Urbancrawl Rules For Slacker DMs

Note: this stuff all got put into Vornheim eventually. So if you like it--buy that. It won awards.

What shape is Los Angeles? I have no idea. (It's way bigger than The City-State of the Invincible Overlord, and that map is huge.)

I don't think anyone knows except maybe Noah Cross. Anyway, point is, I want the big cities in this campaign to be big and mysterious and noiry and, perhaps, in that way, unlike real medieval cities.

In the mind and in books and movies, the noir city is more like a dungeon than a mapped thing in a tour book--it's an amorphous dark space through which the characters grope and carve their way. It's a romantic rather than a classical approach to the city.

Plus, like I've said before, I don't want to world-build a lot of stuff I'll never use. So I'm writing some "urbancrawl" rules so that I can build the city as the PCs explore it.

Urbancrawl Rules:

Once a place is explored, it's fixed on the map. Until then, though, anything the DM hasn't written is up for grabs.


Neighborhoods

Above is a neighborhood map of Vornheim. It was achieved by writing out numbers one through ten in different colored markers. Pretty much randomly.

So far, as you can see, Vornheim has 10 neighborhoods, which is about a third as many as LA or Manhattan and about twice as many as Fritz Lieber appeared to need to write all the Lankhmar stories.

It doesn't show the actual shape of the city, just where neighborhoods are relative to each other and where the major streets and bridges are (Vornheim has building-to-building bridges everywhere--like Sharn in the Eberron setting and many previous pulp sci-fi cities, but for these rules, the bridges aren't necessary). For example, the fastest route from neighborhood ten to neighborhood four is via neighborhoods five or six, though you could go 10-9-2-1-4 if there was a giant lizard eating neighborhoods 5 and 6 or something.


Unique Buildings

Certain kinds of buildings there just isn't that many of even in a big medieval city. Like, Vornheim has:

1 Arena
2 Shipping operations (it's landlocked)
1 Barracks
1 Prison
3 Major theaters
1 Orphanage
1 Spymaster's secret headquarters
1 Cartographer
2 (competing) Cathedrals
1 Zoo
2 Markets
1 Independent library
1 Graveyard
1 Palace
4 Courts of law

If, in the middle of an adventure, the PCs suddenly need to know where one of these things is, or find some other unique place, roll a d10. That's what neighborhood it's in.


Getting From Neighborhood To Neighborhood

The major thoroughfares roughly match all the lines in the words spelling out the numbers in the neighborhood map. i.e. to get from neighborhood ten to neighborhood seven the PCs need to walk across a big "x" shaped intersection and if you flew in a dirigible over neighborhood six you'd see that the major streets spelled out the word "six".

(This is just the default street map for if a neighborhood is improvised during play. You always have the option of getting off your ass and mapping more realistic streets in any part of town, as long as the PCs haven't been through it yet. Plus if you count the bridges, there's several "layers" of connecting streets.)

Walking from one neighborhood to the next isn't that hard if the PCs know where they're going and it's daytime.

If it's not daytime, the DM may roll once on the Who Are You And Why Are You In My Way Table (Vornheim)(below)(Or any other random urban encounter table) once for each neighborhood the PCs travel through on their way to wherever they're going.

If they don't know where they're going, they can ask a random stranger for directions. Roll a charisma check. Success means they get where they're going. If they fail, the stranger isn't charmed enough to give conscientious directions, consult the following chart:

Fail by 1: You're lost, roll d10 to see what area you ended up in.
Fail by 2: You're in a dark alley, there's a thief trying to pick your pocket.
by 3: ...make that several thieves.
by 4: Refuses to give directions.
by 5: Refuses and is offended.
by 6: Person you're asking attacks you.


Non-Unique Buildings

Some stuff is everywhere. Assume every neighborhood contains at least one of the kinds of buildings listed in the table below under "Random Individual Buildings". (This is probably unrealistic, like is there really a jeweller in every neighborhood? No. Is there only one? No. But in a pinch, it'll do.) This way if the PCs go--"We need the nearest cheesemaker, stat!" you just use the "Travel Within A Neighborhood" rules.


