Deer in Scotland have begun biting off the heads of baby birds, sucking out their bones, and leaving behind deformed carcasses of deflated meat. Apparently they’re seeking to supplement the limited calcium in their diet (which they need in order to support the growth of their mating antlers)

But slap on a ritualistic patterning to the bird murders, and you’ve got the basic building blocks of a pretty decent horror scenario. (Or are the birds the real problem with the deer being enchanted by a local druid circle to stop whatever cuckoo terror is nesting on the island?)

Alternatively, crank up the stakes in a fantasy horror game: Replace “baby birds” with “actual babies”. Replace “deer” with “dire deer”. (Possibly deer who have become dire due to their blood-drinking rites. And what happens when the bloodcraze begins to spread?)

The 20′ By 20′ Room blog has apparently disappeared, but here’s something from Neel Krishnaswami that I think is too useful to let slide into the digital vortex:

In our last Nine Worlds session, I introduced Perseus, a captain of the Lunar space fleet, who was married to Nick’s PC’s wife. In the session before that, the players had been boarded by a Lunar ship which had confiscated our engineer’s robot as technological contraband. That ship had a captain, who went unnamed. So when I first mentioned Perseus, the players’ first response was “Hey, is he the same guy?” and my answer was, “Of course — the law of conservation of NPCs demands it!” The players chuckled, and we went on playing.

The principle of conservation of NPCs actually is one of my GMing strategies. Whenever I introduce a new conflict into the game, I try to see if existing NPCs can be integrated into this role before I consider introducing a new NPC. I find two big benefits from doing this.

The first is simply that the size of the cast stays under control — I’ve run plenty of games where NPCs multiplied without limit, and that meant that months of real time could pass before we saw an NPC reappear. This limits the amount of shared history the players can develop with a character, and is often a little unsatisfying as a result. So reusing NPCs helps prevent the narrative from fizzling out.

Secondly, re-using NPCs means they will have multiple facets relevant to the players. In our 9W game, Perseus’s family became a center of the narrative — each of the players was off doing something else, but they affected each other because their actions influenced Perseus and his family. So despite the characters being separated the players were still interacting with each other.

This is great advice, and it can actually be generalized beyond NPCs.

For example, when I was first designing the Western Lands (the campaign setting I typically use for my D&D campaigns), I decided that there would only be a single, limited pantheon of true gods. The pay-off has been that whenever I design a new adventure, I’m forced to figure out how to make my ideas fit within the context of that existing pantheon. This has yielded particularly rich results when I’m using published adventure modules that call for various gods, forcing me to figure out how radically different concepts can be rationalized within a limited framework.

As a result, my campaign’s religions are now rich with saint cults, historical holy symbols, disparate practices of worship, and a rich panoply of relics. Instead of spreading all of that work on fantasy theology out thinly over a multitude of gods, the effort has instead steadily deepened and enriched the Pantheon.

Similarly, the conservation of NPCs will cause drama to accumulate instead of dissipating: Current events will be more deeply informed by past events, and you’ll find all kinds of unexpected synergies and memorable recurring themes cropping up spontaneously.

Go to Part 1

In part 6, we made it easier to run G1 Steading of the Hill Giant Chief by putting a room key on the map — a sort of cheat sheet for quickly orienting yourself geographically while running the adventure. As part of that discussion, I talked about the dire wolf encounter in area 22 and asked an important question:

“Who might hear this?”

The layout of the complex gives us some clue to this, but wouldn’t it be even easier if we could look on the map and actually see where the monsters are?

To do this, we’ll need a symbol. Let’s try something like this:

Using this symbol we can quickly indicate “Here There Be Monsters!” But let’s say we wanted to include more information than that. It’s pretty easy to numerically key the symbol:

We could use that number to simply indicate the number of monsters present, but I think it would be more useful to use the number as a reference to a roster of monsters. And we can put that on the dungeon map right next to the room key:

(click for a larger version)

For this, I’ve basically just grabbed the info from the module. But it wouldn’t be too hard to tap the Monster Manual and include stat lines.

If we wanted to get a lot fancier, we could also use double-encoding here by preparing a different silhouette for each type of monster. They would let us tell in a glance where, for example, all the goblins are located.

Another option would be to color code the monster symbol to represent factions within a dungeon. (This could be really great for something like the Temple of Elemental Evil, for example.)

In any case, the “life” of the complex almost immediately jumps out at you. You could almost play the adventure from this single sheet alone (although you’d miss out on a lot of the detail to be found in the full key), and it shouldn’t be hard to see how a map like this makes it virtually unnecessary to look at any key except for the room the PCs are currently exploring.

THE GM’S TABLEMAT

I coined the term “GM tablemat” to refer to “roll-on” tables. But for years now I’ve been using dungeon maps as tablemats in combination with monster rosters to run truly living dungeon complexes.

Before explaining what I mean by that, let me back up for a second.

