IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

SESSION 16A: TO LABYRINTH’S END

January 19th, 2008
The 6th Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

They left the Temple of Asche. Tee headed down towards South Market to meet with Edarth and collect their payment for the consignment of gems. The rest of the group split up: Ranthir and Elestra headed back to the Delver’s Guild Library to continue Ranthir’s research. The others headed towards the Undermarket and began asking questions about the taint and showing around the tainted objects they had recovered.

Their goal was to find out more about the taint or the objects or both. Maybe there was some other way that they could dispose of the objects or cleanse themselves of the taint.

Unfortunately, their inquiries were unsuccessful. Those who had any familiarity with the taint could only give them one piece of advice: Stay away from it.

Sheva Callister told them the same thing when they asked her about it: “There are dark things beneath the city. Some look for the power to withstand them, but in my experience its better to learn how to avoid them.”

RETURN TO THE LOWER LEVEL

By noon they had all returned to the Ghostly Minstrel. They had learned nothing of value, but at least they had the money they would need to pay the Temple for their cleansing rites the next day.

Despite the fact that neither Tee nor Ranthir were feeling entirely well, the decision was made to return to Ghul’s Labyrinth. “I’d rather not just sit around and wait,” Tee said. “Besides, I may feel a little under the weather, but it’s not that bad.”

They first thing they did was open the doors to the temple of ebony, throw every item they had identified as tainted into the room, and then slam the door shut again. Then they headed straight back to the area they had been exploring before being driven out of the complex by their wounds. The strewn wreckage of the constructs was undisturbed, and they took this as a sign that there were no more immediate threats in the area.

On the far side of the chamber of the jewel scarabs they found a series of workshops that had apparently been dedicated to the creation of various constructs.

In the first of these chambers there was a large forge built into the corner. Strange metal frames were built up here and there and the middle of the room was dominated by a large stone worktable. The materials in this room had been badly damaged, but Ranthir estimated that it could still be quite valuable (worth 2,000 gold pieces or more). However, the total weight of it all – more than five thousand pounds – quickly dissuaded them from any thoughts of looting the place.

The new chamber appeared to be a parts storage of some kind. The walls of the room had been carved out with numerous cubbyholes, cabinets, shelves, and the like. Ranthir identified these golem construction parts as being more valuable – worth 5,000 gold pieces — and lighter weight (only a thousand pounds or so). But it was still more than they could hope to carry out of here. (“We’ll need to come back with hirelings,” Agnarr said, gazing appreciatively around the room.)

In the next chamber there were several rack-like structures running down the length of either wall. Most of these racks were empty, but two of them still contained mechanical constructs.

Various sections of these constructs, however, were open. They had either been disassembled or were never complete to begin with. Ranthir was intrigued at the thought of completing them, but this was a project that would undoubtedly require a great deal of study and even more time.

For now they moved on, taking a hall that led east out of this final chamber. This took them into another workroom in which a large drill – literally ten feet long and half as thick – was suspended from scaffolding. The drill was flanked by two workbenches and was clearly unfinished. However, Ranthir was able to ordain enough of its mechanisms to recognize that, intact, it would have been self-propelling. The drill’s cutting surfaces were edged with at least 9,000 gold pieces worth of adamantine.

While Ranthir had been examining the drill’s mechanisms, Tee had been poking through the workbenches. In one of the many drawers, she found a cedar box inlaid with Ghul’s skull sigil in blackoak on the lid.

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Go to Part 1

This is the point where we take all of the procedures we’ve discussed up to this point and put them into practice in order to generate a dungeon key.

In order to make full use of this material, you’ll need copies of the Blackmoor Dungeon maps. The maps from the First Fantasy Campaign are ideal, but those from Zeitgeist Games’ Dungeons of Castle Blackmoor are adequate, despite introducing a number of new errors. (The most notable of which was that the cartographer didn’t understand how Arneson indicated secret doors on his maps, so missed several of them and turned the rest into normal doors.) The Zeitgeist Games release does have the advantage of currently being available on DriveThruRPG.

