Using AD&D's Spying Table to Resolve NPC Missions

AD&D is a game in which the player characters are expected to overcome challenges themselves. This is made most explicit in the section on NON-PLAYER CHARACTERS, and is embodied by the guiding principle that dealing with NPCs "should be expensive and irritating" - that is, that player characters seeking aid from outside sources should be dissuaded from doing so by the mere fact that those DM-controlled characters will be extremely costly and annoying to recruit, convince, placate, and the like. This is made explicit in the section on HIRING NON-PLAYER CHARACTERS TO CAST SPELLS OR USE DEVICES:

I'm sure that there are many other examples in the text, although my Ctrl + F skills are failing me at the moment to dredge up more evidence. You will have to trust that I've read enough AD&D to be an authority on the matter when I say that this sentiment is apparent in Gygax's writing even when he doesn't spell it out in so many words.

Deserted castles dot the landscape, but do not exist solely for the convenience of player characters seeking strongholds of their own. There are roads to the dungeon built for ease of access, but they're not free to use. Towns and cities are full of NPC adventurers looking for work and high level NPCs with a great deal of power, but henchmen are not easy to find, and high level NPCs are more likely to use the player characters for their own ends than they are to aid them. Dragons' lairs contain mountains of treasure, but henchmen will not stay and guard them on the player characters' behalf. Player characters can find a cleric to cure them of their diseases, but it will cost them dearly.

One exception is, of course, hirelings - those NPCs which the player characters hire and pay on a regular basis (daily or monthly, in the case of standard hirelings, or monthly only in the case of expert hirelings). Most of these are not the adventuring sort, however, and mainly serve to do those mundane or tedious tasks on behalf of the player characters which would make for dull gameplay if handled by the player characters themselves. A limner can draw up a heraldic device for the fighter, an armorer or blacksmith can toil away in the player character's stronghold, and a properly equipped sage can conduct research to come up with the answer to some question in which the player characters have an interest.

Hirelings will go on adventures sometimes, but these are never without the party present. Bearers and porters might carry treasure from the dungeon back to town, linkboys might bear torches or lanterns, pack handlers and teamsters might deal with beasts of burden and vehicles, a scribe might keep the party's map of the dungeon, and a ship's crew might ferry them along a river or across a lake to expedite their forays to and from the site of adventure, but these are all supplemental to the party of player characters - never a replacement for them.

The one hireling which embarks on their own to engage in what we might recognize as "adventuring" activity is an exceptional sort of expert hireling - the Spy:

The spy is a type of assassin NPC which can be recruited much like any other hireling or henchman. They are similar to the sage in that they follow their own bespoke set of gameplay rules and in that their principle purpose is the obtaining of information. The difference is that - while yes, it would be cool if the information the party needs is located in an ancient tome inside a long lost library, and they must adventure to obtain it - the sage's purpose is to abstract the dull work of actually spending months of game time poring over the texts for the answer to the question, whereas traveling to a castle to gather information about the ruler's mustering of forces, infiltrating a secret society, or posing as important officials to gain access to their resources - all without being discovered - is a bona fide dangerous adventure that the player characters well and truly could engage in themselves, and it would be fun to do so.

Whether or not it's a good thing that this potentially fruitful adventuring activity can be handed off to an NPC is not really my concern. Why this particular adventuring activity can be handed off to an NPC and yet the party cannot, say, hire another party of adventurers to conduct some other mission on their behalf (or send their henchmen, their mercenary army, or other followers to do so) is a more interesting question.

It's not such a confounding question, really. The answer is that spying, for one reason or another, is an element of adventuring which Gygax felt comfortable allowing the player characters to engage in at a distance. Going into dungeons, clearing out monster lairs, and laying siege to strongholds is the meat of adventure, and player characters should be involved in those activities themselves.

Except they don't really need to - not 100% of the time. When a necromancer moves into some ruined tomb the player characters cleared out at 1st level and starts raising the dead, why shouldn't those same characters - now rulers of their domains with huge armies and companies of henchmen - be allowed to send those henchmen off on their own adventure to deal with the problem while they focus on more important matters? Why shouldn't they be able to delegate the work of clearing monster lairs from their territory to their mercenary army? When some petty lord in a humble tower stops paying taxes, why should we stop the game to go put him in his place?

The answer is, obviously, because that stuff could be fun. You can send your henchmen to the old dungeon to clear it out again - you just play as your henchmen. You can send the captain of your army to chase the goblins off your land or bring your vassals back into the fold - you just play as the captain commanding the troops. It's all adventure, and worth being a part of.

But maybe sometimes the players don't want to spend a bunch of game time playing out that sort of thing. Their characters have other stuff to do, and they want to get to it. Is that such a crime? Maybe. But I think it should be an option on the table, and if we can abstract spying missions, surely we can abstract other adventuring activity involving NPCs, and I think AD&D's ASSASSIN SPYING TABLE provides a pretty good framework for doing so:

I would argue in favor of ignoring the specifics of this table (that is, the fact that it pertains to spying missions in particular) and instead focusing on what it represents more broadly. On the Y axis, we have the level or strength of assassin, spy, or, more generally, the NPC(s) undertaking the mission. On the X axis, we have the degree of difficulty of the mission. The Simple, Difficult, and Extraordinary categories are defined as such:

While these are all defined within the framework of spying (what sort of action is required of the spy and the resulting chance of discovery), I don't see why they can't be generalized.

For example, the Level Of The Assassin/Spy might instead be the average level of the henchmen sent to clear out the dungeon, or the level of the commanding officer leading the army to clear out the monster lair or lay siege to the stronghold. 

If henchmen are sent to clear out a dungeon, whether the mission is Simple, Difficult, or Extraordinary could be determined by the level of the dungeon relative to the level of the henchmen. If the henchmen are, on average, 4th to 7th level, a dungeon of 3rd level or lower might be a Simple mission (65 to 80% chance of success), a dungeon of 4th to 7th level Difficult (40 to 55% chance of success), and a dungeon of 8th level or higher Extraordinary (20 to 30% chance of success).

If an army is sent to clear out a monster lair or lay siege to a stronghold, an owlbear den or small stronghold (a small shell keep, tower, moat house, or friary) might be Simple, an ogre lair or medium stronghold (a large shell keep or small or medium walled castle) might be Difficult, and a village of 300 orcs or a large stronghold (a concentric castle, large walled castle, or fortress complex) might be Extraordinary. Such an army led by a 5th level captain would have a 25 to 70% chance of success, while the same army led by an 8th level captain would have a 35 to 85% chance of success. You can also use your understanding of the complexity of different location types when determining a mission's difficulty.

We're also given the amount of time required to accomplish the mission:

This does not include travel time to and from the mission location. Simple missions require 1d8 days (average 4 or 5 days), Difficult missions require 5d8 days (average 22 or 23 days), and Extraordinary missions are left to the referee's discretion. If we want to proceduralize it, we could call it 9d8 days (9 to 56, average 40) or 10d8 days (10 to 80, average 45 days). That seems fair. If the players want it done faster, they should do it themselves. This also ensures that they are limited in the number of missions they can have their henchmen, hirelings, and followers conducting at any given time. If players rely too much on these resources, they will soon find themselves spread thin.

