Subway Megadungeons

Here's a half-formed thought on megadungeon mapping. (albeit one that has probably already been done to death, then resurrected as a zombie thrall, turned by clerics, dispatched by adventurers, and then ground down for glue)

Need an megadungeon/underworld map quick? Use an underground map ('subway' in Western Continentalist).

• Each station marker is either a single isolated room, or a Dyson Logos/Dave's Mapper geomorph; 
• interchanges between lines are larger pre-planned clusters of levels; 
• the lines between stations are the seemingly endless tunnels, sewers, burrowings and wormholed cellars that give the undercity its intimidating scale. 
• The railway interchanges? They might be Saturday Night Specials, sealed sub-areas, or dimensional portals to other worlds entirely.

I've recently decided to expand the Vaults into a full-scale Tekumel-style underworld. Being an unabashed Englishman I've decided to use the classic London Underground map as the basis of my underworld.

Here's a spatially corrected version (created by Mark Noad) which combines the clarity of information of the classic Harry Beck schematic map with the spatial clarity of the 1930s geographic version.

The existing Vaults megadungeon will be roughly where the Bank-Monument interchange is. Lots of connections from there to as yet undefined areas underneath other parts of the Lost City of Nagoh. Some might spin off from Level 1 of the existing megadungeon, others from levels further down.

All I need to do is repurpose the exasperatingly familiar pale blue line of the River Thames as a canyon, rift, escarpment, or perhaps some sort of odd underground environmental anomaly, and Bob's yer muvva's bruvva: instant undercity ~and~ a schematic layout of the Lost City of Nagoh.

Yes, this is all very lazy DM. But I have good form for that. My world map? The Green Lantern map of Mosaic. My Sea of Os'r map? An old map of the Aegean Sea, flipped and rotated. It works for me. Less time wasted mapping = more time for play.

Pic Source: Mark Noad

Howling Emptiness of the 5/6/8-mile Hex

(yes, the titular reference to Rob Conley's mapping bugbear is intentional)

This is just a half-formed thought inspired by noisms and steamtunnel's recent posts on just how big and potentially full of adventure even a single 5/6/8-mile hex is.

Hex map icons, by their nature, only indicate the single most salient feature to be found in that particular 21/31/55 square miles of landscape. Sure, you can drill down to a more granular level with the help of nested hex map templates (such as Welsh Piper's fine 1/5/25-milers), but creating a whole new map for a smaller-scale area is a whole extra chore for the already-busy GM. I don't know about you, but I want to minimize my level of extra work thanks.

Could we perhaps add a simple 'emergent exploring' rule that allows the party to uncover more stuff (up to the limits of the GM's taste/patience) the longer they stay in a hex?

• Castles, cities and the like should all be in plain sight unless intentionally hidden away (like Gondolin or Derinkuyu). Heck, roads point you directly to most of them.
• Infamous lairs, ruins and dungeons should, of course, retain their "Here be dragons" hex map icons and easy-to-find status. The yokels can point out exactly in which direction the castle we don't go near lies.
• More obscure lairs, lost ruins, buried tombs and especially treasure map loot should require a bit of active hunting out by adventuring parties.

I was thinking either some form of skill check per day of exploring a hex (something for that otherwise worthless Halfling to be doing with his time?) ~or~ an standard Xin6 chance per day of uncovering a particular feature. In either case the base chance can be modified up or down for degree of obscurity, concealment, speculative vs. purposeful searching, etc.

Perhaps integrate this into the Wandering Monster encounter rolls that are already part-and-parcel of wilderness exploration in Classic D&D? Just tack the 'discovery' chance onto the existing roll so that it goes from being

d6 1-2: encounter, 3-6: no encounter

to something like

d6: 1-2 encounter, 3-4 fruitless wandering, 5-6 Eureka!

with the Eureka! result representing discovery of a previously known (to the party) but locationally undetermined feature.

"I told you the Tomb of Screaming Death was out here. Pay up."
"Alright, but I want a discount for the sheer length of time you dragged us around this filthy swamp."

Thoughts? Suggestions? Accusations of reinventing the wheel?
Is there already such a rule hidden away in the TARDIS of a game that is OD&D?

Rubblecrawl? Ruincrawl? *crawl, in a dead city.

"Yep. Looks like a massive 'X marks the spot' to me."

Inspired in part by Zak's excellent urbancrawl ideas, here are a few half-formed thoughts on a quick ruined city generator.

[note: This is a work in progress piece. I'll probably be tinkering with it and adding more stuff as it occurs to me]

Draw a flow chart of interesting, lootable places in your city (in the case of my own Ruined City of Nagoh this would include such cheesy soubriqued sites as the Toppled Colossus, the Intermittent Tower, the Electric Eye, the Ruined Palace, the Verdant Ziggurat, the Grand Gate, the Necropolis of Certain and Horrific Death, the Valley of the Wang, etc).

Make each such ‘tourist attraction’ the focal point of its own neighbourhood/ward, then arrange them in kind of a spider-web looking diagram of how everything relates together.  Don't draw out every street or building, because that’s simply not important. Oh, and don’t forget to merrily cut some geographically nearer locations off from easy access, simply because you are a GM and being a difficult bastard is your calling and vocation.  ("You can get there, if you swing past the harpy-infested Throne-Temple of the Triple Goddess.  Can’t go directly, unless you fancy running the gauntlet through the Ghoultracts, then climbing the Sanguine Cliffs into the upper city while the Hivers bombard you with rocks...")

Getting from A to B
Sure, you could just decree that there are vast unobstructed Parisian boulevards between the major attractions, but how dull is that?  Far more fun to make the PCs slog their way through furlongs of devastated, overgrown ruinscape on their way to wherever they’ve decided to Greyhawk first.  Try and get the music from the early scenes of Wall-E gets stuck in their heads...

