TSR's module A2, Secret of the Slavers' Stockade (Fort Level)

TSR Module A2: Secret of the Slavers' Stockade

Harold Johnson with Tom Moldvay

At a couple of climactic points in module A1, Slave Pits, the adventurers can find documents that will lead them to the next adventure in the series. Moving away from the chaotic half-ruined town, you find a self-contained fortress in the wilderness, a staging point for the slavers' operations. This stockade is bounded by four intact walls, less of a ruin than the Highport temple. But inside, it's a fixer-upper, with ungoverned areas that continue the theme of the unruly stronghold. The troops are mainly goblins and hobgoblins, not orcs and half-orcs. Two independent bosses with powerful assistants run the place, one in the fort above ground, and two in the dungeons. 

Like A1, A2 was originally run as two parallel tournament adventures, with the above- and below-ground levels as the respective settings. The module's maps shade in the paths of each tournament version. It''s not hard to see how the requirements of each one-track, twisty gauntlet got in the way of realistic defensive architecture. However, even in the limited tournament mode, the fort level threatens the kind of barracks-clearing pitched battle I mentioned in the opening essay as a catastrophic failure for a fort infiltration. As always, full spoilers ensue.

Sure, go ahead, spoil one new monster on the front cover ...

FORT LEVEL: MOATHOUSE

The tournament starts with an easy if improbable way in. Just like in A1, an escaped slave, "Lady Morwin Elissar," shows you the route of her escape - an open window in the outer wall of the moathouse, with a convenient rope left dangling. This device is more interesting because the slave is an NPC who might go with you but is kind of unreliable. Still, it is only the first instance of a repetitive tendency that crops up throughout the module.

This moathouse is one of three buildings on the flat hill where the stockade sits, all held together with outside walls. It's also, you guessed it, an unruly stronghold. Garrisoned by a couple of hobgoblin squads, half of one floor is home to a haunt - more of a Victorian-story ghost than an undead monster. It's the haunting that keeps the troops scared of this area, justifying the lack of attention paid by the garrison. The challenge with this entity must have felt fresh at the time. But by now, dealing with a ghost's past-life obsession and present-day possession is part of 5th edition, and quite a few supplements have extended the Gothic notion into an adventure genre (link, link, link).

In this unruly zone, we are introduced to an unfortunate theme: the defender love silly traps. Here, they have acquired some fancy glassware and alchemy to blind intruders and trip them up with hundreds of glass marbles underfoot. Arguably, these traps sit at the outer limit of plausibility, but worse is to come.

One good point of the writing throughout this module shows up here. As in Albie Fiore's early White Dwarf adventure "The Lichway," each bivouac of troops throughout the fort has some kind of action ongoing, be it eating, gambling, or less wholesome sport. I've described this approach before as the "diorama encounter," but it seems to be a priority of the Johnson/Moldvay authorial team that gives welcome flavor. 

FORT LEVEL: GATEHOUSE

The next building along the railroad is a gatehouse on the far side of a courtyard where a wild anhkheg will pop out of a patch of mud and attack. Why do the defenders allow a powerful monster to sit athwart the only line of communication from moathouse to gatehouse (the walls connecting them have no walkway)? Here's the greed for variety, any fight that's not with hobgoblins, at the expense of naturalism. Other hard-to-believe premises: the fight can go on without the guards on the walls noticing, until the monster lets out a dying screech; and in fighting, the party will become so caked with mud that they suffer a -2 to hit until they can wash it off in a fountain some way down the railroad.

The gatehouse itself was only developed for campaign play. Its inner buildings are more hobgoblin guardposts and barracks, again with diorama activities going on. Beyond the gate that the anhkheg guards, there is another courtyard, which the players can gauntlet-run or sneak across, while guards patrol the walls above. A couple of patrols come with another new monster, an oil-sweating Gollum-like wretch known as a boggle, whom we see on the front cover. Here there's little opportunity to use the boggles' weird abilities. They are just being led around as sniffer dogs, bringing to mind another Tolkien character, the orc tracker Snaga of Isengard. Then on to the keep's courtyard garden where carnivorous apes and hobgoblin archers jump the party. A dead end -- unless they can open the locked door that leads into the keep proper.

FORT LEVEL: MAIN KEEP

The position of this building in the hill fort is beyond absurd. The ramparts have no connection to its interior, even though that's where many of the troops and leaders make their home. What's more, the ramparts loom over the keep - the better to shoot at the roof, allegedly -- but vision to the outside world is blocked by tall palisades cut through with infrequent arrow slits. It's as if the fort is prepared for an infiltration, more so than an attack; but even that goal is bungled in the execution, so that a dungeon-crawling party can take on one group of enemies at a time. For example, if the players make it to the courtyard, there's no line of sight to the fight there from archers on the walls, only to the roof.

The interior layout is also absurd and not remedied in the campaign version. A single path spirals around, kinking up a few times, before ending up in the central room where the main leaders and troops are found. Cut a single door to break the spiral, and the leaders would have easy access to the entrance and be able to reinforce the defense. But where's the fun in that, compared to dungeon crawling?