Travel Within A Neighborhood

Once the PCs are in the same neighborhood as whatever they're looking for, if the DM is lazy and hasn't mapped that neighborhood yet, s/he rolls a d10. The streets between the PC and his/her objective are shaped like whatever number comes up on the die. For example, if the PC comes into the neighborhood from the north and the DM rolls a "1" then the map to wherever the PC is going looks like this:

If it's in the middle of a pleasant and sunny day then the DM shows them this (and makes up some street names) and everyone goes, Well, gee, that's nice to know, the PCs note that down and the DM draws it onto the map of the neighborhood and that's that. (The streets aren't shaped like numbers--the segment of their journey that lies between them and their goal is. And often, it'll only be shaped like part of a number--in this case, the right half. Just add on extra side streets so they don't realize you're doing this.)

However, if the PCs run out of arrows durring a goblin invasion and desperately need arrows and want to find the nearest arrowsmith, then the DM doesn't show the PCs this little "1"-shaped map and watches them run around on it trying to find what they need.

If the PCs take a wrong turn and unwittingly run off the edge of the "1" into an unknown zone, simply roll d10 again for the layout of the streets they just ran onto.

Over time, once the PCs have been a few places in a neighborhood, the "known streets" of the neighborhood might look like this:



And the DM can flesh out the neighborhood at will and throw in "decoy" streets to disguise the scheme--it's easy, numbers are just straight lines and circles.

That's the same neighborhood after 5 seconds of extra streets.

All this is more complicated if you take into account the bridges, but for the sake of a single day's adventure this should do you. If a PC is on a bridge and gets knocked off to a lower "level" and doesn't climb back up, just start the process all over again on the lower city level.


Random Individual Buildings

If the PCs run into-, or just happen to be looking at-, a random building, roll d100 to determine what it is:

1-2-Watchtower
3-4-Whorehouse
5-6-Alchemist (1-3 public apothecary, 4-6 private residence)
7-8-Weird shop full of random crap
9-10-Famous local eccentric's residence
11-12-Nest of criminals
13-14-Armorer/Blacksmith
15-16-Whatever the name is for someone who sells horses (ostler?)(stableman?)
17-20-Tavern/Inn/Pub
21-22-Baker
23-24-Barber
25-Granary
26-27-Scholar (private residence)
28-29-Candlemaker
30-Jeweller
31-33-Butcher
34-35-Cheesemaker
36-37-Leatherworker
38-39-Mason
40-41-Miller
42-43-Brewery
44-Physician
45-46-Hatter
47-48-Veterinarian
49-50-Weaver
51-53-Gambling hall
54-55-Tailor
56-Winemaker
57-58-General outfitter (expedition equipment)
59-60 Bookbinder
61-62 Bowyer
63-65 Fortune Teller
66-Furrier
67-68 Glassblower
69-70 Locksmith
71-Moneylender
72-73 Shoemaker
74-75 Stonecarver
76-77 Printer/engraver
78-100 Private residence

If a PC enters an unmapped bulding, roll d6. The layout of rooms on a given floor will roughly match the layout of dots on a standard casino d6, i.e.:

If it becomes relevant, roll 2d6 to determine number of floors (in Vornheim, anyway, for a more realistic city, roll a smaller die).

Each floor can be laid out the same or differently, depending on how frantic the pace of the game is.

(For major buildings, just roll more dice and put the layouts next to each other. Or just be slightly less of a slacker and have a few of those generic church/castle/great hall layouts printed out.)


Pubs, Inns, and Other Commercial Establishments

Have four short pub descriptions locked and loaded before any urbancrawl session. (i.e. "quietest pub in town, red curtains, drunk painter eating sausage at counter, pick-pocketable for 2d6 g.p., waitress is 9th-level anti-paladin, rooms are cheap"). If the PCs enter a pub or inn roll d4 to determine which one they walked into. If your PCs enter more than four pubs in one session then, well, God help you.

God or Jeff.

Once you use a pub, write a new one between sessions.

Likewise, write short descriptions for four generic local merchants, i.e. "takes forever, expensive, but has valuable information about last NPC party met" and do the same with them.

