Shadowmist Vale: Cave of Grundar the Terrible

Up late working on Grundar's Cave, what's currently the 11th adventure in my grim-dark fantasy campaign, Shadowmist Vale. It's a third-level dungeon with some bugbears and goblins, a troll, and, of course, the titular hill giant.

Grundar the Terrible, in my imagination, looks like a bearded, 12'-tall Lobo from DC comics. He wields the wicked Greataxe +2, Ochiron's Demise. Its black blade casts Continual Darkness on hit, turning its victim's eyes into pools of blackness and blinding them. It can only be recharged by killing a friend or family member. 

In another cave in another hex, there's a related hill giant, nicknamed Grunt, who's blinded and scarred from a stroke of his evil brother's greataxe. PCs who cast Continual Light on his eyes, curing him, could gain a powerful ally.

A sulfurous miasma hangs about the cavern like an ochre haze. Hot Springs bubble and steam. The opaque greenish water is scorching hot, but it’s not boiling. Air bubbles rise from below.

Careful! There are water weirds swimming in them!

Creature Catalogue p. 79

In Room 3, there's Vorkha the orc Thief who's stolen Gauntlets of Ogre Power and a Sword +1 from Room 11, the giant's treasury. She's soaking wet, having swam from the pit in Room 7, where her two accomplices, the gargoyles Crong and Razaad, are too afraid to follow her through the secret escape route. They can't gather the courage to swim underwater or to sneak past the bugbear guards on the precipice in Room 6. So, they sit locked in terrified indecisiveness.

Shadowmist Vale

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Other than the Undercrypt, the dungeon in the center of the wilderness map, I haven't talked much about Shadowmist Vale on my blog. I currently plan for my first release to be titled Shadowmist Vale: The Road to Ebonshire. The mini-campaign will feature at least 15 adventure locations for players to "explore or ignore," as a friend says. Some of the locations are sizable dungeons; others are small spots. Ebonshire is a free city-state in the 6-mile hex flower. Though it is self-governing, it stands in the long shadow cast by castle Black Gate Castle, abode of the fearsome and shadowy Lord Gulthor.

I've moved and re-named the locations on the map so many times, and some of them are placeholders, but here's the map as it is currently:

A hex flower of 6-mile hexes

Grundar's Cave yawns open in the foothills of hex 17.04, just north of what I'm calling the Dark Forest for now. It's a placeholder name, like a lot of them. 

There's nothing I like about my map. It's just for my planning purposes. The finished map, I expect, will share some similarities with the GM's Map for the Barony of Twolakes Vale from CM2 Death’s Ride.

DragonStrike as an OSR Campaign

Everyone loves Games Workshop and Milton Bradley's 1989 fantasy board game, HeroQuest, but its younger sibling, TSR's 1993 fantasy board game, DragonStrike, is mostly remembered for the campy VHS video included in the box. DragonStrike deserves a better legacy because it's a better game—take it from a guy who was the target audience of both at the time they were released.

HeroQuest's dungeon furniture and plastic miniatures were far superior to anything DragonStrike had to offer. Gary Chalk's wonderful artwork put anything of DragonStrike's to shame (with the exception of Robin Raab's endearing battle map art).

None of that made it a better game, though.

Simply put, HeroQuest isn't even a role playing game. It's a straightforward hack-and-slash dungeon crawl—but it's really not that great of one. It's fun for three or four games, but it gets repetitive. I imagine modern dungeon-delving games like Descent provide more sustainable entertainment.

Not only is DragonStrike an RPG, it's a good one. I've talked about it before: TSR's DragonStrike in 1993

It's a rules-light system that encourages players to speak and act in character, and to interact with the world in anyway they can imagine. It encourages the game master to adjudicate the outcome fairly and generously. By my definition, that's an OSR role-playing game!

DragonStrike's Design

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Whereas HeroQuest had a single quest book that contained the map and adventure, DragonStrike's Map Book and Adventures Book were separate. The digest-sized (6" × 8.75") Adventures Book had 32 pages and 16 adventures. The Map Book was magazine-sized (8.5" × 10.75") and staple-bound paper; it had no cover. Each quest in the Adventure Book had a one-page map in the Map Book.

Adventures Book cover and contents.

Map Book, first quest.

It's set up to be played exactly like a regular Dungeons & Dragons adventure module. The GM, called the "Dragon Master," even had a tri-fold stand-up screen. The adventures were played on one of four boards: a castle; a cave; a city; and a wilderness map.

I recall so fondly playing what was essentially Dungeons & Dragons on those four game boards. I wrote and ran so many adventures. Ah, those were the good ol' days! 