Make an encounter table of things that could happen on the way to the next major landmark.  Either a simple big table, or a convoluted series of same, as you prefer.  Add trap/trick/terrain hazard stuff like:

• Looters (not upstanding scholars of the past like our heroes)
• Wandering monsters
• Small lairs/shanties
• Avenues of foreboding statues
• Fallen buildings blocking the path
• Overgrown gardens/parks
• Flooded decorative pools/fountains
• Massive sinkholes into the sewers/undercity
• Magical effects gone bad over time
  
• Inexplicable Wacky Crap [I like the Wilderlands of High Sorcery tables and/or BTBG’s Random Ruins]

Whether you elect to roll for random events/encounters/complication per turn (as in a dungeon), or per exploration turn (4 hours – after MF), or per hour, or every time the players say a particular word, is entirely your business.

Detours Along the Way
If the party decide to nose around in ruined buildings then use the tables below to work out what the hell they used to be, and if there’s anything entertaining/lucrative still in there.  Roll or pick for Function, Layout and Style, Structural Features, Condition, Contents:

Function
What was this place? Choose, or consult the random building table in your preferred city sourcebook.

~Civic~
Temple/shrine
Monument/mausoleum
Museum/library
Basilica/council law/courts
Exchange/bank
Theatre/auditorium/arena
Aviary/menagerie
Guildhall/office/embassy
Hospital/mortuary
Hospice/lazar house
Guard post/barracks

~Commercial~
Shop, merchant*
Shop, craftsman*
Shopping Arcade
Inn/tavern/caravanserai
Slaughterhouse
Masons/builders yard
Warehouse

* See list of example trades and services at the end of this article.

~Residential~
Hovel
Slave Pens
Dormitory
Insula/Tenement
Town house
Urban estate

Layout and Style (choose, then d8)
What does this place look like? Pick a letter or random syllable (jab your finger into a block of text or something...). The shapes of the letters, flipped and mashed together however you choose, define the general floor plan of the building. Rationalised rectilinear blocks? Sooooo 20th century.

Block off rooms, corridors, passages, staircases and such based on function, or as you see fit. This can end up with such apparent incongruities as a big old multi-floored palace divided up into loads of tiny, awkwardly-shaped rooms, blind staircases and voids. But there's nothing to say that this wasn't either: 1) intentional on the part of the designer (architects are nigh-on mad wizardly raving egotists at the best of times), or 2) a building repurposed halfway through its working life by a bunch of guys lacking access to the original blueprints.

(This section is partially urbancrawl's 'numbers as roads' idea, partially leximorph mapping as popularised by John of Nine-and-Thirty Kingdoms. Why re-invent the wheel?)

What architectural form does the building take within the footprint established? Roll d8:

1 Tower house (1d4+3 floors)
2 Insula/Block (1d6+4 floors)
3 Courtyard building (1d3 floors)
4 Terrace (1d3 floors)
5 Hall/Longhouse (1d2 floors)
6 Gable End building (1d4+3 floors)
7 Kraal/Ringhouse (1d3 floors)
8 Other

Structural Features (d8)
1 Balconies
2 Garrets
3 Turret/Belfry
4 Fortified ground floor
5 Overhanging upper floors
6 Colonnades
7 Atrium/Impluvium Pool
8 Other

Sub-basement?
50% 1-2 levels
1in6 chance dungeon/sewer/tunnel entryway

Condition (d6)
Is it still standing, and does it look safe? Or is heading in there tantamount to signing your own death warrant?

1 - Rubble (3in6 unstable)
2 - Dangerous Ruin (risk of cave-ins, possibility of deliberate traps)
3-5 - Ruin
6 - Partial Ruin (3in6 occupied)

• Floor cave in: risk of collapsing floor 2in6, take 2d6 damage and make 2in6 chance again.  Yes, this can lead to a cascade effect...
• Wall/roof cave-in: 2in6, [1d6]d6 as it caves in, save for half.  2in6 chance of any remaining roof collapsing if a wall goes.
• Rubble-slide: 2in6 chance, 2d6 damage (save for half)

So, yeah, pack a sacrificial dwarf or two to check the quality of the stonework.

Contents (d6)
"Little pigs, little pigs. We've come to nick yer stereo." -- Dog Soldiers

1 Monster
2 Monster + loot
3-5 Empty
6 Empty (3in6 hidden/unusual feature)

Bear in mind that most of the original movables, fixtures, and fittings will have been looted or rotted away over time.

Backstreets/Alleys/Slums
If the party decide to head deeper into the ruins, away from all the big, shiny feature you've spent hours detailing, they're probably going to end up in the remains of the low-rent areas that all cities try and airbrush away. Assume these are present by the hectare, and that they've got even more run-down and desolate than the rest of the city.

If you want, you can use them as 'rough terrain' to get the party moving in the direction you desire. Heading into uncharted, organically-developed slums should be tantamount to asking the GM to roll extra 'Getting Lost' rolls, just as if the party were out in the wilderness.  Either use a random dungeon generator or some urban geomorphs (the old Lankhmar, City of Adventure book had some ones). Do they want to risk climbing a building to get their bearings?

Example Trades and Services
(reproduced from Noonan & Wyatt - "Building a City")
A list of trades found in cities. Reproduced here because I have no intention of reinventing a well-researched wheel.

~Trades, Exotic~
Alchemist, art dealer, calligrapher, costumer, imported goods dealer, magic armour dealer, magic item dealer (general), magic weapon dealer, pet merchant, potion dealer, rare wood merchant, scroll merchant, soap maker, spice merchant, trapmaker, wand merchant.

~Trades, Upscale~
Antique dealer, bookbinder, bookseller, candy maker, clockmaker, cosmetics dealer, curio dealer, dice maker, distiller, fine clothier, gemcutter, glassblower, glazier, goldsmith, inkmaker, jeweller, map seller, papermaker, perfumer, pewterer, sculptor, sealmaker, silversmith, slave trader, toymaker, trinkets purveyor, vintner, wiresmith.