Worse yet, the dungeon crawl is fixed up with tricks and traps worthy of a Scooby Doo haunted house. You have the stuffed bear rolling down a ramp to frighten you backwards into a pit. Then the hobgoblin ambush where some of the troops dress as mummies and run at an angled mirror so you'll waste spells and missiles on their reflections. Not just silly, these traps make no sense placed across the only route of reinforcement in an active stronghold.

Off the tournament track, there is another haunted area shunned by the soldiers. But this ghost is just a set of gimmicky manifestations engineered by the escaped slave who lives in the rafters. All these hijinks aside, the final encounter area has a memorable leader in Icar. He's a fire-loving blind warrior who fights with super-senses, taking after Daredevil or Zatoichi. Some of the diorama encounters in the central area are likewise good, and there's a new monster, the cloaker, whose hypnotic droning works as an opiate of the masses for the enslaved. In the boss area, whose defense the module illustrates with an innovative (at the time) tactical map, are a couple of ways down to the dungeons.

...and on the back cover, another new monster to spoil

Can we fix the fort? Maybe, but extensive changes to the map would have to be made. And then the module becomes something different. Raising the alarm no longer causes a temporary pressure situation before the party can scoot on to the next isolated area. It activates the whole beehive of the garrison, acting all together in a mass of close to 100 hobgoblins and powerful leaders, and certain to overpower the mid-level party it is rated for.

Next: The dungeon level

TSR's module A1, Slave Pits of the Undercity

TSR module A1, Slave Pits of the Undercity, is the first and the most coherent of the Slavers modules: inventive and challenging while being the most sensibly drafted of these disorderly villain lairs.

The history of the series further emerges from a thread on Dragonsfoot remembering the specifics of the GenCon tournament that gave rise to the four A series modules. The temple and dungeon levels of A1 and A2 each were a single, linear adventure. Player groups in the first round were randomly assigned into one of these four qualifiers or a fifth one corresponding to the early section of A3.  From these five, the best-scoring made it to the semifinal and final rounds, which respectively used versions of the later (city) part of A3, and all of A4.

From such a genesis we can trace the design of Slave Pits of the Undercity (and here, perforce, the spoilers begin). Helpfully for our archaeology, the module includes the original tournament railroad maps for the top and dungeon levels.

New monsters, meant as a surprise, were regularly "spoiled" on the A series covers - here, the aspis

TEMPLE LEVEL

The tournament scenario gives the players inside information about a secret door in the wall of the temple. This door is trapped but not guarded - such is the security protocol of a disorderly fortress - and leads to a twisting corridor through an abandoned area of the building. The "railroad" takes the party past some well-set fights, and other situations that act like puzzles without seeming contrived, such as a deceptive plank over a pit, or a combat dilemma involving a new plant monster, the giant sundew, that becomes much easier if the party realizes how the fortress forces manage this menace in its midst. After this gauntlet, the party will run into the actual slaver forces, and these encounters are devised with the same art, combining trickery, interesting combat problems, and traps.

That's the end of the railroad; but even the tournament scenario has a couple of distractions and dead-ends. One of them, a roughly patched wall that if broken through leads to a face-to-face encounter with a basilisk, had the distinction of taking out a player-character in my own 5th edition campaign.  And in the campaign version of the module, more areas are added branching from the tournament path - a stable guarded by slaver forces, a haunted cemetery and a garrison of terrified orcs, and a spacious courtyard, possibly a shortcut, but where more undead lurk. The reissue of the module in 1986 added a gate from this courtyard into the midst of the organized opposition area, further adding options for the attack.

This expansion allows different approaches to the temple complex. Jason Thompson's cartoon walkthrough of the module shows two of these: one party sneaking in through the tournament entrance, the other masquerading as slave-buying customers to go through the front door. Entering by the stables, by the graveyard orc door, or simply climbing the wall in an unguarded spot are also possibilities.

DUNGEON LEVEL

There are ways down from the temple, most obviously at the end of the final boss fight of the temple railroad; but the full module places two more descents to vary play in the dungeon level. This underground jams together four quite different areas: the eponymous slave pits, with slaves, slavers, and minions; a set of caves that hosts a tribe of orcs allied with the slavers; another set of caves that hosts a population of another new monster, the fearsome four-armed insectoid aspis folk; and a network of wet and filthy sewer passages that ties the whole place together.

The railroad version of the dungeon has the players first encountering some nasty larvae in the acidic spawning pool of the aspis; then crossing the sewer to muscle through a protracted fight with most of the orc tribe; then finally engaging the slavers, including some of their aspis allies, before confronting the slaver leader - who, it has to be said, is less formidable and treacherous than the final encounter of the temple. 

The open version develops the aspis zone and has more connections to approach the bad guys. While the temple is infested with ghouls and a wight, the underground is only semi-unruly - these are groups cooperating with the slavers for now, but if a way can be found to communicate, faction bargaining in the classic big-dungeon style can happen.

