**Merry Christmas an d Happy Holidays!** In my last post, I blogged about what I _gave  _for the 2025 Secret Santicorn. On this day of gift-giving, I wanted to post what I _received._ My ask was for: _Specific level titles for 4th level, and the requirements to earn them._ I think you'll agree my secret santicorn delivered! Thank you again Anon!

--- The Nightwatch by Rembrandt An amazing work which is huge! __ __I participated in the “Purple OSR”’s**2025 Secret Santicorn** and received the prompt **“Never Meet Your Heroes: Encountering Infamous Adventurers”**. I interpreted these NPCs through the lens of a home setting I’m rolling around in my head. I also tried to make the NPCs reference each other to give them a more grounded feel. I would stat each NPC as 4th level or 6th level, which is “hero” level by OD&D/Chainmail rules for fighters or magic-users, respectively, and a few of them are most likely best interpreted as 9th level.__ __ --- Nicolas Bruno part of a tarot card series __ __ **Voulo the Unseated Or The Chevalier Who Rides The Unseen Horse** Once a marvelous fighter and regionally known as being unseated in the joust from a very young age, Voulo gained a modest sum for himself as a breeder of fine chargers and coursers. His fame rose to great heights such that he was invited to the 10-year Tourney held by Lord Acard, the Black Wolf himself. During the feast, Voulo received a reading from Ysabel the Seer at the table, via haruspicy, that said his 13th tilt would change the world. And true to the reading, Voulo unknowingly killed the young prince who had entered as a black knight. Not believing it an accident, the prince’s grandmother, a powerful warlock, cursed the knight that very day. Now, Voulo is hated by all horses and is unseated from all he tries to ride save for the one he travels on to this day. But rumors say the stead he rides, draped in a black funeral shroud so it is unseen, moves via necromancy. Even darker whispers say that its a part of the prince’s soul that animates the animal, and it must be fed meat as one would a pard. This story is usually told when Voulo departs from an area, and the stable hand or innkeeper has gone missing. **Want** : To make the soul of the prince leave the horse- no priest has succeeded, he slew the last one **Give** : Can allow someone to sleep on the “horse” which will carry them to an entrance to the underworld, if they wake during this journey, they will be eaten --- Mugwort Seer by Erica Peebus **Ysabel the Seer Or She Who Binds Fates To War** Once a savant with regards to haruspicy of the walking lionfish of the lower lakes, it is said Ysabel washed up on the shore of Lake Brilliant as the child of a naiad. Later, the financiers of Ib put her skills to use by allowing her to lead seven expeditions into the isolated vales of the Copper Kingdoms to the north to find ruins of the serpent empires. On her 8th expedition, Ysabel’s team descended into a shrine of Yg. At the inner chamber, she herself was the only one lithe enough to pass through a crack in the sealed door guarding the chamber. Once in the dark, she took a greatl pearl from the coiled alter of Yg, but reported the chamber was empty when she emerged. And also nursed a feverish bite mark on the back of her neck she told no one about. Now, Vsabel’s visions have been as clear as ever, however, all of them link any individual seeking a fortune to the on-going Autum War which was touched off by the killing of a minor prince in a joust and a resulting cascade of unlikely involvements, suspicions, double-crosses, and marriages. All foretold by Ysabel before she went into hiding. Her foreign financiers stopped the expeditions but rumors say she’s still on retainer as an agent of chaos. Other stories say people DO seek her out in order to become involved in the war, figuring conflict brings fame and fortune. No one has tallied the success rate. **Want** : To know what this “egg”, as she calls it, is and to find the shrine to Yg and to give the pearl back, but can hardly stand to not have it in her hands **Give** : Can act as a middleman between contacts in Ib and PCs, will result in money, equipment, and an eventual reading should she be convinced. **Liona Autumn-Song Or She Who Sings To Murderers** Once a changeling of the Autumn Court with a voice that has enchanted 99 lovers over her preternaturally long life. With the unrest in the Summer Lands, monsters drew forth from the forgotten places to feast on the distracted population. Since many heroes have gone off to fight the war, Liona found a new stage as a pacifier of monsters. Her songs enchanted them to lay at her feet as would a lamb and eventually saunter off back into the woods. Her fame has quickly risen among the villages and towns along the rivers of the land. Even the clergy praise her non-violent ways as a shining example of virtue. Now people ask, but never in the earshot of Liona or her many admirers, why the cattle, sheep, goats, and occasional shepherd that go missing where she stays? And why is Liona moved toward the mysterious war that has taken over the lands? She claims she will sing the kings to sleep, but she can’t be that arrogant. The source of this woe, hidden among the smiles, is three monsters that stalk Liona like jealous former lovers. They shadow her life as personifications of ill-fortune. Liona’s gift does not allow her to kill the monsters, and their oppressive presence has worn her down, so she has started working as a mercenary on the side, directing these vicious maws toward whatever she was hired to do all the while promising each of them in confidence she will be their beloved. **Want** : To find a way to kill the monsters following her- three manticores named Demetrius, Chiron, and Alarbus **Give** : For a price, she is happy to travel to a battle or fight and let the monsters do the work, she hopes someone will kill them– so far the beasts are too successful. **Breudrox the Wind Shepard Or They Who Have Forgotten Themselves** Once the Summer Lands were nothing but swamp, however, a clever wizard yoked the four winds and bridled two rivers to turn the land in between them into a fertile delta. This wizard was hailed for this terraforming feat, which made them the premier sorcerer of the kingdom. Breudrox went on to herd the sea inland, pull out the salt, and create the Lake Brilliant which gave rise to the bounty of walking lionfish the region is famous for as well as the sirens’ songs on the wind. As a final act, Breudrox emptied the riches of the earth unto the surface and tamed tongues of fire to melt them. And this brought forth mighty beasts of the underworld for great knights to test themselves against. Then, with these four great works done, Breudrox departed in a great whirlwind! Now, Breudrox is known as “The Baffled” and appears often in sudden violent thunderstorms seeking effigies, paintings, and statues of himself. Chaos is seemingly sown, then the magus departs again, with or without sought items. Those who can hear the voices of the spirit world know what really happened. The four lordly winds resented their vassal status and sent 8 minor winds to gently blow away Breudrox’s memories of self. The magus now can’t control the four winds and are controlled by them instead, but they are still yoked nonetheless, and so is flung this way and that, driven mad by the howls of delight from the wind lords. _Place Breudrox the Baffled on the wilderness random encounter table as a “very rare” or as rare as a dragon- for instance, a “2” on a 2d6 roll. And there is a 1-in-12 chance Breudrox will appear when mentioned in conversation outdoors._ **Want** : Any information on the wizard Breudrox: images, statues, books, locations, rumors and prophecies. Any magic-user who starts with Geometry of Unsceen Potencies will be assumed to be a former apprentice of Breudrox’s and subject to interrogation- whether true or not. **Give** : If convinced the PC have information, this Baffled will trade one-time use of magic of a 9th-level wizard for said information/wants. The spell must be employed locally, within the hour, and not require anything that is not immediately at hand. The Baffled won’t kill the king, for instance, as that’s just too much trouble/time. If PCs lie, the Baffled will remember and seek revenge next time they meet. --- by Zigor Skruggi **Orry the Second-Sword of Fate Or The Left Hand of Winter** Every man, woman, and child around the Lake Brilliant knows the story of Orry or more accurately knows the story of Érard who fought the First Dragon of the Earth. Or the story of Érard who destroyed the scales of Molock. Or the story of Érard who slew the Greater Tarsque of the Valley. Orry, too, was there to in all instances to provide aid, but never quite delivered the killing blow, which was always by Érard’s hand. But Orry was never jealous in the stories, but always willing to play squire to Érard, and in some recountings was a squire. When Érard died, surprisingly, in the opening battle of the Strange War with No Beginning, it was Orry who bore him across the battlefield on a mysterious, shrouded horse. Later, Orry said that he wanted to deliver the great hero to the afterlife himself and bears a frostbitten left hand as a testament to pushing open one of the 13 gates of Death. Now, Orry travels righting wrongs as the Second Hero of the land, a title he acknowledges with gritted teeth and a tight smile. And it's true he delivered Érard to the afterlife, but after he slew him with a misericorde made from the coldest ice, which blackened his hand, then melted away. Ever dawn it reappears in his clenched left hand, cold and accusatory. Never again will anyone stand in the way of Orry the Hero. What Orry does not understand is that his fate was born from a bet between the two fay courts for which child could first deliver a world-changing event. He’s made an unknown spirit very rich. **Want** : To accomplish great deeds for greater renown and status, and so seeks quests of importance and note throughout the land. To understand why the gods have cursed his fate so. **Give** : Orry knows where a great many things are buried or kept as they come to him in dreams. And with the aid of ever-present magical misericorde, Cain, he can deliver a killing blow to most things both flesh and spirit. The problem is he is often driven to a deep jealousy and hatred of allies at the same time. Often turning whatever new found object on former friends. **The Unicorn Renalaut the Splendid Or The Ruin of Innocence** Once a symbol of hope throughout the war-torn lands, this shining avatar of bravery and justice was noted for its ability to cut down the villainous and champion the downtrodden. Renalaut often chooses riders from among the youth of the troubled delta villages. Renalaut fills their hearts with courage and hardens them against the fear of death all to rally the common people to a cause! These various irregular bands of Renalaut are the subjects of many new ballads in the lands as all of them are noted for their remarkable achievements. Now, what those who were there will say is that there are never survivors of Renalaut’s irregulars save for the unicorn Renalaut, lamenting the death of the latest rider-martyr. Even the famous singer Autum-Song can’t remember one song sung about Renalaut where the rider lived. It is rumored the unicorn’s latest “victim” was a young prince who posed as a black knight for a joust. Others say this is because Renalaut values the eager and wide-eyed over the skilled. And while the unicorn fills their head with grandeur and goals it neglects to mention the hounds of ruin track which stalk the unicorn– not metaphorically, this is the curse that was placed upon Renalaut. **Want** : To be the vanguard for truth, justice, and glory! To help right great wrongs. To vanquish great evil! Bring peace to the common folk of the land! To find a rider of true purpose, clarity, and purity. **Give** : All the powers of a talking unicorn, plus the public renown that legendary status can bring.

--- Depiction of 20 heraldic shields I find it easier to be creative when I have a prompt or some starting point rather than a blank slate. Its a seed from which ideas spring. And once again public domain (not AI) provides! Here are a (convenient) d20 heraldic shields which, while lacking historic accuracy, certainly contain easy icon imagery which can be the basis for your next kingdom or set of kingdoms. I like that we have a solid mix of mythic animals, astrological images, crosses, wheels, and tools. Given that some of these icons are very similar, it is easy to imagine a few are related houses or united through marriage. Or roll 2d20 and mix two icons together. If you get the same one, have them be inverted colors representing a past rivalry now united into one house or bloodline-- or a recent split! If you own _Dolmenwood_ like I do, perhaps these could also be additional minor nobility under each of the larger houses in the setting. _Dolmenwood's_  heraldic images are only a little more complex so again these 20 would fit right in.