In spying missions, there is always a chance that the spy is discovered:

The chance of discovery is a function of the time spent spying (longer missions are more dangerous), the level of the spy (the use of low level spies is more dangerous), and the precautions taken by the spied upon (more prepared targets for spying are more dangerous). Being discovered automatically results in mission failure and imposes a modifier to the SPY FAILURE TABLE which generates more disadvantageous results on that table.

Since this is very specific to spying, and the missions which I'm talking about are not concerned with being "discovered", we might recontextualize this mechanic instead as a "chance of complication". The mechanic is already very much left up to the DM's judgment, so we can get weird with it, using these modifiers to account for any other mitigating factors not already accounted for by our initial calculation of the mission's chance of success - that is, any other considerations which might negatively impact the mission's chance of success.

In the case of the dungeon, are there undead present, and does the dispatched party lack a cleric? Are there monsters which can only be harmed by magic weapons, and does the dispatched party lack these tools? Does the dispatched party have a map of the dungeon? Have wards and traps beyond the ordinary been placed there? Is there some higher level monster present of which the party is unaware?

If the target is a monster lair, are the monsters organized by some more intelligent force than is known? Are the monsters expecting an attack? Do they possess some especially powerful magic item? Have they made an alliance with other monsters in the area? Is the terrain especially unforgiving towards a large army? 

If the target is instead a stronghold, is it ruled by a powerful spellcaster? Does the ruler keep a pet dragon? Does the garrison possess other monstrous creatures like griffons or ogres (such as those strongholds detailed in OD&D)? Is the stronghold well provisioned to withstand a siege? Does the ruler have a spy of their own among the player characters' followers? Is an allied army rushing to meet the besiegers in the field?

The last bit to consider is the SPY FAILURE TABLE and its modifiers:

Again, we can loosely interpret these results to suit our purposes:

• On a result of 01 to 35, the mission simply fails and can be reattempted, but the duration must be rolled again. The time spent on the first attempt is wasted. 
• On a result of 36 to 60, the mission fails, and further attempts are 90% likely to fail as well. We can interpret this as the denizens of the dungeon, monster lair, or stronghold taking additional measures to thwart further missions against them. 
• On a result of 61 to 80, the player characters' agents are caught, imprisoned, and not heard from again.*
• On a result of 81 to 95, the agents are caught and tortured. In the process, either they are killed, they reveal some information which the party does not wish to fall into enemy hands (something about the party's plans or interests, or maybe a vulnerability of their own stronghold), or they are turned to the enemy's side.*
• On a result of 96 to 100, the agents are simply killed or turned to the enemy's side.

*A result of 61 to 95 can also result in the agents being set free, but only if doing so would disadvantage the party in some way. Perhaps they are cursed or infected with a disease and sent back to the player character's stronghold to spread it among their other followers, or perhaps they are unknowingly given a device by which the enemy can scry upon the characters and monitor their activities.

As you can see, "discovery" (or in our case, an unforeseen complication) greatly increases the chance of something bad happening as a result of mission failure. Difficult missions are also more likely to yield unfortunate results when failed. Missions of Extraordinary difficulty are for some reason less likely to result in a bad outcome upon failure (still trying to wrap my head around that one).

It is also worth shouting out the brief aside on Fanatical Spies:

This is very flavorful and very spy specific, but we can use it. Rather than killing themselves (which is the bit that feels very specific to spies), perhaps certain NPC followers are so loyal and devoted to their player character masters/causes that they simply refuse to allow themselves to be captured or turned, forcing their enemies to torture or fight them to the death, rather than betray the player character. This would be an excellent opportunity for a loyalty check.

This bit also points us back to the EXPERT HIRELINGS section (at the top of this post) to determine how much it costs to employ a spy. While we're concerned with henchmen and hirelings already in the player characters' employ with some sort of set compensation (either shares of treasure or a certain amount of coin per month), it does make sense that undertaking an especially dangerous or involved mission such as this would warrant some kind of bonus pay.

Instead of referencing the information about spies, however, let's flip over to the PHB and the table MINIMUM FEES FOR ASSASSINATION:

This table lists the amount of gold earned by a player character assassin for a successful assassination. This is a function of the assassin's level and the level (or notoriety) of the victim. I imagine it could also be the amount of gold the player characters must pay to hire an NPC assassin to do their bidding - after all, why not? Might as well make use of those assassins' guilds running around AD&D towns and cities.

We can also use this as a reference for roughly calculating what sort of "bonus pay" player characters might have to pay out to their followers for completing some mission. The 3rd level henchmen sent to clear out a like-level dungeon would receive a bonus of 225 gold pieces (plus any plunder from the dungeon itself, presumably), the 5th level mercenary captain sent to lay siege to a 9th level fighter's stronghold would receive 900 gold pieces, and the 8th level captain sent to battle an orc army would earn somewhere around 4,000 gold pieces to distribute amongst the soldiers under his command.

Getting others to do your dirty work isn't always fun, but at higher levels of play, player characters have access to lots of resources, and lots of options when choosing what they'd like to do next. I don't see anything wrong with letting them delegate some of their responsibilities so that they can prioritize the goals in which they're personally invested without the world falling to ruin around them. I for one think it's neat that player characters with enough resources can simply hire a spy to infiltrate a secret society on their behalf, or pay an assassin to go kill that evil wizard for them so that they can do something else. 

I don't see a system like this getting much actual use at the table. Most campaigns probably won't reach this level of play, and when they do, I imagine that most players will want to play out these scenarios themselves (whether as their own characters or by assuming the roles of their followers), but I think it's interesting food for thought and wanted to demonstrate how it might work in practice.

Of course, you don't have to limit yourself to resolving player character-orchestrated NPC missions this way. You can also use this method to resolve other NPC "missions", sort of like a "faction turn". Does the rival adventuring party clear out the dungeon and steal the player characters' glory out from under them? Does the villainous wizard successfully create that new magic item or spell they've been working on? Does the upstart gang of thieves in town overthrow the reigning Guild? There are many potential uses. 

AD&D is full of these odd little resources that you don't see very often in modern TTRPG materials, usually covering some very specific scenario which doesn't come up all that much in play. It's fun to let these odds and ends inspire you and let your imagination run wild with creative new ways to utilize them. 

Play Report (AD&D 2e): In Search of the Unknown (Session 7)

After a few weeks off, we finally had the opportunity to play the seventh session of our Dungeon Module B1: In Search of Unknown AD&D 2e game. You can read past play reports here.

The roster for this session was as follows:

• Llombaerth, CG elf thief 2 (Adam)
• Malkara, N human mage 1 (Maya)
• Rory the Small, LN human fighter 1 (David)

In our last session, the party spent some time in Timbershore licking their wounds. They regrouped, adding Robbernar the cleric and Malkara the mage to the team. They also recruited Walgretor, a half-elf porter and torchbearer, and Armstrong and Booker, a pair of human men-at-arms. Llombaerth took some time to gather information about Timbershore's criminal element so that the party might smuggle goods into town on their next return visit. They had an uneventful journey back to Quasqueton, felling some trees along the way to make an impromptu river crossing. 

