The Gaming Outpost

  I haven’t written a piece specifically about dungeon adventures in a long time.  Certainly many of the ideas have been useful for that sort of play setting, and some sprang from it, and sometimes an article would mention how to apply its ideas to dungeon play; but not since An Amusing Dungeon, the second article in this series, have I addressed a subject specifically about dungeons.  Even then, the idea presented reached beyond dungeon play to scenario design; it was only mostly about dungeons.

  Perhaps as I return to something that in my mind is really about dungeon play it will again prove to reach beyond that narrow confine into something more.

  I want to talk about the random encounter, the wandering monsters of our early play.  These came up in Encounters, where we talked about having random encounters with people the characters know.  This time we’re going back to the more traditional encounter, with a wandering monster.

  It’s an idea which has generally fallen into disfavor.  Most gamers today, players and referees, prefer all encounters to be fixed.  Yet I have found much value in the wanderer concept, which can be applied in many ways, if the right questions are asked.  For example, in Tristan’s Labyrinth (which I wrote for Multiverser:  The First Book of Worlds) all of the encounters are in a sense “random”.  The dungeon model there is a seemingly unending maze of corridors, and there are no fixed places and no fixed encounters.  It is assumed that as the player characters wander (or even if they remain stationary), so, too, the residents of these caves are also wandering, and at a random time paths may cross such that the player character and the hungry creature encounter each other.  Where that happens is completely irrelevant to the scenario; the dice determine when it happens next, and what is encountered, and with that decided the question of where finds the response, wherever the character is at the moment the encounter occurs.  The complaint commonly raised against such random encounters is that they derail the real adventure; that, though, assumes that there is another purpose to the adventure, and in Tristan’s Labyrinth there really isn’t one.  It is entirely about surviving in a strange environment, and killing monsters.

  Tristan’s Labyrinth maintains the randomness of such encounters in two senses:  they occur at random locations (determined by random intervals of time in the game world), and they involve randomly selected creatures (the randomness determines sliding up and down a scale of relative difficulty in the encounter).  An as yet untitled scenario for The Third Book of Worlds approaches scenario design in a different fashion which is yet very like this.  The encounters in part of that world are sequenced in the order in which they will occur, but the timing and position in the setting at which they will happen is left to the judgment of the referee.  In that sense, all the encounters are wandering ones, but they are sequenced such that the adventure unfolds dramatically through them.

  All of this is connected to an early realization I had about wandering monsters and the lairs in which they wander.  Often they don’t make sense in themselves.  I came swiftly to identifying what I designated closed versus open dungeons, and tended to do far more design in the closed variety over the years.

  The difference between the two ought to be explained.  In an open dungeon, the roll of the dice can indicate any creature from a long list, which usually has been composed based on the strength of the creature (or creature group) rather than on any particular sense of it belonging where it is found.  In my first dungeon, I on more than one occasion rolled the dice and produced a monster in a location where it would have been so completely cut off from anything that it must have been here all along, yet that too was impossible because it could not have survived here more than a short time.  I also became aware that my players had as one of their objectives completely clearing the finite dungeon of all evil and dangerous creatures, one way or another.  The open dungeon meant that there was no way to do so.  Monsters seemed to appear by spontaneous generation, not by any logical means of arrival at the specified location.

  Gradually as I completed that first dungeon, I capped the wandering monsters to a very limited number, all of which I listed and detailed as prepared encounters, and I tried to give connections to more and more of them to explain what they were doing here.  In essence, I turned it into a closed dungeon, one which contained such creatures as had place within it and did not replace these when they were eliminated.

  Most of my work thereafter took the closed form, in more and more sensible ways.  If you were in an area with dragons, you might encounter a young dragon, or an otyugh or other creature that’s able to feed off the wastes and scraps of the monsters without becoming their victim.  If you’re in an area in which gnolls, orcs, and hobgoblins each have colonies of their own, you’re highly likely to encounter residents of those colonies involved in activities that carry them outside their dwellings.  In some areas, there’s a good chance of encountering random vermin that could tunnel in through the walls or hide in the debris, but in other areas these are extremely rare, because they don’t make sense.

