Monte Cook’s Banewarrens is one of the best dungeon-based campaigns of all time.

The campaign, designed for 6^th to 10^th level characters, was originally published for D&D 3rd Edition in 2002. When I read it way back then, I was immediately enamored and knew that I wanted to run it. At the time, I was running an epic fantasy campaign where the PCs had to go searching for various artifacts, and I ended up routing them through Ptolus – the city where the Banewarrens are located – so that I could tease the strange and mysterious Spire that towers over the city, anticipating that when that campaign wrapped up, I would be running The Banewarrens for them next.

Unfortunately, that gaming group broke up. A few years later, however, I had a new group and Monte Cook was releasing Ptolus: City by the Spire, the nearly 700-page sourcebook describing that selfsame city where the Banewarrens were located. The stars were aligned, the campaign was begun, and I have never left the City by the Spire.

I’ve been singing the praises of both Ptolus and The Banewarrens for years, but I’ve never written a proper review. Recently, however, both books have been converted to D&D 5^th Edition, and so it seems like an opportune time to rectify that oversight.

BEHIND THE BANEWARRENS

Thousands of years ago, a good man believed that good and evil existed in balance in the world. Therefore, destroying evil was only a temporary victory, because the evil – released back into the world – would soon find some new way to manifest. The only way to truly triumph over evil, therefore, would be to instead imprison it; to lock it away from the world and keep it where it could do no harm.

This good man, therefore, began a grand project and daring crusade: Recruiting others to his cause, he sent them out into the world to gather banes – things of great evil, whether objects, diseases, or people – while he constructed the Banewarrens, a vast underground vault in which all of these objects could be stored.

Bringing all of this evil together in one place, unfortunately, proved to be a horrible mistake: First, the earth itself rebelled against the evil, thrusting upwards thousands of feet into a terrifying Spire. Then, as the good man’s servants labored to repair the vaults, something went wrong. The good man was corrupted by the banes he had collected. He became the Banelord, betraying his friends and using the evil artifacts they had collected to become a dark and terrible force.

Long ago, great heroes arose who defeated the Banelord. But the Banewarrens, and most of the evil banes which had been sealed within them, remained. In the millennia since, many have attempted to breach them, hoping to claim the banes within and perhaps becomes a second Banelord. But the defenses of the Banewarrens repelled all such attempts, and many believed that, despite his tragic fall, the good man had wrought well and the Banewarrens were, in fact, impregnable.

They were all wrong.

UNLEASHING THE BANEWARRENS

The Banewarrens campaign begins with a random encounter.

The PCs are passing through the streets of Ptolus when they encounter a dark elf named Tavan Zith, a nexus of wild and chaotic magic which is constantly mutating anyone who draws near him.

This is not, in fact, a scenario hook for The Banewarrens (structurally speaking). At first glance, it will likely seem to just be another example of the strange and exotic things that happen on the streets of Ptolus. This will quickly cease to be true, however, as the PCs’ reputation and their involvement in dealing with Tavan Zith brings them to the attention of two different factions.

Because it turns out that Tavan Zith is supposed to be locked up in the Banewarrens. And if he is instead wandering the streets, it can only mean that the Banewarrens have been breached.

The first faction to approach the PCs is the Church of Lothian. They believe the Banelord hid a holy relic known as the Sword of Truth in the Banewarrens and they want the PCs to retrieve it.

Next up is the Inverted Pyramid, an arcane guild which is deeply concerned about the Banewarrens being opened, but also wants to learn as much as possible before everything gets sealed up again.

At first it will seem as if the PCs can serve both their patrons, but as the campaign continues this will become increasingly difficult for them to do. Furthermoer, as they begin investigating the Banewarrens, they will discover that another faction, the Pactlords of the Quaan, is responsible for the breach. A little later, a fourth faction will likely discover what’s happening and also get involved.

This is, ultimately, what makes The Banewarrens such a special campaign. It’s a dungeon-based campaign that’s absolutely drenched in faction intrigue. The PCs will have to juggle the agendas of friendly factions, while simultaneously trying to deal with the machinations of antagonistic ones. (You might even be surprised to discover which ones end up being which in your campaign!) Cook does a fantastic job of presenting these faction intrigues in a format which is both easy for the GM to understand and also packaged into highly practical chunks that can be readily deployed on the table.

The two primary tools for doing this are:

• Events. Listed at the beginning of each chapter, these are floating scenes that can be dropped into the PCs’ dungeon explorations.
• Time Passes. Certain dungeon rooms are flagged with additional key entries describing how the room might be changed by the actions of other factions. (These can be used when the PCs first enter a room if they’ve been dilly-dallying or busy elsewhere, but can also be saved and used when the PCs return to the room later to show that they’re not alone down here.)

In practice, these are quite possible, making it possible to create the simulacrum of real activity with great ease and giving you all the raw materials needed to actively run the factions with only a little extra effort.