They found that Grilk's goblins had been attacked by orcs in the time since they'd been gone. The goblins had killed a few orcs and turned the rest to flight, but one goblin, Tobb, had been captured in the ensuing chaos. The remaining goblins had erected barricades at strategic choke points, and had freed a "demon worm" and corralled it into the corridor leading to the orcs' territory. The party investigated the bedchamber in which the worm had previously been trapped, obtaining some books and a nice cloak, and found two chests bursting with treasure, which they concluded was actually magically-disguised rocks.

We picked up from there. The party debated whether they should do anything with the rocks/treasure, such as give it to the goblins as payment in advance for some future service, or have two of their hirelings lug around one of the chests in case it proved useful. Ultimately, they decided to leave it where it was.

They set out to explore more of the dungeon, heading down a long, twisting corridor straight across from the bedchamber. As they approached a T intersection, they heard movement up ahead. The bulk of the party retreated with the lantern, while Llombaerth snuck up ahead in darkness. He succeeded on his Move Silently check, peeked around the corner, and spotted a lone goblin, its head cocked to listen in the party's direction.

Llombaerth pressed himself up against the wall, lying in wait. The goblin began to approach. When it got close enough, Llombaerth leapt out and grabbed it, muffling its cries for help. He dragged his captive back to the rest of the group.

After some questioning, the party learned that the goblin was Pigmug, of the Stonespeaker Clan. Once a member of Grilk's gang, Pigmug had since opened his ears to the Stone That Speaks, and to Drak, the powerful orc leader through which the Stone speaks to its devotees. The party asked Pigmug how many orcs and goblins were part of the Clan, but Pigmug was not good at counting. They tried to convince Pigmug that they were Stonespeakers as well, and that anyone can speak to the Stone if they're brave and strong enough. Pigmug caught this as a lie, and the questioning deteriorated. They knocked out Pigmug and decided to drag him back to Grilk's gang.

Grilk thanked them for bringing Pigmug back into the fold, and the party charged Grilk with deprogramming the goblin and learning what he knew of Clan Stonespeaker. They returned to explore the rest of the corridor.

They went left at the T intersection and found two doors. They listened at the first one and heard orcish voices in idle conversation on the other side. They heard nothing from the other door, so they tried opening it, but found it stuck. Forcing it would make a lot of noise and might attract the orcs, so they left it to explore the other branch of the intersection.

That led to another T intersection with an alcove at the end. To the right, they spotted one of Grilk's goblins, manning the barricade. They concluded correctly that the alcove at the end of the corridor must be the other side of one of the one way secret doors connecting to the entrance hall and spent some time learning how to open it. They returned to the T intersection and this time explored the left corridor.

The corridor went more or less straight a long way, then turned left. They followed it and heard a thumping sound at the end of the hall, beyond the light of their lantern, as if something big was throwing itself at the wall or a door. Llombearth once again snuck off ahead towards the darkness.

Though he passed his Move Silently check again, the thumping suddenly stopped. There was something between a hiss and screech, and suddenly something big was barreling down the corridor towards them. Most of the party was surprised as a horse-sized worm or maggot came wriggling into the light of their lantern, a mass of tentacles writhing from its armored head.

Bronson immediately lost morale and meant to flee, wrestling with Walgretor for control of the lantern. Rory leapt into action, putting himself between Llombaerth and the worm, hacking with his halberd. In the madness, his attack missed completely, his weapon clattering off the nearby wall. 

Armstrong loosed a pair of arrows at the worm, heedless of the possibility that he might strike Rory by mistake. One arrow sailed just high of the thrashing beast, while another plinked harmlessly off of its armored head.

On the following round, Malkara threw a trio of darts. One bounced off Rory's armor, a second off the worm's head, and the third found meaty purchase in the worm's face, dealing maximum damage (which for a dart is 2). 

Llombaerth scrambled back towards the rest of the group, lobbing a flask of alchemist's fire as he fled. He hit an AC of 2...but hit Rory by mistake! Rory burst into flames, but Llombaerth rolled low on the damage (just 3 on 2d6).

Bronson wrestled the lantern away from Walgretor and fled back down the corridor, leaving the party in darkness, were it not for the fact that Rory himself was alight.

Armstrong loosed another pair of arrows, one bouncing off of Rory's armor while another sailed past the worm.

I considered whether the worm would press its attack against Rory, considering he was on fire, until I realized that this type of worm has "Special" morale. According to the Monster Manual, this creature "will continue to attack as long as any of their opponents are unparalyzed." As the players were about to learn, the dreaded "demon worm" of Quasqueton was none other than a carrion crawler!

The carrion crawler pressed the attack, lashing at Rory with its eight tentacles. With THAC0 17, against Rory's AC of 4, it needed a 13 or better to hit. It rolled a 6, a 9, a 10, a 12...and a 20! Fortunately, the carrion crawler's tentacles don't actually do any damage, so the critical hit would have no additional effect, but Rory needed to make a saving throw versus paralyzation or else be paralyzed for 2d6 turns. He needed a 14 or better to succeed. He rolled a 19!

The carrion crawler attacked three more times, rolling a 5, another 5, and a 2! Wow! Needing just a 13 or better to hit, each of the carrion crawler's attacks had a 40% to hit. With eight attacks, it was statistically likely to hit at least three times. The probability of it missing seven times was 2.8%!

Rory, still on fire, stood his ground and pressed the attack. As a specialist with the halberd, he could attack twice this round. His first hack missed wildly, while the second bounced off the rubbery hide of the crawler's body - softer than its armored head, but still tougher than leather.

On the following round, Rory fell back to the rest of the group. Malkara waited for him to be clear of the worm, then loosed more darts. Two more bounced off the armored head, while the third found flesh and scored another 2 damage. Rory stopped, dropped, and rolled on the floor. Walgretor, who was carrying a bucket of orc soup from Grilk's lair, used it to douse the flames. The smell was unbearable, but Rory was no longer on fire. The corridor was plunged into darkness.

Luckily, Llombaerth could see in the dark. He threw another flask of alchemist's fire down the corridor between the party and the crawler. The crawler, heedless of the flames, charged through them to get at its prey. It shrieked as the flames engulfed it, its body twisting as its fatty segmented body bubbled and burst, painting the walls of the corridor with its steaming innards. It crashed to the floor in front of the party, its legs twitching in its death throes.

The crawler had 9 hit points left, and the burning alchemist's fire did 10 damage on a roll of 2d6.

Bronson was long gone, so the party lit another torch and collected themselves. They waited for the flames to burn out, then proceeded down the hall, coming to a pair of door on the left. At the first door they heard nothing. At the second, which had been battered and scratched by the crawler's attempts at entry, a goblin's voice on the other side demanded to know who they were.

The party identified themselves as the slayers of the demon worm, and again claimed to be Stonespeakers. They told the goblin that the Stone demanded it open the door to them. The goblin stalled for time, and the party could hear it dragging furniture to barricade the door. They managed to convince the goblin that the Stone was displeased with it, upon which it opened the door for them.

They found themselves in another bedchamber, this one with a canopy bed, a nightstand, chest of drawers, a full-length mirror, a sculpted basin, and a tapestry on the wall. The goblin was Numbnuts, and he was here searching for any missed treasure which he might offer to Drak in order to gain favor. The party convinced Numbnuts that they knew where a lot of treasure was to be found, but they would only tell him in exchange for information.

