The Oak of Mother Bones - One Page Dungeon

A couple of weeks ago, Sash and I finished a one page dungeon and submitted it to the One Page Dungeon Contest. Here's a look at it!

  

Cresting over the top of the wode, the Oak of Mother Bones is almost a hundred meters tall. Within lie the assorted minions of a manipulative green hag, as well as the strange cursed treasures that she holds.

Many of the encounters are designed to punish the characters for greed. Those who arrive in the dungeon seeking treasure or an easy route to power will likely be crippled by punishing encounters. I reckon it would work in 5th Edition for characters of 3-4th level, but could be used at lower levels if your players are smart at avoiding combat. 

Drama, Consequence and HP

Drama comes from making decisions with consequence. Hit points suck balls at making this happen. 

If you ask different people what hit points mean, they say different things. What does losing HP even represent? When do you start bleeding? Does HP represent the quantity of blood in your bones or just a numerical measure of fighting spirit/stamina? How does healing magic work? Does it bolster your spirit or actually cause your physical wounds to knit shut? How much of HP is psychological and how much is physical? Does HP work differently for characters and monsters? When is something bloodied? 

A large percentage of games us this mechanic, but a lot of them fail to clarify what they actually means. The abstract needs to exist for gameplay to happen, but it’s just oddly unsatisfying. The fact is, RPGs require something to show how not dead your character is. If characters died immediately when something hit them, that would suck as fights would be swingy, but detailed lists of bruises and injury charts would be complicated and slow the game down. 

Playing D&D or its variants requires you to live with the weirdness of HP. It lives in every TSR, WoTC or 3rd Party book, and most OSR books keep it as well. It can’t be avoided if you don’t want to mod the shit out of everything you read.

All of the stuff above is irrelevant, really. You can handle it just by talking about how you deal or receive damage with different words and bits of imagery. The bad thing is that hit points suck the consequences out of RPGs. 

Your HP regenerate when you sleep overnight. This means that even you are on deaths doorstep, you can fully recover from whatever maladies you have just by taking an 8 hour nap with a sleeping bag (and maybe rollmat) in the dank and dangerous gloom of a poorly lit cave with no fire and no food. This means that combat in the dungeon does nothing, as long as you can take a rest, and the monster doesn’t fully kill you. Combat is no longer dangerous. You’ll be fine if you avoid death (1) and can somehow sleep. 

If you want keep HP, you need to find new ways to inject consequence into your game. You players will not properly respect danger if they can bounce off whatever ills you throw at them. Make them afraid!

Maybe you could add an injury table or an insanity table. My game, Best Left Buried, has both of these, and will be available soon. Make your player deal with the risk of permanent dismemberment or disability if they get crit or are made unconscious. If they face and eldritch horror and only just win, give them an irrational fear or compulsion, or start mucking around with the Trait/Ideal/Bond/Flaw on their character sheet.

The other way is to force them to deal with consequences that are material or emotional. Give them something or someone they care about, and risk it being taken away from them if they make a mistake. If you threaten their favourite NPC or settlement, they will take that seriously. If someone tries to take their magic item or gold, I bet you they will start to care. 

The final way is my favourite. Make the rest do different things depending on how good a night sleep they got, looking at variables like light, food, comfort and interruptions. For example, few hours of sleep scratched together in a wet, damp cave without a fire, while monsters hunt for them, might grant no HP at all. Six hours of rest with a single watch shift in a relatively dry cave, along with some rations and a small fire, might restore a few hit dice worth of HP. If you manage to get a full night sleep in a tavern or a well guarded base, you get all your HP back. This adds a new element to your game, where establishing a well guarded camp with a good supply of food, light and warmth is vital when journeying into multi-rest dungeons. 

If you give them risk that matters, then drama happens. Drama makes the players care more. Try it out in your normal game. It’ll work. Honest. 

(1) At higher levels, death doesn’t really even slow you down either. This is another sapping of consequence away from the game, but is a fun end game reward and should PROBABLY be allowed.

The Game Without A Name

I had an idea for a game. Maybe it's a campaign. Maybe it's a book. I don't know. 

The idea of dynasty play has always appealed to me. There's something cool about playing a lineage of heroes instead of one singular guy is dope as hell. You aren't just Steven the Fighter; you are Steven of the Line of Tellibor.

