Merry Christmas to all who celebrate it! I hope you’ve had a lovely morning because it’s time for my annual humiliation. I think the lyrics came together real well this year. I’m either getting the hang of this, or I’m hitting that first Dunning Kruger peak. You be the judge.
The video is also somewhat competently put together this year. I don’t edit video frequently enough to justify pricey editing software, and in the past I’ve really struggled to figure out even a marginally consistent workflow with free software. This year I started using Lightworks, which is a messy pain in the ass piece of software, but is reasonably usable and consistent compared to every other free video editor I’ve used.
Of course, I still blow the levels on the audio a bit. Also the Nikon D300S that I use for my day job as a professional-ass photographer is remarkably shitty at capturing video. Let’s call it part of the charm. Yeah. My videos have an intentional “bad video” aesthetic. That’s it. If you don’t like it, it’s just because you don’t get it.
Here comes an owl bear, here comes an owl bear Right down the dungeon lane Two claw attacks n’ a nasty beak That’ll leave you feelin’ maimed Hooting Horrors howl with hunger It’s a terrible plight Draw your sword and say your prayers ‘Cause the owl bear wants a bite
Here comes a b’holder, here comes a b’holder Right down the dungeon lane Stalks of Eyes with evil surprise Like an anti magic ray! Round and floaty greedy tyrant braggadocios bore Hurry up and stab that thing Oops it was a Gas Spore
Here comes a pudding, here comes a pudding right down the dungeon lane Goopy, drippy, thick and sticky Boy they are such a pain Can’t be chopped or stabbed or kicked That would only make more Better wake the wizard up ‘Cause we need a spell or four
Here comes a dragon, here comes a dragon Right down the dungeon lane Color-coded treasure hoarder famously too vain Make a save vers. dragon’s breath Hope your dice roll high Best prep well if you want that gold and you do not want to die
Way back in September I set out to write a big ol’ series about my old Dungeon Moon setting. I got as far as writing an introduction, and a bit about settlements before the site intrusion happened and I had to shut everything down. Now that we’re back, I’d like to pick up where I left off.
Characters earning experience points for the wealth they recover is hands down one of my favorite mechanics, but it’s a poor fit for Dungeon Moon. What you and I would consider “wealth” is commonplace there. Every human wears golden jewelry, every town is replete with marble statues. Without commodities to trade, no one values coins for anything other than their base metals, or maybe the art imprinted on them.
The real treasures to be recovered are simple things: food, clothing, books, pillows, wood, anything and everything that will make life a little better. So the question becomes: how does this translate into experience gain?
The most obvious solution would be some attempt to abstract it back into the comfortable XP for GP model. Each pillow is worth 100gp, and thereby is worth 100xp. While perhaps technically functional this approach wouldn’t create the impression I want. I don’t want players to nickle-and-dime their way to higher levels by selling things to their communities. I want to challenge players to really improve those communities. I want them to think about how to get enough pillows for everyone in town.
Throughout 2017 I playtested a ruleset designed by my friend John called “Into the Depths.” Rather than characters incrementally gaining experience points to level, John wrote up a list of 20 generalized “great deeds,” which would grant characters half a level when they were accomplished. Ten of the deeds are repeatable (slay a famous monster, recover a priceless treasure, etc.), while the other ten only work a single time during the character’s career (obtain a noble title, swear allegiance to a powerful patron, etc).
I think something very similar could work for Dungeon Moon. It will take some tinkering and testing to get it exactly right, but this could work as a first draft. Obviously it draws heavily on John’s work.
On Dungeon Moon, Characters gain 1/2 of a level each time they…
Bring a new resource back to their community in sufficient quantities for every family to benefit.
Establish a safe path between their community and a trading partner or other worthy location.
Help an endangered community migrate to a new and safer home.
Solve a problem which posed a significant threat to a community.
Unlock one of the secrets of Dungeon Moon which will make the lives of everyone who knows it easier or safer.
Truthfully take a new community under their protection.
Significantly alter a community’s existing social or political structure without destroying or constantly policing that community.
Behold an incredible sight never to be seen again. (e.g. the birth of a demigod).
Slay a famous monster (e.g. dragon or demigod)
Make something lasting (e.g. write a book, build a castle, found a new community, establish a civil service, create a magical artifact.)
