Wednesday, October 17, 2007

good book

Original D&D Discussion member stonegiant recommended this book a few weeks back and I found it at my local library. There are lots of real-life inspirations for dungeons: the catacombs of Paris, the interior of the Great Pyramid, the steam tunnels at your local University, etc. But Tom Mangold and John Penycate's The Tunnels of Cu Chi is the first time I've come across detailed accounts of combat in an underground environment. The man-to-man fighting between the Viet Cong and the Tunnel Rats of the U.S. Army will only be directly adaptable to D&D if you riddle a dungeon with corridors so small that crawling on hands and knees in single file is the only option. If your DM uses Tucker's Kobolds, then maybe you could root them out using the methods described in this book. The Army could only score small local successes against the tunnels until the later phases of the war, when they just bombed the hell out of the Cu Chi area with B-52s.


This is just a small sample drawing meant to exemplify many features of the VC tunnel system. The South Vietnamese guerrillas had miles of miles of tunnels, most of which linked up so that you could travel from the Cambodian border to Saigon via tunnel crawling. And almost all of it was dug by hand with tools no different than those medieval sappers would use to undermine castle walls. Fighting in the tunnels, knives and bamboos spears were almost as important as pistols and AK's. The troubles of light sources and the danger of traps were constant issues. Running out of oxygen was another major problem.

One great thing about this book is that the authors were able to interview people from both sides of the conflict, and I think they did their level best to be politically neutral, given the polarizing nature of the conflict. You get to see the tunnel warfare from both the eyes of the intrepid G.I. tunnel invaders and the Vietnamese fighters who lived long stretches of their lives in the tunnels.

6 comments:

  1. Anonymous11:03 AM

    Thanks for the Tucker's Kobolds link. Very cool stuff

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  2. Osprey books also has a book on Vietnam fortifications (i.e. tunnel complexes) and they also have one on Japanese Island defenses in WWII. Both are pretty good and may give ideas for dungeons.

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  3. Man, now I wanna play Recon 1st Edition.

    I don't wanna run it or anything, but I wanna play :)

    My favorite real-life dungeon is the series of (in some cases only barely related) tunnels beneath Moscow, which have been added to, lost, re-added to, explored, destroyed, lost, re-added to and so on for centuries. In recent years a group of youngsters gained notoriety for exploring them, and finding portions nobody - not even the authorities - had any ideas about.

    Every city has forgotten tunnels (when I lived in Austin, they discovered some nifty ones right in the heart of downtown that nobody'd known about for decades) but Moscow's got it GOOD ...

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  4. So what you're saying is that we should all go out and dig massive tunnels networks? Please say yes, because I really want to dig massive tunnels networks...

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  5. Anonymous1:38 AM

    Great Stuff, Jeff!

    I myself, am going back in time, too:
    The ultimate, the real, the Labyrinth that started it all: the palace at Knossos!

    It´s pretty large in reality, when compared to the usual ten-foot corridor-dungeon.

    I turn it up to eleven: double all measures, and populate it with archaic Troll-Giants, who were banished by the Gods to their own demi-plane, for worshipping the Unspeakable One. Even the Evil Gods banned them, that´s how Unspeakable their Cult was.

    Populating the Palace of Knossos is in itself educational, learning a lot about minoan architecture and actual usage of rooms in palaces.

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  6. I used Minoan architecture as the basis for a dungeon I wrote for a con tournament 10 or more years ago. The palace had been built too close to the coastline and was slowing sliding into the sea. About a third of the rooms were at least partially submerged, some containing sea-critters. The rest of the place was occupied by the descendants of a degenerate king and his harem and over the centuries they had metamorphosed into grimlocks. Good times.

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