~Trades, Average~
Armourer, baker, bazaar merchant, blacksmith, bonecarver, bowyer, brewer, butcher, carpenter, carpet maker, cartwright, chandler, cheesemaker, cobbler, cooper, coppersmith, dairy merchant, fletcher, florist, furniture maker, furrier, grocer, haberdasher, hardware seller, herbalist, joiner, lampmaker, locksmith, mason, merchant, music dealer, outfitter, potter, provisioner, religious items dealer, roofer, ropemaker, saddler, sailmaker, seamstress, shipwright, stonecutter, tailor, tapestry maker, taxidermist, thatcher, tilemaker, tinker, weaponsmith, weaver, wheelwright, whipmaker, wigmaker, woodworker.

~Trades, Poor~
Bait & tackle dealer, basketweaver, brickmaker, broom maker, candlemaker, charcoal burner, dyer, firewood seller, fishmonger, fuller, leatherworker, livestock handler, lumberer, miller, netmaker, tanner.

~Services, Upscale~
Animal trainer, apothecary, architect, assassin, banker, barrister, bounty hunter, cartographer, dentist, engraver, illuminator, kennel master, masseur, mewskeeper, moneychanger, sage, scribe, spellcaster for hire, tutor.

~Services, Average~
Auctioneer, barber, bookkeeper, brothel owner, clerk, engineer, fortuneteller, freight shipper, guide, healer, horse trainer, interpreter, laundress, messenger, minstrel, navigator, painter, physician, public bath owner, sharpener, stable owner, tattooer, undertaker, veterinarian.

~Services, Poor~
Acrobat, actor, boater, buffoon, building painter, burglar, carter, fence, gambling hall owner, juggler, laborer, limner, linkboy, moneylender, nursemaid, pawnshop, porter, ship painter, teamster, warehouse owner.

Sources
S John Ross - Medieval Demographics Made Easy
Noonan & Wyatt - Building a City (DMG 3E web supplement)
Legoman of the GITP forums for his instant city builder method

Lost Empires of Faerun by WOTC
Lankhmar, City of Adventure by TSR
Warhammer City of Chaos by Games Workshop
Pathfinder: Spires of Xin-Shalast (Rise of the Runelords #6) by Paizo

Pic Source
Wayne Barlowe

The Map Knows More Than I Do

Doing a bit of random hex-map generation this evening (using a tinkered-with version of Victor Raymond's Wilderness Architect method from Fight On! #2).

Here's the generated terrain in question (just so the following makes at least a little sense).

It's supposed to be the Vorra River Valley, south of Adburg and the ruined City of Nagoh. Yes, I called my adventureburg Adburg. It's easy to remember in the heat of play.

So, yer pretty boggo area of forested hills descending from mountains to a well-watered plain; so far, so fantastic realism. But suddenly the dice decree that there's a 5-mile diameter desert in the middle of this verdant landscape. Wuh?!

Now, to me an out-of-place desert hex that just screams adventure hook. I'd be totally remiss as a GM if I just left this as a blank space on the map. A few quick rolls on the appropriate tables in the ever-handy Ready Reference Sheets reveal the salient feature of this particular hex is a keep, ash-covered, and situated on a rocky outcrop. The environs are crystallised and petrified and the local inhabitants are Giants.

Ashes, crystals, keep and giants says to me the obvious: Fire Giants. Probably digging in to protect/exploit something of use in their forthcoming runt-squishing crusade.* They've likely happened upon (or been sent down by some Big Bad to secure) some form of climate-altering artefact or heat-based weapon that, even inactive, is able to create a microclimate hot and arid enough to bake the land for miles around. All that crystallised, petrified stuff is probably the result of this mini Death Valley effect: roasted trees and dried out ponds and the like. Sounds like a proper nasty place that eats adventurers for lunch. *grin*

 * There's always a runt-squishing crusade in the offing for giants IMG; it's kind of a default state of existence for them in a world which - from their elevated perspective - is over-run with tiny, hyperactive vermin.

And blow me down if that doesn't also explain the sparse settlements and assorted ruins the dice have decreed shall be scattered around what should - in any sane world - be a densely populated area of settlement. Obviously the giants have already made a start on clearing the surrounding areas of its infestation of annoyingly short people. ("You must be THIS tall to continue living. Surtr commands it!")

I picture them rocking up 13th Warrior style (hellhounds, salamanders and fire imps in tow) and setting fire to local villages at night. Or standing on a rise hurling lava bombs (treat as fireball or something) down on unsuspecting bargemen plying their trade. A few instances of that is going to have refugees fleeing the area and will royally screw the economy of everywhere along the river: crops from the farming villages and recovered artefacts from the Vaults can't get down the river to the cities; manufactured and luxury goods can't get up-river to Adburg.

I'm already getting a wacky War of the Triple Alliance meets Against the Giants vibe off the situation...

"We want you to head up-river and dispose of the crazy fanatics blocking river traffic."
"Sure, we'll set out right away. Should have them run off by the end of the week."
"Oh, by the way; they're Fire Giants..."

All that from one hex! Random terrain generation: giving you more than you expected since 1974.

Pic Source:
Me, with a little help from AKS Hexmapper

Hex Mapping the World *mwah hah hah*

I'm sure this is old hat to many of you, but I recently found a thread on boardgamegeek about mapping a sphere with hexes. Post 11 is the real meat of it.

Apparently you use an icosahedron as the base, then divide each triangular face into hexes, dymaxion map style. The points where the three faces meet? They're always going to be pentagons, although that might come in handy if you want particular nodes of power at certain places in the game world.

Of course, no mention of such a project in our circles would be complete without a suitable link to the Tao of D&D (just for the passing few who haven't yet stood stunned at the sight of a man gradually hexmaking an entire fantasy Earth, and then using those maps to model pre-modern systems of trade on a planetary scale).

Related, but less likely to be of interest to anyone other than me. Awww, what a cute little hex map of England. Anyone know how I can blow that up to a useful size without it pixelating horribly?