Even without the Blackmoor maps, however, it should be noted that these procedures can be used with any dungeon (particularly those designed along megadungeon lines), even one of your own! So you could grab Undermountain or the Castle of the Mad Archmage or Rappan Athuk and go to town. Or pull out the graph paper and get to work. You wouldn’t be the first, but you would join the same heady tradition as Greg Svenson’s Tonisborg, Richard Snider’s Baronies, and Gygax’s Greyhawk.

There are four versions of the key available for download as Microsoft Word files:

Blank Template – Glendower Template – Seed 1 – Seed 2

COLLECTED ZIP FILE

THE KEYS

BLANK TEMPLATE: This file is a blank template for stocking the dungeons of Castle Blackmoor. It includes the first seven levels, with a table including spots for Protection Points, Creatures, and Treasure/Notes. When I stocked the dungeon, I did three passes:

1. Check each room for habitation and, if so, generate Protection Points.
2. Go back to each room with a Protection Point budget and generate creatures.
3. Make treasure tests for all of the rooms.

It stops at Level 7 because that’s where Arneson’s guidance for protection point budgets stopped. I’m not certain whether it makes more sense to continue increasing the point values at higher levels or allow them to plateau at 50 x 1d10, and I figured putting the current material into play might help elucidate the matter. (So we’ll see where that leads us the in future.)

GLENDOWER TEMPLATE: I’m referring to this format as a Glendower template because it’s modeled after the presentation of the Glendower Dungeon in the First Fantasy Campaign:

As I described in Reactions OD&D: The Arnesonian Dungeon, I found this particular format fascinating because the combination of treasure + protection point budget creates a specific tactical “shape” for the dungeon, but allows the GM to completely reinvent the dungeon on-the-fly each time they run it: This time you spend the protection point budget on goblins and ogres and the Glendower Dungeons are an outpost of the Goblin King. Next time you spend them on Nazgul and it’s a wraith-infested ruin haunted by the ancient nobles who once ruled its halls. The next time it’s infested with giant spiders. And so forth.

A Glendower template can also allow the GM to more precisely indicate what the inhabited areas of “interest” are in a dungeon while still providing an ample opportunity for random generation to create spontaneity in actual play. (That is not the case here; this Glendower template of the Blackmoor dungeons was randomly generated.)

SEED 1: This was the result of me fully stocking the Blackmoor dungeon levels. This is the version of the dungeon that I’ve been running (and which it looks like I’ll be continuing to run for awhile longer as an open table).

SEED 2: To demonstrate the flexibility of the system, I started over and started a second seed of the entire dungeon. (This took about 45 minutes to do all seven levels.) Perhaps the most notable take-away, in my opinion, is how the same stocking procedure can create radically different versions of the same dungeon.

For example, in the Seed 1 version of the dungeon I generated only one encounter (featuring 23 hobbits) on Level 1 and Level 2 was also sparsely inhabited. In Seed 2, however, the upper level is filled with hostile fey (including an attack force in the very first room!) and Level 2 is crawling with bad guys. In play, entering the Seed 1 version of the dungeon was a slow, tense build as empty corridors rolled out behind the party. The Seed 2 dungeon, on the other hand, would be an immediate meatgrinder.

OBSERVATIONS FROM STOCKING

What have I learned from actually putting these stocking procedures into practice?

Primarily that the system starts breaking down for me around Level 5. There are two interlinked problems.

First, it feels weird for most of the Group III creatures to appear in small hordes. Getting results like 6 Balrogs or 5 Dragons feels weird. I’ve decided to roll with it and see how that develops in actual play, but one option to explore in the future would be tweaking the procedures to favor one “Big Boss” with minions generated from the Group I or Group II tables. However…

Second, regardless, the increased point values at the lower levels fund huge numbers of bad guys. Results like “50 Nazguls” or “Giant, Basilisk, 8 Nazguls, 11 Ogres” or “23 Ents” are quite common.