BEST OF THE SERIES

My current party cleared out most of A1, using a conversion to 5th edition. Running it was a delight -- the combat challenges tough and packed with surprises, but not in a way that felt forced or unfair. The tricks and traps have a gritty, naturalistic feel to them, and the different areas of the complex are balanced between abandoned/haunted, main bad guys, and side factions. We see how the garrison of orcs, half-orcs, and evil humans deals with the unruly forces in their midst - finding a way to tame the sundew, cringing in fear from the haunted cemetery, hiring some of the aspis. This was also the deadliest module of my campaign, claiming two PCs. Probably, this is just due to incautious player mistakes snagging on two of 5th edition's few remaining teeth. One, doppelgangers have an absolutely deadly surprise attack if they can catch a party member alone; two, even with two saves, there is no easy answer to petrification until characters hit ninth level.

As we'll see in the pieces to come, the other A-series modules, in my opinion, are less deft at presenting an unruly stronghold: A2 is ambitious but strained, A3 a mess, and A4 returns to better form but famously hangs on a railroading premise that may not sit well with new-old-school values.

TSR's "A" series of adventures in unusually unruly strongholds: Introduction

Illustration from Slave Pits of the Undercity (1980) by David S. LaForce

D&D was born in the castle. The Castle and Crusade Society of wargamers brought Gygax and Arneson together over miniature battles fought at Bodenburg, a scale model of a medieval fortress. Castle sieges were one suggested scenario for the Man-to-Man section of Perren and Gygax's Chainmail rules, the predecessor to D&D's combat system. But despite the genesis of Gygax's and Arneson's dungeons as the cellar levels of castles, it was these underworlds and not the upper rooms that captured the imagination of generations going forward.

Indeed, it's not hard to see how attacks on fully manned fortresses can fall flat as an adventure. The horn is blown, the defenders stream forth from their barracks. Pitched battle on unfavorable terrain ensues. One might, perhaps, set up a night-time infiltration. But then the play only becomes catastrophic: one failure to sneak takes you to the pitched battle again. The appeal of the dungeon environment is precisely its disorganization. There, the adventurers control the tempo of exploration, deciding whether to push their luck, encamp, or retreat.

Still, TSR's first published adventure module was a stronghold assault, the enemy being hill giants (G1, Steading of the Hill Giant Chief), and the next two continued on to fortresses run by frost and fire giants. This choice joins the wargaming castle instinct with a wish to recreate the adventures of De Camp and Pratt's protagonist Harold Shea, guest and prisoner in the stronghold of the frost giant Utgardaloki. Also, the high character levels capable of taking on multiple giants at the same time can access the kind of magic - invisibility, illusions, distractions, knock spells, and the like - that'll support effective infiltration. 

In aid of this goal, the steading is not exactly on a war footing. Giants are drunk, feasting, asleep, on errands: plenty of gaps in the defenses for smaller folk to exploit. As well, the cellars play  more like a classic dungeon - one retrospective has called the lower level a "monster motel" -  - a pattern  followed in the Frost and Fire sequels. If they win through to the underground, the party can take back control of the tempo, switching to the more usual room-by-room exploration.

But let's turn to the next major series of campaign modules after the high adventure of the G-D-Q series. The A series was based on four adventures that made up the AD&D tournament at GenCon XIII in 1980, run on consecutive days as qualifier rounds, semi-finals and finals, at huge scale: 40 tables to start with. Each adventure had a different authorship, but the connecting plot was simple enough: you were mid-level characters infiltrating and attacking the bases of a ring of slavers in the failed state of the Pomarj, World of Greyhawk. 

A word about tournament play. Although this style has largely fallen out of favor these days, it was a well-subscribed activity at early conventions, an answer to the question, "How do I win at D&D?" Tournament mode differed from home-campaign D&D in design choices that equalized experiences across tables, so that in theory, the most skilled player groups could prevail. In the 1980 tournament, each group ran the same set of pre-generated player characters; the adventures were linear, presenting the same challenges in the same order; and sometimes, DMs were told to apply a standard amount of damage from traps and the like, instead of rolling dice. To determine winners, each run was scored by awarding points for dealing with enemies, bonus points for discoveries or anticipated clever solutions, and points deducted for party casualties along the way.

The linearity in these adventures, in particular, deserves comment. It's an innovation that appeared at Origins 1979 with the Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan; the previous year's tournament module, the aforementioned Giants series, was more open-plan. TSR realized that what was good for the tournament might not be good for campaign play, so when the A series was published, some alternative paths were added to give players more of a sense of agency. For the most part, these revisions work, although the final chapter still presumes an escape from having been thrown in prison -- a plot fiat that shines notoriously in the gallery of Railroading Through the Ages.

In reviewing these A adventures, I'll examine how each one spices up the organized stronghold concept by presenting it as an unruly place -- factions that chafe, distracted guards, abandoned areas that follow their own rules, and clever defensive tricks that sometimes try a little too hard. The quality of this series, unfortunately, falls off from A1 to the later modules. It's not that the creativity is lacking. Rather, the idea of the unruly stronghold starts to repeat itself and challenge the limits of plausibility.

Midkemia's Matrix: Rationality Unbound

The Black Tower (Guinasso & Abrams, 1981) is not to be confused with Dark Tower or any other low-albedo third-party edifice from the early days of D&D. It was a product of Midkemia Press, material from a campaign that inspired Raymond Feist's Magician series of novels, one of many gaming-fiction backcrossings to come. You can get a pdf of it here, although I'm pretty sure the typesetting is not the original.

