5 Room Adventure Practice

1.  The Foyer
1. This Room Houses a basin of dark, foul water. A pair of gaunt caryatid golems will leap down to destroy those who try to pass them without ablutions from the basin, which will mute contact with good deities and add hunger/withering effects to spells cast through arcane means. The owners of this tomb worshiped the Queen of Neverending Night. Wisps of  sharp cobwebs cover the statues, walls, and basin
2. The Antechamber
1. Crystalline spiders have shrouded the whole of the tomb henceforward with shimmery, vorpal webbing. Moving too fast or e.g. combat in this room will require Dex saves or damage to the PC. Breaking/shattering of the webs attracts crystalline spiders. There is a mosaic of nobles committing foul and obscene rites, sacrificing peasants, nightgaunts look on and above all the leering face of the QoNN
3. False Tomb 1
1. Easy to enter - the lock is painted red, cheap, and trapped with a poison needle that causes 2d6 damage (save for highest of the pair rolled only). A dais and sarcophagus - A gaunt noblewoman carved in alabaster is the lid. Inside, the remains of a handmaiden have been dressed in silks and festooned with brass gewgaws and a handful of cheap glass spread around the inside. A false map leads to certain death some leagues away. Everything is covered in contact poison that will cause itching and boils. Disturbing the lid brings shimmering spiders immediately
4. False Tomb 2
1. Somewhat harder to enter. The entrance from room 2 is hidden in the mosaic (the navel of a rapacious noblewoman is the trigger for the mechanism by which the door slides away). Inside, another sarcophagus. A nobleman, carved in alabaster, veins of iron artfully selected to appear as blood. Disturbing the lid causes a Coffer Corpse to leap up immediately, as the FF monster but he wields a poisoned great axe of evil and ancient design. If turned he will take his place in the sarcophagus and bide his time, rising up again when the turning's duration ends or the turner leaves the room. No treasure within the sarcophagus, but another map leading to a far-away (ludicrously large and totally imaginary) fortune. Pressing the eye sockets of the visage of the same nobleman on the side of the sarcophagus will cause the whole dais to slide, groaning, to the side revealing the cobwebbed entrance to room 5
5. Real Tomb
1. Egg sacs and webs of ethereal crystalline spiders hang here and there. Demons summoned by the owner of the tomb to guard it. Some long dead petty noble, a follower of the Ancient Queen of Night whose aim is to blot out the sun, give protection to corruption and to hide the misdeeds of the wealthy and evil. This room is a minor chapel to her, resting on a plinth is the real body of the dead man/woman. the body is covered in webs and the 1d8 large phase spiders do not permit approach. Fire will destroy the webs in the room, anger the spiders, and probably destroy the valuable tapestries, spellbooks (summoning phase spider (as monster but 1 level lower);darkness;silence;brew poison;brew aphrodisiac;petty divination) and 1d4 scrolls of evil clerical magic spells (level 2 or thereabouts). Vials of poison (brewed from phase spider venom) and aphrodisiacs/performance enhancers.
   The petty noble is half-living, perhaps a pseudolich, and fed upon the blood and fluids its pet spiders harvest from the local peoples. It will awaken and cast darkness, silence, and web immediately if any of the contents of the room are disturbed, and d12 large, hard-to-hit, and vengeful spider-demons will flood the room to feast and share their prey with their master.

The entrance to the tomb is in a subcellar of some wealthy dilletante's house in town. Plastered over. Most likely the owner is his/her ancestor. Her ownership of the home has caused the awakening of the spiders, who now traverse the neighborhood and feast and prey upon the poor and downtrodden populace. Children and night-walkers disappear. The new owner of the home is not well liked owing to lavish parties and questionable philosophies, but he/she is not fully aware of the cult of the Queen of Night but will gladly join should the PCs bring the matter to his/her attention. In fact, if they survive and do not destroy the spellbooks, scrolls, and other valuables, or otherwise hinder the revival of the cult, this area will become a bastion of the worship of the NightQueen and her demonic minions

The locals have suspicions. Perhaps a child is stolen when the PCs arrive. A fault in construction near the manorhouse of the noble provides access to the Foyer/Antechamber (exiting from the thing without first undertaking the ablutions will activate the caryatids, of course! and put the PCs in the winecellar of an irritable wealthy senator, councilperson, or somesuch). A hedgewizard scries the presence of spider-things flickering around the neighborhood.  A fabvorite doxy, barmaid, or tankard-boy at the local tavern is whisked away into the night right before a PC's eyes during carousing.

Pretty standard fare, I guess

Keeping in Touch

I'm not the best at keeping in touch. Just ask my family.

Here you go, if you'd like to watch the splatterings that dribble out of my brain-holes sometimes.

https://twitter.com/noahms456

https://www.tumblr.com/settings/blog/noahms456

noahms456@pluspora.com

MeWe: https://mewe.com/i/noah.stevens

Patreon: patreon.com/Noahms456

I think that just about covers all the permutations. I have a DeviantArt thing, also, and of course a couple of MAME and MUGEN accounts, but hell I can't' even remember all the ones I've had anymore.

