Keying a Dungeon with Class-specific Descriptions (Microblog)

I bet you've seen notes in dungeon keys that say something like: 

The murals depict an ibis-headed god handing out the tools of writings to grateful humans. (Clerics know that this is represents Thoth, god of knowledge.)  

What if your wrote a whole dungeon with an eye towards giving out this class-specific information? It might look something like this:

A round atrium; the domed ceiling is cracked, and the sun's rays illuminate the room. In the center of the room is a fountain spraying water 15' into the air, which falls back down into a shallow basin. A plant like an enormous squash squats in the fountain's pool, long fuzzy vines spilling out onto the floor.

- Fountain: The fountain's water is equivalent to a potion of plant growth. 

- - ⛧: Magic-users can smell an enchantment in the water. 

-  Plant: The Devil's gourd will attack anything that disturbs the water, sensing its movement (stats in sidebar). 

-  †: Thieves take notice of an obscure scrawl on the west wall that's a sign in thieves cant that means "Monster."

(⚔ = fighter, † = thief, ☥ = cleric, ⛧ = magic-user)

In these examples, it's like certain classes have a special insight into the hidden/secret depths of the dungeon area.

One weakness with this method is that, in practice, the reveal would quickly stop feeling special or unique for your class if repeated throughout the dungeon. What one person at the table is told, everybody at the tables hears (same problem with perception checks). This is just another dungeon key, filtered through a little flavor.

You could go beyond just additional information by building the challenges to be toyetic for different classes, like this:

A catacomb. In the north of the room, there are several plinths, each with a cup of a different make resting on top. A suit of armor, covered in cobwebs, animates as the party enters.

-  Armored knight: An ancient guardian. He will attack anyone who approaches the plinths, stating that they must prove themselves worthy of the sangraal. He is living, not undead; kept alive for an age by his oath to protect the sangraal. Stats as a 5th level fighter.

- -  ⚔ : Fighters know they have the right to challenge the knight to a duel. A duel may be to first blood, to yield, or to the death.

- Plinths: Six separate plinths, each with a different type of cup. Taking a cup other than the stone bowl (the sangraal) from a plinth causes the dungeon entrance to collapse under two tons of rubble. 

- - Cups:  The cups are: wooden goblet, clay kintsugi cup, stone bowl, a wooden cup painted gold with fake jewels, a golden chalice, and a pewter chalice spangled with gems.

- -  ☥: Clerics know that Mythrys was carved from stone and refused gold and jewels. 

In contrast to my previous point that "everybody knows what every other person at the table knows," I have found in practice that these techniques, used sparingly, make players feel special. Saying "Only elves benefit from the magic elf water" makes the elf player feel smart for the character creation choice of choosing "elf." Everything in moderation, they say.

Another way to make class-specific details feel special is to keep them as hidden information at the table: the GM can text the player the details, pass them on hidden notes, etc. Although, the juice wouldn't be worth the squeeze unless it was the whole point of the dungeon: some sort of inter-party tournament where players could get secret advantages and access to additional loot and boons. Such a dungeon could look something like this:

A chamber dominated with a life-size chess board. On the east side of the room stand stone statues of black's pieces: pawns, knights, a king and queen, etc. On the east wall is a fresco of an ankh.

- Chess board: Stepping into the room determines what piece the PC represents based on their starting square. Afterwards, the board treats squares that would be "illegal" for them to step on as trapped, dealing 3d6 via electrical jolt.

- -  †: Thieves may move 1d6 + Dex bonus feet per turn using handholds on the wall, bypassing stepping on the chess board floor.

- Pieces: When a PC ends their movement, each adjacent piece will attack them once. Each chess piece has HD equivalent to their score in chess. 

 - - ⚔ : Fighters have heard a rumor that the person who deals the death blow to a chess piece will receive a number of electrum pieces equal to the piece's HP, deposited directly into their Centrum Bank account.

- ☥: Clerics know that whoever first touches the ankh will receive a random boon (see boon chart, page XX).  

What methods would you use to make this kind of technique sing?

The Secret History of The Castle Automatic

When Sean McCoy proposed the Dungeon23 project, I couldn't help but join in. I wrote two dungeons--one for His Majesty the Worm and one for Under Hill, By Water. This effort eventually went on to become the 100+ room, Metroidvania-inspired dungeon...

The Castle Automatic

The premise of The Castle Automatic is that there is a mechanical castle with a self-contained sun, moon, and seasons. It was once ruled by a cruel giant emperor, but has since fallen into ruin and become haunted by vampires and wind-up golems who play-act a continual faction war. Players need to repair the engines of the castle in order to control the flow of time inside it and change the environment to solve puzzles and find treasure.

But I had been noodling on the basic idea for this dungeon for many years. It had taken root there when I was just a small child.

The True Origins of The Castle Automatic

There is an unfinished blogpost sitting in my drafts that I started I don't know how many years ago. I found it recently. Here is a screenshot of it, in its entirety.

At this point, The Castle Automatic was a gleam in my eye

To summarize the aborted post, there is a children's show that I lives half-formed in my memories called Eureka's Castle (1989-1991). It consisted of a bunch of muppets--a wizard, a dragon, a bat, etc.--who lived in a wind-up castle owned by a giant. Here's a link to the intro. Perhaps you remember it?

The show certainly wasn't a favorite of mine. I never had cable TV. I mostly watched it on doctor's office TVs or when I visited my aunt. But something about it stuck in my brain. When I was doing the work of writing one room a day, those memories came came spilling into my new dungeon.

To give you a preview of The Castle Automatic, I'll post some screenshots from the book of NPCs and dungeon features, then show you the puppets that inspired them. 

Taitale Allcraft

When you see who she represents, you'll say "Eureka!"