Again they asked how many orcs and goblins there were, but Numbnuts was also not good at counting. Slug was the goblin who could count. Lumpknuckles was good at listening. Numbnuts was good at drawing. The party demanded that Numbnuts draw them a map of the Stonespeaker Clan's territory, and Numbnuts obliged.

Numbnuts drew a big rectangle with corridors bordering the top, bottom, and left side. He drew a small rectangle within the larger one in the bottom right corner, which was the room they were in now. To the left of it, across an adjoining hall, was a "junk room" where Lumpknuckles would be. A winding hallway, patrolled by Slug, meandered throughout the larger rectangle. Further to the left of the junk room was the "captain's room". Brubar the orc liked to hide in there and get drunk. 

To the north of that were two more rectangles side by side. The left rectangle was the "stairs room", where Muv the orc stood guard against incursions from the orcs who worshipped the Stone Below, a splinter faction of Drak's orcs who were now enemies of the Stonespeakers. The right rectangle was the "Stone's chamber", where Drak went to speak to the stone and to feed it the essence of heretics. Just above those two was another rectangle, the "treasure room", guarded by the orc Rheev. 

In the upper right corner of the large rectangle was a big area where Drak sat on his throne, guarded by his strongest warriors. The door that party had listened at earlier (where they heard orcish voices on the other side) led directly into the throne room.

With that, we called it for the night. The party has defeated one of Quasqueton's most dangerous monsters and has begun making small forays into hostile orc/goblin territory. I'm looking forward to seeing how it shakes out.

Developing the Sandbox: Dungeons

This post is part of my series on developing the sandbox. You can read other posts in the series here. The series will, when necessary, go into detail on the development of my sandbox for Dungeon Module B1: In Search of the Unknown, but will also discuss sandbox development more generally. You can read play reports from my B1 campaign here.

I'll be honest - these days, I don't actually much enjoy making dungeons. You have to figure out what the dungeon used to be, who built it, what happened to it, who's been using it since, who's using it now, how they get along with their neighbors, where they live, (sometimes) what they eat and drink, what they're doing there, what stuff they have, what stuff is in the dungeon that they don't have, why they haven't gotten it yet, why are there traps, what the traps do and how they work, what a "special" room is, why whoever built the place would put it there, what the layout is, what the rooms used to be and what mundane stuff would be in there to play with, what are the doors like, which ones are secret, which ones are locked, how do the inhabitants get around, how many levels are there and how many rooms are there per level, where are the stairs, what's the percentage chance of encountering such-and-such while wandering around the place - the list goes on and on.

To compound all of this, there is so much advice to be found on the subject, whether it's in rulebooks throughout the many editions of D&D, other TTRPG systems, or online on blogs. It is really overwhelming to take it all in, decide what you like and what you don't, synthesize it all into a coherent methodology, and apply it when designing dungeons for your home game.

It's a lot of level design. There was a time when I really enjoyed that part of the game a lot, but lately, making dungeons has made me very frustrated more often than not. And then you have to write that all up in a key that's comprehensive while also being simple enough to run at the table. 

You have to put in similar work when designing a a stronghold or monster lair, but there's plenty of information about real world strongholds to draw upon, and monster lairs are often smaller, simpler, and easier to imagine. There are dungeons in literature, but few that actually emulate the D&D dungeon-ass dungeon. You're better off just reading old TSR modules to figure out what a dungeon should more or less be like.

I'm more of a big picture guy. I like making big maps with varied terrain, then finding out what all is there, whether it be cities, strongholds, dungeons, or monster lairs. Who lives there? Who rules it? What kind of monsters plague this or that region? How do they all relate? For me, that's where the juice is.

That's why I've basically just started stealing my dungeons. I originally decided to create my B1 sandbox because (1) I thought the dungeon-focused adventure was crying out to be placed within a larger context and (2) I really liked the idea of one of the more tedious parts of the sandbox development process (designing the dungeon) being done for me.

B1, however, does not feature a finished dungeon. The DM is instructed to roll to determine if each of Quasqueton's rooms contains monsters, treasure, or neither. This is relatively easy, however, since the module provides lists of monsters and treasure which the DM can place in each room when a positive result is determined. All that's left is to use the module's thorough room descriptions to figure out where the treasure is stashed, to determine how the monsters relate to one another, and create new wandering monster tables based on the monsters found in my version of Quasqueton.

I used some loosely interpreted opposed reaction rolls to determine monster relationships, eyeballing the map to find out who lives near who (combining groups into factions when appropriate) and who controls what territory. 

What I ended up with was some goblins who control the dungeon's entrance, some orcs deeper within who threaten the goblins and have lured away some of their numbers, and a few smaller groups of intelligent creatures and roaming non-intelligent monsters which are indifferent to the conflict. This has worked out quite well so far, with the players deciding to try to stay on good terms with the gatekeeping goblins, the goblins asking the characters for exchanges of favors, and the orcs launching attacks against the goblins when the party is away from the dungeon.

The DM is also instructed to roll to determine when doors are stuck, which requires more eyeballing to determine who can get into what areas, whose territory they'll need to pass through, and how that affects the dungeon's politics and who is aware of whom. For example, if the bandits must pass through goblin territory to get to the area of the dungeon in which they've been stocked, then the goblins must know about the bandits and have some opinion about them, and there must be some reason why they haven't killed each other.

For the wandering monster tables, I add up all of the monsters in the dungeon to get a total number of monsters. Then, for each monster type, I divide that monster type's total by the larger total to get a percentage. That is the percentage chance of encountering that type of monster wandering the dungeon.

Let's say I have a 20 room dungeon, and there are monster in five rooms: 11 brigands, 6 hobgoblins, 4 gnolls, 2 rot grubs, and 3 troglodytes. I don't think of the rot grubs as "wandering", so excluding those, I have 24 total monsters - 25% hobgoblins, 46% brigands, 17% gnolls, and 12% troglodytes. My wandering monster table would look like this:

d100    Monster
01-46   1d6 Brigands (from Area 8, looking to threaten, plunder, and rob)
47-71   1d3 Hobgoblins (from Area 17, killing any they outmatch)
72-88   1d3 Gnolls (from Area 11, willing to trade information for treasure)
89-100 1d2 Troglodytes (from Area 20, looking for sacrifices for the God of Stink)

(I'm assuming this is a 1st level dungeon, and the number appearing is based on the assumption that there will be 4 to 6 characters of that level, using my cataloguing of AD&D 2e monsters by level to determine roughly how many of each monster would be appropriate. You'll want to make it work for your own assumptions about party size and whatever system you're using.)

However, adapting B1 for my campaign wasn't as simple as stocking the dungeon, making a wandering monster table, and then using the module as written. Like, this isn't really usable:

There's an art to turning this into something that functions at the table. You can't read it as is. You could maybe skim it and put it into your own words on the fly, but you're wasting everyone's time. You could memorize it somehow, but good luck with that. My process has been to rewrite it in my own style, in a way where the interactable elements and the hierarchy of information is plain to see. In my style, this room looks like this:

Descriptive, but not verbose. Concise, but comprehensive. Important stuff is bolded. Bolded items are described in further detail. Additional information is available upon further inspection. I can eyeball the initial description and rephrase it in my own words, then go into further detail when the players spend time examining any one thing. This works for me. Yours might look different.

