RPG Blog Carnival: Endings

Apologies for my lack of involvement over the last few months, real life gets in the way sometimes. I do have a post still in draft for the September Carnival theme, then Orktober took over, and had I previously posted something on the theme for November and was struggling for ideas...

But on to this Carnival! To bookend Scot's January topic of "Beginnings", for December 2023 I've chosen an intentionally broad theme of "Endings" to close the year. 

Image credit: NataliaDrepina

Some suggestions:

Campaign finales and closing plot arcs

(I'm particularly interested in this; as much a fan of shorter campaigns that I am, I still struggle with endings - it's easier to just keep the story rolling on!)

Character death, retirement, and TPKs

(I've talked briefly about the latter before, but I still think it's an interesting topic)

2023 in review / retrospective

(I don't usually do this, but I like reading them; and I think I will this year as I started the year off with hopes and dreams - if you are too then please share here!)

But anything goes that fits the theme!

Drop a link to your themed post in the comments on this post, all welcome, and I'll post a wrap-up at the end of the month when the Carnival moves on.

After this month the 2023 RPG Blog Carnival is ending - signups to host in 2024 are open at the hub on OfDiceAndDragons, along with general info about getting involved (and why you should) and links to all the past Carnivals too.

#dungeon23, Level 3, gets a little weird

Leaving level 2 behind us the party descends the slime waterfall to level 3, which I rolled "Song" and "Edge" on the spark table for so I'm running with it, at least for now!

Rolling a few sparks from the words I generated last time got me the following:

Denizens/monsters: Enchanting Diver & Cutting Siren

Places: Poetic Ravine & Edgy Theatre

Hazards: Melodic Blade & Steep Echoes

Treasures: Musical Sword & Sharp Melody

I'm filing half of these away for next week, I might roll some more and see what I can put together... Some of these spoke to me though, or at least seemed to fit together, so this is what I have come up with for this week:

It's been an interesting adventure, I'm already pondering the "Edgy Theatre" and how that might fit... thoughts and comments always welcome!

#dungeon23 - bringing loose ends together for February's level

 Looking back to the other posts for February's "Fungal Wasteland" I've tried to tie everything together as the rooms draw to a close:

The fungus-folk's prophecy from week 1 was a loose end, as was the giant ancient mother-shroom so I had to tie those together in 26/2.

This also concretes the purpose of the machinery in 9/2 and should give players something interesting to unravel should they wish to.

Another slime waterfall joins the one from 5/2 as the exit down to level 3, and it made thematic sense to join these with a river.

This level felt like it was missing a "boss" encounter so the "feral harvester" spark added that, plus an extra conflict between it and the fungus-folk (to add to the uneasy peace between them and the goblins that the other rooms imply.

Overall I think the sparks from my meta-spark-table-of-spark-tables have helped a lot in the process, there's definitely a lot I can riff off when I come to draft up the level proper and it feels like the "story" of the dungeon is emerging nicely.

I'm going to refine that spark tabling procedure for March and see how things go ... what will Level 3 be??

#dungeon23 - more mothership metroidvania

My plan for this dungeon23 sidequest is coming together now:

Mothership metroidvania, second area

This is the second area in section A, where restoring the power will open up routes to section B and (back) through section A to section D. 

There's an area here, 15/2, that will change if the external door override is cut in section C so the landscape will be different if the PCs backtrack through to get to section D.

Restoring the power will also add some gribblies to the encounter table ('cos containing them was why it was shut off in the first place) which I'll come to in a separate post.

There's also a draft table of "what these crew have" and "what these crew need" for generating some roleplay scenarios, also to come in the future... Comments welcome!

A double dose of #dungeon23 (with a dash of chatGPT)

As I missed posting my progress last week due to diverting time to work on the meta-spark-table, here are that week's and this week's rooms:

I've tried to use a lot of the sparks I generated last week, and some more that I generated this week, and I'm pleased with the results and how it made me approach this.

I found that I was forcing myself to be more creative, I hope that's a good thing!

One thing I think I will do is make the tables more specifically focused on dungeon things - so keep Antagonists for encounters but make the others more focused towards e.g. treasure and special rooms... but I'm happy with the first draft.