If the Castle Automatic is the Labyrinth of Crete, Taitale is Daedalus: a renowned inventor captured and forced to create her own prison. Since time has been broken inside the Castle, she remains trapped there still. Finding and rescuing her and bringing her into modern Underfolk society is one of the hooks for the module. 

She is, of course, inspired by the sorceress who lends the series the series her name. The hint in the text is that saying "Taitale!" is the dwarven equivalent to saying "Eureka!" -- a word to symbolize a sudden flash of insight.

Mr. Knack

Every dungeon of particular size should have a merchant in it to do business with the PCs. In the Castle Automatic, it's Mr. Knack. He appears on the three of the five Meatgrinders (there is a Meatgrinder for each level of the dungeon). In each area that he appears, he has a different bag of wares. 

A weird little fellow. My players hated him in playtesting (positive).

Something I think is cool is this haggling mechanic I snuck in for Mr. Knack: "The price listed is his starting cost. He will come down as much as 50% off of this cost. He will only entertain as many counter-offers as the haggler’s Wands score before he puts his foot down and insists on a final price." Often, rules for Worm are just rulings that I made during my sessions that seem to work.

Mr. Knack is inspired by a character from Eureka's Castle called...Mr. Knack. In fact, he's changed almost not at all from his original version. 

Wearing my inspiration on my sleeve with this guy.

Pimple the Vampiric Torturer

R.L. Stein was a writer on Eureka's Castle. You can see the resemblance between him and the bat, Batley.

The equivalent in the Castle Automatic is Pimple, one of the vampires that now haunt the ruin. He is the torturer and delights in making captured PCs spin his giant Wheel of Fortune, which gives them bizarre banes. 

Batley was terribly nearsighted. Pimple is, too, and takes disfavor on attacks because of it.

Something I think is cool is the Challenge page on the right. I have a ton of these throughout the module, all illustrated by Tiger Wizard. They are intended to be handouts for set piece battles that can occur through the dungeon. These pages delineate the different zones of a Challenge if a fight breaks out in a particular room and outlines special rules that make that fight fun and different. You can see Pimple looming up abstractly in the corner.

The Moat Twins, Bogge and Quaggmire

Another fairly direct inspiration, Eureka's Castle had a pair of aquatic monsters that lived in the moat. The Castle Automatic has these guy, too. Whereas the puppets liked peanut butter sandwiches, my moat monsters love riddles and puzzles. You can fight them, but you can also solve their riddles to get them to unlock underwater gates that normally the players couldn't access. Monsters should have lots of options for how to approach them.

The Devil, a Dragon

Eureka's Castle had a dragon--a childlike, lovable dragon named Magellan. I agree with R.L. Stein that every dungeon should have a dragon. But mine is more in line with Worm aesthetics: a dragon that is unknowable, deadly, a force of nature.

The residents of the Castle Automatic call the dragon that lives in the courtyard "The Devil" for her ferocity. 

The Devil uses special rules for the Meatgrinder in her region. Whenever the Devil major arcana is drawn, she appears!

The Devil is a type of dragon called a wyvern: a dragon of the elemental air. As opposed to the generic fire breath, she calls down lightning. When fighting her, there's a chance to be struck by lightning at the beginning of every round. 

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Anyway, I hope this all isn't too goofy of a way to say: please check out The Castle Automatic if you haven't already. Fingers crossed that the screenshots show that despite the whimsical origins the book has some cool ideas. The early-bird pricing at Exalted Funeral is going to expire very soon, so don't miss out.

Writing in Canon Settings (microblog)

Working on the Middle-earth Hexcrawl Project has made me want to articulate some brief thoughts I've had on writing material for canon settings. This is a microblog, unedited, stream of consciousness, and written while drunk.

If you just faithfully reproduce the things that Tolkien directly talked about, Middle-earth would seem very empty indeed. You can see in Idraluna Archive's map that much of the setting feels empty because nothing is as built out as the Shire.

I have three approaches to filling in the empty space. I wouldn't call them contradictory, but they are different ways to get at the same problem.

One approach is resonance. If I invent something whole cloth, it needs to feel like an appropriate inclusion. In the first edition of The One Ring, Francis Nepitello did a great job with this. The River-maidens aren't mentioned in any of the canon material, but they feel so resonant! Europe is replete, East and West, with water women that wreak havoc. And you know from Goldberry that there are personified Rivers and River's Daughters. 

The other approach is what I call the Grant Morrison method. When he wrote Batman, he said he took the entirety of the comic line as "canon," even the weird and silly periods where Batman and Robin fought aliens and stuff. One part of the exercise of populating the entirety of Middle-earth as a hex map is looking at the licensed games I own and seeing how I would organize them for this kind of blorby, procedural play. If MERP has a weird undead spirit called the Gullion in the Shire, should I contradict them? 

...To answer my own rhetorical, yes! I should! Curating the licensed material for my own finicky personal preferences is part of the fun. But as I read the works of those who have come before, I'm often struck by stuff that isn't necessarily resonant but is...real? Strange? Appealing? I borrow my favorite pieces of these and stick them into the hexcrawl (with credit). 

The third approach is the simplest: revel in the void. Certainly, there are lonesome places in our own world. Not every hex needs to be a slam dunk. Sometimes, a lonely lake or ancient monument is enough to give some color. The writing exercise for the day can be easy. And when I have an opportunity, I can hide cool things in random encounters that will make those hexes feel fun when explored.

As an additional caveat, all of this is just for my own amusement. I've always been writing Tolkien RPG stuff, since my very earliest days playing RPGs, and I suspect I always will. This is a project only as long as it's interesting to me as a daily writing exercise. But while I'm doing it, I might as well be reflective about what choices I'm making today and why.