_While you are planning to carve up the turkey 🦃, here's how to carve up 🔪 PCs._ **Death & dismemberment tables are a bit of table "tech" I return to, because I think they are a nice middle ground between killing PCs off at 0 hp and allowing players to potentially save a good stat line (low levels) or a beloved character (high levels).** It also has the knock-on effect of forcing players to run 2+ characters, and gives additional reason for keeping a calendar. After all, how do you know your injured leg is healed in 6 weeks if you don't track time? One thing I've never been happy about is that most tables I've looked at have a much larger sub-table to deal with injuries. I, for some reason, hate rolling on it and always desire a more immediate result. Also, if they lose a hand or whatnot after they leave the dungeon, its hard, but not impossible, to rationalise how they made it out without bleeding out. It should always be noted, though, that these sorts of tables will _decrease_  the lethality of the game despite their scary-sounding name. I decided to mainly affect attributes and saves because they are "chunky" pieces of the game that players can see and that have far-reaching mechanical effects, which I think better mimics the loss of a hand or foot than actually putting "loses hand/foot" on the table. Here, I also included one result that gives a _Darkest Dungeon_  resolve moment. That is always one of my favourite moments in the game. **DEATH & INJURY** **Roll 1d10 on the following table when a PC reaches 0 hp and add any negative hp and CON bonus. For attribute statuses, either (a) lose any bonus or (b) if no bonus, gain a -2.** 9 | RESOLVE! Gain 1d4+1 hp and immediately counter-attack! 8 | SHAKEN! Standing with 1 hp, but auto-fail the next 3 saves 7 | VICIOUS BLOW! Go to 1 hp, but go last in initiative order the rest of this combat 6 | BRUSH WITH DEATH! Go to 1 hp, but reduce your max hp by 1d6+1 (_no lower than 1_) 5 | BONE FRACTURED! Unconscious for 1d6 turns; 1d8 weeks invalid, then roll 1d6 and you are: _1-2 Feebled (STR), 3-4 Off-balance (DEX), 5-6 Sapped (CON) for an additional 1d8 weeks_ 4 | SKULL FRACTURED! Unconscious for 1d6 turns; 1d8 weeks invalid, then roll 1d6 and you are: _1-2 Concussed (INT), 3-4 Forgetful (WIS), 5-6 Terrorised (CHA) for an additional 1d8 weeks_ 3 | MORTALLY WOUNDED! Dead in 1d12 rounds unless healing is applied; 2d8 weeks invalid, then increase all saves by +2 2 | FATALY WOUNDED! Dead in 1d6 rounds unless healing is applied; 3d6 weeks invalid, then increase death save by +4 1 | YOU DIED. 0 | GHASTLY DEATH. Oh wow. Geez... So much blood... (All hirelings make a loyalty check)

--- _Its not *always* trial by combat..._ **How law and order work in medieval societies can be used to enhance our pseudo-medieval fantasy games by providing important constraints.** I am not trying to run some authentic society any more than I try to make a dungeon perfectly architecturally sound with all proper support columns, ventilation, and oxygen content. But having a simple, referee-friendly construction of law, much like dungeon walls, can enhance play somewhat paradoxically by constraining choice, but increasing decision impact. I think a system of law and order can provide some of the same choice-enhancing constraints. More directly, a system of law and order might provide: * Constraints on murder hobo behavior * Enhances the impact of good CHA scores * Highlights the Thief by providing a reason for the black market & guild * Provides consequences to carousing mishaps * A source of other important calendar dates- court dates! * Encourages even more faction investment & philanthropy * Positions the PCs, new to most villages/towns, as “strangers” and the prejudices thereof * Another mechanism by which PCs or NPCs might wield power * Increase the impact of alliances and fidelity oaths– usually helps “knight” classes * Magic like Charm Person, ESP, and Known Alignment takes one whole new fear/concern/governance Again, I’m not trying to weigh a DM down with some crazy social structure, but just basically incentivize PCs to behave more rationally and realistically when in town. I think this is of particular importance in old-school oriented games where PCs are not “the heroes” but roving adventurers and fortune seekers who break a social order by simply being so. Most of the below is drawn from a single, but very excellent, gamable resource: Ian Mortimer’s The Time Traveler’s Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century. The author has put together a book that pretty much explains what a modern person would need to know to survive a week in medieval England. This includes everything from the people and their character to what to wear, what to say, and of course, the law. I also supplemented with Wikipedia, which also happened to cite Mortimer a lot. I’m going to try to intersperse the historic pieces with “Gameable Component” to call out where some interesting fantasy adventure game rules can be. I’ll use BX, but I’m sure you’ll get the gist enough to insert whatever particular rule will cover it for your bespoke ruleset. THE LAWFUL PEOPLE Mortimer opens with the law being very visible during this time. Heads on pikes, people locked in pillories in the town square, and hanged bodies of thieves are about. Its not all at once, but PCs will see signs of justice. A second relevant thing that Mortimer points out is that everyone belongs somewhere and that people live communally: > “Whether they live in town or country, whether they are free or unfree, villeins and freemen alike are known in their hometown. People worship in church together. They work the firleds together. They attend the manorial courts together. Even times of celebration and relaxation are spent in one another’s company.” So your “adventurer” PCs are strangers when you roll up in some village or town. No one knows them. No one will speak for them. And when trouble starts, they will be the first to be blamed. Why? Because they are unknown and therefore expendable. Gamable Component * A Stranger Score: To understand how folks perceive a party in general, let’s use the “Morale of retainers” under the Charisma score in BX. So whenever an opinion about the PCs is needed, we will roll 2d6 against that score. +1/-1 bonuses can be given if the party has done something exceptional (a bonus of +2/-2 would be if they have buried something down or built something new) * The Capital Pledge of the village will often talk to the PC with the highest Charisma score unless the party as a Cleric or Knight-class in their ranks. Then this person will be assumed to be the party head given they represent the Church and Crown. * If anything bad happens in town, a 2d6 check is made against the PC Stranger score. If a fail (rolling over), the PCs are rounded up. If a pass, -1 to the score as suspicion remains. Good deeds can add to the score. ** ** THE TITHING & CAPITAL PLEDGE (or one village) Cops won’t be invented until the 1900’s, so law enforcement begins locally with every member of the village (age 12-60) is part of the tithing, sworn to uphold law and order, and are led by the “capital pledge”. It is the responsibility of the village tithing to bring any lawbreaker to the township constable. If they do not, all of them will be heavily fined and required to report to the manorial or the hundred court. If a crime is observed, a “hue & cry” is raised, and interestingly, the sounds used in the “cry” correspond to different types of crimes. Everyone, regardless of being in the tithing or not, is required to participate in the apprehension of the criminal. The crime is also reported at the next hundred court, so all surrounding villages will know. Again, if a tithing is seen as failing in their duty to apprehend the accused or seen to have given them aid- they are subject to a hefty fine as a collective. Gamable Component * Carousing: If PC are suspected or caught, it will first be a team of villagers and or a small band of knights that is after them; by the next day, any adjacent villages/towns will also know * No Safe Harbor for Bad People: Similarly, if the PCs are suspected of bringing back “evil” into the village, the Capital Pledge will be all up in their business– after all they don’t want to be held accountable * Friends Keep You Safe: Having several people come to your defense by speaking to your good character is critical, so spread that wealth around to prominent people/businesses in town ** ** THE BALIFF OF THE HUNDRED ( or many villages or a town) A step up from the capital pledge overseeing a collection of tithings is the bailiff, or if a manor lord is in control of the area, then a steward of the lord functions as the bailiff. The bailiff will answer to either the sheriff of the county (meaning to the sheriff of the king) or if the hundred is private, meaning a specific lord owns the land, then the lord. Court at this level is a bailiff holding a hundreds court about once a month, composed of themselves and 12 freemen to hear all claims. Many are from fights where blood is drawn. But other cases are fraud, debts, theft of household goods & animals. Terrible wounding and murder is reserved for the sheriff’s tourn. Gamable Component * NPCs Hate the PCs: Should PC draw the ire of a village, but perhaps have not been caught in the act of a crime, then the Bailiff will be the one to hear about it * PCs are Tried for Small Crimes: This would be the first true court that the PC would need to appear at in order to find their guilt or innocence in “small crimes”- basically anything that didn’t involve death, dismemberment, or other serious wounds or changes to a victim (magical or mundane) * PCs are Fined for Not Paying Tolls, Taxes, or Levies: The Bailiff of the Hundred would also be the level at which fines are levied and collected for not paying other taxes and tolls (such as maintaining the toll road back from the dungeon) * Over at Blog of Forlorn Encystment, there is a fantastic post reviewing the various AD&D money-extracting measures that might be in place in a region, town, or city. * Forlorn also talks about the place of tolls here * In His Majesty the Worm, returning adventurers are taxed 50% of their haul out of the dungeon; painful, but it quickly puts the PCs in the mindset of tax avoidance & smuggling * **MUs are Indentured to Pay Off Debts:** As per Forlorn’s post, many city watches/guards contain indentured magic users of 2nd to 5th level, who I would say are found guilty at the level of the Bailiff and the Hundreds Court * This is pretty big because it means that Charm Person, ESP, Know Alignment, and Protection from Evil can easily be employed by the courts to discern the truth ** ** THE SHERIFF IS THE KING’S CHIEF OFFICER ( or all the villages, towns, cities) The sheriff issues the king’s writs, summons a jury, gathers fighting forces, and makes arrangements to feed said forces. And also maintain the country's gaol. In terms of the law PC might be under, the sheriff can arrest you, imprison you, and send you to the county gaol. But not hang you for a serious crime unless they directly catch you trying to evade the law! But even then, a coroner must be present. At this level of law, a judge is still required to find anyone guilty of a crime. These judges might be drawn from capital cities or might be local, but generally will be from an educated background. The Sheriff is required to hold county court every 4 to 6 weeks, which is for official swear-ins, “small claims” courts, and preliminary Crown pleas. Important for D&D, this is also the court where a person can be declared an outlaw if they are at-large. Once an outlaw, they may be beheaded on sight. The county court is where you can also adjudicate via trial by battle, which also covers land disputes. This last bit has benefited the church. The Sheriff’s tourn (basically a traveling court) is held at a hundred’s court twice a year in order to handle cases and business that needs to be presented to royal judges and makes sure all massive fines are levied against tithings failing in their duties. Gamable Component * Sheriff of Nottingham: Understanding the origins of the sheriff really puts the story of Robinhood in perspective. But why not do the same? Instead of an evil king, you have devil swine who is the sheriff if your kingdom. This is also a gameable-NPC title because they have to travel out in the wilderness frequently, so its a great objective for an escort adventure or even a kidnapping. * Frequent Traveller: The Sheriff is also an NPC that could show up in a lot of places far more frequently than the king, who would not risk their life. * A roll on a weekly or monthly event table could “summon” this official to the PC location: “Well, well, well… once again I find myself investigating a crime and you four are in close proximity.” * County Court is High Drama: Some D&D players complain about the ponderous nature and/or frequent nature of combat in D&D so let’s give a new foci of pitched battles- the courtroom! There have been something like 200 courtroom dramas produced for US TV so why not mine them for campaign drama? * Ty’s reputation system over at Mindstorm can come into play here because various things the PCs have done can be viewed in a negative light * Outlaw Status is Deadly: The word “outlaw” is a word that is bandied about, which rarely has any real weight. But such a designation allows a persons, to kill the “outlaw” with impunity. The gaining of this status and trying to get rid of it can be a whole campaign. This can vastly change their relationship with the rest of the world. How will they seek shelter? Who will they resupply from? Will they just embrace their status? Or seek redemption? ** ** **JUDGES, CORONERS, AND EXECUTIONERS: TO TRY THE BUTCHER, BAKER, AND CANDLESTICKMAKER** Judges are required to find someone guilty, its not decided by the bailiff or sheriff. At the level of the hundreds court, a bailiff will draw 12 judges from the surrounding area- notable members of the community or those thought to be wise. In a manorial court, the lord can be the judge. To kill someone, the presence of a coroner is required to attest that the proper procedures had taken place, including a trial. Also, a coroner was the person to answer a hue and cry about finding a dead body. The Executioner might be combined with the gaoler who controls the running of the jails and the conditions therein. Interesting, they can also refuse to take certain folks into jail as well. Gamable Component * New Titles: The immediate thing that springs to mind here are potential titles for PCs to inhabit and connect them to the game world at the cost of mandatory downtime actions. * Low-level Scoundrals: Since each of these offices is ripe for abuse, but are not overtly powerful, they could also be low-level antagonists * Low-level Patrons or Connections: Conversely, making good with judges, coroners, and executioners could also provide a source of rumor or, more importantly, *protection* against accusations. Maybe funneling a little coin to these folks might ensure some favorable outcomes. * These might be good thieves guild connections embedded into society ** ** **APPROVING: OR HOW TO GET EVEN BEFORE YOU HANG AND OTHER MISCARRIAGES OF JUSTICE** One can name their accomplices once caught, either in hopes for leniency or in the case of death, to get even. After you are hung, those you named are brought to justice and if found guilty, then they hang too. Not surprisingly the gaoler, sheriff, or bailiff might try to get someone to accuse their enemies in return for a favor or just better treatment in the remaining days. Mortimer makes a very good point that given the above, when a review of those indicted of serious crimes is performed, most are strangers and vagrants. Villagers are cautious and fearful of strangers and very quick to point a finger at them when a crime is committed. If a justice comes under the jurisdiction of a lord’s court, then a lord can appoint their own coroner. Since a corner is present, the bailiff can proceed with hangings or beheadings. The lord can deny a king’s sheriff access. And so it is then also to commit crimes and pin them on an innocent person under the threat of torture and death, and use approving to shut-up anyone else who would know about the crimes. Gamable Component * Know Your Neighbors: This combines with the “Strangers” bit from above- it pays to be nice, embed in the community, and generally be seen as pro-the-village; otherwise, when things go down, everyone points the finger at you * Trouble Even From the Grave: Bad people still might cause trouble even after they are hanged, perhaps they gave a last “confessional” which puts the PCs at the center of things ** ** SUMMARY What I hope I’ve laid out here is a demonstration of a fairly simple framework for law & order for your pseudo-medieval game based on English foundations of law. Other European countries at that time had different variations. I’ve not really gotten into the implications of magic on said system, but you can quickly see how even low-level spells like charm person would be very disruptive, but also how the same spell could be employed for law enforcement. I want to do a PART 2 of this where I look at how I might set up this structure for Dolmenwood. And how I might interpret, from a gamable level, the difference between a human and breggle court. Also, how the fairy might run a court as well.

