When I had finished reading through all the submissions for the One Page Dungeon Contest 2012, I had a list of dungeons I was considering for nominations. We had agreed on twenty nominations but here I was with nearly thirty dungeons and adventures I liked!
The following are short commentaries on the entries I liked. Note that I printed all the entries using a black and white printer. If any of the maps are colorful, I probably missed it.
Also, I’d love to read your take on individual entries you want to recommend. What did you like about them? What is worth imitating in our own games?
Spoilers ahead!
The following list was written for referees that are staring at the pile of over one hundred submissions and wondering where to start. If you only have the time to look at a handful of dungeons, check out the stars.
– the name alone invokes the spirit of Middle Earth. Two libraries beneath a monastery: the library, and the secret: a bound toad demon that eats books. I loved the side view of the monastery, the small maps with the monastery and the library, and the silhouette of the surrounding area including other hills with elvish names and hints of goblin tribes and ruinous black magic. I liked the graphical design elements as well. Above, light background and black text, below, dark background and white text. The increased font size to indicate priorities worked very well. The smallest font size was at the very limit of what I could read, but at the same time I knew that it optional content in case I want to expand on this location. This was one of my top candidates. I want to include it in my campaign.
– a high-level underwater adventure involving mermen, a marid king, his daughter, a triton, mermen, a death knight, lacedons, a lich, and a squid wizard (a squizard). The NPCs have different relations and plans with each other. The touch of madness is on the entire adventure and I love it. I really liked the little hand-drawn portraits and maps that accompany the text like a little photo story, and I really liked the high-level aspects of it: a black blade of annihilation “that destroys anything it hits” and the abyssal deeps that lead to the plane of water. This adventure is so awesome, I really want to incorporate this into my campaign. This entry also one of my top candidates.
– another map in my favorite style. Or is it? It takes some studying because this entry has combined side-view and traditional maps. I felt that this slight confusion forced me to study it harder and engage more. I like it when the key facilitates skimming. A key element of that is the use of bold to highlight the important stuff. This key highlights the monsters. Thank you! The monster selection is standard fare (undead, yellow mold, goblins, dark elves, goblins, hobgoblins) with the exception of a zombie plant, a living statue of an undine, a demon and an ogre mage. I like using ogre mages myself. The treasure is guarded by a pseudodragon. Hah, haven’t seen those in a long time. I always wanted a pseudodragon familiar when we played AD&D. This seems like an ideal adventure for the mid-levels. Think of me and let one of the player characters befriend the pseudodragon!
– a beautiful map and a watery theme without going all-out gonzo like Water Genie vs. Undead Mermaid Gladiator. I like intelligent and charming monsters like sirens and nixies, and since I played a fighter wearing glamered plate armor in a campaign years ago I loved seeing one making an appearance in this dungeon. When adding this dungeon to my campaign, I will have to emphasize the danger to the shipping lanes and I will have to buy into the daughters of Lilith mythology. I like this idea. At the same time I realize that this isn’t optional: without the sirens being an obvious danger there is practically no in-character point in exploring the dungeon. Without the Lilith story, the shrine of Lilith will make little sense. Oh, and I’d make sure that the statues coming to life doesn’t result in combat. Instead, there must be a test the player characters need to pass in order to pass: cover your eyes when talking to the medusa, making sure you’re not easily aroused when talking to the succubus, that kind of thing: every daughter is a little puzzle. This will require appropriate hints by NPCs or rumors in nearby fishing villages. An interesting challenge for the referee. I look forward to using this dungeon in my campaign. This dungeon was also one of the best scoring ones in my list.
– wow, what a beautiful page! Unlike some other beautiful maps such as Ankhor Deeps the Worm comes with a backstory, an integrated key (no time lost finding the appropriate entry in the text and very short and to the point by default), intelligent opposition, interesting foes such as a dire hamster – I absolutely want to use this in my game. Another one of my most favorite entries!
