Actual Test: Dungeon Creation Process from The Breakfast Ossuary

After seeing it praised on the purple OSR discord, along with the note that the original blog was lost to the internet wastes, I thought it might be useful to unearth and try out "Zero to Complete Dungeon Generation, Waffle-Style" - now only findable on the internet archive.

The steps of the 'Waffle-style' method are:
Step 1 – Concept Shopping - vibes, mechanics, themes - pick 10-20
Step 2 – Monster Shopping - choose level, list 1-6 monsters
Step 3 – Rough Layout - 5-10 rooms in rough layout
Step 4 – Stocking the Rooms
Step 5 – Revisions
Step 6 – Keying the Dungeon

On complications and retuning my GM'ing for 2d20

I am a few sessions into running my Lizard Kings campaign - below are my notes on trying to get up the learning curve of running 2d20 by tapping the wisdom of those who have gone before.

Written up to follow Gorgon Bones first best practice: "Record your hobby experience", this is a ressurection of the campaign world I could up after receiving the revelation of the OSR, spun back up on the online open-table model of my Southern Reaches campaign, but switching system to 2d20 Conan on the intuition that the momentum/doom system would better fit the high-energy shenanigans atmosphere.

I have tried to pull forward a lot of what worked - encounter tables / random generation, player-driven action, baiting hooks, open-table/roster system - but after spending the past few years honing my style around player agency and truth-in-the-world along the anti-blorbo line, adapting my DM'ing to 2d20 is a shift.

I have on my shelves 2d20 Homeworld, Star Trek Adventures: Klingon Empire and a ton of pdfs for 2d20 Conan and standard Star Trek Adventures from bundles - all of these I have read through but still ran up against a few things while playing that I am going to put here, a breadcrumb trail for those who come after.

Complications

The biggest trick so far has been calibrating complications or "what to do with the doom pool". I was having some challenges callibrating between 'spend some doom, make some random stuff up' and 'doom has no effect' - trying to hit that sweet spot of doom being consequential but to a somewhat known level. The goal here is that players can see the doom pool ticking up and have some idea of how bad that it. Doom of 4-5 could get a bit hairy but probably handleable. Doom north of 20 is time to abandon this enterprise and just start running.

First, I initially missed that reactions all incur Doom - if you dodge or parry incoming attacks, the GM gets doom points. This is in on top of 'complications' from natural 20's which can be converted to 2 doom or the players giving doom to achieve rolls. This builds the doom pool a lot faster than I initially thought.

Spending doom when there are active foes in play always made sense to me, soak their wounds, add more foes, etc. The bit I was unclear on was calibrating how complicated a complication should be - how to play it out mechanically which was ambiguous even after reading the various rule books.

The first good guide was the 'minor epiphany' Gebir had the grace to post as a comment on the Modiphius forum which exactly answered my question on how impactful complications were supposed to be: "2 Doom or 2# [stress] damage + Effect or D2 Minor Action to Clear". This was the rosetta stone I needed.

There was a great list of example complications posted by Feond on a different thread.

There was also a recommendation for taking a post by The Walking Mind on Risks for FATE but considering it as applicable to 2d20 complications in the sense of what opposes what - for a scene about pursuit, complications can be delay, for one about stealth, complications are being revealed, etc.

General Summaries - this character generator cooked up by Mariano Cavallo is very helpful for quickly getting started, next was the website for The Scrolls of Erathius - just seeing what explainers, cheat-sheets and downloads they thought necessary was a great guide on what comes up a lot and what is unclear.

Session timing - I lost my source but another top tip for trying to time these sessions was to plan ~ 30 mins per scene. The 2d20 style of moving from 'action to action' contrasts with the slightly more wandering around, flexing hexcrawl and encounter tables I have been doing lately, so definitely out of my comfort zone and good to get a frame to think about it.

Intros - another neat tip I got that I think helpful for framing things was to ask players to describe introduce their characters as if for the opening credit sequence of the TV show. Was sufficiently different to other 'describe how you appear in this tavern' intros that it resets expectations.

