Analyzing Appendix A

I've wanted to do a deep dive into the AD&D DMG's Appendix A for a while, but have struggled to get started because this section of the DMG is really difficult to wrap my head around. How could I write effectively about something I did not understand?

Time and again, I broke out my graph paper, my pencil, my dice, and my handy DMG to randomly generate a dungeon using Appendix A. I was always very quickly confounded by the sprawling complex of rooms, chambers, and passages that stretched out in all directions at once, twisting and turning out towards the edges of the page and then unexpectedly back in on itself to bump up against where I had started.

It was nonsensical and confusing. What table am I supposed to roll on, and when? What is the difference between a room and a chamber? Why are there so many diagonal passages? Just when I thought I was done with my dungeon, I'd randomly roll up a set of stairs down one level, then a trap door in a corridor which drops the player characters down two levels. That's two more levels I have to map! Will it ever end?

The short answer is no. It won't. And that's by design, probably. Most likely, Appendix A is meant to generate the kind of tentpole megadungeon capable of sustaining a lengthy campaign with dozens of players. The dungeon is never "finished" because the players need to be able to keep exploring so that they can continue to extract treasure and level up, until their characters are powerful enough to move onto other things. Then, there are always new people joining the campaign, and they will need to exploit the dungeon to advance their characters as well. Appendix C's Dungeon Random Monster Level Determination Matrix (a real mouthful!) goes all the way to level 16!

I've been spending a bit more time attempting to randomly generate dungeons lately (trying to get out of a bit of a creative block). I've had some degree of success, though I am still refining the process. I'm using Appendix A, sort of. I am modifying it as I go. At first I was only using it to stock my rooms with monsters, tricks, traps, and treasure. Then I decided to use it to determine how many exits where in a room based on its size. Then I started using it to add some more zaniness to my passages. Then I saw the tables at the end with lakes and magic pools and I felt I had to use those somehow. I'm slowly but surely becoming Appendix A-pilled.

There's lots of great advice out there for designing dungeons. So much so that I would be surprised if any one individual designed their dungeons using a method derived solely from any one source. There are many methods to generate fantastic, like life, sensible dungeons. By contrast, here is a dungeon level I recently generated using Appendix A (sort of - I simplified the room sizes and used B/X's stocking procedure):

You might look at this and say, "This is crazy! It looks dumb! Who would build this? It makes no sense!" And you're right - it doesn't make a lot of sense. It does look dumb. But Appendix A is also like, really good at reproducing a very particular kind of dungeon - the whacky Gygaxian early TSR era D&D dungeon. The dungeon sicko's labyrinth.

Look at B1's map of Quasqueton (particularly the upper level, at left):

You might say, "Okay, well that is also stupid." And you would be right!

I've written before about how the construction of Quasqueton tells us a lot about the nature of its builders, Rogahn and Zelligar. They were dungeon-ass-dungeon heads. They were powerful adventurers, which means they spent a lot of time in dungeons extracting treasure to gain XP to earn that power. Once they had it, what did they do? They used it to build a dungeon, just like the ones they explored in their youth. It is filled with features specifically designed to confound, frustrate, and murder other adventurers. It's not an ancient, inscrutable mythic underworld. It is a bizarro death trap built by some crazy ex-adventurers just a few decades ago.

I wrote about this too. In AD&D, it is assumed that player characters (and, by extension, character-type NPCs) will build dungeons beneath their strongholds. AD&D's wilderness is littered with deserted strongholds. Those all probably have dungeons beneath them. Presumably, the town and city are inhabited by powerful character-type NPCs who also rule strongholds. The especially high level NPCs are never randomly encountered walking around town. What are they doing? They're going sicko mode, working on their dungeons. They just added a third level, and now they're installing trap doors on the first level that drop you down to the third, where they keep their owlbears. And they're hungry!

There are, of course, other sorts of dungeons than these, and you should include those in your campaign as well, but this is maybe my favorite type. As I've been running Dungeon Module B1, I've come to really enjoy Quasqueton. It has lots of bizarre passages that wind throughout the complex and sort of loop back on themselves to rejoin the area from which they originated. It seems kind of superfluous at first, until you realize that playing in these environments is really fun. 

You might wander from the entranceway down the meandering halls, turning this way and that, and just when you think you're lost, you wind up back where you started. You might think the orcs are fleeing, until a few minutes later they appear from the side passage to flank you. Likewise, once you've familiarized yourself with the terrain, it will be you using those same passages to flank the orcs instead. Some of the most blissful moments of our B1 campaign have been those in which the players spend 20 minutes planning an ambush against their enemies, figuring out how to split their massive party into teams of three and which team is taking which passage.

When you think about dungeons as places built by experienced adventurers to confound the novice adventurers who will one day come to steal their stuff, the wackiness of the Appendix A dungeon makes a bit more sense. If you look at it and think to yourself that an insane person must have built it, that's a good thing. The person who built it was probably deeply unwell. I feel a bit unwell just mapping it out!

But enough preamble. I want to get into the weeds and really dissect Appendix A. Let's start at the beginning:

Gygax claims that this system "can be used directly in conjunction with actual play" (by which I assume he means you can use it to generate a dungeon on the fly at the table). I don't buy that for a second, and don't recommend it. I guess if your players understand that this what they're in for, fine, it might actually be fun, but I don't see myself doing that.

The second paragraph suggests, in the event there are ruins above your dungeon, there will always be some monster living in them - this conflicts with Appendix C's castle subtables, which have some castles being "totally deserted" and others being "deserted (monster therein)":

I wouldn't have every dungeon's upper works be inhabited by a monster, but I might roll to determine if a monster's made its lair there, the same as I do any other hex on my map.

The third paragraph tells us to always start the first level of the dungeon with a room in the middle of the sheet of graph paper. We're told to go to Table V and follow that procedure or use one of the "starter" areas (image at the top of this post). We should also keep a "record of all monsters, treasures, tricks/traps, and whatever - a normal dungeon matrix." Sounds reasonable.