This is all very specific to my B1 sandbox, or any sandbox in which your dungeons are repurposed from existing published material. That isn't always the case. Though I don't love doing it these days, when I choose to do so (and I'm not wholly opposed to it - my sandboxes for both B2 and B3 include dungeons beyond those detailed in the published modules, after all), how do I design my own dungeons from scratch?

As with other location types, I'll start with a minimalist sketch. In the case of dungeons, this includes the type of structure it once was, who built it, how it fell into ruin, and (broadly) who or what dwells there now. 

In the AD&D 1e DMG, the ruin types are limited to deserted strongholds (with "mazelike dungeons thereunder" and the occasional monster using the surface ruins as a lair), villages (here I'd include the other classes of small settlement like hamlets and thorps as well), cities (or towns), tombs, and shrines. Tombs and shrines are classic dungeon fare. Deserted strongholds are good fodder as well, especially when considering B1 and how it depicts the maddening, hostile subterranean environments which bored, retired adventurers are likely to carve out beneath their seats of power.

Villages and cities are a bit trickier. They're not quite "dungeons" in the traditional sense. I tend to build ruined cities and towns as I would normally build a city or town, then wreck them. The characters can still crawl through the settlement's ruins district by district just as they would crawl through such a place were it not ruined. Perhaps it is now overrun by the doppelgängers, fiends, lycanthropes, and undead which have always prowled its streets. Navigating the settlement itself might be more akin to a point crawl. It's the locations which were once important to the settlement that are the proper dungeons. 

Using my B1 sandbox as an example, if Timbershore were to fall into ruin in the far away future, perhaps the remains of the Evil wizard Lambrecht's castle is one such dungeon, and the ruins of the Evil cleric Blanchefleur's keep another. Add in some crumbling manors or a merchant consortium's sealed treasure vault for variety. A ruined village, hamlet, or thorp could be much the same, albeit smaller and easier to get around. Instead of ruined castles and manors, a dungeon there might be an old mill or granary - a diversionary location with just a handful of rooms.

As for who built the structure originally, it depends. Strongholds are easy for me, since AD&D is quite explicit as to who can build strongholds and when, and the DMG has nifty (if not, at times, wholly consistent with its own rules) tables for determining who a stronghold's ruler is (or in this case, was). 

Shrines are built by clerics, so it's easy to determine who the cleric in question was - just determine their race and alignment and either pick some appropriate classic D&D god and genericize it for your setting or choose some god unique to your setting which you wish to highlight. If there were to be a ruined shrine in my B1 sandbox, for example, I would make it a shrine to the Horned Mother (Blanchefleur's deity), or I would come up with some other deity in opposition to her, its worshipers long since eradicated. I tend to favor either Evil shrines or Good shrines which have been desecrated by Evil powers. Remember that Evil undead are empowered in such places!

The ruins of cities/towns, tombs, and villages/hamlets/thorps are a bit trickier. I quite like the 2014 D&D 5e DMG's tables, which you can roll on to determine who built the dungeon, what type of dungeon it is, and why it was abandoned - so much so that this framework strongly informed my own ideas about creating the initial sketch of such a location. Still, who and what the tables include can be a bit of headscratcher. A dungeon might have been built by dwarves and elves, but not by gnomes or halflings. It might have been built by hobgoblins, but not by orcs. Beholders, giants, mind flayers, and yuan-ti, but not any other monsters.

Instead, it's probably best to look at what's already been established about your setting, and pick or randomly determine some appropriate creator based on that. My B1 sandbox is located in a heavily forested region, so perhaps a civilization of elves once lived there in the ancient past. Rogahn and Zelligar used orc slaves to build Quasqueton, and went to war with barbarians in the region - perhaps the orcs or barbarians had a civilization of their own and built structures which fell into ruin as the two powerful adventurers asserted their dominion over the place. There is an ogre lair in the area - perhaps their ancestors built things as well. Perhaps Timbershore once had outlying villages which were reclaimed by the forest, or perhaps it was once subservient to a larger city which met a similar fate.

The same approach works for dungeon history. Barbarians, ogres, and orcs may have brought ruin to human or elven civilizations and structures, and may have likewise been ruined by the campaigns of Rogahn and Zelligar. Perhaps there was a conflict between worshipers of the Horned Mother and whatever deity's worshipers had a foothold in the region before them. In addition to conflict from war and conquest, you could work in plagues, curses, and magical catastrophes.

All of the preceding information - the type of ruin, who built it, and what happened to it - can inform what lives in the ruin in the present day. A fighter's stronghold which was ruined when a subdued dragon rebelled might still be home to that dragon. A wizard's stronghold might house summoned guardians or magically-altered experiment creatures. Evil and desecrated shrines and tombs will likely have undead or fiends. An enclave of barbarians, elves, ogres, or orcs might still call the ruined city home. A village abandoned due to plague will be home to disease carriers. A curse upon a city may have turned its aristocracy into wererats or vampires.

I try to pick a few different monsters types - intelligent, organized monster groups with lairs and factions inside the dungeon, unintelligent scavengers and predators which roam its rooms and halls, and singular, powerful monsters with or without minions. In AD&D terms, if I'm making a 1st level dungeon, I'll want it to have a mix of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd level monsters, according to the DUNGEON RANDOM MONSTER LEVEL DETERMINATION MATRIX:

Likewise, a 16th level dungeon might include a mix of monsters from levels 1 through 10.

I might go so far as to use reaction rolls at this stage to determine who is friendly, hostile, or neutral towards the party, and which monsters are allied or at odds with one another. The Dungeon Checklist is a great resource - make sure there is fodder for the characters to kill, thinking creatures to parley with, and dangerous creatures to be avoided or carefully neutralized.

This all will give you a pretty good sketch, but dungeons aren't the kind of environment you can easily riff on using minimal information. You need to know specifics. How well-lit is it? How high are the ceilings? How many rooms are there? How many levels? How are the rooms laid out? Are they connected by passages or doors? Are the doors locked or stuck? Are they wood, stone, or metal? What's in each room? How many monsters are there? Where are the tricks and traps? How do they work? What damage do they do? What saving throw is needed? Where is the treasure hidden? How much of it is there?

As I've said, there are so many ways to determine these things that it's nearly impossible to suggest best practices. It will differ for everyone based on their taste, system of choice, and campaign setting.

One of the best tangible tips I can offer is to design dungeons in chunks. This somewhat solves the question of how many rooms and how much of each thing (empty rooms, monsters, tricks/traps, and treasure) to include. I use 20-room chunks along with the AD&D 1e dungeon stocking table:

Thus, if I have a 20-room dungeon, there are 12 empty rooms, two with monsters only, three with monsters with treasure (these are my monster "lairs" in the dungeon), one "special" room, one trick or trap room, and one treasure room (like a vault behind an especially secure or secret door). This to me is a small dungeon (boo, hiss, five-room dungeons stink). If I want a bigger one, I add 20 more rooms. If I need more, I add another 20, and so on. 

Since each 20-room chunk contains a "special" room which might also contain a stairway, I tend to include one stairway per two 20-room chunks. A level can have multiple stairways up or down, of course, so this isn't necessarily a limitation upon how large a single level can be.