We have here 100+ rooms of evil wizard's castle, with a number of fairly interesting tricks and characters, and a large cast of unique Midkemian monsters living in close tenancy -- screamers, hard luck "snagers" (indistinguishable from doors!), fuzzy pests, goldmoths (indistinguishable from gold pieces!), etc. All are statted out in conformity with THE TOME OF MIDKEMIA fantasy roleplaying game. This game, never published, works with "hits to kill", levels, d20 to hit rolls, damage done with various dice sizes, and spells of familiar stamp with flavor words tacked on like dishes from a gastropub menu (MATCHLESS SLEEP, UNALTERABLE QUEST, THROW LIGHTNING).

But the most interesting thing about TTOM is its attack matrix, reproduced in the module.

This matrix actually earns its pay - unlike the frankly boring matrices from (A)D&D, based on monotonic effects of attacker's level and defender's AC, with a few quirks that were not memorable or justifiable enough to survive being simplified into THAC0 and eventually done away with. Here, though, armor counts for markedly less the larger the attacker is, and is even a liability against huge creatures and undead. Why? Read on!

This simplifies the effects sought by a system like Runequest/BRP or GURPS, in which defensive skill reduces chances to hit while armor reduces damage directly. A similar effect might be had by having large creatures deal massive damage that armor does little to reduce, while the chances to hit are based on relative size, with smaller and more mobile creatures being stymied by strong armor but having the upper hand on both attack and defense.

Now, an advantage of Midkemia's matrix presentation, compared to those other rules possibilities, is that it makes choices transparent. Instead of fiddling with spreadsheets to try and figure out the optimal damage dealing and evasion per round, Midkemia's matrix shouts loud and clear that there is a role for your Frazetta-style fighter just as there is a role for your buttoned-up plate tank -- and the scarier the monster, the nakeder the hero!

Heartbreaker rules are the Burgess Shale of roleplaying -- collectively, a lode of stillborn ideas that might have been. The Midkemia matrix points a way, not taken, for the core mechanic of the game to escape the tedious bonus-and-target escalation spiral already visible in AD&D and reaching a peak in 3rd edition. Instead of high-level play just being a bigger-numbers version of low-level, fighting huge monsters is essentially different, shifting to a table that reverses the logic of armor and requires no further bonus pumping to make for interesting play.

The same impulse underlies more recent rules ideas that recognize, for example, that you can't kill a tyrannosaurus by whaling on its shins with a dagger, and that going toe-to-toe with a giant shark-elephant centaur is not just a matter of hit and miss. Instead of 5th edition's "bounded rationality" approach, which deals with the treadmill by cutting it short at the end, we can call these qualitative shifts in power level "unbounded rationality." They deal with the treadmill by making it a conveyor belt to somewhere new and strange.

Not Just Ruins, But Strongholds

Joseph Manola is onto something in this well argued, erudite essay on the importance of the ruin to classic and old-school-influenced D&D. Ruins, of course, are part of the post-apocalyptic milieu. And yes, part of that genre is allowing characters to have freedom to loot and wreck without getting in trouble.

"Uh, I think they saw us coming."

But another part of the genre are the strongholds. Auntie Entity's fortified town, Immortan Joe's mesa complex. The zombie plague survivors holed up in the mall. The fall of Rome left not only ruins, but also feudal castles, and some places that were both.

An impressive number of classic adventures are actually stronghold raids. The first full adventure from the supplements, Blackmoor's Temple of the Frog. The Giants and most of the Drow series. The Slaver cycle. Even Castle Ravenloft, although its mood is very different.

Quick break for a definition. The difference between a stronghold and a ruin is that the walls of the stronghold enclose a nominally unified fighting group. Sneaking through, avoiding raising the alarm, isolating the different groups, thus becomes part of the adventure. A ruin may have sub-areas held by organized groups, but either they are working against each other, don't care about each other, or they are but a nugget within a larger disorganization. So, adventures like the Village of Hommlet's moathouse or the Keep on the Borderland's Caves of Chaos don't really count as strongholds, even though they have stronghold-like areas.

True strongholds are challenging, and you'll notice they were all written for medium-to high-level characters. They are crafted to overwhelm players who come without subterfuge or tactics. In fact, if the importance of strongholds in gaming has faded, this may be because the hobby has drifted apart from its wargame roots. Early D&D grew, via Chainmail, from miniatures wargaming scenarios involving sieges or spying against organized opposition, like Bodenburg and Braunstein.

The ultimate proof of the importance of strongholds comes from the "win" condition of the game, right through AD&D: get together enough men, moolah and mojo to build your own. The victorious player ascends to the Dungeon Master's throne, using the iconic graph paper not just to snail-creep a copy of someone else's dungeon, but to plan and build a stronghold and delvings of their own. Some old-school revival games, most notably Adventurer Conqueror King, hold on to this goal. And it's surely no coincidence that ACK's meta-plot of rising through the ranks of an organization by doing their dirty work can lead in turn to more stronghold busting than you might usually see in a modern-day campaign.

