An amazing Dwarven Delve

Got an email today from Cedric Plante with some pictures of an amazing How to Host a Dungeon map he created with a friend. I love this stuff. This is what's great about dungeon adventure gaming. Every time I think I've squeezed everything dungeon-themed out of my brain, I see someone else's work with a new slant or a new aesthetic, and I want to go back to the dungeon again. Also, it has an Ankheng.

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!

Arena of Deth

I spent today giving How to Host a Dungeon a careful edit for the third printing. Going through the game reminded me again how much I like it, so I pulled out my supplies for a game tonight.


A superintelligent Ettin with delusions of grandeur and funded by a stolen dragon hoard expanded the ancient ruins of a Dark Elf arena into a massive lair, laying waste the surface kingdoms and forcing its people to fight for his amusement. There are some other great features too, including an entire kingdom within the hollow Earth whose people have never made contact with the surface. Possibly only the ancient clan of crabmen know of the existence of both worlds.

Here are a couple more pictures:


Deep in the Age of Monsters, a powerful party of adventurers lay waste to the dungeons, removing much of its treasure. Most of them succumb to wandering monster attacks before the surviving thief flees with their accumulated trove (8 loot!).



The Dawn of the Ettin's age of villainy. Things aren't as great for him as they seem. Unless those Crabmen succumb to a lucky adventurer attack, he's going to have tough competition for treasure.

The new printing of How to Host a Dungeon should be ready pretty soon. I'll also be offering a print bundle along with The Purple Worm Graveyard. The new edition contains mostly minor alterations, though I have streamlined the Dark Elves quite a bit.

Megadungeon Crossroads

When you spend the night in the Apocalypse Megadungeon, roll 1d8

1. The last monster you left alive spreads the word of your incursion
2. Rumors spread in the dungeon about you, but they're false or wildly exaggerated
3. A new monster or group moves into an area you left behind
4. Something powerful and dangerous picks up your trail and starts following you
5. Some incidental but identifiable piece of your equipment shows up back in town, along with a very believable rumor of your untimely deaths.
6. There's an earthquake, flood, cave in, or other terrain-altering event.
7. Nothing happens of note at all.
8. Something you've seen, sought, or left behind appears in the wizard's store.

Arcologies and Megadungeons

I went down to Portland last weekend with the family and was lucky to find a real gem at Powell's Books: Paolo Soleri's Arcology.

Soleri pretty much coined the idea of arcologies, gigantic self-contained cities that fulfill the material and spiritual needs of their citizens. The book includes many gorgeous drawings of prospective Solerie Acrologies.

Soleri's diagrams are full of little notations like "city center", "light well", or "neighborhood", as though they were real blueprints, and not speculative drawings. The closer you look, the more detail you see; all these little shapes and diagrams that start to look like stadiums, parks, discotheques, and comfortable homes. You start to feel like this is a real place.

These put me in mind of fantasy maps, like megadungeons or megacities like Ptolus or The City of Lankhmar. I can't help but try to imagine these cities as megadungoeons. Can you imagine the Mutant Future or Metamorphosis Alpha campaign you could set in one of these?


These Arcologies are a lot like the best of fantasy maps: they put you in a magical place, they express certain ideas as an imagined place, and they apply a lot of the mapmakers art to the presentation. Actually, I think these are a lot better than fantasy maps. I can only think of 1 or 2 maps that come up to this level. This kind of art really raises the bar for fantasy art, and in a good way. I'm starting to imagine a megadungeon map that works on this scale and in this style.

Dungeon Musings

Go Play NW gave me a big energy boost. There's a bunch of awesome stuff going on right now, so that I hardly know where to begin.

First up, thanks for all the great dungeon ideas in the Thanks for all the Dungeons thread! There were a ton of great ideas. That will help keep us all in dungeons for a while to come. David of Tower of the Archmage won the dungeon giveaway. Go check out his megadungeon maps on his blog!

Also, I'm adding a new theme to the blog: city tiles. I have very fond memories of the City of Lankhmar setting that TSR published. These city tiles were created for John Harper's as yet unpublished Stranger Things RPG. The first one, Wound Way was posted yesterday. I'm going to start posting these once a week as well.

Finally, the Apocalypse D&D project has a new home over at Vincent Bakers Barf Forth Apocalyptica. Most news and discussion of this D&D hack will live there, though I'll make the occaisonaly announcement through this blog as well.

In the Mines of Khunmar

Tuesday night, Phil and Gabe and I decided to throw off our monthly pool game and kick back at the pub for a game of D&D instead, and we were joined briefly by Brandon. I was psyched because I was itching to run an old-style dungeon crawl. Because I had some ideas I wanted to try out, we played a homebrew mashup of AD&D and Apocalypse World.* I also got to pull out the Mines of Khunmar, a pdf megadungeon I’ve been wanting to try out for a long time. *Spoilers Follow*

Phil made a fighting man named Karl, Gabe rolled up a thief named Ebag, and Brandon created a Dwarf Cleric named Stön. These three foolhardy souls were joined by two retainers named Rumsfeld and Griswold.

After circumventing a pit, they stumbled into an ambush of Antlions, cunning ant-like humanoids with a penchant for ambushes and trickery (turns out they can also stick to the ceiling, as Ebag discovered to his chagrin). The antlions underestimated their foes, however, and after a short fight, the party had a clear passage across the plank bridge over the raging underground river chasm to the Antlions hideout. Stön had heard that the Antlions had an illusionary treasure horde to fool interlopers, but that a real stash could be found a secret room nearby so they forged onward.

After the obligatory humanoid slaughter (where Griswold met his demise), there followed a tense struggle where Ebag surprised the Antlion king on his spinning secret door throne, pinning the king’s hand to the throne controls with a dagger at a crucial moment. The heroes extorted the king into revealing his true treasure horde. They failed, however, to extract a promise of safe passage, and the king sprung the treasure’s protective trap on the adventurers, a flooding room. The evening ended with the party trapped in a rapidly flooding room with the King mocking them with mad laughter as they all prepared for an evening of drowning. I do like a cliffhanger.

Hopefuly we’ll get to pick this game up again, because I really had a blast running it, and I think the players got into it too. We might play somewhere quieter next time, though, because the ambient sound at the pub really made it hard to get my DM-ing mojo on. Writing this blog has given me a real desire to play more D&D, and I rarely do, so this was a very nice treat.

* Apocalypse World is a game of Vincent Baker’s that I’ve been playtesting. It’s got some stuff that seems very unusual, but at its core it’s more old-school than anything else. I found it surprisingly easy to mash it together with AD&D.

Daniel Reeve: Master Maps

It's not every day that you stumble upon a map that literally takes your breath away. This morning I was doing a Google Image search for maps of Moria (because I do that kind of thing), and I stumbled across the cartography of Daniel Reeve. These maps are beautiful master works, every single one.