Crystal Frontier - Ongoing Campaign - The Mud Isles

"Vpon the Seuentene Daye of the Seconde Moneth, that same daye were all ye fountaynes of the greate depe broken vp, and the wyir of ye heauens cast wyde."

- Late added marginalia in the Codex of Lead 7:11

Joseph Grady - The Bank of England - 1830
Imagining One's Capital in Ruins...

When the sky is clear and the rain breaks on the coast of Blackacre a brown smudge beneath dark clouds mars the horizon... The Mud Isles are scant miles away over the Silt Straits and Narrow Sea but they are a lost land. Now only known as home to the raft-borne raiders - bands of dozens or hundreds of “Ghouls” - who crash onto the shores of Blackacre almost every Fall. A watchword for cannibal horror and mindless barbarity, the Ghouls of the Mud Isles worship a vile devoured god beyond the understanding of any in the Empire or Resurgent Kingdom — except as a mirror reflecting the dark years of the Demon Emperors. The Ghouls are anathema, even more than the Blackheart cults they resemble and which still infect the Empire. Yet the the Mud Isles are not the waste of bone idols, stinking sucking mud, and festering midden of chewed bones that most imagine them to be. The Mud Isles were once a civilized place. A kingdom that traded with the Empire in ancient times, noted for its devotion to decorum, mercantile avarice, and delicate decor. Some few and foolhardy … or perhaps those who have made dark pacts allowing them the favor and acceptance of the rulers of the Mud Isles … trade there even now, pulling antiquities and treasures from the sunken ruins of the City of Lead.

Classic Vs. The Aesthetic

AESTHETICS

“Clewd the Fighter straps down his heavy heater shield and loosens his arming sword in its sheath, while behind him Sister Agata’s kneels, her mace resting on the flagstones and lips moving in a prayer to St. Cuth the Chastiser. The rest of the party stands behind: Rastar the wizard - impassive, Dougal the thief, picking his nails with a barbed knife, Blackleaf the elf, eyes unfocused thinking back to some riot of flowers or bloody skirmish in the forests of his home three hundred years before, and three stalwart hobilers in thick hauberks recruited from Fort Tribulation and wielding 12’ bec de corbins. The band is ready, and with a shout Clewd kicks open the rotten oak and rusted iron bands of the damp swollen door, bursting into another of the square stone cells beneath the ruins of Castle Doomeye.

Squealing goblins scatter for their crooked spears and rusting implements of war, surprised by the adventurers. In the guttering light of a torch held by one of the Fort Tribulation Stalwarts, the band sweeps through the humanoid’s lair. Black blood splatters, and the goblins fall to blade and bone crushing mace before they can organize resistance. Only Blackleaf can understand the subhumans’ cries for mercy, their gurgling mongrel tongue incomprehensible to the people of law and civilization, but Blackleaf delights in their terror, as his people and the teeming goblin filth have waged a war of annihilation for ten thousand years. In moments the chamber is still and the brave adventurers, inured to the stink of split bellies and ferric tang of blood, ransack the goblins’ corpses for a handful of copper trinkets and braided rat tails.

Dougal grunts, sniffing a dubious, yellowed goblin sausage before tossing it back onto one of the foe’s corpses and points to the damp swollen door on the other side of the room. Beyond the maze of dungeons and gray stone corridors continues, winding ever deeper. Shockingly regular and featureless, only a mad wizard could conceive of and construct such a place to conceal golden treasure and ancient sorcery.”

