My work on converting the archives of the Alexandrian over the past few days have been something of a trip down memory lane as I go digging through material I wrote up to half a decade ago. And occasionally stumbling across comments that I don’t think I ever saw because of the broken and disjointed commenting system on the old site.

One discovery that particularly caught my eye came in response  to the Keep on the Shadowfell: Analyzing the Design series I wrote as a precursor to my remix of the module in 2008. A couple people mentioned that the specific traps I had been talking about in 2008 had been “fixed to a large extent” when WotC revised the module for its release as a freebie PDF.

I was curious enough to check it out.

And discovered that they’d fixed almost nothing. The only two improvements I can identify are:

1. They allowed Arcana and Thievery checks to stack for the purposes of disabling the dragon statues. (A suggestion I’d made in my original remix notes.)

2. They made it clear when the arcane walls of the Whirlpool Trap would activate (“when a creature moves into the 4-square-by-4-square area between the statues”) and the location of the walls once they appear:

But there are two problems with this “solution”:

First, as I discussed in my original essay on the matter, you’ve designed the trap so that it can’t be affected by anyone outside of the trap. (In order to disable the trap, you have to destroy the cherubs. And you can’t attack the cherubs if they’re on the other side of the wall.) They’ve removed the explicit references in the module itself to characters doing the impossible, but that doesn’t remove the larger design concerns:

(a) It’s not fun. In general, this means you will have one character inside the trap who needs to make several attacks against the cherub vases while everyone else sits around and watches.

(b) What happens if the character trapped inside the whirlpool is killed? As far as I can tell, the arcane walls just remain in place for the rest of eternity. (They can’t come down until the cherubs are destroyed; and the cherubs can’t be destroyed by anyone who isn’t caught in the trap.) Not only does this mean there’s no way to retrieve your fallen comrade’s battered body, it also means that the only path for reaching the Big Bad Boss of Keep on the Shadowfell is now blocked by two permanent walls of arcane energy.

Second, the trap breaks the rules. The Quick-Start Rules included in the original Keep on the Shadowfell included “Barriers” as one of the types of Area of Effect:

Barrier: A barrier runs along the edge of a specified number of squares. A barrier must cross at least one edge of the origin square.

This was problematic because the core rulebooks didn’t include “Barriers” and instead included rules for “Walls”:

Wall: A wall fills a specified number of contiguous squares within range, starting from an origin square. Each square of the wall must share a side — not just a corner — with at least one other square of the wall, but a square can share no more than two sides with other squares in the wall (this limitation does apply when stacking squares on top of each other). You can shape the wall however you like within those limitations. A solid wall, such as a wall of ice, cannot be created in occupied squares.

The original version of the trap was problematic in any case because it used the keyword “wall” to describe the arcane cage, and one just had to kind of assume that it meant “barrier” if you were using the Quick-Start Rules. You’ll note, however, that the revised version of the module is clearly using the rules for a “barrier” in its diagram.

So… no problem, right? The Quick-Start rules describe “barriers” and this trap, designed to be used with the Quick-Start Rules, now clearly follows those rules.

Except (and this is my favorite bit) somebody noticed that the rules for “barriers” were outdated and should never have been published in the first place, and so the revised Quick-Start Rules designed to be used with the revised version of Keep on the Shadowfell… don’t include the rules for barriers. The entire section was cut.

(Did they bother to replace these rules with the rules for walls which were supposed to be there in the first place? Don’t be silly. Of course they didn’t.)

So you have a trap which explicitly creates walls, but they don’t follow the rules for walls… and it doesn’t really matter anyway, because the Quick-Start Rules didn’t bother including rules for walls.

So I watched the first few episodes of The Cape on Hulu. The show has some half decent pulp coolness going for it, but the scripts suck. A lot.

CHESS: “I’m going to frame you for being Chess and then kill you! The world will think Chess is dead and my public persona will take the credit for eliminating his threat!”

