With the 5th Edition and Cypher System versions of Monte Cook’s Ptolus being announced this past week, I thought it might be fun to visit The Laboratory of the Beast. This scenario was originally designed as part of my ongoing Ptolus campaign, and I’ve discussed it quite a bit in the “Running the Campaign” columns that accompany the campaign’s journal entries. For those who haven’t read those journal entries, here’s the short version of the scenario’s origins:
Beneath the city-state of Ptolus there are a number of overlapping dungeon complexes. One of these is Ghul’s Labyrinth, the remnants of a vast and ancient underground citadel created by the dark lord Ghul. In the main Ptolus sourcebook there’s a scenario called “Trouble with Goblins” in which a number of goblins emerge from Ghul’s Labyrinth into the basement of an abandoned house and do various terrible things.
When I ran this scenario early in my campaign, the PCs backtracked the goblins and followed their trail down into the Labyrinth. In the published scenario, the trail goes cold and the PCs don’t find anything of interest in the dungeon. I decided it made more sense for the trail to lead somewhere, and so I designed a little mini-scenario.
I later published that scenario as The Complex of Zombies. As I described here, the published version of the scenario had been adapted to make it a generic scenario, notably changing the research complex so that it now belonged to the enigmatic Sons of Jade.
A key feature of this mini-scenario is that, ultimately, the goblins’ trail leads back through a bluesteel door: These doors, which are a common feature in Ghul’s Labyrinth, are essentially impassable for low-level characters unless they know the password. (As I discuss in “The Blue Doors of Ptolus”, this is a great way to control and define transitions in a megadungeon complex.)
The basic design goal here was to give the PCs a reward for successfully pursue the trail, but then definitively end the scenario so that they could move on to other things.
But it didn’t work out that way.
As described in “Tales from the Table: Unexpected Successes” (which is probably worth a read, if I do say so myself), the PCs managed to pull a rabbit out of their hat and successfully guessed the password, causing the bluesteel door to open.
The Laboratory of the Beast is what lies on the other side of the door. (The goblin trail ultimately leads through the laboratory to another scenario called The Goblin Caverns of the Ooze Lord. If response is positive to The Laboratory of the Beast, perhaps I’ll be able to share that latter adventure in the near future.)
With all this in mind, there are a few ways that you could use The Laboratory of the Beast in your own campaign:
- You could use it as designed, attaching it to the door at one end of The Complex of Zombies.
- You could make it a stand-alone dungeon. You could put the door leading to the laboratories almost anywhere: In the basement of a ruined keep. Or found in the aftermath of a tragic collapse during sewer construction. Or carved into the side of a mountain. Or it’s actually a portal that you leap into from a lich’s sanctum.
- You could incorporate it into some other megadungeon complex, with or without The Complex of Zombies.
I’m presenting the scenario here basically in its original form (with a minimal amount of clean-up to hopefully make my intentions clear to people who don’t live inside my skull), so if you use it in combination with The Complex of Zombies you’ll probably want to make a decision about whether you’re using the Skull-King Ghul or the Sons of Jade.
If you’re planning to use this scenario in your own Ptolus campaign, you should also note that it was written for the version of Ptolus as it exists in my personal campaign world and may, therefore, have any number of metaphysical inconsistencies with Ptolus Prime.
GENERAL FEATURES
During the time of Ghul the Skull-King, this complex was being used to breed the hounds of Ghul — powerful war hounds who, through the machinations of this laboratory, became ever more dire and horrific.
Walls: Cream-colored stone (hardness 8, 15 hp/inch).
Unkeyed Rooms: These are empty, dusty rooms. Some might contain vague discolorations on the floors and walls, suggesting that they might have once contained equipment which has been removed. Or strange alchemical stains.
Bluesteel Doors: Indicated by a shaded door on the map. Made from steel with a distinct bluish tint. One cannot open them by normal magical means and they have no lock to pick. Instead, each door will open in response to a specific word. (3 inches thick, hardness 12, 120 hp, Break DC 31)
Glass & Bronze Doors: Indicated in room keys. Made of glass bound in bronze. These doors are very fragile, but have been laced with dark magic which curses whose who break them. (The effect will be described in the key entry when appropriate.) Resisting the curse requires a Will save (DC 24) and can be removed only by a cleric of at least 13th level casting remove curse on sanctified ground.