Want to learn more about the world of Nightwick from Miranda? You can follow her blog here and the ongoing development of Nightwick Abbey at her Patreon here. Previously in Nightwick... Blossom (Rogue 6) Mayfly (Magician 6) Thekla (Magician 5) Liminal Space (Changeling 5) Poppy (Fighter 5) Felix (Dwarf 4) DOWN IN THE ABBEY... * The party decends to the fourth level of the devil-besotted Abbey without incident and intent on exploring the south-eastern region that had been outlined on their map (PC Edit: _Since we have started mapping again, I do think it really helps provide the group with pre-game options (what do you want to do) and in-game focus (which unexplored area does everyone want to investigate?_) * The party returns to a section containing two altars to Queen Moloch a bull-headed god that is often depicted consuming many babies, but also delivering magic to the minds of ancient Acharon. In exploring this alter, the party is split when the door swings shut, cutting the group in half! In side the alter, black smoke arises and the room heats. Outside the altar, vampiric mists glide into the roo,m threatening Thekla, Blossom, and the hirelings. * Fortunately, a _fireball_  and a few swings of a magic sword are able to dispatch the vampiric mists; use of _knock_  quickly opens the door, causing the smoke to mysteriously cease before choking the party. * Felix the Dwarf, whose armor is now festooned in Abbey iconography, decides to make a blood offering to the altar and receives a terrible vision of sacrifice by gold-skinned humans to a bull-headed god. The party puzzles for a moment about how this demon might be related to the Abby. One theory is that the humanoid flys that vomit gold might be twisted versions of the gold-skinned humans. * Finding no riches at the altar, the party turns north to a collapsed section of hallway. It looks like it leads to a disturbed tomb sans actual sarcophagus- however, the "grave goods" are still there! The party grabs the piles of coin, clothing, odd flail, ring, and vial and escapes! ...BACK AT THE _MEDUSA'S HEAD_ The party is excited to see that in addition to ~6000sp worth of coins and bejeweled goods they have also gained a _ring of lesser genie summoning_ , a magic flail _VampireFucker,_ and a potion of _longevity._ _ _ Now we just need to go find more vampires!

--- from Wizard of Barge Due to playing a long-running, well, 6th level anyway, BX magic-user, I've had a lot of thoughts over the years about playing wizards in BX/OSE. I took a quick look at the first of the B-series (1-9) to see what spells were given to early starting magic-users once the game was ~5+ years on from its inception. By this time, the people writing these modules had exposure to D&D as a _player,_  not a creator. Since the goal of the B-series (B for Basic) was to introduce new players to the concept of D&D, many contain pre-generated characters which can be used as hirelings or PCs. A review might allow me to see how earlier designers thought of starting MUs, the obstacles that the players would face, and so might sculpt how they present the magic. **A BASIC REVIEW** **B1 In Search of the Unknown (Carr)** In this module, 12 MU or ELF PCs are listed, and a weighted table is used to determine which spells they have. Unsurprisingly, for 1st-level spells (Table A), Charm Person and Sleep rank as the prime spells at 15% chance each will be rolled. The runners-up at 10% are Detech Magic, Light, Magic Missile, and Shield. Interesting though that 2nd level spells (Table B), has a far more equal distribution among the spells listed. At 10% chance, Continual Light, ESP, Invisibility, Knock, Levitate, Mirror Image, and Web get equal billing. **B2 The Caves of Chaos (Gygax)** For the NPC generation here, only 3 out of 20 potential N/PC are MUs or Elfs. There are no pre-assigned spells to those characters or a weighted table. The full number of 1st and 2nd-level spells is given, with three 3rd-level spells mentioned in the table: Dispel Magic, Fireball, and Fly. **B3 Palace of the Silver Princess (Wells)** Here, there are 13 "read-to-play characters," of which 4 are MUs or Elfs. Each is given either Magic Missile, Sleep, Charm Person, or Light to start with **B4 The Lost City (Moldvay)** There are 5 magic-using characters presented as pre-generated options in B4 and we can see there are only two spells-- Sleep or Magic Missile. **B5 Horror on the Hill (Niles)** - There is only 1 MU and 1 Elf among any of the 11 pre-rolled characters and. **B6 The Vailed Society (Cook)** - Like _Hill,_  there is only 1 MU and 1 Elf among any of the 7 pre-rolled characters Neither pre-assigns spells to the characters nor offers any weighted tables, so I assume you'd either roll these from the book or the DM provides the MUs with their spell selections. **B7 Rahasia (Hickman & Hickman)**- Again, just 2 MU, but also inclusion of magic items and higher levels. For 1st-level spells: Shield, Magic Missile, Sleep, and Floating Disk; for 2nd-level spells: Web **B8 Journey to the Rock (Malone)** - There is 1 MU and 1 Elf both are higher levels than the 1st level adventurers we see in the earlier modules. The Elf has Hold Portal and Magic Missile, while the MU has Charm Person and Protection from Evil **B9 Castle Caldwell and Beyond (Nuckolos)** and **B10 Night's Dark Terror (Bambra et. al.)** - No more ready-to-roll characters **SUMMARY** **Sleep is a clear winner!** Really no surprise, really, since it might be _the best_  singular spell in the whole 1st and 2nd level lists. A fireball of feathers. It can take out 2d8 (avg 9) bandits (1 HD) or 1 ogre (4+1 HD). It's top because its cheap, level 1 and only takes 100gp to make a scroll, and it covers a wide range of threats. **Magic Missile is in second place in terms of frequency.**  This is kinda a surprise to me given that Charm Person is often considered the next most powerful spell at 1st and 2nd level. I wonder if that's because it just _feels_  magic-y- shooting off a bolt of arcane energy that hits unerringly? Or fits its one of the most easy to understand spells? What is true is that Magic Missile is a good offensive weapon against other enemy MUs because it can weave through the ranks and hits without a roll which is perfect for disrupting enemy Sleep spells. But was that really what early designers were thinking? **From an old-school dungeon design perspective, I think there are a couple of opportunities.** One adjustment might be to swap the levels of Sleep and Invisibility. Invisibility is a fun spell that ends when the invisible person attacks or casts magic. So the spell is very hijinks-oriented, can benefit the cast/other classes, and can be cast on objects. It also feels really wizardy. This would place Sleep in a narrower range of opportunity. Or as dungeon designers, we could look at Sleep and Magic Missle as opportunities to increase threats at lower levels. _This is not to be "killer DMs"_ , but instead to enhance the fantastic. Not need for 1d4 giant rats or 2 bandits splitting 20gp. Instead, you could make a band of 20 bandits a presence in a starting adventure. A threat that *could* be solved by a starting MU with Sleep and party with careful planning. With Magic Missile, perhaps more enemy MU should have Sleep themselves, but downed PCs might be a sarifice instead of simply just having their throats slashed (as PCs would do). Or perhaps there could be fast-moving or incorporeal threats that are low HP but cannot be interacted with by mundane means. Either way, again, these would ramp up the excitement of low-level adventures and not make them seem like a waiting room for better fun at higher levels.

This past week I went to the GameHole Con in Madison, Wisconsin. For the 12th iteration of the convention, it was me, along with 8,000 other gamers, plus three of my friends, ranging from con-experienced to con-inexperienced. GAMES I RAN This year I took it easy and only ran two 3-hour sessions of Miranda's _Nightwick Abbey._ However, I decided to not make it easy on myself by running one 9-12 PM and then 8-11 AM to the following morning. Ugh. Similar to the ReaperCon games I ran this year, I used _Nightwick's_  unique geomorph setup to scramble together a singular level made of elements of Levels 1 & 2. This is a unique facet of Miranda's design I've never really seen in any other dungeon. I've more thoughts on it I'll have to share in another blog post. Then, using _Shadowdark's_  0-level rules, I ran a funnel where 5 pairs of villagers had to escape the _Abbey_ after being lured there via wine, song, and a vicar who was a most terrible shepard of his flock. Because _Shadowdark_ uses luck tokens, I also cobbled together a quick mechanism to track different decisions made in the halls of Hell. So PCs started with 1 virtue token used for re-rolls or forcing me to re-roll. But they could gain vice tokens when bargaining for power or performing acts that were particuarly self-serving. After seeing at ReaperCon how hard it was to remember which of the grey villagers minis were which, I decided to paint each pair a distinct color, which worked out really nicely and pushed me to get my painting station set up. But I have to admit, from an old-school perspective, black with white dry brushing is a cool effect. For the specific paints, I used a combination of Reaper's Master Paint 2.0 series, given out this year and Army Painter's John Blanche Vol 2 which I picked up on a whim. How did the game play out? **The 9:00 PM game** was novel out of the gate by the appearance of not one but 3 "VIG" badged persons. Which got me a little sweatty, given they shelled out the big money to play at this con so I didn't want to suck. As a group, only 1 or 2 answered "yes" to the first question of if their characters would murder for a weapon to augment what was left of their equipment. This group tried to stay together for the most part but but slightly undone when they turned north, then back west, which was toward their starting point. Eventually, they found themselves cornered by the Blind Brothers and viciously cut down. **The 8:00 AM group** , despite the early morning hour, was no less willing to embrace the darkness. This group all agreed to murder someone at the party for a 1d6 weapon. Then, the group proceeded to go on the offensive against the Abbey and ganged up on the marrow-eating creatures in the room with them as well. This group's aggressiveness served them well and they were certainly willing to cut a deal with the Abbey. This included being betrothed! This group also had a very virtuous action by a member who prayed for divine intervention from the God of Law at a critical moment and rolled a nat 20! He saved his party but slain in the process; however, he ascended to heaven even in the Abbey. The rest of his party was not so much. They ended up going into the light, which is the burning, infinite gullet of the dragon of Hell. But in the end, despite the long odds, each group seemed to really enjoy their time in these hell-haunted halls of _Nightwick Abbey._ GAMES I PLAYED **Pirate Borg:** I gotta say our "Harbor Master" did a very nice job introducing us to this Borg-hack. Much like its parent ship, Pirate Borg is very flavourful and does a nice job through various random tables of building great characters. My pirate, Philip the Unlucky, and his crew explored a mysterious island, battled a giant crab, and stole a bunch of treasure! All aboard our sloop named "Dogg" led by our youngest member Capt. Waffles, who was surprisingly not murdered by the fay spirit he conjured. **Heroquest** : A blast from the past as my original version was sold in a garage sale many moons ago. This game was run by Doug Hopkins who is the current line designer for _Heroquest._ The adventure we were playing was from the expansion that was designed by Joe Manganiello-- so a cool double twist to this experience. At the end of the game, I won a set of specialty dice that I gave away to our youngest player, given he and his friends were big fans of the game. But I didn't walk away totally empty-handed because I got a free quest and a pad of blank sheets featuring the _Heroquest_  board to design your own adventures. Oh, Doug is also the current lead on one of my other favorite board games, _Talisman,_  so it's really great to get a chance to hang with him at the con. **Shadowrun:** In middle school, I made friends with a guy whose favorite setting was _Shadowrun_  so, like _Heroquest_ , this was mainly driven by my nostalgia. I had also forgotten how many d6's are really needed to play this game so it was laughable I showed up with a paltry mix-and-matched set of 5. The setup with protecting a rising influencer star at a gaming convention like TwitchCon, but in the future. I played a pre-gen Smuggler class, but much to the GM's delight/dismay, kept running Edward Norton like a "Face" class. Turns out our charge was more than meets the eye- surprise! But it was a good time. We convinced a second set of runners to be our B-team, we foiled a drone attack, and had a final showdown. Along the way me and the Street Samurai player had assembled a new concept album for our young pop-star. So coming soon from Tigre: Witness Protection- You Can't Hide My Shine (title) with tracks "Boom! Drones on Fire" and "My Technological Romance" PEOPLE I MET I did drop by a **panel on building a YouTube RPG** presence because it featured noted D&D folks **Ben Milton and Justin Alexander**. It was an interesting hour about some of the realities behind the screen. Notable for me was: * The social media company's algorithm controls a lot of what is actually seen and you have to be really big for them to even bother sending you an email that something has changed * Content in a series rarely does well beyond the first item in that series because the audience just halves after each subsequent engagement * All the panel agreed that while some sorta live-play + DMing advice would be good that sorta content would take too long to produce and suffer from the same sequence problem; ideally, such a thing would have to be edited down from 1-3 hours to 10-30 minutes of the "good stuff" maybe making it hard to follow * A lot of the biggest "stars" in the RPG space had already made a following from something else and brought those eyeballs to their YouTube channel; same folks often have additional editing teams and or experience to help out Maybe none of the above is really unknown, but it reinforced to me that there is a lot of other things going on behind the scenes for someone to make a breakout in the social media space. And a lot of that is often hidden in "percetion" of how they got there. Mica & Doug Kovacs, both of DCC fame: While at the bar, my mentioning of _Castle Rat_  to a friend allowed us to strike up a conversation with Mica who runs a lot of DCC events. It was really cool to meet them and hear some Goodman Games stories. Mica prodded (dared, suckered) me into tell Doug Kovacs he need to listen to _Castle Rat._ Cut to me doing just that...and Doug was ready with an opinion! It actually prompted a neat conversation about music, art, and the state of RPGs and D&D. It was really interesting and was cool to chat with him. I learned three things that Doug has 1. Several playlists culled from an old G+ thread of metal music which was cool 2. A set of _Talisman_  houserules he likes to play with to speed things up 3. A war game called _Dog Storm_  which a wargame consisting of bands of 5 repurposed minatures and found terrain- occasionally a storm of plastic dogs are thrown on the battlefield- if they touch your mini it dies instantly. Final Thought: I really enjoyed GameHole Con this year. I think cons are great because for the most part they are a big gorup of folks who really enjoy *playing* the hobby. That connection is really fantastic!

