Megadungeons

when I go to Google and type in "megadungeon", as I'm wont to do every few months, I always find something interesting. Megadungeons are a feast for the imagination.

Underworld Kingdom is making megadungeons by mashing multiple castles together. Very cool!

FrDave at Blood of Prokopius is playing How to Host a Dungeon, and I do love it when people play How to Host a Dungeon.

Needles at Swords and Stichery dug up this historical gem: a propsal to build a 1 million-person city spanning the continent from coast to coast.

Some King's Kent is posting the design of the Aione Megadungeon. Look closely at some of the diagrams, they are spectacular!

Where have all the Hit Points Gone?

We’re playing Dungeonworld, which is still going through the various stages of beta: pupae, chrysalis, and so on. In the latest phase, character hit points were dropped to about a quarter. So there’s our party, burning the corpses of the vanquished rat man, when suddenly everyone has one quarter of the hit points they used to have.

And I have to say that if the intent of this rule change was to inject some low-level anxiety into higher-level play, it worked. Soon everyone’s scrambling around, trying to decide how they’re going to live in a low-hit-point world.

Magnus loots the rat mens’ cache of stolen trade goods and ties a wooden throne to his back so he can carry it back to town and sell it for enough to hire a bodyguard. Leman takes a similar tactic, but instead she bribes three of the rat mens’ prisoners to carry the stuff for her. They only rip her off a little bit. Ebag dips into the private stash of treasure that nobody else in the party seems to know he has and uses it to buy some mithral chain from the Thieves Guild. Karl… well Karl seems to think this stuff is all beneath him. He almost gets killed next encounter, but that still lies in the future.

Other than the hit point shuffle, this session is mostly about getting safely back to town, checking the job board, and dealing with some overdue town stuff.

Next session–a surprise wedding!

I5 at Denny

If you absolutely have to go through Seattle north-south, I5 at Denny might be your worst choke point. Drivers call this stretch the wreckage because you have to squeeze down to a narrow S curve to avoid a large pile of wreckage on the blacktop. There are always some scavengers hunkered down in the wreckage looking for easy prey--not a problem if you're prepared for it, but be warned, they'll leap right on top of a moving rig without a second's hesitation. No, the real danger is the Jarls. They like to set up snipers and ambuscades on the overpass or in the building overlooking the I. Picking a large group to convoy with is recommended, but don't expect them to stop and wait for you if you get a flat.

Pictures of houses, some of them underneath other houses

Mines of Khunmar: of Minotaurs and Mazes

We’ve played a lot of my Mines of Khunmar megadungeon game since I last wrote. The spring and early summer is the busy time of work for me, because it’s when Microsoft teams are trying to finish up all their projects for the end of the financial year, which is why the blog hasn’t seen so much action lately. When we last left the party, they had cleared a substantial area at the center of level 4, the former laboratory of the mad wizard Lukas Ravenswood, fighter Karl’s grandfather. The current party consists of Karl Ravenswood, fighter; Ebag the thief, Velmar Magnus, wizard; and Leman Desall, death cleric. They are accompanied by an acquisitive man at arms named Rumsfeld. We had a short session exploring some more of the current level. Mystified by some apparently automatically resetting traps, the party spied some wererats leading an ogre prisoner through the dungeon. The ambushed the rats in a wizardly meditation chamber, where the ogre at one point swung Ebag through the air like a club. Fortunately, Ebag survived the ordeal.

I was kicking myself after this session. You see, when Magnus joined the party, he specified that he was searching for a particular artifact of ancient lore. Having a very similar artifact in my notes for the level (the Eye of Truth, a sort of true seeing gem), I handed it to Magnus straightaway as treasure then patted myself on the back for being so clever. But after the session I started feeling really stupid for giving the character his heart’s desire so fast. After all, don’t players *like* having things to aspire for? Was I ruining the game for him? Luckily, I have amazing players, and Jonathan rose to the challenge like a champion, as we’ll see.

Enter a new session. The rats had been making for a particular secret door. Also, Karl had a quest to slay the Rat King, given him by a curiously gregarious Ilithid some sessions ago, so the party decided to continue on in hopes of finding the rumored Rat King on level 3.

Beyond the door they found a series of broad, well-lit, clean, safe seeming corridors. Amazingly this didn’t send them running in fear, so they entered what was in fact a horrific dimensional pocket maze full of illusions and twisting hallways enchanted to trap the unwary for eternity (the rats have their own way of navigating through this natural barrier).

Now in my campaign, the Minotaurs as a race were confined to an extra dimensional prison by a vengeful god. The few Minotaurs not in the prison wander the planes seeking out labyrinths and magical mazes because of a legend that the key to opening their prison maze lies hidden in one. It’s just a thing I daydreamed when I was prepping the level. But when I rolled Minotaurs on the wandering monster table, I had no idea that Velmar Magnus would attempt to parlay, whipping out the Eye of Truth (which could have guided them through the maze quite easily) and offering it to them as a gift.

So to make a long story short, the party gained some Minotaur mercenaries to help them eradicate the Rat King and his minions. Magnus was named Minotaur-friend. They liberated Toe Snap their one-time goblin guide who the rats had in bonds. They fought and almost killed the Ilithid who was playing Wormtongue to the Rat King. And they liberated more stolen trade goods than they could reasonably carry back to town. The surviving Minotaurs returned to the plane of existence and used the Eye of Truth to free the Minotaur race from bondage.

Interesting side note: in my game Ilithids have the custom move “cast any spell in the game.” They are a foe to be respected.

Stones

First Baptist

The streets around Seattle First Baptist are horribly choked with abandoned cars after the apocalypse, for some reason. Not really sure why, but it's not a bad area to scrounge for gas if you're patient and keep a sharp lookout for stalkers.