This is an important one: "Discretion must prevail at all times." Reroll results if they don't make sense, or even if you simply don't like them. I had to hammer this into my thick skull when, to my frustration, I continuously generated side passages which doubled back at a 45 degree angle to rejoin the corridor from whence they had just come. As I described earlier, there is sometimes a certain charm to this when exploited for a tactical benefit, but too much of it can strain credulity just a bit.

As instructed above, let's start with Table V:

We use this table to determine the shape and size of chambers and rooms. Wait - what's the difference between a chamber and a room? Well, that is never really explained. Chambers on average are a bit bigger. Is this really necessary?

The main difference, besides size, seems to be whether the exits from the area are passages or doors (see item 4 in this post - which is generally a really useful post on this subject). Exits from chambers are usually passages (that is, doorless openings which lead to corridors), while exits from rooms are usually doors. There is a separate procedure for determining where a passage leads versus where a door leads.

This is an important distinction because doors are obstacles. There are different types of doors (old wood, good wood, iron-banded wood, stone, metal, etc.). They can be stuck, locked, or trapped. You can close a door on a monster and spike it shut or cast hold portal upon it. If you fail to shove open a stuck door and there are monsters on the other side, they can't be surprised. Areas of the dungeon without doors are easier to explore. Areas with lots of doors are potentially more problematic, but you also might eventually be able to use those doors to your advantage if, say, you are fleeing from a monster.

The choice to start the first level of the dungeon with a room (which has doors) is an interesting one. What if all the doors end up being stuck or locked? Is the adventure over before it begins? Personally, I would recommend starting with a chamber instead, since it provides more options immediately.

One last thing before moving on - I hate the 10' x 10' room. I'm mapping at a scale of 10' per square, so the 10' x 10' room is just a single square with a line drawn around it. It's barely big enough to fit a number inside of it for keying purposes. It's so annoying. I would get rid of it entirely and just make the smallest room 20' x 20'.

Let's look at our chambers and rooms of unusual shape and size:

This is interesting, although I find these rather annoying to draw, personally. I'm hesitant to throw them out entirely though, as I like the chance of generating a cave, but even more so the circular chamber or room, which has a chance of containing a pool, well, or shaft. Neat!

Much like the dungeon itself, Appendix A is a bit of a labyrinth. We're told to immediately got to Table V for some reason (why is it not Table I?), which then might send us further down to Table VIII. There is a lot of jumping around involved, and the organization of these tables and how you're meant to follow them is one of my biggest gripes with this section of the book.

Since we're here, let's jump to Table VIII A and C:

Huh, so if you roll a pool in a circular chamber or room (only a 25% chance), you then have a 40% chance of there actually being no pool? That doesn't seem very fun (this will become clearer in a moment - for now I would ignore results 1-8 or roll d12+8 instead). Pools can contain monsters or monsters and treasure, or they can be magical. Awesome! Let's see that magic pool table:

Sweet. Magic pools can be good or bad. They can turn gold into platinum or lead (presumably any quantity, but only once!), increase or decrease a random ability score by 1-3 (one time only, rolled separately for each character!), or teleport you to the surface, elsewhere on the level, down one level, or 100 miles away from the dungeon in the outdoors (sounds like a great time for a hexcrawl)! They can also talk. Talking pools have an alignment (30% LG, 15% LE, 15% CG, 25% CE, and 15% N) and will either damage you if you're not of the same alignment or grant you a wish (!) if you are. Time to break out the alignment language to make sure.

Here is the table of unusual sizes for chambers and rooms:

The largest size on the earlier table is 1,200 sq. ft. (for a room) or 2,400 sq. ft. (for a chamber), so this will often result in much larger areas. I'm not a huge fan of this. I have been deep into randomly generating a dungeon when suddenly one of these areas pops up, I roll multiple 15-20s, and the new area ends up occupying like, all the remaining space on the page. Again, use discretion.

Table V also tells us to roll for exits, contents, treasure, and how the treasure is contained, so let's go in that order, on to Table V C:

After rolling d20, you determine the number of exits from the chamber or room based on its total size. Generally speaking, a high roll plus a large room will result in more exits - which makes sense - unless you roll a 10 or higher, in which case the chamber or room either has a random number of exits (d4) or just one, regardless of size (note that the "chambers have passages, rooms have doors" rule of thumb is inverted here), or it has just one exit if it's large enough in area, or no (visible) exits if it's too small. In the latter case, we're told to check once per 10' for secret doors.

Before I move on to that, I do think it's interesting that this suggests four general size categories for rooms - up to 600 sq. ft., up to 1200 sq. ft., up to 1600 sq. ft., and over 1600 sq. ft. If mapping with 10' squares, this roughly corresponds to 20' x 20', 30' x 30', 40' x 40', and anything larger than that (let's say 50' x 50'). If you want to standardize your dungeon a bit and get rid of those pesky chambers and rooms of unusual size (but maybe keep the caverns and circular areas with their chance of cool stuff like magic pools), you could simplify it and say there are simply four different sizes of rooms (as I did in my dungeon above).

Table V D tells us how to determine where a door is located and how to check for secret doors, as well as what to do if our doors end up leading to previously mapped areas:

Personally, I just roll a d8 to determine where the exits are located (I have a d8 with cardinal directions instead of numbers). I like when an exit to a chamber or room is in the corner because it creates more diagonal passages, which again recreates that zany character of early TSR dungeons. 

So, about that footnote regarding secret doors. First, note that if a passage or door leads to a previously mapped space, that is indicative of a secret door or one way door leading back to that mapped area, which is a neat bit of looping tech.

Table V C tells us, on a roll of 10-12, if the chamber or room is 1200 sq. ft. or less, or on a roll of 13-15, if the chamber or room is 1600 sq. ft. or less, that there are no visible exits, and to check once per 10' for secret doors. I take this to mean that for every 10' section of wall, we are to roll a d20. On a 1-5, there's a secret door (I'm assuming a result of 6-20 is treated as a negative, although a secret door can certainly also be a one-way door, as in the entrance corridor of B1's Quasqueton).