While it lacks the simple elegance of 1 xp for 1 gp, I do think this will push the gameplay in more interesting directions.
After more than two months offline, I’m ready to get back to work making cool game shit. I’m sure a lot of folks have forgotten all about me by now, so I’d appreciate anything you all can do to get the word out that Papers & Pencils is up and running again. Add me to your blog roll, share a favorite post on social media, write a blog entry about how I’m your greatest inspiration. Before we go full-bore back into game stuff, though, let’s recap the last two months.
To start at the beginning: I fell for a phishing scam. This is a humiliating thing to admit, but it’s what happened. In my defense it was more sophisticated than any other phishing email I’ve ever received. Even once I started to suspect that the emails may have been the source of the hack, it took an IT professional friend of mine a good long while to confirm that the emails weren’t legitimate.
To my knowledge, no visitor to Papers & Pencils was exposed to anything malicious. The intruders seem mostly to have been interested in using hidden pages on my site to do some skeevy SEO for various Chinese companies. I wrote a whole thing about the experience, so you can check that out if you’re interested.
In a way, needing to take the site down was a mixed blessing. The only reason I switched to that Black/White/Green layout in the first place was because of a technical problem with the site’s original layout that I couldn’t figure out how to fix. I was never very fond of that look. Being forced to rebuild the site from the ground up gave me an opportunity to do some stuff that I’ve been wanting to do for ages. How do you like the new color scheme? It is my favorite thing.
I also used this opportunity to add some new sections to the site. Free Downloads and Index were both something I ought to have added ages ago. I’m going to make a real effort to keep both of them updated and growing in the future. What I’m most excited about is the Community Resources page. All of this is pretty basic here to start with. I didn’t want to keep the site down for longer than necessary, but I’m eager to improve all of them over time. If anyone has any suggestions for something that ought to be there, but isn’t, I’m all ears!
Restoring the site has not been without its troubles. My primary backup software failed me (another experience I wrote about while the site was down), so I’ve been needing to restore everything by hand. The work is tedious and time consuming. It’s the biggest reason the site has been down for as long as it has. Thankfully, as I write this, everything back through 2015 should be fully restored, which covers everything worth reading. (Take a look at how ugly the posts from 2012 currently are if you want to see how bad it was before!) In the coming months I’ll keep at it, restoring a few posts at a time until the full archive is corrected.
These past few months for me have been one of those periods where everything in life seems to be conspiring to go wrong simultaneously. Not only was my site hacked, not only did I get screwed by scammy backup software, but I had to deal with this during the most exhausting season of work my day job has. And one of my most cherished and long-lasting friendships devolved into a bitter enmity that I don’t expect will ever be overcome. And I discovered I have acid reflux disease, requiring that I alter my diet to avoid debilitating nausea. And I bought a brand new shirt that I really loved which got ruined on the very first day because a pen leaked and spilled ink all over it.
I’m not complaining. Really, I’m not. All things considered, I’m happy with my life and where it’s headed. I just mean to say that the last couple months have really divided my attention more than I was able to keep up with.
Oh yeah, and FUCKIN’ GOOGLE+ IS SHUTTING DOWN! Is it wrong that this was the most personally traumatic of everything that has happened in the last two months? It’s going to be devastating for the community we’ve built there. This is another thing I wrote about while the site was down. (That’s the last thing, though. You’re all caught up.)
It’s been a heck of a few months, lemme tell ya. But we’ve got a new site, with a new look, ready to face a new world. I’m gonna get back into writing those Dungeon Moon posts I left off with in September, and then I’ve got a few ideas about what I’d like to do next!
As anyone who cares will know by now, Google+ will shut down in August of 2019. I have many feelings and thoughts about this. I need to say something. I do not know what I need to say, but it needs to be said none the less. The best place to begin would seem to be explaining why the death of an obscure and much maligned social media site is relevant to a blog about tabletop adventure games.