As a final example of the yin and yang of strongholds and ruins in gaming, consider the vast and uncompromising amateur PC game, Dwarf Fortress. You can play in two modes. First, dig and maintain a dwarven town complex underground, mining and crafting treasures and defending it from enemies. Then, after it is overrun (near-inevitably) by demons of the magma layer or invading zombie hordes or simply collapses in civil war, play in Adventurer mode within the same world, as a wandering figure bent on exploring its ruined fortresses, defeating their occupiers and looting their wealth. For sooner or later, every stronghold becomes a ruin...

Is-Book-Isms

In fiction writing you may have heard of the said-book-ism -- the overly descriptive dialogue synonym that went out of style around the 1970's largely due to its naming and shaming in the Turkey City Lexicon.

Well, if you're writing adventure scenarios you shouldn't be writing dialogue. Really. But there's a parallel in scenario descriptions: let's call it the "is-book-ism."

An idol of a horned demon looms over the room.
An idol of a horned demon dominates the room.
An idol of a horned demon commands the room.
An idol of a horned demon squats in the room.
An idol of a horned demon stands in the room.
An idol of a horned demon occupies the room.
An idol of a horned demon exists in the room.
An idol of a horned demon can be found in the room.

All to avoid the humble verb "to be" with its drabness and its insinuations of the passive voice...

An idol of a horned demon is in the room.

Most of these locutions are called out as cliches in the Fantasy RPG Bingo Card page by Ryan Macklin (refresh several times to get the picture). But is this fair?

Writing RPG scenario text is a unique literary enterprise. It's best compared to writing stage directions in a play, or the art directions in a comic book script. At its best, the genre works this way: a scenario author creates vivid images and interesting contingencies in the mind of the reader, the gamemaster, which she or he then describes to the players, who in turn react, unlocking more images and contingencies from the GM. Let's call this the GM-In-The-Middle Theory.

Trying to cut out the GM-In-The-Middle and communicate directly author-to-player, through boxed read-aloud text, is a widely and justly denounced "cheat" in this procedure. Having ruled that out, how then to write the module text in a way that helps the GM communicate and interact with the players?

Useful principles emerge from the GM-In-The-Middle Theory, if you consider you are writing for the players through their characters. So, don't describe anything the players will never get to know. Write the most apparent things first, then the more subtle things, then things that can only be known by interacting. Don't force the characters' reactions.

A harder question is, how deeply should these descriptions be written? Some have advocated a minimal, list-like format, to try to break the habit of read-aloud; dispensing with the humble "is" in much the same way that the Russian language does. I've never been happy or comfortable with this.

The GM-In-The-Middle approach explains why: to work in this way, the writing must create a fully formed and vivid image in the mind of the GM, an image that he or she envisions and believes in. Reading someone else's list makes me feel like I'm taking inventory in a dollhouse. Reading prose, even prose with archaic or formulaic or dungeon-kitsch elements, can transport the GM so that the job of description becomes natural. Perhaps the prose can furnish a few bright and lapidary phrases that make it through to the players, but the heavy lifting should happen directly through imagery -- just as someone who is fluent in a second language forms their words directly from raw thought rather than passing them through a process of conscious translation.

All this supports the Is-Book against its naysayers. As long as the prose is descriptive and evocative, without compromising either mission with cliched or rote genre-copying (who the hell knows what a gambrel roof is anyway?) it's OK to have pillars march away into darkness, idols loom, portcullises menace, balconies survey, and wardrobes dominate.

Castle of the Mad Archmage (2014): Short Review

This weekend BRW Publishing finally released the commercial version of Joe Bloch's Castle of the Mad Archmage megadungeon. I've been running people through (mostly) my homemade level one and the shallower levels of the free fan-release since I started DMing again, so I immediately ordered it from RPGNow in pdf and print.

Really, the Castle's unique virtue is that it's truly capable of taking an old-school party from level 1 to name level, with loads left over. No other product can make that boast. With 12 major levels averaging over 150 areas each, and abounding in special areas and challenges, the Castle is first past the post and still uncontested as a truly complete Old School megadungeon experience.

The other part of the Castle's appeal is that it's constructed, where possible, to match the reports and reminiscences of Gary Gygax and his players about the original Castle Greyhawk dungeon. Here you'll find analogues of the Great Stone Face, the Man of Gold, the chute to China, Obmi the dwarf, and many other legendary features. In the BRW release, necessarily so, the Greyhawk intellectual-property serial numbers have been filed off, but I suppose those who care about the difference will by definition know enough about the old Greyhawk campaign to make their own substitutions in play.

The main added material beyond the older, free pdf includes a complete upper castle works and Level 1, both of which are nicely designed, with a mix of weak monsters, powerful NPCs, and factions who -- much as in the original Castle Greyhawk -- extort tolls and tribute from parties venturing deeper. There's also an illustration booklet, Tomb of Horrors style, for some of the key sights in the dungeon. A nice touch, although I'm thinking some of the pages could have been used to illustrate difficult-to-describe puzzles like the Greek letter or ping-pong ones, rather than dungeon landmarks that can more easily be described verbally.

For the most part, except for some format changes and minor rewriting, the levels and rooms appear much the the same as in the previous product, at least from my perusal of the most familiar Level 2. There are expanded notes on play, including a huge table of rumors, a selection of quests, and improved information about the factions on each level. A nice touch at the start of each level chapter is a miniature map showing the location of any factions or special areas. The full-sized maps have their own booklet and are resized to fit a two-page spread. That's very useful, although I miss the grayscale rather than black background of the maps, as being easier to write notes on.