  It took a long time to get there.  One small dungeon I created contained exactly twelve wandering monster entries, each of which had a defined course of wandering through the dungeon, resulting in rather complex tables to determine which creatures could be encountered near which rooms–necessary in a compound in which some areas were not accessible without passing through inhabited areas or locked doors.  Yet even this had one of the significant features of closed dungeon design.  When you destroyed the monster, it was destroyed.  If your creatures are residents of a nearby lair, they’re part of the number there, and destroying them means they’re not there later.  Only creatures who can come in from the outside can be replaced if killed.  Further, some thought is given to how many of such creatures could actually be in the area as defined before it becomes unreasonable.  You don’t necessarily have to know where each one makes its place of rest, but you do have to keep them limited to few enough that they could each have such a place.  That’s good closed dungeon design.

  I don’t mean that open design is unworkable.  I have seen dungeons in which open design made perfect sense.  In one adventure, my character was sixteen miles under ground when he entered a vast cavern in which the river flowing through it provided water for the irrigation of the fields of mushrooms and fungi which spread through the darkness, and we traveled several miles across these hidden cultivated expanses of agriculture before reaching the narrows through which that river poured into a rapid and beyond to a lake vast enough that it hosted two cities on its shores.  If your dungeon is connected to that sort of vast landscape of kingdoms and nations, a stray carrion crawler or curious minotaur could quite easily wander into an area you thought had been made safe in previous adventures.  He could even take a room.

  Today I don’t create as much detail in advance; but then, I don’t run as many dungeons as I once did, and I don’t put the time into designing them.  My scenarios are driven by many things other than maps and encounters.  Yet I find this distinction between open and closed dungeons serves me in good stead.  It helps to recognize which you have when you move into a new area.  When the player character boards the pirate ship, you need to decide how large the ship is and how many pirates it carries, because it’s a closed scenario and must make sense as one.  On the other hand, if he boards the abandoned space station which has been infested with alien monsters, it might be a large enough chunk of real estate with enough hiding places in it that there is no getting every last one, unless you’ve brought high-tech extermination gear.  If it’s not a space station but a planetside spaceport, you’ve definitely got the vastness of the planet to provide more encounters.  So whatever type of dungeon you’ve built, consider what’s in it, and whether anything else can get there.

  Next week, something different.

—–

M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.

The Sword of Night had turned me into a mile-tall, phase-shifted humanoid fog bank. And then it messed up turning me back to human. I lay a half-mile long after the partial retransformation, and my skull buzzed in the wake of potentially world-cracking magic, and I had starved to death in the last world, the world of the Sword where I fulfilled a Quest.



Here, I lay amidst triple canopy jungle with my left eye in the top canopy, and my right eye in low-hanging clouds. Sitting up brought me above the cloud layer, and all I could see was white fluffy stuff.



The mere thought of doing magic made my head spin, not that I had a spell directly suited for this. There was the Ghostwalk ritual I’d made on some Gothic space station, and a request for aid from nature spirits to grow plants to gigantic size I’d learned from a verser priestess of an animistic religion. Maybe, I could work the concepts together, but “aargh”, the mere thought of doing anything more than simple conversation left my head splitting and my soul as dry as dessert scoured bones.



I ducked under the clouds, and saw a man, a pygmy, I think, sitting in a clearing near me. He was tending a campfire, and something about the smoke beckoned me.



So I approached by scooting on my bottom.



He began speaking in Mandarin Chinese, and shortly I knew a few facts. He was a shaman, and he thought me a wandering spirit in need of help. That was true enough. And this was an alternate timeline where Dynastic China had not turned against technology and inward, and where

everyone spoke a corrupt form of Mandarin as the lingua franca.



The shaman tried to help me, but he was not that good at it. He was more of a happy-go-lucky sort who had not mastered the discipline to really rescue me. That was the bad news. The good news was that he was a happy-go-lucky sort who knew a ton of jokes.



He managed to strengthen me, but still within a week I was gone. The problem was simple. No water, and no food could nourish me unless it was transformed to my state.