Let's say we roll a 13-15 on Table V C and our chamber or room is exactly 1600 sq. ft. - 40' x 40'. That means there are a total of 16 10' sections of wall. On average, that chamber or room will contain four secret doors, and it could be much more depending on how you roll.

Many times have I ended up with far more secret doors than I would like in a single chamber or room, so here's what I do. If I roll up a chamber or room with no exits, I then roll again on table V C until I get another result that yields a positive number of exits, then I roll again according to the little secret door footnote under Table V D to determine if those are actual secret doors, one way doors, or regular doors. I treat the initial roll as simply an indication that there might be secret doors, but only in an amount that makes sense according to the size of the chamber or room, and it entirely eliminates the possibility of every single section of wall containing such a door. You might want a 40' x 40' chamber or room with 16 secret doors in it, but I don't. I'm letting discretion prevail!

Next, we have to roll to determine the chamber or room's contents on Table V F:

This table is sure to cause some consternation. 60% of rooms are empty? That isn't very fun! But real empty room-heads know that an "empty" room is not truly empty. I wrote about this a great deal in my post about B1's room design (which also contains links to a bunch of great posts about empty rooms).

If you don't like so many empty rooms, consider using B/X's stocking procedure instead:

Using this table, you end up with something like 28% empty, 17% monster, 17% monster with treasure, 17% special, 11% trap, 6% empty with treasure, and 6% trap with treasure. I go back and forth on which I prefer. AD&D's stocking table is sometimes too sparse, and B/X's is sometimes too crowded. Use whichever you prefer. I can assure you they both work!

I won't go into how you determine what monsters are in the dungeon, as that information is found in Appendix C. 

One thing I will note which is of interest on this table is that a result of 18 is either a special room or stairs up or down - you will have to decide which is which. If you are trying to keep your dungeon somewhat manageable (i.e., you are not creating an infinite dungeon to support an entire campaign's worth of play on its own), I recommend ignoring results which give you stairs leading down. However, I recommend keeping any results which yield stairs leading up, as they can lead to multiple entrances/exits to/from the dungeon, which every dungeon should have.

A method I've used in randomly generating dungeons to make them less infinite is to treat special chambers and rooms and those with treasure as dead ends - I don't generate any more exits from those areas. Since these areas contain treasure, I think they should lie at the end of a given path as a reward to the players for thoroughly exploring that "branch" of the dungeon. There might still be other ways into the chamber or room via secret or one-way doors, as described above, but overall this makes the dungeon a bit more manageable and less likely to sprawl uncontrollably.

Table V F leads us to Table V G and Table VII. Let's look at V G:

One thing I like about this table is that you roll twice for treasure hoards guarded by monsters and add 10% to each roll. These hoards will be larger and have a better chance of containing particularly valuable treasure like gold, platinum, gems, jewelry, and magic items.

I do not recommend using the coinage amounts as is. Instead, I recommend rolling to determine the total gold piece value of treasure in the room, then use something like Hack & Slash Publishing's excellent Compendium II, which contains lots of tables for generating interesting treasure. You can roll to determine how many "units" of treasure are in the room, then divide the total value by that amount to get a certain number of items worth a certain amount of gold pieces each, then dice to determine what each item is. This is much better than finding a pile of 1,000 silver pieces, and is consistent with Gygax's own thoughts about what a treasure hoard should look like.

Before we get to Table VII, Table V G directs us to Tables V H, I, and J. 

Table V H is a list of containers for treasure:

Nothing especially noteworthy here, except I guess that some containers are more convenient than others. The footnote tells us "if desired" to roll on either Table V I or Table V J. Here is Table V I:

This is a variety of ways that treasure can be trapped. This can range from reasonable (poisoned needles in the locking mechanism of a chest) to pretty absurd (a blade scything across the inside of a sack - I remind myself that discretion must prevail at all times). Of note is that none of these entries indicate how much damage these traps should do, or how deadly the associated poisons are, so you'll have to determine that yourself. Once again, Hack & Slash Publishing has a much better resource on this subject (which also addresses empty rooms).

I'm not a huge fan of trapping my treasure. I much prefer to trap the means of accessing the treasure (i.e., the door to a vault). Most treasure you find in the dungeon will be guarded by monsters anyway, so I don't see the need to guard it with scything blades as well. I'm much more a fan of hiding my treasure, which is covered by Table V J:

You could roll on this table, but I prefer to just look at the description of items and furnishings in my room and use that as inspiration when determining how the treasure is hidden. Perhaps a bronze statuette in a library is concealed beneath an overturned bookshelf and a pile of books. A jeweled ring in the kitchen might be stashed in the fork drawer. A coffer containing a stash of platinum pieces in a gallery is secured within a wall safe behind a framed painting on the wall. Stuff like that.

Here's Table VII:

This is golden. We've got pits, pits with spikes, and garbage compactor pits, we've got shifting walls, oil and cinders, arrow traps and spear traps, poisonous gases, illusionary walls, chutes, Looney Tunes doors and stone blocks that fall on you and crush you, and elevator rooms. My only real gripe with this table is that I have no idea how I'm supposed to interpret the 1-5 result. What, in the fiction, is this representing?

I also think it's worth noting that you may want to tailor your traps to your dungeon based on its history. If my dungeon was built by a magic-user, the traps should employ far more magic than this, for example. A dungeon built by dwarves should include more stonework tricks and traps. If you're stuck, though, this is not a bad place to start.

The 1-5 result directs us to Table II, but the 17 result directs us to Table VII A, so let's start there:

We've got gas that blinds you for up to an hour (!), gas that makes you run away, gas that puts you to sleep for up to 2 hours (!!), gas that makes you stronger (?), gas that forces you to return to the surface (??), and gas that immediately kills you (!!!). The most puzzling of these is the gas that makes you sick in a nonspecific way that somehow forces you to leave the dungeon. I don't know what that's about.