In the latest issue of Wyrd Science, B2 Keep At The Borderlands is brought up as a benchmark for the adventure style of Dungeons & Dragons in a discussion about a new game from Osprey Publishing, Through the Hedgerow: > “[Hedgerow] definitely isn’t a game about delving dungeons to murder a few orcs, make off with their treasure, rinse and repeat.” From the article, Hedgerow is a game about a group of PCs who are called to serve the mysterious Light in its never-ending war against the entropic forces of the Dark. The battle and PC adventures range across various eras of England, from the medieval past to WWII. Later in the discussion, a distinction is drawn between American fantasy, which is more oriented toward a small bastion of civilization facing a broad swath of untamed wilderness, and British fantasy, where there is no uncivilized land. As a result, you have to deal with your “neighbors”, both material and immaterial and their choices present and past alike: > “American fantasy is the fantasy of the frontier between civilization and the darkness beyond. … You see it best encapsulated in the old D&D modular Keep on the Borderlands.” Aside: Please don’t mistake me. I am not giving either Wyrd Science or Through the Hedgerow the evil eye. The former is an amazing magazine that everyone should get, especially this issue, which brings up _The Grim and The Dark_ , has an interview with Castle Rat, and talks about Pratchett’s _Nightwatch_ along with reviews by Idle Cartulary. The latter seems like a very cool RPG that started with an exploration of old-school D&D and grew from there into something that fans of Over the Garden Wall and Dolmenwood would seem to love! What I want to focus on is how Keep on the Borderland casts such a long shadow over the entire discussion of D&D, despite other contemporary module alternatives. So what if we consider a Basic D&D line sibling as an alternative, like:**** B4: The Lost City (1982) In brief, The Lost City is a module about an ancient city that dug up an eldritch being when constructing their king’s burial tomb. Not being able to kill the creature, some began to worship it as a new god. Eventually, as more and more folks followed this god, the city was left to ruin, undefended, and destroyed by barbarians. The survivors, mostly still devoted to the eldritch god, built an underground city ruled by the law of this being. However, even there, a rebellion representing followers of the old gods flourished, and they plot revenge. Here is a review by Professor Dungeon Master. This is one of my favorite TSR module,s and I think one that deserves far more praise than it gets and it gets plenty. Let’s consider the qualities of The Lost City: * A Dungeon of Factions: The PCs can make friends with 3 “good” factions representing the old gods of the city who are squared off against an “evil” faction, supported by their eldritch being, currently controlling the city. * NPCs With Their Own Goals: Each faction also has its own goal, set of recruitment requirements, and are all are at odds with each other. However, all want to free their city of Zargon’s rule, so diplomatic players have a clear route forward. In fact, its expressly called out that these factions “give the DM the chance to add character interaction to the adventure.” * All Human: A vast majority of the action in the Lost City centers around what the PCs are going to do with the human factions below ground. Three are rebel factions, one is a large cult, and vast majority of the rest are drugged, oppressed who really don’t know much else. * More Than A Dungeon, its a Sandbox: The main presentation of the module is the upper pyramid. The module ends when the PC reach the titular city, but in a few scant pages Moldvey offers an isometric view of the city, major buildings, alludes to five other adventuring sites (see below), and provides 8 different paragraph hooks for continuing the adventure. * Squarely Swords & Sorcery: Most D&D modules tend to come across as some variant of mid-fantasy, but difficult to pin down in its relationship with the Appendix N.  The Lost City wears its swords and sorcery firmly on its sleeve. In fact, I think it's one of the few modules to actually do so, having been so inspired by Howard’s Red Nails. So what would The Lost City say about Dungeons & Dragons if it were used as a benchmark in lieu of B2 Keep on the Borderlands? I think you get an impression that PCs are often a group of wanderers who find themselves walking into the middle of various conflicts that are at a stalemate between humans divided between good and evil factions, which take place in sites of former grandeur. Their decisions and negotiations, which are mostly to the benefit of “good”, often help vanquish the avatars of evil in the adventure. Along the way they might uncover why the current state of things are the way they are, find some valuables/magic, and ultimately free and oppressed populations. This sets the stage for even more adventure! To me, this seems down-right contemporary but certainly a far cry from “delving dungeons to murder a few orcs, make off with their treasure, rinse and repeat”. I don’t forward this benchmark change to launder Gygax’s conception of D&D, but to remind everyone that even by the late 70’s many voices had already begun providing alternative ideas of what a D&D adventure is. B2 is important for a variety of reason, but not because its the definitive or even defining conception of D&D adventuring.

### --- Original image from the _Diablo_  pitch document, which now feels like an OSR doc from yesteryear ### Why Megadungeons? Over on the Prismatic Wasteland Discord, a member asked essentially, "Why megadungeons?" This is a good perennial question that deserves perennially blogged answers. Heck, Ben L. of Through Ultan's Door does a whole podcast on the who, what, when, why, and how of megadungeons- Into The Megadungeon. Go listen, its a treat! The questions deserve continual attention because megadungeons are a foundational campaign structure for Dungeons & Dragons and, therefore, the campaign structure of most descendant fantasy adventure games. Dave Arneson's Blackmoor campaign, the genesis of D&D as we know it, quickly became centered around the group’s individual characters repeatedly delving into the dungeon below Castle Blackmoor. While it was not initially intended to be this way, accounts suggest that the dungeon delving proved so enthralling that the player refused to abandon it. Only after losing Castle Blackmoor itself, did the players tear their attention away. A while later, once Gary Gygax was introduced to Arneson's novel campaign structure, he too began to formulate his own castle-based dungeon of infinite levels and the famous Greyhawk campaign begun. Its impact on D&D cannot be denied. But Greyhawk was not the second dungeon; one of Arneson's players created Castle Tonisborg with a soon-to-be-released early draft of D&D in 1973, which again featured many multiroom levels filled with treasures, traps, and several dragons. This vast dungeon campaign structure also predominated outside of the D&D founder’s groups. If you read early editions of Lee Gold's Alarums & Excursions, early campaign structures often feature deep dungeons. And even one of the earliest published third-party modules for D&D by Judge’s Guild was the Caverns of Thracia (1979). A very excellent dungeon whose gold-standard design is covered here by Gus L. of All Dead Generations. Megadungeons ARE D&D. ### Megadungeons in Video Games & Popular Media However, megadungeons are not relegated to the past nor to the gaming niche of pen and paper RPGs. Megadungeons have been a big component of early and current video games too! Early PC dungeon crawlers like Wizardry, which I cover here, featured multi-floor dungeons that had to be delved by the player's party and hand-mapped by the player themselves. Of course, Diablo represents another example of a very famous and beloved video game series that features a megadungeon structure (see the image at the top of the post). --- Wizardry (left); Super Metroid (right) Megadungeons as a game design structure gained significant attention with the release of Super Metroid (SNES, 1994) and Castlevania: Symphony of Night (PS, 1997), which eventually led to the genre-defining term "metroidvania". The recent metroidvania game Silksong, a sequel to the acclaimed Hollow Knight, has put megadungeons right back into the forefront of people's minds. I direct you to Josh at Rise Up Comus for a nice discussion about how metroidvanias convey their megadungeon structures in detail. But I think simply looking at the two maps below you can clearly see Hollow Knight owes a lot to the dungeons of Dungeons and Dragons. --- Dungeon example from Holme's _Basic D &D_ (left) Map from _Hollow Knight (right)_ Finally, megadungeons are not just a setting for video games. There are a few examples of very popular media that also place their story in the context of a megadungeon. The first that jumps to mind is Dungeon Meshi, which bears a shocking resemblance to old-school Dungeons & Dragons, but less surprising once you realize one of its big influences is Wizardry. In the category of hot-at-Barnes-and-Nobels, the book series Dungeon Crawler Carl, amusingly abbreviated DCC, is also gaining steam as a popular book series featuring a megadungeon, and it looks like Seth McFarlane's company will produce it as a TV series. The plot is that an average Joe, Carl, is ensnared in an intergalactic TV show after all of Earth is turned into one giant multi-level dungeon. The series feels more like it takes after World of Warcraft than anything else, but it's still a vast dungeon and dungeon crawling at its center. New manga Tower Dungeon also features a band of heroes attempting to reach the top of a 100-level tower to rescue the princess from a necromancer. Megadungeons ARE D&D, but not JUST D&D. ### Misconceptions of Megadungeons Hopefully, you are convinced by the above that megadungeons are not an archaic campaign structure but one that is alive and well in the public consciousness and, therefore, might be a great way to start your next or even your first Dungeons & Dragons campaign. And to help encourage that, let me take a stab at answering some of the misconceptions about megadungeons: Dungeons are boring hack & slash: This can befall almost any RPG game. While dungeons are a basic unit of play in fantasy adventure games, they are not a simplistic unit of play. Dungeons are a creative environment for RPG because they allow a dungeon master and players to develop the call-and-response flow of table participation that is required to make most RPGs work. Furthermore, good dungeons are choice-laden, but are more constrained than their wilderness or open-world counterparts. This often provides the need for improvisation, but limits the need of novelty to a set of recurring themes and subjects at any given point. This constraint prevents a new DM from having to narrate 3 different ongoing situations, likely when starting a campaign off in a town or wilderness and saying, “so what do you do?”. I don’t have time to key 300+ rooms: If you are going to design one, how big does it have to be to be a “mega” dungeon? I tend to think there are two qualities of a megadungeon: (1) is a minimal size and (2) a functional component. First, in terms of size, Hole in the Oak, a popular starting dungeon, is about 60 keyed room. Caverns of Thracia, which is a highly lauded megadungeon, has only about 117 keyed rooms. While 2011’s Stonehell, another highly recommended megadungeon, is over 700 rooms. Second, “keyed rooms” might not be the best measure because 1 huge room could require as much table time as 5 smaller rooms. So, another definition which I think is probably more applicable to today’s entertainment-compeditive lives, is that a megadungeon is a dungeon that forms the loci of play for an ongoing campaign. This means the dungeon is the center of action, with other locations, e.g. “the town”, playing a supportive or peripheral basis mainly as a place to provide downtime actions between the dungeon crawling. Also, you don’t have to key everything at once. Gygax recommended having about 3 floors ready to go before calling your group together for the first game. However, we aren’t playing 8-hour sessions, so even having 1 complete floor of 30-50 rooms keyed would be enough to get started. Dungeon design is difficult because its hard to design good dungeons: You might say that dungeon design is already difficult, made more so by having to create over 100+ rooms interesting enough to support a campaign. Well, fortunately, the creator of His Magistry the Worm, Josh McCrowell and I have written a dungeon design document. This course walks the reader through the steps needed to create a solid, table-ready 30-room dungeon. One can easily replicate this process 3 or 4 times to yield a 90 to 120-room, multi-floor, megadungeon. A key points is one is aiming for playable dungeons, not dungeons so excellent they redefine the genre. Give yourself a break and aim for bored-in-class creativity! Here Nick discusses how to make a megadungeon in two weeks. Miranda of _In Places Deep_ also has good advice. 100 rooms of the same theme will get repetitive: I can definitely answer “no”. Through my many, many years of playing just Dungeons & Dragons, I can say that I still get excited delving cursed crypts filled with the undead. Megadungeons are great at distilling ideas AND giving them depth. Each floor can be populated with only a few ideas, themes, or aesthetics. Which means you don’t have to have an entire list of complicated plots, plans, relationships, and NPCs before you begin to execute a whole campaign. Megadungeons are a canvas to iterate on those same things repeatedly, which allows you to fully draw out an element’s flavor, because you must variate on each element. The opposite side of the coin to dungeons is “wilderness hexcrawls” can be a load of fun and certainly has been popular in the “West Marches” format. However, I think hexcrawls can dilute ideas because a DM is required to spread them out over a much larger area, like a kingdom/region, and the basic unit is the 6-mile hex not a single room. Even with several items per hex, this can give the feel of a lot of empty space. The players also cover more ground and retrace less frequently. This further increases the need for novelty and decreases the impact of a single idea. Moving through the same rooms will get boring: To address again the fear of repetition, megadungeons employ repetition simultaneously on two levels: in-game level and at a meta-level. For the former, the familiarity born from repetition allows the players to quickly navigate the megadungeon, exploit its secrets for their benefit, and maximize the impact of faction engagement. For the latter, repetition increases player knowledge of the fictional world. It helps cement the names of NPCs, location, and keeps them abreast of recurrent themes. Repetition also helps the DM ensure novelty has an impact. If a party has explored and passed by the fountain of Zeus 10 times, then they are going to be pretty surprised and intrigued when the fountain is cracked, water drained, and there is a staircase leading down into the dark. Well, it is a silly idea that one person or group built some huge complex for no purpose other than to store their treasure: Another common complaint that I hear is that a megadungeon in too contrived even for a fantasy game with giant, fire-breathing lizards. That a wizard did it, is too insufficient or by the power of the mythic underworld is too handwavy. I only ask that one take a moment to look at how the mega-wealthy and powerful lived both in the past and present. For instance, the Palace at Versailles has 137 rooms listed which is more than the number of keyed rooms in Caverns of Thracia. The founder of Facebook is supposedly buying up eleven houses, which totals to something like $100 million on his block to create a complex in California. Even if that is not convincing enough, let me try this one last thing. In terms of fantasy adventure gaming, much like videogame counterparts, it is much more important to have a gamable space that aesthetically resembles a realistic space than it is to have a truly rationalized and functional area. After all, more real tombs are linear and contain few rooms at all. Megadungeons are where the familiar allows expression of the fantastic. ### Megadungeons as Campaign Finally, I want to end by addressing the megadungeon as a campaign structure. I think the modern play environment today is a far cry from Gygax’s weekly 8-hour gatherings. And instead, most people involved in D&D post-college can only spend about 2-4 hours per session, once a week. I know I am fortunate enough to play about twice a week, but anymore is really stretching it. It might seem contradictory, but this play constraint is very excellent for a megadungeon campaign. Megadungeon have a simplified campaign structure/loop: Town to megadungeon and back again. The dungeon, of course, is where the action is and the town is where resupply is. But the town usually contains a civic faction, a religious faction, and 2-3 other groups that represent the world at large. Additionally, the proximity to a dungeon of legend provides a good reason for all sorts of weirdos to visit. And, of course, things in the dungeon could also crawl out of it. And, there is usually enough reason to have a few areas outside the town to also provide a small regional space: the other town that hates the dungeon town, the hermit’s hut, the strange standing stones, the lake, and the ruin temple/tower. All which can be their own adventure locals, other entrances to the dungeon, both, or just locations for extras like spell components or special training. When combined with repetition, this means in just a few 2-hour sessions, players become very familiar with a lot of their local world. This reduces the need for a DM to repeat names, locations, relationships, and lore because there is just not that much there to catalog, and the players see it a lot. A huge advantage! On top of that, it also doesn’t take long for players to see the impact of their actions for good or bad. In a large hexcrawl, if you burn down the inn, players can just move on. In a very local megadungeon campaign, they are sleeping outside or in the dungeon. In a hexcrawl campaign, if the evil mimic leaves with the party, they might not see that effect for a while. However, in a megadungeon campaign, said mimic might become the favored inn, replacing (mysteriously overnight) the prior inn they burned down. Megadungeons are where the familiar allows focus on play and player actions. ### The End, but the Beginning …of your megadungeon campaign! I’ve hoped I’ve been able to to convince you that a megadungeon is a contained campaign space that concentrates fantastical ideas by stretching them to full effect, uses repetition to the player’s advantage, which enhances play investment, increases the impact of novelty and change in the adventure location, while being a format that combines well with busy adult lives. And instead of being a campaign of the yesteryears of Dungeons and Dragons, it is a campaign structure that is being brought back to gaming consciousness through manga like Dungeon Meshi or Tower Dungeon and through video games “metroidvania” genre like Hollow Knight/Silk Song and Blasphemous 1 & 2.

