Secrets of Myrddin Q&A

I just wanted to make sure everybody saw the questions and answers from the two Secrets of Myrddin posts:


Q: So when are you going to post the Kickstarter for The Caves of Myrddin?
A: That doesn't seem feasible given the number of other products I rehash.


Q:Were you kidding about [ripping off] level 3 of the Temple of Elemental Evil?
A: Only in that I haven't ripped off that particular module.  Other modules?  Totally ripped off.


Q: Does this map [the vertical geomorph] reflect all the interlevel connections?
A: No.  There are plenty of staircases, shafts, etc. on the level maps.  And a couple of 'secret' levels that can't be accessed via the vertical geomorph.  Philip the Bloody discovered one of these and later led an expedition specifically to loot part of it.


Q: Does horizontal distance on this map always correspond to distance on the horizontal levels?
A: Only sort of.  Any attempt to construct a complete iso-view map of the dungeon would probably discover areas that just don't work right.


Q: I'd really like to get a better idea of how people translate from the vertical layout to the overhead, especially for some of the more complex ones like the one pictured. Obviously some of the early ones where each level is just a box with interconnecting stairs and passages, it's easy to translate since on the vertical map the level is just a featureless box. But on these more detailed ones?
A: Not sure that I follow this question.  Is it the same as the next one down?  If not, please restate.


Q: What kind of cues were you given that you were mapping vertically? Did you have to figure that out, or was it made clear "you may want to switch to another sheet of paper to represent a vertical map"?
A: When you reach one of the standard dungeon levels I just tell people to switch to overhead perspective in their mapping.  I don't really do 'subtle' well.


Q: So then the vertical map was run as a separate map? Like it's own floor, but instead of horizontal vertical?
A: Yes.  Whole sessions were spent crawling that map.  Some seriously epic fights have happened there.  It has a few layers and some hidden loot right on it.


Q: Is this [the vertical map] actually it's own ant-farm style dungeon level? If so, do you think of it as being 2 dimensional?
A: Yeah, it is run as its own level.  I tell people "This map has up, down, east and west.  I might mention north and south occasionally, but don't take it too seriously."


Any other questions at this point?  What else would you like me to talk about?

Secrets of Myrddin, part 2

So about this time last year I pitched the idea of vertical geomorphs to the carto-dungeon-graphic portion of the OSR community.  The basic idea was to take all those side-view maps that show the relationships between levels in a dungeon and actually use them like you do the level maps.  The geomorph artists came through in spades, so I decided to make a vertical map the centerpiece of my new dungeon.  Here are the parts that have been pretty well explored.

Because I actually wanted to use this map I decided that all the initially available entrances to the dungeon would lead onto this map, rather than directly to one of the horizontal (i.e. 'normal') levels.  Later one party excavated the Great Heap in the center of the courtyard of Castle Dundagel, opening up access directly to a medusa-infested Level 2.  But the majority of visitors to these dungeons have spent part (or all!) of each session slogging through this map. 

This behavior amused me greatly, because I originally envisioned the vertical map as sort of an underground Wilderness Area, where random encounters aren't tied to any sliding difficulty level.  Hence the vicious metallic spiders (Dave Hargrave critters, in fact) and the vampires.  I honestly expected the players to spend less time scouting the vertical access once some decent routes to various upper levels were discovered.

But I guess I didn't count on the twin fascinations caused by the Last Dragon in England and the Great Spiral Stairs.  When first assembling the geomorphs to form the vertical level (The above map is not a product of the random generation of Dave's Mapper.  When first assembling this thing the vertical randomizer wasn't fully implemented yet, so I stiched this thing together in MS Paint.) I decided on two things:  1) I wanted to use four "top border" geomorphs that had towers on them, to give a simple four-towered castle.  2) I wanted to see how deep of a spiral staircase I could get away with.

The latter was important to me because I wanted to give a quickie way for high level or daring low level characters to get down to deep levels.  This has come up in threads at places like Dragonsfoot and OD&D Discussion.  Don't just connect level 1 to level 2 to level 3.  Give the players some options so they can influence how big of a challenge they'll be facing.  The Great Spiral Staircase gives direct access to level 8 as well as a chance at finding the lair of the Last Dragon, labeled '11b' at the bottom of the map.  The two holes leading off the bottom of the map are the known Hellmouths.  One of them is under a trapdoor.  So far no PC has fallen to Hell.

