say, a hundred men-at-arms and a dozen court wizards to burn down the goblin lair and snaffle up the coin and artefacts?

Now in this case, there are only weak parallels to draw from our world history: in our world, people are the apex predator and are easily capable of using basic technology to survive most naturally-occurring terrain challenges, meaning there haven't been 'zones of adventure' since the stone age, and when treasures lie buried or forgotten for ages, they're essentially never guarded by traps or environmental hazards. The closest parallel might be local raids against individuals or small groups (of citizens, outsiders, or neighbouring states) to seize their wealth, or larger-scale colonial or pseudo-colonial expeditions, like Hernán Cortés using military and technological advances to loot the Americas for silver and gold.

Still, given a reasonable chance of a large resource payout by directing military action against a somewhat nearby stronghold of non-citizens, especially a stronghold which the TTRPG's nature demands can be overcome by a small group of risk-taking specialists, it's clearly sensible for the state to do exactly that. Directing military action is one of the things a state is good at, almost by definition. If it's more of a 'crumbling trap-filled but otherwise undefended ruin' situation, then all the more reason for the state to use its unique advantages (centralised wealth, coordination of groups, compulsion of individuals) to get some specialists in there and extract the wealth.

I'm not going to go for thousands of words about the world-building problem this time, but I can think of some solutions of various quality.

Poor solutions:

• The world doesn't make sense, so what. Abandon verisimilitude, embrace gameplay. I think this unambiguously makes for a weaker game, but that may not actually matter for e.g. beer-and-pretzels one-shots.
• People work differently here. People in this world act differently, make different decisions, and in the role of the state, do different things. This essentially turns people into aliens and makes role-playing much harder.
• There are naturally-occurring weak states. States in this world just have little collective power and low reach, so non-looted dungeons exist. It's really a non-answer, raising questions about why other states haven't taken over, and why the individuals capable of looting dungeons haven't risen to become state powers.
• Present it as a mystery that the player characters can't solve. By positioning the issue front-and-centre, diegetically, it turns the players' asking "but why doesn't X?" from a complaint into a question. However, it's going to be extremely unsatisfying to then never give an answer. The GM would also have to be careful about things within the world accidentally becoming false "clues".

Unusual solutions:

• States here are extremely wealthy and have low populations. The expected value of running a dungeon is high to an individual PC, but low or negative to a state (the cost of losing manpower is high and the wealth within is low compared to the state's existing resources). This can work in some settings. The state needs to have hoarded a lot of wealth, rather than this just being a rich society: otherwise the implication is that the gold pieces and magic wands you're looting are as common as pennies and screwdrivers.
• The PCs are the agents of the state. I seldom see this as an integral assumption of the game itself, but it can naturally emerge in a campaign. If the PCs are strong enough, then they can be tempted or compelled to act as an arm of the state. Maybe there's a gold rush on dungeons at the moment, and the PCs are one of many small groups being sent to some of the smaller zones of adventure, while the knights and court wizards and levy archers and such are sent to the big ones.
• It's a mystic underworld, innit. In this world, dungeons are haunting netherworlds that can only be broached by true archetypal heroes. The state has no way of acquiring those without removing their 'archetypal hero' status in the process, and this is all part of the setting metaphysics. Of course, it's still in the state's interest to encourage the existence of these heroic types and then tax them enormously when they come out of the dungeon, an angle that's almost implicit in OD&D but which I haven't seen much in games since then.
• Dungeons grow faster than states can keep up with. A few settings, especially I think those influenced by computer RPGs, have organic/magical dungeons as entities which rapidly appear (maybe propagate themselves), grow, etc. The danger/reward can therefore be higher than, and move around faster than, people can collectively deal with. I would expect states to still do what they can, but 'roaming adventurers' and 'professional dungeon delvers' can become a plausible part of the setting.

Neat solutions:

• The game is set after a massive cataclysm. Some disaster or combination thereof (war, plague, ice age, undead legions, minor apocalypse) has resulted in weak and disorganised states, low manpower, recent ruins, un-exploited situations, and maybe a dungeon 'gold rush' as civilisation bounces back.
• The game is set after an apocalypse.  The same thing writ large; the PCs have emerged from a bunker into a post-apocalyptic world. The neat thing is that this not only provides a reason for weak or non-existent state powers, but the remaining bunkers can be natural zones of adventure, as can the post-apocalyptic wastes. Other bunkers can be safe cities to return to.
  