I've also always loved the idea of West Marches. A slow hexcrawl west, as civilisation creeps out into the wilderness. Your characters slowly reaching higher and higher levels.
So here's the pitch, sling them together. 
You start with maybe 2 characters each, who march off into the wilderness and settle a village. You get to make these characters: choose the classes and races, choose a profession (like a background) and give them a couple of magic items to act as heirlooms. 
These are your elders. They start the campaign and are the men and women from which your lines are begun. 
Every year, you get two phases: Summer and Winter. A year takes a week. Each character gets to do something in each phase:

• Travel: Your character goes off travelling, maybe to school, a nearby city or just to see the world. This does something. Maybe some XP, a chance at finding something cool or learning a new skill/language. 
• Go Ranging: The wilderness gets worse every year it is left untamed. You spend a phase treating the symptoms by dealing with minor roving monsters.
• Practice Profession: Each character has a thing they do in the village, like smithing, farming, researching magic, building stuff, hunting, dealing with pelts, merchanting, being village priest or chief. You can assume that this stuff is done casually in your spare time by your character, maybe helped by an understudy, but if you dedicate a whole season to it, it gives you a cool bonus. 
• Study (Under Another Character): Your character spends time learning from another character of the same class and higher level. At the end of the phase, they increase in class level by 1. This is probably the second quickest way to level up after going out and adventuring yourself, but it requires that high level teacher.
• Recruiting: By means other than procreation, you find another PC. Maybe he is a village pleb that you train up to a PC level or an outsider you invite to the village to live with you. This works, but the guy you find is completely random and probably worse. Either that or it costs a lot of gold.
• Find A Partner: Your character finds a partner of appropriate childbearing gender. This might be another character, an NPC or someone else in your village. This means you can now have kids. This is important.
• Have A Kid: Well done. Your line continues. Randomly generate a level zero baby that HOPEFULLY will live to the age of ~15, where it can become a first level adventurer of randomly determined class and stats. Kids probably have their own set of moves they can do, each of which bumps up a stat, gives them a new proficiency or pushes them towards a certain class when they are older. 
• Adventure: The final and most exciting option. Your character goes one an adventure to dig into some dungeon, clear out a tract of wilderness, explore a savage land or deal with a monster camp. Run a one shot dungeon. Only the characters who take the action come with you and go on an adventure. This is the best way to get money. It's the best way to get experience. It's the best way to get magic items. It's the best way to keep the monsters away from your door.

That's the game. Maybe the group meets twice a week? Once over the internet to decide what there characters in their two phases of each year, once again to run any adventures you wanna do. 
A vital part of this assumption is that you run multiple PCs, anywhere between 2-5. This means that even if half of your characters stay at home, at least one is available to go out on an adventure weekly. If you can't make it, your character does something else. Simples.
Once humans get old, their physical stats start to fall off and they stop being effective adventurers, and settle down to raise a family, train followers and practice a profession. Eventually, they die of old age. Every couple of real time months, game time decades, a new generation of baby adventures set forth and has to level up and do the thing.
The base assumption of this system is that most people are humans, who, comparative to everyone else, breed like rabbits. To stop other races being powerful, they get experience slower and are harder to breed and find partners, as well as having kids who take longer to grow up. I love the idea of keeping an Elf Bard, Dwarf Smith or Gnomish Wizard around for hundreds of years, training generation after generation after human adventurers. Even better, you could spend 100 years (2 real-life years) getting that one Elven kid ready for adventure.
So let me know what you think and comment below. If it gets enough traction I might write it up properly for 5e with a whole bunch of professions, random events and maybe the tables for generating new kids.

On Career Prospects and the Lives of Adventurers

Your average RPG/D&D bog of mill adventurer does not look like they would in a sensible world where population demographics exist. 

Neo-Classical Adventuring is a terrible choice of profession for your Average Fantasy Joe. 

The job description is as follows: 

• Travel through several leagues of untracked wilderness looking for a dungeon, while trying to avoid wilderness encounters and avoid getting lost.  
• Once you get there, descend into the depths of the earth, while dealing with various traps, hazards, diseases, wildlife ad naseum. 
• Finding some bad guys, and murdering a small tribe of humanoid gribblies on their home turf.
• Gather spoils from the corpses.
• Head home, go to tavern (if you can afford it).
• Rinse and repeat, with increasingly more brutal, terrifying and eldritch bad guys as you go on. 