--- _Allegory of Charles I of England and Henrietta of France in a Vanitas Still Life_ Anonymous Flemish painter, 1670s. It was interesting to reflect on images and aesthetics that permeated my mind when thinking about the type of fantasy adventures I am drawn to or try to replicate. Here are some media that might have been responsible. I wanted to annotate it, maybe later, or perhaps better without comment? Aeon Flux The Maxx Go-Go the Dodo Farscape LEXX Perdido Street Station The Windup Girl Saga Ghost in the Shell The Bloody Chamber Black Tongue Thief The Bloody Chamber The Magicians Elric Farfad & Greymouser X-men Salvador Dali H.G. Giger Black Moth Tarot Decks Bulfinch's Mythology Clash of the Titans Lost in Space Muppet Show Jim Henson's Storyteller Series East of the Sun, West of the Moon Between Two Fires Legend of Zelda (NES) Dragon Warrior (NES) Final Fantasy (NES) Vermis I & II Millenium X Files Peter Paul Rubens Vanitas paintings Darwin's Finches Early OSR 'Zines Moebius Swamp Thing Dungeon Meshi Tower Dungeon Dorohedoro Sledgehammer Music Video Don't Worry Be Happy Music Video

Over on _bluesky_ , Zenopus Archives posts a new favorite Holmes/OD&D house rule: "._..that thieves can fire into melee without penalty; i.e. no friendly fire_ ". This is a great rule and keeps positioning thieves as a specialists in combat. While they still could use a spear in the second rank, thief PC could be out of rank acting as scouts/recon- this rule allows them to use that position and further encourages the *risk* of breaking rank. Death, Taxes, & the City Guard: _Blog of Forlorn Encystment_  summarized some very nice rules buried in the AD&D DMG about the city guard having indentured magic-users, taxes on goods, and highlights that by applying taxes- your PCs will try to find ways _around them,_  which is fun. Also this is an excellent reason to have a thief be connected to a guild- black market downtime. Good to note too _His Majesty the Worm_  incorporates a 50% tax rate for this very reason! Megadungeon Zine (n.): Casey Garske of _Stay Frosty_ fame has put out a new megadungeon 'zine _Oubliette_ using Google docs, public domain art, and his own pencil art. Two issues so far with "0" being a small player's guide and "1" being the first level of the dungeon. _I love this old-school G+ energy._  We need some more of it in the space. The early old-school scene has a lot of these sorta 'zines and I try to collect as many as I can. It's a lot of similar energy found in many Appx. N Jam entries. > And speaking of megadungeons, Castle Kelpsprot is being put out by The Dododecahedron. Yet another to check out and apparently it already has hundreds of rooms keyed. Mouth of Mormo: Speaking of dungeons, _Goblin Punch_  released a new, free dungeon which comes in a highly annotated form filled with DM advice. In particular, I love:_ In my games, characters are required to have character goals. Why do you adventure? Why risk your life to search for gold in these horrible tombs? _Character goals must be something that can be solved with money;_otherwise, why is this character an adventurer in the first place?_ Speed Dice for Fast Combat _:_ A-new-to-me-blog, _Light From the Far Horizon_ , has an interesting combat system where a weapon's damage die (the speed die) is rolled for the to-hit. If you are a lower roll than your target's roll, you strike them first before they strike you, but armor is ablative. However, two-handed weapons have to roll _above_  the target's speed die. Sheilds get their own speed die, which you have to beat as well to strike. Its seems like a lively and interesting system. d666 Dungeon Dressing Table: Who doesn't want a table of "stuff you'd expect to find in a dungeon" to "gonzo/anachronistic mythic underworld bullshit"?

--- Elric & Stormbringer by Piotr Jablonski* ### Sentient weapons and magic items should be like an annoying NPC With great power comes a great lists of spurious demands. No matter if the object contains a true soul or is more similar to an arcane AI. Jennell Jaquays had great magic items like Tim the Fish Amulet with a great personality and several items in _The Dark Tower_ , which had their own goals. And of course, Stormbringer is a character all its own in the Elric saga. To me, a sentient weapon is not human. It understands its own purpose very well and desires to execute above all else, all the time. It finds it very hard to relate to its human welders. If for some reason it _can relate_ , well most likely it was human at some point and that usually means a lot of baggage. I mean just look at vampires- they were once human too. There can be positive benefits too. It might be that adorning the weapon or building a shrine could attract attention from other factions. Maybe knight errants come to kneel at an alter to the sword and offer a week of service. Maybe when traveling, the PC increases the disposition of neighboring towns towards the party as rumors of the sacred Mirror of Stars- perhaps even the queen seeks to know her baby's fortune. Below are d20 such demands to be rolled during downtime periods. The request must be performed during the following downtime. If not, roll on the hireling negotiation table. Should they be ignored, a magic weapon will be just +1 and will refuse to perform any but innate functions. After all, the great Sword of the Sky is no mere rapier! Its not meant to just hang about your person like 50' of rope or that thuggish crowbar! ### Demands of Sentient Weapons (_& Perhaps Of Other Intelligent Objects)_ 1. I should be oiled or polished with expensive agents 2. Fancy display case or scabbard of rare materials 3. I wish to be paraded 4. I wish to be better known 5. I should be utilized 3 times next delve 6. I desire to walk around in your body, let me possess you 7. A change in scenery is needed; we should travel to the next town 8. You must carouse with me; excitement is needed 9. You should commission a poem about me 10. I should be housed for a week in a place of worship aligned to my purpose 11. Your skill is weak- practice with me 1d3 weeks (_PC cannot adventure_) 12. The king/lord must hear of my exploits, seek an audience and tell them 13. Three foes should be struck down by me 14. You should appreciate my other talents (only use innate or non-combat talents) 15. You should know my history and place in the centuries, find it! 16. You only need me and no other protection! (Wear no armor) 17. Announce me with vigor! (All to-hit attempts are prefaced by a _player_ battle cry) 18. Your vestments should match my regalness and you should bear my icon. 19. Your flesh shall rot, I am eternal- designate who shall bear me when you die 20. You are an adequate bearer, nothing is needed…today. *Really wish I had picked up these Elric reprints from Centipede Press when I had the chance

In the _Rules Cyclopedia,_  there is a section on anti-magic that explains what is is in terms of RC Basic D&D game. And in that explanation, is brings up that all creatures on the prime material plane are made of four components: matter, time, energy, and thought, but that creatures in the astral plane might lack one of those components. Here is the passage below: It is interesting here that one could devise a pantheon of gods around these 5 forces. But given that they are so primal and foundational, I view them as the D&D version of the Greek Titans. They are the gods of gods, but more specifically, they are forces that underpin the gods. And I see them as also falling along the Law-Neutral-Chaotic axis presented in basic: Matter & Time (Lawful), Energy & Thought (Neutral), and Entropy (Chaotic). So could these be the gods of a campaign? Are these concepts too abstract for players to role-play? And why do they all still allow _turn undead_? And I think it might be interesting to consider monster design in terms of taking a vanilla creature and removing one of those 4 forces. Like, what do you get if you take "frog, giant" and remove _matter, energy, time, or thought?_

_Want to learn more about the world of Nightwick from Miranda? You can follow her blog  here and the ongoing development of Nightwick Abbey at her Patreon here._ Previously in Nightwick... Blossom (Rogue 6) Mayfly (Magician 6) Thekla (Magician 5) Ulf (Magician 5) Liminal Space (Changeling 5) Poppy (Fighter 5) Pataki (Graverobber 4) Yevgeny the Coward (Cleric 4?) Felix (Dwarf 1) **At the Medusa's Head...** The group deliberates on any "unfinished business" on the first level. Meaning, what foul captains of the Pit have not lost their heads to our hands. We settled on one last target- the [REDACTED] **...Then Down to the Abbey... ** * The party had to flip way back to their older maps in order to chat a path through the Abbey's upper works (_PC NOTE: mapping works y'all!_) * The trip should have been easy, but a colony of fungal zombies halted progress but a fireball from the hands of one of the party's many magicians sauted those 'shrooms (_PC NOTE: seriously, our party is spellcasters and thieves...and the Dark Country's most beloved being- Liminal_) * The fungal zombies cause further deliberation since they generally reside on lower levels- is something pushing up? Worrying as these same monsters laid low Sotar, a Cleric of the 4th level (_RIP to a real one_) * We also visited the [REDACTED] to show it off to the new party member and ended up tusslin' with some goat men who had ample coin and a figurine of the Lady (uncorrupted; 500sp) * This led us to the lair of our intended target, which is cut off from the rest of the Abbey. We experimented with a few different ways of reaching the beast and found success in rotating magicians out in a tense moment of trying not to die every 3 rounds. * In the end we were able to walk away with some new spells, silver, and furniture! **...And back to the Medusa's Head** Together this action clear the first level of all the "hot-spots", but the presence of the fungal zombies might mean we've just cleared space for a new foe to make its home!