In prepping the monster roster shown above, I simply listed every single creature in the steading. If I were prepping G1 for my home campaign, however, there are several monsters I would have skipped:

• #5: The giantess maids are unlikely to leave their chambers during an assault.
• #6: The pet cave bear isn’t going anywhere unless someone fetches him.
• #14, 15, 16: The cooks and servants in the kitchen are unlikely to go anywhere.
• #17: Iffy. Based on the description in the module, these guys are unlikely to go anywhere. But they might (particularly if loud noises attract their attention from area 22). I’d probably list ’em just to be on the safe side.
• #18: The injured orcs definitely aren’t going anywhere.
• #20: Iffy. The dire wolves won’t go anywhere on their own, but they’re more likely to be fetched to aid in the defense of the steading. Again, I’d probably list ’em.

As you can probably tell, my methodology is simple: If a monster will never be encountered outside of a specific keyed location, I won’t bother including them on the roster. (Like the other details of that keyed location, I’ll notice ’em when the PCs reach that area.)

When I’m prepping my own adventures, I’ll actually go one step further: Monsters that appear on the roster won’t appear in the encounter key at all. That way, if I see a monster in the encounter key I know that it’s definitely there and nowhere else. (Meanwhile, I’m keeping track of the rostered monsters independently.)

At this point, we’ve got the steading down to a fairly manageable 14 roster groups. When it comes time to run the adventure, this is what you want to do:

1. Lay the adventure map out as a tablemat in front of you.
2. Take counters numbered 1-14 and place them on the map in the “starting location” for each roster group.
3. You are now ready to manage your monsters in real time. Just move them around the map as the situation demands.

(Note: Numbered counters are easy to find on the cheap. It’s also pretty easy to make your own by printing out the numbers and then affixing them to washers or quarters or something of the like.)

This is why the monsters in area 11 were broken into several smaller groups: To make them more manageable if the giants need to split up.

The rostered approach also makes it really easy to re-arrange the denizens of a compound on a cycle. For example, you could prep one roster for the day and a different roster for the night.

Personally, however, my limit for this sort of thing is usually around 12-15 roster groups. Larger complexes can sometimes be broken down into smaller sections to make them manageable, but if that doesn’t work then that’s the point where I’ll swap from a “living complex” approach and start using random encounter tables to simulate a compound’s life.

This post is part of the RPG Blog Carnival for Cartography.

Go to Part 1

Let’s step aside from the map itself for a moment and spend a moment talking about how the map is actually used at the gaming table. For reference I’m going to use this redrawn version of the map from G1 Steading of the Hill Giant Chief:

(The only substantial difference is that I haven’t included the fireplaces that appear on the original map.)

Imagine, for a moment, that your PCs have just entered area 22 on this map. You flip to page 5 of the module and check the key:

22. OPEN COMPOUND: 14 dire wolves run free here (HP 25, 23, 22, 2 x 10, 19, 3 x 18, 2 x 17, 15, 13, 12), and they will immediately attack any non-giant or non-ogre entering their area. Note that if they see the whip (room 19), however, they cower and make no sound, but otherwise they howl and bite!

Easy enough. What else might you want to know once the dire wolves start howling and biting?

We can probably start with, “Who might hear this?”

So we’d take a quick peek at neighboring rooms: 8, 10, 10A, 19, 20, 21, 23, and 25. Crap. Now I’m trying to look at multiple pages of the module simultaneously to figure out how, at a fundamental level, this compound “works”. In a lot of modules you can actually find yourself trying to look at a half dozen pages just to figure out everything that the PCs can actually see from a particular area.

The problem, of course, is that the map itself is largely a cipher: It’s a bunch of rooms, some doors, and some keyed numbers.

There are a lot of ways we could make it easier to figure out what we’re looking at. An easy one is to simply list a room key:

(click for a larger version)

Now I can tell in a glance that area 23 is the Guard Room (I’m guessing the dire wolves will attract some attention from there). Area 19 is a servants’ quarters (they’re unlikely to come out, but might flee out the other exit and down the hall looking for help; or maybe they’ll need to keep the orc slaves from area 20 in line if they start panicking).

And  so forth.

Obviously this doesn’t entirely eliminate the need to reference the map key. But it does let us eliminate a lot of key references, cutting down on the page-flipping and allowing us to stay focused on the keyed information that’s most immediately important. This is particularly important when it comes to referencing important, non-localized information (the type of information we want about a location even when the PCs aren’t in that location).

What other non-localized information could be usefully pulled up onto the map?

More on that in Part 7.

Go to Part 7: The Monster Roster

This post is part of the RPG Blog Carnival for Cartography.

While poking around caving websites doing research for the Better Dungeon Maps series, I stumbled across a thread at CaveChat.org of “caving lies”, many of which seemed to have a great deal of pertinence to fantasy dungeoncrawling:

• “You pretty much can’t get lost.”
• “The trip can’t take more than 4 hours.”
• “I’m just going to poke my head in and see where it goes.”
• “It’s dry.”
• “We’ve got plenty of rope.”
• “You can fit through there. No problem.”
• “Trust me.”
• “Leave your pack behind, you won’t be needing it.”
• “I know exactly where I’m at!”
• “The cave map is accurate.”
• “I don’t know how those rocks got in your pack.”
• “I only scooped a hundred feet.”

Tangentially, the idea of “scooping” an area (i.e., being the first to explore it) has recently come up quite a bit in my hexcrawl campaign. Should have more on that later this week or next.