Discovering Dungeon Moon: Base Camp

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.

Developing a Setting: My Trouble with Dungeon Moon

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?

Looking Back at “The Standing Stone” by John D. Rateliff

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

Play Reports for Fuck the King of Space

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.

Gourd Growths

Everyone who spends time near the River Stush has to deal with them. They are the price locals pay for rich soil and plentiful fishing. A nuisance, yes, but no more so than floods, earthquakes, malaria, or any other objectively terrible thing humans have gotten used to. The few who die are mourned, but their loss is made up for by the complete absence of famine from living memory.

The growths root deeply in muscle before the “fruit” appears. It has a hard outer skin, and squishy, yellow-green flesh within, hence the name. They cause a deep aching pain in the body, which can be managed by clipping the growths each morning to keep them small. They’re sensitive enough that clipping is extremely painful, but leaving them unclipped for even a few days allows them to grow to an unmanageable size. The baseline pain threshold of the locals has thus been set to inhuman heights. As far as they’re concerned, outlanders are all pansies.

New growths appear now and again, a few inches apart. They mostly grow on the back, belly, and the upper half of the arms and legs. Removing them completely is a difficult and dangerous process, but necessary for those who’ve got too many sprouts, or whose growths have migrated to an area where they may do serious damage, such as the chest, hands, feet, or head. Fortunately, there’s the River Doctor.

She’s a kindly old woman, well into her ’70s, traveling up and down the river with her tongueless apprentice and her bag of tools. She spends a few weeks in each town, removing what growths need it, and ensuring everyone heals up well before loading her river yacht with the grateful town’s foodstuffs, and moving on to the next settlement. The trip back and forth takes most of the year. She disappears for a few months each winter before starting her journey again after the spring thaw.

It is lamentably inevitable that she lose a few patients each year. What doctor does not? She insists on keeping the bodies for autopsy, which everyone agrees is reasonable. No one is crass enough to question the saintly doctor. Before her, things were much worse.

In truth, the River Doctor has rarely ever lost a patient. The gourd growths are trivially easy to remove for anyone with the right tools and basic surgical training. No, the ones who “die” are simply those with the most promising fruit. In the bowels of her yacht are metal cages where the ‘dead’ are kept drugged and docile until the winter, when she takes her boat down the sea coast to the manse of the Mad Marquis.

Beneath this imposing cliffside villa is a dungeon where the growths are fostered in an ideal environment, clipped only when they’ve achieved a full and painful bloom. The Marquis enjoys them as a delicacy. The enlightened mind can’t be bothered by the trifles of human suffering. If a good meal means turning people into immobile clusters of gourd growths, it’s a small price to pay. The Marquis even operates a small and secret market for other discriminating elites enlightened enough to share his philosophy.

Eventually the unchecked growths always kill their host, but not before producing one final fruit, which always sprouts from the top of the head. Pale blue in color, the Marquis believes it contains the victim’s soul. Whether or not that’s true, there’s no denying that consuming these blue fruits is an experience that defies description. One never quite knows what to expect.

Magic Words 2

It has always disappointed me that more players don’t pursue creating their own spells. Encouraging them to do so was the impetus for Magic Words, a system I created back in 2015 and have been using ever since. It remains my most notable mechanical contribution to the OSR. In the past 3 years the system has undergone numerous mutations and tweaks, but the premise remains fundamentally the same: players collect words, combine those words to form the names of spells, and between sessions the referee creates that spell’s description.

I’ve had no reason to doubt the efficacy of that fundamental premise until recently. For the past few months I’ve been playing a magic user in a campaign run by noted OSR Man of Mystery, Chris H. Much of the peculiar way he runs Magic Users is kept intentionally obscured from the players, so I cannot describe it in full, only what my experience has been.

I began play with two spells: one that can trap other spells in a bubble, and another which conjures a suit of bubble armor for a friendly target. I didn’t have any input on creating these spells, or in selecting the “bubble” theme they both conform to. They were presented to me with exhaustively written mechanics, like any spell you might find in a book, with the caveat that they only represented the most reliable way to conjure magic my character had thusfar discovered. Chris encouraged me to tinker, and twist, and see what I could get away with. To apply the general principals of how the spells were constructed to achieve different results.

For example, that bubble armor spell? I’ve used it to seal and apply pressure to a gaping wound. I’ve used it to create a semi-reflective helm to give me 360 degree vision, and a bonus to my perception checks. I’ve used it to form a bubble around our camp which would loudly ‘pop’ if anyone were to approach. All of these were done in the moment without any additional prep. I presume there is some means by which my spell alterations might fail, but again those details are obscured from me as a player.

Fundamentally, Chris and I are trying to achieve the same thing. We’re trying to force magic users to be more creatively involved in their spells. Yet while my Magic Words prompt creativity between adventures, Chris’s method prompts creativity during adventures. As fond as I am of Magic Words, I must confess that the creative focus of Chris’s method is more interesting, and a healthier way to construct a game.

I’d like to experiment with pushing the creative focus of Magic Words towards that same point. Given that this is by necessity a fundamental departure from the original premise it seems only fitting to dub it Magic Words 2.

Magic Users begin play knowing 3 magic words, determined randomly from whatever list is handy. Additional words are learned by encountering them through play, though Magic Users are limited in the number of words they may know at one time: never more than their level + 2.

Magic Users may cast spells a number of times per day equal to their level. They do so by arranging some number of their words (one or more) into a spell name, and describing their desired effects for that spell. The referee will reject any spell out of hand if its effects do not relate to the words used to construct it.

After the player describes their spell, the referee will assign it a failure chance between 1-in-6 and 6-in-6, determined by how powerful they judge the spell to be. At this point the player may either attempt their casting by rolling a d6, or they may negotiate for a more favorable failure chance by reducing the proposed efficacy of their spell.

Note that while it is possible for spells to have a 100% failure chance, it is not possible for a spell to have a 100% chance of success. Such fungible magic is necessarily volatile.

If a spell fails, the referee will adjudicate some appropriate backfire. A failed fireball may appear in the wrong location, or it may be at the right location but produce only a few sparks, or it may encase the caster in a pyramid of ice. A failed spell may be devastating, however, it does not consume any of the Magic User’s daily spellcasting. If the MU is able to cast 3 more spells today, and produces a spell failure, they may still cast 3 more spells.

ANALYSIS:

If I want to push myself towards more in-the-moment spell creativity, this is the obvious way to do it. Obviousness isn’t a virtue, but if this doesn’t work then at least I’ve gotten the obvious option out of my head to make room for less obvious ideas.

Players have always chaffed at the fact that Magic Words doesn’t give them a say in what their spell’s description will be. I’ve never wanted to give them a say, because it leads to an inevitable back-and-forth negotiation that I have preferred to avoid for the sake of the referee’s time. The codified negotiation presented above should give players what they’ve always wanted without placing undue burden on the referee. In fact, this system removes a great deal of the work the original method required from the ref.

My worry is that this method will be too free form. It will be difficult for me to walk the line between allowing my players to cast spells which are too powerful, and being too harsh with my failure chances.

The only way I can think of to mitigate this is to introduce some guidelines. As I understand it, the game “Ars Magica” does something like this. I’ve not read the system myself, but it sounds more complicated than I’d want to use for an OSR style game. My goal is always to create mechanics the referee can easily memorize.

I do want to give this idea a fair shake at the table, but my gut says this isn’t the kind of idea I’ll want to play with for very long. We will have to see.