Google+ has been the nexus around which RPG people of every type have gathered for years. In 2011 the service was launched concurrently with Hangouts, which folks quickly realized was the most powerful game facilitating tool since polyhedral dice. It was only natural that Google+ (which Hangouts was then inextricably connected with) become a tool for finding new people to play and discuss games with. The fact that g+ lacked the social baggage of sites like Facebook, as well as the tools it had for organizing a person’s interactions by topic, gave people a freedom they lacked elsewhere. Nobody’s grandma is on Google+. Nobody had to worry about bothering people by posting too frequently about weird nerd shit. Google’s failure to convince everyone in the world to use the service made it an ideal space for hobbyists who wanted to spend a lot of time talking about something esoteric.
The OSR as I know it gradually shifted its weight onto the new platform. What began as a network of interlinking blogs just made more sense on g+. It was easier to keep up with everyone since everybody’s threads could show up in a single stream. The barrier to entry was also much lower since nobody felt obligated to “produce content.” G+ didn’t kill the OSR blogging scene, but it did absorb a lot of the verve that had driven the scene up to that point.
I can’t speak for others, but at some point I started to think of my blog as an extension of my presence on g+ rather than the other way around. Tons of posts here had their roots in conversations over there. Its been years since I paid any attention to my site’s analytics. For me, a post is a success or a failure based on the reaction it gets on Google+.
Even more personally, Google+ has been my primary social outlet since 2012. I know that probably sounds strange or pathetic, but Internet relationships have always been my bedrock. My parents kept me isolated for most of my adolescence. They intentionally sabotaged my friendships. The only reason I was able to sneak a social life past them at all was because I understood computers and they did not. Those years made me comfortable with people online in a way I’ll never be with people in meatspace. I have offline friends whose company I enjoy very much, but for my day-to-day, I need the rhythm of online correspondence to feel like my whole self. For 7 years Google+ has been the best social space I’ve ever experienced. I sincerely don’t know what I’m going to do when it’s gone.
Though, sad as it is, we can’t pretend the death of Google+ is a surprise. The writing was on the wall in 2015 when Hangouts got spun out into its own separate service. It was clear the moneymen weren’t happy even before that, but ever since the decay has been obvious. Each “update” has removed or obscured more of the features that made the site so useful. Bugs have been left to pile up for years without even a token effort at resolving them. Truly I think the only reason g+ survived as long as it did is because Google was embarrassed to admit they’d given up.
It all speaks to the inherent futility of profit motivated social media. Either a service will fail to be profitable and be “Sunsetted” like Google+; OR a service will become mutilated and warped in pursuit of ever greater profits, like Facebook and Twitter have been.
Various luminaries have made the point that everything will turn out fine in the end. After all, the OSR predates Google+. It exists on Blogs, Reddit, Discord, and on the shelves of your friendly local game store. No doubt all of that is true. Noble stoicism aside, though, it is the end of an era. No other platform has ever hosted the same collaborative spirit that we achieved on g+. No future platform will have the same concentration of creative energies. I’m comfortable calling this a tragedy, even if that brands me a melodramatic ninny. The one sad consolation is that I think the OSR is a dead movement anyway.
Mors vincit omnia. Vale.
Papers & Pencils will persist, as will Blogs on Tape. You can always find me here, and I will remain active on Google+ until the very last moment it exists. I will absolutely weep bitter tears when the pages stop loading. August 2019 is going to be ugly for me.
I’ll still be “Beloch Shrike” on google hangouts once g+ goes away. I don’t check it terribly often, but it will still exist, and you should feel free to contact me there.
I’m relatively active on Facebook, and always post publicly. However, I don’t often talk about games, and I curate my follow-list like a museum administrator possessed by the devil. Don’t feel bad if I don’t follow back.
Mastadon is delightful, and you should absolutely find an instance to join so we can be friends over there. I mostly use it to discuss politics and make “humorous” observations about the minutia of my life. I’d be happy to talk about games if there was anyone to talk about games with.
On Discord I’m linkskywalker#1679. I do not like Discord. It’s just neoclassical IRC, and I didn’t like IRC much the first time around. It’s too fast paced and chaotic for my comfort. None the less, please feel free to friend me, message me, and invite me to your server. It seems to be the way the wind is blowing, so I may yet learn to love it.
Philosophically, I believe federated social media is the wave of the future. The software and the infrastructure isn’t quite “there” yet, but I think it has a better chance to stand the test of time that any of the other options. I want to support its future development by bringing people onto federated platforms, so I intend to shift much of my g+ activity onto Pluspora and Friendica once g+ is gone.
