In a recent comment exchange with jdh417 regarding (Re-)Running the Megadungeon, I spoke about wandering monster encounters in OD&D:

Practical experiment: OD&D says there’s a 1 in 6 chance of a wandering monster every 10 minutes in the dungeon. There’s only a 1 in 6 chance chance per day outside of the dungeon. Try following those rules strictly for a few sessions. You don’t even have to tell your players what you’re doing: They will find a way to get out of the dungeon.

(In practice, my OD&D game has dropped back to a 1 in 10 chance per turn. And, as I noted, this will drop even further if they’ve cleared a section of the dungeon. I’ll also reduce check rates if they’ve secured themselves or hidden themselves in some way, allowing for potential “camp in the dungeon overnight” scenarios. But I think the only way for a megadungeon to work is if the players can never feel completely safe while they’re inside it.)

But in quickly re-checking the OD&D rules for wandering monsters in the wilderness in order to make sure my memory was accurate for the details, I realized that I had been inadvertently glossing over a potentially fascinating distinction. From Volume 3: The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures, pg. 17-18:

At the end of day (turn) the referee will check to see if a monster has been encountered. The matrix below is for travel afoot or mounted. For travel afloat or in the air two die rolls are made — a 5 on the first one indicates an adventure in the mid-point of the day with waterbourne or aerial monsters; a 6 on the second die roll indicates that there is a normal adventure at the end of the day, and the table below is used.

What I want to call your particular attention to here is the phrase “the second die roll indicates that there is a normal adventure at the end of the day”.

See, the random charts which follow don’t include any information on the number of creatures encountered. They just determine type. Which presumably means that you should use the “Number Appearing” column from Volume 2: Monsters & Treasure. (Which is confirmed when you reference that volume and discover that this column is, in fact, marked with a footnote which reads, in part: “used primarily only for out-door encounters”.)

And that’s when the whole thing starts to make sense.

ROLLING A WANDERING MONSTER

Let me demonstrate by way of example. Allow me to roll up an actual wandering monster for a group of PCs traveling through a forest:

(1) I roll 1d8 and consult the “Woods” column to determine the type of encounter. I roll a 6, which is Men.

(2) I roll a 1d12 on the “Men” table. (This table includes four columns, one of which is “Desert (Mars)” and includes Red Martians, Tharks, Black Martians, Yellow Martians, and White Martians. Goddamn, that’s awesome. BID.) I use the “Typical” column, roll a 5, and get a result of “Bandits”.

(3) Now I flip over to Volume 2 and look up “Bandits”. There isn’t an individual listing on the Monster Type table, but “Men” appears generically. The Number Appearing for Men is 30-300, so I roll 1d10 x 30 and get 150.

(4) I flip to the description of Bandits on page 5:

BANDITS: Although Bandits are normal men, they will have leaders who are supernormal fighters, magical types, or clerical types. For every 30 bandits there will be one 4th level Fighting-Man; for every 50 bandits there will be in addition one 5th or 6th level fighter (die 1-3 = 5th level, die 4-6 = 6th level); for every 100 bandits there will be in addition one 8th or 9th level fighter (die 1-3 = 8th, die 4-6 = 9th). If there are over 200 bandits there will be a 50% chance for a Magic-User (die 1-4 = 10th level, die 5, 6 = 11th level) and a 25% chance for a Cleric of the 8th level. If there are exactly 300 bandits there will absolutely be a Magic-User, and the chance for a Cleric goes up to 50%. There is also a chance that there will be magical accouterments for the super-normal types […]

(5) So I have 150 bandits: That means I’ve got five 4th-level fighters. I also have three 5th- or 6th-level fighters, which turn out to be (roll) one 5th-level and two 6th-level fighters. And their leader will be an 8th-level fighter.

(6) The table for determining “magical accouterments” says that each fighter has a 5% chance per level to have a magical item, and I should check for armor, shield and sword. For the sake of this example, let’s just check for our 8th-level leader: 8 x 5 = 40% chance. Armor roll is 58, no armor. Shield roll is 33, so he has a magic shield. And sword roll is 44, so no sword.

