Real World “Dungeon” Cross-Sections

Over on Google+ we have an active thread going on interesting real world underground cross section maps, an ever-fascinating source of inspiration for me. Photo dumps are cheap, lazy posts and I rarely inflict them on readers so forgive me for taking a tour through these before gearing up for the (supposedly) meatier posts this week.

The Wieliczka Salt Mine near Krakow is a jaw-dropping place: massive soaring spaces, whole ghostly cathedrals carved out of salt, and all. I got there a bare hour before closing time on a trip there in the mid-90s (I lived just across the border in Slovakia at the time) and had one of the worst bits of being tantalized in my life of traveling.

This is a beauty of a map (click to enlarge):

Now a more isometric view:

And an actual look down onto one chamber:

You have undoubtedly seen at least a little of the vast underground cities of Cappadocia in Turkey, but they never fail to impress me no matter how many times I take a gander. To get a sense of the sheer size of the largest of the 36 underground refuge cities, Derinkuyu, check out this bit from Wikipedia:

“The underground city at Derinkuyu could be closed from the inside with large stone doors. The complex has a total 11 floors, though many floors have not been excavated. Each floor could be closed off separately. The city could accommodate between 35,000 and 50,000 people and had all the usual amenities found in other underground complexes across Cappadocia, such as wine and oil presses, stables, cellars, storage rooms, refectories, and chapels.”

Cross section:

From-above map of one level:

The Proairetic Code and Player-Driven Mystery in the Sandbox

Picking apart the sometimes brilliant, sometimes horrific trainwreck that was Lost, the TV show, never ceases to fascinate me. What gives it an added kick for me is that I always find something that comes back around to how the Hill Cantons campaign evolved from being a straight-up, zero-plot West Marches clone to being the complicated mess of a sandbox bursting at the seems with literally hundreds of outer and inner mysteries.

I am not sure which was the chicken and which was the egg, whether I was drawn to the show after developing elements in the campaign or that the elements came to mirror what I was watching on the boob tube. The origin is not important, it happened.

Accidentally through that evolution I think I may have found something portable to future (and possibly you the reader's) campaigns .

Let me first turn to a wonderful and relevant wrap-up critique of Lost from a fellow San Anto resident on the Ludic blog (well worth checking out here). He wrote:

[Lost] was expert at managing what Roland Barthes identified as the proairetic code — the sequences and actions that propelled the reader into the narrative, and the way those sequences and actions helped impart overall meaning to the text.  The most amazing trick of the proairetic code, one capable of being mastered by something as low as wrestling or as high as Shakespeare, is to involve the reader in the creation of the text; its complexity creates conspiracy, and inspires the viewer to create narratives where none may exist.  This was obvious from the very beginning with Lost, as it provided us with enough narrative hooks and background enigmas that we couldn’t help partake in speculation and theorizing.  Thus did it engender a world even more complex and full of wonder than even the show’s creators were capable of imagining.”

In other words, the show created the (perhaps illusory) sense that the arc of the series was as much driven by the viewer as it was by the writer. The sheer tantalizing density of mystery invited--indeed forced--the viewer to make their own connections and answers. If you substitute player for viewer, and Gamemaster for writer you see the possible applicability to a sandbox.

Let me recap the campaign's evolution to bring me back to point. In the beginning there was just pure site-based evolution. To flavor it up I would throw little weird setting dress moments in the session for ambiance. Here was a sudden lunar eclipse and mysterious over-flight of massive dark-shrouded creatures, there a cryptic oracular reading. It was all a facade really, just something to cover the site-based exploration.

But overtime I found the players getting more and more into trying to piece together those bits. Why did the Hyperboreans build a mountain citadel here and a tomb complex 25 miles over there? Why are the runes we are finding matching what we found on the blue-shining gate on the golden barge? Etc. And as they probed I started developing answers just ahead of them.

As those just-in-time answers became more complicated, I worried about the creeping meta-plot and the inevitable long hand of GM-centered creation. So I tried to develop a whole process involving index cards to keep it flowing organically from the bottom, only creating layers to those mysteries when the players actively sought them (longer, detailed explanation of the process back here and here). The deeper they dug into the more there was there. 

This got a little cumbersome, but I stuck with it. Every month or so I would sit down with my notebooks and try and draw connections to all the multiplying bits in bigger arcs. Looking over all that work this morning, I see scores of unexplored question marks (some tied into explored ones, many completely blank other than the trigger) and many more at varying levels with these morass of arrows connecting them to each other.