In short, the benefits are:

• Potential acquisition of powerful magic items. 
• Occasional chance of becoming wildly rich, but only once you kill enough monsters to steal their shit. 
• No workplace benefits, or guarantee of stable lodging or income. 
• Far more likely risk of brutal, painful death.

You can get rich, but you will more likely just die. 

Sit back, right now wherever you are reading this blog post. Does this sound like an enticing career path? Let's face it, most humans are risk averse and desire stability, comfort and just enough money to keep going. 

There isn’t a parallel job role in modern society, or in a medieval one. There probably hasn’t been one in human society throughout all of history. There nearest thing is Gentleman Adventurers exploring the Andes or the Amazon, or Archaeologists breaking into the pyramids. 

These things don't have zombies in them.  

Being a soldier doesn’t touch it. Even being part of a stable army in the middle of a war is probably 75-95% not fighting. Everything in adventuring about knocking down doors, killing monsters and stealing their shit. If you ain't stealing shit, you ain't eating. There isn't much downtime.  

Why has your protagonist chosen adventuring as a career option? Why hasn’t your fighter become a guard in the town militia, or joined the army? Why hasn’t your rogue joined a gang or a Thieves Guild? Why isn’t your cleric still at the temple? Why isn’t your wizard in a tower, studying like a sensible magician? 

Adventuring leaves you a homeless vagabond, with no guarantee of one meal to the next. 

This adds a vital question in character creation. What compelled your character to seek out this utterly bonkers way of living? 

If this is true, and its such an awful option, how come most adventurer in whatever D&D content you buy look like this? 

I don't do myself a favour here by picking art from 7th Sea, a romantic swashbuckling game, but I'm lazy and it came up on google.       

This guy is well-trimmed and smart looking.  He has shaved in the last 3 days. He is wearing clean clothes. You could go for a beer with him. 

What is he doing 50 yards from the surface in a dank cave? Why is he knee deep in swamp ooze and covered in the blood of dismembered kobolds? 

This guy doesn't look like what I envisage as a fantasy adventurer. This is a common theme that dissatisfies me in Modern RPG products. Everyone just looks a bit too clean. 

If your character does look like this, then there is a probably a damn good reason they sought out adventuring. 

The first great DM told me any good D&D should have answered the following 3 questions in their backstory. In fact, they made us all write it on a post-it note before we even looked character sheets. 

(Erin was great. We will talk about their PARTY creation method in another blog post.) 

1. Who am I?
2. What do I want? 
3. Why am I finding it by adventuring?

Unless your character has a really compelling answer to that final question, they are probably at least one of these four things. 

1. Unemployable - Perhaps due to personality deficiency, boredom or stupidity, your character is incapable of holding down a stable job as a guard, hairdresser, farmer, tavern wench, small business owner or fisherman. To survive they have turned to adventuring, as the only way they can make money. 
2. On The Run From The Law - Your character had a sensible job in a sensible town. Maybe even a fitting boy or girl or a couple of kids. Something went wrong, and now they are unable to exist within that society. 
3. Lack of Family or Place In Society - They never got a proper job because it wasn't an option to them. Perhaps this is why RPG characters are always orphans? They lacked the proper parental guidance to get them into a sensible career in the post office.  
4. Thrill Seeker/Lunatic - Your character is fucking insane, and goes into dungeons for fun. 

Amusingly, if all of your character is one of these things, your adventuring party starts to turn from looking like this...

Terrible example again, cos this is one of my favourite pieces of art from the 5e PHB

to this...

That's good advice. Be these guys. Buy Lamentations of the Flame Princess and go wild!

Your "Adventurers" are now a bunch of homeless, vagabond, insane murderhobos. 

And these are only kinds of people who would do adventuring in the real world. 

This has some real interesting implications for your world-building. There is a certain tragic nobility for this kind of quasi-underclass saving the world for everyone else. 

Imagine the generic baron of these lands greeting our heroes for the first time. He is expecting a gallant group of knights in shining armour and noble wizards and priestly men of god. What arrives instead is a squalid gang of wretched folk, with sordid lives and all the more sordid futures. 

God damn, that’s a campaign I would love to play. 

For more about these kinds of protagonist, see the upcoming game I wrote, Best Left Buried.