Cinnabar: Mapping the Infinite City

"Cinnabar? It's no Utopia. There are more options here than you've had before. That's all. There's diversity on an asymptotic curve that never quite touches total breakdown."

Curse you, Tom Fitzgerald! Your mention of extropian science fantasy in the comments to my last post got me thinking about what use one of my favourite New Wave sci-fi novels might be in my game. How could you possibly know that was my Achilles Heel?!

M. John Harrison's Viriconium, China Mieville's Bas-Lag and Jeff Vandermeer's City of Saints and Madmen (one word review: over-rated) seem to get all the love in the esoteric urban fantasy stakes, but Edward Bryant's Cinnabar stories beat them to it by years, and did it with style too. Fine by me, it keeps Cinnabar more of a well-kept secret that I can mine for my own dirty purposes without others calling me on my packrat-ism.

What good then is The City at the Centre of Time for an old school D&D game? Well, in accordance with my recently evolved idea that "the right answer is always the wilder and more audacious of those on offer" (didn't Feynman say something similar?), I think the answer is: plenty.

Cinnabar is a city built around a time vortex and governed by an AI going slowly mad from the strain of synchronising itself across helical time. The burg is described as:

"...a flux of glass towers and metal walls perched atop red cliff crumbling down to a narrow strand of beach..."

and is a post-scarcity dream of genteel urbanism filled with Clarkean sufficiently advanced science (bioengineering, time travel and outright weird sh*t), helical time distortions, and an array of characters bored to the edge of madness by the ennui of their immortal lives.

"And this" said Timnath Obregon "is the device I have invented to edit time."
The quartet of faded and blurred ladies from the Craterside Park Circle of Aesthetes made appreciative noises; the sound of a dry wind riffling the plates of a long-out-of-print art folio.

A few of the more memorable/exploitable elements of the setting:

• Parlours filled with generations of embalmed ancestors.
• Giant ravens and revived prehistoric sharks acting as spies and proxies for warring omnidisciplinary scientists (*cough* wizards).
• Memory scrubbing and personality overwriting.
• Factional strife between bio-modified heterogynes and Luddite natural birth fanatics (the Neo-Creelists)
• Intra-city teleportals (known as the Klein Expressway)
• Living animal statues embedded in concrete to stop them from wandering off.
• The Network, a combination public infrastructure/entertainment system, which hosts shows by sex star Tourmaline Hayes and action star Jack Burton (famous for doing all his own stunts).
• Cougar Lou Landis - a deconstruction of the heroic archetype in a city that only looks to heroes to provide some variety in an interminable existence.
• Catmothers - Nanny/bodyguards for the children of the elites. Genetically modified cats with their maternal instincts refocused on human children.

There's no way I'm not going to rip all this off with the greatest of glee!

Perhaps the oddest thing about the city is that it is described as becoming wilder and ever more expansive the further in toward the centre one travels. Birds are described as travelling in widening gyres to avoid the confusion brought on by time distortions, and characters talk about time compression as one approaches the singularity at the heart of Cinnabar:

"Its the same phenomenon that would make Anita and the others in Craterside Park think we'd have been gone only a short while, regardless of whether we've spent several subjective years at City Centre."

This is the exact opposite of the time dilation which supposedly occurs in a singularity in the real world and, combined with all the other elements involved, makes Cinnabar something of a challenge to map.

Whether you want to use the Cinnabar singularity as written, or make a journey to the centre of the city a one way trip into a timelike infinity (as in the Stephen Baxter short story Pilot, reprinted in the Vacuum Diagrams collection) is up to you. I'm torn between the Narnia/Oz conceit of no time having passed at home, or having ancient and long-forgotten things from the distant past erupt from the inner regions of the city at irregular intervals.

Perhaps the simplest way of doing so would be to treat the wild reaches at the centre of Cinnabar as an inverted wilderness map, with the city as centre point for expansive exploration of its TARDIS-like forgotten areas. Given how big a factor the warped nature of space and time in the city is, this isn't as absurd an idea as it might first sound.

Picture your classic hex map (the one here is from turn-based card PC game Armageddon Empires, chosen purely for prettiness):

The centre hex, rather than representing the city itself, represents the entire world beyond Cinnabar. The wider world receives short shrift in the original book, being described as comprising no more than "The desert. The greenbelt. The city. The sea", and a disused elevated railway to a long-unvisited city known only as Els (I'm sure the striking resemblance between this far-future SoCal and the self-absorbed worldview of La-la-land is no coincidence...). As the city acts as the gateway between the two wildernesses ("beyond Cinnabar" and "within Cinnabar") it really makes no odds.

The robot-groomed greenbelt surrounding the city would be the ring of hexes surrounding this solitary central hex. The greenbelt might need to be modified slightly for the chaotic and hostile conditions of a D&D world; perhaps into the kind of active defence/free fire area the Neo-Victorian enclave of New Chusan had in Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age. After all, one can't have riff-raff turning up uninvited...

Surrounding the greenbelt hexes on the map, but within them in terms of topography on the ground, would be the commonly visited, inhabited areas of Cinnabar itself in all their ferment and glory:

"The Tancarae Institute, Craterside Park, the Neontolorium, Serene Village - where the irredeemably elderly live, the Klein Expressway, the Balloonworks-"

Take your favourite fantasy city sourcebook (or better still, a sci-fi one) and crank the whimsy, spectacle and self-indulgence knobs up until they break off. Cinnabar should be thrilling, OTT and always full of the next big thing. The inhabitants crave novelty to the point of mania. Don't forget the dark undercurrent of ennui, despair and casual cruelty though. Citizens may be inviolate under city law, but you do know how they discipline Catmothers, right?

Spoiler: Implanted memories of the litters of kittens these hybrids could never have. At any time their masters can have their mind replay the memories as if the death of their litter was happening all over again.