This is inherent to Arneson’s stocking method, but the maps of Castle Blackmoor don’t adjust to reflect the nature of the encounters being generated: The rooms on the lower levels remain tiny and cramped.

Based on Arneson’s surviving key of the lower levels, this doesn’t seem to have bothered him: For example, he keys 250 dwarves into a 10′ x 40′ long space. Or 60 ogres into a 10′ x 10′ room.

For the moment, I’ve decided to play it as it lies, simply letting the keyed results stand as they were generated. If my players manage to delve down to those lower levels, it’s possible that I will discover (or create) some method of play that makes sense of these sorts of encounters. Given my predilection for complex, multi-room tactical scenarios, for example, it probably wouldn’t be difficult to interpret large hordes in one room as actually spilling out into neighboring chambers. Another option would be to interpret such entries as actually suggesting that the keyed room is merely the entrance to some sub-level of the dungeon. You can find a suggestion of that in my Seed 1 notes:

Level 4, Area 13: 56 Elf/Fairy – crystal ball; they must live beyond a magic portal in this dead end

Perhaps I’ll grab a few random Dyson Logos maps and have them on hand and simply use them as necessary. To fit them into the tight geography of the Blackmoor dungeons may be a trifle difficult, but extradimensional portals and long inter-level passages that locate the sub-level somewhere else or drop down/up at steep angles to connect with the wider tunnel systems around Blackmoor can simplify the difficulties.

Upon reflection, I actually quite like this “outpost entrance” model: Use a handful of the indicated creatures as a “door guard” of sorts and then use the remaining creatures indicated to stock the sub-level / micro-dungeon behind the outpost entrance. In this model, the lower levels of the dungeon would fall naturally into armed enclaves linked to the central dungeon topography. (This also feeds well into my personal vision of the dungeon as a place where materiel both Ancient and Evil wells up from the depths. These outposts become literal wells from which strange and eldritch things emerge into the dungeon core.)

But I digress.

More generally, I would note that the problem here is not necessarily with the strength of the encounters generated, but rather with the fact that the maps weren’t drawn to reflect the results the stocking procedure was generating. If you were using these same procedures to stock your own dungeons, the problem can be trivially resolved by mapping accordingly.

USING MINIMALIST KEYS IN PLAY

Running a dungeon using a minimalist key is, of course, an act of improvisation: You take scraps of information, throw them into the cauldron of your imagination, and you see what comes spilling out. As you do this over time, the details you’re creating will begin interacting with each other and creating new details.

In some cases, a story will come spilling out of the key as you’re rolling it up. For example, look at Level 4 of Seed 1:

The dice got in a rut and filled the entire north side of this level with Fighting-Men. This section of the dungeon also features a number of connections to the wider network of tunnels which surrounds the Castle Blackmoor dungeons. These tunnels, in turn, feature a number of exits to the surface. Putting these facts together, it’s easy to “see” that these fighting-men are actually bandits, staging their raids out of this hideout.

Or look at Level 6 in Seed 2: Here the dice pumped out 70+ Nazgul. I don’t know exactly what those Nazgul are doing down there, but the entire level — let’s call it Wraith Hall — will be heavily influenced in terms of visuals and content by their domination here.

More ideas will come into focus once play begins. For example, as I mentioned before, on Level 1 of the dungeon I had only generated a single encounter featuring 23 hobbits in Area 6:

It became clear to me that this must mean that this entire corner of the first level must actually be a hobbit warren! If the PCs ever go over there, they’ll find round doors and curved tunnels that — if they’re human — are rather too small for comfort. What are the hobbits doing down here? Well, they were first met as the result of a random encounter roll, so I decided that they must be patrolling the upper levels of the dungeon for Baron Fant, keeping them clear of dangers. (Which is, of course, why the upper two levels are, in this version of the dungeon, relatively unpopulated.) Which is why the PCs met Sir Alcestis, a brave hobbit knight dressed in blue livery, and his crew of hobbit wardens.

