Whilst perusing old notebooks I found the first half of this table, and figured it deserved to be finished. I hope you find a use for it in your game! If you are so inclined there’s some year’s end thoughts down at the bottom of this post, but the first thing ought to be first:

1. Almost all of the thieves are undercover law enforcement of some kind. Only a handful are truly outlaws. The cops are unaware of one another, working at cross purposes for a variety of different interested parties. Any serious raid will trigger each “thief” to bring unexpected resources to bear in their own act of betrayal. The Characters will undoubtedly be accosted for ruining a carefully planned operation multiple times. The few sincere thieves will likely be able to escape in all the confusion.
2. The crown jewels of a local kingdom are here! This is peculiar, as the king wore them quite recently at an official function. As it turns out the real jewels were replaced by an elaborate fake several months ago, and no one noticed. This will be a great embarrassment for the crown if it becomes known.
3. The thieves have a bunch of cats. These are pets, not guardians. Any protection of the hideout is completely incidental. They just try to play, whine for food, or hide in inconvenient places to dart out and trip or scratch people who bother them.
4. There is an extensive cache of records in the hideout, which details how everything stolen by the band was actually stolen from the thieves’ own ancestors during the looting of their homeland several hundred years ago.
5. The deepest chamber of the den opens up into a blazing pit of lava. Each time the thieves return from a heist they ritually cast the most valuable loot into the pit. This is supposed to bring them luck. If the Characters came here in search of a specific item it was most likely valuable enough to be destroyed–although it may be that the players were only able to find the hideout because the ritual was subverted by some thief who decided to keep the valuable object for themselves.
6. Among the loot is a famous book long thought to be forever lost: “Costecles’ Historie & Poetrie of the Taco-Sealite War.” It was taken from a wealthy collector who never came forward with it for unknown reasons. Perhaps they did not know it existed among their vast collection, or selfishly wished to hoard the book’s secrets for themselves. The book may even reveal some embarrassing secret about their ancestry which they wished to keep hidden.
7. The walls are lined with plaques, each displaying some simple object of modest value: a silver fork, a pair of spectacles, a bolt of lace. Each member of the band has their first theft displayed in this way. Only children are recruited so they will grow up loyal to their brother, sister, and sibling thieves.
8. The wall of the main room is dominated by a fresco which replicates the “Honor Among Thieves” cartoon illustrated by Darlene Pekul for the first edition Dungeon Master’s Guide.

9. A set of diagrams and formulae which explain many of the strange thefts the band has carried out. According to the plans, the items taken can be used to construct a marvelous device with terrible implications.
10. Firmly mounted to a display pedestal is a great green gem. When touched, it forces a saving throw versus Magic. Failure causes a person to be afflicted with Kleptomania. They must steal a number of objects each day equal to their level, or suffer a negative each day until they do.
11. A locked room contains Susetta ZuFallo, a renowned painter who went missing several years ago. Wild speculation followed her disapperance: did she wander into the woods and die, or did she flee with a secret lover to some far off land where she could learn the secret techniques for foreign masters? Turns out this band has been keeping her hostage as their resident tattoo artist. It would explain why they all have such elaborate ink.
12. Ledgers detail the many rumors the thieves have set in motion. They range from the petty (“The Cobbler’s husband has been sleeping around!”) to the serious (“The local duke poisoned his sister to usurp her lands.”). Some were started on commission, and list the client and the sums paid for the work. Others were started out of personal enmity, or as part of an elaborate plan to make a difficult theft easier, or simply at random to keep in good practice.
13. A collection of ceramic jars sealed with wax. Etched in the wax of each is a person’s name, a date, and some excretion of the human body: piss, shit, blood, vomit, menses, snot. The list goes on, and none of it is pleasant. The names all belong to notable people. These excretions are easy enough to steal, and can sometimes be fenced to those who wish to author a curse on the individual in question.
14. There is a well illuminated table in a draft-free room. Across it are scattered hundreds, perhaps even thousands of tiny scraps of paper. These used to be a treasure map before some catastrophic event caused it to enter its current state. It’s hard to believe any treasure could possibly be worth the effort of jigsawing the map back together, but the band’s leader is resolute in their belief that it is.
15. Each day at 10:00am in the morning, a water clock chimes a bell which resounds through the whole of the lair. Every member then stands to face their gang’s banner, (one hangs in every room) and recite the oath of loyalty. This happens every day without fail, and every member of the band remembers receiving or witnessing the beatings given to someone who is “in the middle of something right now.” The importance of this act has been so ground into these people’s minds that has become automatic. If the bell were to chime mid-combat, they’d all lose at least one round as they paused in confusion. Some might even go so far as to recite the whole oath.
16. By some unknown science, the band has come to posses a bulky apparatus which shrinks items down to 1/10th their original size, and an even bulkier apparatus which returns them to normal. The former can be disassembled enough to be portable by a group of 3 or 4 thieves, and explains how they have been so successful in carrying off large hauls.
17. The beds the thieves sleep in are eerie. More like glass coffins wrapped in tubes. When they first discovered this hideout the beds were already here. It was easy enough to dispatch the idiots hibernating inside, and claim the space for their own. Anyone who sleeps in these beds for 2 hours will awake fully refreshed as if they had slept for 8. One could also use the beds to hibernate for up to 10 years at a time without food or other necessities, but…why would anyone want to do that?
18. One of the deeper rooms in the lair is a daycare of the kids of those in the gang. It’s a very forward thinking program.
19. There’s a greenhosuse in which someone has grown a surprising variety of foods, and a number of decorative flowers which serve no real purpose here beyond their aesthetic pleasure. Someone among these thieves is quite a gardener.
20. An albino stag roams the halls of the hideout. It is entirely at ease in this unnatural habitat, and the thieves have adopted it as a mascot. They treat it well, and it will become violent if it sees them being harmed.