Beyond the ring (outlying in terms of topography, innermost in terms of cartography) comprising the currently active areas of the city would lie the largely unfrequented centre; interior suburbs inhabited by people tired of the bustle of Cinnabar proper or opposed to the omnipresent panopticon of the Network, or left deserted on human life by the changing tides of ideology and fashion:

"The capacity of Cinnabar is so much greater than its actual population. I assume the inhabitants of Cairngorm grew weary of this austerity millennia ago and simply moved on."

Things would gradually becoming more desolate, outlandish and seemingly impossible as one travelled further in. The Klein Expressway connections would become ever patchier, and things out of their rightful place and time would become more commonplace.

"It appears to be a Tyrannosaurus Rex. They're presumed extinct."
[...]
"Obregon peered over the lip of the chasm; he could not see the bottom. He looked to the sides and saw that the abyss had no apparent limit in either direction. Directly ahead, the other side of the chasm was about ten metres distant. "This is impossible" he said "There's go geologic feature like this in Cinnabar."

This is where all the post-apoc ape world, transhumanist dystopia and alternate evolutionary history fanfic stuff you feel ashamed to include in an otherwise fine and upstanding D&D game can hang out. Me? I just consider it another vista to be tainted with my own grimdark gonzo vision. ;)

Ultimately, after as much travel, adventure and confusion in the laws of nature as the DM finds entertaining, travellers would (Terminus* willing) reach the singularity which powers Cinnabar and creates the space-time distortions characteristic of the city. This would be the functional and philosophical area beyond the edge of the map; but not, however, the end of the line:

"What you see is the innermost point of the time vortex over Cinnabar. Yet this is not in itself the destination of the time flow; the anomaly is both hole and tunnel, exiting somewhere and somewhen else."

* A ruling singularity AI called Terminus: did the people who designed the city never hear about the power of names? Did they really expect that to end well? Bloody urban planners and their (apparent) failure to understand the importance of mythic resonance...

So, Cinnabar. That (or a decadent, introverted city state so similar as to be its' near-identical twin) is definitely being included as part of the wider Wilds when (if) I ever get around to mapping them. See it while access is cheap, and while it's still there.

"It's a tall mountain."
"Well that can't be helped" said the double helix "Dream quests are known for their arduousness"

edit: feel the power of the grogblog hivemind! Posted at about the same time as my half-formed brainwurble:

• Netherworks on synthecosms in Riskail
• Zak on Weird vs. Noir (interestingly he considers urban fantasy a cousin of noir)
• Trey on hardboiled urban fantasy in a weird world setting

Tabernacle Worlds and Schrodinger's Catverse

Further to Mullah Jim's (*kow-tows*) recent ukase on Planes as Planets, and in response to a posted query about atypical game world cosmologies on Rich Burlew's message board, I've been thinking a little about those odd but useful alternate realities. Our hobby, and its parent literature, are richly endowed with veins of lunacy that might be usefully plundered for my own humble, yet nefarious, gaming purposes.

Put another way: I want sci-fi in my grungy tomb robber pulp fantasy ...and cowboys, and tommy guns, and Moorcockian world-hopping and elemental lords, and knights lancing steam trains, and rifts to other worlds, and all the cool stuff from Time Bandits!

Yeah, I'm magpie-ish and greedy like that.

Now, once upon a time - back when I was a little geek with spare time to worldbuild - I'd have demanded of myself a completely internally consistent world. We're talking the sort of game setting that started from dim and distant first causes and somehow managed to hang together in a logical way (logic? In D&D. Hey, I was that young and that dumb). My deep time timelines nested inside each other three or four deep and stretched over several billion years, and my evolutionary trees of the sentient and monstrous races are (shamefully obsessive and excessive) cases in point. Rational dungeon ecologies, carefully filled in and scaled monochrome maps of pseudo-realistic landforms (no "Here be dragons!" warnings welcome, thank you), and finely planned aerial views of fantasy cities were totemic objects for proto-gamer me.

All the above were little, if any, real use for game purposes, but they were part of what I felt was necessary(!) background to a 'proper' gameworld. I was so hopelessly enamoured with obsessive backgrounding that I thought ICE's Middle Earth Role Playing sourcebooks, and the Blessed St Gary's own Epic of Aerth (the crushingly dry, encyclopaedic world book for his "Lejendary Journeys" game) were how-to models, rather than cautionary examples of excess. I'd have probably taken to Hârn like a duck to crack cocaine. Everything had to be cut and dried. The fantastic had to be quantified. Gawd, was I ever a twerp.

As I've grown older this downright anal need to systematise ~everything~ has diminished and I've been happy to take a more relaxed attitude to how it all fits together. Surprisingly it wasn't really the 'rules lite', 'player-led', 'storyteller-ey' games of the 90s that changed my attitude. What helped my shuck the mental straitjacket were the chaotic "all-myths-are-true" world of Neil Gaiman's Sandman comic series, the novels and short stories of Clive Barker (that man loved him some transformative body horror), and especially TSR's fêted and much-loved Planescape setting.

The late-period D&D multiverse presented in Planescape was a real eye-opener for me. Sure, everything fitted together, but it did so in the manner of something repeatedly re-purposed and modified, rather than as a smooth, elegant creation oblivious to pre-existing context. Richness flowered in the unregarded byways and micro-climates of the Planescape universe like they do in the best kind of garden. Wherever you looked there were hints and inferences that there was more to be seen and known. Tiny areas of single layers of single planes in the massive, interlinked cosmology were fertile enough to be expanded into settings for entire campaigns, if that was what the players wanted.

If you wanted to travel though, Planescape didn't offer one or two ways of journeying across the multiverse. Instead there were n+1 ways to get around, where n was "however many you've already though of". The overland travel time between two points of interest: 3d6 days, no exceptions. Power blocs overlapped and fought for dominance in every niche, large or small. Interstices, back doors, exceptions to the rule, odd holdovers and survivals from older regimes abounded in a cosmology that was inconsistent, incomplete-by-design, full of stacked infinities, and all the richer for it.