Later the PCs find the secret doors leading to Area 9:

Checking my key I see that this area contains a magic sword (the N Sword), but not creatures. The odd shape of the rooms and the presence of the sword combine to create a creepy chamber with full-length mirrors on each of the three walls: Those looking into one of the mirrors will see themselves holding the sword in their hand.

What’s the sword look like? Well, I check the Sword Matrix and I see that the N Sword is an anti-lycanthropic blade. So I describe it as have a hilt of gray fur with a kind of “tassel” attached to it. (Why? No particular reason. It’s just the image that occurs to me.)

Finding the N Sword is particularly interesting in this specific context, however, because one of the PCs has been bitten by a lycanthrope earlier in the session. In rolling up its variable stats, I discover that it is only intelligent enough to communicate by “passing on gross emotions”, so when the PCs successfully extricate the sword from the puzzle of the three mirrors, I describe the “tassel” as curling up like the tail of an angry cat and pointing directly at the afflicted character. This ability to detect lycanthropes at a short range isn’t listed in the sword’s stat block, but it follows logically (and, more importantly, awesomely) from the creative chain we’ve been following to get to this point.

Next: Restocking the Dungeon

Go to Part 1

The story goes that Dave Arneson’s Napoleonics players showed up for the game one week and discovered that Arneson had set up the model of a medieval castle on his ping-pong table. That evening they went on the first dungeoncrawl in history and the modern roleplaying game was born!

A great deal of confusion existed for a number of decades because Arneson had misremembered what model he had used. Thanks to Jeff Berry, we now know that the model Arneson had was Kibri model No. 37304, an N-Gauge model of Branzoll Castle. (A model which, not coincidentally, precisely matches the maps of Castle Blackmoor in the First Fantasy Campaign.) So not only do we know exactly what Castle Blackmoor looked like, it turns out that Kibri still manufactures this model kit! You can buy your own copy of Castle Blackmoor for $70-80!

CASTLE BLACKMOOR

• The castle was built during the reign of Robert I, but a fortress has stood at this location throughout recorded history and the castle incorporates many of the underground galleries of the older structures. Moat was created 400 years ago by the wizard Pissaic during the great Ben-Hassock invasions.
• The Coot Invasion began when the former Baron Wesley – now known as the Weasel – betrayed the Great Kingdom, lured the other local noblemen into Castle Blackmoor’s library, and slaughtered them. (“All that is really known is that they entered but never left and no trace of them was ever found.”) The Weasel now serves as loyal lieutenant to the Egg of Coot.
• The current ruler of Blackmoor, Baron Fant, rose to that position by virtue of his actions during the Coot Invasion.
• GM Note: See p. 21-23 of the First Fantasy Campaign for additional background material and maps.

EGG OF COOT

• This all consuming personality lives off the egos of others to support his own ego.
• At one time of humanoid appearance (or so historical records say), but his current appearance is uncertain – a huge mass of jointly operating cells, an undulating jelly, a thickly hided egg, pure energy, a lotus-eating man, a mass of living rock, etc.
• Communications with the Egg are through either direct mental transmission or an Old World artifact in his throne room which allows him to transmit from his City-Palace.
• His realm lies northeast of the castle, beyond the Wolf’s Head Pass (see First Fantasy Campaign, p. 18). [I imagine his City-Palace as a sort of cargo cult edifice of the Old World, with its peoples subjugated into a hive mind consciousness on the edge of the Egg’s vast, domineering mentality.]

FIRST SCENARIO

• Soukup, a treacherous agent of the Egg of Coot, placed Baron Fant into a magical sleep and flees into the dungeons below the castle.
• PCs are sent in pursuit.
• GM Note: Baron Fant has actually been infected with vampirism. (Historically, he becomes the infamous Sir Fang.)