#### Last Thursday, I submitted an entry to the 2025 Appx. N Jam! The Appx. N Jam was an itch.io contest requiring submissions to be a four-page RPG adventure based on a made-up book title that was randomly assigned. Those titles were of the vein of those old swords & sorcery novels found in the _AD &D DMG_'s Appendix N- the influences for _AD &D _listed by Gygax. For a great collection of Appendix N stories, I would like to recommend _Appendix N: The Eldritch Roots of Dungeons and Dragons_ edited by Peter Bebergal from MIT Press. #### I was hoping to get a title such as [The Location of the Noun + Noun], like "Crypt of the Red Wizard". This sort of title gives a clear idea about the dungeon and the random encounter table. Instead, I got "Tabaldak's Geas", which, while it gives a potential antagonist, a "geas" is not a location nor something that could be easily used as a treasure. Furthermore, a geas in the _D &D_ sense often forces the players to do X. For example, in _OD &D,_ running across a wizard stronghold might result in a geas being applied to the party, forcing a task of some sort. So I decided to combine ideas that had been kicking around for the Appx. N Jam: * The idea of the Deck of Many Things has been used as a campaign starter since its often considered a campaign breaker * A cult based around mistaking a beholder-kin (which has _create food & water_) as a bounty-delivering god * Try to submit a fairly good-sized dungeon (I hit 23 rooms) #### Here is the synopsis I created for the dungeon: **** > **“Who has misfortune thrown into this trap’s jaws?"** > > Escaping danger, the PCs are trapped in the villa of an inscrutable, unscrupulous, and absent sorcerer, the Lord has gone mad, the Captain is hopeless, the Vizer is obsessed, & the Friar turned heretic... > > **The only way out rests under the baleful gaze of The Eye!** > > This 23-room dungeon villa tasks the PCs with finding a way to escape the powerful geas that holds them prisoner. They will have to navigate the dead that the geas won't let rest, hungry familiars angry at their abandonment, candle-wax doves that hate light, and a dream-mad lord stalking the halls. All the while, they will puzzle over the tria prima, bemoan a mask made of cheese, tame a desk with a nasty disposition, and ponder the black lacquor box below the alien monstrosity at the center of the villa. > > An adventure for four characters levels 1-2 (or twice as many level 0) I'll try to do a more specific post-mortem after the Jam is over, but overall, I am very pleased that I was able to create, key, and design an old book cover for the Jam. And look forward to maybe doing it next year or participating in other design contests. Below is the map and random encounter table. #### If you are interested in other designs that I've done, please check out the free Designing Dungeons course I co-wrote with Josh, the 2025 SILVER ENNIE (Best Game & Best Rules) award-winning author of _His Majesty the Worm_

--- 🎨 David Mattingly You know a wizard mentor would teleport into your home, drink all your beer, & eat your snacks For more in the Practical Magic series ### **In most editions of D &D, the relationship between NPC mentor and PC magic-user is only vaguely defined and perhaps a missed opportunity for world-building.** _OD &D_ says nothing about the relationship between a magic-user and a possible mentor. Only noting that MUs should have 1 spellbook per level of magic- one book for level 1 spells, one book for level 2 spells. Looking at the stronghold section, we see that a magic-user is 9-12th level, attended by 1d6 monsters, 1d6 low-level apprentices, and 3d6x10 men-at-arms led by Fighting-man lutients. And importantly is neutral or chaotic but _not lawful._ In the _Rules Cyclopedia,  _it is noted a level 9 magic-user with a stronghold will attract 1d6 MU level 1-3 and 2d6 normal people of above-average intelligence who want to become MUs but will quit after 1d6 months- discouraged. While in the _AD &D DMG, _a DM is instructed to inform a magic-user player that they have just completed a course of apprenticeship with a master who was of unthinkably high level (at least 6th) and was presented with a spell book containing _read magic_  and 3 other spells chosen by the DM or rolled randomly. And noted later that a MU will gain 1 spell, and only one, upon advancement, and will have gathered others from found scrolls, captured spellbooks, and or learned from other party MUs. Most of the understanding about this relationship is really a collection of practices and assumptions perpetuated through play culture (and shared media) rather than deeply proscribed in the rulebook. In general, the MU mentor is the source of the starting spellbook, often the source of the MU's new spells, and, occasionally, might be called upon to provide a plot hook or identify a magic item. Or serve some other function under the general heading of "mouthpiece for the DM". **At my own table, I'd like to better clarify the costs and benefits of a mentor because it's an important relationship that the player should be able to understand in a more choice-oriented manner:_Should I play apprentice or strike out on my own?_**  If the PC chooses to undergo mentorship, we should contextualize the mentor and the relationship in the game world and beyond someone who just automatically provides spells. For the DM, this is a great opportunity for a connection to the game world and setting, providing another digetic avenue to convey information about the world without a lore dump. ### Boons ### * _Known spells:_ The apprentice MU can choose the spell they want to know from the master's book * _Item identification:_ The vast knowledge of the master will easily identify most magic items * _Fully stocked arcane distillery:  _At level 2, the apprentice MU will be able to make the 7 basic potions: _diminution, ESP, growth, gaseous form, healing, invisibility, & levitation_ * _Minor wand manufacture:_ At level 4, the MU will be able to use the facilities to make a wand containing 1d2 levels of spells; can cast in melee; recharge uses a component found in spells * _Got yourself in a bit of trouble:_ The mentor will help undo a curse, the effects of poison, or other malady (but not simply heal HP- just sleep it off), however, it comes at a cost below or some other task. ### Banes The mentors are going to want something from each apprentice. They aren't training people in dangerous arcane arts for a hobby. Each week, roll a 1d12 and consult the following table: **_ _** **** > **1-9 |_Your service is not required_ **and you may do as you wish. > > **10 |  _Esoteric needs:_** Mentor desires the gathering of something seemingly innocuous or inconcequential- _Touch this amulet to these 3 spots, make rubbings of this relief,_ or _gather dungeon mushrooms from three corpses._ > **11 |_Demands a body_** _:_  Mentor desires a body for...reasons. It can't be a skeleton, zombie, or rotted corpse. Humanoid is negotiable or might be the specific goal. If the mentor is "chaotic", it might be important that the unfortunate victim is still alive. > **12 |_Summoned to the tower_** : You will be required to take a week off from adventuring to help the master with something. On the upside, you get a free roll on the magical carousing table without the expenditure of coin, but you must make a save to avoid a negative outcome. As the PC gains levels, the mentor might require further activities that take them wider into the wilderness. They might be envoys to fay kingdoms or intelligent monsters. Or have to perform some act on the master's behalf. And if the mentor is chaotic, that act might be an attempt to bump off the apprentice (shrug). Or something as mundane as tax collection. It could also be that the mentor wants magic items that a high-level PC is now capable of bringing back. ### Insta-Wizard Let's synthesize the above D&D sources into a unified table to create an interesting NPC mentor that is both a sort of regional lord and an institution. And again, ktrey's d100- Mercurial Mentors & Weird Wizards will help kick things off with who or what exactly this mentor is. **To establish a Mentor roll:** * **1d2 _for Cosmic alignment:_** to determine MU Master alignment: odd- Chaotic even- Neutral * 1d4+8 _for Sorcerer, Necromancer, or Wizard:  _equals the level of the Mentor * **1d6 _for Those who serve:  _**to establish the number of open apprenticeships, the remainder is the number of current apprentices (i.e. a roll of 2 indicates two open spots and 4 other apprentices) * **1d8 _for Monstrous patronage:  _**to establish the rumored, but never seen, monsters that serve the mentor 1. Chimeras 2. Spirits 3. Dragons 4. Elementals 5. Gorgons 6. Minotaurs 7. Demons 8. Gargoyles; all at # encountered in the wilderness * **1d10 _for (Mostly) Trusted Right-hands:  _**to establish the number of levels of fighting men serving the mentor; none higher than level 4 (i.e. a roll of 6 indicated six levels of Fighting-men, so one level 4 and one level 2 Fighter) * **1d12+2 x10 _for Foul Foot-soldiers:_** to establish the number of men-at-arms (if neutral) or beast-men (if chaotic) that serve the mentor ### Reason the Mentor is Left Alone by the Crown & Church It is foolish of me to list all the ways a mentor might be connected to your setting. However, one question we might want to answer immediately is why the Crown or Church not taken action against someone so dangerous? The results here can simply be a reason OR a seed for a subplot involving attempts by NPC to make the apprentice turn double agent. Maybe because the wizard: 1. Defeated the Great Beast of the Fell Swamps 2. Made a 99-year pact with the Church 3. Has ensorcelled the Crown- a few advisors suspect something 4. Killed the last two commanders that tried and keeps a third as a songbird 5. Threatened the Crown with blight and the Church with plague 6. Pledged to revive the sleeping prince 7. Threatened to revive the sleeping princess 8. Knows the Crown is their bastard child 9. They keep a secret about an atrocity committed by the Church 10. Romantic entanglement with the Crown- so spicy! 11. Keeps the true child of the Royal Family 12. Helped get the new head of the Church the seat of power 13. The Fay only observe the Truce if they are alive 14. The Church requires yearly renewal of a particular set of arcane wards 15. Is the only one who can read the terms of the demonic licence 16. Has been building a great War Machine, wanted equally by the Crown & Church 17. Maintains the undead Council- former rulers & adversaries who give advice to the Crown 18. Enscorcelled all the animals in the kingdom to go mad upon their death 19. Is a child of the Pit and their death will bring forth a legion from the Fortress of Rust 20. Sends nightly dreams that depict terrible outcomes if they are removed ### Mentor Example Elizabeth the Lucky decides to seek a new mentor in the lands of the Rose Swamp. During downtime, the DM rolls: even, 4, 6, 7, 4, 3 + 78 on ktrey's table. And informs Liz the Lucky's player of the following: **** > **Vertel the Absent**  has achieved mastery in the 12 dynamic orders (magic-user level 12) and concerned with cosmic balance. Which is why the magus is said to have stopped a great dragon from raveging the land not by killing it but by challenging it to a game of dreamland chess- a game which continues to this very day. Folks in the immediate area claim that luck has been upended and all for miles everyone's fate is connected to this game.  Being wholy occupied by this contest, and in accordance with the wizard's great power, no less than 8 spirits who travel to and from the tower on moonless nights doing the great mage's bidding. In addition, a hero (fighter level 4) of renown leads the wizard's personal guard. This captain and guard (50 strong) are said to be the knight and company sent to slay the dragon, but pledged fieldy to the wizard once Vertel's deft solution brought a sudden end to the creature's rampage. > > > > > Vertel is willing to accept any who desire apprenticeship along as they first pass through a wall of flame that guards the front door.* And why had the Crown not knocked down the tower? Vertel has threatened the Crown with blight and Church with plague. If you want more on magic, just check out some other posts about running Magic-Users in D&D * Just threw this in there because I think wizards would be this sorta "filter" at their front door