If I want to create a big 100-room dungeon, I know I need 60 empty rooms, 10 rooms with just monsters, 15 monsters with lairs and treasure, 5 trapped rooms, 5 treasure rooms, and so on. 

You might use a different dungeon stocking table to inform the size of your dungeon "chunks". For example, from OSE:

Your "chunk" might be 36 rooms: 12 empty (2 with hidden treasure), 12 with monsters (6 with treasure), 6 special, and 6 trapped (2 with treasure). Once again, adjust to taste.

Empty rooms are not truly empty, but contain environmental storytelling, hints at what awaits in other rooms, time-wasting set dressing, or interactive elements which might come into play in the future, such as if a wandering monster shows up there, or if the room is restocked with a monster on a future delve. 

I like using Courtney Campbell's resource on empty rooms to determine what a room's original purpose was, and from there determine what sort of set dressing to include. I do this with rooms that are otherwise occupied as well. The 1d6+6 orcs are not just standing around in some barren chamber, but are instead in an old kitchen scavenging for food, in the wizard's bedchamber scraping the gold leaf from his headboard, or in the lounge gawking at the marble statue of a nude woman.

The specific monsters I use could be determined by rolling on AD&D's dungeon encounter tables, or I might pick a few based on the dungeon's history. Tricks, traps, and treasure would be similarly informed. An elven ruin might have more magical traps, while a dwarven one might have more traps involving shifting masonry. Gnomes use clockwork devices, kobolds use poison and pots of stinging insects, and defiled shrines are warded by curses and negative energy. Elves treasure ornately carved wooden objects, spellbooks, moonstones, and magical bows and swords, while dwarves treasure stone carvings, gemstones (but not pearls, because dwarves HATE pearls), and magical axes and hammers.

The number of monsters appearing, gameplay statistics of traps, and value of treasures will all be informed by your system of choice, of course.

As for layout, you can create your own dungeon and still steal a little bit. You could take an existing map from one module or another and simply restock it to your liking. This is useful if, for example, you know you want to run the hideout for a cult of Elemental Evil, a fire giant stronghold, or a Tomb of Horrors-type thing, and know where to find one. I ran Tomb of Annihilation's Fane of the Night Serpent, Princes of the Apocalypse's Sacred Stone Monastery, and Storm King Thunder's Forge of the Fire Giants this way, using the maps and room descriptions but changing the monsters, treasure, and mechanics of traps and the like to suit my needs, and it worked quite well.

Alternatively, you can steal a more generic map from somewhere online. I've used a lot of Dyson Logos maps in my games. I often find this unsatisfying though, as the types of dungeons I can make are limited by the maps that are available. I have to either compromise my vision to suit a map that wasn't created with that vision in mind, or find a map I like first, then come up with the vision after. Neither is ideal.

So, I often create something from scratch. I don't usually bother with detailed maps these days. I've tried using AD&D's Appendix A to randomly generate dungeons. It's really confusing and it creates a map that kind of stinks. I feel the same way about random dungeon generators found online. I've basically given up on it.

So, if a relativistic flowchart-stye map is good enough for the players, it's good enough for me! I start with a bubble in the center of the page (with stairs leading up to the surface), then roll 1d4 to determine the number of exits. For each room branching off of that, I roll d4 again to determine the total number of exits (that is, if I roll a 1, there is only one way into the room, and no other ways out). I do this until I've exhausted my 20-room chunk or end up with only dead ends (to which I might add secret doors to additional rooms to fill out any remaining rooms from my 20-room chunk). I can add additional notes as needed, like "This room is really big and takes two turns to map," or "This hallway is really long and requires a wandering monster check when passing through it."

I tend to put important rooms like monster lairs (those with treasure), "special" rooms, and treasure rooms in those areas farthest from the entrance, so that the characters will have to endure the longest route through the dungeon to reach those rooms. Rooms with only monsters or only traps will be those at important intersections or choke points, ensuring that the characters either go through them or find a long way around them.

After that, it's a matter of writing the key, which I've demonstrated in my rewriting of the room from B1, above. I like to find a middle ground between writing something descriptive but also usable at the table. Highlight interactable elements. Try to anticipate what the players will want to investigate and provide additional detail as needed. Try to think of all the information you might need. Think of what questions the players might ask, and come up with answers. Include game mechanics whenever possible to avoid looking stuff up during the session. Write it and reread it and refine it.

As you run the dungeon, it will change. Make note of which monsters have been killed, which have had changes in attitude towards the PCs, which traps have been disarmed, which treasures found, which doors unlocked, and the like. Once the players make contact with the monsters, feel free to move them around. They should be doing something, not just hanging out in one room all the time.

When the characters leave the dungeon, I like to change things. Monsters which don't like each other may come into conflict, killing or capturing one another. Those that do like each other may form alliances. Their territory may expand as the characters open doors, disarm traps, and kill other monsters. They may recover treasure themselves, find secret doors of which they were previously unaware, and update their own dungeon maps with scouting missions.

This is also when I restock the dungeon. I go through each room the characters have already explored, checking again for monsters, traps, and treasure. Perhaps a new monster has wandered into the dungeon, or wandered up or down from some other level. Perhaps a trap has been reset, or a new trap placed where there was none before. Perhaps the monsters have moved their treasure to a previously unoccupied room for safe keeping. 

This can be a boon or a bane to the players. Perhaps the friendly goblins have thwarted a counterattack from the orcs, and now the orcs are lesser in number. Perhaps the orcs triumphed and carried off the goblins, and now the characters have lost a valuable ally. The rival adventurers may have perished in their own quest, or maybe they succeeded and carried off some valuable treasure, or simply made progress and disarmed some trap. Discard any results that don't make sense, or stretch your imagination until they do. No two delves should be exactly alike.

As I've explained, this is much too large a topic to possible cover in its entirety in a single post. Hopefully, I've provided a somewhat comprehensive explanation of my approach to getting started and to doing the long, somewhat tedious work of preparing a location like this for gameplay. Everyone's process will be different. This is a only a peek into mine.

Developing the Sandbox: Outdoor Encounter Tables

This post is part of my series on developing the sandbox. You can read other posts in the series here. The series will, when necessary, go into detail on the development of my sandbox for Dungeon Module B1: In Search of the Unknown, but will also discuss sandbox development more generally. You can read play reports from my B1 campaign here.

First, a preamble. The types of encounters I'm referring to in this post are those procedurally generated encounters which occur when the party is traveling overland. These are often colloquially referred to broadly as "random encounters" - which is not specific enough for my purposes - or as "wilderness encounters" - which suggests the party is navigating an untamed, dangerous outdoor environment, and which is too specific for my purposes. Here I will use the term "outdoor encounters" because they are neither city/town encounters - which I describe in my previous post on developing the town - nor are they necessarily wilderness encounters. These encounters can occur anywhere outdoors, and may take place in either wilderness or inhabited areas.

You can create outdoor encounter tables for your sandbox at various points throughout the development process. In many traditional "old school" campaigns, the dungeon which is the initial locus of play is situated very near to the "home base", so it is unlikely that the characters will have many outdoor encounters when traveling to and from that destination.

Indeed, it is even suggested in the AD&D DMG that the local municipality actually maintains a road leading to the dungeon. In that case, your initial outdoor encounter table probably needs little more than bands of fellow/rival adventurers, patrols from the nearby settlement, or groups of bandits and brigands which might prey upon such travelers.