Campaign So Far

I have been running things as close to RAW as I understand for now, but I am also aware of some modifications from later 2d20 such as having additional d20s beyond the first bought with momentum cost more or be otherwise restricted. Thus far players have been relatively frugal shepherds of their momentum and have not been getting into many fights so doom pools have not been exploding such that I can throw lots of complications at them yet.

In a similar vein, players are proving very conscious of when a scene will end and sap their momentum pool.

The main instance of complications off a rolled 20 was a busted stealth attempt; attempting to be unobtrusive got unlucky and spotted by just the wrong person - consequences may be long term.

Campaign Spin-Up X - Back of the Envelope Campaign Planning

I wrote about "rebooting a campaign with 2d20 Conan" - spinning up a new campaign in the Scaled Lands.

In the grand tradition of getting going by making promises and getting yourself deadlines I poked a list of players and then was committed to at least running something. Shortly after I had a flight for work so that was me stuck in a place with nothing else to do so I worked up the guts of what I needed on the back of an envelope.

Altogether this serves as a nice illustration of constraint breeding creativity. This world had been the campaign where I 'applied the OSR' after discovering all the blogs and wisdom, I had put a lot of thought into it pre-pandemic, including using it for NaNoWriMo, but I had none of that with me when I did this.

First I blocked out things I felt I needed to prep, to declutter my brain and help corral my thoughts into some kind of order. Up in a corner I stuck a to-do list of tasks as I thought of them, again to note and refocus.

Then I started properly thinking of the immediate recent history - the ramp-in to the start. I thought of the forces at play to give factions kicking around, recalled those that I remembered from before, gave names to some that had just existed as 'the infernal fire cult' before.

I thought through what stuff I wanted to see, what were the various secrets for the players to find and what kind of big interesting things could they get up to.

With Yaksha's hexfill method recently in mind, I wrote a d10/d4 encounter table - 10 factions likely to be found out and about and four examples for each.

One of the key reasons I wanted to return to the Scaled Lands is that I hand some wonderful art for the place commissioned from Evlyn Moreau and I never got to use even half of it before the old campaign collapsed. I had a think through how to use that art for best fun.

Campaign spin up II: applying the OSR

tl;dr: how I crushed the time to spin up a campaign setting by bulking out a skeleton of inspiration with the best of OSR random generation tables.

After a significant hiatus, I spun up a new campaign, Lizard Kingdoms. This was a more directed creative process as it happened after ~6 years marinating on the teachings of the OSR. The ignition spark for this was the Mediterranean abyss of Shiveria by Chris Wayan. The specific image, captured from one of his re-painted globes was this, with the gates of Hercules closed and the 2000m deep basin behind that inhabitable - deep and hot. And filled with an ancient culture of lizardfolk.

With this as the setting core, I decided I wanted to run the Lizards as a long-cycle civilization rising and declining, just settling into a decline long-cycle. For ease of sizing things I stole south-west Europe as a basis and fiddled the Iberian peninsula to step down more gently into the Abyss - creating the Scaled Lands. This was to be our play-space.

The hook - that for long millenia the Lizard Empire had grabbed everything they deemed fit for habitation. The players come from a Magocracy, one outside the borders in the cold north. For ages great dragons dwelled in the border mountains preventing any incursion into the Lizard Kingdoms until one day they vanished. Noone knows when that day was exactly, the realisation of their absence was slow to come. The campaign pitch was 'the Wizard Kingdom is sending an expedition into the Scaledlands - you have decided to go with it'.

Lizardfolk of the Scalelands, by Evlyn Moreau

Retrospective of campaigns run - what worked, what did not

I saw a retrospective on a persons gaming (Failing Better on Against the Wicked City) and decided to tot up all the gaming I have been involved in over the years. The big thing I noticed here was there was quite a lot of gaps between games that actually gets accounted for by flare-outs, campaigns that never got off the grounds even after eating quite a lot of time in some cases. I will dig into the flare-outs and what went wrong in another post, but first - the great victories, the glorious campaigns run.

