2020 - The Year of Blackmoor - 50th Anniversary - Day One Hundred and Fifteen
Celebrating 2020 - The Year of Blackmoor - 50th Anniversary of Blackmoor and of Role-Playing!
Today is Part 58 (Part A) of my series on OD&D, with The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures Vol. 3.
**For those coming in, in the middle of this series I am giving you my take on OD&D during my first exposure starting in Sept of 1975. For this first part it is just the first three books of the original woodgrain box set and prior to obtaining the Greyhawk, Blackmoor and later Supplements.**
First up are Dungeons, we will be spending several days on Dungeons:
The Underworld is not limited to constructed dungeons, also included are natural caves, and other underground areas hollowed out by various underworld denizens both intelligent and non-intelligent. There are many and various areas and your imagination should be allowed to run wild in devising them. While the rules concern themselves only with constructed dungeons, as I quickly discovered back in the beginning you should not let that limit you. As always consider what is presented here as the barest hint of a jumping off point. An Underworld area can cover areas so huge it would take a lifetime(s) to draw and four(+) lifetimes to explore.
This is an example of a tiny dungeon and you will note that it does incorporate a natural cavern. I like a good mix of natural and constructed area. There are animals that tunnel through solid rock and when the debris is cleaned out of those tunnels they can run for hundreds of miles in very complex patterns. It can be very easy to get lost in the Underworld. When it comes to the Underworld, thing big. There are large mountains that are completely honeycombed with an unimaginable complex system of passageways and rooms comprising hundreds of levels and a million or more areas. You may never draw or explore something of that size, but it lurks off the map unexplored waiting someone to explore it.
While this kind of map is easy on the eyes, it is not printer friendly, nor is it easy to draw if you blacken all of the non-open space. If you are hand-drawing it I suggest light gray shading or cross hatching as one possible method, there are many more. Find what suits you.Take note of the features shown on this simple map, there are many more that could be present. I would note that this is a pretty sparse map and they can be must more complex than what is shown here with many more rooms and connections, secret doors and passages and such.
Did you notice what was *missing on the newer drawing. See the bottom for the answer. That circular room with the wedge-shaped divisions - each might have a door and it might rotate, it might stop with a different door each time, each door might lead to a different place, but only one returns you to where you were.
I will often have secret doors that lead through narrow passages to other areas or even down to a lower level in places like this.
Arneson, I learned much later, used slanting passages and they have been a favorite of mine too. While we are about it, empty rooms are seldom really empty, while they may not have monsters or treasure, they may have many other things. Along with the trappings of a room, furniture - broken or whole, trash, debris, odor, damp, drips, cold, wet, hot, dry, dusty, etc. Strange noises can be repeated at random or in a pattern, they might be one sound or many different sounds. In some areas, they might here sounds that are close or perhaps even far away.
This is one way to do things, although my dungeons are pretty short on dead-ends. False doors, and what is noted as "C" something that looks like one thing, but turns out to be something else is fun.Slides, chutes and drops to lower levels are good features, drops into water can give a shock and you do not know how deep the water is.
I would disagree that something like this is only if you are "out to get your players". These things show up now and again in my dungeons and they are good challenges for higher level parties who think they are well-prepared for anything. Regardless of level, take them a bit out of their comfort range to keep things fresh and interesting. There are infinite variations on these ideas and related ideas.
This is a lot of great ideas that I put to use early on in my dungeon building.
Again as he says, all round rooms must not be nexuses, these are to used sparingly so that players do not refuse to enter them. One trick is to have complicated designs of such size that when these twists are thrown in the players are not expecting them.Another thing I do is having the players chase or be chased, when you run things at a breakneck pace, the players forget things or may throw caution to the wind This is a good thing for the game. Also notice the difference in the way area 7 is drawn on each of the maps.
Pits may or may not also be filled with hazards. Something I did not think about bitd, but something I read a while back is putting a Gelatinous Cube at the bottom of a Pit Trap. You can imagine a number of different ways that could play out. These are just a few ideas, there are many places that you can find suggestions and design tips for dungeons. So do not limit yourself to one set of ideas, scour the web to find dozens and dozens, they are out there.
*1. The stairway down is missing on the newer drawing.
Tomorrow we will continue on with dungeons. Remember we are just scratching the surface here.
Celebrating 2020 - The Year of Blackmoor - 50th Anniversary of Blackmoor and of Role-Playing!
Today is Part 58 (Part A) of my series on OD&D, with The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures Vol. 3.