– what a glorious mess! Based on dungeon tiles readily available online a mix of traditional and vertical sections create a multi-level dungeon full of terrible reavers, a calamari saint, a squid king, Argonauts, it’s so crazy it’s awesome and I want to add it to my campaign. It’ll be perfect for a remote sea side temple abandoned years ago. This was also one of my most favorite submissions.
– let me finish the list with another awesome map with notes, a bit like a flow chart except that it rocks! In order to activate the eye beams that melt the snow on this pass, the party will need to solve the riddle involving fire water and the ice goblet, fight ice gargoyles, snow wolves and replicas of themselves. Ah, to remember the good old days. Anyway, the visual style makes me want to play it. In fact, I prefer the lack of irony compared to Holy Sword.A final note: Given all of the above, I often felt that a simple way to get more of my attention (I don’t know how the other judges felt) is to have descriptive labels on the map itself so that I don’t have to read the key all the time and to use bold to highlight the important parts of each room so that I can easily skim it (monsters, treasure, anything that’s in your face and easy to spot when players enter the room). I also like my dungeons to have multiple entrances or exits and to provide for more goals, use interesting magic items (simply having an interesting magic item that can be removed by the party would result in two points)… That kind of thing. It’s not easy to balance this with the time and space constraints, I know. My own dungeons wouldn’t score too well using my own system.
Here are some comments I left on various discussion on Google+:
Mike Evans wonders about paladins and suggests “What if you take your oath and drink the blood and poof you gain certain abilities to your class.”
That’s exactly how I handle it in my game. Plus, the abilities vary between gods. At the moment only one character ever swore to dedicate this life to the service of Mitra and thus various minor at will abilities were offered in return: light fire at will, a halo at will, detect the presence of liars at will, preventing the utterance of lies in your presence at will, the ability to make any oath by willing participants binding.
I also tied this to a separate subsystem of reputation – you needed to a service for Mitra to qualify forthe fire making ability, you needed to save a person for Mitra to qualify for the halo, you needed to save an entire village for Mitra in order to qualify for the binding oaths. (See 2011-12-20 Magic Without Spells.)
If you don’t want to do that, you could also tie it to levels: light fire at will (minimum level 1), a halo at will (minimum level 2), detect the presence of liars at will (minimum level 3), preventing the utterance of lies in your presence at will (minimum level 5), the ability to make any oath by willing participants binding (minimum level 7).
(The picture shows a self-declared paladin of Arden, a dead elven god that does not grant any powers at all. He threw himself into a bottomless pit as the other character who had fallen into the pit had been carrying the Chalice of Arden. I love my players.)
Scrap Princess wondered about Law vs. Chaos and asked “why is the original neutral/chaos/law alignment system such a beloved artefact?”
I said: Law vs. Chaos is beloved (ie. popular with some, reviled by others, discussed by all) precisely because it is contentious. All the simple things are easy to decide. The undecidable things attract our attention and focus our emotional energy. I think JRR Tolkien said something about all good stories needing unexplained things to keep people interested and that is why there is no explanation for Tom Bombadil – and see how he pops up again and again even though he seems to be unrelated to the greater story. So much so in fact that he didn’t make it into the movies.
I also happen to think that contentious, unexplained elements fuel discussions and thus these items remain in the popular consciousness. I think there is little contentiousness around ability scores. There is some contentiousness but it’s all explainable when it comes to hit zones. But the stuff that is actually discussed endlessly are levels (vs. skills), saving throws (abstract vs. Poison or more concrete Fortitude saves), hit points and alignment (as opposed to the simple ethics of good or bad deeds). I don’t believe these issues can be “settled” and therefore they keep getting discussed.
Thus, I don’t think there’s anything special about the alignment discussion. Alignment just happens to have these properties: contentious and unexplained.
As for myself, I want to like Law vs. Chaos but find that it rarely has an effect at the table.
Tags: RPG
Old School
reputation 
On Google+, Jeff Rients recently wondered whether he was feeling dissatisfaction with his hexcrawl procedure. I’m interested in comparing notes. How do you run wilderness exploration?
When I read procedures like the ones Justin Alexander recently posted on his blog, I realize that my own procedures are super simple in comparison.