DragonStrike as OSR Adventures

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As written, DragonStrike's adventures are a little too straightforward for the OSR. If the OSR is "problems without prescribed solutions" like the mantra says, then converting DragonStrike into OSR adventures might simply require writing them as if players have complete freedom to do as they wish. 

"The OSR is the players story, not the GM's," is another OSR mantra. Rather than a single goal like "slay the dragon," an OSR adventure should consider the many predictable motivations the players might have. Instead of "Save the princess in the dungeon," we simply state, "There's a princess in the dungeon." Players might set her free, ransom her, kill her (e.g., they are the Duke's paid assassins), or leave her to rot. We don't write the plot; that's the players' job. 

For example, let's take the first adventure for a party of 2-3 players, "Against the Giant:"

Page 3 of the Map Book on top; pp. 6-7 of Adventures on bottom.

The Adventure Book says, "Put the giant in [a cavern chamber]. This is Grunt. If questioned, Grunt has but one response: 'Fee, fie, foe, fum! I smell the blood of hero-scum! Grunt kill you now.'" 

Yikes. That's not going to cut it in the OSR by a longshot. We could re-write it to say something like: "Grunt the hill giant reaches under his bearskin tunic and scratches between his legs as he lounges near the fire." Short descriptions are best; the most important part of the game is the back-and-forth between the GM and players.

We need to give Grunt a motivation, and we need that motivation to be anything other than "kill the players." The story says, "Grunt plans to raise an entire army of creatures, which will march upon our lands." This must be a smart and charismatic giant. It's usually evil wizards who try to raise humanoid armies. 

Elsewhere, it says there's an orc who stole a trove of powerful magic items from Grunt. Right there we have an easy motivation: Grunt wants his stuff back. We also have some opportunity to add some intrigue and diplomacy. Why does a giant have powerful, orc-sized magic weapons and armor? Why is an orc stealing them from him?

These questions need to have interesting answers, because this how we give players reasons to use diplomacy rather than swords. If "just kill the orc and take the stuff, then kill the giant," is the best answer this whole scenario, then this will be a simple hack-and-slash. That's the antithesis of the OSR. Choice becomes an illusion as players lose agency. Maybe they don't want to kill the monsters and take their stuff. 

The story says the giant is raising an army and has orc-sized magic equipment, so it's probably a payment to the orc's chief to fight for him. This nameless orc thief must have a motivation to make sure that doesn't happen.

All we know about the orc is that he or she has stolen the some radical magic equipment: Gauntlets of Ogre Power are a bad ass treasure! Let's give our thief an identity and motivations. 

Vorkha the orc Thief knows what will happen if her small tribe of orcs goes to war with Lord Narran: they'll be slaughtered. She's sabotaging the negotiations by stealing the giant's payment to her chief. Lets make her sympathetic to humans; she's known their kindness. She's also greedy as a dwarven miner and not afraid to take what she wants. She's not a warrior, but she'll fight to the death if players try to take her spoils. She'd rather have gold than the magic junk she can't use; but she suspects the set is very valuable.

Gargoyles inhabit the cave as well; two of them just down the hall. In DragonStrike, they are an interesting encounter: "The gargoyles here are chatty cowards who fight only if attacked." They have an empty chest also stolen from Grunt. They think there's treasure in it. (Quite a coincidence, but the book doesn't expound.)

Crong and Razaad, gargoyle brothers, have just been given the slip. They helped Vorka steal the equipment in return for whatever else they found. They found the chest, which Vorkha convinced them contains gold and jewels. In reality, it's trapped and full of worthless junk, but they don't know that. They're simply waiting on her to come back from scouting ahead for trouble. Spoiler alert: she's not coming back. 

There is a troll and another orc in a chamber with a treasure chest. There's a small band of bugbears with a treasure chest as well. The book doesn't say those are stolen, so we can infer they've met with Grunt and have accepted his payment for their services. Let's say the troll is Grunt's lieutenant and the orc is his sergeant. They'll need identities and motivations, but we're drawing near the end of this exercise. 

The bugbears are visiting and have just accepted payment. In the book, they ambush, so we can infer this truce with the giant and his other henchman is a new and uneasy one. They're just waiting for an attack. Let's say the door is barred from inside. 

The two orcs guarding the entrance (room G), crossbows ready, are on watch for intruders. They rotate one out every six hours. If they detect intruders—a certainty if they're carrying torches and talking—one will run to the giant's chamber. The other will shoot his bow down from above.

Grunt's treasury has three more lockboxes in it suggesting there are three more factions yet to arrive. That can make for all sorts of interesting future encounters. As is, it's a great place to put a lot of treasure, and that's what all players are after!

