The Cat People That Weren’t Cat People At All

In today’s pre-Christmas holiday adventure, our team of intrepid characters set out once again in hopes of finding the third level of the dungeon. Spoiler. They were once again thwarted. 

They team - Theodora, Ember, Svenasus the Pegasus, Ves, and Lorna Doone travelled to the local tavern to hire some fighters. They paid 20 gold pieces and were able to hire six men who would each receive half a share. The party agreed to this knowing first, they had been pulling very little lately, and second, most of these guys were probably doomed to die grisly deaths due to the party’s callous behavior.

The fighters, named A, B, C, D, E, and F (promised names only if they survived and returned on a second adventure), were wary but set off with the team to enter the dungeon through the mansion basement entrance. 

Svenasus was again dropped first and with the help of Ves’ feather fall spell hit the ground slightly less hard than last time (there were some weight miscalculation issues) and only took 6 points of damage.

The rest of the party followed on ropes.

The team noticed that a previously spiked door, keeping the naked hairless humanoid cat people locked up, were missing and the group collectively shuddered. They immediately moved to follow their path from last week into the large room, down the hall, and to the crossroad. Back to the even larger room with the elvin statue that had come to life previously.

The statue was waiting for them. But the team was prepared. Ves cast Dispel Magic stopping the statue in it’s place, still repeating the same words from last time. Lorna Coone set to smashing it to pieces, for the valuable metals inside, with her mace. 

The group opened the second chest from last week and a secret door opened on the west wall. Lorna stayed behind with F (holding the door), as well as C and E to guard/help her. The rest of the group went through the secret door. To the north were wall paintings representing the good and heavenly and to the south were the bad and earthly. Ember removed the daggers on the wall with a green stone (the opposite having red stones) from the south, earthly side.

The party then returned to the larger room and the chest. Placing the daggers inside did nothing. Nor did it reveal anything else on the statues pedestal. So they moved onto the pit. The pit seemed very deep so the group sent two hired men down 100 feet of rope, held by Svenasus. It wasn’t long enough so another 100 feet were added and one made went to what seemed to be the bottom where he started screaming. He was pulled up and was physically fine but emotionally broken and screaming about ghosts.

The party didn’t have time to examine this further as F told them that the naked cat people had just entered the room. They didn’t look as much like cats as the party thought but they were hairless and eyeless and creepy. 

Theodora used her Fireball scroll and burned them all to death. And the party decided to go back to the cat room from the beginning and see if there was an idle there.

Lorna had finished collecting all of the precious metals and they were loaded into Sven’s saddle bags. And the party departed. 

Opening the door to the “cat” room hallway presented the group with four more “cat” people, some large and some small. A fight ensued. There was spear jabbing, daggers, and Burning Hands. They were all vanquished. They party went to the room and moved across it to find another door. On the other side was a corridor and a room filled with snakes. And the party, knowing their time was just about done, turned back and returned to the shaft. 

Theodora cast Levitate on Svenasus, as every one grabbed a hold of him, and the party was transported up and to the mansion again...

No richer, and with no more idols...

- Theodora

 Return to the Mansion Entrance - 12/13/20

The intrepid group of adventurers, this time Ves, Theodora, and Svenasus the Pegasus, opted to venture down the shaft through an abandoned, ruined mansion into the dungeon. Svenasus had to just drop down, sustaining some damage. The others climbed down with rope.

Theodora had some familiarity with the entrance, haven taken in before, but the rest of the party was new to that part of the dungeon.

They group entered a 30 by 30 foot room with doors to the north, south, and west. To the north, Theodora remembered looting so the group went south. There they discovered a room filled with naked scary humanoids as well as goblin like creatures who frightened the group badly enough that they turned, spiking the door three times and the following door was spiked as well. The eyes will haunt them.

And so they ventured west. In that room, a large space that seemed silent and empty, there were Bugbears. The adventures tried to escape through a door on the south wall as Theodora burned the monsters with Burning Hands. This mostly singed and angered them. But the party escaped, even after almost leaving Theodora behind to her fate (she took 4 hit points of damage).

The Bugbears gave chase and Theodora used Push to hold the door closed. The group moved down the corridor and to the west, to the east they saw the Bugbears who followed them but then fell back. The monsters did not follow them to the large bronze doors emblazoned with snakes. Theodora remembered as snake monster behind those doors who demnbaded to be fed. The group turned away. 