Clever plan. Explain to me why Chess immediately resumes the Chess identity?

Then we have the super-secretive Orwell who insists that no one can be allowed to see her face… and yet she is constantly going out into the field and having public chats with the Cape.

CAIN: “I am a member of a secret order of assassins so totally secret that it’s a really big deal that our existence has just now been confirmed with completely circumstantial evidence! Our modus operandi? Well, we have massive identifying tattoos on our forearms and we also leave calling cards at all of our assassinations.”

Winner of the Least Secretive Secret Society Award for three years running.

NEWS REPORTER: “Mr. Portman is the only city councilor willing to deny the Big Bad Evil Corporation control over the city’s prisons! The vote is tomorrow!”

Okay, well, I guess if he’s the only vote against it then ARC doesn’t have much to worry about… So why is ARC trying to assassinate him?

MR. PORTMAN: “I’ve just been told that Mr. Fleming is trying to kill me with poison. I think I’ll go have dinner with him… At the restaurant that he owns…”

Really? Really?

TEACHER: “Here’s a new student. His last name is Faraday.”

KIDS: “Faraday? That’s the same last name as a criminal who was killed several weeks ago! This must be his kid!”

Wow… That’s quite the leap of logic there. I mean, it’s true. But that doesn’t make it any more absurd for the kids to immediately make that association. It’s as if some kid in the Marvel universe had the last name “Richards” and everyone assumed he must be the fifth member of the Fantastic Four.

There’s quite a bit of low-level nonsense in the dialogue, too.

The Alexandrian, as it currently exists, is a glorious mess of amateur HTML and half-assed javascript. It’s difficult to maintain and impossible to renovate. Plus, I can’t actually schedule posts, which means that the site takes a vacation whenever I do and stands unnecessarily vacant on frequent occasions.

Oddly, what’s really prompting this post is the commenting system, which was originally built around HaloScan and has been completely borked ever since HaloScan got bought out (and then bought out again). Honestly, I’m not really clear on how it’s still working at all.

In any case, starting today the Alexandrian will be updating to a WordPress installation. Here’s what you need to know:

(1) The RSS feed will no longer be updated. If you want to access the new feed, click here. (In a few days I’ll be attempting an XML redirect from the old feed to the new feed, but this apparently doesn’t work with all feed readers. If you want to be sure to continue you subscription, subscribe to the new feed now.)

(2) The address https://www.thealexandrian.net will resolve automatically to the new site. Shortly after this post goes live, https://www.thealexandrian.net/index.html will be replaced with a redirect page. If that re-direct isn’t working for some reason (most likely because I screwed it up), simply navigate to https://www.thealexandrian.net and you should be good to go. Update bookmarks as necessary.

(3) All the other links on the old site will continue to work, but will no longer be maintained. If something stops working for some reason, I’m not going to worry about it. So while older links won’t generate a 404 error, if you want to link to the Alexandrian I recommend linking to the new site.

(4) I’m currently in the process of converting all of the old content over to the new site. This is an ongoing process and it’s proven to be a lot more time-consuming than I’d anticipated, so I’m not done yet. Right now I’ve converted all of January 2011, and everything up to May 2008. I’ll be continuing to fill in this gap as time permits, and you may see some weird artifacts cropping up here and there while the work continues. (For example, I intermittently forget to retro-date a post before hitting the “Publish” button — so you may occasionally see an old post appear on the homepage and then vanish again a little later when I realize I skipped a step. Sorry ’bout that.)

(5) I’m manually transferring an archive of all comments posted on the old site to the corresponding article(s) on the new site. I’ll continue doing that for awhile as new comments crop up on older posts, but at some point I’ll stop doing that. (Hopefully I’ll be able to decommission the old commenting system at the same time so that it can no longer be accessed.) I’m fairly certain that some older comments have already been lost due to the distinegrating HaloScan/Echo system, but I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do to recover those. (EDIT: This has now been confirmed. For example, all of the original comments for my remix of Keep on the Shadowfell have disappeared. Makes me a little sad.)