One other factor I hadn't fully counted on: players just love climbing shit.  Seriously, most of my players love spelunking around this map, pounding in spikes, lowering ropes, dropping torches to see how far they go.  In some sessions the sheer joy of exploration really seemed to trump any concern for finding loot.

Secrets of Myrddin, part 1

Okay, so some folks here and on Google+ have convinced me to let folks peek behind the screen just a bit at the Caves of Myrddin campaign.  I'm going to start with the original caves levels.  I was in a big hurry to start DMing this campaign, but the upper levels of the ruined castle weren't ready to go so we started with these nearby caves.

Castle Dundagel is vaguely based upon the real Cornish ruins of Tintagel, which really does have a nearby Cave of Merlin.  I picked Tintagel as my model because of its Arthurian associations. It's the castle Uther besieges in the first part of Excalibur, where Arthur is conceived.  But the ruins there today were actually built in the 13th century, the century after the Wessex campaign is set, almost as an early example of a lord's architectural folly.  Key changes I made to Tintagel when I made Dundagel:

• I put the whole thing on a spit of land, rather than an island just yards off the coast.  I didn't want to deal with boats every single expedition.
• Based upon this photo of Tintagel I decided I needed three 'Merlin caves' rather than the single one I'd read about.
• Since the modern understanding of Arthur and all that stuff only begins to congeal with Geoffrey of Monmouth, who is alive during the campaign, I decided that much of what we know as the standard Arthur narrative is just plain wrong.
• To whit, Arthur and Merlin weren't contemporaries.  Merlin (a.k.a. Myrddin) is a generation or two later, as is Morgan le Fay, queen of Tintagel.
• Also key: Myrddin was an evil wizard and Morgan a benevolent queen.  This got flip-flopped in later legend mostly because the only thing everyone clearly remembers from the period is how the queen used to dress like a tart.

The Caves became named after Myrddin because he used them to tunnel a backdoor into the family crypts below the castle.  The original monsters to move into the dungeons were part of Myrddin's army of evil.  For a time the good guys beat back these creatures and sealed them below, but they only dug more dungeons.  Eventually they dug so deep they reached the uppermost level of Hell.

The dragon moved in three or four generations after all this muck.  The House of Fay had spent its energies and lost many of its bravest sons and daughters trying to contain Myrddin's mess. (That guy was long dead, thanks to a vorpal sword to the neck.  Neither head nor sword have been recovered from the dungeons.)  So the dragon didn't have to do much to seize control and set up shop in a hidden lava-filled cavern just slightly above Hell.  But it got lazy and sleepy and soon it only ruled the monsters in name only.

Later, a trandimensional meteor crashed into Goblin Land so hard that it punched a hole through straight through to level 1 of Dundagel.  But that's not what we're talking about today.  Here's some maps.

Each cave corresponds to a dungeon level in terms of difficulty.  Most of the early parties stayed the hell away from the Wet Cave (see below), but no one ever figured out that the monsters in the Small Cave (pictured above) were noticably easier to beat than the other two.  Notable features include the broken teleporter in area 4 (that circular thingy) which the Gnome Submariners used once and the Spaniard tried to repair, the Stirge Nests in the stalactites of area 6 (the line across the tunnel mouth just south of the 6 is a gate of iron bars, a tar-baby sort of monster was fought there) and the chasm between 14 and 15 which may lead to something deep below.

The Wet Cave is one of my most complicated dungeon levels to DM, because the tide washes in twice a day.  Areas labeled A, B and C flood to different depths based upon the time of day.  I have a turn-by-turn tide chart for this.  Some parts of the dungeon completely flood.  At high tide a bunch of sea water pours into the chasm at area 9.  Other neat features are the magical cloud of poisonous gas (recently dispelled) at the location 5, the sinkhol in area 15 (which fascinated the sea ghouls that previous haunted much of the level) and the small tunnel (big enough to crawl) leading up out of area 3.