To my frustration, within 17 seconds of the announcement that g+ was shutting down, everyone jumped onto the MeWe bandwagon. It’s the most popular lifeboat, so I do have an account there, and you should get in touch if you’re there as well. That said, MeWe is a shitty website which lacks basically all the features that made g+ so useful to begin with. Moreover, it’s run by a wacko whose entire strategy for promoting his platform seems to be based around catering to people who were awful enough to get kicked out of places like Facebook and Twitter. I really hope a better option comes along in the next 9 months, but until then something is better than nothing.
Of course I’m always available by email, most conveniently at my LS@PapersPencils.com address.
As you well know, good reader, Papers & Pencils was recently hacked. I had to tear the whole site down before I could start to fix it. Obviously I made backups before I deleted everything.
Because the default wordpress backup system does not save images my primary backup method was an addon called “All in One WP Migration.” With over a million installs, a 4.8-out-of-5 satisfaction rating, and a frequently updated version history covering many years, it seemed a safe option. My data was backed up smoothly, and I’ve currently got a 2.55gb backup file sitting on my desktop.
After the backup was completed I deleted the database on my server, as well as all the site files, and installed a fresh wordpress on PapersPencils.com. Among the first thing I did with this fresh install was add the All in One WP Migration plugin, and attempted to import that file. An error message popped up informing me that importing from a file would require me to install a separate “importer” addon. This already struck me as skeevy. If such a thing was necessary, why wasn’t it mentioned in any of the documentation I read? Why did the base addon include an “Import” option if that option did not exist?
It will cost me $69 USD to import a file larger than 512mb.
Again: the Papers & Pencils backup file is 2.55gb in size. It is a file the All In One WP Migration addon was able to create easily. A file which is currently stored on MY hard drive, which I would like to upload using MY bandwidth, onto MY server. At no point would any of the addon creator’s resources be used, aside from the code itself which was provided on the explicit understanding that it would perform its job free of charge. No strain would be placed on them for a 2.55gb website that would be greater than the strain for a 20mb website.
Nowhere on the download page is this mentioned. Looking
everywhere that a person might be reasonably expected to look while
making their backup, I cannot find any reference to this fee.
Essentially, my website is being held hostage.
Reading through some of the addon’s reviews, this seems to be a recent change. Perhaps within the last few months, which would explain how they’ve managed to garner such a positive reputation. The funny thing is that if they’d simply been up front with me, if they’d told m
I sincerely doubt that this is legal. I
further doubt that it’s acceptable within WordPress’ own ToS for plugin
authors. I don’t see an easy option available for reporting malicious
plugins to WordPress, but I’ve gotten in touch with them via twitter to
ask how best to report.
Fortunately for me, I’m paranoid enough to create multiple backups in multiple formats. In addition to this scammy plugin, I also used WordPress’ native backup tool (which does not back up any media), as well as doing a full scrape of my site (which did back up media, but cannot be automatically imported back into WordPress). So everything of value has been saved, but it will all require manual adjustment to make it properly presentable.
My current plan is to work on manually adjusting the last 2 years of posts before I relaunch the website. That will cover most of the work that is commonly linked to. Then, while the website is online, I can pick away at fixing the less popular and more numerous posts of the 5 earlier years of the site. Whee.
I’m not
too worried about myself in all of this, to be honest. I’ll be fine. But
the word should be spread far and wide that this “All in One WP
Migration” plugin is not trustworthy.
UPDATE: This morning I checked back to see if there was any reply to my review on wordpress.com
calling this addon a scam. There is not, but there are two 5 star
reviews there to bury my review, and another similar review made shortly
after mine.
Both 5 star reviews were left by accounts with
boarderline nonsense names, which appear to have been created for the
sole purpose of leaving these reviews. Obviously they are fake.
As those of you who follow me on g+
will already know, Papers & Pencils was recently hacked. To my
knowledge there was no risk posed to visitors. No malware, or anything
of that sort. Certainly, though, some naughty bois and gurls were
running amok on my back end. Their primary goal seems to have been to
upload hidden pages to manipulate Google search results for a bunch of
Asian websites.