35% of gases are benign, and the next most likely result is actually to empower the party's fighters. The players might be lulled into charging headlong into any gases they see, only to have a 5% chance to instantly die unless a saving throw is made. Funny. I'm sure you could have lots of fun coming up with your own gases - a stinking cloud that causes choking and retching, a death fog that kills only the party's 0th level hirelings and dogs, a flammable gas that explodes if any open flames are brought into it, etc.

So we know how big our chamber or room is, how many exits there are and where they're located, and what's in the room. Where do we go from here? Table II:

Okay, ignore the "Location of Door" column, because we already know where our doors are. This part is confusing. For now, let's look at "Space Beyond Door Is". 

A door can lead to a parallel passage (I think what is meant by this is a "T" intersection, although I suppose it could mean the door opens onto two passages straight ahead which run parallel to each other, though the "30' in both directions" footnote makes me think it is the former) or to one of those pesky 10' x 10' rooms, a passage that goes straight, 45 degrees ahead or behind (the ones that go behind are a bit annoying as they tend to run into previously mapped areas often), or to a room or chamber. Note that doors lead to rooms more often than chambers.

We're also meant to check the width of passages on Table III A. Before we go down that route, let's look at Table I, because the first footnote refers to it, and it makes this table make a bit more sense.

This table is badly named. This should be called, like, "Passages". It is named "Periodic Check" because - I think - you are meant to roll on it periodically as you're mapping a passage. Based on results 6-10, 11-13, and 19, it seems the default length of a section of passage is 30'. Remember that rooms have doors and chambers have passages. Based on result 14-16, it seems that exits from a chamber always lead to 30' passages, at which time you start rolling on this table to determine where those passages lead. You would do the same thing if, when rolling on Table II to determine what's beyond a door, you get one of the passage results.

You can see that result 3-5 yields a door in a passage. This is when you roll on Table II "Location of Door", which makes the first footnote on that table make a lot more sense. If the door in the passage is straight ahead, then the passage simply leads to that door. If it is to the left or right, then you roll again on Table I (placing any other doors that are rolled) until you roll something other than a door (or until a door is determined to be straight ahead, I suppose), in which case you ignore that result, and the passage simply continues for 30'.

Not confusing at all, right?

Back to Table I. In addition to leading to doors, passages can continue straight, side passages can branch off of them, they can turn, or they can lead to chambers, stairs, or dead ends (some of which have secret doors - I assume it is a 25% chance each for left, right, and ahead, based on the Table V D footnote). Passages can also contain tricks, traps, and wandering monsters. I like this a lot because it means you'll have to actually key your passages. 

When I'm rolling up a dungeon ahead of time (which again, I recommend you do), I treat the "wandering monster" result instead as a "monster sentry". You can see in the example dungeon I shared near the top of this post that the bottom left corner of the map contains four (!) chambers or rooms with monsters and treasure, connected by several passages, two of which have monsters in the middle of them. 

Perhaps this section of the dungeon is controlled by a faction of goblins, and the monsters in the passages are goblin sentries, guarding the passages against incursions. This allows monsters to actually control their territory in the dungeon, not just sit in their chambers or rooms waiting to be killed. I like it a lot.

Table I points us towards Tables III, IV, and VI. Here is Table III:

I love this. The "T"s, the "Y"s, the four-way intersections, and the "X"s...this is true Gygaxian zany dungeon madness. Again, this is very much generating an infinite dungeon. A side passage is already yielding two passages, but there's also a 20% chance that you end up with three new passages to map, and a 5% chance you end up with four (if you roll a 20 and the existing passage is horizontal or vertical). It's very silly, but I like it.

Table III A determines passage width:

I'm not sure how I feel about this. I've been mapping my dungeons with passages represented by a single, clean line, which for my purposes is a 10' passage. I don't really want to draw out the dungeon in this level of detail. The 5' passage is also annoying to draw for the same reason that a 10' x 10' room is. That being said, I love the "Special Passage" table, Table III B:

A 50' wide passage with columns and an upper gallery, and streams, rivers, and 200' deep chasms that bisect passageways! Streams, rivers, and chasms might be bridged or serve as obstacles. You might be able to leap across the chasm. There might be a boat you can use to cross the river. Perhaps there is some sort of dungeon ferryman? A troll that charges a toll to ferry you across one at a time, only to ambush the lone member of the party on the other side? This is sweet. More galleries, rivers, and chasms in dungeons!

Here is Table IV, of which I don't have much to say:

Note that you have to check the width of the passage again whenever the passage turns, but you do not check the width of side passages, for some reason.

And finally, Table VI:

Stairs can go down one to three levels, and there is a percentage chance that a door will close behind the party, trapping them in the lower level of the dungeon for the day. That's really scary! Stairs can also go up (but only ever one level for some reason). They can lead to dead ends, which sometimes contain chutes which go down. Stairs can instead be chimneys which go up or down, or trap doors to lower levels (I assume that the difference between a chute and a trap door is simply whether the characters are aware of its presence). Stairs can go up one level and then down two. It's very silly, and again you might want to have stairs only go up if you're trying to keep your dungeon a reasonable size.

The footnote to this table mentions solo play, so let's jump to the end of Appendix A:

"For special areas you can have a friend or correspondent send you sealed information." Okay, I kind of want to try this!

Bonus round:

Caves and caverns are large, mammoth even! They can contain pools or lakes. Here the 40% chance of there being no pool on Table VIII A makes a lot more sense - remember when I said it would eventually? Lakes in mammoth caverns are awesome:

Like pools, lakes can contain monsters. Also like pools, they can be enchanted, but enchanted lakes lead to other dimensions or special temples and are very often guarded by monsters. Man, the lower level of Quasqueton would be so much cooler with an enchanted lake (the huge cavern with all the bats would be a good candidate, and I'm kicking myself now for not adding that in).

That's it for Appendix A. I've really come around on this one. It is horribly presented, and it's taken me years of puzzling to figure it out, but I do think it creates some interesting stuff if you're willing to embrace the wackiness of it. Like many parts of AD&D, such as its domain game, you can take or leave what you like. Use a different stocking table, come up with your own tricks and traps, standardize the size and shapes of rooms, whatever. Remember that discretion must prevail at all times.