Here I must give Special Mention in the Dispatches to Nicholas Mizer and his elf Celumir the Bald, who led the first party into this level.  He did a fabulous job of scouting out the place before time.  It was he who first learned of the Curse of Blue Nellie.

And here's the Big Cave, a.k.a. level 3.  Monsters here were mostly unintelligent beetles, slimes, wobras (winged cobras), etc., with the notable exception of a couple appearances by Joe Mama, the trollish psycho with a chainsaw.  The corkscrew/sprial/whatever of the main corridor really made mapping this level a giant pain in the ass.  The criss-crossing in area 10 is spider webs.  No giant spiders though, just a zillion regular sized ones.  No one knows where the the corridor at the top of the map leads.

I think I got all these maps from Paratime Design.  The Caves/Dungeons complex is a Frankenstein of stitched stuff.  Some levels are entirely swiped from published modules.  Others I just used the map.  One level I use the map from one module with the key from another.  A lot of Dave's Mapper brand geomorphs get used all over as well.

Riffing off of other people's work is great for several reasons:

• I can recombine stuff for interesting new effects.
• I enjoy the challenge of presenting old material in a fresh way.
• I like secretly daring the players to blurt out "Hey, this is level 3 of the Temple of Elemental Evil, you fraud!" So far I've gotten away with a LOT with no one calling me on it.
• I'm a lazy ass.
• Besides, there's a lot of good stuff out there.  Why not use it?

Next installment I'll talk about the big vertical geomorph.  I'll even show you some of it.

troupe Traveller

So I made this super-simple Traveller character sheet that holds five PCs per page.  Eight of them come with one of the pre-gens from Adveture 4: Leviathan already filled in for the first character.  Like this:



Stupid red squiggly lines.  Anyway, the eight pre-gens fill out the command staff of the ship nicely, putting the players in charge of the ship.  The other four slots on each will be generated randomly using the normal methods and then jobs on the ship found for them.  So, for example, if you put together a character with the skills Admin-1, Computer-1, Gunner-1 they could be assigned as the Boat Deck Officer (Admin-1, Comp-1 required) or as the Fire Control Officer (Comp-1, Gunner-1) or as one of the Computer Operators (Comp-1).  Or anybody can wash dishes and chop onions as a Galley Hand, no skills required.

Each player operating a stable of up to five characters on the ship is advantageous in the following ways:

• Cuts down on my work fleshing out the rest of the crew.
• No need to send the whole dang command crew down with every landing party.
• Makes it easier to switch scenes "Meanwhile, back on the ship..."
• By running different PCs with different jobs, we all will get a better sense of how the ship operates.
• Combat in classic Trav is pretty brutal.  It's good to have some back-ups ready.
• Gives the players a sense that there are people on the ship they can trust to handle things while they are planetside or whatever.

Since we're using the basic generation system I don't think it will take too long to fill up the sheet.  As is typical for games of this period, buying equipment will probably take the longest.  I ought to figure out how to streamline that.

So which player gets to be the captain?  Hell if I know.  I think I'm just going to fling the charsheets down on the table and let the players work that out among themselves.  If they can't figure it out that have no business flying a fifty billion credit starship into unknown space.

one more Caves of Myrddin update

So Carl (Bishop Aethelred), Louis (Sonoma the Psycho Elf), Tom (Lankii the Diabolic Elf) and Nick (Vithujin the Necromantic Elf) were discussing a plan of action at the beginning of the session last night.  There was a bit of himming and hawing over what to do with this, the last run of the campaign, when in walks Chris (Fred the Dwarf).  He announces that he had a shitty day at work and that he intends to take it out on the Vampire Lord of Crows.  Everybody agrees that icing that particular mofo would be sweet.  And they have someone who can guide them to his lair: Billy White-Paw, the Bishop's cat.  Aethelred can communicate with Billy and once asked him to tail a couple vampires back to their lair.

So after stocking up on holy water and other provisions and Aethelred using the spell commune to get some intel from God hisself, they follow Billy into a section of the vertical map that no previous party has penetrated.  They end up spelunking like you wouldn't believe, pounding in stakes and attaching ropes, climbing mysterious chains, falling in pits that are at the bottom of other pits, abandoning their hopeless losers when they become a burden and generally clanging about the dungeons.  Billy is just leaping from ledge to ledge effortlessly, smugly waiting for the rest of the party two or three dooms ahead of them.