What makes this work particularly well is that Cook has designed the Banewarrens to periodically pull the PCs back into the metropolis above. (For example, at one point early in the campaign they’ll figure out that they need a particular magical resource to unlock the doors within the Banewarrens and continue making progress, so they’ll need to leave the dungeon to track it down.) This ingeniously creates absences from the dungeon, allowing the Events and Time Passes elements to be seamlessly implemented. It also allows the PCs to interact with the other factions in new and different ways. Plus, these interludes also provide breaks from dungeon-based play, mixing things up and preventing the campaign from become a monotonous slog.

THE NATURE OF THE BANEWARRENS

The Banewarrens are sometimes described as a “megadungeon,” but I don’t think this is quite right. They’re a rather large and ingeniously mapped dungeon, with more than a hundred rooms, but they’re designed as a single, coherent scenario with the PCs pursuing a singular goal, and not the warren of disparate scenarios you’d see in a true campaign dungeon. (See Types of Dungeons for a deeper discussion of the differences here.)

This is not, of course, to the detriment of The Banewarrens. The singular purpose and vision allows Cook to craft a truly memorable – and terrifying! – environment for the PCs to explore. The expertly xandered maps, distinct flavoring of the different sections of the Banewarrens, and the unique sense of progression (as the PCs travel in-and-up, rather than down-and-out) provide an excellent playground, into which Cook pours a ghastly variety of horrific foes and a creepy panoply of banes.

The banes, in particular, gives the Banewarrens a very unique feel. It fundamentally inverts the typical dungeoncrawling tropes: Instead of kicking down doors and grabbing loot to haul out of the dungeon, the PCs will instead quickly learn that they need to keep the doors locked at all costs and make sure nothing gets out. The Banelord may or may not have been right about the conservation of evil in the universe, but there’s little doubt that releasing these things of great evil into the world will have horrible consequences.

(“Hey! What are the PCs going to do about treasure?!” Fortunately, the other factions and the interludes that take place outside the Banewarrens are designed to solve this problem.)

CONCLUSION

And all of that is why The Banewarrens is one of the best dungeon-based campaigns of all time.

If it hadn’t already been converted to the 5^th Edition rules, I’d still be recommending that you track down a copy of the 3^rd Edition campaign and adapt it to 5^th Edition ASAP. (Or Shadowdark or Basic Fantasy RPG or Old School Essentials or maybe even Mork Borg, whatever floats your dungeoncrawling boat.) It’s not just that it’s a fantastic campaign that you and your players will remember forever; it’s also one of those transformative campaigns capable of teaching you a whole new way to run your game.

GRADE: A+

Author: Monte Cook
Publisher: Monte Cook Games
Cost: $12.99 (5E PDF) / $6.66 (3E PDF)
Page Count: 180

ADDITIONAL READING
Review: Ptolus – City of Adventure
Ptolus: In the Shadow of the Spire
Ptolus Remix: The Mrathrach Agenda
Ptolus Remix: The Vladaam Affair

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 39C: Liberation of the Slaves

Tor became a whirling dervish – a one-man electrical storm – at the top of the stairs, holding off the churning wall of fur. Several of the ratlings leapt down onto the stairs behind him, surrounding him utterly, but they were no match for the speed or ferocity of Tor’s electrical blade.

When the furious job was done, Tor and Elestra quickly got the prisoners up the stairs and out the front door of the temple. They sent them, with money in their pockets and food in their bellies, to the watch station in Delvers’ Square.

Particularly in campaigns where the PCs are Big Damn Heroes™, I think it can be really powerful to show how their actions have earned them a reputation.

You save the world a few times and people start taking notice, ya know?

One technique I particularly like is the Big Social Event, as we saw back in Session 12: A Party at Castle Shard. As I discussed in Game Structure: Party Planning:

I’ve … found them to be effective as a way of signaling when the PCs have changed their sphere of influence. You rescued the mayor’s daughter from a dragon? Chances are you’re going to be the belle of the ball. And you’re going to discover that powerful and important people have become very interested in making your acquaintance.

When these events work, they’re exciting and engaging experiences, often providing a memorable epoch for the players and spinning out contacts and consequences that will drive the next phase of the campaign.

But, more broadly, the attitude of the world towards the PCs should shift. Partly because the players get a huge thrill out of their actions being recognized. Partly because it just makes sense.

One thing I find frequently useful for this is some form of Reputation system. For In the Shadow of the Spire, I’ve been using a streamlined variant of the Reputation mechanics from the 3^rd Edition Unearthed Arcana sourcebook.

The short version is:

1. Stuff that the PCs do earn them Fame or Infamy points, which collectively create a reputation bonus.
2. When the PCs meet a new NPC for the first time, the NPC makes a DC 25 skill or Intelligence check + the PCs’ reputation bonus.
3. On a success, they recognize the PCs. Their reaction depends on their opinion of the actions the PCs’ took to earn their Fame/Infamy (and this may also inflict bonuses or penalties to subsequent social skill checks equal to the reputation bonus).

I can also flip that around and give NPCs a Reputation score so that PCs can recognize them with a successful Knowledge (Local) + reputation check.