For the most part, from your POV the new site will probably end up being largely indistinguishable from the old one. (At least, after a potential period of working-out-the-kinks.) If you’re reading this today on the new site, you should already see a few key improvements:

– A search function (currently at the top of the right sidebar).

– Integrated commenting so that you no longer have to try to guess to figure out where the article associated with a comment is located.

– New RSS feed includes the full text of all posts.

Things I’m hoping to implement in the future:

– Re-establishing permanent “content shrines” and the upper crossbar navigation panel (albeit in improved forms). For right now, you can still access the older versions of the Creations, Politics, and Reviews page. You can also access the old Bibliography page.

– Theme-switcher for those who miss the old white-on-black theme.

If there’s anything else you’d like to see on the site, leave a comment. (But you’ll have to go to the new site to do it.)

UPDATE: As of 6:40 PM, we’re having some migration problems. When you view an individual post’s page, both sidebars are appearing below the post. Everything appears to display correctly on the rest of the site. Debugging now.

UPDATE 2: As of 7:40 PM, the problem appears to have been fixed. In addition, you will no longer be required to log-in in order to post. If you run into any additional problems with the new site (broken links, weird formatting, etc.) please leave a comment on this post to let me know. Thanks!

UPDATE 3 (2011/02/02): Still tweaking the settings and filters for the commenting system. Trying to find the right balance between “I need to approve every single comment” and “website overrun with spam”. There’s likely to be some fluctuation over the next few days which you may or may not notice in terms of how quickly comments appear on the site. (The goal is to have legitimate comments appear immediately with a 0% incidence of spam. This is, of course, impossible. But it’s a nice goal.)

UPDATE 4 (2011/02/09): Archives are now complete through the end of 2008. 350+ posts. I have apparently written a lot of stuff for this website over the past 5+ years.

I’m re-posting a tale from the Caverns of Thracia which I’ve shared previously here on the site because it provides the context for my favorite character sheet of all time. (This was originally posted as part of OD&D in the Caverns of Thracia. You can just scroll down to the end for the new bit.)

What’s your favorite character sheet? Post it to your blog, link back to here, and throw a link up in my comments.

THE GRAND TOUR

As Thalmain led them into the Caverns of Thracia, he was able to act as a bit of a tour guide for the new players/characters. (“Here’s where the bridge almost burned down… Don’t open that door… Here’s the pit trap I heroically saved the party from… Here’s the place where I roasted lizardmen…”)

Eventually, however, they began pressing on into unexplored territory. A short while later, they found themselves descending broad stairs of stone…

And that’s when things got epic.

In the Caverns of Thracia, there is a room keyed thusly:

The Burial Crypt of the Cult of the Dark One: The reek of decaying flesh permeates the air here. Lying in ordered rows are rank upon rank of corpses. Most are long decayed and in skeletal form, but many are still fairly fresh, not having been dead for more than a few weeks (if you can call that fresh!). […] If the southernmost pair of columns is approached within 5′ or if the columns are passed between or to either side, 1-4 skeletons will animate and begin to attack intruders. Each additional melee round 1-4 more skeletons will animate as long as there are living intruders to fight, up to a total of 400 skeletons. Skeletons, AC: 7, Move: 12″, HD: 1, Damage 1-6, HP 3.

I decided that the Thanatos cultists that they had killed before would have been moved down here, so there were also about a dozen bodies laid out directly before the leading into this large chamber and covered with fresh linen. (This creeped them out because, of course, it implied that there had been somebody around to move the bodies.)

Inevitably, of course, the PCs moved far enough into the room to trigger the undead guardians. As the corpses began to stir and wrench themselves free from the cordwood-like stacks of the dead, the party fell back to the entrance.