Random Schmuck Table

If the PCs accost someone and you want it to be interesting, roll on the Who Are You and Why Are You In My Way Table. If they accost somebody and you just want it to be some random loser, roll below or on the WFRP career table if you've got that:

1 Acrobat
2 Apothecarist
3 Architect
4 Armorer
5 Artist
6 Astrologer
7 Baker
8 Barrister
9 Bowyer
10 Brewer
11 Bricklayer
12 Candlemaker
13 Carpenter
14 Cartographer
15 Clothier
16 Cook
17 Diplomat
18 Dyer
19 Engineer
20 Engraver
21 Farmer
22 Fisherman
23 Forester
24 Fortune-Teller
25 Furrier
26 Gardener
27 Glassblower
28 Grain Merchant
29 Gravedigger
30 Herbalist
31 Hunter
32 Innkeeper
33 Interpreter
34 Jester
35 Jeweler
36 Leatherworker
37 Locksmith
38 Messenger
39 Miner
40 Minstrel
41 Moneylender
42 Navigator
43 Painter
44 Peddler
45 Physician
46 Playwright
47 Rat Catcher
48 Sailor
49 Scribe
50 Servant
51 Shipwright
52 Shoemaker
53 Spy
54 Stonecarver
55 Storyteller
56 Weaver
57 Bookbinder
58 Mercenary
59 Beggar
60 Juggler
61 Dwarf (roll again)
62 Elf (roll again)
63 Half-orc (roll again)
64 Tiefling (roll again)
65 Half-elf (roll again)
66 Roll on WAYAWAYIMW Table below
67 Child
68 Extremely ugly child
69 Long lost relative (boring, but friendly and helpful)
70 Dog catcher
71 Thief (not working today)
72 Wizard
73 Soldier
74 Fishwife
75 Wife (non fish-)
76 Tavern wench
77 Strapping young lad, possibly unemployed
78 Lunatic
79 Alchemist
80 Executioner
81 Confused foreigner of indeterminate occupation
82 Two goblins standing on top of each other hiding inside a human-shaped costume
83 Noble
84 Drunk noble
85 Creepy...(roll again)
86 One-legged...(roll again)
87 Pirate
88 Bard (about to die of unknown causes) (authorities will be apathetic)
89 Tavern keeper
90 Fetch-it Boy
91 Knight
92 Siamese twin (roll twice)
93 Lovable scamp (1-3 red-headed 4-6 with stolen pie from windowsill) (is actually wererat)
94 Suspicious, evasive weirdo
95 Carnival freak
96 Fake carnival freak
97 PC chooses (holy shit it's all Gameforge in here!)
98 Cleric
99 Doppleganger (roll again)(means no harm)
100 King/Local lord in disguise roaming amongst the common folk


Who Are You And Why Are You In My Way Table (Vornheim)

(empty spaces to be filled in by DM when PCs aren't looking)

1-Pickpocket
2-Thugs (#=#of PCs)(level 1 fighters)(probably)
3-Kindly, helpful old woman, who happens to _______________
4-Fat fortune teller
5-Crazy poet who will __________
6-Drunk noble that __________
7-Drunk priest who ________ but only if ___________
8-Confused goblin
9-Drunk commoner (1-3 funny 4-6 boring)
10-Aggressive Prostitute (roll on world's most famous AD&D DMG table)
11-Thief with intriguing proposition (possibly plot-relevant)
12-Creepy noble with intriguing proposition (possibly plot-relevant)
13-Dog, normal, except _____________
14-Frightened child being pursued by (roll again on this table)
15-Old man who is actually _______________
16-Disshevelled damsel in distress, being pursued by (roll again on this table)
17-Helpful NPC who ________
18-Street fight between goblin raiders and locals
19-Corpse
20-Locked chest someone just threw out, containing _________

(Reader-suggested additions to this table welcome.)

Once an encounter has been used, cross it off and write a new one.
My "second string" so far includes...

-Travelling theatre (1-3 good 4-6 annoying)
-(Roll on table) being chased by (Roll on table)

Well, I was a wee bit tipsy and...

Extended Carousing-Mishaps

I'll be using these rules with Jeff Rients' carousing mishaps table, since quite a few of the "mishaps" could be adventure seeds, given a little room:

First, these rules will normally be for the end of a session, not the beginning. This'll generally be a session where the PCs have finished by finally reaching a city or have just pulled off a big score somewhere in a city.