I guesstimated the hours spent running for the different campaigns to get an idea of how long all the campaigns ended up being at the table. This was surprising to me, I had felt some of them to be a lot longer than others but that may just have been prep time I sank into them vs how much actual play time happened.

Still Here: Lizardfolk culture post

I like lizardfolk and all their many scaly-kin cousins. Given the explosion of variety we know happened in our own world back before the unpleasantness with the asteroid I think it is reasonable to say that injecting magic and dragons into the pot with basic lizardfolk should yield a lot more interesting things than 'lives in a swamp, focused on survival'.

The big hook I use for lizardfolk is stability and long, long cycle culture. Crocodiles showed up pretty early, realised they were on to a good thing and just stopped where they were. Crocodiles saw the dinosaurs come, crocodiles survived the dinosaurs going away, crocodiles are still here. I think that is a great hook to build on.

Lizardfolk by their hearth by Evlyn Moreau

So what are the aspects of our lizardfolk culture?

City building: Reasons strangers come to Sholtipec

Strangers come to Sholtipec to seek many things. The abandoned parts of the city have been un-evenly gleaned and the active core still produces crafts and answers that can be found nowhere else. Still an administrative centre within the Scaledlands, the ways lead from the dragon cult-cities back to Threshold and the deep homelands.

I built this table to have a skew by using d6+d12 in place of 3d6. This makes the 6-12 block equally probable among themselves to allow equal weight to the main activities of the city. The tails on either side are then reflecting the stranger aspects of the city.

d6+d12	Things to seek in Sholtipec
2	Answers from the Great Library
3	Military assistance (official or mercenary)
4	Gemwork
5	Decisions and warrants from the Temples
6	New intoxicants from the Hives (dusts, honeys or bugs)
7	Eel delicacies from Crystal Ponds
8	Cult affirmation for deeds or sacrifices
9	Sage suppositions from Drumspires
10	Space for dwelling/activities
11	Fuel, heat
12	Fashion, garments
13	Exoteric equipment
14	Reagents & ingredients
15	Information or intelligence
16	Art, culture or performers
17	Vengeance, assassins
18	Magic crafts (made in Drumspires or dug from Rooftops)

The purpose of this table serves both as a motivator for anyone encountered on the street - either as a stranger, this is why they have come, or as a local this is the aspect of the city they are involved in. Similarly for buildings, it can give a tag to the activity within; though for an out-of-district result, this can be assumed to mean that some non-normal activites are dominant at this place just now.

City building: aspects of Sholtipec

Building the centre-piece city of my last campaign, I tried to spend time prepping the toolkit instead of creating specific detail; for instance in the first post on the city we saw what the population make up was. Now we will look at building generation tools.

A lot of this was seeded by the Infinigrad suburb generation tools on Lizardman Diaries but I felt I needed to cook up a few more specific tables to help specific more closely what I wanted.

For background the city, Sholtipec, is old; first growing up around the Great Library, then becoming a bastion of the Lizards Empire after they crushed the Gray invasion force nearby. Buildings and populations reflect all those epochs through to the current long, slow depopulation and retrenchment. So while the generalised chaos and atmosphere of the city can use the Infinigrad generators, beneath that I wanted an original epoch of the building.

So a given building in the city would roll a d10:

d10	Epoch	Building Aspect
1	Ancient	Eldritch carvings, non-euclidian spaces, illithid-inspired
2	Elder	Stilted, tree-dwellings, organically grown, magically mutated
3-4	High Lizard	Fortifications, neuva-aztec; insulated buildings
5-7	Dragon Era	Multi-racial build-outs; different sizes; big dragon-sized
8-10	Late	Repurposed buildings

This would give me a start point for who built the building, replacing the 'raceoid' originators from Infinigrad and then allowing me to use the rest of those generators more or less as is.