I think the players (I could be self-deluded and high on my rhetoric) have thrived on this. I love following the post and intra-session discussions on Google Plus by players, it's a reward in itself for me. Hundreds of comments pile up, questions and hypotheses about the what and the why of things they encountered. Sometimes they are shockingly accurate, down to what pulp fantasy literary source I obviously jacked this or that element from. More often they are wildly off, but on occasion their connections and theories are too rich for me to ignore fully—and then low and behold partial or full self-fulfilling prophesy occurs.

That activity I believe has deepened the sandbox experience. It's all good and fun to just have the non-linearally designed dungeons/wilderness sites and the standard adventure hooks--and all the rich emergent story to follows out of play there. I enjoy that in itself too, but I also like having my Big Whopping Something Going on There cake too and--to mix metaphors horribly--having the players also help create it is just icing.

In a funny way it distantly mirrors life. You can coast along fine even having romping fun adventures without probing much into what makes everything tick. But you might also start asking hard question. Why isn't it weird that our lives are dominated by little dirty green slips of paper? What gives that paper that power? (Or whatever.)

The exploration multiples itself and channels your sense of meaning of the larger world. By asking on set of questions one way you find yourself viewing the world in a totally different light (and one possibly radically divergent from a view developed by another exploratory series of questions).

And isn't the best fantasy the dream projection of life with the boring bits cut out?  

The Unbearable Dullness of DnD Wilderness

The road runs crooked here, the braying radio long since turned off. My mind has retreated to that long contemplative place, a slower mode that is all about absorbing details of the countryside. Though the two tons of steel and fiberglass molding are hurtling through time/space at body-smashing velocity internally it feels slow and leisurely.

Old stoned piled fence set off against the gentle curve of a live-oak and cedar covered rise. Great leafy canopies of pecans and elms as the road drops alongside the white limestone banks of a muddy, engorged branch river. Riots of wildflowers bordering old barb-wired posts...and wait is that a herd of alpacas?

It's Conan Country too, this long Hill Country backroad runs 15-20 miles parallel with another that will take you to Cross Plains and Cimmeria. That strong sense of place in fantasy —my own that just has to happen to share part of Robert E. Howard's by the accident of birth—washes over me and, of course, I am thinking of things DnD.

Why is wilderness travel so damn dull in-game?

Maybe dull is over-strong. Why is it so consumed with what punctuates the traveling? The throw of a one and the sudden switch in mode to encounter. Or the mysterious appearance of a site of interest, the burned out, ivy-choked shell of a tower and the like. Granted these can be exciting, the stuff of great sessions.

But why is the land itself left so faceless? It's “forest” full stop, perhaps grudgingly modified by being evergreens or light/heavy? It's the brown dull little triangles of “mountains” arranged in hexagonally-bordered bands. The wildly-varying and satisfyingly-creepy real world spread of wetlands is rendered “swamp”.

I look at the posts of my blogging friends and wilderness is almost inevitably handled as an exercise of game mechanics, the nerdy little debates (granted that I often love overly-much too) about how many beancounting checks for encounters per day over how many beancounting hexes.

Over the years I have managed to both play and run in a score or more of different wilds in a campaign—on a rare occasion recently with people who literally in this game from the first play group—and I've yet to ever feel that you had a strong sense of the Land you traveled.

The terrain has no face, little nuance and rarely itself also becomes the adventure. It lacks adversity. It's tangles and mysteries become obscured by a simple “lost” check. A horse never dies exhausted of it. A party rarely finds a spot that “they can't get there from here.” Occasionally you'll get charts for rockfalls and other impediments, but there seems to achingly little of it.

I can understand why the stick got bent this way. Nothing bores a group of players more than waxing into purple prose for more than five minutes without allowing them to hear the sound of their own voices. To be sure, it's a game. We fidget impatiently at the person who spends an eternity agonizing over whether they build three houses or a hotel on Baltic Avenue. They are hogging the play experience after all.

Of course I exaggerate for polemical effect. Everyday we also have examples of Gms breathing life into that aspect of the game. Why here today is my friend, Michael, giving some evocative twists to trekking through Grot. So here's my opportunity to turn it back to the positive (crap, it's only Monday, I can grouse later).

How are you sexing up that wilderness crawl? Can you impart a feeling of something unique about that land without achieving eye glazing? How do you make the wilderness itself the adventure? What's your trick?

"I am a Golden God"

I finally got around to reading that letter from Gary Gygax in Alarums and Excursions (July 1975) that was making the internet rounds recently.