The two halfings — skilled in ranged weaponry — picked off the first wave. (Aided by the occasional coin-toss from Howard.) But more and more of the dead were beginning to stir, and they realized it would only take a few unlucky die rolls for the skeletons to reach their defensive position.

(Actually, I don’t think I’ve discussed this previously: Halflings are described in OD&D as having “deadly accuracy with missiles as detailed in CHAINMAIL”. These sessions are being run with the conceit that I don’t “have” Chainmail, so we decided that halflings would simply get a +1 bonus to damage while using ranged weapons.)

Against the eminent risk, they quickly rearranged their lines. Brennan and Reeva took the front line. Greenwick switched from ranged attacks to a polearm in the second rank. And then Howard, Thalmain, and Bob lined up in back using their ranged attacks to thin the undead ranks before they reached the melee fighters.

But, more importantly, they also started spreading oil in front of their defensive position. And as soon as some of the undead got close enough, they lit the oil.

Based on my interpretation of the room key, the undead would just keep coming. Each undead had 1d6 hit points. Those that survived the ranged attacks would enter the oil, suffer 1d6 hit points, and frequently die before they even threatened the melee fighters.

After a couple of rounds, it was clear that the 1d4 skeletons per round were just never going to pose any kind of credible threat: The defensive position they’d created was too strong. And while the oil would only last for 1d6 rounds, they had stocked up on it (in large part due to Thalmain’s success with a similar tactic during the last session).

THE MASSACRE

I was in the process of trying to figure out how to make the encounter more interesting (since wittling through 400 undead 1d4 at a time wasn’t particularly exciting) when the PCs made it easy for me:  They decided to try proactively eliminating the undead before they could rise. They tossed a flask of oil onto one of the piles of corpses and then fired a flaming arrow into it.

I ruled that the resulting conflagration was successful in destroying a large number of potential undead… but it also had the effect of rousing them. I rolled 1d10, got a result of 8, and went from rolling 1d4 to rolling 8d4 for the number of undead animating each round.

As the undead rose en masse, the piles collapsed — sending the dead cascading across the floor of the chamber.

It’s a testament to the strength of their defensive position that they managed to hold out for several more rounds against the larger waves of undead without sustaining any injury. I was literally rolling fistfuls of d6’s to calculate the skeleton’s hit points while the players rolled a fistful of d6’s to calculate the damage wrought from the wide moat of fire they had laid down. They would read off the results and I would toss d6’s aside or lower their totals to reflect the current hit points of the skeletons.

Unfortunately, many of them were just 1st level characters. Eventually the law of averages worked against them and one of the skeletons emerged from the flaming oil and with a howl of undead rage managed to rip out Brennan’s throat.

Around this same time, my d4’s rolled high and a wave of 22 skeletons started heading towards them. At that point, they decided that discretion might be the better part of valor. But they weren’t done yet: Howard moved up to the melee line and they held the position for another couple of rounds.

As the wave of the 22 skeletons got close, however, they fell back.

But they weren’t done yet. See, Brennan had been the one carrying most of their (very large) supply of oil. So before they retreated, they rolled Brennan’s body into the flames.

1… 2… 3….

KA-BOOM!

Surprisingly, a couple of the skeletons managed to actually emerge from the far side of the inferno and pursue them a couple of steps up the stairs. (I say a couple of steps, because Thalmain and Bob put arrows through their skulls before they got any further.)

When it was all said and done, I tallied up the dead:

They had killed 76 skeletons.

Killed? It’s probably more accurate to say “slaughtered” or “massacred” on a scale that a bunch of 1st level characters (with the exception of the 3rd level Thalmain) should really not be capable of dealing out.

Of course, they weren’t 1st level any longer. Everybody not only leveled up, but also maxed out their XP for the next level, bumping into the “thou shalt not get enough XP for two levels” ceiling. (Well, except for Thalmain, who bumped into the “thou shalt not advance past 4th level” ceiling for halflings.)

76 skeletons.