**For those coming in, in the middle of this series I am giving you my take on OD&D during my first exposure starting in Sept of 1975. For this first part it is just the first three books of the original woodgrain box set and prior to obtaining the Greyhawk, Blackmoor and later Supplements.**
First up are Dungeons, we will be spending several days on Dungeons:
The Underworld is not limited to constructed dungeons, also included are natural caves, and other underground areas hollowed out by various underworld denizens both intelligent and non-intelligent. There are many and various areas and your imagination should be allowed to run wild in devising them. While the rules concern themselves only with constructed dungeons, as I quickly discovered back in the beginning you should not let that limit you. As always consider what is presented here as the barest hint of a jumping off point. An Underworld area can cover areas so huge it would take a lifetime(s) to draw and four(+) lifetimes to explore.
This is an example of a tiny dungeon and you will note that it does incorporate a natural cavern. I like a good mix of natural and constructed area. There are animals that tunnel through solid rock and when the debris is cleaned out of those tunnels they can run for hundreds of miles in very complex patterns. It can be very easy to get lost in the Underworld. When it comes to the Underworld, thing big. There are large mountains that are completely honeycombed with an unimaginable complex system of passageways and rooms comprising hundreds of levels and a million or more areas. You may never draw or explore something of that size, but it lurks off the map unexplored waiting someone to explore it.
Remember what is laid out here is a starting place. Your underworld may look nothing like those Arneson, Gygax, or Kuntz devised. They will be unique to you. A word of caution, it is easy for dungeons to be designed like adventure modules with a linear railroad only one way to go. I urge you to break free of that and make your dungeons non-linear with multiple ways in and out of them, both horizontally and vertically, with lots of secret passages and all manner of ways for a monster(s) to get around behind an adventuring party. In practice, I like to always have a back door or way out built in, it may be very hard to find for the uninitiated, but it is there.
Also a word on teleportation, my dungeons often feature portals. These portals appear as a door shaped (or other shaped) shimmer in the air. The shimmer can be many different color which may mean different things. The portal might be there all the time, or it might only appear at certain times, which may be standard or random. It might always appear in the same place or it appear at different places at different times or it could randomly appear anywhere. It might take you someplace else in the dungeon, or to someplace outside the dungeon or to a different dungeons, it might take you to another continent or the other side of the world or to different worlds (which could be anywhere). Some portals do one thing and some do another. Some are one way, so you have to search for a different one that leads back.
Above is the original map presented in the first printing, we are going to look at a newer drawing below. See if you can note any differences between the two maps.
While this kind of map is easy on the eyes, it is not printer friendly, nor is it easy to draw if you blacken all of the non-open space. If you are hand-drawing it I suggest light gray shading or cross hatching as one possible method, there are many more. Find what suits you.Take note of the features shown on this simple map, there are many more that could be present. I would note that this is a pretty sparse map and they can be must more complex than what is shown here with many more rooms and connections, secret doors and passages and such.
Did you notice what was *missing on the newer drawing. See the bottom for the answer. That circular room with the wedge-shaped divisions - each might have a door and it might rotate, it might stop with a different door each time, each door might lead to a different place, but only one returns you to where you were.
I will often have secret doors that lead through narrow passages to other areas or even down to a lower level in places like this.
Arneson, I learned much later, used slanting passages and they have been a favorite of mine too. While we are about it, empty rooms are seldom really empty, while they may not have monsters or treasure, they may have many other things. Along with the trappings of a room, furniture - broken or whole, trash, debris, odor, damp, drips, cold, wet, hot, dry, dusty, etc. Strange noises can be repeated at random or in a pattern, they might be one sound or many different sounds. In some areas, they might here sounds that are close or perhaps even far away.
This is one way to do things, although my dungeons are pretty short on dead-ends. False doors, and what is noted as "C" something that looks like one thing, but turns out to be something else is fun.Slides, chutes and drops to lower levels are good features, drops into water can give a shock and you do not know how deep the water is.
I would disagree that something like this is only if you are "out to get your players". These things show up now and again in my dungeons and they are good challenges for higher level parties who think they are well-prepared for anything. Regardless of level, take them a bit out of their comfort range to keep things fresh and interesting. There are infinite variations on these ideas and related ideas.
This is a lot of great ideas that I put to use early on in my dungeon building.
Again as he says, all round rooms must not be nexuses, these are to used sparingly so that players do not refuse to enter them. One trick is to have complicated designs of such size that when these twists are thrown in the players are not expecting them.Another thing I do is having the players chase or be chased, when you run things at a breakneck pace, the players forget things or may throw caution to the wind This is a good thing for the game. Also notice the difference in the way area 7 is drawn on each of the maps.
Pits may or may not also be filled with hazards. Something I did not think about bitd, but something I read a while back is putting a Gelatinous Cube at the bottom of a Pit Trap. You can imagine a number of different ways that could play out. These are just a few ideas, there are many places that you can find suggestions and design tips for dungeons. So do not limit yourself to one set of ideas, scour the web to find dozens and dozens, they are out there.
*1. The stairway down is missing on the newer drawing.
Tomorrow we will continue on with dungeons. Remember we are just scratching the surface here.
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