There's are a handful of marginally interesting historical insights in it (full text here), but the one that I fixated on was this one about a religion in the original Greyhawk campaign: "I recall...that in Greyhawk we do not have existing religions included, for this is a touchy area. We have such groups as "The Church of the Latter Day Great Old Ones," Church of Crom, Scientist", "Brethren of St. Cuthbert of the Cudgel", and so on."

Google searches revealed Mike Mornard saying on Big Purple that he started those running jokes with neutral characters going to the "First Church of Crom, Scientist", Lawful characters being "Mitra's Witnesses", and “Chaotic characters belonged to the "Church of the Latter Day Great Old Ones" (nee Lovecraft)." Further searches had Rob Kuntz confirming the actual existence on the Greyhawk city map of the both the Crom and Old Ones temples. 

It's hard not to love that bit from before fantasy gaming became Serious Business. The mix of pulp fantasy with absurd humor hits a sweet spot and reminded me of how vaguely disappointed I was about the mostly dullish deities revealed in Dragon magazine circa 1983. We had been playing in our own corner of the published setting for almost three years already with a strange and eclectic mix of gods and the like, the canonical “newcomers” seemed so anti-climatic.

I have written before about how religion in the Hill Cantons campaign tends to distantly mirror my own all-over-the-place ambivalence with a (mostly gentle) emphasis on the human vanity and absurdity aspects.

Recently we even had the introduction of a somewhat cargo-cultish brand of medieval Catholicism thanks to the battlefield conversion of an evil high priest by the interdimensionally-hopping Father Jack. Vatek, son of Vatek, is not the best of listeners and throwing into the mix his rarely sober spiritual mentor and lack of doctrinal materials, he's created a rather distorted, dionysiac mystery-religion version of worship of the “Blood Jesus.” With nun-maenads and a small flock gathering around him I am sure this is going nowhere serious.

That the events above were player-triggered gets me around to my second point. One of the exceptions to my disappointment with the Greyhawk canonical deities were the “quasi-deities”, mythic heroes just below demi-gods in status. Some of them were explicitly mentioned as having been PCs in the original campaign such as the gunslinger and swordsman Murlynd, a character of TSR co-founder Don Kaye.

Those mentions and the half-page section in the first DDG on “Divine Ascension” (which is a surprisingly easy if power-gamey process by the book) totally grabbed us at the time. Our “end game” was never really about carving out a wilderness hold—though we did that—but about that megalomanical drive to ascend to demi-god status. In retrospect it seems nuts, but it was there and there in spades in how we played around that time.

Now obviously the BECMI series would come along and institutionalize that as the ultimate power arc, but do others remember the earlier reach for the stars? Did it play a role, even if just a distant and never-obtained carrot (as it was for us, fortunately)?  

The Arneson Hoard and the Public Domain

Am I alone in finding the “gold rush” news of the auction of Dave Arneson's mother lode collection profoundly sad?

For a little over a year, I have heard a number of Midwestern friends talking in hushed tones about a great horde of Arneson's papers, manuscripts and gaming who-ha lifted out of a sealed storage shed in Minnesota.

Now in the hands of an rpg auction house, an undoubtedly white-hot bidding war is about to commence--and thus my case of the sads. A golden opportunity to regain missing pieces of the early history of our hobby once again slips out of the public domain and eye and into the hands of private collectors.

Looking through the pictures over at the GeekDad exclusive, it's hard not to notice how great of a loss we are talking about. Just take a gander of the pictures of a spread of the Domesday Book, the near-lost newsletters of the medieval wargaming Castle and Crusade Society that D&D sprung Athena-like out of the head of. Pre-D&D details of Blackmoor are among some of things covered in the issues. And that leaves out all the unpublished manuscripts found in there.

This is not a rant against private collectors per se. I have known several collectors who have a profound love of the game and its history. Some like Harami who drop by to provide real insights into the grand experiments of that day. I sincerely hope that one such collector has an eye to sharing highlights and missing links with the rest of us “fever pitch” fans.

It's hard not to be with GeekDad in openly pining for a public archive to swoop in like this and help preserve it for the long haul. 

Compare to what happened with the legacy of one of other hobby giants, M.A.R. Barker (who serendipitously is being mourned and celebrated as I type by our friends up in Minnesota). Again you had a giant collection of gaming history, but instead of auctioning it off, it was donated to the Tekumel Foundation (assisted by the Aethervox Gamers). 