The most important thing I have to say about this is fuck Bluehost.
I’ve spent well over $1000 on their services since I first set this
site up back in late 2011. I’ve never required any significant
assistance from their support staff, and their first suggestion to me in
resolving this issue was that I sign up for an $800/year security
protection plan. Failing that, they’d help me resolve the issue for a
minimum payment of $300. Money my little tabletop blog doesn’t generate,
and which I don’t have. That is some absolute horse shit, and I would
not recommend their services to anyone.
Fortunately I have good friends. Thanks must go particularly to Robert Freeman-Day
who held my hand through the process of deciding what I could do about
the situation. Unfortunately the best solution we could come up with was
to burn the whole house down.
That’s what this is. I’ve purged the files and the SQL databases. Everything
is gone. That includes not only Papers & Pencils, but also Blogs on
Tape. Whatever hole the hackers were using to get in ought to have been
destroyed. That’s the hope anyway. My fingers are crossed, but we
weren’t able to understand how they gained access in the first place, so
we can’t say with any certainty that I’ve gotten rid of them quite yet.
I can’t even begin to tell you how frustrated I am about this. My
work on this website is among the proudest accomplishments of my life,
and I hate to have it disrupted like this. Everything is backed up
several times over in redundant formats, and I hope that I’ll be able to
get it all back online soon. However, I don’t know how much of the
nasty google-manipulating pages were collected in my backups. There is a
potential worst case scenario where I have to add everything back to
the website bit-by-bit, copying and pasting it from my archives. It
would be a tedious process. One I would have to balance out with writing
new material for weeks, or even months.
I was really starting to get into that “Discovering Dungeon Moon”
series as well. Go figure I only managed to get a single post out before
this nonsense hit.
To make matters worse, all of this is coming at the worst conceivable
time for me personally, with my day job keeping me too busy &
exhausted to give this problem proper attention, AND the looming shutdown of Google+. It’s a tangled mess that I’m only just barely coping with, to be perfectly honest.
Blogs on Tape is going to be a particular challenge. The only sign of
vandalism that occurred during this hack was that the Blogs on Tape
website was made entirely inaccessible. I have all of the audio files
themselves stored locally, but it never occurred to me to back up the
website. All of those posts, as well as syncing them to iTunes, will
need to be done over again. Whee.
I am sorry about this, everyone. Keep an eye on this space, and know
that I’m doing what I can. If you need to get in touch I am available on
Google+, on Mastadon, or by email at linkskywalker14@gmail.com. With any luck we should be back up and running soon.
The surface of Dungeon Moon is divided into six mile hexes. This is a literally true thing in the world of the game. Characters can travel to the little 3 foot walls which divide each hex from its neighbor. Unlike a natural planetary body with a gradually curved surface, Dungeon Moon is visibly “hinged” at the boarders to each hex.
By default the surface of each is a blank desert of grey flagstone, but six out of every seven hexes were zoned for development. Any of the moon’s many resident wizards could apply to The Neverborn for permission to alter these, and The Neverborn rarely refused. It would not be uncommon to have a lush rainforest on one side of a 3′ wall, and an arid desert on the other.
(In its original iteration, Dungeon Moon was constructed by “The Motherless Warlock,” for reasons which no longer seem quite as clever to me as they did in 2012. I’m taking this opportunity to rename them “The Neverborn.”)
The center, seventh, hex of each group (together referred to as a “hectare”) was set aside as a place where the moon’s many human workers could make their homes. A handful of these grew to the size of cities before The Neverborn abandoned his sphere. The vast majority, though, are little more than hamlets, housing about 100 families each. Regardless of size, each of these worker settlements shared a few features.
Decor: Dungeon Moon is the low-magic aftermath of a high-magic apocalypse. At its height, when The Neverborn still resided on the sphere, it was garishly opulent. Every town was adorned with marble statues. Every building had frescoed walls. Even the folks who emptied chamber pots dined beneath golden chandeliers.
Three generations of absence have led to a lot of decay. Pillows, carpets, fine clothes, shoes, candles; anything consumable has been worn away to nothing. The fine works of metal and stone mostly remain, though some have been smashed in anger, or reforged into more useful tools.