Out of curiosity, while writing this post after the fact, I also fed last week's spark results to chatGPT and it gave me this:

• Rotting survivors' chamber: A dimly lit room with decaying corpses of previous adventurers, their rusted weapons, and tattered armor scattered around.
• Slime refuge: A small, damp room filled with glowing, bio-luminescent slime that provides refuge for various small creatures.
• Infested prophecy: A chamber decorated with rotting vines, with a prophecy inscribed in the walls, warning of the impending doom of the dungeon.
• Corrupted collapse: A partially caved-in chamber, filled with twisted metal and rock fragments, surrounded by clusters of rusted spores.
• Scrap/junk farm: A makeshift farming room where a group of jury-rigged fungus-folk tends to a variety of plants grown on scrap metal and junk.
• Rusted spores' chamber: A large, eerie chamber with rusted spores hanging from the ceiling, filling the air with a metallic scent and slowly corroding any metal objects left within the room.
• Forgotten feast: An abandoned dining hall filled with festering food and rotting remains of long-dead creatures, with a decaying table at the center.

I would be interested to know your thoughts.

If you have your own favourite dungeon generation procedures I would love to hear about them, either in the comments or by leaving a link to one of your blog posts on the February RPG Blog Carnival page here, which this month is all about "procedures".

Working on a #dungeon23 meta (mega?) spark-table-of-spark-tables

As you may know, this month I am very much thinking about procedure. Being a fan of procedural generation generally, and spark tables specifically, I'm building up a mega meta-spark-table where each entry references another spark table (or set of spark tables).

For level 2 of my megadungeon I rolled "Fungal Wasteland" on my original d100 spark table, so for further inspiration I built some more quick spark tables, for "Fungal" and for "Wasteland" specifically:

Fungal

Adjectives: toadstool, spore, rotting, corrupted, infested, slime, mushroom, fermenting

Places: farm, forest, spore-field, giant cap

Antagonists: mycologists, fungusfolk, harvesters, cultists

(NPCs will come from the above)

Things: world-stool, spores, juice/extract, truffles

Situations: infestation, hallucination, feast, rot

Wasteland 

Adjectives: feral, forgotten, jury-rigged, wasted, disused, rusted, barren, scrap/junk

P: ruin, wastes, refuge, camp

A: raiders, survivors, prospectors, treasure hunters

T: artifact, cause (of the desolation), prophecy, scrap heap

S: collapse, ambush, awakening, restoration

Sparking

Rolling a few times on these (an Adjective from one + something from the other) gave me this little lot of potentially useful ideas:

#dungeon23 side quest - a Mothership metroidvania

I'm starting a Mothership campaign and it's a good feeling so I have - understandably - been pondering a Mothership megadungeon. Gradient Descent exists. 

The nature of Mothership got me wondering what sort of megadungeon I could create without the traditional levels and loot, and without returning to the surface with treasure, but still with a delving feel and with ramping challenge.

After explaining both Samus Aran and Simon Belmont to my youngest child in the context of Smash Bros, the idea - trying to stay within the bounds of dungeon23 - is to make a 12 area "metroidvania" dungeon and play around with escalating encounter tables and with re-traversing changing areas.

4 conceptual stages, 3 diary pages each. One a month:

#dungeon23 update. How it started vs how it's going

I switched to using a diary last week; prior to that I had been trying for more of a "one page dungeon" but I got lost in trying to make the flow work around the rooms I was writing, and how to make the rooms fit in the flow I had created.

I thought it would help, but it didn't.

Using a diary (yes I know that was the idea all along) I'm finding that I fill the space with notes, and then stop, and I'm feeling less constrained by the map:

My dungeon23 megadungeon, week 3

I'm still trying to work to the rough proportions from last week but if I can't make it fit then I'm not worrying too much.

On #dungeon23 and losing myself in old school dungeon stocking tables

As I have been working on this megadungeon I have been increasingly interested in the old school ways of dungeon generation.  I'm building a location not an "adventuring day". A heavy amount of research has led me to trying to make this first (sub)level 18 rooms large:

Progress on level one of my megadungeon

There's differences between systems and authors but an easy generalisation, looking particularly at OD&D and B/X, seems to be that probabilities are something like this: (please do correct or enlighten me in the comments!)