(7) I flip to the Treasure tables. There isn’t a separate table for shields, but on pg. 24 there’s a table for Armor which includes shields. I roll three times on the table before generating a result (65) which includes a Shield +1.

(Weird note: There’s an example in the rulebook for how to generate bandits. It starts with, “Assume 183 bandits are encountered.” Which made me realize you could actually generate the number of bandits with 30d10. I did so just for kicks and generated… exactly 183 bandits.)

Total result? The Blood Shield Bandits, named after their fiery-haired leader who carries a shield of bright crimson into battle.

THE BANDIT ADVENTURE

My point with all this is that the OD&D rules for wandering monsters in the wilderness are not rules for generating random encounters in the sense commonly understood by later editions: These rules do not generate a single combat encounter. They are procedurally generating an entire adventure.

What does this adventure look like?

Probably something like this:

The Victorious Battle over the Bandits at Huanghua

In no small part because these rules are meant to gel with high-level play where the PCs are expected to be local baronial lords leading small feudal armies.

But even at lower levels, the encounter tables are telling you that you’re entering an area currently plagued by a large tribe of bandits. Does that mean getting waylaid on the road? Being forcibly deputized by the local lordling to deal with the problem? Being hired by a wealthy merchant whose daughter has been kidnapped? Being press-ganged by the bandits themselves and tasked with kidnapping the merchant’s wealthy daughter? All of the above? A dozen or so dice rolls have me pretty much brimming over with ideas.

In any case, the point is that you’re generating an adventure, just like the book says — something that the players can engage or ignore; bypass or be ambushed by; become embroiled with or skim past.

READING WITH FRESH EYES

Delving into the OD&D manuals continues to be a rewarding experience. I’m constantly amazed at how often I’ll realize that what I’m reading could actually mean something completely different and that I’m only defaulting to reading it in a particular way because of the conditioning imposed by thirty-plus years of RPGs which all went a different way.

In part, this gets back to my discussion of OD&D as the Ur-Game — a mirage that doesn’t actually exist because the rulebooks are open to so many different interpretations.

What fascinates me is the idea of the road that wasn’t traveled: All those passages whose enigmas were refined to read as “A” when they could have just as easily been read as “B”. (With “B” being potentially just as interesting.)

Since the OD&D PDFs are no longer legally available, people have occasionally asked me which OSR clone I recommend to take its place. The truth is that I don’t recommend any of them. OD&D is a severely flawed game, and all of the clones I’ve looked at have generally inherited its flaws while simultaneously (and probably necessarily) whitewashing out the ambiguities which I find rewarding to explore.

(UPDATE: The OD&D PDFs are once again legally available!)

Interesting Facts About the Blood Shield Bandits

Back to Reactions to OD&D

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.

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

REFERENCE MAP – PLAYERS DO NOT LOOK!

The rest of you may want to open that up in a separate tab or window.

An effective megadungeon has three basic components:

1. A map.

2. A starting map key.

3. Wandering monster tables.

The map should be large and thoroughly xandered. Xandering is crucial in a campaign megadungeon because of the complex and dynamic environment it provides: Players need to be free to choose different experiences each time they return to the dungeon. If you force them to trudge down the exact same path each time, the dungeon will have no effective replay value.

The map key should be flavorful and interesting. It will be frequently rewritten, but the starting key should provide a strong foundation for you to build on and a rich soil in which the dungeon can grow. Most old school bloggers I’ve seen tend to advocate minimalistic keys that tend to de-emphasize memorable geography. (For example, the Castle of the Mad Archmage contains key entries like “ORC SERGEANT. (8 h.p.) armed with sword and flail. He has 12 e.p.” and “SECRET CHAMBER. Great skeleton (3 HD, 15 h.p., turns as a ghoul, otherwise as a normal skeleton). Small locked chest holds 75 g.p.”) But I disagree with this approach: The monsters in the dungeon are ephermeral. It’s the geography that’s going to stick around. Minimalist keys are fine, but use them to make memorable locales. (Check out my Halls of the Mad Mage for my own efforts to use a minimalistic key to create interesting locations.)