Developing the Sandbox: Rumor 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.

This post will focus on creating rumor tables for your towns and cities. 

What is the purpose of an in-world rumor in a TTRPG? According to the Designing Dungeons course (which is of course preoccupied with dungeons specifically), rumors provide clues to the dungeon, reinforce its themes, and point the players back towards elements of the dungeon they may have missed. More broadly speaking, in a sandbox setting, rumors drive investigation and exploration of the world and help make the world feel more lifelike.

In short, rumors are information. Information allows the players to make choices - as always, the better the information, the better the player's ability to anticipate their choice's impact. Thus, we need to make sure our rumors provide good information.

What about false rumors? That's a thing in Dungeons & Dragons, right? False rumors are, at times, delightful. I'm as big a fan of "Bree-yark" is goblin for "We surrender!" as the next guy but, more often, false rumors are just kind of detrimental to play. As Gus L. points out, they waste time and erode trust  between players and the DM. They serve a purpose opposite to what rumors are meant to accomplish, muddying themes, sending the players on wild goose chases, or paralyzing them entirely.

Since I am currently running my B1 sandbox, let's look at B1's rumor table as an example (as an aside, see this post about B1, Caverns of Thracia, and the hunt for the first rumor table.):

This is not a bad rumor table. It tells the players what sorts of monsters might be found in Quasqueton, that it has multiple levels, that there are secrets within, and what sorts of rooms the players might expect to find there. The information is somewhat pedestrian, but this is an introductory module. The rumors are not only telling the players what to expect from the dungeon, but what to expect from the game itself. 

The false rumors, however, are largely terrible.

Zelligar does have a workshop in the stronghold, but the rumor is "false" because he didn't work on magic stronger than any known to man (he just used it to torture barbarians, stocked it with containers full of mundane junk, and kept a ghost cat in a jar to troll adventurers). There is no 100,000 g.p. gem hidden in the stronghold. There is no curse upon the place or its treasure. The "treasure" hidden in a pool of water is a totally pointless illusion. The dungeon is not filled with guards, and Rogahn and Zelligar have not returned.

While there are kernels of truth to some of these rumors, more of them either set up the players for disappointment or actively discourage them from going to the dungeon - you know, the single adventure site upon which the entire module depends. What happens when the players comb the whole place and don't find any sign of magic "stronger than any known to man" or of a 100,000 g.p. gem? What happens if they decide the dungeon sounds too dangerous? It's full of guards, and Rogahn and Zelligar have come back, too. It's treasures are all cursed anyway, so what's the point?

"But wait," you might say, "you talk all the time on this blog about running AD&D the Gygaxian way, with constant taxes and annoying NPCs who hate the player characters and want them to go away and die. This adversarial bullshit should be right up your alley!"

And you are kind of right. I am trying to run my game in some approximation of that style, and I do find it quite fun. For some reason, I draw the line at false rumors. Why? I don't know. I think I just have a lot of information about this setting that I want to communicate to the players, and I don't want to waste space on my tables with four different (false) rumors about how the dungeon is dangerous. The players know the dungeon is dangerous. What actually makes it dangerous?

That's not to say I'll come right out and tell the players that the magic stone in Quasqueton has a 5% chance of granting a limited wish specifically. Unreliable rumors are good! "An enchanted stone within the stronghold will grant a wish to anyone who chips off a piece of it and places it within their mouth" is a false rumor because the stone does other things besides granting wishes, but the fact that it grants wishes is true. The rumor itself is a bit too on the nose for me, but that's besides the point.

Now, in a sandbox, I don't want all my rumors to be about the dungeon. I want my rumors to also point to other settlements, strongholds, and monster lairs. I want them to give hints about outdoor encounters. I want them to indicate what sort of monsters prowl the town's streets and to clue the players into the political landscape of the settlement or what events I have scheduled on my campaign calendar.

How do you create a rumor table? These posts each have a sort of "generic" rumor table you can roll on almost like a spark table to create more specific rumors. This is neat! I personally don't need this tech, but you might find it useful if you're having a hard time coming up with ideas.

What I've done recently is split my rumor table into three tables. How do I structure that? I will give you a hint - the three tables are derived from this page of the AD&D DMG:

I don't think it's particularly hard to figure out, so I will tell you. Much like modern D&D puts forward three "pillars of play" (combat, exploration, and social interaction), here I think Gygax is putting forward a different (parallel) set of three pillars - dungeon expeditions, outdoor exploration, and town adventures. Thus, my three rumor tables list dungeon rumors, wilderness rumors, and settlement rumors.

"Wilderness rumors" is a bit of a misnomer. Just as the "exploration" pillar is more like the "everything else" pillar in modern D&D, "wilderness/outdoors" is the "everything else" of the sandbox. This includes rumors about other settlements, strongholds, monster lairs, and outdoor encounters. The town and dungeon are both complex enough environments to warrant their own tables, but the other locations in the sandbox really just need one rumor to point the players in that direction (or, in the case of outdoor encounters, give them fair warning).

While dungeon rumors will be hyper-specific, providing information about specific rooms, monsters, tricks, traps, treasure, and other secrets, all other rumors can be somewhat vague - again, just kind of nudging the players that way. Dungeon exploration is the default mode of play in the early game. In most cases the players will not need to be directed towards the dungeon, but they will need specific information about its contents. As the campaign evolves, however, you'll want them to slowly become aware of adventuring opportunities in the town/city and elsewhere.

For my dungeon table, I included those rumors from B1 which I liked, then supplemented them with my own. I basically combed through my version of B1 and thought of every bit of information I might give to the players about the place - again, rooms, monsters, tricks, traps, treasure, and other secrets. These are very broad, and complement each other when combined. Some rumors might simply say "There are goblins in Quasqueton" or "There are orcs in Quasqueton", while others might be more specific: "The goblins and the orcs of Quasqueton hate each other", "The orcs of Quasqueton worship a magic stone" or "The orcs of Quasqueton are at war with one another."

