Tomb of the Iron God: My Awesome Players' Maps

Lui, who plays the party elf, was responsible for mapping in our recent run of Matt Finch's Tomb of the Iron God. In the course of play she made these profusely illustrated beauties that go way beyond "Here be monsters." Spoilers for the module, of course; click to enlarge. And yes, that is Official Social Cognition Graph Paper.

Iron God: Should All Dungeons Have a Climax?

To close out my play report/review of Matt Finch's Tomb of the Iron God, here are some of the changes I made in actual play, in line with my last post about dungeon story. Spoilers follow.

The goblins had smart leadership, and I played it that way. After their group took about 50% casualties  in one epic battle, I had them leave the dungeon. In a later session they snuck back while the party was in the dungeon and blocked their exit with a large rock. Although the party eventually moved the rock by chipping away at the doorway (soft limestone), the tactical situation they walked into, fighting up on a stair surrounded by enemies, was almost suicidal for the party. They only prevailed by  luring the overly enthusiastic goblin troops back downstairs into a much less favorable position while their leaders were still under a sleep spell.

I also thought it wasn't realistic to have the animated iron statue of Ardarus just stomping around the same area as the goblins. I decided that the goblins had confined him to his room by stopping the door with an iron brace, but that when they left the dungeon they threw the bar into the storage room. The clues were the notches still carved into the wood of the door and the stone of the ground. The party picked up on the clues and found the abandoned brace. So they approached the room with extreme caution and were able to block the door again when the statue came to life.

The second level raises the question: should all dungeons have a climax? Tomb of the Iron God is interesting that way.  Its "goal" area - the caverns of the Iron God -  comes on the first level. The second level is a series of strongly themed rooms, where undead stalk, and treasures and other things are hidden in the burial niches carved in almost every wall. In hindsight this arrangement was fine, because it helped preserve naturalism by defying the conventional expectations.

Also, in play it turned out there were a couple of strong concentrations of dangers and treasure on the second level which created climaxes of their own.

The climax I helped to juice up was the three-sarcophagi room. Here, I added a lone ghast living in the secret chamber under the middle tomb. The ghast, it turned out, while still human, had been a mastermind behind the priests' turn to necromancy, and left a diary behind for the players to puzzle out. The poison gas trap in that room, I moved to the left tomb (realism again - if the middle tomb had been disturbed, why was the gas trap still working?), and signaled it with the effigy on the tomb: an alchemist surrounded by toads, snakes and spiders.

The other was the room with an army of skeletons. This proved a tactical challenge on par with the goblins, and this time everything came from the module, which explicitly details their maneuvers. To their credit, the party saw groups of skeletons peeling off into the side corridors, and decided to fight a retreating battle rather than be outflanked. Eventually they found a strong position behind an opened pit and emerged victorious.

All the same, more could have been done with the story behind the undead. Having skeletons and zombies detailed into guard duty and menial tasks ... finding the necromancy lab where they were raised ... having some clue of why the decision was made to raise them (from town and some documents in the dungeon, I let the party conclude that it was part of the extortion of funeral customers ... pay up more or your loved ones are consigned to a walking hell) ... and how the much more evil switch was decided on from mindless undead to creating actual ghouls (this, I revealed through the ghast's diary, was his doing,  connected to the cult of Orcus.)

Another realistic consideration I added: what the families who buried their dead in the catacombs would have done once they found out that corpses were walking around in there. This created a number of missions for the party, where long-dead loved ones identified by particular personal items were sitting in one niche or other, and a bounty would be paid for the return of their bones. This kind of issue marked a larger opportunity for dungeon-story development that I mostly missed this time around. Are there haves and have-nots in the burial places? Did one group of people get singled out to be turned into skeletons and zombies? Is there a special section where the monks themselves are buried?

If you're running the module, I found that the second level tends to drag on a bit. I would recommend you trim anywhere from 4 to 8 of the rooms, or replace them with a different styled area ... perhaps a necromancy lab and makeshift shrine to darker gods.