Wandering monster tables have generally gotten a bad rap in many modern gaming circles. They’re generally considered to be “wasted time”. But when properly employed, wandering monster tables are improv tools and low-tech procedural content generators. (See Breathing Life Into the Wandering Monster for a deeper look at how this works in practice.) Wandering monsters also play an important part in maintaining proper pacing throughout the dungeon complex and help to make the complex “come alive”. In all of these functions, wandering monster tables are playing a vital role in preventing the megadungeon from becoming a place that can be “cleared out”.

Caverns of Thracia, of course, provides all three of these essential elements: Although the reference map I’m using for this essay shows only the small, specific section of the dungeon complex I’ll be discussing in detail, there are, for example, three completely separate entrances into the caverns and the delves described below represent only a fraction of the sessions I’ve run there. Similarly, Jennell Jaquays’ map key positively drips with detail — the unique characters of the Caverns of Thracia seem to ooze out of every room description. Jaquays also provides detailed and dynamic wandering monster tables.

THE FOUNDATION

Let’s start with the basics. Looking at our reference map, allow me to present a very simplified/summarized version of the pertinent map key:

1. Walls once painted in brightly color murals. Now home to several hundred bats. The floor is covered a couple feet deep in bat guano.
2. Columned hall. More bats and guano.
3. Ruined statue, digging rubble pile turns up the face of Athena. More bats.
4. Ruined statue of a winged figure. Giant centipedes (x19).
5. Ruined statues reduced to complete rubble. Lizardmen hunting party (x4).
6. Spear trap.
7. Anubian Guardpost. (x6)
8. Sloping passage.

42. Rubble-filled cavern. Colony of rats in rubble (raise alarm if disturbed).
43. Guardpost and Pit Traps. Anubians (x4). One of the pits leads to a sub-level with a small, hibernating dragon.

In addition, the module provides two wandering monster tables — one for Level One and one for Level Two. There is a 1 in 10 chance per turn of generating an encounter.

Simple enough, right?

Now, let me show you how I’ve used these simple tools to run 20-30 hours of high quality gaming.

DELVE ONE and DELVE TWO

The first delve is pretty simple and by the book: The PCs entered the dungeon, held their noses at wading through bat dung as they headed through areas 1-3. They found the lizardmen in area 5 who were nursing a comrade who had been injured by the centipedes in area 4 (as described in the adventure key). They killed the lizardmen and then entered area 4 to fight the centipedes themselves. After a nasty fight, they spiked the door shut, dragged the corpses of the centipedes that they had killed out of the dungeon, and returned to the jungle. That night they feasted that night on roasted centipede meat.

When they returned to the dungeon the next day I generated a surface encounter using the Level One wandering monster tables. It turned out to be a rather tough one, featuring a minotaur along with half a dozen dog-faced anubians. What were they doing there? Guarding the entrance. The party’s wizard tried to use a sleep spell, but it failed spectacularly. He ran back to where the others were waiting, but they all dithered long enough for the minotaur to reach them and then it turned rather abruptly into a TPK.

The heads of the PCs were placed on pikes outside the dungeon entrance (where they remain to this day).

DELVE THREE

The players rolled up new characters and ended up entering the dungeon through a different entrance. A few sessions later, however, a different set of PCs returned to this area. They discovered a half dozen anubians (minus the minotaur) standing guard at the entrance. (Another random encounter, which also slotted naturally into the “guarding this entrance” concept.) This time the battle went much better for the heroes and they were able to clear away the freshly positioned guards.

Downstairs they returned to area 3. They could hear noises coming from behind the door to area 5 and saw that the door to area 4 had been spiked shut. They tried to ambush the anubians in area 5 (which had been generated from the wandering monster tables), but the door squeaked when they tried to open it and the anubians were warned. Despite this, they dispatched the anubians.

With their backs secure, they carefully pried up the spikes. Somebody scooped up some bat guano in a skull and tried to use it to grease the hinges and then they threw open the door.

