From 1989 and on into the 90s, something strange happened. Gary Gygax went to Hollywood and did a surprising amount of cocaine while laying the groundwork for the Marlon Wayons-Thora Birch epic Dungeons and Dragons Movie. Charts got themselves consolidated, turning into the clear and self-explanatory THAC0 number. And AD&D Second Edition came out in dribs and drabs, held aloft on the wings of Dragonlance and the clear understanding that Lorraine Williams has for her audience. Nothing could possibly go wrong. But how best to introduce players and DMs? Not the Book of Lairs bundled with the boxed set, that's no good. How about a nice new 1-10 adventure, taking characters from zero to hero? Enter Night Below: An Underdark Campaign. I know less about Night Below than I do many of the 1e modules, or later 3e adventures. It appears to be a fairly standard plot...first you have a menaced Ye Olde Medieval Village (The Evils of Haranshire), then you go underground (Perils of the Underdark), then you go even deeperer underground (The Sunless Sea). There's nothing intrinsically bad about this, but it's fairly generic...and that's borne out in the movie-poster-esque box set cover. First I suppose I should be complimentary...we're far beyond the bright and childish color palette and wonky perspectives that marked earlier modules' cover art. Not only is this illustration one with depth, but there's also a clear hierarchy in the monsters depicted. If I'm playing this thing, I expect to fight in order:
That's it, though. There are no protagonists depicted, unlike in earlier covers, no characters to inhabit. The monsters are also inhabiting a vague and cloudy neverspace, not part of a solid scene. There's no hope of treasure, no strange places to poke around, no protagonist actions suggested at all. There's an implication of progress, but it's just bigger and bigger bosses to battle, evil because they're lit up with menace. I don't think the problems with AD&D Second Edition were just due to the rules...all the vices are pictured right here. Still no pants depicted.
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We all knew this one was coming, right? X1: Isle of Dread. What has to be the most played lineage from the TSR era, B/X, started with this classic hexcrawl adventure with dinosaurs, zombies, sugar glider people, spiders, and weretigers. The adventure itself is a glorious romp in an exotic, strange island filled with color and that gets reflected in the adventure's cover art.
To start with, just as eXpert levels are all about leaving the dungeon, the illustration is also a startling shift. Long sight-lines showing multiple biomes, bright and vivid colors, enormous scale of action...this thing is a huge contrast with the covers we saw before. The care given to scale and depth is appreciated, although obviously its still a little crude. A lot going on though in this sun-drenched picture. Again we have the protagonist of the piece as the monster. I think it's supposed to be a T-Rex, but it's hands and stance make it just look like a huge lizardman. Big Green here looks a little goofy, but rippling to muscle, glaring with intent, and freakin' murdering a guy definitely have him as empowered and menacing. Critter has taken multiple spears in the back and is completely unphased. Strong secondary billing has to be given to the lovingly detailed coral snake, which I think is a normal-sized snake closer to the viewer but the wonky perspective kind of implies it's a man-sized snake as well. Scary, do not want to approach. The adventurers come off extremely unheroic. Now if I recall there's nothing stopping replacement party members from being from the local villages, but there's definitely the slightly unfortunate implication that Sailor Elf and Splayed Fighter Guy are the PCs, while the NPC allies or hirelings are the poor unarmored guys getting wrecked by the monster. It's pretty funny how the story is going, though...the NPCs are bravely fighting the terrible monster, posed in action and clearly scoring hits. Meanwhile the very armored PCs, with their access to metal armor and hair conditioner, are using the courage of their native friends make good their escape. I hope Splayed Fighter Guy steps on another snake. I think this cover is great for showing what B/X is all about. High adventure in varied and broad environments, powerful and terrifying monsters that should be run away from, and of course sacrificing the torchbearers to make good your escape. It's perfect. For the third time in a row, nobody pictured has pants. There's going to be a tricky section here with the next few "editions". After some debate, the module that makes the most sense as the "into" to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons is C1: The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan. It's obviously an odd duck, being a competitive tournament module, very different from the standard mode of play. The timing is right, though, and although the adventure is in some ways odd it is what TSR released to market these strange new "advanced" rules. I'm going to go with this as the representative cover illustration.