Here are the basics:
With this in place, players will usually learn about a new location from NPCs, decide to travel there, have one or two random encounters on the way providing side-quests, other plot-hooks and adding to the wilderness. After exploring the dungeon or doing whatever needs doing, the party will travel back, sometimes picking a different path for their way back in order to learn something about the area they’re in.
Thus the actual procedure at the gaming table is simple:

That’s it.
If your procedure is more complicated, I’d love to know what you do and why you do it. Maybe it’s something I could add to my own procedure! 
Tags: RPG
Old School
Sandbox 
Comments on 2012-06-20 Hexcrawl Procedure
Gavin Personally I’ve not done any proper hex crawl style adventures since I was a kid, so I don’t have a procedure of my own.
I did notice this though: “When player characters enter a hex searching for a particular structure they will always find it.”
This is how I’m leaning towards handling secret doors these days. Players rarely search for them, and I feel it’s nice to reward it if they happen to look in the right place, whether by chance or by deduction.
– Gavin 2012-06-21 21:52 UTC
AlexSchroeder That’s my approach to all thieving skills, bard skills, knowledge skills or whatever you want to call them. Unless there’s a very good reason to roll dice, I’d rather the characters know something or find something.
If you don’t run hex crawls, how does travel work in your campaigns? Is there a map with all the known locations on it, players point at their intended destinations and say “we go there” and you respond with “two weeks later, you finally reach the elven palace of Mirkwood?” Or do you have an abstract flow-chart like map that involves other locations to pass through—and potential encounters?
– AlexSchroeder 2012-06-21 22:00 UTC
Gavin Well, the LL games I’ve run the last couple of years have involved very little overland travel – they were mostly centred around a huge city and a few surround areas. So, yeah, the few times the PCs went between places on a larger scale I just told them how long it took to get there and that was that.
– Gavin 2012-06-22 17:57 UTC
As Claytonian JP and others said on Google+, humans can walk much further than five miles per day. Based on the d20 SRD Terrain and Overland Movement tables and the rumors you find on Google (such as the thread How far could the legions travel in a day where you’ll find people saying “the carolean army under normal circumstances marched between 20 and 30 kilometers a day with a days rest every other day, and they used the same means of transportation” ie. 6 to 10 miles per day or “Tacitus (or was it Iosephus Flavius? - I’m far away from my books) wrote, that the standard distance for a legionaire was 20,000 steps/day, […] the Roman pace or passus was 2 steps, total length of about 5 feet. Hence the mile is from millia passus or 1000 paces, 5000 feet” ie. 20 miles (on a Roman road).
As I said in the original post, however, it seems to me that the exact distances covered aren’t really necessary at the table. A day’s march is a day’s march and only the most basic logic needs to apply: how big of a detour would you take around a swamp of trackless forest? Will you save any time by not following the road? How much faster will you be by ship? How many hexes do you need to settle in order to build a castle?
– AlexSchroeder 2012-07-13 15:23 UTC
Justin Alexander There are a couple things I notice from your procedure:
(1) By using invariant movement rates, you are removing one of the major incentives my players have for investing in horses. I’ve found that horses can make for a lot of interesting gameplay ranging from the common (the security precautions necessary to make sure they don’t get eaten while waiting outside the dungeon) to the unique (over the past couple sessions I’ve had one player invest in a scheme by the Halfling Mafia run by another group of players to use illusion magic to disguise nags as high quality horses, which resulted in an entertaining sequence resulting from random tables in which a third player ended up buying three nags in a row from the same horse dealers)
In short, interesting trade-offs of encumbrance, expense, and logistics that I’ve found have interesting impacts on practical gameplay and interesting story outcomes.
(2) By limiting the number of potential encounters per day you are affecting the strategic/tactical balance of wilderness vs. dungeon gameplay. Probably not a big deal, but something to think about.
I make four checks per day, with cumulative odds of roughly ⅛, ⅛, ¹⁄₃₂, ¹⁄₃₂, ¹⁄₃₂, and ¹⁄₃₂. This totals a 38% chance of at least one encounter per day, which is not disparate from the 33% your ⅙ and ⅙ checks have. But I have a significantly higher chance of generating multiple encounters per day.