That collection is being carefully archived and restored with the ultimate eye of being accessible to lovers of that great world-building effort. It's not a theoretical push, we've already seen the re-release of the pre-TSR 1974 manuscript of Empire of the Petal Throne. Several more historical documents including the early-awaited Jakallan underworld are coming down the pipe.

The DMG Ordered me to Show My Work and Irritate My Players

One of the difficult things I am finding about digging into the 1^st ed. DMG for Talmudic readings on domain-level play is that I keep finding funky sections that spin me off into long thought-train tangents. Today I raise the white flag and give into temptation and look at two of the ones I just can't get unstuck from my cranium.

Monsters and Organization. Nestled into page 104 is one of my favorite bits of Gygaxian pedagogy. The take-home messages here provide solid advice: think deeply about the intelligence, alignment, and social organization of the adversaries that players face and create contingency plans and strategies for dealing with interlopers. The numerous examples are also pure gold, showing a range of monsters and how they cope with not just one sortie by the PCs but several.

Now here's the part that struck me as both strange and poignant:

“It is necessary that you make a rule to decide what course of action the monsters will follow BEFORE the party states what they are going to do. This can be noted on the area key or jotted down on paper. Having such notes will save you from later arguments, as it is a simple matter to show disgruntled players these 'orders' when they express dissatisfaction with the results of such an encounter [my emphasis].”

Strange because..well...you know, can you imagine this actually happening at your table in the here and now? It struck me how far the competition-adversity paradigm in rpgs has shifted—even among “old school” circles. I've certainly faced the cocked eyebrow of skepticism from players, the little subtle body language that sounds off, but I can't imagine ever taking out my notebook opening it up to the chicken scratchings of my fevered mind and pointing to prove that they face an “objective reality”. And I certainly could never imagine players feeling entitled to see it. 

That said I'm not sure it's all sunny upward progress to have ditched it. The trust that comes with maturity certainly is but I still like the idea of both the semi-adversity of the GM (I've written about this before here and here)--and having the “fairness” of a tough-knocks situations that can be "won".

Now I am way too much of a seat of the pants bullshitter to have complex, written SOPs for each and every monster situation, but I do quite often set up some naturalistic sketchy orders that I try like hell not to breach the faith of in-game. Usually they are expressed as a range of broad probabilities around courses of action. Something like: “Roll d10, 2d6 space elves 1-3 are laying an ambush back at a good spot in the dunes, 4-6 hunting the players when they get back to town, 7-8 holing up in their current position, 9-10 sending back to the Bizarro Hill Cantons for 2d6 reinforcements, roll again.”

Somewhere down in the recesses of my DM reptilian brain I must have bought back into this. I freely admit it's a weird principle to get hung up on, so I'm curious as to how readers feel about it. Is this in your ballpark of actual practice or some strange vestigial thing you've long since evolved past?

Other NPCs. Turn over to the page before the last one to the last subsection on running NPCs. Most of this is is quite dull and unremarkable until...

“The host of merchants, shopkeepers, guardsmen, soldiers, clerics, magic-users, fighters, thieves, assassins, etc. are likewise all yours to play...These NPCs will have some alignment, but even that won’t be likely to prevent a bit of greed or avariciousness. Dealing with all such NPCs should be expensive and irritating.”

A throwaway sentence but one that packs a lot of Vance in there. Lovers of Jack Vance's work know that one of the enduring themes of his work is that great chunks of humanity are either “marks” or “hustlers” (broadly speaking since many of his protagonists are shrewd but moral actors). Whether it's one of his space operas, planetary romances, or fantasy novels time and time again you see the picaresque travel punctuated by complicated swindles and counter-swindles “in town”.

The two-paragraph example given after this not only reinforces that but—ignoring all the Welsh-sounding name dress--is a golden little window into what looks like actual play in Lake Geneva. Here you have a witless PC, Celowin Silvershield, waltzing into a “strange town” trying to get one of his buddies unpetrified.

He has an annoying time at the tavern getting unhelpful advice (which he has to pay for with drinks) and then has a run-in with an even-more annoying beggar (and pays him off). Then he has to deal (pay off) with a swarm of beggars before even making it to the mage's tower. There he has to deal with a jack-ass gate keeping warlock just to meet with the wizard—just in time to royally piss him off by spoiling his arcane experiment. And if he can't pay the exorbitant sum he gets geased into another adventure.

Love it.

Town should be expensive and irritating. It should be a place for pulply fleecing and being fleeced. It should be a place that makes you want to get what you need, gear up and hightail it back to the next murderhole or wilderness death march.