** --- BERSERK by Kentaro Miura ****Prismatic Wasteland posted a bunch of potential blog topics, which I collected into a list of 34 possible posts to keep in my back pocket when I feel uninspired or bored or want to exercise my creative thinking. Here is the previous one:EYE OF NEWT AND A DASH OF STARDUST: Ingredients for Fairy Tale Adventures** In general, limb replacement can be performed with regeneration or with some interpretations of restoration or in extreme cases, by getting the PC killed and going with reincarnation. For the options below, I tried to come up with rituals that would require folk lore, magic of Old Gods, obscure rituals, bargains, and commitments to those giving this “gift”. In a game, they would be an option the PCs could research, require a new contact with an NPC, and have a twist that makes it cheaper than paying the 2000-5000 gp cost of orthodox routes. It might be fun to roll below 3 times and have those be the only option for arm (or limb) restoration as a method of world-building or reinforcing the occult nature of magic. Meaning magic is not tailor-made like modern medicine but was established through routes that work, not routes that are efficient/”clean” aka magic as fantasy science- bleh. Also, don’t forget that each of the below can be riffed on depending the situation, so maybe you want to replace a leg but get the arm-replaced-by-goosehead & neck, well that could be changed to the leg of a mule/goat but it will try to always kick nobility. 1d20 replacements for the arm that bugbear just ripped off your torso & may work for other limbs too… 1. A hook forged by the famed cannibal Malic the Toothsome, noted amputator, gourmand, and prosthetics fashioner; payment is eating your own limb at a dinner for two with a paired wine chosen by you 2. The stone arm from a statue of Ishtar after you have prayed incessantly for 7 days and to permanently gain function PC must prosthetize as a cleric of Ishtar 3. A trained stygian python from the cult of Yg, but you have to let it loose in downtime to hunt giant rats make a 2d6 reaction check to see if it comes back and in what disposition 4. The amputated arm of your shadow, severed & stitched back on with spider silk by a witch; children, goblins, and clerics will notice your one-armed shadow easily 5. Domesticate slime, pudding, or ooze beaten within an inch of its “life” and cast charm monster on it; lose dexterity and might dissolve whatever it touches as per the monster of the same type 6. The arm of a scarecrow that has seen at least 1 season from planting to harvest; graft functions using living pumpkin roots smeared with 3 crushed lizard tails jammed into the wound and the scarecrow limb 7. Any piece of a troll or hydra grown and shaped, like an ornamental plant, into an arm, but every level up, make a save vs spells, two successive failures means monsterification, otherwise works quickly 8. Sew a jacket, with one arm taken from a different jacket and terminating in a glove taken from somewhere else, using the seinew from an animated corpse, flesh construct, or undead; when wearing the jacket, the “empty” arm is highly flexible, looks real, but can’t hold more than a purse of coins 9. A beam of light passing through a stained glass window after continual light & phantasmal force have been cast; arm glows as candle light, can pass through objects, but only allows the faintest of touch and hold barely a feather 10. A charmed giant centipede, after charmed monster has been cast, will always appear at inappropriate moments in an unsettling way (negative to negotiate, positive to intimidate) 11. The severed neck & head of a goose or swan after giving an offering to the petty god of serpentine things of 500 gp in value; vicious and surprisingly able to manipulate a dagger expertly when used for dark purpose. 12. Intact arm of a zombie, ghoul, or wight; save vs paralysis to not strangle any priest, cleric, or good-aligned religious official you meet and might awkwardly salute evil religious figures, icons, and/or gods 13. A planted seed of either an oak or a rose bush, which will rapidly grow into are arm in 4 weeks; oak arm adds +1 AC if non-sword arm, while a rose arm gives +1 to reaction rolls 14. Clockwork prosthetic make from the dwarven artisan Able Ticker Tink after payment with 5 gems of 5 different colors, each worth 250 gp each; winding required every 3rd downtime action 15. Your reflection’s arm severed with a silver dagger from a mirror catching the moonlight after hold portal has been cast; every full moon, said reflection must be given an offering for its “loss” or else… 16. Make an offering to benthic gods of 500 gp for a giant octopus tentacle or 250 gp for a giant crab claw; both can be eaten with butter in a pinch, but it is a blasphemous act to said god(s) 17. The arm of a demon/devil you win in a game of chance, while another better body part (or a friend can bet one for you); the fiend will go double or nothing for a second go if pairs of parts are bet (exclude fingers/toes) 18. Trained monkey or particularly clever parrot- nothing crazy here, just an expensively trained animal (500gp) that will require a loyalty check to grab anything dangerous and won’t fight. 19. Arm-y ants who are protecting the queen you buried in your shoulder; resists severing as ants reform but 2x damage to fire after a year, save vs paralysis or you are actually a colony of sentient ants! 20. An arm gifted by one of the fay courts after a season’s salon will come with a court-specific quirk (always snap when walking or roll a glass orb) and a court-mandated purpose (may only hold weapons of beauty or used in the pursuit of lost objects)

--- Reaper Miniatures sculpt: B. Jackson 1. Moldvay's Labyrinth: Someone has made a dungeon crawler based on _Moldvay Basic D &D_. Apple phone and Android! 2. When in doubt, fuck up the moon! _Save Vs. Worm_ does just that in this fantastic post about moon men that crawl from their lunar haunts to raid the earth! Also has a cool calendar. 3. Combat in Abstract: Over at _Press the Beast,_ there is a lengthy discussion on old-school combat shortcuts. 4. _Barrowmaze_  Retrospective: Having run both _Barrowmaze_  and _Archaia_ this is a fair evaluation of my own experience and why _**Nightwick** _continues to enchant after 100+ sessions. 5. _Ah, Delicious in Dungeon!: _Skerples has the _Monster Menu-All of the classic AD &D Monster _which "_takes all the creatures in [the AD &D Monster Manual], divides them by flavour and effect, and gives random tables and neat little rules for some of them_". 6. Known Spells of Wizards Past: At _Half Again As Much_ , the good Dr. Curious looks at their father's D&D known spell list, which contains 400+ different spells across 14 levels. While they contain the old standards, they also span the mundane (Summon Frog) to the wicked sounding (Wailing Wheel of Fire). Its a fantastic resource that reminds up how free-wheeling _Dungeons & Dragons_ once was before being standardized (perhaps too much) by convention. * Bonus because I am thinking about NPCs as of late. Here is an interesting perspective on creating NPCs using: _Name, rough age, notable physical detail. Skill, Skill, Skill. One Obsession. One Secret. One Burden_

This is a small collection of posts about my experiences, thoughts, and advice on how to run 1st-level MUs as well as make them seem like more than just a 1 spell, 2 hp chump. The class has great potential in old-school D&D games, but its early fragility and seemingly low starting abilities are barriers to people's enjoyment. Having gotten a MU up to 6th level in a fairly aggressive megadungeon, I have thoughts which I've been putting into posts: PRACTICAL MAGIC: Or what to do now that your 1st-level magic-user cast their one spell PRACTICAL MAGIC II: Or A Magic-User's Tools of the Trade PRACTICAL MAGIC III: Starting MUs Are Not Feeling the Magic Foldable spellbooks for your game

### Context For How I Prep Jumping in on the "How I Prep" series started at _Roll to Doubt _by describing how I prep for my megadungeon campaign using Miranda Elkin's _Nightwick Abbey _(of which the first three levels, plus a lot more, is available at the Patreon). Let me start by providing some context for the megadungeon campaign. My _Nightwick_  game is played roughly two to four times a month, lasting 2 to 2.5 hours, with 3-5 players. After 31 sessions, each player as a PC level 3 or 4. The "area" I am trying to cover in the world is a loop between two 6-mile hexes consisting of the Abbey and the titular village. Like many who have recently posted, my goal is to have prep take a short amount of time, demonstrate the impact of player choices, and make the world move independently of the players (factions, events, ect.). To that end, I keep a Google doc of campaign notes, employ a one-page tool that helps me prep, and I restock according to _Nigthwick Abbey's_  prescribed methods. ### Campaign Documents It is a collection of both session notes and session one-pagers (which I'll talk about below). Collections of other elements that I want to incorporate into the game or to modify to be more _Nightwick-_ flavored or specific, like the carousing table and the overloaded encounter die. I have also thought of other geomorphs that might be good substitutes should I want to expand areas of the megadungeon itself or replace pre-existing 'morphs due to player actions. I will often doodle these or think of themes, so instead of letting them be idle thoughts, I write them down! Why let good ideas go to waste? The last little bit labeled "articles" are more long-form thoughts about how I think about elements of the megadungeon. Again, after being a player in ~100 sessions and a DM for ~30 sessions, I have ideas about how run the dungeon, so putting them down helps me remember and keeps me consistent. I also, for a little bit was conferring with another DM who ran 50 sessions of _Nightwick,_  so we traded notes. ### Session One-Pager (the Actual Prep) Here are the sections for my prep sheet which I try to keep somewhat digetic by framing it as if the characters are having a drink at Nightwick Village's best/only inn: * AS THE WORLD TURNS * IN YOUR IDLE TIME * WHAT IS THE CHATTER FROM THE BADDERS' BOYS * AFTER DRAINING YOUR CUPS, FIGURES APPROACH **AS THE WORLD TURNS:** Here is where I am reviewing the yearly, monthly, and weekly events that shape the world and the current attitudes of Nightwick Village. I try to place faction movements (if the party were aware of them) here as well as random events. * I also try to tie **yearly & monthly effects to an increase/decrease of resources**, especially those that the players might need to use in the dungeon. And/or have the event impact their downtime abilities. I think this is one of the best ways to make these events feel real. For example, a recent monthly famine removed rations from the store. The woodsman PC had to hunt in downtime for rations, of which only about 1d4+1 were ever hunted. * **For weekly events** , I try to make them a potential problem to be solved before or in lieu of going to the dungeon. The PCs don't have to pursue it, but it might have an impact depending on the action they do or don't take. **IN YOUR IDLE TIME:** The is just time for me to run down a list of what actions and effects downtime choices had on the PCs. This is also a time we check in on the progress of various crafting efforts and with those who have been gravely injured. This is also the place where I think about how the PCs actions might have affected NPCs that they want stuff from. **WHAT IS THE CHATTER FROM THE BADDERS' BOYS:** The goal of this section is to show how last week's session might have impacted the village. Its also an opportunity to hold up a mirror to the PCs actions from the point of view of the NPCs and in particular, the "law" of the land represented by the Badders' Boys. So they talk smack, in loud whispers, about the PCs: "_Funny how that lot always drags 2-3 poor peasants into that abbey, but only they seem to come back alive...yeah....real funny..."_ _ _ **AFTER DRAINING YOUR CUPS, FIGURES APPROACH:** And just when everyone is about to leave the inn, they are approached by hirelings (if any) looking for employment. I generate the number of hirelings, the type, quirks, and try to tie each hireling to one of the 7 deadly sins for added fun in the Abbey. ### Dungeon (Re)Stocking Miranda has a nice method of restocking _Nightwick_  that is based on a decreasing die size with each real-life week that passes between sessions. I usually also review the random encounter table here to make sure it best reflects the current state of the dungeon and the level of agitation the dungeon might have toward the PCs. This is also a time for me to upgrade villains that have continued to plague the PCs. The final thing I might do is try to alter parts of the dungeon if the yearly or monthly events warrant it. And that is it!