NOTE: THIS POST IS NOT ABOUT THE USE OF HUMANOIDS OR THE RACIALIZED OTHER IN DUNGEONS & DRAGONS. OBVIOUSLY GYGAXIAN VERNACULAR FANTASY IS STEEPED IN UNEXAMINED MID-CENTURY AMERICAN CULTURE AND ATTITUDES ABOUT RACE. ONE CAN'T CHANGE THIS BY DECLARING HUMANOIDS COSMICALLY EVIL, OR NOTING THAT D&D IS JUST A GAME, AND THE ISSUE PERSISTS OR EVEN WORSENS IN CURRENT EDITIONS WHICH REMOVE NUANCE AND MORAL DECISION WITH A TENDENCY TOWARDS COMBAT FOCUSED PLAY.
THIS POST IS ABOUT HOW AESTHETICS  (SETTING, PLAYER EXPECTATIONS, THEMES AND IMAGERY) INTERACT WITH MECHANICS AND DESIGN PRINCIPLES. 

Dungeons & Dragons has specific aesthetics, the most frequent a product of the particular vision and play style of its early pioneers, changed and complemented by the way their games evolved and refined through the art of early TSR publications, and in the half century since. The Mid-Western campaigns of Greyhawk and Blackmoor were a pastiche pulp Swords and Sorcery, Tolkien and wargaming ephemera. While the earliest art and description for Dungeons & Dragons is haphazard and fairly fantastical in nature, much of the late 1970’s Dungeon & Dragons art suggests a knowledge of and concern for historical arms and equipment. Especially in the work of some artists, characters are fully armored and wield a variety of authentic looking weapons. Gygax’s particular interests also push in this direction, with the increasingly detailed (and apocryphal) equipment lists of AD&D and his indulgence of an uneducated obsession in medieval weaponry. Gygax’s first editorial in Strategic review is an odd pseudo-historical (it was used by “primitive” and poor peoples) justification of why spears are ineffective in Chainmail while his second is a compilation of loving description and mechanical details for varied polearms that doubles the size of the Original Dungeons & Dragons weapon list.

I call this “Gygaxian Vernacular Fantasy” -- a bricolage of Tolkien, Conan and Osprey Publishing’s Medieval Warrior series full of dungeons, evil humanoids and +1 swords that is incredibly influential. The paragraphs of fiction above are an exaggeration of the form, emphisizing its retrograde and unexamined morality, and by now it should look quotidian. In the 1970’s it was novel, and useful for early Dungeons tying down the more fantastical elements of Swords & Sorcery with the details of medieval wargaming. It has been highly successful since, creating the basic understanding of "fantasy" seemingly worldwide. Yet, that very success has led to some of the present difficulties in writing for it or playing it.

A NOTE: Illusionism

What’s Illusionism, and why should you care while running a game?

Illusionism is a method of setting building or adventure design that raises the question of player choice or agency. It’s the practice of Game Masters or designers of changing encounters or events in game that will follow a specific path or create a specific scenario. The term itself is sometimes used pejoratively - but like most other things in a hobby or fandom that get people angry it’s a nuanced issue with multiple perspectives. Obviously GM actions that force specific results or events can be a problem for players when the players feel that their choices will lead inevitably to the same results. This is somewhat like the tendency of players in of computer RPGs to skip through cutscenes and dialogue because they expect that decisions about plot developments or the motivations and plans of their characters are pre-scripted or will inevitably lead to the same result.

In a tabletop game roleplaying the plans and motivations of both player characters and NPCs or factions in the setting are an area that tabletop can manage extremely well with a GM there to make the setting react reasonably to unexpected plans, shifts in allegiance or changes in player goals. In a video game the next adventure or scene has already been scripted and designed and cannot be modified should the player decide they want to do something else or approach things in an unexpected way, while a tabletop Game Master can easily change things to adapt a scenario to unexpected player decisions. While such improvisational adaptations might share elements of illusionism, they generally result in players feeling more connected to the setting and events then if the GM had simply run events as initially expected.