It isn’t the largest single-battle slaughter I’ve ever seen in a D&D game, but it’s almost certainly the most impressive. The only battles that rival it in terms of sheer number involved groups fighting large hordes of significantly weaker opponents.

Smart play. Very smart play.

Admittedly, if the skeletons had been smarter they wouldn’t have continued marching into the flames. But, on the other hand, I’m not sure how much difference it would have made: The skeletons had no access to ranged weapons and any possibility of a retreat was cut off by the chasm to the north). Even if they had hung back, they would have simply been picked off by the party’s ranged attacks.

MY FAVORITE CHARACTER SHEET

Which brings me to my favorite character sheet, which belongs / belonged to Brennan:

(click for larger image)

As decoated posthumously by Brennan’s player, Katlin.

Go to Part 1

DELVE FIVE

The first four passes through this section of the dungeon had completely cleared out the anubian outposts on Level 1 and heavily decimated their forces on Level 2. I made the decision to allow this section of the dungeon to be temporarily cleared and dropped the chance of random encounters to one check per three turns.

This allowed the next group to pass through relatively quickly through largely abandoned chambers. They were once again tempted by the plaster-chipped door, but decided to pass it by when one of their veteran party members explained what the inscription said. Passing down to area 42 they encountered an ochre jelly (random encounter) who had taken up residence in the rubble pile and grown to a rather impressive size as a result of feasting on the dead rat corpses left behind by the last expedition. (This encounter nearly resulted in intra-party homicide when a particularly dim-witted knight couldn’t figure out that he was not helping matters by constantly hitting the ochre jelly and splitting it into smaller-yet-equally-vicious portions.)

They then continued south of this area, had several other adventures beyond the scope of this section (including rescuing an amazon warrior who had been frozen in ice for a thousand years), and then left.

(Nothing too exciting about this. If there is a lesson to be learned, it’s that you don’t have to cram in fresh content all the time. The importance of negative space — the absence of something to contrast its presence elsewhere — can’t be dismissed as a design principle.)

DELVE SIX

There was then a lengthy break in the campaign, which was marked in the game world by the pollen monsoon. When the PCs were able to return to the Thracian ruins, I spontaneously decided that an elementalist had moved into this vacated upper level. Accompanying him would be a number of lesser elementals.

And then, when the PCs kicked down the door to area 5, I found myself saying, “… sheets of malevolent flame dance around hearts of molten magma.” When the elementals died, they left behind smoldering, blackened pyrites. If they were struck with cold-based spells, I decided there would be a percentile chance that their magma hearts would explode from the sudden contraction (killing the elementals, but peppering the room with shrapnel).

So, those were pretty cool.

I also knew at this point that the anubians had re-fortified the guardpost in area 43, but the PCs didn’t make it that far during this session.

(This is our first major re-population of a deserted section of the dungeon. Couple things to note: First, I didn’t consult any repopulation tables. Why? Because I was struck by a cool idea. Random tables are tools, but I feel that you shouldn’t feel enslaved by their results.

Second, I’m not spending any time outside of the game prepping this repopulation. At the beginning of a session, I’m jotting down a few notes on how the dungeon has changed during the same time that the players are rolling up new characters, shopping for supplies, and the like. Of course, nothing says you can’t spend some time doing detailed prep work between sessions. But preserving the “I can play this any time” nature of your megadungeon means that you never want to feel like you need to do that kind of prep work before you can play the next session.)

DELVE SEVEN

When the PCs next returned to this section of the dungeon, I decided that the elementalist had been killed. (They discovered his flame-scorched body jamming the door to area 5 shut.) The reasons for this aren’t really important (and would be spoilers for my players), but this meant this section of the dungeon (along with 3 others) were depopulated.

I decided arbitrarily to check repopulation for each section by making a single 1-in-10 wandering monster check for each “section”. (The determination of “section” was essentially arbitrary on my part.) The check in this section came up positive, and I rolled on the Level Two wandering monster table (on the theory that some group from deeper in the dungeon had moved up to occupy these chambers).