Carousing at the end gives the DM time to write up the necessary info (if any) for the carousing result before the next session starts. If the chart is used at the beginning or in the middle of a session, the DM should be ready to improvise.

Normally, PCs will only get x.p. for monsters. However, once they get to a Big City, they may trade g.p. for x.p. by blowing it on various forms of strong drink.

Exchange rate is 1 to 1 and must be exchanged in chunks of at least 100 g.p. per PC. Resulting X.p. is divided evenly among the players.

However, for every (total # of PCs) x 100 x.p. exchanged, one member of the party (the party may choose who) must carouse excessively.

The excessive carouser must then roll d20 on the Modified Carousing Mishaps Table below. Complex results are resolved at the beginning of the next session:

1-As original chart .
2-Random pub brawl. Whole party faces number of brawlers = # of PCs. Resolve as normal combat but overcarousing PC is at -2 for being drunk.
3-As original.
4-Wake up in bed with someone... roll on subtable below.
5-Gambling losses. Gain o x.p..
6-As original.
7-Insult Local Person of Rank (roll on subtable below).
8-As original except malady takes a more virulent form.
9-New tattoo (roll d6 1-PC chooses 2-DM chooses 3-player to your left chooses 4-player to your right chooses 5-player 2 to the right chooses 6-player 2 to the left chooses).
10-2 thieves set upon PC while s/he is alone. Resolve as normal combat but PC is at -2 for being drunk.
11-You wake up with only your armor and, on a successful wisdom check, your most prized posession.
12-As original.
13-As original.
14-You've joined a local organization--you remember the passwords and secret signs (for Vornheim, roll on subtable below).
15-As 4 above.
16-Wake up stark naked in local temple, roll a D4 (for Vornheim) on the Local Organizations table to determine which of Vornheim's four temples.
17-As 7.
18-There was something in that drink. You are smitten with (roll on subtable below) for d10 days.
19-As original.
20-As original.


Local Organizations Subtable (Vornheim) (d12)

1. Church of Vorn
2. Church of Orth
3. Church of Esk
4. Children of the First Wyrm
5. The Pale Web
6. Church of the Hex King
7. Cult of En Vorath
8. Church of the Undiscovered Eye
9. Church of the Cold Eye
10. Church of the True Eye
11. Elite strike force aimed at nearby enemy of city
12. Local nobility


Local Person of Rank Subtable (d8)

1. Priest of most important local deity (Vorn, in this case)
2. Local monarch
3. Tavern owner
4. Chief of the constabulary/local military
5. Court wizard
6. Court librarian
7. Random local noble, female
8. Random local noble, male


Wake Up In Bed/Smitten Subtable (d12)

1. Succubus
2. Dead albino elf
3. Apparently normal attractive member of orientation-appropriate gender
4. Randomly determined other PC (neither remembers anything)
5. S/he's ugly. You're married.
6. (Roll again on this table.) You're married.
7. Lizard woman who loves you
8. Halfling
9. Most important NPC in game
10. Your exact double
11. Roll on "Local Person of Rank" table
12. Priest/ess of...Roll d10 on Local Organizations Subtable

Gift-Horse-In-The-Mouth-Report

In my recent quest to find free locations to plunk down in the game world in case the girls go someplace unexpected, I have gone and done the strangest thing: I'm actually looking at WoTC's published materials.

(And yes, I know about http://www.megadungeon.net/ --but it's mostly blank maps so far. And a fungus forest.)

I went and looked at the old 3.5 free adventure archive.

Skipping the first two, which are just re-hashes of old suff, I first went through all the descriptions and eliminated the obvious total-failures:

"Fang, Beak, and Claw involves an evil druid of Malar, his cronies, and a tamed owlbear. "

Oh go fuck yourself.

That eliminated about a third of them. Also out were murder mysteries, since we need locations here, not suspects.

Then I actually started looking at the adventures themselves...

So, ok, I understand the economic need to pad out products you put between hard covers, but these are free and yet we still get...