Ogre art from the 1st Edition Monster Manual

So essentially the danger with illusionism is that players will feel their actions and desires are meaningless, advancing a plot that the GM has already designed even when they want to take the game in another direction, and the advantage of it is that it can create more dramatic or responsive reactions to player decisions and character plans, goals and personalities. In dungeon crawls the advantages of illusionism rarely outweigh the risks - because the nature of the setting already contains a great many logical, diegetic (that is resulting from the story itself) restrictions on player choice. Many classic types of Illusionism are also more dangerous for the GM to use in a dungeon crawl because the sorts of decisions, especially decisions about character movement and encounters, that it tends to effect are ones that are already a focus of player attention in a dungeon crawl. For players to accept the GM violating the assumed nature of the setting: time, physics and other constants (for example putting the same mundane creature in multiple places at the same time to force a player encounter) it's best that these interventions are secret, unknown and relatively unimportant.

An alternative way of viewing illusionism is as a sort of inverse of ‘simulationism’ - the impulse to make your game as realistic as possible - entirely controlled by realistically modeled rules and chance. In the perfect (and entirely impossible) simulationist game the GM wouldn’t make any decisions, only consult rules and tables of chance and likelihood for even the most mundane events. As much as illusionism’s bad reputation is earned when GM’s use it excessively or clumsily to negate player decisions, simulationism deserves an equally bad reputation when ‘realism’ and the inescapable tyranny of chance are used in ways that make game boring or lead to frustratingly pointless character deaths (such as a GM who claims that characters have a 1 in 100 chance of slipping on tavern stairs or choking to death on a beer).

Exploration Play

THE DUNGEON IS FIRST A QUESTION OF SPACE

The first leg that the classic Dungeon Crawl stands on is “Exploration Play” - a description that points to (or obfuscates depending on how understandable the following is) the Locus of Play in the Dungeon Crawl. Characters in Dungeon Crawl scenarios or games are first explorers - adventurers even - not combatants, designed with abilities and ‘builds’ maximized for destroying specific potential opponents. Nor are characters in the Dungeon Crawl personalities first - they don’t require meaningful information about their pasts or goals (not to say these aren’t potentially fun elements) to play and the Dungeon Crawl isn’t designed with story growth in mind. Exploration play may include a good amount of role play, but it doesn’t focus on emotional character development in the sense of the examination and resolution of character flaws, traumas or desires. It also doesn’t ask the players to deeply inhabit their characters as representatives of a genre - a Dwarf fighter won’t succeed or fail in a dungeon crawl based on how well the player performs aspects of ‘Dwarfiness’ or ‘Fighter’. None of these other types of play are bad, but they aren’t at the core of the Dungeon Crawl experience. Instead the game is found in the characters and players direct interactions with the location itself.

From the 1st Edition Player's Handbook

A dungeon or location exists to be explored - to have it’s passages mapped, its puzzles solved, secrets revealed and inhabitants outwitted or pacified. The trick is understanding what that all implies and to make these exploratory activities both mechanically significant and meaningful for the players. Exploration is facilitated by more than a dungeon with a large number of keyed areas, or many encounters that will take multiple sessions to investigate or overcome. To make exploration meaningful the act of moving through dungeon locations needs to create a sense of ‘risk’ - tension and anticipation. In a scene or encounter based adventure tension builds as the narrative rises towards confrontation and the story advances towards climax - much like a novel or film. In a location based game the progress of the party in exploring the location creates tension without expected end point or climax: unraveling secrets, delving deeper, discovering its dangers and its potential rewards while steadily exhausting their resources.

Another way to say this is that there is no overarching plot to provide tension, and no predetermined, expected or rules generated climax that will become the moment of greatest risk and reward. I don’t want to suggest that you can’t have plot or set piece encounters in your game and still incorporate dungeon crawls - but if one is running plotted large-scale narratives it may be best to think as the crawl itself as a single scene or plot point. Nor is this to suggest that characters’ motivations can’t be tied to a location - a character may want to explore a location for personal reasons, and the GM can, even should, still accommodate that. A character’s backstory can be worked into a dungeon - a missing brother may have joined a faction within the dungeon or a lost heirloom might have been stolen away to the dungeon’s fastness - but this is an afterthought. Characters’ individual stories can advanced while exploring the dungeon, character background might even be a useful hook to initially encourage exploration, but personal character stories shouldn’t be the focus - both because this fails to offer incentives for other characters and because the Dungeon Crawl’s Design Principles make scene based revelations and narrative structure difficult to include without forcing the spatial complexity of the dungeon into a linear mold, scattering clues and scenes haphazardly or engaging in sleight of hand that degrades player trust. I don’t want to suggest that a good GM can’t pack a lot of story into a location or that a good location based adventure doesn’t lend itself to creating stories, and I’ll get try to address some ideas about how this works when I discuss the importance of factions in a a Dungeon Crawl, but the Design Principles behind exploration aren’t related to any kind of extrinsic story or narrative.