For my town rumor table, I generated one rumor for each element of the town which I wanted to put on the players' radar - that is, its locations, NPCs, and potential encounters. There's a rumor about the wizard who rules the town, a rumor about the lesser wizard who serves him, and a rumor about the cleric who rules her own stronghold. There's a rumor about beasts attacking people, a rumor about spirits haunting the streets, a rumor about a corrupt official blackmailing merchants, and a rumor about a derelict house from which strange lights are seen at night. All of these point to locations or warn the party of potential encounters. I also include a permanent entry on the table for whatever town event is coming up on my calendar.

Likewise, my wilderness rumor table has one rumor for each "wilderness" location, plus a few more for particularly noteworthy outdoor encounters which aren't otherwise covered by my other locations. Brigands terrorizing the countryside would be covered by the rumor about the brigands' stronghold, and owlbears in the forest would be covered by the rumor about their lair - I would not include an additional rumor for those outdoor encounters just because they also appear on my encounter tables. If there are unique or interesting monsters wandering the wilderness who otherwise don't have their own lairs (fey "river women" who don't live anywhere in particular but are sometimes encountered deep in the forest), those get their own entry on the table.

Since I replace outdoor encounters on my tables once they've been used, I update my rumor tables accordingly. You may not have to do this, but I do think a rumor table should be a living document, assuming that the status quo is changing even when the player characters are being somewhat inactive. 

This goes for rumors about the town and dungeon as well. If the first rumor discloses that the wizard and the cleric in town have an uneasy truce, then the next might disclose that the cleric has attempted to assassinate the wizard. If the players already have the rumor about the orcs in the dungeon being at war, the next rumor might tell them that one side has triumphed over the other.

You can go down a real rabbit hole with this stuff, creating subtables for each entry on the main table (you could have a d4 table of rumors about the wizard overlord or the plundering brigands specifically), but I think this is overkill. The rumor just makes the players aware of the thing. If they want more information, they can start asking specific questions, and I have most of the information to answer those questions, if appropriate, as needed. No need to make your rumor tables maddeningly comprehensive.

With three separate rumor tables covering distinct topics, when players go hunting for rumors, I can ask them: Do you want rumors about the dungeon, the town, or the wilderness? I view rumor-gathering as an active pursuit, not a passive one. The players don't just accumulate rumors by existing in town. The players have to say they want to do it, and they have to spend time and money doing it, just like with almost anything else they do in town. Since they are choosing to gather rumors, it also makes sense to me that they be able to choose which rumors they're looking for.

I like this rule of thumb for rumor-gathering from OD&D:

Delta's post on the subject clarifies that this was likely intended as a means for players to find out about expeditions by rival players operating in the same campaign simultaneously, but I see no reason why it can't apply more broadly. I feel there has to be some cost to gathering rumors, and, as Delta points out, this is seemingly the only guidance provided in any edition of D&D. It is a little bit cost prohibitive for player characters just starting out, but that's okay with me. They can either spend less on equipment and get some information instead, or they can go in blind for their first expedition.

It's also worth considering how you choose to present rumors to the players. Do you attribute each rumor to a specific NPC? Personally, I'm fine with abstracting it. I have enough NPCs to worry about as it is, and I can kind of wing it when it comes to where a rumor is coming from based on the nature of the rumor and where the players hear it.

Do you roleplay out the dispensation of rumors? I don't know, do you roleplay shopping? Again, I'm perfectly fine with abstracting this and simply telling the players what they hear. I don't need to tell it to them in a gruff sailor's voice. If they start asking follow up questions, maybe, but I'm only going to spend a significant amount of game time on this of the players decide that it's worth their time.

I also like this post about tying rumors to settlement events, however, again, I think it might not be for me. I have a separate procedure for determining when events happen, and events already provide information about what's going on in the world. It makes sense to me that players should be able to learn about something that's going to happen before it happens. That is, the players should be able to learn that loggers have spotted kobolds in the woods before the kobolds launch a raid on the town.

There's even more to explore. Player characters may have the choice to live at different economic levels and in different conditions. The character who is unwashed and flea-ridden and sleeps in stables does not have access to the upper classes, and the haughty character who dresses in fine silks and gold rings might be shunned by the downtrodden and class-conscious folk. Their affiliations may likewise affect their access to rumors. A paladin will not have access to criminal networks, and a thief may not be privy to the church's scuttlebutt.

What rumors are exchanged by loggers and hunters? How about dockworkers and fishermen? Merchants and officials? Mages at the Wizard's Day ball? Do monsters know rumors? Can you gather rumors in the dungeon?

You can clearly get deep in the weeds with this stuff. For now, I prefer to keep it simple. If you were out drinking at the tavern and heard tell of some cool new rumor tech, I have 10-60 gold pieces with your name on them!

Developing the Sandbox: The Campaign Calendar

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.

A man of disputable wisdom once said that "YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT." This has since become a bit of a meme in the TTRPG community. It is an emphatic declarative statement written in all caps by a larger than life figure in the hobby whom a lot of people enjoy ridiculing, often for good reason. But is there truth to it?

Kinda! Honestly, I've actually never kept a calendar for any of my D&D games. They still felt pretty meaningful to me. Nonetheless, at the end of my longest-running campaign ever (a three and a half year 5e game that took the player characters from 3rd to 20th level and beyond), I felt myself regretting not having a calendar. 

How long had it taken for the characters to make their ascent to power? How long had they known each other? When did they first meet that henchman? How many seasons, moon's turns, and holidays had passed them by? I didn't know.

I was running the campaign by the seat of my pants. I randomized the weather every day. It was an NPC's birthday or the day of some festival when I needed it to be. If a PC became a lycanthrope, only then would I bother to figure out when the next full moon was. Dungeons were restocked, new monsters moved into the region, and factions moved against one another and towards their goals when I felt like they should.

It worked for me. I didn't need a calendar, but I felt myself wanting one all the same.