A ghost of me hangs out there and it would tell you something, but it's amnestic and too focused on videogames and RPGs

The Phylactery of Google Plus

So. They went and did it, the fools!

They announced the projected plug-pulling of the walking corpse that is Google Plus. A Golden Age has passed us.

Let me be pretty straight, here.  It's like someone is euthanasia-ing my favorite uncle after they starved him to death, put him in a coma, strangled him, with-held meds and treatment, saying WELL THERES NOTHING TO BE DONE FOR IT

Google killed Plus the way they killed Reader. By slow death, cranking back the best features, and general negligence. It's been a good run, but that RPG and war gaming part of me aches where the incoming vacuum will be.

Got an Anchor app on the phone, reinstalling mastodon and discord. Most of my favorite peeps on there I can find again. Not sure how this will play out but I guess I will double down on blogging and figure out how to stay in touch.

Dungeon Stocking Things - Moldvay

I'm always thinking of ways to get a machine to do my lame work for me. I've coded up lots of Tablesmith tables for easy-peasey pregeneration of dungeons, but many of them were based on Moldvay's pages in the old Basic Red Book of my youth.

Not to get too MATHY, but I was thinking about The Moldvay Stocking Procedure. It's interesting to me that many rooms in a dungeon were meant to be empty so that you could have a Wandering Monster bump into there but otherwise just sort of MOVE ALONG NOTHING TO SEE HERE. I can't recall the odds n such, but I've found that the one I coded into TableSmith (the same rolls as Moldvay I'm pretty sure) produces way too many traps, although I guess if you want to thrill the players and try their brainpower, that's one way.

If I made a grid like a tic-tac toe board (that is to say 9 boxes/rooms), I think I'd want 1 box to have a big angry sub-boss or boss monster, 2 or 3 to have monster occupants with treasure, 1 with an ouchy-non-deadly-trap, 1 with a kills-a-PC-or-henchman-or-hireling trap, 1 or 2 with hidden treasure (but still interactable scenery to find it), and 1 with some Special Scene Chewing Feature or Puzzle. Obviously, these are OSR conventions, here. Resource management is sometimes tedious but if done well then it adds an edge of tension.

That is to say:
1 Boss (difficult to win with combat but other solutions possible)
3 Planned Encounters
1 Resource Drain
1 Killer Trick
2 Hidden Treasures
1 Special Feature

So some rooms would APPEAR empty, but still have some minor loot, almost always. An entirely empty room would be suspicious, but the chance of incurring a wandering monster is not negligible, and the disposition of WM need not be combative, and it's not always easy to tell if the room is OCCUPIED by a monster or if it is just, like you, passing through...

I'll give this some more thought. My next project is using Tablesmith to generate dungeons from 1-9, fill in cool details, procedurally generated themes, and lay them out in double column mode as the Ancients did. Why? I don't know! Just to do it, I guess. I have a Tegel Manor-type Big House Crawl in mind for this month and we'll see if it goes over but like always, it's a bit iffy to do but fun to think about.

Much Ado For Errybuddy

I been thinking. I'm a zero-prep type. I find that if I prep very little for a session, I'm better able to savor that feeling of discovery and share in it. Also, if I'm running e.g. Barrowmaze or ASE then that GENERATOR lobe is free to get tone across. I noticed recently though that my freeing up of MY brain sometimes leaves players hanging because even if I'm coordinating the thing weird and wooly the way I like with eg Tablesmith, then the very nature of pseudorandom means it's likely a few people going to be bored. Generate 10 rooms. 8 have monsters. Some treasure. No traps. The thief is bored. Damage low. Irritable monsters. Cleric's bored. Etc.

I started recently to focus more on good stuff to build into games on top of the pseudorandom bones of it. So, fighters always going to get the opportunity to smash, intimidate, lift. Thieves to tinker and steal. MUs going to find weird artifacts, demons, etc. Clerics to persuade the ignorant and expand the influence of their God. Robots to hack and not feel emotions. I know who's probably going to make it thanks to FB so I know what I ought to present for them to have a crack at.

My way of thinking about this suggests that instead of generating A feature in e.g. Tablesmith, I ought to generate two or more features based on different classes, stats, or traits and mix it up so that it's not too repetitive in terms of who gets to play with it. Never one solution means nobody will be bored.

I guess these are sound design principles at the bottom i.e. Nothing new there. The important piece is to recognize the balance between shunting responsibility onto the machine system procedurally versus the need to keep players engaged by offering them a range of things to noodle with.

Maybe I'll tinker with the code later and devise some THERES ALSO THIS HERE charts

Maybe look into the 5-room dungeon thing since there's no way I'm able to get more rooms than that into a session