d10 Things the lizardfolk aristocrats are in a twist about

d10 Things the Lizard Aristos are in a twist about this week

1. That someone has bred bees to produce something indistinguishable from moon bee imperial jelly! But the rituals!
2. The dragon gods are thirsty and someone drank the holy offering beer!
3. The war in the East has disrupted trade and the price of scale wax has skyrocketed
4. Cold snap. Everyone slow and grumpy.
5. Imitation gold scale paint now indistinguishable from the real thing. Poor people are wearing it! Existing artful designs now worthless for flaunting.
6. Heirs of two rival castes discovered sharing a sunning stone. Scandalous!
7. The flies taste different since Tuesday. Not bad, per se. But different. And different is bad.
8. Those damned humans left corpses in the swamp. Again. The value of the swampedge property is plummeting.
9. Lady Ysscale is holding a party, but failed to provide adequate frog legs. Some of the guests left hungry.
10. How is green this season's colour? The common lizards are green. It is all because Lord Twiss married that jumped-up serving lizard, and no everyone is slumming it with green scalepaint.

With thanks to: ArkosDawn, Thriftomancer, Vance, Spekkio, stm, MerlynZero, mtb-za

The Shifting Sand Tower from Towers of Krshal

Towers of Krshal turned up - had it printed from Lulu and read it avidly.

To test run the tables I set out with the tower generator to see what I could create as a spare tower for Sholtipec

Following down through the tables give me an unexpected 17m tall single story tower with an accessible roof. Relatively ordinary round, stone walls, inhabited by ordinary townsfolk and with 2 levels of basement.

So what have we here?

First off accessible roof means that we can somehow traverse the whole tower - obviously it has a dangerous spiral stair running up the interior of the walls. Why one ludicrously tall single room - because there is something suspended from the ceiling in it. An orrery or difference engine, maybe a hive or other thing the inhabitants or tending. This place is not a temple, or cult, whatever the inhabitants are up to it is odd but secular.

I think we have a pendulum based seering engine here - with the apparatus hanging in webs and chains from the top of the tower; its progress across the floor of the room dictating the activities of the inhabitants.

The apparatus is a complex sand cascade, with many colours of sand being fed into the top of the apparatus and their paths through the structure modified by the tick of the pendulum and the shifting of its parts. The blends of the sand, the intensity of the colours and where it lands on the floors provide weather forecasts, crop timings, and other 'almanac' factors that guide the inhabitants throughout there lives.

The basement is filled with all of the reference books.

Some of the reference books have never been opened in the life time of the current inhabitants; some reservoirs of sand have never flowed in all that time. Some streams are beginning to turn up now; flecks of dark bone, greenish metal. None of the inhabitants know what this means and have found no references in the books of the first cellar. They have not yet ventured into the locked second cellar yet, noone has since the last invasion from beyond the ocean.

In Corpathium to feed Nanowrimo

I wrote a draft novel for Nanowrimo this year and short circuited a lot of the world-building by setting it up the road from where my current campaign is set.

This had one or two neat pieces to it because it was easy to have the characters rattle on about their concerns and what was happening in the background because all that was already in play, I knew what was going on.

What was super useful, that I did not expect, was setting out the layout of the city where a lot of the action took place was greatly simplified by using some of the quick and easy world-building tools that are sloshing around in the OSR scene at the moment. In particular, I pulled up the glorious In Corpathium city generator to quickly block out where things were and what was happening in the various places.

Sholtipec of the Scaledlands - who lives there?

The Scaledlands are a melange of all sorts of creatures; more or less living in harmony under the Pax Saurus of the Lizards. To start filling in the cities of the setting, first we want to know who lives there.

From the DMG3.5 (pp139) we take the integrated community ratios and have:

37%	Lizardfolk
20%	Humanoids (incl. humans, goliaths, tabaxi, etc.)
18%	Goblinoids (incl. orcs, goblins, bugbears, etc.)
10%	Dragonkin
7%	Kobolds
5%	Half-dragons
3%	Planar, other

The dragonkin are the big, "distant cousin to dragons" from Monsters of Faerun (pp44), half-dragons are the close descendants using the template from the Monster Manual (pp146). The big categories of lizardfolk, humanoids and goblinoids cover multiple races but for now this is our starting table.