However, Dungeon Module B1 relies upon the premise that the dungeon, Quasqueton, is remote, its location lost to history and local knowledge. Few if any know of its whereabouts, which serves as justification as to why it hasn't yet been plundered. It wouldn't make sense for it to be right next to town, and certainly not for a road to lead right to it. The player characters have the fortune of coming into possession of a map pinpointing the dungeon's location, but that doesn't mean the trek should be easy.

This meshes well with my own preference for remote dungeons and low level wilderness exploration. In older editions of D&D, the wilderness is a wildly variable and dangerous place, unsuited for prolonged expeditions by low level characters or those traveling without formidable armies. That doesn't mean low level characters can't adventure there. In fact, I think they should! They just have to be careful. They might encounter an orc warband, see a giant prowling on a far away mountainside, or spot a dragon flying overhead.

These encounters not only inject some variety and unpredictability into your game, but present the players with dangerous situations they will have to carefully navigate, reminding them that the world is not carefully curated to accommodate their characters - that they are small fish in a big pond and will need to act accordingly until they acquire some power and have more agency.

In the first session of my last AD&D campaign, the party had seven random encounters before finally arriving at the first dungeon. Many of them were potentially deadly, but a combination of mitigating factors like distance and reaction rolls plus the players' own savvy and my wise and benevolent restraint allowed them to reach their destination unscathed. Spotting a lone hill giant wandering in the distance filled them with fear. A dozen or so sessions later, they encountered another such wandering giant and laid a trap for it, slaying it with ease. The characters' growth in power over that span of time was self evident.

In my sandbox for B1, Quasqueton is located about a day and half's travel from town over settled farmland, across a river, through the forest, and atop a high, wooded black crag. It's not a super deadly trek, but it provides a decent chance that a 1st level party on their initial expedition may get wrecked by a band of hobgoblins or worse. That may not be to your or your players' taste, but I find the possibility tantalizing.

Since reaching the obvious first adventure site for the campaign would require some overland travel (both through inhabited lands and the wilderness), creating my outdoor encounter tables would need to be a priority. How would I go about it?

There are more ways to write outdoor encounter tables than I could possibly summarize here. Here are some of my favorite blog posts on the subject. If you want more, Google "D&D encounter tables blog" and go on a voyage of your own making. It's not my job to educate you.

The primary conflict when deciding how to structure my outdoor encounter tables was whether to draw my encounters from a preexisting, generic, all-encompassing table (such as those found in the AD&D DMG) or to populate my tables only with those creatures that would reasonably be found outdoors in my sandbox, based on the settlements, strongholds, and monster lairs which dotted the landscape.

For example, the cultivated farmlands and wild grasslands surrounding Timbershore would be populated mostly by farmers, patrols, merchants, and the like. Brigands would prowl the lands surrounding Fayette's Hold. The forest would be home to ogres, owlbears, giant eagles flying overhead, and the occasional chance encounter with the leprechaun, Jinglepuff.

While this makes plenty of sense, it's also rather dull. It's not super exciting if the only people found in brigand territory are brigands. It forces me to think about what sorts of mundane animals are found in which environments, and to think of which factions have overlapping territory or which might venture into one another's spheres of influence. Most importantly, it eliminates any possibility of being surprised myself.

Using a more generic outdoor encounter table is certainly good for producing results which surprise even the DM: "Huh, I didn't expect there to be a green dragon living in the woods. That's exciting. What does it portend for my campaign?" But it also produces incongruous results: "Uh, so why is there a sphinx hanging out a couple of miles away from the brigands' castle?"

The solution I eventually came up with was to use two encounter tables - a generic one which I used almost like a spark table (in this case, the outdoor encounter tables from the AD&D DMG) to then populate my own curated encounter tables for the region. Basically, I would roll first on the AD&D encounter tables, try to come up with some rationale for the result, add it to my curated encounter table if it made sense, and discard it if it did not.

This was easy enough with many of the most common encounters - merchants in the grasslands were probably traveling to town, pilgrim encounters were with devotees of the Evil cleric Blanchefleur, brigands were from Fayette's Hold, orcs were from Quasqueton, and the like. 

But I also ended up with some unexpected results, like the sphinx just outside of Fayette's Hold (which I discarded, but now think I could have actually used - it would be cool if the brigands had made an alliance with a Chaotic Evil hieracosphinx), or some truly strange things hanging out around Quasqueton (one of which turned my preconceived notions about one of the region's important NPCs on its head, which I won't spoil here).

My sandbox wound up needing seven encounter tables: inhabited/patrolled forest (the hexes bordering Timbershore, Ebongrove, and Fayette's Hold), uninhabited forest, inhabited/patrolled forested hills (Zerelda's Camp), uninhabited forested hills (Quasqueton), inhabited/patrolled barren hills (Fayette's Hold), inhabited/patrolled grasslands (which was all of the grassland on the map), and rivers and lakes.

For each table, I generated four results. If the result was a creature which could be encountered only during the day or night, I generated another "mirror" result for the opposite time of day. To keep things interesting, I rerolled duplicates, so "brigands" was only ever one of the entries on the table. At most, the table for any given terrain type would have eight entries, so I would have to generate a maximum of 56 encounters. I ended up with 39.

Since this is a lot of encounters, I tried to keep them light, but I also wanted to have most of the work done for me ahead of time so that I wouldn't have to roll much at the table. If the encounter is with people or creatures who can speak, what is their leader's name? How do they react to the party, why, and what do they do or say? If their reaction is indifferent, how can I make that into an encounter which is still engaging? What treasure are they carrying? Where are they from? Where are they going? What are they doing? If the encounter includes spellcasters, what spells do they have prepared?

Some encounters are easier than others. Animals and unintelligent monsters are easy. Mounted patrols with mixed arms and multiple character-type NPCs among their number are more challenging. But it's worth it to put in the time to prepare them properly.

Throughout the process, I tried to keep in mind a few things: logic, but also fun, and variety. There's no proper orc lair in the region, so it didn't make much sense to have a band of 100 orcs wandering the forest. However, a group of a dozen or so orcs venturing into the region from just off the map would suit my purposes. There would be no bands of roaming giants, but a single wanderer passing through the region seemed within the realm of possibility.

While I do enjoy the idea of the wilderness being an unpredictable and dangerous place with huge groups of monsters prowling about, I also had a mind for balance - again, because it makes more sense to me. It seems appropriate that the party would be more likely to encounter a handful of brigands rather than a giant army of them. 

Thus, I loosely "balanced" these encounters based on a d100 roll: a result of 01 to 65 would be an encounter for 1st to 3rd level characters (1d3), a result of 66 to 85 would be for 4th to 7th level characters (1d4+3), 86 to 95 would be for 7th to 12th level characters (1d6+6), and 96 to 100 would be for characters 9th to 20th level (1d12+8). Most encounters will be with small groups, but there is the chance of running into a large force which must be evaded or negotiated with. 

This roll was made only after I had determined the general type of creature encountered, so if I rolled up a dragon and could make sense of it (easy to do, since dragons fly all over the place, whether they live there or not), then there would be a dragon, balance be damned. The roll only determined whether it was a singular dragon or a gang of teenagers.