And notes there will be, because as before, much of the dungeon is given over to essentially empty or undetailed rooms, with one or two sentences describing by-the-book inhabitants and treasure. Many of the tricks and puzzles seem dead-dropped into the dungeon, bringing to mind the likes of White Plume Mountain. Along with certain features, these give a decidedly goofy feel to the environment; nonsense limericks, skeletal musicians, clown murals, and the like.

There's a conversation going on about hacking megadungeons, and I'll write soon about what I do to add  to the Castle myself. One thing to realize - there's not much to choose between a set of rooms left empty for the filling, versus a set of rooms filled with random monsters, undetailed treasure, clues and dungeon dressing features that lead nowhere, and so on. While the Castle has many subtly interesting situations and set-pieces, there is also a lot of filler in the spaces. Still, the thing is finished and out there, so I can't criticize too much ...

In conclusion, serious old school aficionados should put the Castle at the top of their shopping lists this year. Again ... there is nothing else like it. The full set of pdfs is $20 and the full set of softcover books (plus pdfs) will run you about twice that, plus shipping.

The Lichway (White Dwarf 9): Concept and Design

Spoilers, of course, are ahead.

The most "WTF" illustration I could find.

I never really understood the point of the Sussurus monster from its description in the ol' Fiend Folio. A big headless ape made of honeycombed bone channels? Wind blows through it and makes a sound that sleeps the undead? Only after opening Albie Fiore's White Dwarf module The Lichway, from 1978, do we see this critter in its original context. Yes, it makes perfect sense as the linchpin of a puzzle-trick set up to confound murderhobo play. If you kill it or drive it away, the colossal undead army it was keeping asleep wakes up and comes after your weedy 1st level party.

There's a clear debt the James Raggi module Death Frost Doom owes to this module. In DFD, the undead-sleeping monster is a plant that has to be hacked down to get to a treasure, its sound described with the word "susurrus." Fighting Fantasist calls this more than coincidence and cries foul; another review gives DFD a pass. I think it's no coincidence, but it is possible that Raggi's starting point here was the monster from the Fiend Folio, a source more available to someone who grew up in the US than old White Dwarf issues. Although it is odd that of all the undead critters it could be keeping asleep - up to and including an actual lich - the "undead army" happens to get picked. It's also peculiar that we expect attribution for adventure ideas but not monster variants, but there it is.

Anyway, I also agree with Fighting Fantasist that the original trick is more fair to the players. Yes, DFD famously delivers "doom," but the point of horror or any other foreign genre in an adventure game is to provide a setting that can be won through by cooperation and wit, not to "doom" the party. The Lichway gives a clue in the form of a rhyme and a couple of sample undead that are lying on the ground sleeping, and gives more options in interacting with the caged-up critter.

Structurally, The Lichway offers a single path of least resistance on the way to the susurrus, who sits atop a big hidden treasure. Following the ever-louder sound, through a couple of easily opened doorways, leads you right there. There are also side paths that pass through secret doors and a flooded area, leading ultimately to the secondary path of the dungeon, occupied primarily by the renegade magic-user Dark Odo and her minions. In terms of my previous article, this is an almost-railroad that gives the possibility of alternate paths, Jaquays-style. But in practice, to reach the susurrus any other way is hard.

The most likely scenario, then, is that the party proceeds down the right-hand path, screws up at the climax and has to run from the skeletal multitude that appears along their previous path, and so flees back through the left-hand passage, encountering Dark Odo along the way. Because of the clueing and design, though, it doesn't feel like a railroad in play, and this kind of illusionism is perfect for a limited-run adventure - or as the title describes it, a "mini-dungeon."

Next: Hacking, fudging and running the Lichway, and the value of "diorama-style" descriptions.

Review: Red Tam's Bones, Dragonsfoot Module DF27

For four months or so, John Turcotte's AD&D 1st edition module "Red Tam's Bones" (available for free here) has been the loose and often-violated framework for the adventures of my main party in and around the lands of Faerie, which in my world extradimensionally straddle the border between the Inviolacy (think Papal States) and the elven kingdoms. So, the main plot seemed ideal - a cranky Abbot underwrites two expeditions into Faerie lands to find the bones, and later the musical instrument, of the bard Red Tam. A few spoilers follow.

All the same, my initial impression of it was negative. Indeed, we are in the world of the wistful and fanciful fey, but it never helps to have the exposition written out in some sort of Anglo-Celtic-Groundskeeper Willie dialect, with smirking asides so coy that like the Eric Idle "nudge nudge" character, it's not entirely clear what exactly is being intimated.