They circled around and ended up back in the main room, heading back into the Bugbear room and headed north this time. They saw a door but then heard the same Bugbears behind them. This time they fought.

The Bugbears inflicted damage on the party and then Theodoras put them to sleep and the group killed them as they slept. Taking what little money they had.

They went through a door in the west wall and entered another hallway. At the intersection they could go south but this appeared to head back to the snake room. Or go west but this path headed upwards. Or north which was a graduated down tunnel, so they took this path. 

The group ended up in a very large room, they could not make out all of it. There were two large chests along the east wall. One which demanded glory, the other sacrifice. Further along the north wall was a slab, a table, which had cracked and lead down into a pit. And in front of it was a large elvish statue figure with a sword through its chest. 

Ves casted protection from evil on theirself and opened the glory trunk, it was empty, but as they did this, the statue came to life, pulling the sword from its chest. It was 10 feet tall. The group chose to run for it and come back with more people to fight another’s day, exited the way they came, and levitated to the surface.

Ves and Theodora visited Xylarthan and Ves learned the Feather Fall spell for when they party returns.

And now it is time to rest.

- Theodora the Gnome

Gygaxian Spontaneous Generation and a More Involved Procedure for Setting up your Demense

You're Playing OD&D. You get your fighting-man to 9th level. He raises and army with all his gold. He travels to a hex on the map. He rolls to see if there are any monsters in that hex. He kills the monsters. There are now 2d4 villages in that hex. Each has 1d4 *100 people.

Where did they come from? Were they always there?

Maybe each hex on a map has villages. This would mean that the wilderness is not so wild and that when a party is travelling (I am not British, just an asshole) through the wilderness they should be more likely to meet a village as they are to meet 1d4 manticores or whatever.  Despite this the OD&D tables from Wilderness and Adventures shows that "Men" have a 1 in 4 chance of appearing, suggesting that there are not in fact 2d4 villages in every hex.

Ok, What if they weren't always there then where did they come from?

I think as far as Gygax is concerned the answer is, "who cares? Don't worry about it."  These people are spawned out of the wilderness in units of whole villages waiting to be taxed. This might be ok in a world with spells and gods. Maybe you build a castle and a god comes down and breathes life into some piles of clay and they become your peasants, a publica ex dei (I don't actually know Latin either).

What if I don't like that and want a bunch of new stupid rules?

Well, let's go back to the part where you travel to the hex and check for monsters. Let's say if that hex is empty there are no people in the hex. If you build your stronghold here, you get 0 villages for your first year. Then after each year there is a 1% chance that a village will spring up for every 100 gold that you have spent on your stronghold and/or demesne generally. Roll 1d4 and multiply by 100 to see how big the village is. Then roll 2d4 if that number is less than or equal to the number of villages your demesne has than you will stop attracting more villages to your demesne.

Now let's say the hex is full. Whatever monsters you found there are the population of that hex. So if you find amazons in your hex and you subjugate them you become the lord of the amazons and your villages are populated by amazons. Did you find goblins? Congratulations goblin King! Did you find undead? You've got spooky boys who probably don't pay taxes! If your population consists of creatures with more than 4hd then the population of each village is 1d4 * 10.  If your population consists of creatures with more than 6hd then the population of each village is 1d4. If you get dragons there is only one village, but hey you are a dragon lord. 

More on Dungeon Mapping and Darkness

Here be Monsters

My last post triggered another one of these reactions:

There is an element in old school d&d that having players map their own map based on the DMs descriptions is prone to a misunderstanding and incorrect mapping, which is a part of the game that Gygax really seemed to be into, as much as his "gotcha!" Tricks he seemed to encourage. So when the party goes back into the dungeon and find out that they mismapped the section of the graph paper with a dungeon corridor by 30', it's more frustrating that fun.

Once again, I get it. People think it is annoying to try and make a map.  This is an aspect of the dnd that has been excised from the rules in the last few editions. My internet friend quoted above continued on with this other common thing you hear often when talking about player mapping:

Logically, if you've been somewhere before, chances are you'll have a good idea how to navigate back to a location the next day (unless you fell down a pit or some other involuntary moment happened)

As logical as this may seem it is not true for being underground. I have been in a pitch black cave with a torch (an electric torch, which is better than a flaming stick). You can't see a whole cavern at once and it is very difficult to get the dimensions or a mental model of the space in your head. It is super easy to get lost in a dark cave:

From our first step into subterranean darkness, our hippocampus, which so reliably guides us through the surface world, goes on the fritz, like a radio that has lost reception. We are cut off from the guidance of the stars, from the sun and the moon. Even the horizon vanishes—if not for gravity, we’d scarcely know up from down. All of the subtle cues that might orient us on the surface—cloud formations, plant-growth patterns, animal tracks, wind direction—disappear. Underground, we lose even the guide of our own shadow.