One of the benefits of running a small sandbox (like the one I created for B1) is that you stand a reasonable chance of, at some point (possibly even before play begins), actually finishing prepping the whole thing for play. Technically this is possible for larger sandboxes as well, but it's a more Herculean task, and you are more likely to burn out before play even begins or to fall behind during play (if, like me, your interest waxes and wanes naturally as the campaign goes on), likely resulting in a lesser quality experience for you and your players.

The sandbox is never actually finished, because running the sandbox is its own thing that requires maintenance between sessions. The benefit of having most of your sandbox prepped and ready to go is that you have more time between sessions for those more ancillary pursuits. When you're not rushing to detail the owlbear den the players intend to clear out on their next expedition, you can instead spend that time restocking the dungeon, updating your outdoor encounter tables, and figuring out if those NPCs succeeded in their most recent scheme.

This is also a great time to work on your calendar. Now, the calendar might be one of those things you want to have prepared ahead of play. Perhaps you want to generate a month's worth of weather. That's pretty reasonable. But I've run nearly two dozen sessions of my B1 campaign, and I'm only just now feeling the need to create one of these bad boys.

What made me want a campaign calendar? Well, part of it was that I just thought it would be neat. That's reason enough. Part of it was remembering the regret I felt at the end of past campaigns. A big part of it was that the party started to accumulate an absurd number of NPC hirelings and paid them in advance, and the way that I was tracking the length of their employment was totally impractical. 

So, I made a calendar.

If you like, you can go on rootring and search "calendar", read all the advice, and come up with something that works for you. Like making a dungeon, there is tons of advice on this subject, and it's impossible to summarize without conducting a meta analysis.

Here's what I did. I got a calendar template from Google Sheets (I used the first option, which is just a sheet for each month of the year and a cell for each day of the month). This is a 2026 Earth calendar. There are no fancy names for the months of the year or the days of the week. You can do this if you want, but it isn't important to me, so I didn't do it for now (I remember really liking the vanilla fantasy names for the month presented by Shamus Young on his Twenty Sided blog...21 years ago?!).

First, I went back through my play reports and figured out when the campaign began. I had already decided that the campaign began in Spring, because that seemed like a reasonable time when adventurers would embark on adventuring activities. For simplicity, Spring is March, April, and May, Summer is June, July, and August, Fall is September, October, and November, and Winter is December, January, and February (this will be important when determining the weather).

I looked at when my first session took place in real life - March 12th. Perfect! I decided that was the in-game start of the campaign as well. Then, I went through my play reports, looking for any mention of the party resting or time passing. I also noted when the party brought on their hirelings and for how long. I ended up with this:

After 20 sessions and 6 months of play, just 13 days had passed in game. Wow! You could go more in depth, noting which sessions occurred during which days and what specific activities the party engaged in - and I might do that still - but it felt unnecessary at the moment.

Since one of the main reasons I wished to start work on the calendar was to track the length of NPCs' employment, I went into the future on the calendar and marked the days when each hirelings' employment would expire. At this rate, it will be another 5 or 6 sessions before the party's porters' and mercenaries' contracts need to be renewed, and 18 or 19 sessions before the crew of the party's river barge can retire, but it's useful information to know. Time passes weirdly during a campaign. A single day might be several sessions, and the next session might cover several days.

I also liked the idea of pre-rolling weather for a month or so. In the real world, you can often tell when it's likely to rain in the coming days, and I want to be able to foreshadow that (the players might not want to embark from town if it seems like they're going to get a torrential rainstorm the next day). It also allows me to skip rolling for weather at the table, and makes me less likely to forget to do so. So, I rolled weather for the rest of the month (as well as the following month, since we're nearing the end of the current one).

I used these hex flowers to determine the weather:

I like these because they're evocative, they only require a single roll for each day, they're based on the seasons, and each day's weather affects the next day's weather. Depending on your system of choice and how weather mechanically impacts things like overland travel or encounter chances, you'll likely have to do some interpretation of the results, but it works reasonably well. In addition to marking daily weather on my calendar, I noted if the weather imposed penalties on overland movement or modified outdoor encounter chances for that day.

Since I am using a real-world calendar, I could also look up what the weather was actually like on each day in some area of the real world comparable to my setting, but in practice I found the information I was looking for too difficult to find, and the information I did find too fiddly for my uses. It would be fun to use a system where the weather can change throughout the day, as it does in real life, but I personally don't need that.

Another thing I thought would be fun and necessary to track is the phases of the moon. This information can be based on the real world and is pretty easy to find, but you can also just make it up. Pick a day during your first month that the moon is full, then have it be full again every 29 days or whatever. Or decide that full moons in your setting are more or less common if you like. You'll have to come up with that yourself. You can also track other celestial events like eclipses and supermoons the same way.

Why is the moon important? Well, don't tell my players, but my sandbox has lycanthropes in it. I want to know when there's increased lycanthrope activity. The player characters might in turn become lycanthropes, and I want to know when they're going to transform and wreak havoc, or do whatever it is werebears do (for example). The AD&D DMG has this whole table breaking down the percentage chance of a cursed individual transforming into a werebeast based on the current phase of the moon:

Clearly you will need to accurately track the phases of the moon to use this thing properly! Also note that you will need to know for how long the character has been a lycanthrope. Another win for the campaign calendar!

You might also decide that the local Evil temple does some nefarious stuff during the lunar eclipse or that magic is more powerful during that time. That seems like a fun application of this tech.

Another fun thing you can do with your calendar is track settlement events like holidays, festivals, NPC birthdays, or whatever. If the players plan for their characters to spend a week in town, it would be nice if they knew that it was the friendly wizard NPC's birthday so that they can arrange to get her a gift. If they're planning to venture out into the wilderness but they learn that tomorrow is the annual Cheesemonger Parade, they might decide to stick around an extra day to attend the festivities and rub elbows with important contacts in the cheese industry.