I woke in the next world thinner than ever, any maybe a bit shorter. It was a place of pitiless sun. Heat mirages all about, and white rock, and no water even if I could have drank it. I would not last long here, I thought.



Then I saw the woman. Clothed in rags, but quite healthy with a nice tan. She was being pursued by a gang of brutes. Frustrated, I reached for psi powers, but no joy. And my head still ached after that close shave with the lesser powers of the gods.



So I swooped down on the ostrich-riding thugs with their rifles and crude swords and ragged clothing. Startled they drew up short, but they were brave sorts, and not inclined to give up. They shot at me, and tested me in various ways while I contrived to scare them as best as I knew how.



Finally, I went after their mounts, and was rewarded by seeing the ostriches tear off in various directions.



I cast about for the girl, and found her climbing a shale slope.



“Thank you, Great Cloud Being. Know that you have a friend in Cheyenne Mountain.”



We talked, quickly, and it developed that she was an American born after the Firefall when the Cuban Missile Crisis got out of hand. The thugs were descendants of Russian invaders.



And she desperately wanted to get over the hill to get to her “Mount”. I took that to mean her horse or ostrich, and allowed that I could try to fetch it for her if she gave me a name.



I stepped in five steps over the mountain and into the next valley to try to herd “Duke”. Duke stood much shorter than me being only seventy-five feet tall of simian muscle. His eyes glowed, from the atomic radiation, I assumed. I’d entered a world where atomic radiation had created gigantism among the animals.



It seemed fairly smart for an animal, and so it came quickly, and we were in time to rescue Grace.



I journed with them back to their camp outside Cheyenne Mountain, and saw about a dozen of these great beasts being ridden by the tribesmen.



The more numerous invaders of a crude and barbaric but militaristic and brave culture had developed techniques which enabled them to have a chance against these beasts. And the spawning ground was captured by the invaders, and so the next generation of giants would go to the invaders.



I was able to help by scouting. My incorporeal status made me the perfect scout, and so my fellow countrymen were able to reclaim this field of glowing lights where the eggs of the great monkeys had been laid.



The chief scientist, Grace’s father, offered to test a theoretical shrink ray on me. It did not work, and I was blown into the next world which was just as well.



I spent the next day looking down on a field of worms of varying sizes. The smaller worms seemed to be on top, and occasionally a much larger worm would rise out of the mass of worms and chomp on some of the surface worms.



Their was no dirt, just squirming worms. I think the ones on top were the bottom of the food chain, and highly photosynthetic. They were solid black so that meant they used all available light, and it seemed as if that light included gamma rays because I felt like I was getting a sunburn as I stayed there.



I was shorter, and it may have been the shrink ray, or it may have been because I was losing mass. The last joing of my fingers was gone.



After one day, I was out of there. My resistance was lower, and it was a harsh place which I think the space commando girl verser had told me of before. H’mm.



The next world was pitch dark. No sun, moon, or stars. Then I started to see bio-luminescense. For a long while, I thought I was in the water, then I thought on land, and then I realized halfway up my trunk was under water, and the rest was leaning onto dry land.



I’d grown so tenous, that I could hardly feel gravity.



There seemed nothing intelligent to talk to although I tried.



My next world, I saw men and woman standing about up to their knees in a sea of blue goo. They wept, and cursed and blamed each other in hysterical tones and in somewhat American English.



I tried to get them to calm down, and find out what the problem was. They were freaked out by me, and later they used me as a symbol.



“See someone else is even more messed over than we are. We need to pull it together.” This use of me as a bad example did cheer me in a gallows humor type of way.



I did find out their problem. They’d had a runaway assembler, nanotech make anything device, dissasemble everything not labelled “pet”, “sentient”, or “house plant” or “planetary crust”. All of their buildings, spaceships, computers, etc. were now a chemically inert blue goo. And so was the assembler because it discontinued itself.



Still, I lasted less than a day. Starvation was versing me out quicker and quicker. And while I thought my ability to do magic was improved, my physical status was rapidly worsening. I might end up caught on some loop where I verse out every five minutes.



I really needed to do something, I told myself. Only I was so tired.