Let us banish boxed text to the training modules, where it will exist only to teach beginning gamesmasters how to turn third-person prose into second-person immersion on the fly - never, ever as a permanent crutch. And above the ruins of its dwelling let us erect this motto from today, from a dude who gets it:

... the intention is not to describe things directly but to put them inside the head of the DM who will then describe them to other people. You are not making a normal form of art, you are making a virus. It is not to be looked at, it is to infect people, go inside them and then they do actions round a game table with other people- Patrick Stuart  

Anyway, once past this barrier, you are in the first part of the adventure, where the party is trying to get the titular bones in a wild goose chase across three outdoor locations separated by encounter rolls in various terrains. There is a path suggested, but it's not a railroad; the players may follow rumors in a different order or (as mine did) subvert the mission entirely. This may cause less confident DMs anxiety, but it was perfectly fine with me. The locations are very atmospheric and folkloric, with challenges going beyond simple-minded combat or riddle-me-ree; my party actually approached one of these spots, the faerie mounds, in their later outdoor travels, but thought better of investigating.

The second part turned out to be really wonderful. The goose chase this time targets Red Tam's rebec (a primitive viola) and the evil faerie lover who drained his soul and gave the rebec to her latest paramour, Diarmuid. Her place, the Vernal House, is a sprawling mansion in ornate decay, stuffed to the gills with strange curios, eccentric residents, and treasure if you can get it. My party cut more or less to the chase, which is easy to do if you ask around, and only sampled a few of the wonders available: the three bird-men in the cottage, Diarmuid's horse, the art gallery on the second floor with a painting that clones one of your characters to create a memorable villain.

I appreciated the different denizens - and one of the most important in my run was a random encounter with a spriggan whom I named Goatgamble. These characters can be set into motion like billiard balls, interacting with the weird environment. Goatgamble reaction-rolled his way into love with an elven henchwoman and craftily led the party to the gallery painting so he could have his own evil clone of her.

If you were to use the Vernal House, it might work better as a one-shot with no set goal or only vague rumors, rather than follow the rebec-stealing plot. Give your adventurers only one shot at its riches - it wouldn't do to have them just clear it out room by room like some dirty dungeon.

D&D's Modular Bounty

Last night the players met the Three Fine Gentlemen, who in the Dragonsfoot module "Red Tam's Bones" are set to bedevil the players as they go about the quest of recovering the bones for the good of the Holy Church and the erotically haunted Duke's daughter.

In the course of conversing with these foes, my players realized they liked them and the roguish, departed Tam better than they did the sourpusses of the Church and State, their ostensible employers. Avoiding a donnybrook, they still got experience from the encounter, and a new tip - perhaps the spirit of Red Tam could be found elsewhere, placated by other means?

"Yes, but ..."

So off the railroad and on to  the Faerie Road to a certain Market, from where it should be possible to find the Winter Court wherein Red Tam's spirit might be found ...

Oh YEAH. The thing about D&D is that, over nearly 40 years of this game, there is an insane amount of material that is more or less compatible with whatever version you're playing. Need a Faerie Court? There's Ravenloft stuff and 3rd edition stuff  and even a tasty-looking module from the renowned Wolfgang Baur which comes wrapped in a 4th edition crust ...

Well, despite the wrong turn in later editions, D&D's basic simplicity makes it ideal for improvised, free-running campaigns like the one I run. And sure, there are plenty of other simple systems. But what I appreciate about D&D is the ready availability of material - to be modified and hacked and hijacked to be sure, like my players hijacked "Red Tam's Bones," but that's part of the fun, and having the D&D corpus at my beck and call means I only have to put in a fraction of the work.

Anomalous Subsurface Environment

Anomalous Subsurface Environment, by Patrick Wetmore of the Henchman Abuse blog,  is the first installment of a megadungeon. It has been out for about a year, and shortlisted for the Three Castles Award in 2012. I decided to get it at the OSR booth at Gencon this year, not because it would be particularly useful in my current campaign, but as inspiration and possible grounds for a future campaign.

Please note that some spoilers for the ASE settting, inevitably, follow.

Also, this video by The Sword.

Wetmore puts the players in an explicitly postapocalyptic setting bombed back to medieval technology millennia ago, where tyrannical wizards rule the majority of humanity and one free city, Denethix, is hesitantly crawling up the technology tree. This somewhat excuses the dedication of about half of the book to setting up the city and surrounding area. Settings like this are rare in gaming outside of Gamma World and the like, although more common in literary and pop science fiction. There are subtle and not-so-subtle nods to Gene Wolfe (both New Sun and Long Sun series), Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz, the film Zardoz, etc. Plus, dinosaurs.

Some goofiness in the art and descriptions is excessive, but easily toned down with a simple twist of the dial - for example, I'd change the cornstalk men to Wolfean chlorophyll-sustained Green Men.

The titular ASE is a self-sustaining, seemingly magical realm discovered in the ancient days beneath a mountain near Denethix, and investigated in secret by scientists. It conforms to the model of a mythical underworld dungeon, with dressed stone walls, ironbound doors, monsters, traps, and treasure. Elusive "dungeon elementals" creep around, closing doors and restocking rooms. After the research facility was sealed four thousand years ago, accelerated mutations in the inhabitants and investigators have left the chambers teeming with rival factions: surviving robot soldiers, standard D&D goblins, H. G. Wells' morlocks, and "Screechmen" patterned after the Weekly World News' Bat Boy.