I roll a d20 for each day on my calendar, and a result of 18+ is some day of significance in the settlement. I like this table from the 2014 5e DMG:

This is one of the many unsung tables of that oft-maligned book, which is honestly full of useful little stuff like this. You'll have to ignore some stuff - seasonal events like equinoxes and solstices, midsummer/winter festivals, fertility/harvest festivals, and celestial events which you're already tracking by other means - but overall this is pretty good stuff!

I wouldn't bother determining events like this for every settlement in the sandbox. I simply rolled for the largest settlement - the one the PCs are most likely to spend extended amounts of time in. You can probably safely assume that the villages, hamlets, and thorps which surround your town celebrate more or less the same events as the town itself.

There's also no reason to limit this to settlements only. Do the denizens of the dungeon celebrate holidays? Is there some mutually recognized armistice day where they come together and parade through the dungeon? Do monsters in their lairs celebrate birthdays? Is a tournament being held at the fighter's stronghold?

You might also want larger events going on in the background - wars and famines and natural disasters and stuff. Joel at Silverarm Press wrote a post which highlights a neat table from uh...Oriental Adventures, on which you can roll for a single yearly event which in turn influences which monthly events are likely to occur. This is pretty neat tech. I haven't tried it out yet, but it's worth a look if you want like, a war happening somewhere "off screen" (or maybe even on it). Warren D. of I Cast Light! also reworked the table on his blog.

Just as you might do with weather or the phases of the moon, you can also pull yearly/monthly events from real life. Simply pick a real-world year that corresponds roughly to the period during which your campaign takes place, Google it, and look at the Wikipedia article to see what happened that year.

The calendar is also useful for tracking faction events. I know that the wizard that rules my town has a tenuous truce with the cleric who rules her own stronghold. The wizard also has a mutually friendly working relationship with a subordinate wizard who wishes to build a stronghold of her own. The cleric wants to kill the subordinate wizard. Will the cleric achieve her goals? Will the truce deteriorate? When does that happen? You will probably want some way of running factions.

You might also use the calendar as a simple timer. One of my biggest bugbears in adventure design is when some time-limited event is happening in the setting (a monster is growing in power, a city is being overrun with plague, or a bad guy is working on a nasty ritual), and the conditions of those ongoing events don't change unless the player characters intervene somehow. 

There's something to be said of a "powder keg" scenario where everything exists in a tenuous equilibrium, requiring some "X factor" (the player characters) to move things decisively in one direction or another, but that doesn't mean everything has to remain static. If some event is going to occur if given enough time to gestate, you should track it somehow. No more Big Bad Evil Guys waiting until the player characters show up to complete their rituals!

There's a party of adventurers camped out in the wilderness, clearing land to build their stronghold. When do they finish? The wizard in town is plotting against them, trying to recruit a band of ogres to root them out. When does he get the ogres to act? There are brigands who have usurped a stronghold and keep its rightful ruler prisoner. When do they execute her? Set dates for all of these things on your calendar. If the player characters take actions to aid or thwart these plots, adjust the timeline on your calendar.

These are the broad strokes. The campaign calendar is of near infinite utility, and there are many things both big and small which it can be used to keep track of. Here are some examples of what else you might track:

• When does a disease or parasitic infestation run its course or kill the afflicted?
• When do followers arrive at a player character's newly built stronghold?
• When does an NPC spy complete a mission and, if the mission fails, when can the characters safely employ another spy on the same mission?
• When does a slow poison kill?
• When does a character or NPC finish crafting an item (magical or otherwise)?
• When does a sage find the answer to a question (or discover that the question is unanswerable) and when can another question be asked of the sage? When does the sage finish acquiring a new minor or major field of study?
• When do henchmen respond to recruitment attempts?
• When does an unfaithful cleric finish atoning for their sins?
• When must an Evil cleric reassert control over their undead minions?
• When does an injured player character make a full recovery?
• When do effects like psionically induced comas, magical enchantments, or temporary insanities end?
• When does a character who mixed an oil of slipperiness with an oil of etherealness return from being lost in the Ethereal Plane? 
• When is a soul no longer trapped in an amulet of life protection, when does a character finish reading a manual of bodily health, and when can a character again invoke the Goat of Terror, and other magical item effects?
• When does an assassin finish their study of poisons?
• When does a character finish their training and level up?
• When is construction of a font or basin for holy water completed?
• When is spell research completed?
• When does an Evil artifact inflict its malevolent effects upon its possessor?
• When has a character known a hireling or henchman long enough to warrant a loyalty score increase?
• When does a character finish training a griffon as a mount and when do they finish training to fire a bow from its back?
• When does the next peasant rebellion occur? When does the rebellion evolve into a civil war?
• When do the characters have to pay taxes?
• When does a cleric or magic-user finish creating a golem?
• When is a paladin's warhorse or a conjured demon released from service?
• When is construction of a stronghold (and mazelike dungeons thereunder) completed?
• When does a character die of old age?

(This list was created by combing through the AD&D DMG with Ctrl+F, keywords "days", "weeks", "months", and "years". There are undoubtedly a great number of many other things you can track as well!)

The calendar is not just for the DM's benefit. Just as players can master a dungeon's layout and use their knowledge of such to plan optimal routes for exploration, treasure extraction, and avoidance or ambushing monsters, they can master the calendar and use it to their benefit. If the DM knows when it will rain, when the hirelings' contracts expire, and when the NPC's birthday is, this should be telegraphed to the players in some way so that they can make informed choices.

Do they wait another day in town to let the weather pass? Do they prioritize their next expedition, before their hirelings demand more money? Do they make sure to be back in town so they can attend the wizard's birthday? There's a full moon tomorrow night. Should they plan to patrol the streets of town and lay a trap for the werewolf? When are the owlbears out hunting versus sleeping in their lair? What can they do before the royal ball to improve their chances of getting an invite?

These are all more or less things you will have to track as a result of player actions - they are less about developing the sandbox than they are about running it. You can wait until your game is underway and until you absolutely need the calendar before creating it (as, admittedly, I did), but hopefully I have demonstrated why creating the calendar upfront can be beneficial as well.