To Be Continued . . .

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That's all the book gives us for "Against the Giant," but it's more than enough to create a fun, exciting, and interesting OSR adventure. 

If all 16 adventures were converted, it would make quite an OSR campaign. There's the "good" king Halvor and the "evil" wizard Teraptus (a play on S2 White Plume Mountain's Kerpatis), not to mention the titular red dragon, Darkfyre.

If I get time, I'll re-write "Against the Giant" and upload it as a PDF. Who knows, maybe I'll convert some other DragonStrike adventures in the future.

Until next time! 

BoT's Third Anniversary

Happy birthday, Blood or Treasure! 

Another year of OSR. It's been a fun hobby. 

The OSR Pick-Up Games Discord server hit 1,000 memebers! Yay! 

Last April I published my entry for tenfootpole's contest, Wyvern's Roost. It won a "No Regerts" (silver star) award, I'm proud to say! 

A few excerpts from the review:  

"A delightful romp in a simple lighthouse, its got some decent imagery and nice interactivity. A B/X adventure, in the most laudable sense of the phrase."

"What’s notable, here, is this being a Level 1 adventure with a Wyvern, a Troll, and a Vampire . . . with only the Wyvern being an outright obstacle. And that leads to a wonderful tone, the kind most of us enjoy, where you’re not just hacking shit down but, rather, scheming and talking to the people inside."

"What this is is a great example of a B/X type adventure that is short. It feels like a good adventure, and like a good BX adventure."

Wyvern's Roost is available here: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/392795/Wyverns-Roost

My hope is that by this day next year, I'll have published my mini-campaign Shadowmist Vale to wild success and acclaim. I can dream, right? 

Here's to another year of OSR!

Magic Item Monday: Necroscope

This palm-sized magnifying glass's ivory handle is engraved with skulls and funerary masks. Any corpse examined through the glass appears as if alive moments before its death, even if its flesh has completely rotted away and only brittle bones remain. The object is not magical, nor are its properties divinely granted leaving sages utterly perplexed.

Magic Item Monday: Rug of Concealment

This rectangular, rose-red flatweave rug is so worn, sun bleached and threadbare that it barely manages to cover the 5' × 8' patch of floor beneath. However, anything placed under it seemingly disappears so long as the rug can cover it wholly. Even if a treasure chest sits on the floor below it, the rug will appear to lay flat on the ground. It could cover a corpse, but a person would have to lay down in order to be magically concealed. The rug won't muffle sound or hide light, nor will it offer protection from damage; a teacup beneath the rug will shatter under foot. If it is disturbed, including by anything beneath it, whatever it covers will reappear.

One Rando's Thoughts on Using Lycanthropes

Beoric, with whom I have never shared discourse and don't know from Biblical Adam, made a comment I appreciated on one of Bryce Lynch's reviews: 

There are 3 reasons to use a lycanthrope in a module:

(1) they are hidden, and the challenge is to figure out who is a lycanthrope;

(2) the risk of the curse of lycanthropy, which drives play if somebody might have been infected;

(3) you want a regenerating combat opponent and the party is too low level for trolls.

“Wererats in the sewers” defaults to (3), and is overdone and not that interesting to begin with. The curse has been sufficiently nerfed in 5e that it is really not much more than an inconvenience, so (2) is no longer a serious option.

That leaves (1) as the only remaining option that has any potential to be interesting at all. Which clearly should not take place in a sewer, since you need sufficient non-lycanthrope humanoids around for the lycanthropes to blend in. You could have an encounter with wererats in a sewer, disguised as public works workers or some such, but if *everyone* is a wererat in disguise then no wererats are really in disguise.

It will necessarily have a strong social element. The Thing is a better example of this than most werewolf fiction.

The Death of the Old School: Skill Systems

The following is an excerpt from an excellent article, "A Historical Look at the OSR — Part II," written by Keith Hann and published here: http://osrsimulacrum.blogspot.com/2021/02/a-historical-look-at-osr-part-ii.html

The Death of the Old School—Skill Systems

More relevant for our purposes than Unearthed Arcana is the other hardback rules volume of 1985: Oriental Adventures (OA).  Following close on their heels was the 1986 duo of the Dungeoneer’s and Wilderness Survival Guides.  Collectively, the effect of the sudden appearance of these four new rules-laden hardbacks six years after the last official AD&D rules release, plus the clear shift in module design in 1984 and Dragon’s insistence that all material going forward would use the UA rules when relevant,[2] eventually led players to refer to this late period of 1st edition’s life as 1.5 edition (or 1.5e).[3]  A major element of this new quasi-edition was that the three non-UA books all fielded D&D’s first (non-thief) skill system: the non-weapon proficiency (NWP) rules.[4]