• The state has bad information. The state is wrong about how dangerous the dungeon is, how lucrative the dungeon is, how close by the dungeon is, whether the dungeon exists, etc. It's easy for us in the information age to overlook just how slow it can be for accurate knowledge about the world to be discovered and propagated in pre-industrial times (although you'll need to scrutinise whether communication and divination magic are enough to overcome this). This solution works best when there's little to no history of dungeon discoveries. It's perfectly reasonable for a short dungeon-delving campaign to be propped up by, say, the PCs just happening on a collection of treasure maps.
• We entertain the gods. All-powerful interventionist forces enjoy the world being a certain way, which happens to align with the GM's aims, and the result is a setting that's good for the TTRPG. Very easy to implement, and a conscientious GM will make it a discoverable premise within the world. The only question left is "why do the omnipotent forces have these preferences?" and there are lots of answers if they are remotely person-like in nature.

 

 

Are there games that have lit upon other notable solutions?

Time, water, and the dungeon

Dungeons have a problem. The problem of entropy!

Metal rusts. Various bios degrade. Water seeps in, rotting and ruining things, warping wood, destroying mechanisms, bringing silt. Air itself is corrosive to most substances in the long term, hence the word "oxidation". Absent any countervailing forces, everything that we want in a dungeon decays.

Modern steel locks may seize up or jam quite fast in moderate humidity, especially if unused for long periods of time. I can't imagine how much faster it would happen for a tiny poison needle trap, embedded inside a lock, made with pre-modern technology.

Over the course of a few years (months somewhere moist, decades in an arid clime), locks, traps, hinges, volatile liquids, and stringed weapons will fall into ruin.

Over the course of a few decades (years in the damp, centuries in a desert), things like leather, plaster, armour, weapon blades and hafts, and ropes will join them.

Over longer periods, planks, leather, and textiles, and more solid metalwork will fall before entropy. Statuary, ceramics, and tiles might survive... except that the construction around them won't. Debris blows in - dirt, sand, dust, leaf litter. Walls get eroded by groundwater. Earth tremors rattle the place. Ceilings collapse. An underground structure anywhere near the water table gets infiltrated by groundwater produced by seasonal rain. Intermittent saturation makes the foundation give way.

Entropy! It means that on the face of it, the idea of "the ancient dungeon, recently rediscovered" fails the verisimilitude sniff test.

And then there's the really short-lived stuff: monsters. All organic life is fragile in the long term. Populations are fragile in the longer long term. A "bottle" ecosystem is very difficult to set up, let alone one with large animals, let alone big dangerous predators, let alone underground, let alone without deliberate design.

Deathless monsters only go so far; having local monsters wander in to 'lair' is only a partial solution; sometimes you really want it to be an ancient megastructure only recently breached. In particular we'd like there to be some monsters that only occur in the dungeon, lost to time. At some point a monster that's familiar to everyone just becomes an animal.

But we want forgotten languages, ancient traps, and primeval monsters! The detritus of a forgotten civilisation like museum pieces preserved under glass, inside a still-intact sprawling architectural masterpiece! What's to be done?

I think the possible solutions mostly fall under three categories:

1. Meticulous caretakery
2. It's just magic
3. Encysted outside time

Meticulous caretakery

Sapient creatures are the ultimate force of negentropy. Nobody's surprised to see pristine valuable materials and oiled clockwork traps when there are people around. Or people-like entities. Here's a few popular variations.

• The dungeon is isolated and maintained by a cut-off relict population of dangerous monstrous sapients, at least until recently
• The dungeon is leaking out of a nightmare dimension or a mythic underworld, with an innate sapience behind it providing direction
• The dungeon is a work of deliberate artifice, actively maintained - perhaps as entertainment for the viciously rich, or a gauntlet to prove religious valour
• The dungeon is filled with autonomous workers: golems or gargoyles or spell-constructs or immortal dwarves or undead servitors or elementals or generations of replenishing vat-bred monstrous servitors
• The dungeon is a delicately balanced ecosystem fought over by a set of sapient factions each with different but partly overlapping self-interests in maintaining and replenishing certain aspects of the dungeon

It's just magic

I tend to think of this as the default, when things are otherwise unexplained. That said, just because it's magic shouldn't mean it's unexamined, or that there should be no detectable signs of that magic.

Magical maintenance can be infinitely varied in form, function, and rationale. The simplest is an enchantment which silently cleans, scours, replaces and rebuilds as necessary. Further up the scale, Acererak's demonic housekeeping staff linger in the ethereal plane between delving parties. But it can get as odd as you can imagine.

Some games like it to not be magic, but elaborate systems of high technology. It has to be pretty advanced: at our own earth tech level there are plenty of things we can't make last all that long outside of exceptionally arid environments.

Encysted outside time

Very effective if done well, especially as a setting-wide feature, in this solution the dungeon has been preserved in stasis until recently.

It means the dungeon can be arbitrarily large, old, and well-populated: things pick up wherever they left off however long ago. The (magical) stasis itself in turn needs a reason within the setting, and in my opinion needs to be readily discoverable by player characters, but this is not difficult to achieve. And there are all sorts of knock-on effects and variations you can have fun with.

And so

Entropy! Don't let the gradual dissolution of all things ruin your fantasy world's verisimilitude.