"Trap: The ice is brittle in this area, and unwary characters
might fall into the lake when the ice breaks away
underfoot.
Brittle Ice Trap: CR 5, location trigger, no reset,
DC 20 Reflex save avoids, Search DC 20; Disable
Device DC —. Market Price: —."

Seriously, WoTC?

How about:

"Brittle ice. DC 20 to find or avoid."

If you can't figure out that a sheet of melting ice and a patch of frozen sea beneath it is not a practical thing to try to re-sell, you probably should not be running a game of anything.

Monsters are worse--it takes half a page for them to do stat-blocks for monsters--that's longer than the stats in the monster manual. And really, this seems like maybe a nitpick but it isn't because this goes to a core of the whole thing--there's remarkably little here except the idiot-proof padding. Which might be a metaphor for the whole logorrheac WoTC-D&D experience.

What's left in most of the adventures when you take the fat padded walls away is a handful of monsters in a place. And not like an exciting place, but like: "The orcs are holed up in a barn. Two are behind the hay bale. One is out chopping wood." If it's a high-level adventure, then it'll be Bloodfrenzy Meatlicker Orcs, but they'll still be in a barn. That--plus some scared villagers telling you there are some orcs in a barn, and exhaustive descriptions of the armor class and feat list for each hay bale--is the whole adventure. Ten pages to tell me that. Which isn't even "Something I could have thought of myself" it's the minimum level of elements you have to achieve even to be playing the game at all. It's like someone telling you they have a great idea for a bike and it's that it should have two wheels and pedals and should be painted a color. Ah, but did you expect the color to be eggplant? Um, maybe...

Some may say I'm looking for old-school love in all the wrong places, but, seriously, I feel like any DM of any age with any play style would find a lot of these adventures insulting. I don't need a professional writer to put together a monster from the manual and a map from the WoTC Generic-Map-A-Week site and have a bartender point the PCs toward the result.

But, hey, you get what you pay for. Maybe the designers didn't want to blow their wads thinking up elaborate stuff for a bunch of freeloaders.

But there's a way worse problem--stuff like this really just breaks my heart, because there's no excuse for it...

"Puhrjan: Spirit naga... Treasure: Puhrjan carries his magic items with him, in a small pack strapped behind his head."

So this mysterious being from the mists of eastern legend carries all his stuff in a fucking fanny-pack? Really? And he also is teamed up with a couple will-o'-wisps who set a rope trap for people. And in another adventure there's a hag and a barghest who move into a lighthouse because they're trying to rent it out to pirates.

Where's the fucking magic? Where's the incomprehensible wonder? Since when do nagas need fanny-packs? And how would they get into them anyway?

I can see maybe a sort of Warhammer-esque chutzpah to making these mythic terrors go around and pay taxes and take out the trash like everybody else, but in Warhammer the naga would have a squid-slime grenade strapped to its back or something--some outrageous new brand of wondrous weird to replace the wondrous weird you just removed by implying a naga would ever need to strap anything to anything else.

This is endemic. Half the spells in these adventures are just ability-buffs or things that do straight (fire, acid, cold) damage, the items are just seamlessly-efficient-tech-in-magic-clothing, every unusual thing has a name and a stat and a brand new book you can buy that lets your PC have it. And...

Ok, I've run out of steam on this issue. They're dull and hurt my brain and I wasted a lot of time and it's all my fault, that's all.

For the record, of the 65 adventures there, I found three containing usable material: the one with the dwarf tower is complex enough make a decent half-session-long tactical bash, the one with the naga has (and basically is) a slightly novel trap, and the drow one has an unusually creepy encounter.

Now there's way more free adventures out there. Including some on this list from Dragonsfoot. Anybody read those, specifically? I want to know whether I'd have to be a masochist to go through them too.

This Is The First Hard Thing My Brain's Had To Do All Day

I get up. Get on the phone and on the e-mail.

Like your job, probably, my job often involves getting asked a lot of questions.

The answers? The answers are usually the same as the last time somebody asked. Often they're the same answer as last time the exact person who is asking now asked.

So: easy.

And my computer asks questions too: "Abort scan?" Yes, abort the fucking scan, can't you see I'm in the middle of some shit here, Billion-Dollar-Development-Budget-Operating-System?