Meanwhile I'm throwing dice to see how many of the remaining vampires are in their lair and how active they are.  Turns out Billy is leading the party to all seven of the bloodsuckers and six of them are resting in their coffins.  So when they arrive in Coffin Central they quickly dispatch Alice Cooper's Vampire Snake.  Thanks to careful planning, casting a ton of spells (including haste), bringing along a bag full of sunshine and my crappy rolls they manage to kill every single fangy bastard in the place with no casualties.  I almost laid vampiric hands on the throat of Fred the dwarf, but then somebody remembered that Fred's henchmen hadn't acted yet and one of them put a magic crossbow bolt right through the vampire's heart.  Sweet.

It was neat how hard the party whupped up on the bad guys.  We had discussed anti-climactic boss fights in D&D earlier in the evening.  I offered my opinion that the fight against a big boss should be totally one-sided: if the PCs do their homework, they ought to win.  I didn't mention the corollary out loud.

For the record, here's the list of the vampires they murdered:

Alice Cooper (treasure: Hat of Protection +2)
Alice Cooper's Snake
The Skipper from Gilligan's Island (Gilligan was staked in a previous expedition)
Zed Zardoz (treasure: Zardoz mask of protection from gaze attacks)
Vampire Donkey (poor beast was left behind by a previous expedition)
The headless body of Spiro Agnew (treasure: iron collar of no head required)
Trevor, the Vampire Lord of Crows (treasure: unholy crystal ball that allows two-way communication with another unholy crystal ball)

After the fight in Coffin Central they located a secret door that they hoped would lead to more vampire treasure.  ("Where are these jerks' gold?")  Billy White-Paw was sent in to scout the area.  He came running back very quickly.  "There's a huge fucking spider in there!"  Sonoma wanted to throw a fireball into the room to kill it, but was talked out of it.  That's too bad.  The fireball would have blasted back into the PCs' faces and the spider, being one of those metallic Arduin jobbies I like to use, probably would have come out unscathed.

After getting their items identified the party pitches in a crapload of gold they've been saving up to build a kick-ass stone castle in Goblin Land.  Carl is leaving for an intership at the University of Versailles, so in a fit of sentimentality I decide that papal legate Alberic of Ostia makes Aethelred the legit Bishop to the Goblins.  Lankii and Fred declare themselves the elvish and dwarvish Moses respectively and lead bands of their fellow demihumans out of the realms of men into a new life under the twin suns of Goblin Land.  They seal up most of the routes between Goblin Land and Wessex, but leave one way open for those future adventurers who might want to join the good fight against the monsters of their adopted homeworld.

All in all, not a bad way to end things.  After the run is over, I pull out my vertical map and we compare it to the one Chris has made.  He did a pretty dang good job, as have several other online cartographers.  At the urging of several folks on Google+, I'll be scanning a few of the better-known parts of the dungeon and doing a sort of designer's notes thingy with them, maybe starting tomorrow.

Wizardly Wednesday haz a sad

Poor fellow just found out there'll be no magic spells in my next campaign.

Goodbye Wessex, hello outer space

Tonight's tabletop game is going to be the last Wessex game for a while.  I don't know if anybody has noticed or not, but I haven't run my Monday morning game for a couple weeks now.  School has gotten kinda hectic and I've needed my Monday mornings for homework.  I don't know when I will next run an online game.  It may be a spontaneous thing, with those of you on Google+ at 4:30am my time getting a "Hey, anyone want to play a game of ______?"

Meanwhile, I'm going to pitch to my Wednesday group a few session of Traveller.  I've long wanted to run Adventure 4: Leviathan, which involves giving the party command of a big merchant explorer and sending them into an unknown subsector.  Since it's a commercial interest providing the ship the scenario is an interesting hybrid of Star Trek's exploration/first contact ethos with Traveller's more grubby economic bent.

Thanks to all the super-cool players who made the Caves of Myrddin/Dungeons of Dundagel a hoot.  That dungeon still has a crapload of unexplored nooks and crannies (whole levels, in fact), so I will probably return to it some day.