Down in a tight cave passage, or in the bounded folds of a catacomb, our field of view is blinkered, never reaching beyond the next twist or kink. As the cave historian William White observed, you never really see a whole cave—only one sliver at a time. When we navigate a landscape, wrote Rebecca Solnit in A Field Guide to Getting Lost, we are reading our surroundings as a text, studying “the language of the earth itself”; the underground is a blank page, or a page scribbled with language we cannot decipher. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/02/getting-lost-cave-labyrinth-brain/582865/(You should seriously read the whole article. I am going to get the book the article is base on.)

Here is another account of people getting lost in a cave once their light went out they had no mental model of the cave and couldn't navigate out. Then check out the Wikipedia article on Mine Exploration.

Player mapping is I think supposed to simulate this. When a player asks how big a room is and their character has a torch with a 30' radius of light. I imagine and sometimes describe to the players how they need to travel from one end to the other counting paces while their comrades wait in the darkness. One wall disappears. you count. Then a corner appears. You turn. the corner disappears there is a door way, you pass that it is engulfed in darkness then another corner. Eventually you have the perimeter. Then you push out blindly into the middle of the room. slowly. You might trip. If you've been quiet enough it is conceivable that there is still something sleeping there. 

Patrick Stuart from of False Machine has written a lot about light on his blog during the writing of Veins of the Earth

http://falsemachine.blogspot.com/2014/03/light-is-initiative.html

http://falsemachine.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-lume.html

http://falsemachine.blogspot.com/2013/06/the-law-of-light.html

Here is an interesting narrative about the role of light in underground combat:

http://falsemachine.blogspot.com/2013/12/ever-so-quietly-we-gained-on-them.html

 Under these conditions it is highly plausible that you might make a mistake mapping fumbling around on your tiny island of light in a sea of darkness scraping your grease pencil or charcoal nub on your vellum or sheet of papyrus. Here is another excerpt from the Atlantic Article; Apparently real world delvers had just as much trouble mapping as frustrated Dnd players:

Even when they did manage to make measurements, meanwhile, the explorers’ spatial perception was so warped by the caprices of the environment that their findings would be wildly off the mark. On a 1672 expedition in Slovenia, for example, an explorer plumbed a winding cave passage and recorded its length at six miles, when in reality, he had traveled only a quarter mile. The surveys and maps that emerged from these early expeditions were often so divergent from reality that some caves are now effectively unrecognizable. Today, we can only read the old reports as small, mysterious poems about imaginary places.

Maybe you still aren't convinced. Maybe you think that the artificial seeming dungeons would not be as disorienting as natural caverns. Plenty of people have gotten lost in the Paris catacombs. Here is one account. I would also encourage you to watch this Youtuber get lost in the Paris Catacombs; notice how feeble the light seems and the knee deep water. 

These maps make me think of the early maps that cavers would make, "a mysterious poem about an imaginary place."

 

 

Also imagine the party members that stand still shrouded in darkness watching this orb of light move off in the distance with no accurate way to no how far away the light is. Imagine the dread they feel when they think that the light might go out and their comrade is alone in a sea of dark and they have no idea what happened. You can see some of that in these videos made at the artificial caves under Castle Valkenburg in The Netherlands (these are the caves I was in. It was amazing; if you ever have the chance take a tour of these caves).

It's interesting that these maps were labeled by of exploration. It supports my idea that player maps are often adventure logs rather than surveys.

 

 

So you may think player mapping is annoying and you might not think it is fun but it the way that Dnd recreates the disorientation of being underground and the trouble of mapping labyrinths while robbed of all the things that humans use to orient themselves. If you do not want to simulate that in your games that is more than fine. You have the support of the last three version of Dnd. However, If you think that your character would not need to make a map and that your character would "have a good idea how to navigate back to where they were before," you are just wrong and have a very unrealistic idea about what it is like to be underground.

Also check out what the caves under Castle Valkenburg with a bunch of flashing lights

When and How Players Should Map: In which I Ramble on until I Tell you to Match the Type of Mapping you are doing to the Type of Adventure you are on.