So: Not a hard question to answer.

Only new question today was from a director: Do I want to do a scene with _____?

Google her, look at her--Yes I sure do. That was easy.

Then I ask how much I get paid. Not hard to remember to do that.

Then, after working--excercise. This isn't so hard, because I get to listen to The Death of Bunny Munro unabridged on CD while I exercise. If it does get hard, I just think: all the fried chicken I am ever going to get to eat is on the other side of this push-up. Okay.

Go to the store...

(December in LA--reindeer and snowmen picked out in Christmas lights.)

"A banana?" asks the counter man--though I am grateful that he asks, because I like the way Mexicans say "banana", the answer to that one is easy--"Yes, a banana."

Then home.

I have my Cherry Dr. Pepper now and doom metal on the CD player and a feeling of total calm.

Now:

The girls arrive at 1 pm tomorrow. In fifteen hours.

They've just killed a wizard in a tower and are surrounded by jackalmen.

I have to give them something to do now--probably something that'll be done in one session since everything'll get all screwy as the holidays approach.

But still, something good. Some fun, the memory of which will keep them warm while they're eating chocolate by the tree and listening to in-laws or alcoholics or watching that godawful Tim Allen Christmas movie.

It should also seem to flow logically from what they were already doing. Wihout being repetitive or too obscure.

..and gotta have action for KK...

..and gotta make sure Frankie can sneak around, and...

And I think: This is the first time I've had to think hard all day.

This isn't an escape. This is exercise. It's good for you like playing soccer is good for you.

Humans haul around the animal kingdom's most highly-evolved brain all day and most of us in this country are in a position where the money we need to live off is withheld from us unless we use these brains to answer inane questions that no-one really wants to know the answers to or cares about or will remember the answers to--for a third of the goddamn day.

So fucking thank god you have something to do with that brain. One day you might actually need it.

Taxonomy Of Archetypal Dungeon-Types I'm Interested In And Notes On Cannibalizing Them When They Appear In Published Form

The Lesser Crazy-Wizard (or Funhouse) Dungeon

So this guy (often a wizard, though it can be a demi-lich or an innkeeper or just some jerk) threw a place together for largely the purpose of fucking with people. Full of puzzles. Un-full of internal logic. Room follows upon room for no particular normal-architectural-function-serving reason. Egregious genre violations are likely but not essential. (The Crazy Wizard being the traditional catch-all excuse for all D&D genre-violations). The worst parts usually have stupid puns, old jokes and references to showtunes in them but these, likewise, are not essential.

A slightly more "sane" rationale for a puzzle dungeon like this can be: "Evil force treating the PCs like test subjects in order to plan future attack on humans/earthlings/surface-dwellers/air-breathers/two-legged-ones etc."

Either way, this sort of dungeon is among the easiest to write. (Though the hardest to master.) Perhaps the best thing about puzzle dungeons is it's very easy to pull individual rooms, gimmicks, or traps out of them and stick them into other puzzle dungeons. So if your players miss a bit of it, you can stick one onto the next lunatic mage tower.

It's kind of pointless to buy a published one of these and just keep the structure and re-skin all the details, because all the designer's work generally went into the details, not the structure.


The Greater Crazy-Wizard Dungeon

This resembles the Lesser Crazy Wizard Dungeon only there is a structure and that structure is as crazy as the details.

That is--some over-arching meta-puzzle or meta-challenge profoundly affects everything you try to do in the dungeon. The rooms all spin independently of each other so it's a mapping challenge or you can only see what's in a room if you enter from the proper direction or you have to kill everything in the blue rooms but not everything in the red rooms. These can be awesome if done right but are highly taste sensitive--if the gimmick doesn't fit what you or your PCs want to do, the whole thing's pretty much useless.


Working Palace

This is any kind of big residence of some people/monsters/entities that are alive and active in the world and have built a big place to hang out in. The logistics and aesthetics of the place tend to match whatever race inhabits it.

These dungeons put the most pressure on the DM to actually make some sense. (DM's are free to ignore this pressure, but whatever, anyway...) Locked doors have keys, the inhabitants have bedrooms or other quarters, and there should probably be whatever things a big residence is supposed to have just in order to function normally as a residence like, say, a kitchen.