Taint: Various items and locations are tainted. See Advanced D20 Rules: Taint for rules on this dark perversion of reality.
Kaostech: Kaostech items can be found throughout the laboratories. See Kaostech for more information on this technomantic art.
Nice to see a deconstruction of one of your adventures. Justin, when you run this sort of dungeon with your home group, how hardcore/gritty do you lean? Time passing underground, counting down torches, random encounters, etc. Did you use adversary rosters here? Party being hunted through a maze by undead & cultists?
Tracking time and resources is almost always important, IMO, and I did that here.
Random encounters and adversary rosters weren’t used due to the nature of the dungeon: Long-abandoned and moribund, there’s no activity to be modeled by those.
Well, not initially. Reviewing my notes, I can see that once the PCs had sort of “woken things up” I used both rudimentary random encounters and an adversary roster to track activity. The latter was somewhat interesting because it was usually more of a temporal table rather than geographic: Various NPC groups were coming to the dungeon at different times, and the roster on my campaign status document told me not just where they were, but when they would be there.
The most notable example of the former was the skeletal ghulworg, IIRC. Once they woke it up, I used random encounter checks to determine when it would track them down again.
I am currently running two Ptolus campaigns, and enjoy seeing how you integrated various things into the Ptolus world. I love your Ptolus campaign stories, and would very much like to see your Ooze Lord materials as well.
Thank you so much for this and the kaostech/taint posts! I am curious what methods you use for tracking time/resources in DnD? (any edition)
I find I often go into a new campaign with the intention of doing so, but get bogged down in the details too much and quickly abandon it. Do you have any advice? Is it just a matter of forming the habit to do so? Do you track encumbrance? From reading around on the internet, I know I am not the only one who has this problem, maybe this would be a good topic for a post?
Also here is my vote for a future Ooze Lord post!
Re: Encumbrance. I use a system I designed called Encumbrance by Stone to simplify encumbrance tracking. I think encumbrance is important for any exploration-oriented campaign (whether dungeon or wilderness), but it’s often too complicated and ends up getting dropped. The Encumbrance by Stone system is an effort to simplify it so that it doesn’t get waved away.
Re: Time tracking. The fidelity with which you need to track time varies significantly by circumstance.
In an urban campaign like Ptolus or Dragon Heist, I’m generally following a mental model that breaks the day into:
– Early Morning
– Late Morning
– Early Afternoon
– Late Afternoon
Which means, roughly speaking, if it’s first thing in the morning and the PCs all go off to do different things (shopping, research, whatever), then they’ll do those things in the Early Morning and then they’ll do whatever the next thing is in the Late Morning.
Maybe something is super quick and they can get a couple things down in the Early Morning. Maybe it’s more involved and it takes longer than that. This is really just a rough mental construct that I use to organize activities and make sure things keep moving forward.
When running a dungeon crawl without random monster checks, I’ll just periodically review what the PCs have been doing and guesstimate how far the clock has moved forward. (“They went down here and then over there, so all that walking took about 20 minutes. And they must have spent about 15 minutes searching that room and 5 minutes killing those goblins. Et cetera. So it must be about 4pm now.”)
In OD&D, like my current Castle Blackmoor open table, dungeon time-keeping is more rigorous because the random monster checks and rest periods are performed at a very regular tempo. So I’ll literally count off movement and keep track of turns with hash marks.
But the rules can frequently be broken. For example, time-keeping has gotten much more strict in Ptolus lately because I have two different PC groups exploring the same dungeon, so I need to know with a much higher degree of accuracy exactly where each group is at what time (to keep the continuity straight).
But, basically: Habit. Hash marks. Mental timelines that match the fidelity of the decisions being made by the players (“What do you want to do this morning?” vs. “You have exactly two hours before the orc horde arrives, what are you doing?”).
Thank you! That is fantastic!
Might I suggest you add it somewhere in your Gamemastery 101 list? That was where I looked to see if you had any encumbrance or time tracking advice before deciding I would just ask you in the comments!
It can’t just be me who _really_ wants you to share ‘Goblin caverns of the Ooze Lord’ too, right?