And what a cover it is. A psychedelic work of monochrome art, at first glance primitive but with surprising skill...I love the shadows being cast on the walls, the way that stream of fire is the central source of illumination for the whole piece. In immediate contrast to the monster-free In Search of the Unknown cover, here we have a monster front and center, engaged in violent conflict. And the monster...a weird bat-gargoyle thing that has no immediate mythological or pop culture antecedents, it's striking and strange and ugly. I'd say it's not particularly menacing-looking, but it's engaged in straight-up killing the hapless magic-user, with that aforementioned shadow adding some real weight to it. It's a great monster. The adventurers are interesting, here, because even though they're engaging in combat, there's nothing heroic about how they're portrayed. I'm assuming the Meso-American gentleman is actually a fighter for the party, but his stance is actually ambiguous, turned almost to smite the luckless magician with his glass sword. The heavily armored lady adventurer is also turned away from the monster, rearing back in dismay at her companion's immolation. The magic-user is at least doing some visible damage to the monster, although the contest is clearly one he's losing...the poor guy even gets a bland pageboy cut and an average build next to the Barbie and Ken proportions of his companions. Nobody on the player side is empowered by the art...they look like they should have run away, or figured out a better method of fighting that doesn't involve frontal assault. I love the disaster depicted here. What we can conclude from the Hidden Shrine cover is that while there are more weird, exotic, and strange threats here in this new AD&D, this still isn't a game about heroes conquering evil villains. The monster is weird and ugly, but it doesn't look like an existential evil threat to the world...in fact, it's clearly living where it's supposed to live, it's the adventurers who are trespassing on its home. We're still safe from any world-saving quests, it's just gotten a lot more dangerous and exciting, and you can still expect to be dying. As the hobby matured from the Chainmail-derivative little boxes, D&D eventually realized that the best way to teach the game to new groups not blessed to know somebody in Lake Geneva was through examples of play. The original DMG's examples were beautiful, but some people needed a little more...so in comes the published adventure module. And with the release of the Basic Edition, some bright star in the TSR marketing department realized that a companion adventure would fit the bill. Enter...In Search of the Unknown. I'm not going to review the adventure. It's been reviewed in various locations with exacting detail. But what I wanted to look at and compare were the cover art for various editions' starter adventures. My suspicion is that more than in the Player's Guide, more than in the DMG, more even than in the monster manuals, the given edition we'll look at can be properly summed up when looking at the cover art of the "first adventure". I'm not looking mainly at the reprint, let's look focus on the eye-searing yellow original, at the top. First off, I love the environment depicted both times. Fungal forests are wonderful; every decent-sized underworld needs one. Something about the weird, colorful mushroom caps just evokes the loamy scent of rot and decay, moist and soft. It's a low-magic way to thrust someone immediately into the Mystic Underworld, and you can tell the adventurers are unnerved, perhaps even a little grossed out. The adventuring party is remarkably tiny for old school D&D, just four dudes being dudes, eschewing pants like Uncle Gary intended. There's a tension and action in their poses despite the complete lack of monsters; it's the environment itself that holds the danger. Spear-Guy is poking a mushroom cautiously, well aware that it might explode into some terrible save-or-die trap. Torch-Dwarf and Awesome-Stache have just heard something worrying and are readying themselves to receive monsters hidden amongst the mushroom-trees, while Traditionalist Wizard looks on with vague caution (he is out of spells for the day). It tells a story. In Search of the Unknown has a cover that tells you that you're going to be delving underground in weird and dangerous DUNGEONS. There's clearly the possibility of monsters and fighting, but the environment itself seems to be the primary menace depicted on the cover. Traps and hazards are the focus of the cover illustration, not combat. There's nothing heroic in this cover...the adventurers look tough and scrappy but without a hint of nobility or chivalric tradition. I think it's a great cover for the basic edition. Riffing on the subject of dungeon scale, there’s the larger consideration of TTRPG campaign scales in general. You can busily write out two thousand room keys set in the middle of a hexmap that accurately puts a continent the size of Australia down to six-mile hexes, but if you can’t get a coherent group together for longer than three months weekly, then in fact that is your campaign’s scope. And as much as I appreciate the ideal the OSR’s playing to find out the story, there’s something inherently unsatisfying about an abortive campaign that never comes to any conclusion. Just like writing a dungeon the wrong size for a given theme, it’s a mistake to bring an adventure to a given group that doesn’t match their schedule.