All this, PLUS the fact that it should still be fun, PLUS you need a way for the PCs to get in there without immediately being killed by guards, PLUS trying to give it enough monster/NPC variety so that, say The Palace of the Lizard Prince isn't just endless fights with Lizard Man Guards makes this the hardest kind of dungeon to write. Plus it's really hard to buy a published adventure of this kind and re-skin it because if the featured monster/NPC race doesn't particularly fit what you're trying to do, then a lot of the other elements might not fit either. Like, sure the Red Dragonmen have a magma bath but if I want to re-skin it as a Kenku palace then you've got to re-write the bath, too, which sucks because the magma bath was kind of cool...

It is usually easier to write by making the monarch insane, therefore giving excuses for making parts of it into a Puzzle Dungeon.

I have yet to see a good, published Pure Working Palace dungeon. Yes, that's a challenge.


One-Shot Funnel Dungeon

This dungeon can be gotten through in a session or two and never lets you forget the main objective. You know "Den of the Moldy Ogre Who Is Like Ten Feet Away" or whatever. There's a big bad or quest item or major gimmick in there and the rest is just roadbumps and the PCs generally know it. These are useful to have around but a good DM can write one in his sleep.

(A subgenre of this is the Strongly Implied Plot One-Shot Dungeon, where the PCs not only are moving toward some simple goal, but have few enough options that they have a decent chance of tripping certain predictable plot events on the way. This doesn't have to be a railroad.)

When you buy one, you tend to go "I could've written that in my sleep", unless it has some really clever stuff in there which allows the PCs to "use" the place in more than one way.

When you buy a full-length adventure that turns out to be just one of these stretched out to ridiculous proportions--say, not just Dragon + A Handful Of Sucksmear Kobolds And Not Much Else, but, say Dragon + Several Thousand Sucksmear Kobolds And Not Much Else, then it can make you want to not buy a published adventure ever again.


Re-Purposed Forgotten Place
There once was a mighty empire, then it sucked and died and now blobs and tribes of ratmen crawl around their Once Mighty halls. Relatively easy to write because if you don't want to write in the Once Mighty Kitchen or Once Mighty Horseshoe-Making Room then you can just say there was a cave-in or it's been emptied out or lost to the mists of time or whatever. However, they're more fun when you write in some politics among the new inhabitants--like the ratmen hate the blobmen who are servants of the cheesemen who are imprisoned by the Elephant Pig who worships the Demon Pheasant who possesses the Fairy Cow. If they bump around long enough, the PCs can do a pretty good job of unwittingly stitching together their own plot.

(This is a good place for Schrodinger's motive--i.e. there's several mcguffins and several mcguffin-wanting NPCs/intelligent monsters, but which of them wants which mcguffin is left in the air 'til the PCs actually show up. Whatever the NPC/critter wants inevitably forces the PCs to go to some part of the dungeon they haven't been in yet or go to some place they have been and try harder.)

It also allows you to throw in bits of Crazy Wizard Logic but you don't have to carry them out to their conclusion because maybe part of it has Fallen Into Ruin. So like this room fills with water if you try to cast a spell in it but the next one just has some orcs and a pine cone.

Also, this kind is really easy and fun to re-skin if there's some politics since you can just change the factions around and pin any uncongruous element on the long-dead "architect" culture. Like I pointed out yesterday while re-skinning Tomb of The Bull King.


The Dungeon Where Something Just Happened
This dungeon can be any of the other kinds of dungeons, but then some large and transformative event just occurred--invasion from without, meteorite strike, experiment-gone-awry. An important function of this change is to create an easy in-game reason why a horde of supposedly powerful, intelligent, dungeon-dwelling beings can't keep 3-12 adventurers of levels 1-3 from just waddling up to their front door and stealing all their stuff.

Once you come up with a good event, this kind of dungeon writes itself. Plus it provides an instant in-game excuse for rooms to radically change if things get boring. The only problem is it can get in the way of the default "delve/loot/rest at inn/delve/loot/rest at inn" default-OD&D type adventurer-whim-centric dungeoneering schedule. Things in this kind of dungeon have to have a little bit of a life of their own.