The next world was modern, and I appeared on stage in a magic act in a nightclub. The stage magician kept his cool, and incorporated me into his act.



Later, in the dressing room, he asked, no he compelled my by magic to explain what I was. I did in short bursts, and he listened in astonishment that changed to compassion.



He placed a phone call.



“Yes, I’m aware its the middle of the night. This is of potentially great importance. This individual has a great deal of knowledge about other realms, and seeing as we have daemonic assasins dropping in on a weekly basis, I thought you might could wake the Man up. Now!”



Within the hour, the President of the United States and his cabinet surrounded me in spells and pentagrams to try to give me health and transform me.



The made me feel better, and clear-headed, but they were not able to reverse the disintegration, or cause a transformation. The second was beyond the bias in that world, I thought.



Nevertheless, I repayed President David Copperfield for his kindness in telling them all I knew about daemonic realms. I’d definitely vote for him, even if he was so inherently tricky that he’d make Nixon look like an amateur. In his world, the U.S. did not send in the Marines or the Aircraft Carrier. They sent in the CIA which used Magi to cause “accidents” to foes of their country. And of course, they also had interdimensional invaders to deal with while keeping the whole thing secret from the public, for some reason I never found out.



My next world, I found myself in the midst of a transformation even as I awoke. I looked up at trees, and bushes. It was a great relief. So great that I jumped up and down and yelled.



Then I tried to cast magic, but it was hard focusing on all the different aspects that I needed to at the same time, and I felt uncommonly clumsy. The Reverse Ghostwalk spell I’d been considering trying for the first time did not do as advertised. It flung me into an orbit of a nearby flower bush which I later learned was labelled “Ghost’s Tears.”



A woman of assurance came walking across the fields to me, and I saw she was taller, much taller than I.



“Oh. You naughty, naughty little wizard. Look what you have done to yourself. If only you had just submitted to my spell, you’d be fine.” She shook her head, and to my deep embarrassment, I began to cry and to weep.



“There, there, I’ve got just the thing for you.” An air elemental, not at all like the malicious creatures I’d met in the world where this mess started, held me on her arm, and snapped her fingers. An illusionary lollipop appeared. And she stuck it in my mouth. It was the first thing in several weeks I’d tasted, and I was very happy. And I’d wished I’d thought of that earlier when the shaman had offered spells. He might have known an illusion or two that would have made my slow disintegration easier. But, I hardly cared at the moment. My time horizons had shrunk. I was happy now, and that was all that mattered.



On the way back to her gleaming marble castle, we came upon a toddler dressed in solid black with a skull topped wizard’s rod.



“I am Virxly the Black, terror of thousands! You will fear me, Tonya of the White Order. You will beg me to kill you before I am finished with you.” Of course, he had much poorer diction than that, but I got the gist, and I broke out in tears.



Tonya patted my armspace, and then Frowned.

“Anymore talk like that, and we’ll be washing out your mouth with soap.” He blanched, and I’m afraid I stuck my tongue out at him.



She carried us both to her tower, and we got acquainted with the others who had tried to teleport into Tonya’s Valley to kill her and fallen prey to her spell of Instant Toddlerhood.



It seemed Tonya had a very strong maternal instinct, and a prophecy that said any natural children of hers would destroy the world. So she made her enemies into her children. And she set about raising them to be decent citizens.



It helped that she was very powerful, and clever, and that the local magic system seemed to require the kind of focus that an adult mind did with practise, and a child almost never did.



Being a kind-hearted person, and a powerful mage in one, I thought I had found my deliverance. But she would not listen to me. It had something to do with one of her problem children trying to flash-fry her, and quarter-succeeding:(usually such attempts did not work at all). She healed herself, and then she gave him a serious spanking, and took his magic rod away. And by then, she was not in the mood to hear my problem, and she did not realize I was close to starving. She thought I was elven or something which explained my skinniness. So she compelled a nap, and I versed out in the midst of it.



And in so doing, the spell unwound itself, but maybe it had something to do with what happened next. Indigenous scholar, you ask, what happened next? Well, the universe, sort-of lost track of my molecules, and I came back in another world solid but different. Very different.



Tadeusz