In this case, I decided that recusing the slaves from the Temple of the Rat God would create a big enough splash that it would add a half point to their PCs’ reputation. To track this, I have a short section in my campaign status document that looks like this:

REPUTATION

FAME: 5.5

INFAMY: 0

FAME: Rescued Phon. Recovered Jasin’s body. Castle Shard party. Shilukar’s bounty. Association with Dominic. Tavan Zith riot. Freeing slaves and children from Temple of the Rat God.

The quick rep reference basically gives me a menu of stuff that I can have NPCs who recognize the PCs mention. (“Didn’t I see you at the Harvesttime party at Castle Shard?” or “Oh my god! You saved my brother during the riot in Oldtown!” or “I heard you helped us out on that Shilukar case.”)

In practice, I grade these on a pseudo-logarithmic scale: Rescuing the pregnant Phon was enough to get earn their first point of Fame (people might recognize them as “the delvers who rescued that pregnant woman!”), but after that they aren’t going to earn Fame for every single person they rescue.

In any case, I’ve found this minimalist reputation system to be pretty effective. It tends to only be meaningful once every few sessions (although as their Reputation grows, that becomes more frequent), but the maintenance cost is extremely low and the moments when it’s triggered provide nice little spontaneous pops of payoff and, in some cases, unexpected twists.

Campaign Journal: Session 40A – Running the Campaign: Show the Help
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

Mothership is a sci-fi horror RPG. Think Alien, The Thing, Pitch Black, or Annihilation. The core boxed set of the game comes with two amazing resources.

First, Unconfirmed Contact Reports, which is Mothership’s equivalent of a Monster Manual. It includes a fair share of ghouls and greys and husks, but also even more terrifying threats like The Good and Granny and Sally in the Screen.

Second, the Shipbreaker’s Toolkit, which notably includes a dozen ships with full specs, illustration, and maps, like the Sato GS Grail VI executive transport:

I love this kind of raw adventure fodder. Stuff that’s prepped and packaged so that you can just drop it straight into session and take off running. You need to put in zero work, because everything you need is already on the page. You can just use it. And often not just once, but over and over and over again.

You’d think this sort of stuff would be the rule rather than exception in RPGs, but this is surprisingly not the case. You’re far more likely to get a bunch of “adventure ideas” that you need to flesh out. Or you’ll get something like a ship described in broad terms, but without the concrete tools you need to bring it to the table with rock solid confidence.

Because Mothership gives you these great resources, though, we have an opportunity to leverage them to even greater heights.

DERELICT ADVENTURE RECIPE

Scenario Hook: The PCs find a derelict spacecraft floating in space. Or they answer a distress beacon. Or they’re sent as a salvage crew.

Step 1 – Ship: Pick a random ship from the Shipbreaker’s Toolkit or roll on this table.

Step 2 – Monster: Pick a random monster from Unconfirmed Contact Reports. This monster is onboard the derelict (and is almost certainly why it’s a derelict).

Note: Not every creature in Unconfirmed Contact Reports is equally likely to work well with this adventure recipe, so I’m not including a random table here. (If you want to roll randomly, you can flip to a random page or roll a random number on the book’s Index.) Don’t forget the Five Quick Horrors on the back cover of the book!

Step 3 – Monster Sign:

• Pick three ship compartments. Place a hint suggesting the horror that was unleashed here in each compartment.
• Pick three more compartments. Place a clue revealing the monster’s identity and/or abilities in each compartment.
• If the monster has a special weakness, add three clues that reveal this weakness anywhere in the ship. (One of these clues may be found while encountering the creature itself.)

Step 4 – Confrontation: Either…

• Pick a compartment where he monster is currently located.
• Roll 1d6 each time the PCs enter a compartment. On a roll of 1, the monster finds them and attacks.

Or both.

And that’s the whole recipe. As you can see, you can probably spin up the whole adventure in less than fifteen minutes. (I’d say you could it while the players are rolling up their characters, but that’s probably not true only because character creation in Mothership is so insanely fast.)

LARGER SHIPS

Some of the ships described in the Shipbreaker’s Toolkit, like the Northstar Paragon exploration vessel, are very large. Using the basic recipe on these ships will result in adventure content being spread out too thinly across the numerous rooms.

Option 1: Increase the number of hints and clues. For example, you might use the guidelines above for every deck of the ship instead

Option 2: Run the ships as a sector crawl, reading “sector” in the recipe everywhere that it says “compartment.” (Conveniently, the ships in the Shipbreaker’s Toolkit are already mapped in sectors.)

RANDOM DERELICT SHIPS

The adventure Dead Planet, which can be found in the deluxe edition of Mothership or purchased separately, includes a Random Derelict Ship Generator, including stuff like random cargo and, even more importantly, a random deckplan generator.

How incredibly useful!

Instead of selecting a ship from the Shipbreaker’s Toolkit, you can obviously use the Random Derelict Ship Generator to provide an endless variety of ships for this adventure recipe!

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