(parallels with good practise in dungeon building are obvious enough to pass without expansion here)

Planescape's sedimentary, partly-inherited setting came to seem somehow more authentic to me than a perfectly rationalised, 'no element wasted', ex nihilo world. Sure, it was a product of the late-period TSR release machine, but unlike some of the output of that particular content sweatshop, Planescape hadn't had all the strange, extraneous and contradictory bits focus grouped out of it. There was an almost punkish sense that nothing had been circumscribed or lopped off by the editorial equivalent of an officious and philistine town council planning department. The setting had real character.

I like Planescape; it's not strictly old school, but it does speak our lingo. ;)

For the Vaults game I've followed the Gaiman/Planescape/China Mieville (yeah, he's got a bad case of Marxist tubthumpery, but the man can imagine!) lead and ventured out further than usual into the surging seas of ambiguity and oddness. Were someone to ask me whether there's a standard, an odd, or a mythic cosmology to the Vaults world I'd currently have to answer: Yes. Well, no. Kind of. All of the above.

Yep. Something of a non-answer. But right now the world of the Vaults and Wilds of Nagoh is still in a delightfully indeterminate state. I'm only filling in as I go, and enjoying the freedom of being able to throw 'this' idea out in favour of 'that' one so much that I'm thinking of making indeterminacy a fixed, defining feature of the setting (erm, oxymoron much?).

So, to answer the question, the world of Nagoh is a wave and a particle ...and phlogiston, the luminiferous ether and astral space too. The cosmology constantly wobbles between states of being in a phantasmagoric mix of Spelljammer and Ulysses 31, Planescape, Terry Gilliam's Baron Munchausen, Dunsany's Gods of Pegana, Hodgson's Carnacki stories, and maybe a lil bit of Runequest. Heck, the Discworld is hidebound, cut and dried by comparison!

Just a couple of examples (note: no information presented here can be relied upon to stay the same from one day to the next, the world is just like that):

• The known world is built inside a giant tabernacle and is flat enough that you can sail right off the edge, or pass beyond the misty boundaries of the world and meet the straining giants who hold up the sky. It also has curved horizons, Gygaxian 'slides to China', and a Hollow World (or two) deep within. Oh, and it's also the gathered cloak of a sleeping earth deity who will one day awaken and cast it away.


• You can travel to the lands behind the winds, except for those times you can't because that would just be silly.


• The moon is a bizarre desolation where the ground glows with sickly corpselight. What civilisation there is resides deep underground, leaving the surface to uncanny moonbeasts and marauding warbands of Whistling Selenites hungry for the fabled plunder of the mythic overworld. At the same time the moon is also the barque and the iconic weapon of a scholar godling who wards the world against raging star dragons (comets, at least in a certain light) and keeps the hungry, destructive sea goddess in her appointed place. Sometimes the moon's a grey desert sphere, sometimes it's a flat silver disc, other times it's a rocky crescent you can climb atop, and still others it's a twisted moon-faced thing leering and whispering baleful secrets from the night sky.


• The sun is a giant ball of flaming gas, but it's also the golden palace of the solar divinity, as well as being some blonde dude in a chariot eternally chased by ravening wolves. You can sail the glowing curls of solar flares down to where spectral presences leap and cavort across the ever-burning plains, except when you can't.


• The Void beyond, wherein lurk the alien intelligences that long to wipe away the fleshy infection of humanity, is Grubbian Wildspace, and a freezing gasping radiation-blasted vacuum, and a collection of isolated prison dimensions, and a colossal air-filled, hole-riddled dome through which starlight, rain and the occasional alchemist leak. Yog-Sothoth could explain, but he doesn't want to. :p
  


• The realm of the gods? Over there, at the top of that mountain, or in that desert mirage. But also enthroned in their shining stellar palaces in the heavens (said stars also being distant suns, and leaky holes in the sky, and transfigured culture heroes), and in a subtle spiritual realm beyond the world we know, which happens to look a lot like fluffy cloudscapes. Oh, and the Powers that Be also have a tendency to hang out on distant planets and form looming doom-saying faces in nebulae. Gods are funny like that...

How and when does all this stuff change states? Mu. It doesn't. It's both/all at once/none of the above, as the game requires.

Object lessons I've taken from this:

1. Whatever is more interesting to play is the right answer.
2. It all works out so long as you throw a sack over logic's head and leave it tied up in a closet somewhere.
3. Most players really don't care about internal consistency if inconsistency is more fun.

Pretty big talk for an game setting that's little more than a 25x15 hex map (and those numbers are hexes, not inches), a bunch of funhousey and thematically discordant dungeon levels, a sheaf of random tables, and some half-assed rules for what goes on in town between the looting sprees.

What can I say? Brass necks are really over-engineered 'round our way. ;)

Jakandor: the Last Sandbox

[non-Vaults material. ckutalik at the Hill Cantons blog suggested I should talk a little about Jakandor in terms of exploring city ruins. I wish I'd never leapt with alacrity to oblige his whim; it reminded me how badly rose-tinted glasses can actually affect your memory of something]

The three-book Odyssey series setting could have been one of the last great TSR settings. Published in 1998, when the creditors were already circling and while veritable drifts of unsold Dragon Dice were piled high in the TSR warehouses, the Jakandor setting should - in theory - have been a great success. A self-contained lost world setting where superstitious tribesmen and atheistic necromancers fend off mysterious monsters and fight over the ruins of lost civilisations: this could have been a rethink that revolutionised and revitalised AD&D, as had Planescape or Dark Sun a few years earlier. Just a glance at the Isle of Destiny cover above shows you the potential the setting had. (Are those tiger-headed zombies the Thoth-Amon looking dude is setting on that cowering tribesman?)

Unforunately, Jakandor as released was cataclysmic fail: a textbook example of how not to do it. I can only hope the name Mike Botula is an Allen Smithee pseudonym, because this is some of the laziest hackwork ever committed to paper and spewed onto the market to meet a release deadline.