System-wide skill systems (as opposed to those associated with a single class, like skills for the thief, which debuted in 1975's Supplement I: Greyhawk) were an early game design innovation.  They first showed up in 1976 in FGU's Bunnies & Burrows game, but are better known to most through their implementation in Chaosium's popular BRP rules system, starting in 1978 with RuneQuest.  Skill systems have some core downsides.  They add more rules to the game, imposing a comprehension tax that makes it take longer to learn (and to leaf through the book during the game when you're in search of a rule).  And, as with any character option added, they make characters take longer to create, as players want to go through everything available and make informed choices.  All the same, there are numerous games that utilize skills well, and if done well they can provide a useful means of differentiating characters and defining their capabilities: this is not an article claiming that there is no role in game design for skill systems.

But to understand why they matter from a specifically old-school perspective, it's important to realize that, when a player wanted to do most anything in the game prior to this point, they usually had to negotiate with the DM for how to do it: was it possible, if so what would it entail, how long would it take (for time was a vital currency in old-school play) and finally, how would it be resolved mechanically (e.g. roll 1D6, 2D6, 1D20; Gygax favoured percentile).  A player would a) in general have to describe what they were doing (even if often this was just a very brief description), and b) tend to leave things that were assumed to be outside their grasp to NPC specialists (“why would I know anything about alchemy?”).  Tasks were arbitrated on the fly by the DM, with those that came up often enough typically given answers that progressed to the status of house rule.  Each group could handle things in their own preferred fashion.  With skill lists, even if optional, players tend to look to these as official implementations and want to use them in that fashion, greatly reducing the scope of rulings.

Skills also almost inevitably shift the playstyle to what one might call button-based gameplay.  Players no longer feel the need to describe what they’re doing, because the relevant skill check (or its kissing cousin, the attribute check) allows a shortcut.  To pick one example, every old-school ruleset back to OD&D had a basic X-in-1D6 roll search method for secret doors, but this existed side by side with a narrative approach to actually finding the door that could entirely obviate the need for a roll; see p. 13 of The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures and pp. 97 and 99 of the 1st edition DMG for a good example.  As time went on, the roll aspect came further to the fore, while the narrative angle retreated to the background.  B/X was happy to run with a declaration of intent followed by a roll (p. B21 and B60), as was Mentzer, largely ignoring the narrative element.  Eventually we wound up with a universal application of “I make a Search check”, with the narrative element abandoned entirely.[5]  This broad tendency is so powerful that even with there being a caveat right in the rules of “X roll shouldn’t take the place of roleplaying or logic”, you still have people just shortcutting to rolls, because people are naturally lazy.[6]  To return to the question I opened with, "what sort of gameplay does this rule create?"  Here we see a mechanic slowly but surely changing the face of play.

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[2] “The Transition Starts Now,” Dragon #99 (July 1985). 

[3] The first reference to 1.5e I can find is from 1995, in the rec.games.frp.dnd usenet group. 

[4] I'm not including the 1st edition DMG's Secondary Skill system here.  This system, which gave a character a pre-adventuring career (e.g. farming, sailor, teamster, hunter, trapper), and a broad knowledge base derived from this, featured no rolls or special abilities.  It was "up to the DM to create and/or adjudicate situations in which these skills are used or useful to the player character."  This system would be featured as an option in 2nd edition as well, alongside the NWP system. 

[5] The common OSR approach to secret doors, as epitomized in Matt Finch's influential A Quick Primer, largely follows the AD&D and earlier approach, but as we have seen, it was not the only method used in old-school play and there has been some pushback against Finch's depiction as overly reductive or even anachronistic.  See this Alexandrian article for a 2009 example of such. 

[6] Another good example of such includes the D&D/AD&D thief, whose skill-based set of abilities lent itself well to button-based gameplay ("I search for traps"—*rolls*).  See also this article on "hidden skills" in B/X, and Grognardia's overview of the thief's role in D&D.  At the same time, for those who find the traditional OSR interrogative approach to be an exercise in pixelbitching, cutting to the chase with a simple mechanical solution can be very freeing.  Similarly, placing the burden of estimating risk vs reward and the mechanical execution thereof on DMs relied on the DM being good at doing that on the fly, and many were not, easily leading to frustrated players and relief at having something codified by professionals (though one look at the procedures in the Survival Guides made it clear that professionals did not always get it right).  Again, we’re largely speaking of how approaches can differ and change, rather than always contrasting right vs. wrong.