Part of the charm and dark comedy comes from the multi-layered civilization/barbarism faceoff. You have the schematic and stagey primitive ruin that is the ASE itself, being studied by the high-tech scientists whose works have decayed and degenerated, while your explorers are breaking in from a society on the rise that wants answers, laser guns, and money. The strong implication: your discovery of the ASE complex and its mysteries will seriously upset the political and technological balance of the world. Yes, there's a meaningful megadungeon among all the macabre inventiveness.

The module does a good job of leading potential adventurers into the drama of opening the sealed Environment, and also stands out for interesting map and monster designs, including the memorable corpse jellies and blade zombies. Descriptions are sparse, in old-school style, except when outlining the complications of a mechanism or the history of a particularly meaningful room. However, only one complete level of the megadungeon, plus an entry level and a side adventure, is detailed in the volume.

In sum, I'm glad I picked this up. It would be my first choice right now if I wanted to start running a non-standard campaign setting while still keeping old-school D&D compatible rules. The only question for me is whether and how soon the next installment is coming.

Analog, Digital, Procedural

I haven't posted that much about my Tomb of the Iron God campaign - though I did share one memorable mini-game event. I have been reluctant because a) I'm not sure people want to read play reports, honestly and b) it's so tied into the Tomb that I really wanted to wait to the end to do a report.

That report is coming, but it will be more a review of the module and description of how I altered the Tomb for my playing style, than what the players did therein. And to get into that I need to talk about the three things I find useful in an adventure key, without the cliched and restricting terms "crunch" and "fluff".

Analog details: Descriptions in real-world language of the physical environment, serving three purposes: to set an atmosphere of immersion and discovery; to give hooks for player creativity as they interact with the surroundings, and to provide grounds for old-school rulings of the kind famously described in Finch's Primer. This can also extend to psychological descriptions of NPCs and their motivations.

"This room is a small domed natural cavern 10' high at its apex. Its walls are moist and caked with formations of off-white and beige limestone, while a layer of fine sand covers the floor. A crude gate of half-rotted oak logs lashed together with rope stands at the north exit, held closed by a twine latch on the inside. A patrol of 6 kobolds armed with clubs and throwing stones is resting here and telling stories. The troops are wary but led by a hothead, Kzitch."

Digital stats: Numbers and classifications in game terms, on which game procedures and rules can be based.

"The north door can be easily opened from the south side, but takes a door opening roll at -1 from the north side. There are 6 kobolds - a leader with 4 hp and five with 3,3,2,1 and 1 hp. Kobold: AC 13, +0 to hit, damage = club 1d6 or thrown rock 1d3 with 30' range, move 9, morale +2 if leader alive and present, -2 otherwise."

Procedural instructions:Directions for running the adventure in an if-then format.

"In this room are 6 kobolds including a leader. If they detect the party first, the leader will take 1 combat round to rally his wary troops, and then charge headlong. If surprised by the party, they will rush behind the gate and attempt to hold it against the party. If the gate is pushed by those on one side it will start to topple forward to crush those on the other side, possibly creating a shoving contest."

So, at one end of the descriptiveness scale is the minimalist kind of description found in the Stonehell or Castle of the Mad Archmage megadungeons. Statblocks are often dispensed with, you are lucky if you get hit points for the creatures, and the DM is usually left to provide details about the physical surroundings and play out the logic of the encounter.

At the other end is the maximal style of, say, Ruins of Undermountain, where everything and every contingency is described along all three dimensions in great detail, you get to know every hobgoblin's government name (I'm hardly exaggerating) and one room description takes up half a page to two pages.

I actually find all three of these elements useful, in the appropriate doses. It's good not to have to flip through a rulebook to find an armor class, and good to have some idea of the monster strategy. But there has to be some compromise, because I want the written material to be manageable and not stretch over multiple pages. Of these three, the one I can most easily come up with myself on the fly is the procedural, and the one thing I would most like to see is the analog.

You see, in Old School play ... fluff is crunch. The sandy floor, moist walls made of soft stone, composition of the gate, and disposition of the kobolds all can feed into the players' improvised plans and the DM's improvised rulings. Critics of "fluff" in adventure writing, already prejudiced by that term, call it unnecessary. Indeed, the prose need not be purple. But basic material facts about the structure of things are something I'd rather not have to improvise, even though I have done so many times running both Tomb of the Iron God and Castle of the Mad Archmage.

Megadungeon Mini-Module: The Tavern

With all my thoughts on the modular megadungeon, I realized something recently while on the road. The best format to present my Cellars of the Castle Ruins adventure (an Upper Works and Level One compatible with Castle of the Mad Archmage) would be in modular segments.

Here is my first such segment. Players in any of my existing campaigns, of course, should not peek. Can we get a crowdsourced megadungeon going across the blogiverse? Talysman has taken the first step.

The main elements are a one-page format, a three-letter code, a map at 0.5 cm = 10 feet, a key to said map, and a small graphic that presents the shape of the module at 0.5 cm = 50 feet (this one is a 3 x 3 square). The small graphic is meant to be traced or cut out and fit into the larger-scale map of the megadungeon.

It's also helpful to have the exits mapped to the middle square of any given 50' edge, so the segments can fit with each other and the usual style of geomorph. Note also the blank line left to fill in your own megadungeon and campaign connections.

Anyway, let me know if you try your own hand at the megadungeon mini-module!