• 2/6 chance of there being an encounter room (note that in those days, as in my mind, this could mean combat or social encounters) and 3/6 chance there is treasure
• 1/6 chance of tricks and traps in this room and 2/6 chance there is treasure
• 1/6 chance of this being a "special room"
• 2/6 chance of this being an empty room and 1/6 chance there is treasure

This is obviously easily applied to 6, 12, 18, 24 and 30 (and so on) room dungeons, and there were enough people proposing that 18 was a reasonable size for a dungeon level (or here, sub level) that I thought I could aim to fit 18 on the page and see how it went!

How it went was ... OK.  Not as well as I had hoped because I think I have been too focused on making things fit in the context of the map (i.e. "finishing") than getting ideas down on paper (which is more akin to the "beginning" I was aiming to focus on last time!)

However; back to the drawing board and armed with a week-to-page planner/diary I now have a modified plan going forward.  I'm going to stick to the original proposition of just writing rooms but at least I can feel confident that each week long spread of 7 rooms should/could (on average) contain:

• 2 rooms with encounters, that could be played out by combat or roleplay (best: either)
• 2 "special" rooms with puzzles or traps or some sort of set-piece
• 2 empty rooms - although hopefully these will still contain enough dressing to be interesting or relevant
• 1 wildcard (any of the above, it's just guidance after all)

Generally, 1/4 to 1/3 of these rooms should have treasure (so say two, on average) and this treasure is generally most likely to be "guarded" (by an encounter or a trap) than "unguarded" - but searching empty rooms should prove to be rewarding sometimes!

I'm happy with my progress and what I've learnt so far, how's everyone else getting on?

Beginnings: #dungeon23, 2023 in gaming, and 2023 in blogging.

It's a time for beginnings.  My - lapsed - group and I am beginning a new campaign and beginning tabletop gaming together after a long period of doing other things. I have begun working on #dungeon23, as a personal challenge to get more productive geeking done more than anything else.

I rolled "Artisan Mines" on my hastily constructed dungeon themes spark table and felt I could run with it:

The beginning of Level 1...

The challenge is to write a 12 level, 365 room megadungeon - one room a day. I find that somewhat intimidating so I'm aiming to average a room a day and still try to do a level a month.  Some may be big, some will be small - I suspect August's and December's won't exist - but my aim is to share one level each month here for all of 2023.  Fingers crossed. Beginning to blog again.

I spent a lot of time panicking, mainly about what to build and how to stock whatever dungeons I did build, but I think I'm settled down now.

I found a great tool for "cyclic dungeon generation" on itch.io which has been a boon for inspiration about shape and flow.  I searched for the old school tables for dungeon stocking but found a rule of thumb that - back in the day - dungeon level = monster level = hit dice that I like, so I'm riffing off of that for encounters. I found so many resources about treasure, and that treasure is so different between systems, that I'm going abstract with it so the details can come later.

These are my dungeon beginnings:

• Room: Dilapidated dormitory. 2d6 [goblins] asleep here on any given shift.
• Room: Shelves cut into the walls hold gems (major treasure) seemingly arranged by texture and flavour.
• Room: Privy. Smells bad. (I'd had a busy day)
• Room: 2 yoked golems trudge mindlessly, endlessly, on a circular path turning the machinery via cogs and shafts.
• Room: Empty. Carvings on all walls depict feasting trolls. Large double doors, locked and barred from this side. Bell calls a single [goblin?] wearing overalls and fancy hat.
• Room: Short cut? But far too dangerous to pass through when machinery is turning.

I had planned to begin thinking more about dungeon and adventure design way back last year for the RPG Blog Carnival. That panic that I overcame by beginning was what meant I never began this before, despite wanting to for so long. I needed a push to start before I felt I was ready, 'cos I was never going to feel I was ready otherwise!

Coincidentally, this month's RPG Blog Carnival theme is beginnings. That struck the chord to begin work on #dungeon23, and begin a new campaign, and motivated me to begin blogging again.