DESIGN NOTES

The scenario here is meant to be evocative of, but not a precise duplicate, of the First Dungeon Adventure as described by Greg Svenson. (The enemy agent Soukup is a transparent homage to Jim Soukup, who played the balrog in the original scenario.)

It should be noted that it has become fairly apparent that the scenario described by Svenson is not, in fact, “the first dungeon adventure in history of Dungeons & Dragons.” (Although it is very possible that he’s unintentionally conflating details from different sessions.) I strongly suspect that the scenario hook that Svenson describes — the Bad Guys have done something to Baron Fant and fled into the dungeons — is, in fact, the event in which Fant was transformed into Sir Fang (the first vampire in the history of Dungeons & Dragons), which is why that’s reflected in my selected scenario hook here.

(In the real world, Dave Fant — Baron Fant’s player — had taken a job and needed to withdraw from playing in the campaign, as described in this interview. Arneson apparently came up with the idea of turning him into a vampire.)

DUNGEON FEATURES – ON THE MAP

Stairs: All stairs are circular (though not drawn that way). 20 to 30 feet between levels.

Secret Doors (Thin Wall): Anywhere there is a “thin wall” between areas.

Devil Fountains (Black Dots): Made of black, glass-like material with ruby eyes, gold horns, silver accoutrements. They spew out sulfuric acid. They are highly magical. Attempts to molest them will cause a great howling of sound and earth tremors, followed by the entire area collapsing into ruin.

Fire Pits (Crosshatch): Deep flue-like chimneys that go into the deepest parts of the dungeon to connect with the great lava pit beneath the castle (level 25). There is always a low railing (2 to 3 feet) around them. Often marked with religious images, etc.

Note: The famed Orcian Way does not yet exist. It’s also likely that the tunnels on Level 1 were not yet collapsed.

DUNGEON FEATURES – OTHER FEATURES

Catacombs: Honeycombing the hill that Blackmoor Castle has always stood upon are a series of tunnels and galleries which have been used for a number of purposes throughout history.

The Tombs: Area used for the final resting places of Blackmoor nobility and distinguished warriors. Haunted.

The Gallery of the Undead: Used during the Plague of the Undead as their headquarters and temple to perform their unholy rites.

Dungeons & Torture Chamber: Used by various sadistic Dukes or Barons of the past. Torture chamber is lost; it was sealed up at some point in the past.

Wizard’s Pit: Former ruler of Blackmoor’s Attendant Wizard practiced his arts here. Workshop was destroyed some 500 years ago due to the nature of his research. Wizard was imprisoned here when it was sealed up.

The Black Pit: An area of noxious fumes and bottomless pools caused by some natural phenomena where it is, of course, rumored that a gate to Hades is located.

Sealed Treasure Vaults: Sections filled with treasure and then sealed up (to hide it from those besieging the castle; or, more recently, by delvers hoping to return for it).

DESIGN NOTES

Although it was not my goal to attempt to “recreate” Arneson’s original dungeon key, I did want to tap into his creative palette. So I sucked the material here out of the First Fantasy Campaign to both understand his conception of the sorts of sub-complexes the dungeon would contain (catacombs, tombs, wizard laboratories, etc.). For my own utility, I’m also planning to print out a copy of 101 Curious Items to supplement my description of the dungeon.

Next: The Dungeon Key

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

SESSION 15C: THE TAINT OF GHUL

January 12th, 2008
The 6th Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

MORNING SICKNESS

The next morning, Tee woke up early and was struck almost instantly by a wave of dizziness and nausea. She felt sick in both body and soul.

She woke Dominic, but he wasn’t able to find anything wrong with her. So she decided to cross Delver’s Square to St. Gustav’s Chapel and speak with Brother Fabitor. But, like Dominic, he wasn’t able to find anything wrong with her. She seemed perfectly healthy.