The Place That Wasn't A Dungeon A Second Ago But Now Is

Basically, it's like Alien. It's an ordinary (to the PCs) place and something bad just got loose and so now every corridor is infused with primal terror and whatnot. Generally I kind of hate this kind of dungeon because it's hard to make the environment "come alive" for an extended period of time (In a game, I mean, not in a movie. I like Alien just fine--I'm not a psycho) and, to me, D&D is as much about the place itself as the things in it. I've yet to see a really good one. However, it is closely related to...


The Dungeon that Used To Be That But Now Is This

This place was, long ago, something interesting but benign, like a zoo. Then it became horrible. Some malevolent and probably supernatural thing has evilified every inch of it. Like the Greater Crazy Wizard Dungeon, it's all about the premise. Unless you like that, a published one is probably going to be kind of useless.


The Dungeon of Beings Who Are Completely Weird

Unlike the Crazy Wizard/Puzzle dungeon, the entities in charge here are not necessarily hostile or cruel, they just behave or live in such an alien way that it's a big pain in the ass to go around finding stuff in their house. Like the Bath House in Spirited Away or Lewis Carrol's Wonderland. Again: the premise here is everything, and there is a huge possibility of genre-dissonance. If you don't like the premise then you won't like the dungeon because the premise affects everything about it.
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Obviously there are other kinds of dungeons--and most dungeons have elements of more than one "species".

Anyway, can anybody think of excellent examples of dungeons that fit one of these bills (aside from the usual suspects--like we already know about White Plume Mountain)? Are there types of dungeon you like that I've left out?

(Not "types" in terms of what specfically is in the dungeon, but in the sense of the structure of the dungeon.)

Slowly Removing Togas

Ever wish there was a solid, standard, but really big sandbox dungeon with a nice map that was free that you could go through and make into whatever kind of weird, personalized dungeon that fit your taste?

I wish that all day long--for those times when the PCs start wandering into Realms It Had Not Occurred To Mortal Men They'd Have Managed To Get To By This Tuesday.

Well, there's one right here. (Thanks to Ara Kooser for pointing it out the day I went around asking everybody for big pre-packaged locations to put some extra meat on my gameworld.)

It's written by Carlos de la Cruz Morales and, although it's for Mazes & Minotaurs, it's eminently malleable. You can re-skin most of the monsters for D&D without changing the stats at all (If you're smart enough to figure out that "Hits total: 6" = "Hit Points = 6" and "Damage = 3d6" means "Damage = 3d6". Change the AC to descending for old D&D, leave it as-is for later versions.).

My only problem is this 200+ page dungeon is set in ancient Greece and, although I love the Greek monsters, man was their fashion sense appalling. So I printed it out (the dungeon section is easily readable at 4 sheets per page, so you won't necessarily run out of paper) and am going through it removing sandals and togas and inserting Warhammerish terror, Gygaxian weirdness, and the occasional crossbow.

It is unbelievably excellent for this Mad Libs approach. There's a lot of monsters, a lot of treasure, a lot of standard traps ("Pit Trap, Concealment 16"), a few interchangeable mcguffins, and various factions warring all over the dungeon. There is absolutely nothing that makes you go "Oh, if I don't do it in ancient Greece this makes no sense" or "Well that whole section is a bust if I take out the tunnel in room 206."

Like I said, it's a simple, solid, very big, and very customizable piece of work. It's the Ford Mustang of dungeons.

And free.

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Oh, and someone let me know that over on RPGnet they're arguing about whether my players are Actually Porn Stars. Seems like they're mostly talking about Mandy, which is weird, because she's the one who's done the fewest movies.

City-State of the Incorrigible Slacker

Hey Mandy, can you help me get everyone's attention?


Thank you, Mandy...

Hey DMs! Here are some city maps you can re-key for your campaign--
just write "New Haven Performing Arts Center"="Mages Guild Headquarters" and "Pine Ave."="Street of White Death" or whatever. Click pics for bigger JPEGS.

Then, at the end, turn it around and watch your players be all "Holy shit, we were in Toronto all along..."