Isle of Destiny
Format: 96 page book + 32 page DM's booklet, 22"x17" full colour map.
Produced by: TSR
In: 1998, the Dark Age

The volume exploring the Charonti necromancers native to Jakandor, is ok, but no more. Only ok? How do you even manage that?! You have an institutionally atheist magocratic culture who live in the haunted ruins of ancient cities using their own ancestors as advisers, warriors and labourers. How can you possibly make a culture like that boring?

Unfortunately they managed it. The writers appear to have bottled it by actively fleeing from every interesting idea the material might suggest. The Charonti have a caste system; only not really. They are hidebound by tradition, ritual and cultural manifest destiny; except when being wholly rational and pragmatic. They're a culture of atheist necromancers; except all the ones who aren't (i.e.: the vast majority). Priests and Outcasts are reviled and hunted; except the ones who decide to fit in. The Charonti are a dying race fighting for survival in the ruins of their former greatness; but what they're besieged by is never made clear. Ultimately the Charonti culture comes across as little more than a lazy Tekumel pastiche for people who found the original "just soooo tl;dr."

This cultural coping out is entirely supported by the mechanics on offer. The fearsome thaumaturgical plague that destroyed Charonti civilisation is anything but fearsome and can, in fact, be cured by a cheap alchemical mixture. The mighty and terrible necromantic servitors are just bog-standard 1HD skeletons and zombie with silly names. Even the unique magical constructs are yawnsome. Zeppelins made of whale bones, mummified ancestor head libraries, or giant necromantic digging machines made boring? An achievement in itself. And the class kits (you remember these, front-loaded modifications to the existing AD&D classes...) are dull beyond the dreams of accountants. There's a scribe kit for Gygax' sake! Kits take up more than a score of pages in the book, and they could have been dispatched in two.

The DM's Guide, a short 32 page coverless volume containing information on the Knorr, the lost ruins of Jakandor, and a short adventure with a suitably Lovecraftian grue is denser with plot hook and ideas than the 96 page main volume. Lost cities under the sea? Menageries frozen in time? Gates to other worlds? Intelligent undead and their agendas? Rebel priests of the sleeping god? Why was all this goodness not explored before?! Oh? Is that my 32 pages up?

Isle of War
Format: 96 page book + 32 page DM's booklet, 22"x17" full colour map.
Produced by: TSR
In: 1998, the Dark Age

This book introduces the Knorr barbarians (yep, insert your own soup joke). If you just read their brief blurb in the Isle of Destiny DM's guide these guys initially seem pretty cool. Proud Warrior Race dudes with magical mecha totems, spirit brother animals and shamanic magic. Fear arcane magic and the undead. Circle of Life/Earth Mother religion. Despise missile weapons. Loot tombs for sacrificial goods and bragging rights? Yeah, they could be fun.

Unfortunately when you crack open Isle of War you'll see that that's *all* there is to the Knorr. Their culture is no more than a generic Celto-Maori-Amerindian viking animist cliché storm. They're so cliché they actually wear buckskin chaps, count coup on one another, and decorate their weapons with feathers. In 1998! This wouldn't be so bad if TSR hadn't already explored similar cultures in a much more interesting fashion (the Vikings and Celts historical sourcebooks, and Birthright's "Rjurik Highlands" are a couple that spring to mind). The Knorr's motivation to adventure isn't even explained in their book. You learn a lot about them as tribesmen, but their reasons for leaving the tribe and rummaging around in taboo ruins are only to be found in throwaway passages about Knorr tomb-robbers in the Charonti book.

As with the Charonti, the Knorr cultural cop-out is entirely supported by page after page of guff about kits (a dozen animal lodge warrior kits? One would be fine thanks. Three types of semi-ok picarro rogues, and three or four variations on the theme of shaman? Spread those ideas thinner!). The Runequest-style minor magic rituals which anyone - caster class or no - can supposedly utilise cost more than they're worth (4 proficiency slots for a luck re-roll in a setting that tops out at ~10th level? *pfffft*). The rules for totem guardians (30' high remote-controlled wickermen and statues) are fun, but will probably only see use once in a campaign. Full page maps of Knorr longhouses, villages and farms? Waste of paper.

The Isle of War DM's Guide is weaker than the Isle of Destiny version. Larger typeface means less content, and what there is... let's just say it could be better. The included 'adventure' (and I really do use the words advisedly) is certainly no B4: The Lost City, or Hidden Caverns of Tsojcanth. In fact it's more "everyday life in tribal times" than rip-roaring tale of 'barbarian heroes vs. ancient buried evil'. Again, so much promise; failed so badly.

Setting
The Isle of Dread points and laughs. Lost cities and dungeons scattered all over a generic island wilderness full of unintelligent creatures (is the isle temperate, sub-tropical or tropical btw? We're never told as far as I recall). The only intelligent creatures on the island: the two (inimical) cultures, and some random roving undead. Monsters and animals only. Final Destination.

Map
Pretty, decorative, but lazy in that the landforms are obviously based on continental America (forested tribal lands to the east; big river valley down the middle; semi-arid and mountainous lands to the west) even though Jakandor is only about the size of Britain. The only good thing about it - apart from the pretty colours - is the deliberate omission of information. Charonti lands are little more than blank terra incognita landforms on the Isle of War map, Knorr tribelands on the Isle of Destiny are based on what horribly out-dated Charonti maps say.

General Conclusion
There are some (few) good ideas in the Jakandor setting, and a lot of things that act as a creative spur by the degree by which they fail of their promise (the "I can write better than this!" factor). The intent was doubtless there. But oh! the execution. Three books to cover a mini-setting with only two cultures and no major new rules content. With an editor who knew his job, and freelancers who weren't being paid by the word, the content could have been cut into one - potentially really good - 96 page book:

• one chapter on characters
• one on the two cultures (and ramp the weirdness up)
• one on lost cities
• one on the perils of the wilderness
• one on monster stats
• one on lost artefacts (magic and otherwise).

