Gamer ADD: Re-Skinning Quasqueton

So, Into the Borderlands, published by Goodman Games, arrived in my mailbox yesterday. It is a late-arriving birthday gift and, boy howdy, is my inner gamer all kinds of distracted. For those not familiar, Into the Borderlands is a lovely little piece of gaming history which compiles the Holmes-era and Moldvay-era editions of both B1 and B2. In addition, there are some essays by various luminaries of the gaming world, three different exercises in stocking B1, and a 5e update of both modules.

Of the essays I have managed to read (the rest of the book is very distracting, so please excuse my inattentiveness to the introductory material), the thrust is that these two modules stand as the gateway to not only as the starting point for many a campaign, but how to play the game of D&D for an entire generation of gamers.

Although my copy of the Homles Basic Edition Box came with the mono-chromed cover version of B1, and I certainly spent a lot of time looking through its pages, the sentiments expressed in these essays do not really apply to me. I have never used either B1 or B2 in any campaign I have run nor have I ever gone through them as a player. I learned how to play the game from older players who were willing to put up with me, because I was a slow reader when I was young and all of D&D's text was over my head for a number of years to come.

As long-time readers of this blog know, the one module that stands out in my playing experience is T1:The Village of Hommlet. I have used it a number of times as the starting place for a campaign. I have re-imagined it in all kinds of different scenarios and it still is my favorite TSR-era module. This is in part because, not despite the fact, that we never really got the Temple of Elemental Evil until years after the fact and the one we got fell way below expectations. Again, long-time readers will be well familiar with my various escapades and creating my own version of ToEE.

Thus, as I have been thumbing through Into the Borderlands, my Gamer ADD is going off like crazy because my inner gamer is desperate to throw together a campaign that marries B1, B2 and T1 in a crazy homage to the best beginner TSR modules of all-time. It was when I was perusing the various takes on stocking B1 that this inner chaos found its voice and it said:

Why not re-skin Quasqueton as the Temple of Elemental Evil?

It makes a twisted kind of sense. The two builders of B1’s dungeon were Chaotic, the place has some wonderfully weird rooms that can be re-skinned with elemental clothing and it would take a mere hand wave to explain its abandonment with the crusades of the followers of St. Cuthbert. One could also re-skin the Shrine of Evil Chaos in the Caves of Chaos as a fall-back position by the survivors of the cult and the Boathouse from T1 could still stand in as a forward position by the Cult as they seek to re-establish themselves after licking their wounds.

To boot, there is nothing that is preventing me from placing higher HD creatures with an elemental twist within all those lovely blank spaces between the covers of B1.

The Caves of Cormakir the Conjurer

Today is the feast of St. Prokopius the Confessor. Though he is not the Prokopius for which this blog is named (that would be St. Prokopius the Great Martyr), it seems apropos to celebrate by sharing The Caves of Cormakir the Conjurer.

As it was with The Slave Pits of Abhoth, I have spell checked and proof read this module myself, but have no real means to go further than that. Therefore, there will be mistakes; however, I am very pleased with the adventure and am also pleased by how quickly I was able to get it to this stage. Doing all the ground work in terms of design concept and layout with The Slave Pits have really paid off.

Please consider this an open thread for constructive criticism and notes about any of the aforementioned mistakes. The file can be found here.

Happy St. Prokopius Day!

Dwimmermount, 3x5 Geomorphs, The Tome of Adventure Design & Boring Adventure Design

There has been a confluence of events and ideas lately that are all peripherally related and I wanted to chew on them all in hopes of putting them all together in a way that will give every one a means of meditating upon the megadungeon/dungeon adventure if not a tool with which to make one.

Let me first break my silence about the Dwimmermount project by Mr. Maliszewski. There has been a great deal of disappointment when it comes to this project, not the least of which is the dead lock the project is in due to personal circumstances. I have four things to say:

1. In my line of work, I deal with disease and death on a regular, if not daily, basis. It can be emotionally debilitating and (especially in a culture that does its best to avoid the issue at almost all cost) the grieving process is a long and difficult road. And I am not even talking about what happens to the people I council and help through this process. When it happens to one of your own (as it has with me on more than one occasion) it is devastating. As such I am more than willing to give James as much room as he needs to get through this time of his life. Speculating about if and when the project will be done is not helpful and may very well make the process of grieving that much more difficult.
2. I am a backer of the project. I took a capital risk in order to get a glimpse into a world and campaign that I have been following for years. Even if the rest of the project never sees the light of day, I have gotten my money’s worth with what has been released to backers. It is easily one of the most comprehensive and well crafted megadungeons ever to be shared with this community and I am very much looking forward to playing it one day. The material I have in hand is, frankly, exactly what I was expecting and what I paid for.
3. I consider Dwimmermount, even in its current state, to be a major success. As an experiment with OD&D as written with the basic assumption that it is not wrong, we have all had to seriously wrestle with the concept of the dungeon and the megadungeon. One meme that is making the rounds is that the first levels are “boring.” The most insightful of these meditations is by Roger of Roles, Rules & Rolls. 
4. Patience is a virtue everyone desperately needs to reacquaint themselves with.

Personally, I have only recently started to read all the material available to Dwimmermount backers, and in context of what is available I do not see the first level boring at all, but (again) I got what I was looking for. However, I do appreciate the conundrum, especially since my own attempts at a megadungeon in my Lost Colonies campaign met with mixed results.