And again, just because I'm pointing out how the module could have been better, doesn't mean I'm slamming it. It is a great setup, and it's probably more fun to work out these details yourself than to get them store-bought. If I run the Tomb of the Iron God again I will certainly take some of these ideas into account and make it a dungeon with a much stronger story behind it. Not a story with an artificial climax like the level boss of a computer game, but one that's woven all through the dungeon. I want to leave players with the impression that their exploration has been about more than filling in a sheet of graph paper.

Iron God: Taking Secret Doors Beyond the Letter S

Level 2 of the Tomb of the Iron God module is the actual burial place of the corpses consigned there, and it has more secret doors than a season of Scooby Doo cartoons. There are other things that aren't ideal about it and I tried to fix ... which I'll get to in the last post of this review. But the secret doors were the toughest thing to work out on the fly.

(This post is not as spoilery as the last one, so no cut.)

Anyway, we are not talking about dwarven or magical workmanship here. I ended up deciding that most of the doors could be seen; either in passing with a d6 skill check if you're on the same side as the door (exploration movement is slow going as it is, and most party members have a 1 or 2 in 6 chance), or automatically if you're giving that area special attention. No, you cannot give every area special attention - or at least I'm going to make that process player-boring, and eventually you as a player are going to make the choice that it's better to die a hero than live an obsessive grind. But an exception can be made for the niche-lined walls that parties have an interest in searching for loot.
 
The secret doors show as outlines of fine grooves in the limestone corridor walls. In the burial chambers, they appear as seams down the middle of a row of stacked niches, the halves sliding back both ways when opened. Niche doors usually open by pressing a button at the back of one of the niches, and these buttons also open the corridor doors, though they may be some distance away from their chosen door. Part of my map notes involved working out which niche button would open which secret door. There was a good moment when I combined one of those buttons with a poison needle trap that was already in the key. "Okay, you push the button in ... with your finger ..." Well, the dwarf had a great save and made it, but from then on, used his axe handle.

What was hard was squaring the many, many secret doors dividing the level into sections with the appearance of wandering skeletons and the need of nonintelligent monsters to rove around the dungeon. Some of it I just handwaved, other times there would be floor plates on the inside of a secret area that could let skeletons out. The players quickly grew paranoid and started whispering about a "skeleton factory."

As with pit traps, it's all-to-easy to answer "Why did the monks put so many secret doors in their burial ground?" with "Because it's a dungeon, duh!"  But if I had it to do over again I would have reduced the number of S'es on that level. Make some of them plastered-over concealed doors, which is more plausible if you're talking about a burial ground where some sections eventually get full. Just erase the unnecessary ones, like the ones that represent only a shortcut between two areas you can reach anyway, or the ones that hide one down-stair area from another.

This obsession with secret doors - on every level! by the half-dozen or more! - has apparently left its mark upon a whole generation. You see, as D&D players grow up, they get certain ideas about how their family lairs should be constructed ....

Iron God: The Pit, the Pole and the Point Dwarf

This post has spoilers for Black Blade's Tomb of the Iron God adventure module. But not any spoilers for my players who have marched through most of it. So be forewarned and see you on the other side of the cut.

OSR Contradiction 2: Player Skill vs. Minimal Dungeons

Does OSR mean an Old School Regurgitation of everything that was played, printed and xeroxed in the olden days of the adventure gaming hobby? Or an Old School Refinement, taking the best products and learning from them, and looking past the rules as written to mine the reminiscences of the founding roleplayers and see exactly how they had fun?

Geomorph by Fighting Fantasist

Certainly, if you look at almost all old school modules you'll see two things that had rules associated with them: pits and secret doors. Especially in the early days, these rules were rough and ready, betraying the miniatures origins of the game: roll a d6 and fall in on a 1 or 2, roll a d6 and detect the door on a 1. Because there were rules, and character features that improved the odds, it was seen as necessary to include pits and secret doors in any dungeon worth its salt. Leaving them out would be like leaving sand traps and water hazards off a gold course.