Year’s End Thoughts:
Anno Domini 2019 has been the second most sparse year Papers & Pencils has ever had. At about 1.5 posts per month, I fell short of my goal, but still fell within the 1 post per month rule I set for myself at the start of the year. I certainly would have done better if not for how busy I was through September-November, but this should not be a factor in 2020.

More positively, I was way more productive in releasing more polished work this year than I’ve ever been before. There was Deadly Dungeons, Mice with Legitimate Grievances, and The Dachshund Dungeon. There was the re-release of The Bloodsoaked Boudoir of Velkis the Vile, and my Zelda fan-game LOZAS to boot! This was the whole point of scaling back my commitment to the blog, and all those releases were in the first half of the year. I can certainly do better in 2020.

The G+ diaspora is still a afflicting me nine months after the fact. It is so much more difficult to produce good work without a reliable community of folks to energize my mind. I have many good friends of course, and I know many have found homes for themselves on Twitter and Discord, but the extant platforms are more exhausting than energizing for me. This is a problem I hope to tackle actively in the coming year. For now I will remind anyone reading this that my Twitter account is @linkskywalker, my Mastadon account is @linkskywalker@radical.town, and on Discord I’m linkskywalker#1679. The TROIKA! forums could be a nice place, and if need be I can also be found on Facebook, Instagram, Pluspora, and MeWe.

I hope you are well, and safe, and happy. You have my best wishes for the coming year. Be good to people, and punch nazis wherever you find them.

About two years ago Diogo Nogueira wrote a post which eloquently explained the importance of contextualizing choices in a dungeon. The referee cannot simply say “There are exits to the East and West.” That’s a false choice. A coin flip. Useless information. I performed a reading of it for Blogs on Tape.

Earlier this year Anne Hunter wrote a response to Diogo. She agreed that his method was the best way to run dungeons, but argued that the current state of published material made it an unreasonable expectation to place on referees. After all: if a hallway has 4 exits, that’s 4 rooms that must be referenced and processed into clues before the referee can finish describing the hallway. She suggests the problem could be alleviated by keying hallways to include these hints. I have performed a Blogs on Tape reading of her post as well.

Diogo is correct* about how dungeons ought to be described. The importance of giving players sufficient information to make their choices with real agency is fundamental to OSR play. Anne is likewise correct that most published material doesn’t support this style of play. Speaking for myself, I’ve only got so much mental bandwidth. Sometimes it’s difficult to process the current room’s description for my players. Processing every adjacent room’s text in the same breath just isn’t going to happen.

*(Though there is some unexplored ground on what can make a dungeon choice meaningful. A simple East or West choice can work if the players are mapping, and have a specific place they wish to reach or to avoid. Likewise, one corridor left undescribed while another is given detail creates a meaningful contrast. )

So my D&D friends are super cool people with clever thoughts about gameplay, and they deserve to have their work read. That’s good and great and all, but what’s the point of this post? Well: while Anne is correct in her criticism, I don’t like keying hallways as a solution. I have 3 reasons.

Reason the First: Adding descriptions to hallways would make dungeons more wordy. Words take time to read; so unless they are memorized more words means the game will run slower at the table. We ought to be aiming for dungeons that are less wordy, not more.

Reason the Second: If the idea is to add information to help referees give players meaningful choices about which exit to choose, then we couldn’t stop at hallways. All rooms have exits, and so all rooms would need this extra text, further exacerbating bloat issue.

Reason the Third: A set of static hints for what exists in adjacent spaces feels like a drift towards boxed text. It attempts to do the referee’s thinking for them, and in doing so makes the dungeon inflexible. I would rather a more open ended tool. One that can be interpreted different ways in different circumstances.

Rather than adding more text to our room descriptions, I believe the problem would best be solved by adding more descriptive art to our dungeon maps. This would avoid straining our readers’ attentions with bloated text, and make use of space that is otherwise left empty.

Take this Dyson Logos map. It’s gorgeous, modern, and empty. If someone were to use it for their module, they’d of course need to add reference numbers in each room they wished to key. The numbers alone would hardly fill the space, so why stop there? If each room also had a tiny doodled icon that represented its contents, that would turn the map into a vastly more powerful tool.

It is reasonable to assume that anyone running a published adventure will need to have read it through at least once. Their familiarity with the text will allow them to dynamically create their own hints for players on the fly. A cat-o-nine tails icon might indicate a torture chamber. When the players come to that door, the referee might describe screams of pain coming from beyond, or it might be smeared with blood, or an executioner’s hood might hang on a hook beside it. The referee is empowered, rather than dictated to.

The art need not be fancy, either. So long as the referee can look at what you doodled and be reminded of what they read, the goal is accomplished. I experimented with this in Mice with Legitimate Grievances, which has an ugly as hell map, but even my crude scribblings do the job of giving the referee better access to necessary information. I regret that I didn’t carry on with it in The Dachshund Dungeon, but I believe it’ll be a standard feature of my adventures from here on.

By all the gods real and imagined it feels good to get back to writing.