Bluestone Barrow: A Dunkey Dungeon Adventure

Used the Dunkey Dungeon Generator to make three dungeons for my new setting, The Salt. Changes I've made to the dungeons are in bold.

Below is the first dungeon, which us two Dunks just played through in about half an hour as a kind of mental midnight snack.

Bluestone Barrow

First dungeon is set in the far south; a land of dried-out swamp, mangroves thick with salt, flooding once a fiveyear. The dungeon is a treasure hoard cum barrow. A hibernating CLAY LEVIATHAN slumbers in the cracked earth out front. SPECTRAL PIXIES giggle from the thick NIGHT BLOSSOM covering the mound.

NIGHT BLOSSOM:  PLANT
CLAY LEVIATHAN: MONSTER
PIT ROACH:      VERMIN
SPECTRAL PIXIE: HUMANOID
OCHRE HOG:      CRITTER

MAP:

C--A--B

Room A.
SOUND: Muffled voices from next room. (Room B)
Treasure room. Magnetic gates prevent you removing any gold or steel, even if you brought it in with you. PIRATE'S SPEAR made of pure gold in hand of enormous porcelain golem. Talisman in room B deactivates gates, activates golem.
Entrance is to the south, a half-collapsed arch of rough stones. Eastern staircase leads down to cool cellar. Roof has partially collapsed to the west, separating rooms A and C.

Room B.
SUMPFIANA the HELPFUL PLAYWRIGHT and SUMPROGG the ABSENT-MINDED GARDENER (who are spectral pixies) fighting for possession of a SCABBARD OF THE ELEPHANT (Any weapon sheathed therein gains +2 when fighting from back of pachyderms/aurochs), each with an extremely good argument for why it is rightfully theirs. Actually they stole it from a nearby burial mound and have probably annoyed the shit out some ghosts.

Room is lit by light from Room A and a jar of fireflies. The room is newer and better reinforced than the others. Six bodies are buried in raised, open-air coffins full of salt. One corpse clutches the runekey for Room A. The pixies know this.

Room C.
Formerly a necromancer's lair. Now a breeding pair of OCHRE HOGs has made a nest of the spellbooks, which reveal interesting magical snippets if closely examined. Torn-up pages, gummed back together, may have produced odd new spells. (1d3 workable pages. Roll two results from the first three available death, destruction, earth and plant cleric spells* and mash them together in some way that mostly makes sense.)
A few holes in the ceiling let in dappled light. You could almost certainly bash your way out through ones of these if you really, really wanted to.

*Those spells are:
1. Cause Fear: One creature of 5 HD or less flees for 1d4 rounds.
2. Death Knell: Kill dying creature and gain 1d8 temporary hp, +2 to Str, and +1 caster level.
3. Animate Dead: Creates undead skeletons and zombies.
4. Inflict Light Wounds: Touch attack, 1d8 damage +1/level (max +5).
5. Shatter: Sonic vibration damages objects or crystalline creatures.
6. Contagion: Infects subject with chosen disease.
7. Magic Stone: Three stones become +1 projectiles, 1d6 +1 damage.
8. Soften Earth and Stone: Turns stone to clay or dirt to sand or mud.
9. Stone Shape: Sculpts stone into any shape.
10. Entangle: Plants entangle everyone in 40-ft.-radius.
11. Barkskin: Grants +2 (or higher) enhancement to natural armor.
12. Plant Growth: Grows vegetation, improves crops.

me and Matt on vacation
a juvenile CLAY LEVIATHAN

where Matt and I went on vacation
what the landscape looks like basically

~playthrough below~

Holiday Games: SESSION RECAP

This is a long one - buckle up, or just read the fun, hacky ruleset at the top.

So I was on holiday recently like a month ago I took so damn long to write this up oh my lord. Obviously the Thing To Do was play some rpg games with my two cousins: Lucie (14) and Jack (18)

We played two games, using my AP system for both. 4AP and 6 Health to break among as many characters as you want. I couldn't find my d20, so we used a coin instead, totally winging an entire ruleset as we went. Basically, hard things had a 25% chance of success (two heads), easy things 75% (one head in two flips). You get it. Lack of dice also meant we didn't use normal damage. Instead, people trained in a weapon did 2 damage a hit, the untrained (or weak monsters) did 1 damage. You could probably simulate 1d2, 1d4, 1d8, 1d16 with this, but doing binary at the table is not my favourite thing.

First game was run by me, the second by Jack. His first ever DM experience too! gj Jack I am so very, very proud. I will continue to weep openly as I type this.

If I ever write a DnD sitcom these will be the stars
Two white dudes. Because I fucking suck. 

The games went like this:

saturday game

Trying to figure out what the minimum amount of work I can do for this Saturday game is. Want people to enjoy the game but can only reasonably expect them to take it so seriously. Also if I call a character "Gobespierre" there is a very real chance that Sven will flip the table.