As we play out this campaign, I replace those encounters I've already rolled as makes sense. For example, the hobgoblins encountered in the forest during our first session were merely frightened away, not defeated, so they are still out there. The giant tick which was slain is gone from the encounter table until I roll up another giant tick to replace it. There are certainly more giant ticks in the woods, so I could simply reuse this encounter, but again, two of my priorities when creating these tables are fun and variety, and encountering a giant tick 25% of the time in the forest is neither.

Hopefully, as the campaign continues, the party will have more outdoor encounters, and I'll be able to showcase some of the work I've put into them in my forthcoming play reports.

Play Report (AD&D 2e): In Search of the Unknown (Session 6)

We played the sixth session of our Dungeon Module B1: In Search of Unknown AD&D 2e game last night. You can read past play reports here.

The roster for this session was as follows:

• Llombaerth, CG elf thief 2 (Adam)
• Malkara, N human mage 1 (Maya)
• Robbernar, CG elf cleric 1 (Nael)
• Rory the Small, LN human fighter 1 (David)

As you can see, we had a new player joining us. Maya is playing Malkara, a human mage who, like the rest of the party, has an exceedingly average spread of ability scores. She did manage to roll a decent selection of 1st level spells: comprehend languages, magic missile, and spider climb. She should be an adequate replacement for the recently deceased Pommernar.

Last time, the party returned to town from the dungeon. They encountered another giant tick while camping in the wilderness, and it slayed Pommernar. Back in town, they were taxed heavily for their recovered treasure, but earned enough gold for Llombaerth to reach 2nd level. The party spent some time brainstorming the best way to use the few days they would need to rest and recuperate in civilization. They met Robbernar, Pommernar's father and a cleric who agreed to adventure with them.

After some number crunching, I told the players why it might be unwise to buy a boat. I reasoned that whether they bought the boat or not, they would still have to pay the crew. And if they owned the boat, they would be responsible for all its upkeep expenses. The main benefit of owning a boat would be that the party would not need to pay the regular fee for passage - 66 silver per head for a trip downriver to the dungeon and back. But the boat itself costs 500 gold, so to break even the players would need to go back and forth to the dungeon about 25 times (assuming an average party size of three - with one hireling and a donkey it's closer to 15 times, which is still pretty excessive). 

So, they abandoned that notion for now. They set off for the River Ward nonetheless, as they wished to recruit more hirelings and to learn more about smuggler activity. Robbernar managed to hire a half-elf porter/torchbearer named Walgretor as well as a pair of human men-at-arms named Armstrong and Booker. Rory also decided to retain their original porter and torchbearer, Bronson. Llombaerth got a lead on a seedy tavern named the Drunken Pike, where the ward's criminal element liked to congregate.

At the Drunken Pike, Llombaerth met Malric Two Fingers, a grizzled old sailor with just one hand, and that hand with just two fingers. Llombaerth initially offended him by making thief signs with his hands - flaunting all his fingers in Malric's face - but eventually (after some bribery) the two got on the same page. Llombaerth asked if Malric knew how someone might bring goods into town unnoticed by the constabulary.

Malric told him about the Rusted Anchor, an old barge tethered to the wharf but long out of commission. Malric recounted how, back in the day, sailors would board the barge and give a special knock at the door to indicate that they were ready for work. He had heard that sometimes, out of respect for the old ship, people would board it at night and give the same knock - since Malric did not have the proper number of fingers, he had his bar boy demonstrate. Llombaerth took note. Though the barge was out of service now, Malric had heard that there are somehow still sailors unloading its cargo to this day.

With that, the party regrouped and set off into the wilderness. They were nine now - Llombaerth, Malkara, Robbernar, Rory, the men-at-arms Armstrong and Booker, the porters Bronson and Walgretor, and the mule, Hasselback. After crossing the river halfway through the first day of travel, they set Armstrong and Booker to work felling some trees to create an impromptu crossing for any subsequent trips. I told the players that this should last at least until there are some heavy rains, which are likely to wash the logs away.

At the end of the first day, they made camp at the bottom of the wooded black crag upon which sat Quasqueton. The night passed without incident. The following morning, they had a three-hour hike up the hill to the ruin, which was also uneventful. They plunged back inside the dungeon.

As they moved down the familiar long entrance hall, a goblin voice sounded an alarm. They saw that the goblins had fortified the landing at the top of the short staircase at the end of the hall with a makeshift wooden barricade, a bloody orc's head skewered atop a spear with an arrow through its eye.

Grilk emerged, recognized the party as friends, and told his goblins to stand down, welcoming his friends back inside. The party learned that a band of orcs had attacked the goblins in the night, with three groups of two attacking from different directions. The goblins had heard them coming, but not quickly enough to save Tobb, who had been wounded with arrows and carried off as a prisoner. Three orcs were slain in the counterattack, at which point their morale broke, and they retreated.

This was part of my restocking/updating the dungeon process. I made opposed reaction rolls for those dungeon factions which might be in contact with one another and determined that the orcs would launch an attack on the goblins. I looked at my map and figured out how they might go about that strategically and what numbers they could bring to bear, then roughly simulated it with surprise rolls, attack rolls, movement, morale checks, and the like. It was a fast and bloody conflict which did not go very well for the orcs, but they managed to take a captive.

Grilk informed the party that earlier, the goblins had managed to trap a horse-sized "demon worm" inside the closet in Zelligar's bedchamber, which was nearby. After the orc attack, the goblins had freed the worm and corralled it into the corridor which led to the orcs' territory. The party decided to explore that room.

The goblins had put lots of orc meat into their stew, in which the party declined to partake, but Robbernar did instruct Walgretor to fill a bucket with the slop in case the worm showed up. They entered Zelligar's bedchamber and found it in disarray, furniture overturned and broken down for the barricades outside - including a large bed (its frame dismantled) and some smaller tables and chairs.

The party had their men-at-arms bust open a nightstand which they thought might be trapped, but found nothing inside. The far wall was decorated with a long stone carving of a mighty wizard casting a fearsome spell. A door in the room opened onto a 30' long corridor, at the end of which was a pair of jeweled chests overflowing with coins, gems, and jewelry.

This was obviously a trap, so Robbernar used detect magic and determined that the chests and their contents did indeed radiate magic. The party was very careful. They threw a chair leg at the chests, then poked them with their 10' poles, then used a fishing hook and line to fish out a piece of jewelry, then lassoed a whole chest and dragged it out into the main room. Robbernar finally touched some of the treasure with his hands and noticed that everything felt and sounded like rocks, not precious metal and gemstones. It was a trick, but one the party might be able to leverage against their enemies.

Lastly, the party checked the closet. Inside, they found a small pile of slimy giant rat bones, partially crushed. Malkara claimed a cloak studded with circular bits of pewter. They looked over some papers detailing stronghold inventories, expenses, and construction, and found four books: a history of the local area, an Elvish encyclopedia of herbology, a handwritten notebook in an indecipherable language of runes and esoteric markings, and an illustrated tome describing meteorological phenomena, with similarly indecipherable scrawls in the margins. They pocketed the books.

That's where we left off. The party has explored a good amount of the dungeon, but there's still some ground to cover. I'm looking forward to seeing what they do next.