Dining Table: The centerpiece of each community is a stone dish which once produced grand and varied feasts three times each day. Without maintenance these have mostly deteriorated. Now they merely produce a flavorless gray paste. It has a sticky texture, and a yeasty smell, but imbues a body with all the nutrients it needs to survive.
Most folks haven’t eaten anything other than this degraded slop for a generation or more.
Circle of Protection: The moon is a safe haven for boundless magical experimentation. As such, even when The Neverborn was present, the moon’s surface teemed with dangerous creatures. To protect their workers from attacks (and to control any expansion or migration of peoples), The Neverborn laid in a glowing circle of runes around the boarder of each town.
Only residents of the town are able to cross these barriers freely. No trickery or magic has yet found a way to circumvent this abjuration. Teleporting doesn’t work. Burrowing or flying doesn’t work. Throwing something across the barrier doesn’t work. Attempts to damage the runes from the outside don’t work. Which isn’t to say that every Circle of Protection remains intact, merely that those which have been destroyed were destroyed as a result of the residents making a mistake.
Residency in a town was originally handled by The Neverborn’s bureaucracy. Since this has ceased to function, immigration to a new settlement is now completely impossible. Thankfully, anyone born within a given settlement is automatically made a resident of that settlement.
Each town does have a type of “draw bridge,” which can temporarily interrupt a section of the runes to allow a non-resident to cross the barrier. The danger in doing so is limited, since visitors can no more attack the runes from the inside than they can the outside–though they could operate the drawbridge.
Descent: Each settlement has a passage down to the interior of the moon. These may take the form of staircases or elevators, and generally lead down between 4 and 12 levels. Access to these passages is sealed with a force similar to that of the runic circles.
I’ve got quite a bit more to say about how base camps work, but this post is starting to run a bit long and my time is definitely running a bit short.
The essential purpose of the towns is to give the players a safe place to return to at the end of each adventure, and a place which they can improve over time. I’ll talk a little bit more about how that works in the next post.
In my experience the success of a campaign is inversely proportional to how much thought I put into the setting before play begins. When I’m gearing up for session 1 of a new game I have two basic priorities:
To come up with a central conceit which is wild enough to be memorable, and open ended enough to accommodate any sort of adventure I want to run in it.
To do as little work as possible justifying that conceit.
On a Red World Alone is a good example of this approach:
Game is set in a post-apocalyptic biodome city on Mars. There’s mutants and magic and factions squabbling over territory.
The apocalypse was so long ago that nobody understands or has access to technology. That way we can still use the LotFP equipment lists.
It’s a cheap attempt to have my cake and eat it too. I wouldn’t accept that sort of shallow setting design in a published product, but it’s a good way to get a new campaign off the ground. As the game progresses tweaks and retcons can be made here and there to develop the setting into a more well rounded whole. Anyone perusing ORWA’s play reports will see that technology has been a prominent part of the game for awhile.
Which is a very roundabout way of introducing a question that has been floating about in my brain for years now: what do I want to do with Dungeon Moon?
For the uninitiated: Dungeon Moon is a campaign I ran back in 2013~2014. It was set on an artificial moon built by a wizard who had decided a mere tower was beneath his dignity. Eventually the wizard disappeared, and the inhabitants of his flagstone moon were left to fend for themselves. The PCs are the great grandchildren of his cooks and gardeners and such. They live in communities surrounded on all sides by horrible monsters and evil experiments. They venture out of the magical barriers that protect them in search of whatever comforts they can bring back to their community.
Dungeon Moon has all the makings of great setting. It’s the first time I really nailed it in making something “wild enough to be memorable.” The plan was always to develop the setting further, and eventually make it into a book. My problem is that Dungeon Moon was (and is) an absolute mess. Every campaign is a mess, but Dungeon Moon was particularly bad. Realistically the only salvageable thing I have from that campaign are the ideas it was based on. Everything I actually developed was trash.
I was in the grip of some really stupid ideas at the time. I had this obsession with creating complex areas described down to the color of the drapes. I had fat stacks of graphing paper that were dense with rooms, cross referenced a dozen different ways, and none of it was done clearly. Remember my old Deadly Dungeons posts? Imagine that, but for every single room. The information was too dense to use at the table, and writing it was too time consuming to keep up with the player’s rate of exploration.
