| From Darkest Dungeon |
DIY & Dragons recently had a post wherein they said, quote:
"I have also literally never heard of a game session where the characters actually ended up trapped in the dark, truly unable to see anything for the rest of their delve. There's probably a reason for that....So the problem with torches is, I would rather rule by fiat that all the characters just die than be forced to play out a session where I have to describe the characters feeling their way along the wall and groping blindly through pitch blackness because no one has a light source. I would rather end the session right there, send my friends home, and never run a game of D&D again rather than risk having that happen more than once."
That was somewhat eye opening to me. In the games that I run, light sources are really important. In the last few sessions, the players decided to haul back to the surface because they were running low on light. But if they had actually run out of torches in the Underworld, I wouldn't have known how to handle it. It would be tedious ad nauseum to narrate an experience without light.
Therefore, I whipped up this little table. If a guild runs out of all light sources in a dark dungeon—not a torch or a lamp to their name—each player must draw to see if they become lost in the dark. Your chances of seeing the surface world again are slim.
It’s pitch dark. Can you find your way back to the surface? d12
I-V: You are eaten by a grue.
VI: You are lost in the Underworld. The GM places you as an encounter on the Meatgrinder table. You may re-enter play if you are encountered.
VII: You make it back to the surface, but only after making solemn oaths to forsake the adventuring life. You retire and become a City persona.
VIII: You are captured by monsters. The GM will choose an appropriate monster in the area based on their Meatgrinder table. Escaping guild members know your general location and the type of monster.
IX: You are held for ransom by the bird-faced Okku Gang. It takes 1,000 gold per reputation level of the guild to buy your freedom.
X: You scramble back to the surface all but naked and shivering. You lose all of your equipment, both from your belt and backpack.
XI: You limp back to the surface, shaken to your core. You gain a Scar from a conflict with a random monster. You have a 50% chance to have lost each item carried, tested individually.
XII: You limp back to the surface, mostly unscathed but raving about the twelve different flavors of darkness.
rad
ReplyDeleteStock up on those torches and lamp oil. And keep the dwarf and elf alive just in case.
ReplyDeleteEven better when you play with elves and dwarves not being able to see in the dark.
DeleteI really love this because it reinforces the resource management of the exploration aspect of the game in a way that has traditionally been glossed over.
Is the Meatgrinder table a reference to a particular game or blog?
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DeleteThis really just means "The GM's Random Encounter Table." The version I use is an adaptation of the Overloaded Encounter Die from Necropraxis and the hex crawling procedures from City of Iron's Dolmenwood rules. I can post them here if there's interest. It's the way I handle what happens each turn in the mythic underworld.
DeleteYes please? Especially if you've actually used them at your table.
DeleteThanks for writing this! You're keeping me on my toes!
ReplyDeleteI like it! I use a similar table (Table of Despair, from the ODD74 forum, I believe) to determine the fate of characters if they don't return to the surface by the end of the session (it's more like an incentive than a mechanic we often use, really) - I guess I could use that for such "lights out" situations as well.
ReplyDeleteWhen I first started running dungeon crawls, I ruled that in complete darkness there was a cumulative 1-in-6 chance per ROUND that a random party member gets eaten by a grue (this way, a gush of wind blowing out the party's torches was way more than a hindrance) - although I called it "living darkness" (mythic underworld and all that).
Back when I was running a different Death and Dismemberment system, I would frequently ask the question "You have one round left to live, what will you give me for another one?" I've had players offer up items, stats, abilities, other characters, all sorts of things. I probably would do the same thing with this. "You are in the dark, underground, trapped possibly forever. How much would you give to see the light again?" and then adjudicate between "nothing" (you die in the ground) and "everything". Either way, a great thing to think about!
ReplyDeleteHey, that's a very cool method. Thanks for sharing it!
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