The result was “giant spider”. There’s a minor spoiler here that I’m going to put into black text. My players shouldn’t highlight it, but the rest of you can do so to read it:

(On the second level of the dungeon there is a Shelob-sized spider that is described as having an egg sack of young spiders that’s ready to hatch. I decided that the egg sack had hatched, and some of the young spiders had migrated to this upper level.)

In any case, I decided these giant spiders had moved into the bat chambers. They had strung their webs and were basically feasting on the bats (whose population had been significantly depleted).

The PCs’ first inkling that something was wrong came when they found the giant spiderweb draped across the staircase leading down to area 2. After they had cleared out the spiders, they found the elementalist’s scorched body, verified that the rest of this section was still deserted, and then moved down to the second level where they engaged in multiple, semi-futile skirmishes with the anubian guardpost (which I had repopulated before the previous session).

(Here we can see how random tables can provide the raw seeds that you can riff off of to develop the megadungeon in interesting ways. This kind of improvisational extrapolation from a simple table entry of “giant spiders” is what makes the campaign come alive.

The wandering monster table is like the audience members who yell out suggestions on an improv show: Simply yelling out “mime” and “airplane” doesn’t make for a comedy show; it requires the improv actors to create a sketch about a mime pilot making an announcement over the plane’s intercom system for that. Similarly, just having random “giant spiders” attack the PCs because the table says so doesn’t make for an adventure; what you need are giant spiders in a particular place for a particular reason and doing a particular thing.

Why use the table at all? For the same reason the improv actors use audience suggestions: It keeps you fresh. It forces you to think outside of your comfort zone. It can give you an idea where you’re drawing a blank. Perhaps most importantly, it’s fun.)

A FEW FINAL THOUGHTS

At several points during the writing of this essay I found myself thinking, “This is really boring. This is just me giving a litany of fairly simplistic events.”

But maybe that’s the point: There really isn’t any magic here. You keep the dungeon alive by using wandering monster encounters to simulate the activity of the complex. You partially repopulate the dungeon inbetween sessions to keep it fresh. The result is that you can take 10 encounter areas, a couple of tables, and get dozens of hours of play out of it.

With that being said, if these 10 areas were the only section of the dungeon available none of this would work. First, the PCs would be able to “clear” the dungeon and there would be no immediate motivation to return. I could, obviously, repopulate such a dungeon and remotivate them to come back (“the draconian scouts have established their advance base in the same abandoned mines used by the orcish raiders!”), but there would be a greatly reduced sense of building on past successes or contributing to a single, larger goal.

Second, in the megadungeon the PCs aren’t being forced to go back over the same ground. They’re choosing to come to this entrance of the dungeon instead of another. This is important for both tactical and psychological reasons.

But, laying those caveats aside, my biggest point here is the ability to effectively reuse and refresh the megadungeon. This material can be used and re-used many times over without becoming stale. And if it ever starts to become stale, it’s a relatively trivial matter to freshen it back up again: Lizardmen invade the complex from the nearby swamplands. In a mighty, magical earthquake a new ziggurat pushes its way out of the earth leading to an entirely new complex connected in yet unknown ways to the caverns beneath. The black-eyed cultists approach some of the heroes to form an alliance against the aggressive anubians. And so forth.

In many ways, I feel like a megadungeon becomes the DM’s character. And I play my megadungeon much like I would play a PC. Before play begins, I don’t really know what my megadungeon is going to do: But my random encounter tables generate 2d4 anubians just after the PCs raid the depths, and I know the anubians have sent a team of assassins to hunt them down. Black-eyed cultists are holding a ritual on Level 2 and I suddenly know the sin day they’re celebrating. Lizardmen show up in the anubian sections of the dungeon and I know tensions are erupting between their tribes. Then the minotaur shows up to determine why tribute is not being paid and… and… and…

And a story gets told.

Go to Part 3: The Players Take Charge