Many, many games were played with this mechanistic, 8-bit digital method. Many more would be played using the more sophisticated rules that interacted with character skills and eventually turned into Spot checks. What almost nobody was doing was the "player skill" method that's seized the Old School mantle. Next to no space in Dragon magazine was dedicated to elaborate analog mechanical trap descriptions in the manner of Courtney's Hack & Slash blog. What you saw instead was rules, charts, tables.

So does your Old School Reenactment involve tooling around a graph paper funhouse just rolling for pits and doors? And if your Old School Rejuvenation involves tapping ahead with a pole, what effect does that have? Is the pit lid heavy or light? Might it tip open or echo with a tap? These are questions that need analog solutions, immediately bypassing the "roll 1 or 2" crudity of the Old School Rules.

Tomb of the Iron God is the dungeon we have been playing in since January. It's by Matt Finch, who also authored the 95 Theses of player skill, the Quick Primer. By the Primer, using player skill for pits and secret doors requires analog descriptions of their mechanisms. But in the module, recreating the more usual form of Old School play (or perhaps just out of reflex), you have oodles of un-detailed pit traps and secret doors. Bam! Contradiction. Yes, the module notes tell you to ad-lib ... and ad-lib I did. But I would have appreciated being tossed at least a bone or two for such frequent, important, and eventually unexplained features of the catacombs.

Next time ... my solutions and the players', an in-play review.

This Is the Story of a Thing That Is Not a Story

Here's the difference between an immersive game and a story:

The persons in a story don't know they are in a story.  The persons reading it do.

So the person playing an immersive game shouldn't be aware of a story structure to his or her experience, either. The player should be focused on the play within the world, not consciously waiting for the big twist, the climax moment, or any of the other screenwriting-class crutches. ("Hey, GM, is this the part where they invade my safe space?")

Just like the experience of playing a tactical miniatures game, i've found the experience of playing a "story game" with mechanics aimed directly at narrative elements can be enjoyable, but is ultimately somewhat "cool" in all senses of the word. It sticks a critical, self-aware distance between the players and the characters. Perhaps this is what some people want ... but to me it comes off a tad insecure.

Embrace character identification! It's our hobby's dark, dorky secret. Hell, I'll even let you wear elf ears to the table if that helps.

These thoughts have come up as I preside over the wrapping up of our Tomb of the Iron God game. Instead of a big, climactic mastermind fight, there have been a number of tense moments, revealing areas, and epic battles, and the party is currently debating how many loose ends to tie up in the dungeon before moving on. C'mon ... you know you want to fight the Eater of the Dead ...

Notes from a Hiatus

Some of you may have noticed I haven't posted much here in the past couple of weeks. Cresting the New Year a lot of work (psychology) and "other work" (pro game design) activities have come up and the old blog jones has been put on a back burner ... probably for the whole month actually, bookended as it is with two conferences.

Getting out of the groove of posting every day is definitely a factor. The little obsession of comments, page views, and post counts is easy to put down when other things from the paid side of my life intrude.

We did play yesterday and the party that left off in the middle of the Tomb of the Iron God, fought and ran their way past goblins aplenty to freedom. I had worried that the encumbrance limits were too harsh but they enforced just the right level of concern for the value of treasure and a limit on the dungeon haul. There was a kind of deus ex machina that saved one party member who otherwise would have been left behind, but it's hard to resist that when he became, according to the rules and laws of Mr. Finch's module, the chosen liberator of the Iron God. Well, he was left behind, too injured to run ... just miraculously transformed into an iron statue, which fits the God's M. O. perfectly.

I'll be in LA next weekend but can't stay long enough to catch Satine's charity gaming day. More's the pity.

I'll be back ... soon ... probably in February things will clear up and I'll get back on the tracks.