So here's a map:

sauce

I cannot believe we've just been drawing maps this whole time like a bunch of fucking plebs. LRN 2 HISTROY GUYS. Anyway. This is a coastal goblin fortress. The players - a crabman bard, a dwelf (half dwarf half elf) cleric and a human (probably) negapaladin - are sugar traders on the Silicon Sea who were lured by false lights onto the rocks of an uncharted island and awaken face down in a bunch of shallow graves. Goblins are extremely bad at telling when things that are not goblins are alive or dead.

Notes:

• None of the PCs have a very clear memory of the shipwreck. The dwelf has a carnelian scarab-shaped amulet in his pocket. He doesn't know where it came from.
• They awaken in the Burying Ground, obviously. The soil is full of bones and bits of corpse. Not all were put there by the goblins. Some are thousands of years old.
• The kiln is an ancient black ziggurat that the goblins have converted into a crematorium. Ancient bones are fed into the hole at top along with pieces of smouldering charcoal, goblin guano and raw sugar. The shaft narrows as it gets deeper and there is a chamber in the base into which a viscous black liquid - "corpse honey" - slowly drips. A couple of goblins can always be found on top of the pyramid, stirring and pressing the mixture.
• The gun battery is a gun battery. Most of this stuff is just exactly what it says it is. That includes the arsenal + bakehouse.
• What's left of the PCs' boat is being kept in the harbour. To get to the harbour you either have to cross the pond (which is full of vicious sand dolphins), go around the rocks to the north (same deal with the sand dolphins) or persuade the guards at the Brouillan Battalion to let you in across the moat. They can be bribed with corpse honey, which is a goblin delicacy. They can point you in the general direction of any other NPC.
• The harbour chain can only be lifted by the goblin princess, her vizier or her sergeant-at-arms. Goblins are like bees - queens, drones, larvae, royal jelly, you know the drill. This goblin princess has taken a bunch of followers and gone off to found a new hive.
• The chain is drawn back with a giant iron wheel up on the Spar that it takes forty goblins, or one ogre, to man. The only ogre on the island is currently asleep in the Bastion Pond. He has one eye and is named Grumpus. It would take a bucket of water to take him and water on the Silicon Sea is incredibly scarce. The sergeant-at-arms cannot currently spare forty goblins.
• The princess can be found in the King's Bastion. She is paranoid because she thinks the Red Pharaoh is about to launch an attack against her in protest at the desecration of his ancestor's bones. She won't open the boom chain until she is satisfied that this is not going to happen.
• The vizier is a skinny, goateed, Rincewind-ish human who has found his true calling being vizier to a bunch of shitty goblins. He is madly in love with the goblin princess.
• The sergeant-at-arms can be found bossing troops around on the parade ground. He is eternally frustrated at the inability of goblins to understand the concept of "formation".
• The mother superior of the goblin nunnery is secretly a vampire and an agent of the Red Pharaoh. This is why her wimple is so... wimple-y.
• The head baker can do amazing things with corpse honey, which is hilariously flammable. He has an excellent moustache that he is very proud of.
• A cockatrice wallows in the sandpond to the south, near the Prince's Bastion. The many marble statues of goblins flanking the pond testify to their inability to tame this foul creature, as well as their enduring fascination with it.
• A surveillance balloon flies high above the fortress. Two more are tethered on the flat piece of land that is apparently the Queen's Bastion. All are made of inflated toads, one of which was the mother of the cockatrice, which as everyone knows is what you get when a chicken's egg is incubated by a toad. God knows where the goblins got a chicken's egg.
• The sergeant-at-arms hates the cockatrice and would like to see it dead, but the princess has expressly forbidden this because she finds it hilarious.
• The sands of the Silicon Sea come in many colours and a good navigator knows how to read them all.
• The Red Pharaoh's skeletal legions will attack at sunset to evade the piercing rays of their heavenly tormentor. The sands will turn blood red to presage their coming.
• The Red Pharaoh has transformed himself into a carnelian scarab-shaped amulet and used his will-o-the-wisp aides-de-camp to lure the PCs onto the rocks, whereupon he secreted himself in one of their pockets. When the sun sets he will assume his true form.
• It is now about midday. Every time you do something an hour passes.

d6 encounter table for goblin colonial fortress:

1. 1d4 goblin musketeers + sergeant
2. 1d4 goblin nuns
3. 1d4 giant cane toads + toadmeister
4. 1d4 canecutters on break
5. 1d4 bakers juggling combat muffins
6. Important NPC out for a walk

Pictures of stuff:

goblin musketeer

tomb-barge of the red pharaoh

cockatrice

silicon sea

Final thoughts - I should make a whole game about 18th-century colonialism, that'd be sick. Like the PCs are voyageurs in Acadia or something.

VIKINGS: Actually Play Report feat. Actual Play

Brother, the Other Dunk, was in my city a few days ago, so we spent time talking hot noise about the procedural generation of narrative and, obviously, played some DnD. It seemed like a good opportunity to test out my new Adventure Point system, so we each grabbed a friend, I drew a shit map, and we all went wild.

This is a photo I took of us going wild.