That same obsessive over-documentation prevented me from making all the little tweaks and retcons that have allowed ORWA to develop beyond its early flaws. ORWA has no secret 30,000 word bible that I’ve bled and sweated over; which has allowed it to be agile in a way Dungeon Moon never could be.
I’ve actually made two attempts to fix Dungeon Moon. The first was in 2014, shortly after I stopped running the campaign, and is still burdened with many of the flaws that weighed down the first iteration. The second, in 2016, led to a fun few sessions, but wound up getting pushed aside in favor of other projects. It did result in the development of Flux Space though, which I still think is the best way to model the idea of a moon-sized dungeon.
I think what I’m going to do is spend the next few P&P posts exploring the individual ideas that made up Dungeon Moon. I want to figure out what the setting needs, how to approach it and make it the fun and playable and shareable setting it always ought to have been.
Some topics to cover:
Town generation, management, and development. Dungeon Moon is very much a setting where the party will have a home base they return to and improve over time.
What is treasure? One of my biggest regrets is that I stuck with traditional treasure in a setting where pillows and meat should have been valued more highly than gold or silver.
Culture and faction development. It’s a longstanding conceit that human life is cheap and cannibalism is commonplace on Dungeon Moon. What other weird habits and communities have developed given the oddity of this particular apocalypse scenario?
A lot of ink has already been spilled on the subject of megadungoen design, but I might waste some time retreading old ground just to figure out what exactly it means to effectively expand the endless chambers of Dungeon Moon specifically.
History and cosmology needs to be explored in greater depth. Aside from a few details about the wizard who built the place, I never really explored the context in which Dungeon Moon exists. That would help provide some direction to the way the setting is developed. For example: what world does Dungeon Moon orbit?
The early 2000s were not a great time for D&D adventure modules. Not many were even published compared to the volume of splatty rule supplements WotC was pumping out every month. Only a few left any kind of lasting impression on me. Of those which did, this is by far the most notable.
That’s not to say The Standing Stone isn’t a product of its era. It is. There is boxed text. There is terrible information design. Most of the book is embarrassingly divided into “scenes.” The implied setting is blandly kitchen-sink. There are sections which bloviate on about nothing at all. There are names like “Ashardalon,” and “Saithnar.” Underneath all that malarkey, though, is a fairly robust location-based adventure that I’d be happy to run even today.
The remote thorp of Ossington is built within a circle of Stonehenge-style standing stones. The people of the town are nearly dead from starvation because the elves of the nearby forest have turned murderous. The poor villagers are being picked off with arrows from a distance. They cannot defend themselves. To make matters worse: a ghostly knight appears to attack anyone caught outside the circle of stones. Ossington can’t go for help, or even plant their fields. The town is about to go extinct from famine.
If the players dig deeper, they may discover that the original townsfolk have actually been murdered and replaced. The starving peasants are minions to an evil wizard (named Dyson, of all things). The elves refuse to parley only because the wizard has already perpetrated a massacre against them under flag of truce. The ghost knight is actually a paladin who died trying to prevent that massacre, and notably only attacks the wizard’s minions, or those who aid them.
It’s a good premise, with some sincerely memorable characters, twists, and locales to back it up. For example, there’s the self-effacing bard who is actually a Vrock in disguise; and I love how the replacement villagers are all animals who’ve been given human form by magic. They still exhibit little animal characteristics, and seem to obey the wizard only because they don’t want to be turned back into woodland creatures.
Rateliff also includes a lot of great little details to establish the setting. There’s a skeleton slumped over a plow in a fallow field which the players pass on their way into town. That’s an image that sticks in my head. There’s also the various eerie items the townsfolk hide or burn when they discover strangers are approaching.
Perhaps the greatest appeal to me is how down to earth the module feels. It’s an adventure for 7th level characters using 3rd edition rules, but the most fantastical elements are the remnants of forgotten history. A red horse carved into a hill, a great barrow to the north, the titular standing stones. These are all the sorts of things that have existed in the real world, and been given mystical importance by locals who’ve forgotten how they got there.