--- A campaign big on torches, less on tommy-guns My ideal Call of Cthulhu game would consist of the following materials: * Copy of Cthulhu Dark, which is a small 3d6 dice pool system * A Sears Roebuck catalog from the 1920's as the "player's handbook" * A campaign structured around Sean McCoy's investigation sheet like here * A map of CoC's Arkham City, which really can be Anywhere Town, US Anywhere Investigators Are Everyday Outsiders: Pull out an index card and write your name and profession, which can't be a part of any established power center like the police, city hall, military, or even university faculty (could be new professor or pushed aside faculty). I’d even exclude “big” criminal backgrounds because they themselves are enforcers of (inverted) power structures. Ideally, its professions that push boundaries or study obscure corners or exist in the cracks of power structures. You can’t be anyone important. In terms of investigations, I think Sean McCoy’s investigation sheet is the bee’s knees when it comes to empowering the player to actually be fully invested into the mystery of the world. This stands in a little bit of contrast to the official CoC publications as well as Cthuhlu Dark’s own philosophy via Stealing Cthulhu. Both sources frame their campaigns more as revelations that true “whodunits”. No to Sanity Mechanics, Yes to"Cassandra Effects": Basically, do away with "insanity" because the investigators aren't insane- ever. There really are evil fish-people, they did see star-vampires, and reality-eating colors totally ate that guy. There is nothing to cure because they are not suffering from any delusions. NPCs can go "insane," but players always maintain agency, but are thwarted by non-believers. Instead, it will be up to the investigators to explain to the humans around them what the hell they exactly were doing when the local Presbyterian church blew up with Mann Co.'s suspiciously missing dynamite. This crime-suspicion-alibi structure will also reinforce the campaign's framework. Players will have to avoid their investigators becoming the prime suspect in their own investigations! Cthulhu Dark's Insanity Die becomes the "You're Crazy" Die: Okay, so here's how the dice work in Cthulhu Dark: ** ** [Roll 1 or more of your dice] [t]hen your highest die shows how well you do. On a 1, you barely succeed. One die if the task is within human capabilities. One die if it’s within your occupational expertise. Your Insanity die, if you will risk your sanity to succeed.On a 6, you do brilliantly. Your Insanity die, if you will risk your sanity to succeed ** ** In some respects, a CoC campaign very much embraces noir influences of being an outsider investigating the dark corners of society. So instead of risking your literal sanity, let's risk the public perception of your sanity. As the score increases, you lose access to people and institutions because the good people of the town won't be seen with you, let alone listen to you. At max level, you lose access to society in toto, not because you are insane, but everyone perceives you as insane. **_ _**Mechanically, this means different institutions/NPCs have varying levels of tolerance on this scale. For instance, Joe's Soda Shoppe might stop letting you in if your score is 2, meanwhile the local speakeasy, Diamonds, will keep letting you in if up to a score of 4. Arkham Library is closed off to you at a score of 3, while Ms. Terry the local, supposed, medium and fortune-teller to the ladies of Arkham might still let you come by if your score is 5. She, too, knows what's up in Arkham. Cults, the real ones, are always ready to welcome new congregants, but you can't be less than a 5. The Terminator & Cosmic Horror: Or The Slow Train Wreck You Can’t Stop: It will be up to the GM to continuously press on the tension between the reality the players know and the illusion of normalcy the NPCs maintain.  And, to spell it out, this always includes the press of law and government, who keep the peace and enforce the law. The horror here is knowing the absolute truth with a big "T" and being almost powerless to stop it and in fact thwarted by the institutions who could do something about it. Not so much a jump-scare by tentacles. With this framing, Sarah Connor in Terminator is the perfect Lovecraftian protagonist. She is a waitress in LA who meets a drifter claiming to be from the future sent back to protect her from a murderous robot sent from the same future by a machine intelligence so powerful it invented time travel to kill her before she births the child who will stop it from destroying humanity. Sarah (and the audience) knows this to be true, but part of the horror of Terminator, besides being hunted by an unstoppable killer robot, would be trying to convince others of this truth. No one would believe you, you might even hardly believe you. By Terminator 2, she is put in an asylum and has her child taken away for being “crazy”. But again, she’s not! Its all true. Magic the Cosmic Cheat: If we are somewhat logically deducing our way through means, motives, opportunities, and suspects, what is the role of magic in this context? Most obviously, it allows the solving of investigations/mysteries with a greater supernatural element to them. But more importantly it provides a way to cheat. I think too attempting the investigation framework will also provide the temptation to do so too! For instance, players might have a victim, motive, location, but 3 different suspects, all with not entirely air-tight alibis. A _speak with dead_ spell could fix the issue because you can merely ask the victim who killed them. But now you have to exhume the body or break into the morgue. A small crime in the greater context. But then if you know the perpetrator, how do you legally bring them to justice, given you don’t have admissible evidence? Maybe you take the law into your own hands. After all you know the truth and that is what matters right? Again this puts characters back at odds with the “polite” society around them. My goal here is not to turn our investigators or the game into some 90’s grimdark Frank Miller Batman, but instead have players themselves experience somewhat the same temptation of magic NPCs feel. And also have things only get more complicated from there. Which, while maybe not a direct reflect of CoC source material, does put this game and magic in contrast to fantasy adventure games– magic is dangerous not because it causes insanity, but because it allows you to act in anti-social ways. Its continual use naturally drives you away from normalcy. Summary: An investigation-focused game that features normal folks attempting to keep it cool while peeling back the Truth about fish cults, trans-dimensional travelers, space fungus, and elder gods all the while trying not to let the magic at their fingertips go to their heads. Specifically for the players, this means using a rules-lite systems to find a solution (not necessary “solve”) a logic set-up that structures a crime/mystery with natural and super-natural elements using whatever is in the fictional environment: libraries, NPCs connections, skills reasonably linked to chosen profession, and anything else in the Sears cataloge. So there you have it, my ideal “CoC” campaign. **P.S. Downtime:** I love carousing tables in D&D, so I'd most likely have 3d6 version in this campaign too. The objective here would be providing outcomes for very mundane tasks the characters who try to get a handle all while they are investigating some mythos plots. I might have their current "perceived sanity" score added to the roll (low = good, high = bad). How can you keep your university position if you are coming into class beat up? Will you ever get tenure? What will your family think if you disappear in the night, then show back up in the morning, soaked in sweat and dragging your torn-up friend into the house? How can you maintain your job at the garage if you never show up consistently for your shift, but weird people keep coming in asking for you?

__ __ _ _ _Want to learn more about the world of Nightwick from Miranda Elkins? You can follow her blog  here and the ongoing development of Nightwick Abbey at her Patreon here._ Previously in Nightwick... Blossom (Rogue 6) Mayfly (Magician 6) Liminal Space (Changeling 5) Thekla (Magician 5) Krupe (Cleric 5) Yvgeny the Coward (Cleric 5) Pataki (Grave Robber 1) _and THAT hireling..._ AT THE _MEDUSA'S HEAD_... Theklas appears to be afflicted with a spirit after a magical research mishap. The party decides to travel south to the town of Blackleg in order to seek help in removing the creature's presence much to Mayfly's protests: "_Think of what you could learn!"_ ...DOWN IN THE ABBEY... * **Deals Are Made:** The meddlesome spirit offers little reprieve and the party is forced to strike a deal with it which they will regret do doubt (_PC EDIT: And we did...)_ inorder to prevent it from continually spooking the horses. * **Abbey Is Not The Only Place The Dead Are Buried:** A small investigation reveals a blizzard depression which could indicate buried treasure- our grave robber investigated and digs up two large buried urns. * **Not All Spirits Are Evil, Some Helpful:** Mayfly consults the Thing-In-His-Pocket and the party learns there are things from the Abbey trapped in there. * **Better Left Buried-- By Someone Else, Not Us:** After a failed _fireball,_ the party decides to drive our holy sword down into the jars, hoping to destroy anything there, but spare the treasure. The plan is enacted, but the strike is not true enough-- a ghost erupts from the urn with a terrifying scream! * **Silver Hairs, Silver Treasure:** Liminal, Krupe, and Thekla take of running as horrible visions filling their minds and their faces age 10 years in horror of it all. Mayfly, fires back with a lightning bolt that seems to just do enough to destroy the spirit. The reward: 19 platinum disks which our rogues believe is values at a total of 1900 sp. Hmm, might be worth taking a crack a the second one... * **Two Things We'll Regret (Maybe):** The party collects our lost colleagues, makes camp to decide how to tackle the next jar, and make good on our promise to the medelsome spirit. ...STILL ON THE ROAD...

The D&D cleric has been with us since the game's inception, initially to handle one blood-sucking Sir Fang using the combined powers of the Holy Bible and Hammer Horror's Van Helsing. Here is a nice post from _Scroll & Coins_ post from 2017 describing those influences in the Cleric's spell list. --- _Dracula, not Sir Fang_ **What I would like to focus on is the lesser-known "liturgies" of the Cleric's spell list. The secondary effects or alternative uses for some spells.** For instance, when reviewing the cleric spell list in OSE for a wholly other post, I stumbled upon this surprising bit in _cure disease_ : __ > _2. Kill green slime: This monster is killed instantly_ I knew about a few other instances of additional uses for spells in BX, most notably _light_ (blind) and _cure light wounds_  (cure ghoul paralysis), but did not remember this bit for _cure disease,_ which had escaped my notice. Looking in the _Rules Cyclopedia_ , for another _Basic D &D _comparator, I found that _cure disease_  is phrased: __ > _This spell will cure one disease, such as those caused by a mummy or green slime_ There is also a corroborating note in the green slime monster entry in _Rulese Cyclopedia_ noting the same vulnerability. **This got me thinking about what an alternative cleric would look like if conceptualized using these secondary spell effects.   **Here are those alternative effects listed out. Its a slim list and perhaps could use some padding with reverse spell effects, but I wanted to stay true to my query. Level 1 Spells (at 1,500xp) 1. Cure Paralysis (cure light wounds) 2. Blind Creature (light) 3. Cancel Magical Darkness (light) 4. Touch Immunity from Constructs, Demons, or Enchanted Beings (protection from evil) Level 2 Spells (at 6,000xp) 1. Ritual of Purification or Consecration (bless) 2. Silence Creature (silence) Level 3-4 Spells (at 25,000xp) 1. Permanent Blindness (continual light) 2. Destroy Green Slime (cure disease) 3. Communicate with Monsterous Plant (speak with plants) Level 5 Spells (at 50,000xp) 1. Banish Enchanted or Undead Being (dispel evil) 2. Destroy Undead (Raise Dead) So what sorta vibes to I get from this list? Honestly, when I initially thought of this post, I was expecting to generate some sorta "dungeon hermit" who was born in the mythic underworld and can manipulate, and be resistant to, the environment therein. But upon review, especially with the first 6 spells, what the spell list signals to me is a class more like **a wizard-hunter or Witcher (TM)**. _Cure paralysis, cancel darkness, blind creature,_ and _silence creature_  all seem good options to battle opposing spellcasters. You prevent your hirelings from becoming immobile, remove the darkness that hinders you from seeing, and then you can blind the enemy spellcaster and silence them to prevent further spellcasting.  _Touch Immunity_  helps keep you safe from melee attacks from summoned/extra-planar creatures or constructs that are guarding the warlock and their manse. And finally, the _purification or consecration_ spell can destroy whatever magical device, altar, idol, or gate they were using to do their foul deeds. Finishing the job right! **Toss A Coin To Your (Wizard-Hunter)** Reg: STR 09+ and one stat must be 13 (_a mark of your unlucky past_) Prime: WIS HD: _As Cleric_ Attack: _As Cleric_ Save: _As Dwarf_(_dipped in the waters of Styx)_ Armor: Any + Shields Weapons: Any one-handed, thrown weapons (_everyone knows wizards can't be hurt by normal arrows_) Spells: _As Cleric_ , using spells as above; _Detect Magic_ 2-in-6; Extract component from killed monster XP: _As Dwarf_ You were a child who survived a terrible calamity caused by or infused with magic. Stark white hair and a thousand-yard stare made it easy for the order to find you. They bathed you in spring water mixed with 7 drops from the river Styx. They said this would protect you from the more harmful effects of magic. Then they fed you milk & honey with 13 drops from the river Lethe. They said would make you forget the pain of your loss. Then they put a sword in your hand and drilled you in liturgies of gods lost spoken by the 77 sphinxes of Bnazic. Then the order sent you into the world to hunt the same wizards that stole your childhood long ago.

1. The Moon Realm: One of the minor domains of the OSR is screwing with the moon and _Alone in the Labyrinth_  maintains that tradition with their "exiled stone-age psychonauts exploring the spirit realm". I especially enjoy blogging about settings/campaigns because it harkens back to blogging of yore. 2. Market Instability: Nickoten at _Pathika_ lays out a brief rule for market instability: > _The “base” price of a good is 2d6 of your standard currency, which can be rerolled for each item or each shopping trip. This price is then multiplied depending on the price category. So a “Plentiful” good is 2d6 coins, a “Limited” good is 10x that, a “Rare” good is 20x that, and a “Treasured” good is 200x that._ 3. Review of Appendix N: False Machine not only does a nice job reviewing _Appendix N: Weird Tales From The Roots Of Dungeons & Dragons_ but I think it also succinctly frames what is attractive about the energy of sword & sorcery stories: > _Impulsivity, immediacy and atavism, but always with intelligence, sharp wits and keen senses. These stories are about things happening now. Too late! In the time it took you to read this sentence the Barbarian has killed a man and moved to another scene.  _ Also, I have this book and I am on my second read-through despite having read a few of the stories like _Tower of the Elephant_  many times before. However, its interesting to consider them all in aggregate. Its also a great gift for D&D fans, young and old. 4. Most Adventures Are Bad: Gus L. has a breakdown of why a published adventure might miss the mark in terms of quality as well as a few questions we all could ask ourselves when putting together something for the table. 5. Where to Start With OD&D: I faced this same issue when running the Gygax 75 Minute Challenge. I am leaning toward WhiteBOX: FMAG as it seems to keep me from overly obsessing about the ruleset, which puts attention back on the game. 6. Holme Alone: This is a nice post about a 2008 thread from _Carcosa_ 's author McKinney about looking at Holmes Basic as a complete game. No AD&D supplementation, Level 3 is the cap, and it would last as long as it would take to reach third level which is about 33 sessions. I like this because it matches some of my ideas about level 4 being a natural break point and 33 sessions make for a nice timeframe, especially with today's modern entertainment environment. Its a sorta capsule campaign and something to think about as I frame _Tropics of Cancer. Also,  Blueholme: Printice Rules is a favorite ruleset of mine. __And if you are thinking of such a game, the Zenopus Archieves Holmes Reference is a must!_