To that end, let me call attention to a number of my older posts and bring them into the context of the long shadow of Dwimmermount:

• I did a review of Matt Finch’s Demonspore. I highly praised its modularity — it was specifically designed to be placed into an extant dungeon and not a complete dungeon in and of itself. This modularity made it possible for it to be utilized as part of my megadungeon and ended up being a highly entertaining episode in my long-running campaign. My challenge to adventure writers and publishers to duplicate this modularity has thus far fell on deaf ears.
• In my own forays into improving my craft as an adventure designer and maker of megadungeons, I came up with the idea of the 3x5 geomorph. As a concept, it duplicated the modularity found in Demonspore on a smaller scale. Each 3x5 card has more room and flexibility than a normal geomorph and each can contain its own function and backstory. The dungeon maps that I made for The Slave Pits of Abhoth used this method. I challenged folks to start working on 3x5 geomorphs, but that, too, has thus far fallen on deaf ears.
• I recently purchased another of Matt Finch’s publications, The Tome of Adventure Design. In it, with the use of dozens of tables and a lot of sound advice, Matt lays out a formalized way to utilize the very modularity that I found in his adventure Demonspore and I tried to create with my 3x5 geomorphs. You can roll on a series of tables to determine the characteristics and size of a particular section of a dungeon, including what it looks like, how many rooms, what size those rooms are and how they are arranged. There are also tables for coming up with various kinds of landmarks that differentiate this particular section of dungeon from every other part of a dungeon. In essence, the results of each of these series of die rolls is something that could theoretically fit on a 3x5 geomorph. String a bunch of these together in various patterns and one can come up with several fantastic-looking dungeons that have a suggested history and use because of all the various landmarks that dot each section of the map. Not only is it a gratifying way to build a dungeon, I believe that the end result is much better than some of the more traditional ways of putting together a dungeon.

This brings me to my current project, my re-imagined version of The Caves of Chaos from B2: The Keep on the Borderland. I used The Tome of Adventure Design heavily as I constructed my vision of the caves and the result was a series of small dungeon sections which I pieced together to come up with what I feel is and rather exciting 1st level adventure with the potential to become a megadungeon should anyone want to take it that far. No boring here.

A huge reason that I feel this way about the dungeon is the fact that simply looking at a section of the map, with a title taken from a landmark derived from a random table is truly evocative. I could run this adventure on the fly simply from looking at these maps. For example:

This map is just brimming with possibilities and could be used in all kinds of different contexts. Indeed, it is specifically designed to do exactly that.

Thus, I challenge everyone, instead of whinging about how your latest Kickstarter is behind schedule get out a pack of 3x5’s, draw some maps, label them with evocative landmarks and titles, put them out there for people to use and let us see the fruit of this re-examination of the megadungeon that Dwimmermount has so successfully and beautifully done. I pray this challenge does not fall on deaf ears.

Finally, I need to acknowledge that both James and Matt have made me a better player and a better dungeon designer. I’d like to take the time to thank them both.

Gamer ADD: Fiend Folio + The Caves of Chaos

I am suffering a rather severe case of Gamer ADD and am struggling to keep my focus on any one project; however, one of this plethora has sort of emerged as something that I may very well have an opportunity to finish sometime in the nearish future. As I have noted, since WotC started to re-release its D&D library as .pdfs, Moldvay’s Basic Edition and B2 The Keep on the Borderland have hogged the 1 and 2 spots of top selling items over at RPGNow.

One of my most popular series of posts was an intellectual exercise to see how Moldvay’s Basic Edition would look like if the monster section only had creatures from the Fiend Folio. Although I did end up making Wandering Monster Tables and I did stock a dungeon using them, I never took the whole exercise to the next level: producing a version of the Caves of Chaos that would have come with that Fiend Folio’d version of Moldvay’s Basic Edition.

Given the popularity of both B2 and Moldvay’s wonderful little red book, I decided to take on the task. I can’t speak for other folks who write adventures, but there are those that fight you every inch of the way (my continuing struggles with my version of The Chateau des Faussesflammes immediately comes to mind) and those that seem to write themselves. When I started thinking about re-imaging the Caves of Chaos infested with Fiends from my favorite Folio, the adventure definitely fell into the latter category.

I have a similar variety of monsters in store, with a similar spread of HD, a similar amount of available treasure, a far more naturalistic make-up for why those monsters are there and a little over 40 more rooms to explore. Here is a little background to whet the appetite (and put a fire to my feet to get this thing done):

The Caves of Cormakir the Conjurer

Also called The Caves of Cormakir the Chaotic or The Caves of Chaos

Almost two decades ago, a group of adventurers happened upon a collection of caves on the edge of the Wilderness. They explored them, rid them of all the horrors that dwelt within and returned laden with the riches that adventure sometimes brings. One of their number, Cormakir the Conjurer, decided to make the caves his own with the intention of having them be a new vanguard against the forces of Chaos that lurked in the Wilderness.

Unbeknownst to all, there was something yet undiscovered within the caves that corrupted Cormakir to his core. Rather than making the caves a vanguard, he turned them into a laboratory for creating vile creatures intent on wrecking havoc upon Civilization. Fortunately, his experiments got out of hand before he was able to mass an army of Chaos and several of his menagerie escaped. Thus warned, his former companions and a small force of soldiers descended upon the caves and put an end to Cormakir and his depraved research.

Though the survivors went thoroughly through the Conjurer’s demesne, they could not find what it was that had corrupted him. Thus, they abandoned the caves for fear of being corrupted themselves.

That battle took place ten years ago. There is now growing evidence that there is a new master of the caves, who is sending out raiding parties of humanoids intent on not only wrecking havoc, but taking prisoners. A call has gone out throughout the area for a new generation of adventurers to return to the Caves of Cormakir the Conjurer and rid it of its evil once and for all.