If you took out the casual mentions of dragons and halflings–none of which are integral to the adventure–you could easily believe this module was published by Lamentations of the Flame Princess. Heck, even the wizard’s tower is a modest 3 story shack.
Despite the whole thing being described as a series of “scenes,” the challenges in Standing Stone are open ended enough for the players to approach and resolve them a dozen different ways. For example, that ghost knight who attacks people? The referee is provided with the basic rules that govern his behavior, and specifically instructed in how to telegraph those rules to players. He’s less a character than he is a force of nature, but it’s made clear that players are just as free to become his allies as they are to destroy him or run from him. Moreover, the area is seeded with clues that may eventually lead players to discovering his corpse, which could be used to destroy him, put him to rest, or ignored to keep him bound to his ghostly quest. No matter what your players do about the ghostly horseman, the adventure works just as well.
In fact there are no forced combat encounters in the module. There are combats which will be very difficult to avoid, but clear reasons are always given for why that is. For example, as mentioned above, the elves have already suffered one massacre while treating beneath a white flag. The referee is frequently reminded that the elves are unwilling to parley because of this, but also makes a point of outlining some stuff the party could do to change their mind.
I think my favorite non-combat encounter is within the great barrow, which is a trap-filled, wight-infested maze. The party will eventually encounter the long-dead warlord for whom the barrow was raised. Despite being an undead monstrosity, the book actually includes more advice for how to run him as a social encounter than as a combat encounter.
The Standing Stone’s greatest flaw isn’t so much a matter of what is written, as it is the way it is written. If you replaced the cumbersome “scene” structure with a simple timeline of events; nixed all the boxed text and the tired bits of fantasy faff; and tightened up some of the less focused writing, I’d go so far as to call it a great adventure.
If the book wasn’t owned by Hasbro, I’d be tempted to contact Mr. Rateliff and ask permission to rewrite and refine it for the OSR. I betcha I could even con Dyson into doing some pro bono cartography since he gets name dropped as an evil wizard. Alas, the machinations of capitalism make that possibility unlikely in the extreme. None the less, I’d recommend checking it out if you’ve got a folder full of pirated 3rd edition PDFs sitting on your hard drive somewhere.
The post is over now, but I have a bit of bookkeeping I want to communicate to regular readers. I’m currently going into the busy season at my day job, which often means working between 50-60 hours a week. It tends to kick my ass pretty hard, and leave me too exhausted to do much of anything at all.
In the past, I’ve pushed myself to make sure Papers & Pencils continued to be awesome every week no matter what. However, this year I have quite a bit fewer posts in my buffer than normal. Add to that the fact that I no longer have any obligation to my Patreon supporters, and the fact that this season is shaping up to be more difficult even than normal, and, well…I’m just not going to kill myself for this blog.
As it stands right now, I fully intend to keep up the weekly update schedule, but I’m significantly lowering my standards for what constitutes a worthy post. Don’t be surprised if you see a few 300-word posts in the coming months. Worst case scenario, I’m not going to be too upset at myself if I miss a week here or there. Worse things have happened.
That’s it for now. My busy season ends in November, so things should hopefully move back to normal around then. Thank you all for reading. <3
For the past year I’ve been maintaining private play reports for Fuck the King of Space, same way I’ve always done for ORWA. They’re dry, soulless things intended strictly for my own records. None the less, I’d always intended to create a section of the site where I posted them publicly, same as I’ve always done for the ORWA recaps. I was lazy about it, which is why they’re still not up even though the game is 9 months old now.
Or, rather, they weren’t up until today! A few hours ago Play Report Author Extraordinaire Anne Hunter prodded me about my laziness, and knowing someone is actually interested in reading something is always a great motivator. So now they’re all up and ready to be read if you’re interested. You can always access them using the little “Fuck the King of Space” link on the top navigation bar.
While we’re on the subject, if anyone is wondering why the ORWA recaps stopped…yeah, I’m sorry about that. I had a rough few weeks where I just didn’t have the energy to post them, and then I never felt like going back to upload all the ones I missed, and because I didn’t do it the project just kept getting bigger, and now I’ve got 30 posts to upload and it just sounds like a tedious mess and I’m sorry. I’ll do it. I’ll do it.
Also, visit DIY & Dragons. Her play reports are much better than mine.
