Cursing sketch

Quick draft of a spell user cursing something or someone.

StoneHell and the power of losing your helm

With my Thursday group I played my first session of Dungeon Crawl Classic with Vincent Quigley as our new dungeon referee.

We rolled up our group of level 0 adventurers and we had a great session venturing into the StoneHell valley.

We had 16 characters, only 5 character died, I was expecting the funnel to be more deadly. But we scouted the valley and we dint really venture into the dungeon itself. Exploring the dungeon would clearly had produced a deadlier and greater funnel. But still, the funnel worked and I already have 3 favorite characters: A clever 1hp merchant, a crafty dwarf mushroom farmer and a clumsy squire.

Vincent house ruled that we could sacrifice our character helm to avoid taking damage from one incoming attack (3 characters started with a helm). This saved the life of two characters. I found the house rule colorful and very interesting, it remembered me of the warrior special ability in Stars Without Number.

I am tempted to also use this house rule in my LotFP campaign. But tweaked a little bit.

Like: once by session you can sacrifice a major piece of equipment to avoid the damage from a killing attack.

You can sacrifice:

• A piece of armor: Helm, shield or 2AC worth of plate armor.
• Your main weapon, but it need to be a large weapon.
• Your holy symbol if you are a cleric.
• Your spell book if you are a magic user. (you can "re-write" it but you lose d3 random spells!)
• A medium sized magic item.

But you are also stun for d3 round (maybe a saving throw can let you avoid the stun).

EDIT: well I am still thinking this over.

Eggshell Immortals

Little bit late for easter, but here are the Eggshell Immortals (clic for larger image).

My forest is turning into a megadungeon.

I am working on a adventure location: a ancient forest slowly rotting in a perpetual autumn (kind of inspired from my memories of the Forest of Doom). 

I left the project sleeping for a time, but after receiving and reading Barrowmaze, I had a spur of enthusiast and I checked up my old projects. So I started writing new location entries ("rooms" descriptions) for my forest and now I have 90 of them. 

I am trying to apply a lot of stuff that I have learned from reading many OSR blogs, but recently a note from Dreams in the Lich House, "For Where Your Treasure is, There Your Heart Will Be Also", nourished a lot of my thinking and it indirectly made me realize that I can easily find some parts of me in my dungeon entries. I think that I like that, while still keeping in mind to produce a solid dungeon, I will try to dig more into this.

Also one of my main inspiration is the autumn palette of colors. Often I think about a combination of colors before writing my entries. I will also keep this in focus. Oh and naturally, I will also want to illustrate my dungeon myself.  

As for the forest layout, I am still thinking about how I will organize my entries on a map. I know that I want to keep a dungeon map feeling VS a wilderness hex map. If you look at a geomorph caves map it easy to imagine the background rock as a dense forest, corridors become trails and chambers become glades. Naturally it not perfect, but I think that I will experiment with this.

Great clothing illustrations book.

I just came back from the library with this book: European Civil and Military Clothing.

I love Dover's illustrations books so much, their line art drawings are just so clear and fantastic. I had many of their coloring books when I was a kid (Ancient Near East, Egypt, Indian design, etc), they contributed a lot to my love of drawing and my imagination.

Expect some fantasy drawings in the coming weeks. :)

Ruins of the Undercity with no GM.

With my my friends H. and Yan, we played 2 sessions of Ruins of the Undercity. Since we were only 3, we decided to try to explore the Undercity without a DM (as proposed by the book). We used the party organisation chart and the random dungeon generator. But we also used a oracle table on which we could roll to ask YES/NO questions. It was ok, the game was functional, it reminded me of roguelike games like Stone Soup Dungeon Crawl or NetHack. But naturally the whole thing also felt limited. But still we had some fun moments when we complicated our character situation by asking questions to the oracle. Stuff like: "two rot grubs on the floor... ok is the ceiling crawling with them?" and when rolling a "1" while defending a doorway: "shit can the grey critters push me aside and swarm in the room?" We could have been more creative, but most of the questions concerning the dungeon were answered by the random dungeon generator tables.  

What I appreciated the most about Ruins of the Undercity is how the build-in setting color all the random tables. I especially appreciated the list of shops offering local flavored equipment combined with availability rolls.

We rolled up 2 characters each to form a party of 6 characters. We used the former profession table from the book to add some colors to our characters.

We ended up with:

• Galatea, a actor's daughter who ran away to became a cleric in a poor temple.   
• Madu, a bad cartographer who learned some magic charms. 
• Xenokrates, a runaway bower apprentice now fighter.
• Paedo, a ruined leather worker who felt the calling of the Red Goddess.
• Dbeti, a nubian dwarf who had enough of being a petty clerk. 
• Gowad, a persian merchant who dabbled in forbidden arts.   

Madu stats sucked so much (STR 5, INT 9, WIS 8, DEX 6, CON 8, CHA 11), I liked how he was not gifted at anything and how, against is better judgement, he choose to venture in the undercity in search of treasures he imagined when daydreaming while he was reading old and crumbling maps of the city. It was fun to watch him survive against the odds! (But that said, except for his 2 hit points, his poor stats din't hinder him that much) 

Generating the dungeon room by room & door by door during play was slow and laborious. The result was ok, but was not especially interesting or intriguing. I think the random generator can be useful as a GM tool, but I prefer random geomorph tiles over rooms by corridors generation. Or again I prefer to work with a dungeon creation tool, like How to Host a Dungeon, that provide a dungeon history and ecology that spark the imagination instead of detailed floor plans.

Oh and we constantly rolled poorly on the rooms content table, so we din't discover a single treasure in two sessions.    



In conclusion I like Ruins of the Undercity, but not for it GM less proposition or it random dungeon generator, but for how it setting is build-in in it tables and lists. I would play in a campaign of Ruins of the Undercity, but only with a GM that use the random dungeon generator as a tool to dress up his or her dungeon instead of using it to entirely generate dungeon levels.

Gold Beard Fortress

I am reposting the dungeon that I have drawn with How to Host a Dungeon (and my friend H.)
(there is some additional notes on the map).

Some notes about the history of the dungeon.

Primordial Age:

• Three primordial beasts inhabit the region: a cyclop, a gigantic spider and a sentient giant slime. 
• The purple plague infect some of the caves. 

The Age of Civilization:

• The dwarf's runes point toward a deep gold vein. 
• Gold Beard Fortress is build.
• The red gold vein is found and named "The Setting Sun". 
• Construction of the Great Hall of Deep Shine.
• Construction of the red workshops.
• Construction of the Hall of Records.
• Foundation of the underground city of Glorious Gleam. 
• Construction of the royal secret chamber and forging of the first Red Sun. 
• The dwarfs dig too deep and awaken the Beast from Below. 

The Great Disaster:

• The Beast from Below summon a underground river to flood the dwarf's tunnels to hunt them. 

The Age of Monsters:

• The water level diminish and monsters settle in the dungeon.
• The Gnolls - Antling war. 
• The Gnolls vanish, hunted down by dwarven ghosts. 
• The Purple plague orcs tribe settle in the now empty dwarven city and prosper. 

The Age of Villainy:

• The Lich King settle in the dungeon and enslave the purple plague orcs.

Animals adventurers

Cartoony animal adventurer, just for the fun of it.

Other dust mutant characters

I had the occasion to play a roleplaying game again this december. We played a one shot of Other Dust.
We all choose to roll up mutants and we ended up with a really weird group that really din't look like the characters on the cover of the book.

We lost two characters during our venture to bring back a water filter for our village. I liked how each time a replacing character was introduced, this added setting detail and fleshed out the "dungeon".

Strangely none of the replacing character were mutants.