What is a Dungeon Crawl?

The blinding blackness of the underworld held back only by the sputtering light of your candles, lanterns and torches -- dim points in a vast ocean of darkness. Dank stone walls close in the and the weight of earth and stone above grinds down on a maze of corridors, galleries, vaults, tombs, caverns and ancient fortresses.  You trespass in the domains of long extinct subterranean peoples - the histories of their underworld unclear or unknown, their wealth abandoned and unclaimed. The darkness is full of death, yet it draws fools and fortune hunters with whispered intimations of gold for the plundering, only to devour them -- the dead's monuments melted candle stubs and mummified corpses clad in rusted mail laying forgotten in dusty endless halls.

The Rakshasa - 1977, Dave Trampier
AD&D Monster Manual

This is the stereotypical setting for fantasy table-top games, the titular ‘dungeon'. Acknowledge for a moment that the ‘dungeon’ is an utterly bizarre conceit, a setting that has few if any corollaries in the real world, an expansive multi-level maze of tunnels and rooms beneath the earth filled with treasures and home to monsters. Despite the absurdity, there are plenty of ways to justify and visualize this classic setting in the context of fantasy world building.

Planning and running the exploration of such dungeon, or at least running it well, is a bit more complex than a fictional origin and a few evocative descriptions of stone corridors or caverns teeming with bats. Running a RPG in a dungeon setting requires an understanding of a play style that’s fallen out of favor or been set aside in recent years and editions, and benefits from mechanics and adventure design principles that can at first glance appear antiquated or burdensome. The earliest editions of Dungeons & Dragons were designed with a vast underground maze drawn on graph paper as the playing field, primary challenge, and largest, first, part of the setting: this is not true of more modern editions and adventures, including 5th Edition, which are designed with the idea of the adventure as a series of encounters which together create a story.

This difference in design is the first important element in running a dungeon crawl -- a dungeon is spatial environment, not a narrative one. There is little or no predetermined story. few events are designed or even expected to happen in a dungeon crawl campaign. The players characters tend to be less complex at the beginning then contemporary players may be used to and their motivations and personal backgrounds aren’t intended to be the source of future narrative. There are (often confusing) ways of talking about these conventions and how to play older editions that depend on gnomic phrases like: “Rulings not Rules” and “Heroic, not Superheroic” (both from Matt Finch’s excellent Quick Primer for Old School Games) ... they won't always help one understand older systems. Instead a larger framework is needed.  For me that framework is Proceduralism, the idea that dungeon crawl play depends on a set of often unwritten rules regarding how and when to apply the rules that determine success or failure in the fantasy world.

There is plenty to say about the interplay of mechanic, procedure, and table expectation that produce the Dungeon Crawl, but I also want to talk about how one might use a contemporary system to create a play style with some of the same elements and feel as that older style of adventure. Old School primers such as Finch’s may offer some ideas on ‘design principles’ and ‘game ethos’ (Ben Milton & Steve Lumpkin’s Principa Apocrypha is similarly interesting and more approachable source also available online), but without the ruleset to support them, cultural notes and a set of aspirational maxims will only go so far. This blog will try to note the distinctions between more contemporary play styles as well as considering if what sort of rule changes to 5th edition might make it better support "Dungeon Crawl” play.