I run a very old school game and I won't draw maps for my players when exploring dungeons. I like mapping, A good map is very useful and hopefully rewarding to make. Here are some things I think a dungeon map is good for:

• lets the players know where they've been
• serves as a kind of adventure log
• helps players plot goals for the next session
• can help the party find secret doors 
• can help the party circumvent random encounters

 

My players are less enthused about mapping. More recent fantasy rpgs have done away with having players create their own maps of dungeons and other environs. Several blogs in past few years have also come out against requiring players to make their own maps. Here's a reasonably popular blog summing up the anti mapping sentiment:

For years, mapping formed a part of D&D that players tolerated, but that few questioned. Then, this revolutionary game seemed so fresh and intoxicating that even duties like mapping found love, just a lot less than the game’s actual fun parts. 

                                            -DM David

Here is Geoffrey from the comments, he also hates mapping: 

Geoffrey Greer May 14, 2016 at 10:19 am

Enjoyed this reflection, David. I’ve always thought that mapping was stupid. We used to do it all the time with 2nd edition, but then it seemed ridiculous and unrealistic. I mean, if we accept that the player-characters have the time and luxury to make a reliable map (and often times the DM would assist to make sure they were correct!), then why bother? Just let the DM answer all the questions you might have and direct you accordingly? And if the DM *wasn’t* clear with directions/descriptions, then there’d be an argument when discrepancies emerged.

Of course, with the advent of erasable, gridded mats, or even model dungeon-construction toys, mapping became unnecessary, and the “fog of war” was all you had to worry about.

I dislike mapping so much because of the immense time-suck, that I even look for ways to not have to make maps in the first place–AS A DM. lol During the 2E days, I had a copy of Ruins of Undermountain, but we never played that for what it was. I just looked for small sections of the map that had the kinds of tunnels and rooms I wanted, photocopied the area, then used a marker to black-out the sections I didn’t need so the map would be self-contained. A few notes in the margin, and then ta-da! A dungeon map. I have long sought a good system for random dungeon generation, since nobody really cares about the *shape* of the dungeon as much as the *adventure* inside it.o

The last sentence of Geoffrey's comment does the most work in illustrating why people don't like mapping. They don't think that mapping is part of the adventure. And you know what if the don't think that mapping is part of the adventure then it doesn't have to be for them. In an old school dungeon players get to decide what their goals. If they can have fun without making a map then they don't have to make a map. What I don't like is when players shift the map making responsibility to the dungeon master. The dungeon master has done enough work already. If players don't want to make a map then they should figure out another way to achieve at least some of the goals I outlined above.

Here is an idea from the Angry Dm:

First, let’s throw out the notion that it is in any way necessary for the party to produce a map of the same quality as one of Pathfinder’s in house cartographers. That s$&% is useless and pointless and it sets the bar way too high. Instead, let’s agree that the best way to map is the way that those of us who ever played a game Zork already knew – one of the old Zork games before graphics were invented that is. All the party needs is a flowchart. A room is just a box with a name in it. A connection between rooms is just a hash mark on the wall between the rooms. A hallway is just a line. That’s it. Quick and dirty.

The point is that a player’s map isn’t meant to be a f$&% architectural rendering. It’s just meant to show how to get from room to room and which rooms are where. Basically, a player’s map just needs to answer some very basic questions:

• How the hell did we get here?
• How the hell do we get back?
• Where the hell do we go next?
• Where the hell is that room with the statue with the missing eyes because now we have those two eye-shaped gems?

In other words, players don’t need a map. They need a flowchart. That’s it. Hell, it’s really just a list of rooms with identifying features and some way of showing how to get from one to another. These are perfectly fine player’s maps:

 I think this is a great idea a flow chart can serve most of the purposes that an accurate map does. The only limitations of a flow chart are  in avoiding random encounters and finding secret doors. Let's see what the comments have to say:

No. Just no. Ten years of having to map other people’s fucking dungeons has taught me this is a waste of time. Getting rid of this was key to actually enjoying dungeons First of all, the reality is that verbal language is a shitty ass way to describe room shape, unless, as you say, all of your rooms are conveniently rectangular with at least one single distinctive feature and no complex spatial relationships. This describes almost no interesting building ever. Caves arent rectangular either.
More to the point, in real life, people have strong spatial awareness, which means walking around they rapidly build a spatial map. This does not apply to verbal descriptions, and adds an excessive amount of mental effort to the roll.
A key component of playing an rpg is being able to feel present and oriented in person. Making accidental fuck ups about basic room shape and orientation rampant makes that practically impossible. It’s even worse if you run a large group and people cant always make it every week (such is life). Then half the players have no clue where they are, and find it hard to contribute. I say this, and half of the people I play with work with building maps, now, though I suppose they didnt at the time.
Works well for wilderness crawls, though. I do like a basic global map to remind people of “you started in that village, and there are mountains over there”, but this may relate more to the issue of “large group, occasionally players cant make it” issue.