(None of which is to say “you’re wrong!”. I’m just answering your question about why I do things differently.)
@AlexSchroeder: I find the hexcrawl to be useful if exploration is the name of the game. If exploration isn’t the name of the game, then there’s generally a reliable map available that the PCs can base their travel plans on. This either takes the form of them planning their intended journey which I then prep with appropriate stops and scenery (either in detail or “montage”). Or it takes the form of a “flowchart” of decisions, although these are rarely preplanned.
Another way to look at it: If the game is structured around making a map, then I use a hexcrawl. If the game is about using a map, then I do travel montages or travel decision-points.
– Justin Alexander 2012-07-14 21:08 UTC
AlexSchroeder Thanks for the comment, Justin.
Indeed, horses are a topic that I’ve been most frustrated with as a teenager playing AD&D 2nd ed and one or two years ago when I wanted to play a mounted archer using D&D 3.5. Taking care of horses always seemed like a chore. I’d be interested in giving it another try.
Currently, horses haven’t come up much. I guess this is due to two reasons:
Apparently horses are only faster if you can change them every so often and this is how the old communication networks did it: have manned stations along the roads where couriers can get fresh horses.
You are absolutely right regarding the number of encounters per day. The only fix I have is this: I roll for a few consecutive days of exploration and combine the results as I see fit. This mostly applies not when exploring the wilderness but when travelling from town to town or from town to dungeon and back.
Perhaps adding a simple additional step to my rule provides a similar result: Just roll for an additional random encounter whenever there is one? Keep rolling until there is no additional random encounter.
Interesting that you make a distinction between making and using a map when travelling. I confess I used travel montages exclusively when I ran adventure paths or just strung modules together. As soon as I started running my sandbox, however, I’ve used my hexcrawl procedure to cover all travel.
I guess I would not use my hexcrawl procedure if the party was moving through an area that was 100% safe. I’m not sure such an area exists in the Wilderlands of High Fantasy. I suspect it does not.
Perhaps I’ll change my approach if my players are getting tired of the constant stream of random stuff they meet on the road. This is something I’ve done in my D&D 3.5 game once the party reached level eight and nine: I just described how they sometimes saw orcs or lizardfolk patrols fleeing them and skipped random encounters unless they were moving through areas controlled by giants, dragons or vampires. Absolutely something to consider if my current campaign ever makes it to the mid levels.
– AlexSchroeder 2012-07-14 23:07 UTC
Google+ feels like a big torrent of discussion—and just like forums, Facebook and Twitter it seems to me that little things I said I would like to come back to are lost. Not even I can find them anymore! In an effort to remember some of the things I said, I’m going to copy some stuff to this blog of mine.
Evan Elkins of In Places Deep wondered about the stats needed to run a monster.
Here is an example from my submission to Fight On!:
Atk lists damage and any other special abilities which take effect upon a hit whereas the special abilities listed at the end are spells and other abilities that can be used in addition to or instead of actual attacks.
At first I also wanted to add Labyrinth Lord style saving throws: F5 and the like, but then I looked at Swords & Wizardry and decided a simple save (SV) would be good enough and simpler to use. Then I discovered that the save was simple to determine based on HD and I decided to not include it at all. If this was a monster manual I was writing, I’d add it as well.
I feel bad for not having added morale (ML). I find that morale is extremely important when playing old school games. It’s not hard to improvise: cowards use 5, weaklings use 6, men use 7, well led humanoids use 8, disciplined use 9, fanatics use 10, lunatics use 11, unnatural creatures use 12. When sustaining the first loss and when having lost half the number, but no more than twice per fight, roll 2d6. If you roll over the morale score, they break and run or do a fighting retreat depending on alignment.