WHAT IS A DUNGEON CRAWL?
Obviously a Dungeon Crawl is a setting, adventure, or part of an adventure where the characters spend the majority of the time exploring some kind of maze of rooms: a cave system, a buried city and hidden tomb or whatever else doesn’t stretch suspension of disbelief too far. Yet the dungeon need not be underground and it might not be a maze. An abandoned city is another traditional location which works well for Dungeon Crawl play and any location can function as a dungeon. Others have written about the nature of the dungeon more eloquently than me, but a definition of the dungeon that focuses on its mechanical elements and design principles should be more useful to the Referee then one that looks to its metaphysical purpose.

Interestingly, the first edition of Dungeons & Dragons has almost nothing to say about the existence or nature of the dungeon.  Though Underworld & Wilderness Adventures (booklet 3 of the 1974 edition) is about dungeon crawling, it doesn't explain much about what one is, choosing to immediately launches into peculiarities and specific rules regarding the exploration, lighting, and design of dungeons. The 'why' of the dungeon is assumed, even in the first edition of the Dungeon Masters Guide, Gygax assumes the dungeon is a known quantity and is far more interested in justifying and describing how one might play the game in non-dungeon environments: the wilderness, under the sea, on alternate planes of existence. The Guide spends pages and pages describing these environments, their fictional relationship and underpinnings, as well as the rules that make them mechanically different from the default environment of the dungeon--but it doesn't discuss dungeons very much.

The assumption of the dungeon as default setting is such an inevitability at the publication of the Dungeon Masters Guide, in 1978, that it's section on "THE ADVENTURE" (after an admonishment to draw a map) begins:

"Naturally, the initial adventuring in the campaign will be those in the small community and nearby underground maze."

- Dungeon Masters Guide (First Edition - 1979) Gary Gygax, pg. 47.

The idea of an underground maze filled with monsters, traps, and treasure is already so natural after four years of Dungeons & Dragons that it needs no explanation.  It's a central concept to Dungeons & Dragons, yet there is very little about how to run a game in one in the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide (or Player's Handbook).

Even the sections that seek to aid new referees in running dungeon adventures are, much like those in the 1974 edition, short expositions of specific mechanics such as underground movement and searching speed. Rather then offer a theory of dungeons or how adventures in them work (something that the Guide does with wilderness and other types of adventure) Gygax provides the partially keyed map of a dungeon level beneath an old abbey along with examples of play. Examples are a great teaching tool, but they rarely address the foundational ideas and goals of a task. There are also some hints in the Appendices, including a large section on random dungeon generation, but Gygax's assumption that readers will already use and understand the underground maze as the chief location for adventure is absolute.

Little has improved today, though perhaps the knowledge that underpinned Gygax’s implacable assurance has withered. The 5th Edition Dungeon Masters Guide, while it's discussion of how to place Location Based adventures within the game is still limited, does a better job of encouraging their adoption, and notes a key conceit of the Dungeon Crawl that make it distinct.

"Within a dungeon, adventurers are constrained by walls and doors around them, but in the wilderness adventurers can travel in almost any direction they please. Therein lies the key difference between dungeon and wilderness: it's much easier to predict where the adventuring party might go in the dungeon because the options are limited- less so in the wilderness."

Where the 5th edition fails is that it doesn’t seem to understand what this limitation means. It doesn’t point out how the spatial limits of the dungeon work with mechanics that emphasize supply and randomized risk exploration.  It doesn't recognize that the dungeon emphasizes player navigation choices as it's limited but primary narrative or that it's goal is to elevate exploration to a coequal part or pillar of play. 5e’s advice on designing locations is limited to using them as backdrops for challenges, encounters, and longer external narratives that often depend on limiting player choice. Perhaps because of these omissions, the modern Guide seems reluctant to embrace the dungeon, despite a note that "Many of the greatest D&D adventures of all time are location-based. Creating a location-based adventure can be broken down into a number of steps."  Subsequent years and many published official adventures for 5E show that location based exploration really isn't the system's focus, or at least remains unsupported.