D&D – Page 4 – Gamer Peak

Dungeon 23 – Week 9

Boss battles are not necessary for a good adventure, but they sure can ensure a great one. Having a big enemy every not and then to contend with raises the stakes, and also boosts the feeling that you are making great progress.

Layer one of my megadungeon doesn’t really have a major boss. The leader of the Principles is slightly stronger, but not by a great margin. The leader of the Tungsten Line is very much Boss material.

So far in this dungeon, negotiating with the clans within can prove fruitful. Whilst the rest of the Tungsten Line are semi-rational creatures, ‘The Tungsten Supervisor’ is not going to let any unauthorised personnel wander ‘his domain’. When the party have to contend with this strange creature, the rest of the clan will be more than happy to look the other way; they aren’t fans of their Supervisor either…

A Guard Watches a Gate

Night approached relentlessly. The sun had slipped behind the walls of Valderin and the silhouette of the city was imbued with a soft amber glow. Yet soon, that light would be snuffed out, and darkness would take hold.

Paledos stood amongst the Legionnaires on the Southern Redoubt. From this defence, the City Guard could protect the farm folk outside the city walls, and provide an early warning from assault . As the guards on the stone wall looked out across the horizon to the east and south, Paledos admired the city behind them. His prey. His plaything.

Dungeon 23 – Week 8

Let’s make some robots!

I’ve not made too many creatures for my Megadungeon yet, because I haven’t landed on what game I want to run it in yet. I default to 5th Edition D&D, but I’ve also been introduced to Old School Essentials recently, and in the recent issues with WOTC, I’ve been giving Pathfinder the side-eye.

Having said that, building monsters is fun. To me anyway, and I’ve been looking at the robotic, colour-coded ‘Sentries’ in my notes and wondering what they would look like.

Dungeon 23 – Week 7

Nobody poops in a Table Top RPG. Our characters eat and drink – in some games that’s how you heal – and we need to pay some attention to where the next meal is coming from. We have to think about what we’re wearing, at least in terms of armour. But we never need to care about where and when we poop.

Of course, we don’t really need to roleplay our bathroom breaks. I just found it odd the other day, when I was adding bathrooms to my mega dungeon, that I don’t remember the last time I saw a toilet on a battle map.

It’s not how I expected to break ground with my map making. But it does help to make the ‘dungeon’ feel like the clans can live and survive here, as well as allowing the party to have a toilet break without trekking all the way back to a bush outside…

Dungeon 23 – Week 6

365 rooms feels like a lot. That’s where the challenge lies, after all. Part of my logic in filling in all 28-31 rooms of each floor is by deciding that my Mega Dungeon is very much ‘lived-in’. It’s a structure designed for people to live and work in, so you need all the spaces that requires. Bedrooms, office rooms, work stations, amenities. All these things tick off a room or two.

The layer for February is a production facility. It was established to build technology en masse. The engineers and workers here were working around the clock to construct a way past a world altering event. So as well as some big factory rooms, each space is either dedicated to managing this huge project, or giving the staff their living quarters.

TTRPGs with Kids – What to Expect

Before life became somewhat more isolated than usual, I often joined in with the D&D club at my school. I also DMed for the children of friends who heard their parents playing and wanted in. From ages 5-18, I’ve run tabletop games for close to a hundred kids.

One thing is for certain, its a very different experience than running a game for adults. If you are thinking of hosting for young people, either as a friend or a teacher, there are a few important things that will help you:

Dungeon23 – Week 5

We’re going deeper underground.

The end of January means the completion of the first layer of the Megadungeon, and the beginning of the next. So I needed to make sure that the first was rounded off at 31 rooms, and I needed to think ahead to what the next layer should be.

What I’ve found curious about this self-imposed project is how the ideas flow steadily. I came up with an overall idea for the whole megadungeon from the start, but I didn’t really know how I wanted the whole of Layer 1 to look until it was half-formed. As I started on Layer 2, I had even less of an idea of how it should look. Nevertheless, day by day, the mental image is developing. I don’t think I would have created the same dungeon if I’d sat down to build it in one go.

A new layer in my mega dungeon means a new time period, a new Prophecy leading to its creation, a new clan living within its halls, and new threats for the party to face.

Fantastic Beasts and How to Slay Them: Yeti

We made it. All the way to the end of the book, two years later. 98 Fantastic Beasts turned into D&D monsters.

Some have been unique, weird and wonderful monsters that were a challenge to convert, some were a new version of a pre-existing critter, sometimes less impressive because the description in the book lacks the outlandish abilities in the original’s stats. It’s a slight downer, that the last beast falls into the latter category, but the result is, I think, a different brute of a yeti from what Dungeons & Dragons already has.

Dungeon23 – Week 4

One of the aspects that intrigues me about a Megadungeon is how they can feel so ‘lived in’. A standard dungeon might be completely barren of life – just ancient traps and treasures left behind – or it might still be occupied by a big bad monster or evil villain. If you greatly expand the limits of the rooms and landscape within, suddenly theirs room to add whole ecosystems, small pockets of civilisation, clans, potential allies and enemies.

I have an overall idea that several of the layers of my Dungeon23 creation will have humanoid groups living within. Remnants of a bygone age, or people seeking refuge from the calamities outside. As outlined in earlier blog posts, this ‘dungeon’ was a high-tech complex trying to save the world. Whilst it failed, and has since given way to the chaos, collapse and corruption, some pockets of the dungeon still support life.

If nothing else, offering a party potential companions/nemesis that are just trying to survive amongst the aging machinery and monstrous abominations, has the potential to create interesting scenarios and problems for the players to overcome. Unless they blast through human and monster alike without a second thought… that’s okay too.