Frustrated and confused, Tee returned to the Ghostly Minstrel in time to join the others for breakfast. When she described what she was feeling, however, Ranthir suddenly spoke up: “Actually, now that you mention it, I haven’t been feeling well since we were exploring that strange temple yesterday.”

“And you didn’t say anything?” Tee was aghast.

“I didn’t think it was of import.”

Now they were all worried. Was the temple the ultimate source of Tee’s illness, as well? And, if so, would they all succumb to it eventually? And how bad would it get?

“It’s not a physical illness and it’s associated with Ghul’s Labyrinth,” Tee said. “Maybe somebody else has run into this before.”

“I could check at the Delver’s Guild Library,” Ranthir suggested.

“Good idea,” Tee said. “I’m supposed to be meeting with Mand Scheben at the Temple of Asche this morning. So I’ll meet up with you here for lunch? See what you’ve found?”

A CONVERSATION WITH MAND

When Tee reached the Temple of Asche, the priests took her directly to Mand’s office.

Tee had thought it was going to be difficult to explain what was troubling her, but she quickly found that she was gushing information: She told him all about the deal she had made with Malkeen (a detail that not even her comrades knew about) and then went on to describe her encounter with Malkeen the previous morning. This led her into an explanation of who Dullin was and how she had ended up sending him a note (although here, at least, she curtailed the explanation in much the same way she had with Malkeen himself).

Mand was concerned. Malkeen was dangerous, and he was certain that Lord Zavere had never meant for them to attract that kind of attention. He promised Tee that he would bring the matter up with Zavere as soon as possible.

After leaving Mand’s office, Tee felt twisted up inside: She wasn’t sure if she’d done the right thing. She certainly wasn’t happy with all the information that had spilled out of her. But it was what it was. She’d have to live with it.

THE SHADOW OF TAINT

Tee returned to the Ghostly Minstrel. About an hour later, Ranthir came back, as well.

The news wasn’t good: Based on the description of their symptoms and the events surrounding it, Ranthir suspected that they were suffering from a phenomenon known as “taint”. Taint was a perversion of the natural order – a corruption so profound it warped the very nature of reality. It was a manifestation of extreme evil or chaos concentrated into a single creature, artifact, ritual, location, or act.

Ranthir suspected that the temple they had explored was a tainted place. It was also possible that some of the items they had taken from the Labyrinth were tainted themselves (which would explain why Tee didn’t begin manifesting symptoms until hours later).

“How can we know for sure?” Tee asked.

“Certain divination spells – particularly those which can detect the presence evil or chaos – can detect the taint,” Ranthir said.

Dominic said that he would be able to pray for such divinations in the morning, but Tee wasn’t willing to wait. She marched them all straight back to the Temple of Asche.

Mand was surprised to see that Tee had come back so quickly, but when he heard the situation he quickly summoned in one of the other priests and had him perform the appropriate rites.

These confirmed their fears: Tee and Ranthir had been touched by the taint, which clung to them like a miasma. In addition, several of the objects that Tee carried proved to be tainted themselves – specifically the two cube-like hunks of metal; the small box of metallic discs (specifically the discs themselves); the glass sphere filled with blackish liquid; and the twenty arrows of milky-white glass.

Mand Scheben knew that there were holy rites that could cleanse the taint out of them, but they would be expensive – even with the favored status in which the Temple of Asche held them. (There were lesser rites that wouldn’t be so expensive – but they would leave some residue of the taint behind.)

In fact, the only way they could afford the more expensive rituals would be with the money they were going to get for the gemstones Tee had consigned to Edarth’s the day before. They hadn’t been paid for that consignment yet, but they would be soon enough. Tee asked Mand if the proper rites could be prepared for the next day. Mand agreed.

Tee also asked him if the church would be willing to take the tainted objects from them. But at this Mand balked: He would have to consult with the elders of the church before agreeing to such a thing. Tee was frustrated by this – “You’re a church! That’s what you’re supposed to do!” – but really had no choice in the matter.

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