So, this beginning technically has its beginnings in the Carnival. Signups are open for hosts for 2023 so why not check out the RPG Blog Carnival hub on Of Dice and Dragons and consider beginning to join the Carnival if you're an RPG blogger?

I'll be beginning a new campaign soon, most likely Mothership. I will be beginning to play Warcry this year too, and maybe Blood Bowl again. That means I'll begin painting minis again too.

Let me know your beginnings in the comments? Whatever you begin in 2023 I wish you well.  Sometimes beginning is the most important thing.

d100 #dungeon23 spark table

Happy New Year! I've been meaning to start making some dungeons for a while now, so what better time to start than now.  Whether I actually do or not, I've thrown together this spark table for inspiration; please do feel free to use it:

1	Ancient	Childhood
2	Death	City
3	Sunken	Factory
4	Love	Touch
5	Empire	Fall
6	Heavy	Pit
7	Rural	Library
8	Darkness	Ocean
9	Bloom	Song
10	Rust	Roots
11	Noise	Bones
12	Time	Gardens
13	Excess	Portal
14	Decay	Idol
15	Flood	Door
16	Sleep	Light
17	Cold	Bridge
18	Ash	Mask
19	Meat	Rise
20	Solitude	Galleries
21	Growth	Cliffs
22	Greed	Road
23	Luck	Badlands
24	Chaos	Trench
25	Laugher	Labyrinth
26	Smoke	Passages
27	Forgotten	Junction
28	Song	Causeway
29	Roots	Caverns
30	Bones	Mines
31	Hangman	Riverbed
32	Blood	Crypt
33	Prophet	Vents
34	Stars	Warrens
35	Cut	Meadows
36	Sacrifice	Shafts
37	Incense	Jumble
38	Gold	Crawlways
39	Obsidian	Wasteland
40	Winding	Halls
41	Fractured	Canyons
42	Deep	Shore
43	Flooded	Chasms
44	Dripping	Maze
45	Sulfur	Worm-casts
46	Ice	Edge
47	Misty	Darkness
48	Artificial	Refuge
49	Crystal	Wonderland
50	Gem	Jungle
51	Endless	Arches
52	Fungal	Pillars
53	Lava	Geysers
54	Noxious	Dunes
55	Giant's	Burrows
56	Jagged	Battlefield
57	Ashen	Railroad
58	Steaming	Ossuary
59	Haunted	Nest
60	Ooze	Hunting Grounds
61	Twisted	Society
62	Enchanted	Factory
63	Antimagic	Tonic
64	Pastry	Heap
65	Highrise	Chimney
66	Loud	Debt
67	Overgrown	Crowd
68	Burnt	Museum
69	Disputed	University
70	Repurposed	Office
71	Dirty	Distillery
72	Glass	Art
73	Electric	Canal
74	Murder	Tourism
75	Paper	Lizard
76	Smoked	Graveyard
77	Bombed	Council
78	Fat	Slum
79	Luxury	Music
80	Wild	Ruins
81	Broken	Fort
82	Prototype	Market
83	Artisan	Rookery
84	Antigravity	Holy Site
85	Biomechanical	Lair
86	Cosmic	Homesteads
87	Floating	Boomtown
88	Folding	Harbour
89	Hallucinogenic	Prison
90	Hypnotic	Vaults
91	Living	Town
92	Orbital	Paradise
93	Regenerating	Rain
94	Slippery	Sea
95	Silken	Belt
96	Soul	Fleet
97	Space	Cloud
98	Truth	Titan
99	Vanishing	Worldtree
100	Wizard	Wheel

This is using the words from Sean McCoy's original expanded post, plus some borrowed or stolen from the excellent Downcrawl / Skycrawl and from spark tables I have bookmarked at both Bastionland and Prismatic Wasteland.  Plus a few words I sprinkled in as the mood or inspiration took me, or when I realised I had duplicates and needed to replace them!

Image credit: midgptjourney

This is so intimidating that this might just be it for today for me. If you're looking for more then you may like my 5 room dungeon generator and this dungeon-related RPG Blog Carnival round-up post - good luck.

Comments are always welcome.  If you use this I'd love to know what you rolled, and see the results...