Ok, wow. Also this doesn't really address what the blogpost was about at all.

Anyway, here are some maps from my two most recent sessions:

This map has a lot of pretty colors and attempts to be to scale. I am not going to say whether or not it accurately depicts the dungeon. That would be telling. This map was made while the party was trying to locate a treasure trove.

This map is from the following session. It is much less organized. You can see that there were mistakes made when deciding where to start mapping from (the safest bet is always the middle of the page). This map functions more as a diary of the adventure than as an accurate map that a 3rd party could use to guide themselves.

 

 The first map would be ok for trying to find secret doors and does a great job of depicting the encounters that the players had during the session. The second map depicts a long journey but in a disjointed way. It might not do a good job at helping the party explore further or retrace their steps. It does do a good job of providing snapshots of the parties adventure throughout the delve. We can see that they were followed by cats, that one of them drank beer. It lists prominent landmarks that may be worth returning to but isn't clear on exactly how to get them. I think that when like here the party is documenting a broad sweep of the dungeon, a flow chart is better than trying to construct an accurate map. The first map was made while the party was doing a more focused search of an area while looking for a specific item. When doing something like this all the benefits that a detailed map give are important. You can see that more care was put into the dimensions of this map and I think that reflects the task that the party was engaging in. 

Maps are a record of an expedition and players should tailor the type of mapping they are doing to the type of expedition they are on. If there is a unity between the purpose of expedition and the type of mapping that players are doing then the maps will be more useful and more rewarding to make

Creatures that Should Turn to Stone in the Sun

There was a plan to go and find instances in folklore to provide some sort of evidence of source material for why these creature should turn to stone. but instead I am not going to cite anything because this is a blog and I can do what I want.

Goblins

Obviously, right. They are goblins. The more weird and folkloresque they are the better. There is also a famous Dutch fairy tale about goblins turning to stone in the sun.

Trolls

 

Bugbears

First of all they should have pumpkin heads cause that's weird. And, if they have pumpkin heads then they should have weird spooky folklore properties. And turning to stone in the sun is one of the weirdest spookiest folklore properties a spooky monster can have.

 

Sea Hags

Yeah dude, they are all wet and gross. They totally dry out and turn to stone in direct sunlight. I imagine this as more like Dracula in Bram Stoker's Dracula like they can be out in limited sun and in the shade but if they are exposed to the sun at noon then they will turn to stone.

Beholders

This is probably because I have sensitivity to sunlight; so it makes sense to me that something with a bunch of eyes would be sensitive to sunlight. The idea of having all those eyes and no sunglasses seems like agony to me. So yeah theses things should turn to stone.

Gods of Marmo

In the Temple of Nodens the Dream Elves speak of other Gods and cults that ruled Marmo in the past. 

 

Boccob - Neutral God of Magic 

Boccob is not so much worshipped as fed. Every spell cast, every new spell created, every magic item destroyed adds to his being. It is said that if a magic user dies with spell still memorized then his mind becomes part of Boccob.

Donblas - The Justice Maker Lawful God of Life and Order

In the past Donblas had a cult on Marmo but the last of his known true worshippers were slain two centuries ago. The body of Donblas is buried somewhere in the Underworld.

Istus - Neutral Goddess of Fate

The elves know very little of her and her cult. They believe that dreams can thwart fate.

Arawn  - Lawful God of Death and Revenge 

There are legends that this god will trade a living soul for a dead one of equal value.

 

Nergul -  Chaotic God/Goddess of Death and Entropy

This god of course wants to unravel the universe and consume it inside himself as one big ball of chaos. It births monstrosities from a cosmic womb and mutates its worshippers before consuming them or mating with them.

 

Nodens - Neutral God of Death and Dreams

Obviously the coolest god according to the dream elves, he rules over the land of dreams where memories and lost souls drift like wreckage in a sea of ether. Death is a dream that lasts for eternity and he is the monarch of dreams.

Priapus - Chaotic God of Fertility and Change

No one on earth worships this god, probably. You do run into his statues in the land of dreams.