Pop the Isle of Legend image on the cover. Add some evocative interior art and colour page backdrops (the Jakandor books have unrelieved monochrone pictures and plain backgrounds - bear in mind that this series was created after the proverbially pretty Planescape and Birthright lines). Job done.

Sad to say, but if this was typical of their late-period stuff then TSR deserved to go to the wall.

note: I haven't included the third Jakandor book "Land of Legend" in this review as I don't believe in throwing good money after bad.

Beyond the Gothic

Some interesting (if under-explored) observations on the semiotic representation of evil in architecture. Particularly timely given all the delicious dungeony goodness in Knockspell #2.

Evil Lair: On the Architecture of the Enemy in Videogame Worlds

(hat tip: Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing)

Blueprints and Blather

The second quadrant of level 1 of the Vaults has been mapped. A couple of days of staring cluelessly at gaming boards for things like chess, backgammon, nine mans morris, and the like finally resulted in a wholly tangential, mildly drunken two-hour mapping binge last night. Strangely enough, having "X-Men 2" blaring in the background is excellent mapping inspiration - the Alkali Lake base, the tunnels in the X-men Mansion, Nightcrawler in the disused church, even Cerebro: all good, stealable stuff.

(related, and semi-topical: no, I won't be bothering with the "Wolverine" movie. I know a Hicksian P.O.S when I see one)

Oddly, it seems that as I create more Vaults-specific creatures, locations, and iconography the process of mapping out sections and filling rooms with interesting, bizarre stuff becomes *much* easier. Sure, it's nice to be able to write "2d6 Goblins", or "20 rats", or "50% chance 1d6 Orc slavers" and just forget about it. But scratching down "2d6 Tologs", or "1 Rook Seer and entourage", or "1d3 Mrotas" has me actively thinking about what has attracted these weird creatures so close to the surface (and, in some cases, has me making a note to work out what the heck these beasties actually are before the PCs bump into them!) That in turn leads to further embellishments to the area they'll be encountered in.

The art of Keith Thompson, Ursula Vernon (particularly her Gearworld, Bestiary and Oddities galleries. The winged phalloi? Not so much) and Wayne Barlowe's (Inferno and its' companion piece "Brushfire: Illuminations from the Inferno") have been a great help in tapping into this self-perpetuating cornucopia of bizarre imagery and situational complications. The almost Boschian baroque aspects of their art are top notch inspiration when it comes to adding fun replacements to the usual suspects of the monster menagerie. Of course, having Barlowe's "God's Demon" and the Weta Workshop "Natural History of Skull Island" as my current bedtime reading helps a lot too.

"Dark have been my dreams of late." - King Theoden, LOTR:TT

If he'd been a gamer the next thought would have been:

"I'd better make notes while I still remember the details."

So, yeah. Mapping begets gribblies, which beget tricks, traps and setting colour, which in turn begets a lot of erasing, swearing and more mapping. I just can't wait to throw my group into this, and (inevitably) watch them ride heedless and roughshod over my carefully considered setting details in search of gold, glory and sweet lewts. The little tinkers.

Thanks to Amityville Mike for pointing me in the direction of Dungeoncrafter v1.4, and to Harmyn at the Dragonsfoot forums for his excellent TSR Classic Blue tile set. It looks like I might be able to include actually legible to human beings maps in with my one page dungeon sections.

edit: semi-related, subterranean fun in Rome (the Domus Aurea, and the stacked Basilicae of San Clemente).

Building the Vaults

OK. So that's the mechanics tacked and wired, physical paraphernalia (minis, battlemats, charsheets, dice, etc.) assembled, players corralled; now what we need is a dungeon to explore and loot. That'd be the eponymous Vaults of Nagoh then.

So what are the Vaults? So far I picture them as a variation on the time-honoured theme of the big-ass mad wizard's hostile underworld megadungeon (tm). You know the type: masonry walls and oaken doors; piles of loot beyond the dreams of avarice; swarms of surly natives looking to kill and eat the puny surface-dwelling interlopers; successive levels of ever greater strangeness and danger; mainly built in the Cyclopean Monolithic and Overblown Gothic styles; and all decorated by someone with a magpie's eye, an unlimited budget, and thousands of freshly-whipped slaves.

The sole aesthetic unifying touch to the Vaults so far: the ceiling will almost invariably be held up with vaulted ceilings. Why?

1. Because vaulting is an efficient load-distribution system
2. It looks cooler than boring old domes or post-and-beam construction (rib- and fan vaulting especially so)

Here's a list of possible names and themes for levels, sub-levels, dungeon features and such for the Vaults. Opinions sought and welcomed.

Major Levels
The Gearworks
The Invert Tower
The Tumbled Halls
The Self-Created Halls
Crypts of the Sacred Blood
Cantonment of the Undefeated
Porphyry Halls of the Mage-King
The Warrens of the Cloaked Heralds
Court of the Resplendent Judge of Harmony

Sub-Levels
The Seraglio of Silver Masques
Quire of the Screaming Dead
Tomb of the Moonstone King
The Gallery of All Worlds
Reclusium of the Magus
The Sealed Barracks
The Fane of No Gods
The Barren Treasury
The Orbital Palace
The Dread Forges
The Mirror Realms

Features
The Ferris Wheel of Doom
The Stalagmite Mansions
The Ascending Streams
Shimmering Pools of the Ever-Holy
The Grand Vault
The Vortex of Unbeing
The Brazen Gate
The Jotunbrand
Hall of Blind Windows
The Chambers twixt the Walls
Duo-Directional Corridors
The Necrosump
The Lifemill
The Vents

For minor colour and detailing, I'll be borrowing the idea of omnipresent pest holes from Sham, a native trap restocking crew from Amityville Mike, vertical connections between levels from Jeff, and the idea of explorable ventilation shafts from Pat.

What the hey! If I can't do original (*rassa frassa* Harn), I might as well do the best derivative possible.