I feel like the system did a good ground-level of work simply because character gen took about four seconds. One person came up with their character in a 10 minute conversation the night before, one did all their character gen in the car on the way in, and one came up with theirs in the time it took to listen to the first two describe theirs. This was really, really nice to have work. The characters they built seemed really well rounded just by having a set of slightly comedic powers based around a central theme in a way I've never quite seen click in a game system before.

Part of the reason the generation was so quick is that I didn't really fuck with stats. My big thoughtspiel on the stat system of VIKINGS is yet to be dropped like a cursed sword, so I decided to run this game completely without stats of any kind. It was alright in the sense that things went a little faster. People were imaging the fighter-style character as tougher than the seahag without a solid basis for that assumption, so that worked, but it turns out that rpg's definitely demand that your players have health totals if you want to keep the final battle - or any battle, really - properly nail-biting.

But enough of me going 'Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm' onto a page. Fun things that happened:

Actual Play??

The session starts with the PC's on a boat, crossing the great inland sea around and on which most of the world's vikings live. They're a disparate bunch: a ghost-sniffing fighter with a sea-urchin flail; a shriveled seahag with a pet crow and an obsession with toads; a shapechanger that quickly establishes that the only form she knows is 'big angry crab'.

After the mild railroading of a prologue in which the party spots a cursed white whalefish on the horizon and promptly has their ship trashed by it, they wash up on a deserted island and have three days to make a new boat and hunt down the injured whalefish before the curse takes them all.

They did a bunch of stuff:

• They break into a run-down wizard's tower, ransacked a dozen times over. They get past his booby-trap/practical jokes and steal the only things that haven't already been stolen; a scroll of summon treacle and some hand-drawn pornography.
• The wizard's bedroom is entered, his NeverStain sheets pilfered from beneath his rotting bones. They won't be particularly 'viking' sails, but one has to make do.
• An old ent, the last tree on the island, is tracked down. I gear up for a fight and then the party asks him if he's ever considered being a mast. Apparently that sounds like fun.
• The northern beach is explored. A whale corpse lies swarming with crabs. One shape-shift and a bit of scroll-reading later and the beach is now littered with dead crabs, drowned in a sexy treacle orgy. The shapeshifter is pregnant.
• An old shipwreck is reached. The figurehead has been deliberately torn off, but the armory is in reasonable stead. The party walks (and scuttles) away with a dozen harpoons and some choice bits of the giant squid they found.
• The boneyard in the center of the island offers up an old, rusted anchor. It also offers ghoooooooosts! But news of the wizard's death appeases the spirits, and the boneyard is now a fine source of decking materials.
• Not wanting to leave the island before ticking off every box, the party wanders down to the small fresh-water lagoon on this surprisingly spacious island. They horribly poisoned the juvenile lake drake that lives there, and before it can even get an attack in the seahag summons a rain of frogs into a hole cut in its side. It dies the death of an awful pinata. The figurehead at the bottom of its lake is swiftly stolen.

Happily skimming over the time it actually takes to construct a working longboat, the players soon find themselves crewing a ship forged from the bones of a hundred dead mean, armored with the shells of a thousand dead crabs. Drake wings sweep back from a twice-stolen figurehead. The mast itself is alive, a venerable ent draped with, uh, stars-and-moons bedsheets.

They set out after the whalefish, tracking a trail of black blood and dead fish over the waves. After a dramatic encounter with some of the whalefish's intestinal parasites (tapeworm hydra is an idea I'm using again) they track down the great white beast itself.

Sighting the whalefish on the horizon they steady themselves for a fight. A white fin cuts the waves, and the ship lurches as the whalefish rams them. Stingray-like pilot fish slam into the deck, start thrashing at the crew. The shapeshifter transforms and engages in dramatic sea-creature battle. The other PC's sprint to the prow and start peppering the whalefish with parasite-poisoned harpoons as it beats itself against the longboat. A few rounds of bludgeoning later, the whalefish shudders and throws a spray of quills toward the sailors. A dramatic set of natural 20s hits the gametable and one of the stingrays is nailed to the deck by a redirected quill, the other quickly flattened by the mast/ent.

Just as the crew starts to get stuck into the whalefish, it shudders again. Four fat tongues burst from its mouth and land on the deck. Halfway between a slug and a praying mantis, the tongues begin their attempts to invade the shapeshifter's crabby mouth. Despite the best effort of the crew (and a friendly whale ghost!) two tongues are still alive when one reduces the friendcrab to 0hp and slips into her face.

Two rounds later the seahag's pet crow dies a hero, flying a vial of parasite poison into the fray and getting swallowed by the face-hugging tongue. As the shapeshifter, now unconscious, slips back to human proportions, the seahag pours her only health potion down her friends throat. The shapeshifter's eyes flicker open and she lunges forward, splitting the last tongue in twain as it cuts down the seahag.

The whalefish, badly bloodied, attempts to flee. Harpoons and a well-thrown net drag it back to the ship. The injured crew leaps onto the body. Three fish spears rise and fall in tandem. The beast is slain. The day is won.

So yeah, five hours of fun. Good job everyone.