I didn’t add % in Lair. At first I felt bad because I liked the idea. The number can be used when facing an empty hex map that hasn’t been “stocked” with lairs, yet. As characters encounter creatures, the lairs get placed. Then I thought I could use a simple ⅙ chance to place lairs. The differing % in Lair numbers mean that some lairs of creatures on the random encounter tables will be hard to find because apparently the creatures travel a lot. But how much difference would this make at the table? Now I feel pretty good about dropping this stat.
I also didn’t add hit-points because I prefer rolling them at the table. What I hate is sorted hit-points for a group of enemies, ie. 2, 3, 3, 4, 5, 5, 6. Do I need to mix it up again? Do the weaker ones just fall first? What I usually do is throw a handful of dice when combat starts and whenever a creature is hit that doesn’t have hit-points, I quickly roll for them and subtract the first damage roll.
Finally, let me plug the Old School Monster Wiki: Campaign:Monsters.
Tags: RPG
Old School 
I got interested in Mystara after reading the reviews by Lowell Francis, seeing the new maps on Bruce Heard’s blog and the other maps by Thorfinn Tait. If only the printed copies were not so expensive. I checked eBay and felt that the price was far beyond what I was willing to pay.
The argument I find convincing from Francis’ last thoughts on the gazeteers:
I think I’m appreciating this more right now because when I try to describe my Labyrinth Lord campaign with the Shields Shall Be Splintered and Death and Dismemberment house rule, I often fall back on the images of murder hobos and killer clowns. It’s deadly and dangerous and in order to deal with all this danger and their flawed characters, players are ingenius, ideas are awesome, events are goofy, and we have a great time at the table. I’d say retro-stupid according to Jeff Rient’s threefold model.
I’ve seen this sentiment expressed on another blog, recently:
Tags: RPG
Old School 
Comments on 2012-06-27 Mystara
Bruce Heard Dear Alex. I’m glad you enjoy the work I do, however, in the future I would prefer you only posted a link to my maps, rather than posting them directly on your site. Many thanks.
– Bruce Heard 2012-06-27 14:05 UTC
No problem. I’ll use a map of mine instead.
– AlexSchroeder 2012-06-27 14:23 UTC
Bruce Heard Or you could use a thumbnail. Cheers! 
– Bruce Heard 2012-06-27 17:40 UTC
Bruce Heard You can upload a portion of the map from here: https://docs.google.com/open?id=0ByHsRdpWU3qeQXJjSm1vb2xoU0U This would help illustrate your page.
– Bruce Heard 2012-06-28 17:43 UTC
AlexSchroeder Thanks, Bruce. No worries about the map. 
– AlexSchroeder 2012-06-28 21:41 UTC
What: Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts
When: 20 June, 19:30 – RSVP on Meetup (optional
)
Where: Bistro Lochergut (tram 2+3 ‘Lochergut’)
In 1978, gifted student and writer Greg Roberts turned to heroin when his marriage collapsed, feeding his addiction with a string of robberies. Caught and convicted, he was given a nineteen-year sentence. After two years, he escaped from a maximum- security prison, spending the next ten years on the run as Australia’s most wanted man. Hiding in Bombay, he established a medical clinic for slum- dwellers, worked in the Bollywood film industry and served time in the notorious Arthur Road prison. He was recruited by one of the most charismatic branches of the Bombay mafia for whom he worked as a forger, counterfeiter, and smuggler, and fought alongside a unit of mujaheddin guerrilla fighters in Afghanistan. His debut novel, SHANTARAM, is based on this ten-year period of his life in Bombay. The result is an epic tale of slums and five-star hotels, romantic love and prison torture, mafia gang wars and Bollywood films. A gripping adventure story, SHANTARAM is also a superbly written meditation on good and evil and an authentic evocation of Bombay life.
Tags: BookClub 
Roger Carbol Thanks, Alex.
My thinking behind the Crown is that this is a dungeon for a West Marches sort of sandbox. They romp around through the dungeon for a while, need to go up north to find the king’s bones, and have general hijinks. Many levels later, they come on back in and get the final treasure. It’s certainly not a “let’s finish every room in the next four sessions” sort of thing.
Hope to hear someday of how it works out in your campaign.
– Roger Carbol 2012-06-12 20:21 UTC
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