The easiest adventure to schedule but hardest to properly write is the good old One Shot. Often synonymous with a lair in a D&D-derived game, the one-shot is something that’s typically slotted for 3-5 hours. Almost everybody can make a one-time commitment to a single session, but the onus then lies much more heavily on the adventure’s writer, and the game master running it. To properly “do D&D” (or whatever derivative) in all its parts there’s a real challenge in designing something that small that still permits exploration, discovery, challenge, and advancement. Just like how there are only so many ways to draw a lair, there are only so many ways you can run a one-shot. Many wonderful game systems are only ever designed to be run as a one-shot. I love 2-3 games of DREAD (that Jenga tower horror game) a year, always have a great time, but it’d be nuts to try and make DREAD into something with continuity. Horror as a genre plays well with small scopes, but I’ve run and played plenty of systems in every genre for a single con game; I’m not really talking about these here. Like the bigger proper dungeon, there’s also the bigger “small campaign” or module. Definitions are fuzzy, but I’d say a good satisfying campaign minimum is something done over ~5 sessions, so call it two months’ playtime. There’s enough room there for an arc to the characters’ progression, both mechanically and emotionally as the players bond with the people they’re pretending to be. D&D-derivatives are built with leveling up in mind, and that’s hard to capture in a single session’s play. Just like a full dungeon is big enough to showcase a wide variety of tricks and traps, the module is typically enough to really explore around a live in the world a while. It’s harder to get adults to schedule regular times even for a two-month commitment, but that’s also a timescale where even millennials seem to be able control their calendars for without major life changes. It’s finally where your TTRPG really starts to shine over board or video games. It’s not until you hit the true campaign, a year or more of progress, that you can properly call yourself a hobbyist though. If you’re playing week in, week out, planning around sports seasons, holidays, and work travel, keeping continuity with a consistent group of other players...now at last you’re experiencing D&D the way it’s meant to be played. Not only do you come to know the characters and the world they inhabit, but given the way our minds work, in a long campaign you begin to identify with them, to form long term memories of your adventures. It’s a beauty of thing, if done well, but it’s got to be something that everybody prioritizes in their actual real lives, an incredibly difficult thing. Despite all of this, nobody writing or running D&D should forget the fact that the experience is broken down into discrete sessions. It's a lot easier to commit to a year-long game if every single time you sit down to play your brain comes away with a satisfying narrative. Every campaign is a series of one-shots, in the end. We're still here in the chilly early days of 2023, and the RPG blogging world is still enthusiastic about the Dungeon 23 challenge, an inspired idea from Sean McCoy for making a big dungeon over the year 2023 by just writing a single room key a day. Who knows how many will persist through the long year, but I'm going to exercise my old man card and take exception to the term "megadungeon" for something with merely 365 rooms. Clearly this challenge is making a very big dungeon, but is it truly a megadungeon? I won't grant it. I classify that size as the respectable and honorable kilodungeon, which is impressive enough. I've always classed dungeons (in this case meaning any adventure structure traditionally keyed, not just the underground variety) into four categories: Lairs, Dungeons, Kilodungeons, and Megadungeons. Not only does this mean we shouldn't grant the term "megadungeon" to most products published with that name, but it means the vast majority of published "dungeons" probably shouldn't even be granted the honor. Lairs are the single most basic "self-contained keyed adventure site", with 2-9 (ish) keyed areas. This thus encompasses the vaunted "five-room dungeon", most broken down locations on a hexcrawl, a "one page dungeon", and about half of all the maps on Dyson Logos' website. There's absolutely nothing wrong with lairs; the upper range of about 9 locations is a fair estimate for how many encounters (traps or fights or negotiations or searches) a decently efficient party can accomplish over a single session. There's not a lot of room for heavy exploration but a well-designed lair can have a loop or two, some verticality, and enough room to require some thinking about how the physical space is tackled. Much as the size limits aspects of play, we do have to acknowledge that these games are broken down into discrete sections of time so organizing content into "2-4 hours with my friends" has its appeal. Dungeons are where we graduate into something that will require us to gather together and play multiple times. I generally classify dungeons as anything from 10-99 keyed locations, with the definitions and purpose obviously blurring at both ends. A good classic, most of the original TSR modules have locations on this scale. A dungeon, proper, will almost always have some verticality and there should be multiple paths through it as well as various nooks, crannies, and secret doors. The original way D&D was meant to be played starts in locations about this size, with players taking multiple nights of gaming and their characters typically taking in-game days or even weeks fully exploring the challenging depths. A dungeon is usually good for about a level of experience, be it found in monster XP, gold-for-XP, or even milestone/story award. Bigger dungeons weighing in at 70+ rooms will start to tip towards the next category, where the commitment in time and effort really starts to crawl up there. Kilodungeons are where the "dungeon campaign" actually meets reality, 100-999 rooms sprawled across multiple levels (both elevation levels and character levels). A kilodungeon is a campaign in and of itself; you and your three-to-six buddies are committing to months of adventuring in this location. Most products billing themselves as megadungeons are actually in this weight class, but unfortunately, for the vast majority of dungeon campaigns "kilo" vs "mega" barely matters, as schedule conflicts, moves, and just plain boredom will most often kill these dungeon campaigns long before the final levels get reached. Such is the way of life, particularly when these things are hobbies people play for fun. But at least conceivably, a kilodungeon can be completed by a dedicated weekly or biweekly group in a year or two, with the player characters beginning as cowardly ruffians in the dark and ending as masters of a magical and deadly domain. Megadungeons, then, are something even more. A proper megadungeon tips in at over 1,000 rooms, over numerous levels, with a scale and scope that approaches less "campaign" and more "campaign setting". A megadungeon isn't really something to be run for a single group, rather it is an extensive world perfect for an open table with multiple groups of players and even GMs exploring and plundering. Few and far between are the true megadungeons, but the best should be enough to encompass decades of gaming. Most of us will never come anywhere near a proper megadungeon, but we should all hope to play with one some day. There is, of course, a theoretical gigadungeon, clocking in at an immense >1,000,000 rooms. Only one such creature has ever been made, by a fellow named Irving toiling in complete obscurity since 1975 in his basement near Lake Geneva. He and his friends still play in it weekly, rolling their dice with hands just starting to show arthritis. They have recorded 5,721 TPKs and have never progressed beyond level 1. |
AuthorWeblog of Ben Gibson, the main writer and publisher of Coldlight Press. Archives
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