Angry red centipedes looked up at them.

They slammed the door shut and spiked it again.

Exploring the room where the anubians had been, they found the secret door. They turned left, through area 8, and down to the second level.  They fought some giant rats in area 42, spotted the guards in area 43, and decided to retreat back to the first level and finish it off.

There they fought and killed the anubians in area 7, looted the treasure chest, spiked the door shut from the inside, and spent the night. In the morning there was a loud buzzing coming from outside the door, which turned out to be stirges which were feeding on the corpses they had left outside the door the night before. (The stirges were a wandering encounter; I figured feasting on corpses made the most sense given the circumstances.)

DELVE FOUR

The PC who had been mapping in the previous delve sold their maps to a newly formed adventuring party for a percentage of the treasure liberated on their expedition. (The player of the PC who owned the maps couldn’t play that night.)

This group returned to the tunnels and finished exploring this section of the first level. An elf in the party detected the secret door hidden behind some plaster at area 9A, but when they discovered that the inscription on the door read: “KNOW YE THAT BEYOND THIS PORTAL LIES THE DEMESNE OF THANATOS, THE CURSED, HATER OF LIFE, GOD OF DEATH. SEEK NOT TO PASS THIS GATE FOR IT LEADS ONLY TO HIS BOSOM.” They decided that discretion was the better part of valor and left it alone.

But what the party was really here for was to push through the guard outpost on Level 2. Down they went and got into a huge melee with the anubians. (Complicated by a wandering monster encounter that reinforced the guard post.) During the fight, one of the PCs fell down one of the pits depicted on the map… which led to a chamber where a small dragon was hibernating. (This was all according to the map key.)

There was some abrupt panic, but the PCs rallied and actually managed to kill the dragon. (They were very excited about that.) In the pit they found several ancient Thracian artifacts, which they hauled back to town and sold for a tidy profit. (It was at this point that Himbob Jimblejack bought up all the garlic futures in town and set up his monopoly on garlic sales.)

FIRST DESIGN INTERLUDE

Up until this point, things may seem fairly standard. I haven’t really deviated from or supplemented the original dungeon key. But the one key factor to note here is the effect that random encounters have had on the game. Half of the combat encounters have been with randomly generated encounters:

KEYED ENCOUNTERS

• Lizardmen (Area 5)
• Centipedes (Area 4)
• Anubian Guardpost (Area 7)
• Lower Anubian Guardpost (Area 43)
• Dragon (Area 43)

GENERATED ENCOUNTERS

• Minotaurs + Anubian Guards (Delve 2)
• Anubian Guards (Delve 3)
• Anubian Guards in Area 5 (Delve 3)
• Giant Rats (Delve 3)
• Stirges (Delve 3)

At this point, these generated encounters have accomplished three things.

First, they have slowed the pace of the PCs exploring the dungeon. By providing an additional ablative layer, they have prevented the PCs from delving as far into the dungeon as they otherwise would have been able to. This puts a premium on exploration — their knowledge of the deeper complex is hard-earned and, thus, more appreciated. (Of course, this also presumes that there are interesting and cool things to find down there in the first place. Fortunately, the Caverns of Thracia provide that.)

Second, they prevent a “return to save point” mentality. You can’t just leave the dungeon, come back at a later date, and pick up where you left off. Permanently clearing a section of the dungeon is hard work, and it’s not particularly permanent. (There are not guarantees that something won’t wander back in or that deeper denizens won’t extend their guard perimeter.) This provides a drive to “push on a little farther” because they know that they’ll have to fight hard just to get back to where they are now.

Third, they are keeping this section of the dungeon fresh. In many ways, it really is a completely new dungeon crawl every time they go in. But, on the other hand, their preexisting knowledge of the geography of the place is a reward in itself. (“Oh, I know how to get past these guys. There’s a secret passage a couple chambers to the west that we can use to bypass them.”) That this knowledge is valuable to them is proven by the fact that they were willing to pay cold, hard cash for it.

Tomorrow we’ll take a look at the next step in managing your megadungeon…

Go to Part 2